a message for you

watch RENT. i don't care if you hate musicals, or you think it's too dramatic, or if your name is aaron bailey. watch it for the amazing acting, watch for the little idiosyncracies of each actor. watch it for the incredible story behind it, and the way it defined an entire generation an emotional movement. watch it for the person who wrote it, who died the morning of its opening and had an incredible life. watch it for the cast who really lived together, and who are amazing people.

overlook what you might think is a melodramatic ending, or lyrics you don't understand, or character flaws you don't think are realistic. look at it in a real way, in the way that you want to affect the audience, the feelings you want people to leave with. think of it in terms of the story, and the meaning of the entire group of people, and what each line and each lyric means. what it for the amazing final number where all the songs fit together perfectly.

more than anything- watch it for yourself. watch it for the times you've sat and thought "i wish things were like they were a year ago." i know that ryan and i have been thinking and praying that very often right now. i don't know if my other friends from back home are thinking the same thing, i don't know if they ever miss what we had or are worried that they're losing it like i am afraid of every day, but this movie helps me udnerstand life so much more. and don't demean it or me if you don't understand it or refuse to see it.

sit down with me to watch it and let's talk- i'll make you love it. i know these people, we are these people. and i don't know if sini or aaron or scruggs or james understands what this makes me feel, but it allows me to trust that we will never stop being friends. it lets me stop being afraid that i'm going to lose everything. it brings me back home, back to planet earth. i trust in the world, i understand that things change and sometimes things really fucking suck and sometimes it feels like my whole world is colapsing in on me and this is the end isn't it? but it isn't, and i believe in myself and my friends that things like this aren't going to end.

after watching the entire thing over ten times, the director/actor commentary, all the deleted scenes, the full-length documentary, all the interviews and illegal videos of the stage performances i can get my grubby little hands on, it only amazes me more. you think it's just some shallow musical you can look over, but if you can't look deeper into it than that than it's your own fault for thinking it shallow because you won't consider that a movie of its calibre can carry something greater within it. i challenge you to really watch it, to really consider the acting and the tiniest detail. i challenge you to appreciate the musical talent that had to go into it and the real point of the ending- no matter if you like it or not, think about the message they're trying to get across.

these things are real. you might think it's over the top, but it isn't.
i have fallen in love with everything RENT.

i hope that my friends understand how much i miss them, and how on the days where i feel closest to giving up, the memories of our last year together keeps me going. please, never forget any of that, and get back in touch, and stay that way, and don't ever, ever let me or any of us lose you. we are each other and we are one heart and we can not let space separate that. i love you all so very much, and this movie solidifies that love, and squelches my fear of losing you all, and brings me back to a place that i love every time i watch it.

good night.
good morning.
good life.

you can't dump me- you're blind!

CSI is probably the most rediculous show i have ever had the displeasure of watching. it positively butchers the legal, medical, and scientific world in ways i didn't know people could fathom. the medical tests that the doctors and medical examiner's conduct are out of this world, having images of the human body project up on a computer screen that no current hospital ever had or could ever invent. and since when can these machines point out, with bright, blinking yellow boxes, exactly what the examiner is looking for? and since when is it necessary protocol to accuse a man just out of surgery that he purposely put his copilot in a coma so he couldn't answer questions he somehow knew would occur after a plane crash he didn't cause?

W-T-F!

and their characters have such mesmerizing dialogue as "you can't dump me- you're blind!" and "good thing manequins aren't people." not to mention the criminals they portray are probably the most moronic characters ever created so much that they are laughably inhuman. there's a doctor who wants to gain on the insurance policy he's taken out on his hands, what is his first idea as to how? well, obviously, take his partner to grand central station and have his partner pour acid on his hands during rush hour. but- uh oh- the partner flubs it up and the doctor ends up dead from acid to the face.

who writes this shit?

i won't even go INTO the absolute idiocy that is their genetics lab and forensic pathology, considering the abhorable dialogue only humorize slightly the way they portay genetics, with tests that are so science fiction i feel like i'm watching star trek. you take the DNA from a dead girl, DNA from another guy, and instantly you can match it to a child you have no sample of? creating a dna fingerprint in about 6 seconds by putting a drop of blood into a canister? let me tell you, i've made a DNA fingerprint, and it takes 2 days and lots of work- they don't even extract the DNA from the blood! they don't even run a polymerase chain reaction so where the hell did they get the sample?! there's no centrefuge, no adding dye, no counting nitrogenous bases- they don't even know how to read the damn fingerprint! how did these people get into crime scene investigation?!

ok, so i did go into the idiocy that is their genetics lab, but i got all excited.

the point here is, if the news media wants to assume that criminals out there are devising perfect crimes because of crime shows, they certainly aren't crime shows like CSI, because that shit is off the wall crazy.

no polymerase chain reaction using a viral plasmid?! who does that?

<3 gen

cliffs of red clay

today was a good day. the day that i needed. the day to give me a reality check, about things that are beautiful and good and untainted by everything else that i have in my life.

today i woke up late and ate cinnamon rolls with my friends. we went for a walk through deep woods and saw antique bridges and walked through mud and climbed over mossy trees. we went up high hills and looked out over the tennessee river while the sun was high on the horizon and the chilly air blew up off the river and made us all huddle together. we heard the water and the birds and the wind.

and i walked home with my true love in the slow-falling snow, the tiny flakes hitting my eyelashes and we kissed in the street. and i stood in lindsey's front yard while the snow came down in great big chunks of ice and coated the ground and the wind blew the snow sideways. and i stared out over the river while the sun peeked out from under the clouds and heavy snow blowing everywhere and i kissed ryan again and everything was just so beautiful.

then we all made pasta together, ate a nice meal all at the table like a family, and watched good movies and loved each other very much.

today was the day that i needed to show me everything.

<3 gen

how ryan cooper feels about dinosaurs....

i do not think there is a single thing in the world i love more than kittens in cups.

from now on, when someone asks "what's your favorite thing in the whole world?"
my answer, emphatically, is kittens in cups.
<3>

the only living boy in new york

it's amazing what a nicer mood you get into after you clean up your space. living with four people in one room, this place gets pretty disgusting. i'm someone who doesn't mind mess and can't clean up after myself to save my own life, i just dust compulsively and my roomies appreciate that, lindsey is someone who likes things clean and neat, but is cluttered because she's always too bouncy and excited to worry about cleaning, andrew doesn't give a fuck about anything, the least of which is a clean room, and ryan will bitch about the room all day and night but won't lift a finger until it gets to the point where ebola is growing in the corners.

so, i took the initiative, put on garden state, and cleaned the motherfuck out of this place. i overhauled the bathroom, getting rid of weeks worth of newspaper and toilet paper rolls. cleaned out the sinks, got rid of the dish drainer [i.e. putting it on the shelf in the hallway], and put all our stuff on one side. we've got a new suitemate moving in and he'll need a sink.

then i threw away every ounce of garbage on mine and ryan's side of the room that i could find, put our clothes into equal piles, hid my stuff beside the tv stand, and organized all our school books. i also fixed ryan's shrines, excorsized his lamp [it was possessed by demons of the underworld], and dusted every appliance and object i could reach- on both sides of the room.

so now i have a nice environment to drink my tea, write my essay, and finish garden state before falling to sleep.

god damnit.
it's 3:47 a.m.

the one downfall to cleaning like a madwoman- now i don't have time to do the things that caused me to clean. i will go to sleep, then use the hour between french and english tomorrow to finish this paper, it's really all downhill from the point i'm at now anyway.

"good luck exploring the infinite abyss"

<3 gen

p.s. i need to buy a watch, buy myself a pay-as-you-go cellphone, apply for a debit card, and start seriously looking at scholarships. good night.

we will be wildlife children

i think one day we will begin to devolve.

all of sudden, after centuries of slouching, our backs will bow and crack until we walk completely bent over like we're all looking for the change we just dropped. everything will be moving so fast, that shopping and eating will become first-come-first-serve. everything will be a race, and we wil bash eachother's heads from running bent over for the last morsel for 5.99. sooner or later we will start hunting food, because its the only way we can figure to eat, because the race has become too fast and too dangerous.

car accidents will become the leading cause of death for everyone. animals and humans alike, automobiles are the new plague, the new aids. everyone is just going to fast that all we can do is slow down. we'll start walking out in the woods so we aren't hit from flying shrapnal from the thousands of car wrecks every day. explosions will sound all day long, and nothing but construction and slicing trees can be heard for miles.

the people in the gated communities will eventually become right up against the interstate, and after a few house fires from flying car engines and hundreds of children dying in the streets from flying vehicles, the yuppies and their families will move further out into the neighborhoods, buying small houses away from the noise.

but the all day noise and explosions and danger won't be able to be escaped. we'll move into the forests that are left, the few that greenpeace and sierra club have saved. the animals that have survived will be in surplus since their habitat has been reduced so drastically. we'll hunt our own food, and build our own houses. we will walk hunched over and pray that no one else comes for us.

the crews will come to us and try to build their wal-marts and their mcdonalds and their gateway stores, but we will stand on our front lines, we will protect our families and our trees and we will shout in rough voices, "you will not take this. this land is not for you. go away." and we will take them down with our primitive tools, because they can't fight us. civilization will deplete because we just can't take the danger any more.

we will grow together in natural, healthy communities. we will redevelop social roles and gender biases. prejudices will shift and empathy will thrive because we all moved here for the same reason.

contruction will end, cars will stop driving, because there's no one left. the people left in the cities to shop at the malls and race for the food will have died, in competition or on the interstates. most of them died on contact. the newest disease spreading across the world is technology.

so then we will be like atoms, searching to reach our lowest potential energy. we will devolve and reevaluate and recreate and ressurect our universe.

one day we will re-survive our creation, and perhaps we will avoid the burning engines from cars in mid-air, and the twenty-thousand floor buildings, and the television broadcast directly into our minds.

one day we will not know "television".

<3 gen

don't wake me i plan on sleeping in

allright, so it has recently come to my attention that i feel the shittiest i have felt in months. someone's airborne, god-forsaken, man-eating cold crept up on me yesterday, and today, without so much as a warning or sympathy card it it me full-force with a brick to the face. i feel absolutely awful. when i get a cold, i get a fucking cold, and my head seems to be slowly collapsing in on itself, while my nose bursts into flame, my throat coated in a fine layer of what can only be described as GAK circa 1994, which puts me in a constant state of feeling like i'm going to vomit. this fucking sucks.

not to mention that since this morning, it is becoming increasingly clear that i need to have my wisdom teeth taken out. it was looking like the little fuckers were going to creep in under the radar of my anal, oral-surgery obsessed dentists. but low and behold, the one on the back right has popped inand made his presence known making it nearly impossible to eat without sering pain through my jaw on that side. NOT to fucking mention that i just got done having that stupid fucking stomach virus so i can actually eat regular food again, but i can eat even LESS now because i can't god damn chew.

i want to be at home with my mommy. i feel so disgusting, not to mention sick makes me feel lonely and sad anyway, and my boyfriend is asleep. so i'm just going to sit here, feel like crap, and miss my family where they take care of me.

pros of being in college:
-eat what and when i want
-sleep when i feel like it
-act on my whims

cons
-no mommy
-no one taking care of me
-did i mention no mommy?

<3 gen

{pout}

coagulated

this is good story

so monday night, my creative writing class trekked across the parking lot and through the doors into gorgas library. we travelled to the third floor, my favorite floor, because it is full of fiction, literary criticisms, and science journals. our assignment was a simple one: find a book, pick a page, and use the words on that page in any new form you choose to create an original work. our teacher put money in the copier, and we were told to choose one page with lots of text, and copy it. i searched for a book for longer than anyone else, my desire to find a genetics book and use their scientific jargon to create prose. my search proved futile, so at the last second i grabbed "an american dream" from the shelf - a small, antique-looking book with a battered brown cover. i flipped through the pages, and on a certain page the word "coagulated" jumped out at me and i chose that page- page 59. i photocopied the page, stuffed it into my bookbag, and left- it wasn't due till wednesday.

so today, after french, i walked over to the starbucks to start on my assignment. i ordered a sweet coffee, sat down on a couch, and pulled out my notebook. i took a few seconds to rip off the edges of the photocopy to reduce my copy to the single page- page 59. i sat down, ready to start, and read what i had brought with me.

you can read what i read if you like, at the bottom of the page, you then may understand my feelings better.

i was moved to tears. unbelievably moved. magnificently changed. i read over it what must have been ten times, just in awe. how did i manage to pick this page, this moment, this desperate scene out of all the hundreds of pages? how could i have walked around with such emotion in my bag and not felt its weight? how could these words have been hiding in my pack for two days without them breaking free and screaming "look at us we are beautiful!" until i was forced to read them. the page, isolated from all its brothers and sisters, tells only a tiny fraction of a story, but at the same time tells so very much. i cried in the middle of starbucks, surrounded by people blabbing about facebook and vanilla lattes and gymnastics, and they were ignorant to the bright light i held in my hands. i just wanted to force them all to read it, to start a sobbing fest in that coffee shop and change everyone's life.

the tiny bits of dialogue are the most amazing. it is so horribly sad without using any words like sadness, or any tears, or any explanation. its description and simplicity evoke the deepest sort of sadness and sympathy, and there is so much about the narrator that is revealed. a good book is one that you can read the entire story in one page, and this is that. the words are so sweet, the narration so matter-of-fact while at the same time being so intensely mournful. i couldn't get enough of it. i wanted to swallow it whole, i wanted the words to run through my blood, i wanted something to show for this feeling that overcame me. i wanted to burst into flame.

after reading it enough times to where i was satisfied with my feelings for it, i started my assignment. i wanted to use every single word the author had, i wanted to somehow get that same reaction and that same meaning and make eveyrone in my class just burn with the same intensity that i had. i separated the whole page, made columns for all the nouns, all the verbs, the adjectives, adverbs, prepositions. i wrote down all the personal pronouns, articles, adjectives that could be nouns and prepositions that could be adjectives. i picked apart every piece i could get my fingers on, separating and labeling every part of every sentence. i wrote down all the punctuation- i wanted to be thorough.

then, as i readied myself to begin rearranging, i suddenly felt a great sense of guilt. what had i done? this beautiful piece, these moving feelings and intense emotions, i had just reduced the entire page to several pieces of paper covered in meaningless garbage. i felt like i had gone into someone's home, stolen their baby, and pinned it down and dissected it, spreading all its parts on their floor, and yelling "i didn't mean to! it was so beautiful! it was only homework!" i looked at all my work and rearranging and felt disgusting, like i had destroyed something irreplacable. i read the original page again, trying to catch that original feeling, the holes it stuck in me- but still, i felt so plainly awful.

so i crumpled up my pages of dissection and stuffed them in my sweet coffee cup and threw them away. i read the page over again, and penciled in some thoughts on the copy, underlined particularly good words, and contemplated different ways to rearrange. but i just couldn't sit there any more with all the baby parts lying in front of me in a bloody mess. i'll do the assignment, and i might post it if any of you want to read it, but i just thought i would share this strange little experience.

it's changed my life in a very small way.
and i'm going to read this book.
<3>An American Dream page 59

of pink-tinted glasses was sitting in his car, the door open, holding
his temple, and groaning in a whining gurgling sound which be-
trayed the shoddy state of his internal plumbing.
But I had broken through the crowd and was about to kneel at
Deborah's body. An arm in a blue serge sleeve held me back.
"Officer, that's my wife."
The arm went down suddenly. "You better not look, mister"
There was nothing agreeable to see. She must have first struck
the pavement, and the nearest car had been almost at a halt before it
hit her. Perhaps it pushed the body a few feet. Now her limbs
had the used-up look of rope washed limp in the sea, and her
head was wedged beneath a tire. There was a man taking photo-
graphs, his strobe light going off each time with a mean crackling
hiss, and as I knelt, he stepped back and turned to someone else, a
doctor with a satchel in his hand, and said, "She's yours."
"All right, move the car back," the doctor said. Two policemen
near me pushed on the automobile and retired the front wheels a
foot before the car bumped gently into the car behind it. I knelt
ahead of the medical examiner and looked at her face. It was filthy
with a scrape of asphalt and tire marks. Just hald of her was
recognizable, for the side of her face which caught the tire was
swollen. She looked like a fat young girl. But trhe back of her head,
like a fruit gone rotten and lying in its juices, was the center of a
pond of coagulated blood near to a foot in diameter. I stayed between
the police photographer who was getting ready to take more pictures
and the medical examiner who was opening his satchel, and still
on my knees, touched my face to hers, being careful to catch some of
the blood on my hands, and even (as I nuzzled her hair with my
nose) a streak of two more on my cheeks. "Oh, baby," I said alound. It
might have been good to weep, but nothing of that sort was even
near. No, shock and stupor would be the best I could muster.
"Deborah," I said, and like an echo from the worst of one's past
came a clear sense of doing this before, of making love to some

digestion imperfection

i find that blogger, much like a beautiful woman, has such attractive and beauteous design that i can somehwat overlook its aformentioned annoyances and shortcomings. so here i am, to return to the blogging site that i am so good at complaining about.

i seem to have somewhat beaten this stupid stomach infection that i have- and i am fairly certain that's what it is. i managed to eat tuna and a plum earlier, and so far my intestines have yet to scream and thrash in protest. i believe that the key to these health problems is to find food that doesn't piss of any of my inner organs, and that has so far proven to evade all potential agony associated with my digestive system. the following things can not be ingested any longer:

1. paty [which usually isn't safe for any human being, anyway]
2. anything moderately greasy
3. anything heavy in sugar
4. anything with alot of fat, like mayonaise or salad dressing
5. pretty much any food that is moderately "tasty" "delicious" or "fucking amazing", my diet is now reduced to things that fall under the category of "fruit" "vegetable" or "cow dung"

*sigh* i feel like i am getting a 50 year old's stomach and little early. so now i have the beauty of a young metabolism, and not the stomach to take advantage of it. then again, maybe this is god's way of making me get to a healthy weight- by literally forcing me to eat healthy food. fuck god.

i want a cookie.

<3 gen

endlessly irritating

why i have returned to this pathetic blogspot, i do not know. the navigtion is aggravatingly difficult, my profile picture continues to look horribly pixelated no matter what action i take to replace it, the design tools are unclear and fickle, and the publishing process, which other blogs seem to have no trouble making a point-and-click procedure, blogger manages to add a thousand more buttons to add to my annoyance.

i do not think that anything frustrates me so much as technology that tries to make things more "convenient" by adding ten thousand more options and patches and extensions which, in reality, just make everything ten thousand times more difficult and annoying to use. not to mention that it then proceeds to make me feel incredibly stupid.

that frustration then leads to me and my boyfriend arguing over nothing, but just annoyed by eachother's idiosyncracies, the sounds of our voice, the way we look at one another. we read into it way too much, we get frsutrated, i listen to music and pretend i don't just want to scream.

all of this just because this stupid god-forsaken website is overly difficult, firefox makes everything complicated and won't read my xanga html, and my boyfriend's keyboard is so insensitive that i have to practically bash it to pieces to make it recognize that i'm typing.

fuck technology and fuck blogger.

internet explorer, xanga, and old keyboards rock the world.
fuck.

<3 gen