glow-in-the-dark dicks cannot be bored out of their gourd

Sweet mother of all that is sacred, I'm bored out of my gourd.

I'm listening to a few tunes via Winamp. It's playing rather softly, but it's music that I downloaded so long ago that there's no reason to turn it up.

There's Cascade dishwasher fluid on the counter, along with some graham crackers and the midget of all televisions. I got it for Christmas a few years back. We had a thirteen-inch television a month or two ago, but it was donated to Pat so he could play video games and be connected with the outside world. His roommate doesn't have a TV. His roommate hammers away in the basement at midnight and sometimes forgets to cook herself dinner after she's gotten all of the materials out. She doesn't own any measuring cups whatsoever, so when Pat makes macaroni he has to use the blender to measure out the water. The TV that's on the kitchen counter now in my house, if I wanted to block the screen from anyone watching, I wouldn't even have to stand in front if it. I could place my hand in front of it or hold up a postcard, and you'd only be able to see the light seeping through my fingers or the fiber in the paper. My dad tries to watch the nightly business report every night, even though everyone who walks past knows he can't see the stock quotes.

School starts tomorrow. I remember when my freshmen year ended and I walked aimlessly down the back streets with my CD player, and then I wrote an entry about it that was even boring to write. During my walk, I dropped the CD player, for some reason unbeknownst to me. It cracked open and the CD skidded across the pavement, but nothing seemed to be damaged aside from a few scratches on the CD player. While walking, I wished I had had a different CD with me, but my Linkin Park CD was the only CD I had in which I liked or didn't mind every song.

I bought a new backpack. It's not even a backpack in its literal meaning, really. Last year I felt like an elderly man the way my back always ached, and I couldn't walk upright down the hallways because the sheer weight of my backpack made me lean forward. I weighed it once, and it was a little over twenty pounds. The frightening part was that, by the end of the year, it didn't seem so heavy anymore.

When I was in elementary school and junior high, we got a list of supplies that we needed for the year. It was convenient. You just went out and bought your seven folders and your seven notebooks and your three-ring binder and your nice pens and pencils that were stolen before the quarter was over, and that was all. I have enough leftover notebooks from past school years to rewrite War and Peace and have enough blank pages afterwards to make fun of boring passages and taunt the author.

This year I bought a small file with thirteen folders in it, a five-subject notebook, and a black pen/red pen/mechanical pencil all harbored in one entity. It's genius. I'd have to be plastered onto the grill of an eighteen-wheeler before I forgot one notebook or one compilation of folders. If someone steals my notebook, I would notice in seconds, and soon thereafter I would be standing, my chair strewn to the floor, and I would pound the desk and demand, "Who the fuck took half of my schoolwork just now?" After the notebook begins to become frail and fall apart at the seams, I will reinforce it with duct tape. That way, if it becomes lost, all I have to do is look for the glare coming off the tape onto the ceiling.

I normally don't plan what I'll wear for my first day of school. I just wake up at an ungodly time of the morning and dig through the basket of clean clothes, gather a pair of jeans from the basement, and then on I go. But this year -- this year, the pattern will be broken. And apparently, the pattern costs fifteen dollars.

While I was in Japan, Di and I noticed this Japanese girl walking ahead of us who was wearing a skirt over her jeans. It struck me as odd initially, but the combination grew on me the longer I stared at it.

Then! A week ago, Resa was discussing how she would participate in "clash day" for homecoming at her school this year, but that it would be difficult to clash anything against jeans or khakis. I replied offhandedly that she could wear a skirt, and then it all came flooding back to me. The Japanese girl, the confusion, wondering if she also wore her underwear over her pants like Superman and other such heroes.

But the Japanese? They don't make mistakes. That's why they don't have erasers on their pencils.

Within seconds I was slipping on my poncho over my head -- it was sprinkling outside, you see -- and I was biking to the nearest Target with Resa, my poncho billowing behind me in the wind, reminiscent of the witch from The Wizard of Oz. I had the forty dollars I had earned taking care of Resa's cats while she and her family were in New York, and I had a dream.

I found a skirt at Target, one that was plaid and blue. I pulled it on over my pants and stood in front of a mirror.

Five minutes and fifteen dollars later, the skirt was mine, and I again stepped into it and zipped it up. Resa and I meandered through Target to cool off -- ponchos retain heat, or so I learned.

Resa agreed wholeheartedly that I was dead-ass hot with my skirt/jeans combo, so once we had biked back to her house from FuncoLand, she put on her own skirt. We were pimping, not unlike rappers who cross their arms over their chests menacingly and miraculously keep their pants from sliding down their ass and hitting the floor. Except Resa and I are literate.

So! Come tomorrow, when I step through the fingerprint-smudged doors of the halls of learning, I will be wearing a skirt over my pants and a shirt I purchased in Japan that reads, "I will love you pleasantly." I figured that by wearing a shirt that I bought in Japan, I can give credit where credit is due. One of the Japanese chaperones that escorted us around Japan told us that the Japanese don't like wearing shirts with Japanese written on them. I think I would rather wear a shirt written in my mother language than one with a foreign language that, for all I know, could be like a shirt a woman in Taiwan sported who could not speak English -- "I used to trust the government, and now my dick glows in the dark."

Bitter Republicans should make T-shirts and sell them in Taiwan more often.

I hope you've gotten something out of this, because this sure feels like an ending to me.