rest in peace

r.i.p. manny

There's something particularly sad when someone so young dies. There's this sort of slap-in-the-face kind of sting, a startling reminder of mortality. I didn't speak to Manny much after I moved from Saipan, save for the few messages he left on myspace, but I still want to remember him how he was in high school, someone funny and genuine and great to be around.

can't get through the bathroom door

The other day I caught my reflection and noticed how round my face has become. There's a term I use to describe my body now. If you're familiar with construction lingo, you might know this one: fatty-fatty two-by-four.

my six-year-old niece sends me emails

how are you today auntie mona

I am at the hospital with my mom and dad. my mom is going in the hospital to check if its open.* and my mom is going to call me if she is going to let us inside and if it is ok. and i really miss you. i wish you could call me but not when it is morning. call me when it is night time at seattle. i love you auntie mona. goodbye from brianna i love you. goodbye again.

*I think she means that they'll check if my sister's dilated, but I guess that's how they explained it to a six-year-old.

today's thought.

nothing rhymes with preggers

edit: keggers!

good samaritan

So last night while I stood in line at JC Penney to pay off my bill (because this shitty company doesn't accept payments over the phone and will only post your payment online thirty days after you make it), I watched a teenager pull out an envelope to pay for her South Pole jacket. She counted out the bills and realized that she was short three cents, so she began rifling frantically through her purse for pennies. She kept looking in her bag and then looking around her, laughing nervously and saying, "My sister's somewhere around here..." I knew she wasn't going to find anything in the bottom of her purse, so I slipped her a dollar. She thanked me profusely, paid for the item and then left. As I walked to my car, I saw her in the parking lot and realized, "That bitch stole my 97 cents!"

So I did what any good samaritan would do, I ran the girl over and bought the teenager a lesson in honesty.

must have drank some of it, too.

In my short-story writing class, we were deconstructing Blake's proverbs. In response to, "Expect poison from the standing water," one guy answered, "Yeah, this reminds me of the time my friends and I were in the woods and had this bong but didn't have any water for it, so we used water from a puddle. It didn't taste very good."

Speaking of my writing class, there's a woman in there who doesn't belong. That sounds harsh, yes, but she's admitted several times that she's only there to write about her dead mother. She was in a poetry class of mine and there she only wrote abstract/obvious poems about her mother. Part of me wants to be sympathetic but the other part thinks that this is a college class, not a therapy group. And how do you critique someone who's not there to improve her writing? In poetry, she defended everything by giving a disclaimer that this was about her mother. What pisses me off is that she was on the waiting list and another student who needed the class to graduate couldn't get in and she didn't relinquish her spot. At the risk of sounding insensitive, I must admit her story is old.

We are close.

We are close.
Originally uploaded by kirida.

A couple of months ago, I went to this restaurant where the food was disappointing and the owner had the social graces of styrofoam. I've driven by a couple of times and finally noticed that not only was it closed, they had posted signs.

According to this sign, they are nearby, you know, for safety reason.

The Killers

At The Killers concert last night, the woman sitting on my left looks at me and says, "Nicole!" I turn to her and she gasps, replying, "Oh, your profile looks so much like my old friend Nicole's. I was wondering why you didn't say anything to me." We exchanged a laugh and that was it. But then I realized that I missed a perfectly good opportunity to mess with someone. I could have said, "Yeah, I know the Nicole you're talking about and she wants her Destiny's Child CD back, biatch."

While in line to buy some concert garb, I overheard a family have this discussion:

Eight-year-old boy: Mom, what kind of music did you listen to when you were younger?

Mom: Oh, we just picked up rocks and banged them together. We didn't have music.

ha ha.

Me: Did your mom tell you I'm pregnant?
Nephew: Yeah, congratulations.
Me: The baby's going to be half-white, you know.
Nephew: No, I think the baby's going to be all white.



I'll kill the preceding by explaining that my light skin has been a running joke in my family. I'm not racist, yo.

I think my sister's having her baby right now and I won't find out until later. Okay, no she's not. Grrr.

finally, some fun

I bought tickets to see The Killers on Wednesday. I've loved them since their low-level crime days, when they were called The Petty Thieves.

more weird conversations

person: So do you have any weird cravings yet?
me: Oh totally. Like last night, I wanted to eat my cat. Well, not eat it, just lick its fur. Yeah that was kind of crazy. And the other night, I wanted to eat some concrete mix. Yep, that's weird.

be kind.

I think I should work on being nice. Lately, I've been really mean and irritable. Some girl in my English class began her monologue-length response by saying, "I don't know what philosopher said this, but like, you know when you're in a cave, and like, it's really dark, and like you go outside and see all this color and you want to get people out of the cave..." and I thought, "It's Plato, woman, now STFU."

Maybe it's senioritis or pregnancy, but whenever I'm in class, I automatically hate people. Outside of class, I hate women who don't know anything about pregnancy giving me advice. At the breakfast where that stupid woman told me that she'd rather abort herself by falling down the stairs than have a baby, I was trying to explain that I'm reading material on what I shouldn't eat from babycenter.com and another woman said, "Oh, you should get a real list." I thought, "Thanks for the advice Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, I should stop reading fake lists."

Sometimes, I don't know how to respond to questions. A lot of people ask if I'm throwing up yet, and I think that's because everyone knows more about morning sickness and cravings than they do about hot flashes and heartburn so it's an easy thing to ask. Still. Do you really want to know?

weirdo

I remember a professor of mine who shared that she was pregnant and that all at once she felt that people claimed such access to her body. I know what she means. I dreamt that a strange woman pushed her face into my stomach and started talking to my belly. And I dreamt I was having a girl, so now I don't know what to think.

I wish my intuition would just make up its mind.

unnecessary anal-sex references

I hate being on a crowded bus, trying to get off through the rear exit and having to shout to the oblivious busdriver, "BACKDOOR!"

grrr.

I got a letter from my bank saying that a check I had deposited was not being honored by the "maker's" bank and I had to "refer to maker." The maker in question: KING COUNTY. I got two seperate checks for my jury duty and only one of them went through, meaning I was charged for the returned check. There wasn't a letter asking me to disregard the second check or a phone call. My bank should stop calling them the "maker" and call them the "ass taker," because that's what they've done, taken my poor ass for a ride.

This is what I get for voting.

food.

Last night I had two great dreams. In the first one, I played with my baby. It was a boy. Dark hair and dark eyes; just what I thought. In my second dream, I was at a chamorro food buffet and I couldn't have been happier.

Today I am going to get off my pathetic island butt and make some chamorro food. Wish me luck.

And what else makes me happy? People who are as insane about the show LOST as I am.