a marriage proposal

conan, i love you. i can still remember when our relationship first started around 9th grade, and i would try staying up till 12:30 every night to watch your show with the volume turned down super low so my parents wouldn't here. conan, we started off when i still thought 12:30 was late.(bending down on one knee, of course)
conan, i've loved you since the day we met, so many years ago. will you marry me?

constructing a linear life

today, i slept until noon on an air matress in the basement curling up in my blanket, trying to stay warm. my whole extended family had left for the zoo about two hours earlier. i claimed i was feeling real sick so i wouldn't have to go to the zoo with then, and also so i could sleep in and masturbate in near privacy. and i also was feeling sick. but definitly not real sick. just slightly - my throat is still in that state of somewhat sickness; of kind of yuckiness -- i totally could have gotten out of bed and gone to the zoo but playing hooky is always fun. there are no opportunities to play hooky at college - no mom to pretend to be sick to, so i take advantage of these chances to play hookey whenever they come up.*******

i feel like way too often, i have started my entries off detailing what i do in the morning, moving chronologically through the rest of my day. does this mean i'm a linear thinker and boring? maybe, but maybe i also don't care.

*******

a bit of dialogue that just occured between me and my cousin, chelsey:
-this jacket's kind of small.
-whatever. [as i try to keep typing, and ignore her]
-where did you get it?
-[should i tell the truth? yeah, okay-] rue 21.
-rue 21? that's why. i wasn't going to say anything, but it's kind of girly.
-okay...
and she then mumble mumbles something about me being girly.

snl's over and so it's late-night infomercial time, and i will briefly play the salesdude role: i just brushed my teeth tonight with my relatives toothpaste that they brought. and it was so so good. it's tom's of maine children's toothpaste and it's strawberry flavored. i feel sort of weird about brushing my teeth with a toothpaste that is sweet. it seems that it should be minty flavored, but the strawberry toothpaste tastes so good, it makes me feel like i'm four or something, being naughty, and not brushing my teeth before going to bed. sugary sweet, but it prevents cavities, how cool is that shit? why didn't my parents by us this toothpaste when we were kids? i wonder if this toothpaste even existed when i was a kid. kids today [i know i sound like an eighty year old man now] have all the coolest shit. when i go to my cousin's houses, i'm amazed by how rad the latest toys and video games are.

snl was a repeat tonight, but i was stil so so excited, because it is this one with the skit where jimmy fallon is shirtless. he's shirtless in a hot tub. r. e. d. h. o. t. red motherfucking hot. jimmy fallon is so going to be boyfriend when i get to ny. wynona rider, if you're even still dating jimmy fallon (i haven't been that up on the celeb gossip - sorry e.t.), you better watch out.

last night, me and all my cousins had fun slumber party late night talk until we were touched by mister sandman. and i just listened to the most surreal conversation before i started writing this. we were all downstairs in the basement watching snl, and my bobo cousin said that mad tv was better than snl, my sister was not going to stand for this type of libel, accepted the challenge to a duel and defended snl by introducing a series of wonderfully funny analogies tailored to the teeny bopper set of my cousins to say that snl was the motherfucking shit:
-if snl were seventeen magazine, mad tv would be tiger beat. if snl were express, mad tv would be rave. [and it went on and on, with all the pop culture references your justin timberlake loving hearts could ever desire.]

i kind of want to go brush my teeth again. that tom's strawberry toothpaste is seventeen; is express; is the motherfucking shit; is jimmy redhot fallon. it is not my air mattress. my air mattress is mad tv; is tiger beat; is rave; is chris kattan. it is not my bed. oh, how i love my bed and am counting the days down until i can again curl up in it, masturbate freely in the middle of the night, stay up as late as i want reading. the only thing that i think i will slightly miss is the teeny bopper late night pillow talk. oh, and i'll miss that strawberry toothpaste, because having my bed back will mean that my relatives will have left with their cool toothpaste.

who needs fingernails

my right thumb is still in pain. eariler today after climbing old rag, i looked down at my thumb and realized that there was dried blood by my thumbnail. wow, i cut myself climbing over a rock or something, i had thought. but no, that would be too normal an explanation. what had really happened is that i had bit my thumbnail so short, chewing on it, that my thumb had started to bleed.

this morning after picking rebecca up for our little adventure, we gossiped and gossiped about people from new college that she had not seen in a while. we did this while driving around all of dc, trying and trying to get to brian hughes motherfucking house. what should have been a fifteen-twenty minute drive took in excess of an hour, as rebecca showed for the umpteenth time that she is the worst navigator in the world and i demonstrated my miraculous ability to just realize i need to make a turn right after we pass the street that we need to turn on. anyways, while taking our little sightseeing tour of dc, rebecca and i also talked about how it might be a weird day, conversation-wise with brian hughes since neither us had really ever talked to him that much. but, we were still very excited about our day with brian hughes.

however our excitement could not prevent our prediction of a lack of steam in conversation from occuring. shortly, the so what have you been doing over break formalities were exhausted, and it looked as if it were about to occur right then. but save! we could always talk about school, so we asked him about school shit for a brief while. however, that conversation puttered out pretty quickly too. this is probably the point at which i started nervously chewing on my thumbnail to somehow make up for the lack of conversation.

the entire trip, me and rebecca asked him about school, his family, and his friends. those were the only topics which our pathatic brains could think of to talk to him about. so, you're friends with x right? do you have any gossip about x? how's x doing? subsitute x for all of brian's friends and you will have something pretty similar to a transcript of our conversation during the hike.

i don't know why it was so hard to talk to brian at times today but it so was. there were long stretches of silence that i filled by thinking: "okay, what can i ask him? no, don't ask about school anymore! or anymore questions about his friends! c'mon charlie you can do this, just think of some normal question to ask him." after we dropped brian back off at his house, rebecca said she had the exact same conversation with herself during parts of the hike.

to think of things to talk to brian about, i started to think about what i would talk to just rebecca about, and i realized it consisted of mainly gossip: trash-talking someone i hated, telling her about my crushes, and just general gossip about who's smooching who. and for some reason, i just could not talk about these things in front of brian -- i thought that he would have thought i was petty or something, and he just seems above fun trash talking. i don't know. but anyways, brian hughes is still super cute and nice, i just wish i did not have such a hard time talking to him, however for this reason today i decided that maybe i don't have a crush on him anymore - that i just think he's a super rad person. something maybe like that.

anyways, these occasional lapses in conversation were not the hike. the hike was gorgeous views, the occasional trip over a rock, swishing through leaves, super windy weather, huge motherfucking boulders of rocks, leaveless trees, and countless other things that i will not even attempt to describe since i am tired as fuck and it will invariably end up sounding cheesy as fuck.

and there's still a bunch of dried blood under my thumbnail.

press 1 for yes and 3 for no

i am so upset right now. the reason for this is that i am not allowed to work at borders because i was unable to pass this rehiring test that i've already taken and passed twice the other times i worked at borders. how the fuck did i not pass this test? it is this stupid stanton survey, that is like ten minutes long and consists of five million variations of the same fucking question: is it okay to steal?

even though i steal a lot, i'm not a complete fucking moron and am not going to respond yes to that question to a place that is considering hiring me. i took the stupid survey about two weeks ago now at borders and i had been wondering why it was taking them so long to tell me when i could come into work. how in the hell is this possible? the only possible thing i can think of is that i pressed the wrong buttons. i took it in someone's cubicle over the phone, half paying attention and reading all the comics tacked to this person's cubicle while the questions were being read by this stupid automated system.

you know how those automated things take ten years to say a fucking question and you're like uh-huh uh-huh get to the fucking part where i can push a button. and for the whole time 1 was yes and 3 was no on the phone pad. maybe i got them mixed up i don't know. but regardless, my inability to pass this motherfucking test is making feel slightly dumb.

would you steal from your employer if you wouldn't get caught?
3

would you report a fellow employee you witnessed stealing?
1

is it all right to take just a little bit of change from the cash register?
3

are you a fucking idiot for somehow not being able to pass this stupid test?
1

in other news, hunter college did not have me on file and registration started sunday, which means that i have missed the first four days of registration. they are now just fixing this problem and i should be able to register by tomorrow, and of course i'm sure every single class i want to take will be full by that point. and my grandma is coming to visit my family tonight. and, i still haven't found a place for me and nikki to live in ny. i am going to call a bunch of listings right now. and oh, i so don't even want to tell my mom why i can not work at borders, she is going to think that i am grade a dumb.

she sure could sing

-SUPER BOTTOM Young, smooth WM w. a hot, tight, clean butt. Joey, (703) 486-XXXX
-STARVING STUDENT 22, smooth, clean-cut, 5'9'', 143#, defined build, versatile. Likes older guys. Out only. (703)887-XXXX

super lazy day # far past the point of keeping track:
today i woke up bright and early at two in the afternoon, sat around in my pjs watching crap on mtv and half-heartedly masturbating out of boredom to the blur that was the tv since i had still yet to put my contacts in and take a shower. my mom came home from work and commented/bitched about how i was still in my pajamas. usually i am able to manage to at least make it look like i have been up for a while before my mom comes home from work. the fact that i was still groggy and attired in pjs and had no desire to change at all made me realize how fucking lazy i was. i thought to myself how i had no plans to do anything and so why bother getting dressed if it's already five in the afternoon.

however, my sense of shame won over my desire to be lazy and i got dressed and decided that i should go buy my family x-mas presents. that that would be my outing for the day. when i am at home in va, there are seriously days in which i don't even leave the house, sometimes stretches of days. georgie bush, you need not worry. i am america united in this time of crisis. i sit on my ass all motherfucking day, watching tv, and only take trips out of the house to buy shit. w, aren't you proud? i am the couch potato. i am the consumer. i am america. god bless.

so, being the patriotic citizen i am, i go to borders and buy my family x-mas presents. this is really bad and probably not in the x-mas spirit (however, it may have been in the american one), but i bought my family presents that i want. i figure that once they get tired of them, or even before they do if they are taking too goddamn long, i will read the books or listen to the cd's, and effectively repossess them.

after i went to borders, i checked my bank account, and i now have $1.89 to my name. this has made me realize that i need a job badly. there's this new manager at borders, and he's being totally bobo and keeps saying he has to call me back. tomorrow morning, inspired my destitute status, i'm going to call him up and be like "look dude, what time do you want me to come in?" and we'll see how well that all works (or more likely, how it does not).

after checking my bank account, i lied down on my bedroom floor and read the free gay weekly that i picked up at borders. i listened to this gram parsons album, and kept getting up to skip it back to "she" since i don't have a helpful repeat button on my stereo. i went to the classifieds/personals section right away since the personals are always my favorite part of any paper. it's all these assorted characters trying to put themselves into 50 abbreviated words or less, plus they somehow mange to verbalize what exactly they are looking for in a partner. i don't know, i always find them real fascinating to read, and sometimes sort of want to reply to the cute, funny ones, but always chicken out exclaiming, for god sakes, it's a personal, you are not so pathatic that you are going to start responding to personals. but one day, i'll be brave and reply.

however, today my attention was not so much on the personals ads as it was on the escort listings. there were pages of all these little escort listings. all of these men trying to market themselves as young boys, smooth, skinny, and all that shit. and i daydreamed about being an "escort".

listening to "she" over and over again, and planning on how once i get to ny, i am going to make a go at being a ho. i am definitly not a man, i'm much more a boy, so i figure i could advertise as young and skinny, maybe. i might have to get a little bit more in shape and lose some of my fun pudge, but i really want to do this. i feel like nikki would kill me if i was an in-call ho, but i think it would be so much fun. getting paid to meet all these weird, maybe creepy, maybe deviant people and to get it on with them and then to never talk to them again. to be in my own private idaho, so to speak. but, i have all these questions too, i kind of want to call one of these listed escorts and be like, um i have a couple of questions. i wonder how fast they would hang up. but, i wonder if the "escorts" ever have any violent/scary tricks. and i wonder how much they get paid, and i wonder if it's awkward when he's getting dressed, and oh i so want to do it. i'm going to have to check out the gay weekly in ny and see if they have lots of little escort ads.

i lay there on my back daydreaming, the next song starts, goddamn i wish i had a repeat button. get up change song back. lie back down again on my worn bedroom carpet, daydream about being a hooker for another three or so minutes before i have to get back up to switch the song again.

feed me seymour

i love food. but even more so, i love eating food.

so, it gets real interesting when there is not much food to be found in the kitchen. usually, two possible things happen: 1.) that i am too lazy, and just sit on my ass slightly hungry, or 2.) that meals get real "creative."

the first thing had been happening for a while, with me surviving off of cheerios. the second thing always will eventually happen, a person can only be so hungry and continue to eat only cheerios.

the past two days, i have been making fried onion dishes. i am obsessed with onions. they are by far my favorite vegetable. but, i used up all of our onions during my little onion binge, and so today i had to get creative again.

i have been saying that there is nothing in my kitchen. that's a lie. what is more accurate, is that there is nothing in my kitchen that i want to eat and that is quick to make. so i find myself making weird food combinations, and eating the things in the cabinet that i have no idea when they were bought, or more importantly, why they were. marshmellows, weird canned fruit, and peanut butter contatiners that seem to have been always almost empty.

today i feasted off of cheerios, of course. i then made a huge thing of instant mashed potatos, flavoring it with bbq sauce. it made me super tired after eating those mmm mmm good potatos, but i was still feeling the piggy bug and so ate way too old pickles with some cream cheese that was about to expire.

and, then i was stuffed and tired, yet i wanted more more more. i felt so much like that plant in little shop of horrors screaming feed me seymour, feed me! my fridge however is not rick moranis, and did not heed my commands. i lied down on the couch watched some simpsons and realized that i was so about to fall asleep. then a random realization struck me. fuck shit i left my coffemaker in florida. oh, how i loved that coffemaker, why the fuck don't we have one in our house, i so want a nice big pot of coffee right now. this means i'm going to have to buy another coffemaker, i will not be able to live without one in ny. hell, i cannot live without one now. maybe i'll take a trip up to the thrift store and see if they have any that don't look too grungy.

why a fake x-mas tree would never do

my family got a christmas tree this morning.our house is now consumed by that smell of winter and of pine and of a sense of peace, that it is christmas time and everything is okay, and even more importantly, that everything is going to be okay. that pine smell IS christmas. it feels like christmas time for real now. some scents just have that power to induce certain feelings and certain memories. that christmas tree smell is one of them.

"when i was young, and we didn't care..."

feeling really good right now. listening to the cranberries, and not feeling guilty about how unhip it is, because i'm not around any new college people right now. since i have come home, i have refallen in love with all of the music i listened to in high school. the radio, when it is on, is always on the alt-rock station i listened to in high school, and i swear to god, they have the exact same motherfucking playlist save for a few new songs. it's all old green day, nirvana, cranberries of course, live, old dmb, smashing pumpkins, sublime, and so many others that draw to the suface from somefuckingwhere the wonderful feelings of comfort and memories of a time when i was an even bigger geek than i am now. and a john melloncamp quote seems all to appropriate here to express these feelings of high school nostalgia, and to also offer irrefutable proof of how big a geek i am to actually quote cougar boy: "hold on to sixteen as long as you can, changes come around real soon, make us woman and man."

the other things that are adding to my state of bliss right now are:
-i am now offically done with school work

-nikki is for sure going to live in ny with me. or so she says, and she sounds the most serious she has sounded yet, which is enough for me to believe her. and so, i have been wasting time looking at village voice classifieds and tomorrow i'm going to call some of them

-the gray sky took a vacation today, and the sky was this wicked wicked gorgeous blue. i looked out my window as i was waking up, so so excited to see such a bright blue filling the sky, and just wanted to go outside and bike and play and have that beautiful color be the background to my day. to be a part of the scene with the blue, to be its buddy and play with it. i'm never this excited about the sky in sarasota, even though it is a beautiful blue all the fucking time. the long stretches of gray in va make the blue's appearance seem all the more special. it's like that person who works at your favorite restaurant, and you're like man, you must love working here since you can eat good food all the time. and they have a blah response and they say the food's not that great, since they can have it whenever they want. and living in florida is sort of like being the person that works at that really good restaurant. you lose appreciation for the blue skies, cause they're always there.

-i just played on the playground for about two hours with my four year old cousin who came with her family to visit my aunt who just had a baby boy named conner, which i think is a pretty dorky name. but whatever, i played on the playground and forgot that i was 20, without a job and without a fucking clue what i'm doing with my life. those concerns were lost to the diziness and the queasy stomach feeling i got from spinning my cousin around, and swinging so high that i swear i could have touched the sky if i could just have pushed myself an inch further. just an inch. but, i couldn't -- i was pushing myself as far as i could go on that fucking swing, swinging and swinging like i was ten years old and still trying to swing higher than the boy next to me. however, my gaining of a quite a bit of weight since i was ten made the swingset start to shake, which had me a bit worried, and so even though i wanted to touch the sky, i didn't want to knock over this swingset. touching the sky would have to wait for another day and a more sturdy swingset. then these two other kids came and played with us. and this little seven year old boy had this need for adoration that all little kids seem to have, and i wonder if this is just something american kids have. look at me. look at me. watch me do a jump off of the swing. i bet you can't jump higher than me. and of course, i had to squash this little surge of what would be a future case of egomania. and i showed him who could fucking jump higher off of the swing. i showed him that he was not the god of tag. and i showed him who could do a better handstand. but, of course, it was all in the spirit of good fun, not of seeing how much better you are, but instead seeing how much you and the other people can push yourselves. how far can one go before they scrape their knee and gash their elbow. and i thought of how i need to carry that playground mentality of reckless abandon over to my everyday life. to see how high i can swing. to fucking scrape myself, and then to get up, clean it, and to keep fucking jumping off of shit.

-and another reason that i'm feeling good is since i am now done with my work, i am lifting my self-imposed house arrest. and i am going to hang out with rebecca tonight, which will be so nice, since i have not seen her in forever, since whenever it was she came down to visit, it all seems like a lifetime ago. but yeah, i'll see her, and i'm making plans to hang out with my good old geeky comrades from the high school struggle.

get in my belly

-molly's in labor right now, she's doing real good, and the baby should be born in a couple of hours
-...

my uncle just called all excited to tell my family that my mom's sister who lives in dc, is about to give birth. of course, i am the only one home and so he tells me all about it, even though he really wants to talk to my mom, but he's happy to tell the news to anyone. the thrill of being the town-crier, of being privy to information before anyone else and being in charge of dissemination. my uncle's high with this thrill, and also probably high off the thought that he will soon be a parent. my mom is in alabama, or if her flight has left already, she's in the air somewhere between alabama and here. in a few hours, i have to pick her up from the airport, at which point she will be very excited by this news and talk to me forever about it and may even end up going to visit my aunt.

in a couple of hours, i will have another cousin, there will be a new human being existent. that all seems so wild and fantastical -- this entire process of life coming into the world. i wonder how my aunt is feeling with a person inside her belly, and i wonder how she'll feel in a couple of hours when her belly is deflated and there is some brand new person in her arms, that she pushed out of her vagina. this is one of the few reasons that i think it would be super-cool to be a woman. i really want to be pregnant, and be a god of sorts by bringing life into the world. if i only had a uterus.

these thoughts are so not the type i need to be thinking right now. i have still yet to figure out what the hell i am going to write this faulkner paper about, and i still have to go to the airport, and then i will have to listen to my mom babble excitedly about my aunt.

fuck this paper. i just want to daydream that i am a pregnant male like ah-nold in that oh so bad movie that i cannot even recall the name of. but, it was sooo bad. so probably not a pregnant male like ah-nold, after all. maybe i'll just daydream about being a pregnant female.

"elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me"

okay, what is up with salon folks? normally, it is pretty damn progressive and covers stories from different perspectives, but these last two days have made me pissed as hell. today's top story is an anit-arafat piece of bullshit, and yesterday they had some columnist babbling about how we need to cut off ties with palestinians and just basically nuke them. i really love salon, but i really hate israel even more, and so salon's coverage as of late is pissing the fuck out of me. and i was about to write a letter to the editor about the lopsided coverage but i decided against it cause i didn't want to waste paper-writing time looking for statisitcs and dates about all the far too numerous atrocities committed by israel against the palestinians. dude, i really do try to be a pacifist, but i would so like to see sharon get his fucking head blown off, and i would so love it if the us would just be awesome and bomb the fuck out of israel, and let palestinians have all the control they want over the land that was stolen from them by motherfucking western europe and the us so that they could absolve themselves of holocaust guilt. and i know it's really horrible that i have all this rage towards israel, but the fucking way the situation is portrayed in the news makes me want to throw shit. a couple israelis killed in a suicide bombing. big news, with a isn't this terrorism horrible slant. countless palestinans killed in retaliation, forced out of areas occupied near jewish settlements, restricted from traveling outside of whatever atomized chunk of "palestine" they live in. inside of the motherfucking paper, with a fair and just retaliation slant. mothefuck that shit.

and i really am not an anti-semite, i just hate israel. i get very angry about such things that i have no control over, and that seem so so unjust.

okay, but i thought i would rant here to save me a little bit of time since here i don't have to worry about citing facts and shit. and very soon i will write a real entry based in actual experience. i feel like a bigoted zealot or something with these last two entries: yesterdays about how much i hate fags, and today's about how much i hate israel.

really i'm not that serious in either case. these are not statements that i would vocalize to another person. here it's okay, cause it's a diary and i can bitch like rush or someone, and not give a shit, cause we'll all read each others shit and then never talk about it when we do talk. its something we are aware of, but act like we're not, and yeah so whatever.

anyways, i swear this is the last polticized entry for a good whiles. i am worried that i am pissing people off immensely and that people will secretly hate me, and think that i'm some horrible person. and also these are kind of boring entries, and far too easy to write.

right now, i am on page six of my language and politics paper. i am tired as hell and so so want to snuggle up in my cold bed under my warm blanket and get goosebumps from my cold sheets. but i have told myself that i am not going to bed until i finish this paper, since tomorrow i have to write that stupid faulkner paper.

i have just realized the joy of paper writing. i used to approach papers very seriously and with an oh dear god i have a fucking paper due attitude, and would feel like it was such a chore. but now, i have discovered the i don't give a shit, i ain't gonna unsat the class for a smartass paper approach - i take the paper as not seriously as one can take a paper and add as many pop references to it as i possibly can. the paper i wrote a couple of days ago for postcolonial lit, had the line "motherfuck him and john wayne" after every 3 or 4 paragraphs. the title of my language and politics paper is "meow meow meow: heath and his capitalist fat catesque dismissal of ideology" for god sakes. and i have managed to fit in totally random references to the cranberries, to gym culture, and to the sound of music. i am thinking about approaching my faulkner paper as a challenge, wherein i think of really random things beforehand and somehow insert them into my paper. the things i have thought of so far are: boogie nights, john waters, prince, snickers, and the chiquita banana lady. i don't know if i'll actually follow through with my plan of action, since out of all of my professors, i think dimino would be the least receptive towards my who gives a fuck style of writing.