my animal cracker box could be a purse

This is going to be a random entry, filled with random thoughts.

I feel so forlorn now that my fan club is merely sand sifting through my fingers!

Pat and Resa and I drove to Target today hoping we could all pitch in for an inflatable pool. You know the one -- the one with the sprinkler hooked up to the blowup palm tree, the makeshift slip-and-slide... In Japan, the second host family I stayed with was Buddhist, and they had an altar in their house made of pure gold, along with offerings of chocolate. That thing could probably pawn off for more money than I could roll in naked, but given the choice, I would still choose the inflatable pool over it.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that the aisles have been cleared out to accommodate Barbie notebooks and Tonka Truck folders in preparation for the upcoming school year, the pool was not to be found.

So instead, we played with all of the children's toys. The ones that teach letters, geography, and how you can annoy your parents to the point of tears just by giving them under a minute of silence before you smack up the noisemakers on your toy again.

We also bought three boxes of animal crackers. In order to make the transaction faster, we all pitched in a dollar so that we could split up the change later. It ended up coming to $2.97, so the old woman behind the counter with the teeth like Indian corn gave us each a shiny new penny.

And just like before, there was a polar bear depicted on a goddamn box of animal crackers along with all of the other normal circus animals, like the one dink who eats a hot dog instead of a hamburger. Although there were no polar bear crackers, there were other non-circus animals, like sheep, zebras, and buffalo.

Last night I had a dream that I couldn't find the language department at school, and then another that some pictures of my friends were flashing in the little boxes sketched in on calendars.

A few nights ago I had a dream that I was listening to some audio diary entry made by Katie, and I thought one part of it was so funny that I practically had it memorized even once I woke up. She was talking about some of the odd situations she had encountered in the past working as a waitress:

"Sometimes people like celebrating by throwing fish up into the air."

(I then got a mental picture of this table full of dining folk throwing a trout up into the air around sunset and while their table was on top of the water.)

"Then some people don't know where the fuck they're going -- that's always funny."

(Once I woke up, it occurred to me that Katie isn't the type of person who swears often unless her wrath has been incurred. Regardless, after that statement I had an image of these drunken men wandering around a pier and slamming their heads into small fishing houses.)

"But I think it's strangest when they ask me for two tomatoes to squeeze together."

(A picture of two tomatoes side-by-side and all misshapen from being forced into one another was seen.)

I think I'm going to fashion my animal cracker box into a purse.

Oh God, I look like a Pok�mon.

A quiz on M&M's website tested my level of "greenness," as in, "how similar I am to the green M&M," as in, "how sexy am I?"

"Green Sheen:

"You exude, well, everything. Your ambition is to be larger than life and, perhaps, to have a movie named after you. Be kind to those in your wake...they don't know what they've gotten themselves into."

If I were a movie, I'd be the kind of movie that makes you want to suck a lemon and turn off the VCR/DVD player thirty minutes in, because it'd be so fucked up and random that it'd make you anxious and disgusted and amused all at the same time and make you toss your cookies.

The movie would make you want to do a lot of things, basically. It would be as superfluous as a bucket, or one of those decorative knickknacks that you screw into wine corks, or maybe one of those and a bucket.

Pat and I went to the grocery store the other day to get some ingredients for banana bread, and this large man who looked like a candidate for skin cancer, a heap of STDs and who wore sunglasses busted up laughing when he saw us. "That's a piece of work," he said.

"Excuse me?" I replied, smiling just because he looked so odd giggling to himself like that. It was on the verge of amusing and disturbing, like those Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls that were so popular a few years back, the year before Furbies were all the rage.

"That's a piece of work," he repeated. "Which one's the man? I can't tell which one's the girl and which one's the boy."

I didn't try countering with a witty comeback. I didn't even try. The man looked like he'd roll when you pushed him, and I figured knowing that and keeping that thought close to my heart would be satisfactory enough.

This entry will now end suddenly.