jelly grows colonies of mold after a few months

I'm supposed to be working on the four articles yet to be completed for my group presentation in economics tomorrow, but it seems as though I can't buckle down and be productive. I promised myself I wouldn't continue to put myself through such suffering by procrastinating, but the pressure that had built up to overwhelming proportions over the course of the school year is rapidly dissipating.

Instead of remaining on-task, I checked my favorites listing in the dim hope that someone had updated; no one had. So instead I meandered around various diaries and eventually found myself at a site that gives monthly topics that the site's members are expected to elaborate upon and submit by the end of the month. I only read two, because most of the featured responses were dark and contemplative and within seconds I could feel myself nodding off to sleep. One of them had to deal with, uh, a topic that I skimmed and promptly discarded from the archives of my memory, and the chosen response drifted from career to career that she had dreamed of engaging in throughout her childhood. The author concluded by saying that, currently, she has a large Styrofoam question mark cutout hovering over her head, and I found her indecisiveness in a career choice even into adulthood much like dizzy children trying to pin a tail on a cartoon donkey poster. I don't understand how you can be well in your twenties and still not have so much as a vague clue as to the kind of life you'd like to lead. I can imagine myself asking such a person what their name was and then blinking in astonishment when they hesitated in an attempt to remember.

When I was in daycare, I wanted to be a doctor, because I enjoyed pretending to be one. Now, if you ran into me on the street and began educating me on subjects such as self-injury, bloodletting, hemophilia, or bruises, you'd soon find yourself walking alone, because I would quickly pass out onto the sidewalk after tossing my cookies into the sewer.

In elementary school, I revised my thoughts and instead aspired to be a waitress. I feel like I started at the top of a black diamond skiing slope as a doctor and then rolled to the bottom in pieces as a waitress. This idea was trashed when I considered the devastatingly low salary and that I hate people.

For a long time afterwards I had settled somewhere in the realm of a cartoonist or an author, but then I realized that having a deadline put on my artwork would soon lead me to laugh maniacally and yank my hair out of my scalp, and I don't harbor enough discipline to finish a book or survive on ramen noodles.

So now it's down to writing columns in the newspaper based solely upon my opinion, or translating Japanese, both of which the country is in dire need. The other day as I was reading through advice columns (you can learn a lot about people from those), I noticed a column revolving around this woman's life as, as Katie has lovingly dubbed it, a "dinghy." And "Meg March," that sounds familiar, like one of the characters in Little Women. As I ran over the four women in my mind, I tallied them off as such: "Jo, Meg, Amy, and the one that dies." Morbid and yet true, as Beth's only role in the entire movie was to play the piano come Christmastime and stumble around as the sickly woman that she is. Or was, before she expired. I love using the term "expired" to refer to death, because suddenly, instead of mourning the passing of a human, a family weeps over the rancid cottage cheese they were forced to throw out. Someday I'll write a poem about the expiration of a loved one/rancid cottage cheese -- pay heed, my children.

I think I was going somewhere with this, but I forget where.

In conclusion, I purposely included an educational fact in the short description of this entry: "jelly grows colonies of mold after a few months." After I experienced this for myself, I had nightmares for weeks. And I'm exceptionally proud that I've managed to remain consistent with my diary entries, so poke around the archives to ensure that you haven't missed a pant-wetting news bulletin from yours truly.

And then the curtains fall.