July 25, 2004 - 10:12 a.m.
Well, in keeping with what my perceptive friend Misa called the "roller coaster" patterns in my life, things are again looking up. And, knowing the sort of roller coasters they build these days, things are looking around and around and backwards, too. But mostly up.
I've been spending a lot of time with the Far West Friend Squad. They aren't called that-- they aren't called anything, really-- but I like any sort of phrase that calls to mind the sort of team that would need color-coded uniforms and robots that join together. I never thought about it until now, but I think the reason it seems notable is that I did not meet these people in high school. I did not even meet them through people I knew in high school. They came from other parts of the country, they're employed as temps where I work, and they are now my friends. Hugs all around for the concept of friendship!
There's Brian, who you should already be familiar with by now; there's Tanissia, Brian's fiancee, who has taken some very odd photographs of me and some very awesome photographs of my stuff; there's Jon, who rocks in a way completely unrelated to Rock & Roll; then there's Jon's sister Sarah, who is entirely fascinating and entirely uninterested in Mario Party (but still beat the pants off me). They tolerated the orgiastic reading material on the coffee table in my living room in order to play exquisite-corpse-style party game Eat Poop, You Cat with the friends that I do know from high school. You'll soon be able to scratch your head at the results of this by visiting Brian's website, robot machine dot net. Brian claims that not only does he not mind scanning a near-infinite number of tiny sheets of paper into his computer for upload, but he actually claims to enjoy it.
So that's fun. (I'm not sure even I understand the paragraph I just wrote up there, but really, it is all very fun.) I also checked my bank account in dispair, and found, to my surprise, that I had been way too convincing when I tried to convince myself that I had no money. I did it when I deposited my last check, so that I would not spend very much of it, but I went too far and somehow my self-delusion snowballed into a sensation of being totally broke, which I am not. I'm not rich, by any means, but I can actually buy groceries, which I was convinced I wasn't going to be able to do. So, perhaps I should be a little more careful when I lie to myself in the future.
But yes, finding out you actually have the money you will need is a good feeling. And so is starting up your presumed-dead car on a whim and finding it shaky but entirely driveable, at least enough so that it will transport you to food when your girlfriend is in Texas and you find yourself pathetically unable to feed yourself without her. I'm not sure how that happened. Anyway, it may be too early to tell, but it seems I can count on my car to go short distances. I'm going to try to drive it to work on Monday. I should probably take it to a mechanic to see why it feels like it wants to stall when it slows to a stop and why it wants to lunge forward when it sees babies, but remember the last paragraph where I said I had more money than I thought? Yeah, it wasn't THAT much money.
Another fun thing is that I went ahead and made the assumption that the glass table and "ugly" lamp in the corner of the living room where expendable, and, much to my surprise, my assumption was correct. In their stead is now my Terra Cresta arcade cabinet, and the people in this house were generally more excited about it than I expected. So I won't have to sell it after all, and it seems I will have a lot of support should I decide to convert it back into the Donkey Kong it once was.
So, in general, life is good. I decided I really need to be writing more, and drawing more, and stressing out less. So I think that is what I will do. After all, practice is the only thing that can keep me from writing like this. It seems scattered and difficult to follow to me. Like I am really hungry or something and can't be bothered to conclude a sentence or paragraph with the concepts it began with, which, hey, I think that is actually true, I am very hungry! Wow! If Laurie doesn't come back soon, I think I may fall over from unrecognized hunger and collapse into a ball of pure Attention Deficit Disorder.
