lonely roller coaster rides

I can't tell whether today's been adequate or miserable. My prediction is that, by the end of this entry, the majority of people who visit my diary will be not unlike the exploded remains of a hot dog splattered on the walls of a microwave.

Yesterday in band, given that there aren't any more upcoming concerts, we began watching "The Beatles Anthology," the first tape of a trilogy. Much suffering ensued as the video continued today. Though I currently have no qualms with the Beatles, I may soon. We've been watching part one of this godforsaken anthology for a combined total of two hours, and, I'll reiterate for added emphasis, we have not yet arrived at the second part. I visited England about four years ago for a little over a week, and since then, listening to an English accent over a prolonged period of time evokes an urgent warning from my stomach that I will soon find myself tossing my cookies into a garbage can. I was in awe over the fact that they managed to stretch such a short span in time over a two-hour TV special.

I left first period with the gift of nausea and a card with hugging bears and dogs with spots that was signed by the Beatles.

During photography, I developed a few more pictures that are needed in order to complete my grad standard. There exists two darkrooms, and, while the right darkroom would be the one of choice, it was in use by too many students and I was forced into the left. Two girls were already developing pictures within, chatting to one another like bubbly little parakeets. This is probably an inappropriate analogy, because while parakeets are conversing they look so intelligent, whereas one of the babbling girls was the proud owner of a unibrow and the other looked like a man. To complete the fa�ade of masculinity, they showed complete disregard to the obvious fact that I, too, was attempting to get some work done, and they leaned against the sink blocking the path to the developing solutions with prongs idly in hand. I was forced to shove and "excuse me" my way through and dunk my hand into painful chemicals, and this did not make me happy or better my queasy belly. Much like someone diving and then surfacing, gasping for sweet, sweet oxygen, I stumbled out of the darkroom once my pictures were developing away in tubs of peanut butter-scented chemicals, joyous to be away from the rambling girls.

"Bah," I declared with a scowl. "They go on and on! Sweet mother of sanity!"

Not looking away from his picture-studded board, A (I have a newfound fondness for addressing people with the first letter of their names) replied, "Oh, you mean those two ugly girls in the left darkroom?"

"Yeah, those would be the ones. They kept fumbling on about their ten or twenty pictures that wouldn't turn out because they were so blurred, and somehow they concluded that it was their negatives. How can you look through the viewfinder, see that everything's blurred to hell, and then take a goddamn picture?! Bah!"

It also puzzles me as to why they even take this course if it's an elective and they are in no way bound to continue coming to the class each day.

We dissected earthworms that must've been twice the average size based on the ones I see after storms, and when I asked questions of Dockin about a vague diagram of the earthworm's innards, he volleyed questions at me about the ovaries and testes of earthworms, questions I did not want to answer, and accused me of not listening. Am I the only one that doesn't feel comfortable engaging in open conversation regarding the hermaphroditic characteristics of earthworms?

I left a minute or two before the bell rang so I could retreat back to the biology classroom and shove some worksheets into the slot, and then returned to the biology lab to retrieve my textbook. It had mysteriously vanished. I circled the science department and finally located Dockin, asking him if he had taken my textbook when he thought that no one would claim it. The man is the self-proclaimed overlord of the earthworm's sexual tendencies, the universal sex hand gesture, and propping his leg up on high lab tables and flaunting his -- pleated pants? -- to innocent students less than a foot away, but he could not tell me where my ten-pound biology textbook had gone.

I gave up, since passing time was almost over, and headed off to English. I walked in the door and one of my lab partners flagged me over and gave me back my biology book, and said that she had thought I'd forgotten it and decided to take it for me. This had only vaguely occurred to me during the mad search for my textbook, but the idea was immediately discarded, pointed, and laughed at. My school is ridden with insecure assholes who feel the need to shoot people down so they can repair their tattered self-esteem, and their intelligence is equal to that of a damp rock. I gave them the extra molecules found in water because they can tie their shoes.

We discussed To Kill A Mockingbird in English, and then the loci of spheres in geometry, and during lunch I saw a girl who was wearing her pants inside out. I debated telling her but decided that her embarrassment of ignorantly going the entire day with her pants inside out would be more fulfilling.

We did small group presentations in economics, presentations I found useless because Ms. Olson ventured to the front of the classroom afterwards and taught their entire segment to the class over again. A little boy whose home is his head up his ass, a little boy who will be referred to as J, sat in the desk behind me, and belittled every group that presented and called every male that spoke gay.

It saddens me when people use "gay" as an insult. The other day, a junior in my Japanese class was asked if he would get off a bus if he discovered all of the men on board were gay, and he laughed nervously and replied that he would. What self-flattery! Every girl I've that's seen him has shaken her head in pity and glared in annoyance, so it makes me wonder why he thinks a gay guy would give him a second glance.

Anyway, so back to J, the boy whose upper lip seems to creep over his entire face and who is in dire need of neutering. There's not much to tell besides that he annoyed and continues to annoy the living fuck out of me. My economics teacher grew up in Arizona, and she's often spoken to derisively because of her minor accent. Again, I wonder how my classmates can act so superior when they have an accent as well, and, on top of that, can't spell and have no grasp whatsoever of the English language. At the end of class, J announced that Ms. Olson's accent sounded funny, to which I replied, "So is your face." Unfortunately for the boy who somehow manages to be more boring than his painstakingly monotonous voice, he did not hear me.

I gave a presentation less than thirty seconds on lanterns in Japanese class. As I was returning to my seat I realized that I had excluded the entire paragraph I had intended to read about the history of lanterns. The two or three presentations that followed mine were worse than what I had presented in thirty seconds, and I wasn't sure whether I should be proud or cry. C, otherwise known as the boy who likes to pretend that gay men find him attractive, rattled off soft and muddled information about Japanese castles, and appeared to not have previously read what he tacked onto his poster board. When he cheered at the mention of beer in a later presentation, I could, being the prophetic person that I am, see his future! I saw the murky outline of a man tacking on the little plastic strips to the end of shoelaces, and watching women grimace and speed away at the mention of his job and/or his bathtub filled with beer and makeshift lily pads that are actually the weed he's illegally harvesting.

After school, my mom carted me home so I could snag an assignment and then back to school so I could run up two flights of stairs to the math department to hand it in. My mom and I then went out to coffee, but not to Starbucks, because fetching my assignment had drained the time we would have needed to travel so far. I ordered an iced mocha there, and tried not to gag when I took a swig. A mocha is supposed to be a delicate balance of chocolate and expresso, not coffee that's hidden by disgustingly sweet chocolate that you'd expect to find lacing french silk pie. I didn't drink much until the ice cubes had melted and effectively watered down the chocolate, which seemed to defeat the purpose of getting a mocha in the first place. My mom talked to me the entire way home as I peered out the window at the vividly green trees, and the cotton tumbling over the windshield as we drove past. She chatted about how Pat's apartment and job search was coming along and if his new housing complex would allow cats, then how he'd be lonely living in a new state, and then how his mom had told her over the phone that "he wasn't exactly college material." My mom then went on to say how she completely disagreed and that he seemed like he worked hard, and that she thought it was the only reason his parents weren't supplying him with more than three hundred a month or paying for him to go to a university. She told me she thought it was condemning him before he began, and that he would do well if he was given a chance. I nodded and grunted when I was cued for replies. I already knew all of what she was saying, but I let her talk anyway.

I came into the house once I was dropped off and played "Retrospection" from Suikoden II on the piano by ear, and then popped in a CD that was made for me and listened to Stone Temple Pilots. It reminded me of the comics Bryan and I made while Resa was at camp last summer, and of one comic in particular (comic no. 5) in which I quoted Stone Temple Pilots -- "'The roller coaster ride's a lonely one,' Bryan," I told him.

I wonder if people really do slip on banana peels.

I'm done now.