I'm in love. Love at first sound. I know that might seem a bit odd, but I believe that perhaps being a musician makes my ears more finely tuned than my eyes. (Not that my eyes are reliable in the first place; -6.25, -7.00 is my prescription. I'm blind.) "Who are you in love with?" You may very well ask. I'll give you a hint-- I've spoken to this person everyday this week, it's some one who always is there to tell me what I need to do, in short, some one to watch over me. Monday, I called her twice, just to make sure that I had understood all she said during the first call. Her voice is a little bird's; delicate, cheerful, a song in itself. Sure we got off to a rocky start, but now I feel like I really know this person, you know? Like maybe we'll be seeing a lot of each other if things go our way.

"But, damnit, Who, Toad? Who is this wonderful being of which you speak so fondly?" I'll tell you: I am in love with the County Commissioner of Jurors' secretary. She's the woman on the recording that I have to check in with everyday to see whether I am needed to report to the courthouse. I've never seen her, don't even know her name, and to her I am just one of the jurors numbered 200 through 299, not even Juror Number 272, which is my personal number, but in my heart I know that it is meant to be.

I have written the following little poem for her.

O' Jury's Secretary girl, how much

Do I adore your pleasant silvery tone?

I'd listen all the day, you'd be my cruch,

My one and all, on touch tone telephone.

On hold I hold only for you alone

This record of you is all that I want

I cling to it like a dog to a bone

And on just this my heart grows lean and gaunt.

But though you say "Away!" believe I shan't,

You say "Jurors one up to ninety-nine"

Reject me all you like you cannot daunt

The truth, that is, it is for me you pine.

What will it take this poor ol' Toad to do

For you to call Juror Two Seven Two?

We four slept until about noon. Made macaroni, ate, and left. The previous night Z had mentioned a trip down to New York City, and had said I should join them. They were planning on leaving right after the macaroni. A dropped out, he had stuff to attend to and was tired besides. As I'd never been to NYC before, the idea of heading down there was appealing. L had never been either. Z had to go to visit his girlfriend, Bk. So it was settled. The plan: Drive back to B's apartment so I could drive Coldfish home, assuming she was not impounded. From my house, we'd then drive to L's house to chart a course. Yeah... then the whole, college musicians thing kicked in again; we didn't even leave my house until after five, and arrived at L's house around six. Now it was looking like we'd have to spend the night in the City.

This is where we ran into problems. Unlike, Z, who could spend the night with his girlfriend, L and I had no lodging arrangements. We couldn't stay with Bk, because she was staying in a hotel with her mother. L's folks were not amused. My grand'rents were and remain perfectly amused, I suppose, because they did not, and, shall never, know of these plans. Such is life.

The three would-be cosmopolitans sulked about L's bedroom kicking ideas around. It was absolutely necessary that Z make it down there that night. Bk would be leaving for Alabama shortly, and he might not have a chance to see her for a long while after that. We could all drive down, drop off Z, grab a New York slice of pizza, which would later become our mission, then drive back, but-- nah, that's silly... who'd do a thing like that? Right. So we could all catch a train into the City at the station in Renneselaer first thing in the morning? No, that won't work because, remember, Z needs to be there NOW. Well... we could take him to the station now, I could spend the night at L's and then the two of us could go down to meet him the following day. We checked the schedule. There was one leaving in just over a half hour; we could just barely make it if we flew. Yeah! That's the ticket!

And the ticket was sixty bucks. Waaaay over our meags budget. We resumed sulking in the station. "Wait," said Z, "It's only ten bucks from Poughkeepsie." That was about two hours south of where we were. Looks were exchanged. A phone call to that station was made, the schedule there was checked. We had until eleven-fifty-nine. It was only about eight-thirty. Sweet.

What to do with our new found time...? Well... we could head down there right now, then mill around Poughkeepsie until midnight. Or we could go to Z's old man's place and eat burritos. Poughkeepsian nightlife.... Burritos....Mmm....Burritos.... We had time.

Z's dad let us raid the fridge, and burritos we did have. Z was planning a road trip after NYC, so L rummaged through his stuff to see if there was anything he would care to borrow. He grabbed some hats, one of which was a positively dapper green plaid snap-brim, some books, a few shirts. Around nine-thirty we were back at L's house to Google up some directions.

I'm still not clear on what happened precisely, but, through some combination of a computer under siege of Pop-ups, and an intestinal battle Z was fighting in the loo, we didn't leave L's house until well after ten. I kept us posted on the time on the drive down to Poughkeepsie. We could still make it. Barely, but if the train was just a few minutes behind, and they always are, we could do it. Totally. In the bag. We were four minutes late. Crap.

It was just after midnight. It was cold. Now what would we do? All this adventuring, seemingly in vain... We stood, sulking once more, now in defeated silence, in an elevator on the platform. L leaned against the door to keep it open. We waited for Z to say something, watching our breaths freeze and fall silently to the ground. I tried to send a telepathic message to L to offer Z a ride the rest of the way, or at least the message that we should move into the car or station to think about what next. After fifteen minutes of standing in the sub-arctic elevator, it seems it worked. "Well, there is always the option that I could just drive you the rest of the way," he said. And our spirits were elevated once more.

It was decided that we would take the Taconic Parkway south, to Yonkers, where we intended to park and catch a commuter train the rest of the way into the city. I wanted to know why we weren't just going to drive right on in.... Ahhh, poor Ol' Toad... so full of West Coast naivete. As we drew nearer to the city, whose bright lights were hidden on the other side of some mountains, my question was answered. New York, NY drivers are insane, even at two in the morning. And our driver L, good and careful and responsible though he usually may be, was no match at this moment for the full-on borderline sociopathic driving of the average New Yorker.

L signaled to change lanes and moved over to the right. However, he failed to check his blind spot and cut off an Audi. Said Audi honked and hit the brakes. This is where most people would drop the issue. However, the Audi then changed lanes, flew out to our right, and cut us off, then slammed on his brakes. We had only just crossed into whatever the northern most burrough of the City was, and already had had an altercation with the natives.

It was time to start looking for a place to pull off the freeway. We had just passed a sign for the Zoo. The lanes were growing narrower and narrower and it was clear that no one, least of all L, was still comfortable on the Taconic, which, at some point, had become the ominous sounding Sprain Bronx Parkway. Wait...Bronx? that wasn't the Bronx Zoo, was it? No... That'd be crazy. Three milque toast music geeks in the Bronx at two-thirty in the morning. Hahaha, yeah... right... Ah hah, ah hahahah... that's great. Anyway. Let's get offa this thing before the sitch gets hairy. We need to park and find a train.

When we pulled off, for the benefit of some of you seasoned New Yorkers out there, here are some of the things we saw: a Sunoco, some seen-better-days-apartment buildings, and an autobody shop that, apparently, was open twenty-four hours a day. Some streets: White Plains Rd, signs for various parkways (there were about seven hundred), a Cross Country Road, and 241st street. L pulled in at the Sunoco for directions, a pit stop, and coffee. A man in front of the mini-mart gave us the name of a rail station that he thought was still running. There was a little plastic coated map there that L and I wanted to buy. We tried to find some of the streets from the man's directions while we glanced over it. We looked, with longing, at its streets, laid out and laminated, just for us, in shiny simplicity. We were debating whether to run back out to the car to get money, but Z just wanted to get outta there. "I totally know where we need to go," he said. So we left, mapless.

Driving around through darkened streets, barbed wire fences, and buildings that were either abandoned or about to be, looking for this enigmatic station, I finally came to terms with the truth-- that we were totally not in Yonkers. This was the Bronx. Yes, the Bronx. And now it was of three. I should really learn to listen better. L and Z had already found out that the last commuter rail from Yonkers was around ten. This is why we'd had to continue into the Bronx. L took us in slow, concentric circles spiraling outward from the Sunoco until we came to what appeared to be a station under a bridge. We passed by it twice, but were unable to ascertain its nature. We left Z on the bridge to figure it out. Yes, in the Bronx, at three in the morning. All alone. But he'd only have to cope for five minutes; L and I were just going to go look for a place to park. Parking had become the primary objective. It would be a terrible thing to return to the station wagon to find it up on blocks.

Five minutes passed. We were slowly tracing the rails from below, driving about twenty miles per hours along White Plains Road. Ten minutes passed. "Hmmm... I really wish we had that little map," said L. I began to think of Z's situation as a new sort of eXtreme daredevil sport. Leave some kid in the Bronx totally unsupported in the wee hours of the morning and see how long he can survive. The longer the better, and more impressive. Eventually, I supposed, there would be a real following for the sport, with national and international championships and everything....

"Hey! Aren't you watching these street signs? You need to pay attention to the cross streets or we'll get lost." L stared at me in disbelief. Yes, even in times of dire urgency, in which a member of our group has become separated, in the Bronx, at three o'clock in the morning, I am still able to become entirely distracted. "Huh? Sorry... Um." I said.

The further we drove, the sketchier the surroundings became. We watched the numbers on the street signs slowly decline, we noted cross roads. I think we were looking for a parking spot as much as we were trying to figure out how we had come to be where we were. Fifteen minutes passed and we began an easy zig-zag, crisscrossing White Plains scouting for parking spots and familiar street names. Twenty minutes passed. We had managed to retrace our steps back to the Sunoco, but once there we seemed to have misplaced the bridge on which we had left Z. I imagined him hunkered down behind a trash bin, his gear next to him on the ground, talking on a wireless headset to a coach in some far off medical tent.

=tschk= (the headset would go)

"I don't know if I can go on! I-- I think I'm about to be killed and thrown off a bridge..." =tschk=

Then his coach would respond: =tschk=

"Just hang in there kid, three minutes and forty-seven seconds to go, and you'll have beaten the record set in 1910 by Johannes Fünfäpfel; you're so close!" =tschk=

I imagined it all on an old news reel, accompanied by scratchy a jitterbug pumped out on a Victrola, and narrated by that guy, you know, the one who used to read the news on those old news reels....

"Yes, folks, all in all, this daring young lad from Schodack spent 29 minutes, forty-two seconds, absolutely unsupported, in the Bronx at three-thirty in the morning. He was only mildly accosted in this time, a truly miraculous showing, as even Johannes Fünfäpfel, the record holder since 1910 for the Unsupported Bronx Sitting Time Trial, was lightly shot ten minutes into his own attempt... We're awaiting news from the judges now, but, surely, this ambitious sitting shall be a new record.... By the way, it has been just wonderful to report to you all, this, this true achievement of the human spirit... Wait-- we're just getting this in, why, why... Yes! Yes! A new record! Z, the boy from Upstate, has beaten Fünfäpfel by a full twenty seconds! Just amazing, folks... We're going to go now to Z--"

"Toad! Aren't you looking at the streets? Does any of this look at all familiar to you?? I think I recognize the next one... I'm going to turn. My instinct tells me left. How 'bout yours?"

"Um." I said, and cleared my throat.

"What? Which way? C'mon!"

"Um. Yes? Left."

"Is that what you think, or do you not recognize the name at all?"

"No... Um. No. I recognize it, I think. Um. Yeah, left."

We finally caught up with Z on the bridge. He was less than amused, especially because we still hadn't found a parking spot. It didn't matter anyway, because the thing near the bridge wasn't a station after all. L resumed his concentric circling. Eventually we were back on White Plains Road, the idea being that we would simply follow the rails until we happened upon a safe place to park. We slowly drove up and down, popping down the occasional side street, until we found a spot on Richardson. From there we walked to 241st and White Plains, the last stop on the No. 2 (I think), and caught the 4:00 train to Times Square.

To be continued.... (I know... sorry... I told you there was a lot to report back. And I've been busy getting prepared for school)

In Other News: Lessee... Well, I got one of those "MySpace" things. ...my chums made me do it. Other than that... hmm. Classes begin Monday.... You know what? Seriously, I don't know how you guys keep these things up so well. Take Jules: Full time college student, high marks, but nevertheless, he runs an awesome blog over at On The Rocks With a Twist. or fatty, with a full time job, and kids, and, you know, responsibility and stuff... I mean damnit. Every one but me is able to make time everyday for a full length, publish-worthy article. And you're all busier than I am. It's just amazing to me... that's all I'm saying. Then again, if memory serves, my very first post was about how I'd never be able to keep this thing updated daily for long.... sigh. Aight. Anywho, I need to figure out what classes I have scheduled for tomorrow, because, seriously, at this point, all I know is that I don't have to come in on Fridays. But, o' such a sweet score that is.

Photos: One is of Z and me (I am the one in the laughably gianormous green parka) on the train, the other is L, our stalwart driver (Note the killer hat! I have a snap brim my grand father gave me hen I first came to live in New York, but it's bigger and floppier than that one. I still wear it all the time though). I hope they don't mind my posting their photos.... Well, I can take 'em off natch'rally, if they do.

Well. Now that I've had sufficient time to recover (from the festivities surrounding the New Year and the much awaited visit of Ja'ar that followed right on it's heels) to be capable of stringing two thoughts together, I find that there are simply too many adventures to relate, real or silly and exaggerated.

I last posted on New Year's Eve. In that case, I'll start from there.

After talking to Jan about the intricacies of the Cellular Phone, I left for a New Year's Eve party at the house of J Shizzle, a piano major. I arrived at Shizz's around nine, and, after drinking a cup of Hawaiian Punch and acting as sports photographer for several rounds of Twister, left approximately one hour later. I took my leave in the middle of an evil, blizzarding, ridiculously bad snow storm that only a fool West Coaster like myself would ever be caught dead in. Ironically, I left early in order to avoid the inclement (by which I mean "White Out") weather conditions. This excellent show of foresight gave me much comfort as my wheels spun helplessly in reverse, pathetically trying to back the bulk of my grandmother's white '93 Pontiac GrandAm out of the ditch in which I was firmly lodged.

"CURSE YOU!" I screamed at the dashboard. Didn't Coldfish (the Pontiac) realize how dire the situation was? I have no cell phone. I heard the German pro cyclist's laughter in my head. "Dat's vat you get, hah hah hah! Maybe next time you vill covoporate vith me venn I try to help you! Hah hah hah!" I imagined the news... "Dead imbecile found frozen solid on side of country road." the Times would read. "MORONCICLE TREE-HUGGING CYCLIST!" The New York Post would shout almost surely adding, "Dumb New Yorker reader get what's coming to her! Who's Hoighty Toighty Now?" 'No...' I thought, 'I cannot give that rag the satisfaction...' I gunned it again. Miraculously, Coldfish somehow took hold and launched herself out backwards all the way into oncoming traffic. I laughed maniacally. Let the cretins honk if they must! I was out of the ditch of despair.

Now the only question was... where was I? I stayed on the same road and kept driving in the same direction at about ten miles an hour. I did this for about an hour. Nothing was familiar, but having never been out in this area before, there was no telling, really. It was no help that I had been lost on the way in, and going about thirty-five (fifty); I couldn't even gauge whether I had been so far on this road or not. And that's when I found myself in Saratoga. Good lord. I was about twenty miles in the wrong direction. I turned around, careful not to slide into a ditch again, and went back in the direction I came.

When I finally pulled into my garage, I vowed never to venture out into wretchedness like this again. As this last sentence clearly foreshadows, I would find myself back on the road in the blizzard once more, in a matter of minutes. No sooner had I kicked off my shoes and settled in for a depressing one-toad-New-Year's-gonna-drink-by-myself-until-I-pass-out-watching-CSPAN-fest than the phone rang. It was none other than L, a guitar major who has been teaching (or trying to teach) me in the ways of jazz improvisation. Did I want to come play some music? Yeah, yeah I did. Where at? Meet you at B's place and then we'll all to another party in Amsterdam? Okay... I'll think about it, but I don't want to drive in this... I'll call you back when I figure out what I'm doing. I sat in the garage staring at Coldfish, weighing the pros and cons. Of course, I'd rather spend the evening with my chums, playing music. But was the Coldfish up to it? With her balding tires, her non-working defrosters, the leaky driver's side door? No. She was definitely not up to it.

I parked what could've been a mile away from the apartment. There was some music already playing, but as I understood it, L, A (was guitar, now piano), and Z (not a music major but, I believe, plays bass, guitar, and drums), and I would be leaving shortly for a different party in Amsterdam. There was a general consensus that it would be cool not to actually be anywhere during the ball drop. Let the sheep stare into the shiny ball of belonging! Hah! We will be somewhere on the road when the Man gives you an injection of zombification! Huzzah! However, we are, after all, college students, and musicians to boot, and are therefore unable to organize anything in under an hour. Thus we missed missing the ball drop by about fifteen minutes. I left Coldfish parked on the side of the road, and the four of us crammed into L's station wagon. I bid Coldfish god speed as we drove past her. I couldn't help but notice that, through al the snow, I had no idea of whether or not I was parked in front of a driveway.

After a pit stop to let A grab his keyboard from his girlfriend's house, we continued on to Amsterdam. There was nothing to drink there except soy egg nog (oh stop, you'd like it if you tried it), vodka, and Kahlua. So we drank that. It wasn't bad; Reminiscent of a Brandy Alexander with just Kahlua. With the Vodka... Well, one makes do. Music was played until, I think, about three. It was either one or three.... Maybe it was two? Four? Some wee hour or other. The night wore on, we were inundated with the rapid fire comedy of Family Guy until six, at which point, no one could even make out the jokes anymore. Under threat of mutiny, it was finally agreed that a change of pace was in order. They put on the latest Romero zombie flick-- something about zombies with feelings and entrails, I believe. I dozed off during an arm being ripped in half down the middle. My snores blended melodiously with the spluttery sound effects.

.................................

Well, it looks like that's all the time we have for this entry folks. What will these four brave collegiates do when they awaken from the night's indulgences? Will Toad still have a car, or will she have to quit Coldfish cold turkey? Tune tomorrow for the exciting conclusion-- Same Toad time, same Toad channel!

In Other News: Well, as you can see, I've updated the side column there. The spring semester approacheth. I had meant to do a lot more of everything over this break... more training, more practicing, more reading, more studying. Such is life. I think I can still squeeze in a couple more books at least. That'll be nice. This next semester is shaping up to be a doozy. I'm very excited about Wind Chamber Ensemble. Usually, the chamber ensemble is just a trio to a quintet of whatever instrument you're majored in. I am the only flute major though, so for me this means I get to play chamber music with all sorts of other stuff! Yay! I love playing chamber music with other instruments! I'm also excited about US Government and Politics.... After this, I'll only be one class away from finishing a degree in the Humanities, and only seven credits from finishing the Music. I'm still going to stay at SCCC for a full third year, though. I'm having some doubts about giving up music for languages when I transfer, and am beginning to explore the idea of perhaps staying in music. A full third year will let me focus entirely on music, and, hopefully, with nothing else to distract me, I will improve enough to make music a serious second option.

Each successive year, come holiday season, I am put ever more out of sorts. These last two years (since I've come out of "hiding" and am no longer too concerned with surviving winter to dwell on things), I have found myself in a perpetual state of general down-ness. It's the little things that begin to grate away at me; the Spanish essays on what we were planning to do with our families over the four-day weekend, my cohorts' various plans to visit their 'rents in Vermont for ski-trips, the Hallmark-ish commercials, with images of the sweater-clad nuclear family of perfection, cuddled together in front of the fire, with their golden retriever.

I remember when I was a part of a nuclear family, once upon a time. I don't know if it was ever the sweater-wearing family from the commercial, but it had its moments. Now, let me just preface this entry by saying that I am not the bitter "I want what they have, but since I don't I'll just say I hate it anyway" type. And I'd be lying through my teeth if I said I didn't wish, periodically, that I was still a member of a sweater-clad nuclear family. I miss my old life, California (where I lived with my father until about seven years ago, when I ran away), my cat, my father, my mother (wow, that's going WAY back into the old life)...

I suppose that if I plan to continue in this vein, I had better supply some background. I don't know why I haven't already. It's kind of important to the way things have wound up.

When I was eight, my 'rents, paternal grandmother, and I went up to my great-grandmother's farm in Fresno for a baby shower that was taking place over Easter weekend. Obachan's farm was awesome; I like to go exploring in a dried up canal with my father or cousins, there was a coy pond...dirt. Dirt was a big attraction to me when I was a kid. I never wanted to leave when we'd go up there.... Especially this time. I wanted to stay and play with my cousins, wanted to hit the pinata once it was up, wanted candy (and by "wanted" I mean threw a fit, being the wretched spoiled thing I was), and I didn't give a care if the 405 was still barely moving (Northridge Earthquake in '94 had traffic on there backed-up for months), and that staying later would mean that my father would have to take an alternate route home to make up time. So we stayed... and I killed my mother and my grandmother, and put my father in a wheelchair for months, I guess. I mean, technically, a drunk guy did it, by hitting us head on, but I put us on Route 41 in the first place. So.... Let's just move on, okay?

My father is the most determined person I know. He was a scholastic over-achiever back before it was stereotypical for Japanese kids to be straight A's, back when they were still Japs. His mother and brother were in an internment camp during World War II, that's how close he was to it. But he made his way through school and eventually wound up with an assortment of bachelor's degrees and, seriously, two doctorates. One says he's a doctor of being a dentist, D.D.S., and the other is a Ph. D. in Immunobiology. And, true to form, after having his rib cage and both legs crushed, and being told it was unlikely he'd ever walk again, he was jogging in six months, after extensive physical therapy.

I'd rather not point fingers right now as to which one of us was ultimately responsible for the way things turned out between us. I have heard that he was never too normal. That he was always... erm... less than couth. To me, and to my mother. I have heard of... things. But I've only heard. All I know is that I was a disappointing child. I was a shame to my family, to my mother, to my father. So, I am going to go ahead, defying many guidance councilors and therapists over the years, and say that it is likely that I absolutely deserved my father's scorn and loathing. It was probably terrible for him to live with some creature that, on the surface resembled his late wife and himself, yet was, in reality, rapidly growing into some monstrous abomination of a youth. And i don't think I got much better as I got older, because I think I started a vicious cycle, slowly driving my father insane with frustration, which would result in negative experiences betwixt him and me, which would only make me a worse person. Repeat the process for seven long years.

Well, to make a long (highly difficult to relate) story short, the unpleasantness between my father and me grew unbearable. If I could go back in time, I'd be different. I'd be a worthwhile daughter. I wouldn't make him hate me so much as he did, but it's too late. As he always liked to say, "the damage is done" and "there are no excuses." (Once, having said this to me after I lied lied to him about some scratches on the TV remote, he declined to speak to me for a period of some days because he "couldn't trust me anymore.")

In a way living with him had been a life of fear. Nothing like mortal danger-type fear, but to always to be afraid of what horrible thing I'd do next, afraid of the repercussions of this action, can become a tiresome way to live. I was often "useless, a waste, stupid, lazy, selfish." I really believe that he hated me. Everyday, I got home from school knowing that at some point, I was going to be the target of all this hate. I went to sleep every night wishing I could be somebody, anybody else. Everything I did was disappointing. When he bought a flute for me, it was just one more thing I could disappoint him in. I remember one night when I missed the same lick over and over again, he, in utter frustration and disgust, snatched up my music stand and hurled it at me. I moved, and it broke against the wall. Amazingly, this did not help me to learn the lick. After I was gone, he told the investigators he was strict and "unbending." The line must be drawn between strict and needlessly harsh. I know I didn't go into the gory details here, but he raised me harshly, and I don't think that a lot of what he used to do is justifiable, even if I was disappointing and dim. All parents seem to be frustrated all the time. Not all parents deem it necessary to scream that their twelve-year old is worthless in the middle of a packed sushi bar. Not all parents shove their daughters into walls when they can't unlock a newly installed door (that turns out to have a broken lock), demanding to know what the f--- is wrong with them, and would they like something to cry about? Not all parents chase kindergartners around kitchen tables then slam them on the floor by the arm and demand the recanting of perceived fibs.

Things came to a head in December of 1998, when for whatever reasons, I found myself stuck in an "institution." I don't know if I needed to be there or not. When I was released, highly medicated, I finished Christmas break, then returned to school for a day. I had no intentions of sticking around. I only wanted to say goodbye to my friends. One chum decided to tag along for want of anything better to do. The next day, I asked to be dropped off at said chum's house, saying that we had a joint science project that we were supposed to be working on. I told my father I loved him, but he was still pissed that I hadn't already been working on the project, so he said nothing. I wonder if he remembers that; it was very important to me at the time. My friend and I left from her house for points unknown, where I sold my Prozac for twenty bucks and a doughnut.

I miss him, even if he still hates me. I think in a past life I was a daddy's little girl. I wonder if I knew everything I know now, if i had worked harder, if I had been more responsible for taking care of the house, if things would've been different. The thought that right now, right this very minute in a parallel universe I am visiting my father (it's three hours earlier in Cali), telling him about what I am doing at university, bonding over late-night coffees makes me... not sad. I don't know what it makes me. At any rate, it doesn't look like that will be happening anytime soon. The last time we spoke, all my father said was that he would rather not give his information to me to give to FAFSA, and it'd be best if I could figure something else out. I tried to tell him about classes. Silence. Then, "...oh yeah, by the way your cat died." =click=

I have not seen my father since I left that day. I didn't talk to him again until October 2002, and only a handful of times after that. For a while, I tried to call him, but he never returned any calls. I tried writing, but have received no response. He told me he wants me to apologize for "betraying" him. I told him that I couldn't do that. All I will not do is apologize. I don't want to spend every holiday season for the rest of fmy life away from my only parent. Naturally, I want a father. But I am certain that had I not left, both of us would either be in a prison or in a hospital or gone today, so I will not apologize.

Given that I have only made four entries thus far this month, I feel obligated to squeeze in at least one or two more before the Holiday shopping season begins. That said, for any interested, here is part one of my Holiday wish list, Recorded Music. (I always conveniently divide The List into 1-4 parts, in order to make easier your shopping plans...aghem, Ja'ar) Hah. But really, I swear, the links to Amazon are only there so that you can go listen to the thirty second clips that they put up and hear for yourselves the wonder that is...

...Toad's Recorded Music Wishlist

-- Bach: Sacred Masterpieces Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) Bach Is is one badass mofrappi. I take a Bach postcard with me everywhere I go when I travel for good luck. Someday, I'm going to go to Leipzig, in the hopes that some voice-leading mojo will rub off on me just from being there.

-- The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage John Cage (1912-1992) Gotta love Cage.

-- One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note (2005) John Coltrane

-- Prélude a l'apres-midi d'un faune; Images; Printemps (Deutsche Grammophon) Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

-- Third Stone fron the Sun (1993) Robert Dick

-- Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat (2001) Robert Dick. Aggressive flauting with many extended techniques.

-- Reloaded: Greatest Hits (2003) Tom Jones (What? I'm Serious. You can't tell me that the last time you heard Sex Bomb you weren't groovin' right along with it. You know: "Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb, You're a Sex Bomb...")

-- Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass (1995) Kronos Quartet

-- Symphony No. 5 Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

-- True Love Waits: Chris O'Riley Plays Radiohead (2003) Chris O'Riley

-- Motifs (2005), Paris Combo

-- Edith Piaf: 30th Anniversaire (1994) Edith Piaf

-- Good Bye Lenin (Soundtrack) (2004), Yann Tiersen

Whoops. I forgot what I was doing and fell asleep for a minute (okay, actually a few hours) there. Hmm. I think originally I had a bunch more recordings that I wanted to add here, and I was planning on saying something about each one on the list, but now I am just interested in posting so that I can shut down the computer and go to bed. So. You must do without, it would seem.

"Meeeeeeeeeow."

"Toad, if you do not get that cat's paw out of your face, shut him up, and lay the smack down, I am going to throw him out of the cab of this U-Haul. Which I know you don't want. Because we're in the Rockies, so that would be the end of it."

"Ja'ar! You wouldn't!"

"Meeeow," protested Albert.

"I absolutely would. He's been screaming for the last two hundred miles, without stopping, and you're just making it worse because you let him get away with it. You're going to give him a mommy complex." Ja'ar turned to young Albert, then only three months old, and known affectionately as Boozin'. With his left hand, he grabbed him up by the scruff of his neck, raising him up to eye level, "Do you understand Lil' Booze? Mommy can't save you forever!" He gave Albert a little shake, then redeposited him in my lap. Albert quickly resumed his incessant pawing at my face as I tried to eat my Sonic Burger (I used to eat stuff like that, once upon a time).

"Meeeow."

"Ja'ar, dearest, be reasonable; you know there is nothing I can possibly do about it-- stop it Boozer!-- Albert is just feeling a little piqued."

"Meeeow."

"He is trying to grab food out of your mouth! There is cat food right there."

"Meeeow."

"But it's a bit soggy, and he doesn't like it soggy. (Do you bubbula? No! No you don't! Because you're such a good bubby....yhessssh...he's a good bubbies...) I told you not to take turns so fast."

"Meeeow."

"No, that's not why he won't eat it. It's because you let him eat your food. And no multi-cellular organism, not on Earth anyway, will choose that dry crap over a Sonic Burger. That's why."

"Meeeow."

"Oooh... Albert, Ja'ar's cranky, huh Bubby? He'sh cranky, yesh he ish! But yer not cranky! Nohhhh! Cush yer mah good bubbala, huh? Yeshh... Eeeyesh. Yesh you are..."

"Meeeow."

"GAH! OH MY GOD! I CAN'T TAKE IT! We're pulling over. Here's a gas station."

"Meeeow."

Ja'ar wildly steered the speeding moving truck into the gas station, screeching to a halt mere feet from ramming clean through the brightly painted glass windows of the associated mini-mart/ Dunkin' Donuts. Insanity and a certain murderousness burning in his eyes, he booted open the driver's side door, and leapt out of the crowded cab, and began storming away, kicking at the parking lot gravel as he went. I clutched Albert, and clipped him into his harness, to be safe, then reached over to shut the door. Pixie, Albert's mother, and Midget and Elvis, his sister and step-sister, respectively, looked at me with confusion, as though they were asking if Ja'ar had just lost his mind. I tried to reassure them that he had not, then hopped out after him.

"Ja'ar! Ja'ar, wait!"

"Get away from me, Toad. You're insane!"

"I'm insane? You're insane! What're you doing? We'll never make it to your buddy in Silverthorne at this rate. Come, let us back to the cab. It's dark out. Albert will be scared."

"Damn you, fiend! Away!"

A brief silence followed.

"Abut--"

"AWAY! For gawd's sake!"

I went back to the cab. When I opened the door, I was confronted by the most foul odor. It seemed that Albert had missed the litter box by a few inches (really a very small margin of error when it comes to those things, in his defense), which was situated under my seat, had consequently become covered in his own mess and was now running happily about the cab leaving little, brown, Albert-foot-sized tracks all over. After gently closing the door, I cautiously returned to Ja'ar.

"Ja'ar..."

Ja'ar remained silent, but I did note that he turned slightly redder. I took this to mean that he had not heard me, and was embarrassed by his own inattention. I ventured again, "Ja'ar, dearest roommate?"

"Argh! What?! What is it is?!"

"I know that you are rather tired and grumpy at the moment, but I'm afraid that young Albert has had... Well, it's not his fault. I imagine if you hadn't frightened him so, I mean, driving in here like a maniac and--"

"Toad. I am going to pitch you off a cliff if you do not get on with it at once."

"Eh heh. Well, the Boozer has messed himself a little. Ehh..erm... In fact he's rather messed the whole cab a little bit."

Ja'ar very quietly got up and went around behind the gas station. I went in to the station to grab paper towels and fill up the water spritzer we had been using to discipline the cats to use to clean Albert up. While I was letting it fill in the bathroom sink, I thought I heard a man's desperate half-sobbing scream, which seemed to come from the other side of the wall. But this must've been my ears playing tricks on me, because I know only Ja'ar was back there. After all, when one doesn't sleep for a few days, one may hear any number of things.

Poor Albert! When we had to clean him up, he was so cold from the water being spritzed on him, he began trembling, and of course, he thought that he was in trouble the whole time, because the Spritzer was usually only for disciplinary purposes. Not as easy to clean up was the U-Haul cab (floor mats are surprisingly absorbent, it turns out) and the interior smelled of cat processed Sonic Burgers all the way to New York.

Ahh... Good times.

Sitting here, writing a paper for Environmental Science on the differences between Coal and Nuclear power, I was reminded of Albert. His birthday is coming up on the fifteenth, you know. Anyway, this has all been a long excuse to post a couple Albert pictures.

Until now, I have not gone into very great detail in my description of Seattle (the Drug Addict, not the city). I suppose this is because until I returned from my week-long time-out in Kenmore, he didn't figure too heavily into my daily affairs, besides that his veins absorbed most of the money that was brought into the Elektra. In fact, other than that I didn't approve of his habits, or his getting others into them, I had little to say against the guy. Sure, what little there was is heavy duty out here in the real world, but where we were-- well, things are just sort of taken differently. Because of the guarded nature one's existence has, there's a certain detachment from the people one associates with. Although there is a strong sense of camaraderie, and a band of gutter punks will quickly form to defend one of their own, a person's too busy surviving (melodramatic as that may sound) to bother having any vehement feelings about the doings of a mere acquaintance. Feelings are reserved only for those you have a tight bond with, those few that you're willing to stretch yourself that little extra bit for, the ones you take care of, stick your neck out for. The ones you would strike for hurting themselves.

Well, Seattle was not one of those close chums, so up to this point I paid as little attention to him as I have awarded him thus far in my little narrative. However, when I returned to the Elektra, Copper and I became closer, and so I wound up interacting with the unsavory fellow all the time.

A little man complex personified, Seattle made up for his diminutive frame by overpowering any room he was in with himself. He would flood the air with long, over-exaggerations of his powerful connections to the underworld, his supposed influences in local government, and fights in which he claimed to have taken down huge packs of rivals completely on his own. His favorite topic was how humble his upbringing was, and how he still couldn't read. (Everyone knew that he had come from Bainbridge Island, and that he could read fine, but no matter.) He'd monopolize you by getting inches from your face when he spoke, something he seemed to think would show that what he was telling you was in confidence, and that you and he were on intimate terms, and he was a trustworthy guy. When more than one person was around, he'd dominate everyone's view by situating himself in the most unavoidable locations, and scattering his personal items throughout the room, so that one couldn't sit down without having to come into contact with some piece of clothing, or his butterfly knife, if he wasn't flipping it around in his hand.

He had a squashed, bitter face, with a petulant, lower lip that always seemed to pout in a most juvenile way below a pug-dog-like nose. He had many tattoos. In the crooks of his arms, he had large black "tribal" tattoos, the words PUNK and HATE across his knuckles, and assorted explicitly posing nudes on his back. On his neck beneath the brown layer of dirt, one could just make out that he had tattooed, in big sloppy letters, the number 206. It was because 206 is the area code for his namesake city; I've never heard of such a thing before, and I don't think it's because Seattle was so original as to think of it, but rather because it is so ridiculous and idea for a tattoo.

Seattle was a chauvinistic boor, and disliked women unless they were under his thumb, and terrified of him. He was dreadfully unpleasant to poor Copper. As time went on, and she failed to stand up for herself, he went so far as to declare her apartment his (not that it wasn't more his than hers by this time, but still), and essentially reduced her role to bed mate, cleaning woman, and provider of food and money.

Besides this, he was also an extreme Celtophile, though he knew nothing of Celtic heritage that he didn't learn in Braveheart, and the general consensus was that he wasn't even Irish. Nonetheless, most of the people he had surrounded himself with were some brand of Celt. Copper was Scottish, Tommy and Serina had been too. In fact, over the course of my stay at the Elektra, I (being half-Japanese, half-Italian) was the only non-Celt that ever saw past the threshold. He liked to tell me that he was proud to be an Irishman, and that in his opinion, it was a massive blow against me to be not only female but not even Irish, or at least Scottish. However, at least I wasn't English. Apparently it was "a good thing for" me not to be English, because then he'd have to hate me, and if he hated me, then I would either have to clear out or face the consequences. He'd remind me of these inherent flaws of mine on a daily basis, often he'd repeat himself two or three times more, if he thought there was some one in the room who hadn't heard him the first through third times.

At the time I returned to the Elektra, which, as best as I can tell must've been mid-February 2001, I knew both Seattle and Copper equally, if I didn't know Seattle a little better. (Of course, I liked Copper infinitely more.) I didn't know that as time had been marching along, from the first few copacetic weeks to now, her life had been becoming increasingly more painful. While I thought it had been in awfully poor judgment to involve herself with Seattle from the get-go, I had not seen the extremes to which his abuse was heading. After all, in the weeks prior to my departing the apartment, as I said, I had hardly her, and only knew that there was a lot of dope going into the back room where she and Seattle holed up. I assumed she looked like the living dead on account of the poisons coursing through her body. Had I known what was really up, it wouldn't have come as such a shock when, early one morning after I reappeared, around two or three, I was awakened by a shrill shriek from their room, followed by loud thumps and crashing. I didn't move, instead opting to see if the situation might not resolve itself. What on earth was going on out there, I wondered. Cops? Burglars? Old enemies? The next instant, the door to their bedroom exploded open, and I heard struggling in the hallway outside my door (I slept in the hall pantry-thing). I pressed my thumbs to my eyes, feeling low growlings of growing adrenaline levels, and cracked my door to see what was going on.

As I wrote above, I was shocked by what I saw; Seattle was kneeling on Copper, with her left arm hoisted behind her and up, the way you see police grapple offenders. She was kicking and helplessly trying to roll over. It took a minute or two to even fully be aware of what was going on. In that minute, Copper managed to wiggle away, and bolted into the living room. Seattle chased, and as he rounded the corner, I heard a loud crash, and a lot of cursing. Something about, "You f-------g ---- you -------- ---- you hit me with the f-------g lamp in the face! F--- f-------g s--- I'm going to f-----g kill you!" I wasn't yet fully awake, but it slowly dawned on me that I had to do something. I needed a weapon, but would have to pass them to get to the kitchen. So I went to the bathroom, and, like an idiot, grabbed the plunger. I don't know why, it was a big stick, I guess.

When I got to the living room, Seattle was throttling Copper, and the two of them were half-way out of the window. He screamed that he was going to throw her the rest of the way out. She made a gagging sound and ground her feet into the carpet. In my head, I could hear myself screaming, "DO SOMETHING, DON'T THINK, JUST DO, GO!"

"Oy! OY!" I shouted, "What the f--- are you doing?! Knock that s--- off!"

Seattle ignored me, and seeing that Copper was moving very little, I ran up and grabbed his left shoulder, trying to yank him away. "OY!" I shouted again. And this time he released her and spun around at me.

"What? What? What, you wanna go?" He shoved me, and I stumbled backwards. "You think you're gonna do something? You ain't doin' s---!" Out flipped the butterfly knife.

I didn't say anything, but instead held up my plunger like a bat, and prepared to remove his head with it. I wished I had thought to remove the rubber plunger head. A big wooden stick versus a knife seemed much better than a plunger versus a knife. Seconds crawled by, he stared at me and I grit my teeth and stared back. My hands hurt, gripping the plunger as I was, and I was evermore certain that I was about to die. If he had killed me, and it would've been an easy thing for him to vanquish a wimpy toad like me, my last thought would've been, "Gah, what a dork. Should've stayed in bed." He made as if to lunge, and I cocked the plunger back, and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to brace for what would surely be a bad stabbing. When then the most bizarre thing happened. His eyes glazed over, and he started laughing. Hysterically, madly laughing. It was unnerving, metallic, and sliced the air. I backed up, still clutching the plunger, eyes darting from him to Copper and back. Copper was coming to her senses, leaning against the sofa, gasping for breath.

"A plunger?! What the hell are you? Some kind of [lesbian]?" He laughed until he couldn't stand anymore and had to sit down in the armchair (I never did see what lesbians have to do with plungers, but he had drawn some connection up in his mind). Within a few seconds, or at least it seemed a few seconds, he had passed out there. I went to Copper, she looked all right, besides a few bumps and scratches, but later on her arm swelled up and turned purple, and it turned out to be broken and the elbow.

After the turbulence that night, Copper and I began hanging out a lot during the day, when Seattle was either out or asleep on the couch. She told me how awful he was, and all the indignities she had been subjected to by him, which I refrain from posting here. I hated to see them interact. He was so rude to her, such an incredible bastard, he had an array of uneducated slurs and derogations by which he'd call her, and never asked for anything, rather, he ordered.

Oddly, the worse he was to Copper, the better he was to me. Ever since the incident in which I challenged him with a plunger, he excluded me from his sweeping generalizations about women, treated me like one of his drug-buddies, and even, occasionally, would defer to me. Nonetheless, I think Seattle is the only person I have ever considered murdering. That Copper hadn't eighty-sixed the fool after what he'd done was nearly too much to bear, and late at night I used to think about sneaking up and slitting his throat while he slept or waiting for him to load a rig for himself, then switching it with one I had filled with bleach when he wasn't looking. I even planned ways to dispose of the body and evidence.

Thankfully, Copper began to stand up for herself more and more. I like to think that maybe she only had needed a friend in arms. Before much longer, Seattle met some young thirteen- or fourteen-year-old runaway, not unlike Serina, who he was able to manipulate and badger with less effort. Neither Copper nor I was sad to see the SOB go, though we tried to give a word of caution to the girl when the two of them came back to get his bags.

From the day Seattle no longer officially lived in the apartment, Copper began coming back to life. This process was retarded a little because she continued shooting an enormous amount of speed everyday. We still lived in squalor, the once-nice apartment now as burned out as its owner, with layers of filth too deep to describe covering every inch of floor, and a whole set of big plastic shelves that the tweakers had brought in and filled up with garbage. But, well, baby steps. For the moment it was just nice that Seattle was gone, and we passed a few days soaking in the pleasantness of only the two of us living there, and we could deal with the piles of crap.

One morning, Copper and I were sitting in the living room by the windows, smoking after-breakfast cigarettes, when she mused that the hanging planter was swaying back and forth. An instant later the whole building was. We watched, helpless, as the view from the window shifted several inches left and right, and the apartment rattled and shook. The shelves full of crap toppled over, having never been secured to the wall, the television hopped off of its stand and spraying broken glass and bits of TV innards when it landed, and some dishes in the kitchen fell out of their cabinets, shattering on the tile floor. The quake seemed to last forever, though it wasn't really so long, and when it was over, Copper's apartment was quite the disaster area. The next day we started cleaning. Most of the mess was from before the quake, but the quake had been the final straw. We pulled bags upon bag of trash out, washed the dishes, mopped, vacuumed; the works. Slowly, as winter readied itself to turn to spring, the place began to look like an apartment again. The second day of our reclamation of the apartment, I was busily scraping some kind of goo from the kitchen tiles, when I heard Copper call from the living room.

"What is it?" I asked. In her hands, she held a brown paper bag.

"He's gonna throw me out the window? That punk?! Well, I'm gonna throw HIM out the window. Or what's left of him anyway. See this toothbrush?" She pulled a toothbrush out of the bag, "This toothbrush is goin' out the window! HAHA!" And she victoriously hurtled the plastic Oral-B from the thirteenth story of the Elektra.

"This butterfly knife? Out you go!" Out it went.

"These comic books that he supposedly couldn't read? Woooohooo!" She ripped them up and tossed them out, like confetti. I watched the colorful pieces flutter to the ground. She proceeded to toss everything in the bag over, one at a time. The skies had cleared. Copper even started weaning herself off the needle.

Not long after the earthquake, two or three weeks tops, Tommy came back. He was visibly on the nod, and said he'd lost Serina somewhere, and was alone in the world, and could he stay with us.. "Wah," I thought, and told Copper as much. But she took pity on him, and he moved in. Before I knew what was happening, the two of them were an item, and Copper (who I think I mentioned was a recovering heroin junkie) had seamlessly switched from meth to heroin. The situation was lost. I hung around for a while longer, just because I cared for Copper, and maintained some hope that everything would work out, but such was not to be. The longer I stayed there, the more it was like a living death. The two of them were practically zombies, and I was there only as a sort of nursemaid to them.

Finally, sometime in the end of March, I was leaning out of the window, trying to scrape some bird poo off the glass, when, like a dork, I lost my balance and found myself hanging upside down by one knee thirteen floors up. Copper and Tommy were out cold, and I couldn't reach the ledge with my hands. So I hung there, trying to think of what to do. I considered letting go. Even at the best of times in the years I was missing, there was a certain sense of pointlessness to "it all," so naturally, in the defeated state of mind I was in, losing "it all" didn't strike me as particularly good or bad. I decided that if I were to bother to make the effort to get back in, I would try to make it worth my while. When I had climbed back in, I wrote a note to Copper, to say so long and that I had gone, and I left. I heard a month later that Tommy had been found belly up in a hotel room. Not ten days later word was that Copper overdosed too, alone, half-dressed, in her bathroom. She kicked heroin once, then she kicked meth, but by the second bout with that tar, it was too much, and I suppose her body just gave up. Such is life, I guess. It hardly seems fair though.

Well, here's the second third of the Elektra Saga. I had wanted to get this done in two entries, but it's gotten late now, and I have to go study. (I was fifteen at the time this is all taking place. When I posted the first half of this story, I said I was fourteen, but these events took places between 2000 and 2001, so I must've been fifteen. Like I said, the years I was "missing" tend to mush together a bit. -ed).

I stormed out of the apartment, not looking back, not even bothering to slam the door behind me. I marched to the elevator, and kicked the "down" button. I was pleased when the steel toe of my boot cracked the light orange, iridescent plastic. My breath hissed through my nostrils. Calm wasn't even on the radar. Opposite the closed lift doors, there was a writing desk with a black marble top and brushed aluminum trim, and a plain mirror bolted above it. I stared hard at myself, searching the image reflected there for some explanation of the day's events; searching for and inkling of the future. In my own eyes, I could see my thirteen-year-old charge, Serina. Her short, spiky black hair, childish, wide eyes; I could hear her over-cute-for-all-the-street-punk-attire voice prattling on about how she wanted me to take her to Gameworks sometime, and how she planned to get her own place someday, when she was old enough to work, instead of having to beg for change the way we did. We thought maybe we'd share a pad when we could both work. It all just made the blood boil harder. My shoulder ached a little. I had really thrown that punch. Whether it had actually been very powerful, I can't say, but I know I hit her square in the face. That this may have been an unreasonable reaction made things even worse. I had caught her shooting meth. That is a fine reason, I told myself. How could she do such a dumb, stupid thing? Why? Idiot! Did she want to die? Did she want to end up some kind of spun-out junkie? Is that what she wanted? I thought she could be in real trouble, and here she was shooting dope?!

I waited there, in the florescent-lit pseudo-art-deco hallway, feeling that the neutral pink and teal walls were far too close together for a body as full of burning, savage, anger as mine. And just where was that friggin' lift already? ARGH! For just a moment, I stood still, quiet, listening to my racing pulse. Then I yanked the mirror off the wall and smashed it against the slick marble surface of the table. "Enough of this crap," I thought, abandoning the elevator for the stairs. I raged down thirteen flights to the alley exit, and from there stormed away into the rainy back streets of downtown Seattle.

During the week I was gone, I really didn't do a lot. I still had the forty-odd dollars that had sent me back to the apartment triumphant and early, only now I didn't have to give them to Seattle (the meth-head boyfriend of Copper, owner of the apartment. Seattle is the guy that sold the dope to Serina in the first place). Immediately after I left, I bought several packs of Top Ramen noodles, a couple cans of corned beef hash, and a pack of cigarettes. Then I snagged a Metro bus to Kenmore, where I knew there was an abandoned house that I could stay at for a while. I still remember how to get there, though I think the house was torn down and replaced by some shiny new condos; Take the Bothell/Kenmore line until you pass the Denny's. Then look for the giant Mexican restaurant Cactus, and pull the cord. Cross the street to the strip mall thing, and go back behind it around the self-storage building. Turn right. It's the dilapidated house, with moss on the roof, up the street from the library. There is, or was, a huge weeping willow in the front. It looks like once upon a time there was a swing on one of its branches. The yard is overgrown and splotchy, littered with scraps of metal and other debris. A rusty scythe leans next to the door, propped up with two cinder blocks. I walked up the cracked cement path to the door, which gave way with a creak.

Inside, it smelled of rats and decay and water damage. Large parts of the floor had rotted away, revealing a dirt-cellar, and the stairway to the second floor was missing two steps. If one wanted to sleep upstairs (to avoid the rats) one had to watch the stairs very carefully, because it would be easy to fall all the way down, right to the damp, rat-ridden abyss below, and not I nor anyone I knew had ever located the cellar door. I dropped my pack next to the fireplace, sending up a cloud of mold and dust. No one had been here in a few months, I guessed. See, most of the kids would only stay there in the warmer months, as there was no way besides the fireplace to keep it heated, and the numerous holes in the roof and floor made it a drafty, chilly, miserable sort of place to inhabit during winter. I went back outside to hunt for dry wood (not easy to find in the Seattle area, in February, I learned) and when I had enough for to last the night, I went back in to build up a fire.

Building a fire was easy. I just arranged some logs into a teepee sort of shape, then stuffed dry grass and old newspapers under them for kindling. Before long, I had a nice warm fire. The fireplace will forever stand out the most in my mind from this house-- though the cat-sized rat, who I affectionately named Poochy was also quite unforgettable-- as it seemed to be the only in tact thing in the house. It was decorated with intricately glazed yellow ceramic tiles, depicting scenes of pastoral life. Farmers, shepherds, dogs, sheep, a few windmills, all in painful detail. I don't know how the potter got that kind of detail with just glaze. If you looked, you could see the faces on the people and animals, the door knob on the door into the windmill.... Late at night, in the flickering of the fire, I often wondered if I couldn't see the shepherds tending to their flock, oblivious that I was freezing my bum while they wondered what the lil' lady was cookin' for sup.' Were the sheep grazing, was the wind blowing down from the roof turning the mills in the tiles? Maybe?

I didn't want to return to Copper's apartment. I didn't want to ever look at the tweaker Seattle's pug-dog face again. I didn't want to get involved in the meth scene. That way lies madness. I was happy to sit in my Kenmore Squat-house, and sit by the fireplace. I even contemplated waiting out the remaining three years until my eighteenth birthday there. Despite all the good reasons not to, I thought that I should go back. I wanted to apologize to Serina, and make her swear never to do something so dumb again. And I wanted to tell Seattle that he better not ever suggest that she shoot up. Not that I could've done anything about it, if he had, but I just wanted it to be clear to him that I wouldn't stand for him to be getting some poor, dumb kid like Serina hooked on speed.

After only a week, I found myself waiting at the strip mall for the bus. It was weird, but when it finally came, it was not only the exact same driver who'd been driving on the way out, but also the exact same bus. I know, because when I went to the back to sit down, the graffiti was the same. I could feel an invisible track running beneath the wheels of the Metro Bus, pulling me back to Copper's apartment, and I fancied that these tracks ran beneath me at all times, always leading me back to where I started; endless, elliptical loops that I periodically get stuck on, in which all roads will inevitably lead me towards bad things. I went to sleep across the back seats, wondering if I was right in this, or just tired and over-dramatic.

Back at Copper's, I found little changed, besides that Serina and Tommy had gone. It would take a sudden shift in the tectonic plates beneath Seattle to upset the routine of speeding-up and coming down at that apartment. And then things, literally, started going out the window.

PS: Hahaha.... I'm so cheesy to do some wanna-be cliff-hanger like this at the end of these things. I really didn't want to stretch this out further, but I am all tuckered out tonight. Much homework. Muchas tareas. And I have some left to do still.... By the way: The conducting went better than I thought, though still not terribly well: 91. Engh... It's awkward posting grades.

Sometimes when it is very late, and cold, and quiet, the world seems made of only me and my thoughts. So much so, that it isn't uncommon that a thought will be loud enough that I need to check that it was really in my head. (I've noticed the same sort of thing happening occasionally right as I am dosing off... must have to do with the brain relaxing?) Skulking barefoot in PJs through the backyard last night (which I'm sure made the neighbors uneasy), grabbing up toe-fuls of moss and pine needles as I slalomed between the pine trees that mark the property line, I heard "This toothbrush is goin' out the window!" It was as loud and real as if it had been shouted next to my head. Startled, I froze a moment; I immediately recognized the voice to be that of my old roommate, Copper, but obviously, it couldn't have been her. As far as I know (though I hope I am wrong), she's long dead of a heroin overdose.

Well, I'd not thought much about Copper, her Seattle apartment at the Elektra, or the events that transpired there. Maybe I was trying to block it all out. At any rate, now there's about a half a year's worth of memories that have been brought to the front of my thoughts, and I feel like I'd like to write them down.

Copper, called such for her bright red hair, was a half Jewish, half Irish, recovering heroin addict, punk rock-skateboarder. She had a killer sense of humor and fashion (punk fashion, naturally), and a huge heart. I had met her through an acquaintance, a pompous, violent, drug addict calling himself Seattle, who had met her at some sort of rave. (As much as I hated this crumb, he always seemed to treat me with respect, unlike he did anyone else, man, woman, or child, including Copper, later on. I suspect it is because he was inherently a coward, and I hated him too much to fear him, but I'll probably get into that later.) It wasn't long before she invited me to come to stay at her apartment with her and several other street kids who lived there, including Seattle. She and I got on quite well, and I ended up living with her for about six months, in or around 2000 (All those years get kind of mushy).

Copper's apartment was on the thirteenth floor of the Elektra apartment building, opposite Battery Park. It wasn't big, but it was a nice place the way she'd done it up. She had a kind of, natural, earthy theme going. Lots of greens and browns, with mostly whicker furnishings. The place felt like a home, not mine, but hers. It was in stark contrast to the Elektra itself, which, if memory serves, was a sort of new wave art-deco, in light pink, black, and teal, with black marble and brushed aluminum in the lobby. Too institutional and cookie-cutter to capture the Twenties, it merely looked like the inside of a looney bin for the wealthy and left me with the same impression as an abandoned hotel would. Perhaps in an attempt to add some life to the building, the management had provided a billiards room and a lounging area, but I think in the whole time I lived there, I saw maybe two guys ever use them. The place had no guts, no soul, and it gave me the willies. The only reason Copper was living there was because her father had already paid her rent for a year, in advance.

The first couple months went by without much trouble. Since rent was not an issue, between the five to seven people there at a given time, it was easy to come up with utilities every month. We could generally get what we needed by splitting-up into spanging (contraction of spare changing) teams of two; usually Seattle and his "street brother" Tommy or some other guy named Conroid ('Roid usually didn't spange, as he received SSI, but sometimes he'd do it just to be useful) would make one team. I would pair off with Tommy's very under-age girlfriend, thirteen-year-old-runaway, Serina (who I ended up functioning as some sort of elder to, even though I was only a year her senior. Ridiculous.). Between the two teams, we could usually come up with forty dollars in a day. Serina and I generally did a bit better than the men. Serina was infinitely cute, even with everything she did to avoid it; the dyed black pointy hair, the leather, the spiked dog collar etc. She just had these big ol' green baby eyes (making her look a bit like Liza Minelli in her prime), and she simply couldn't help being adorable. Luckily for us, adorable got sympathy, which inspired people to give us money. Sometimes, if things were going well, we'd wander down to the Barnes and Noble's on 3rd and Pine, or down to the Starbucks for a $1.40 house coffee to split, and if they were going really well, we'd go to this hot dog vendor and buy a huge three-dollar hot dog with everything. Copper was exempt from spanging, as she provided a base of operations and shelter, but sometimes, when not at work at the 24 Hour Fitness, she'd come by to drop off cigarettes or a snack or just to stand and chat with Serina and me. It was a pretty mellow couple months.

Given that calms always being followed by storms that are proportionately bad in relation to how long the calm has been was already an established pattern by this time in my life on the lam, I suppose I should've known that the period of relative placidity I had been enjoying could not last, and would be followed by the most dreadful turbulence. One soggy, foul day, having fallen miserably short of our daily goal, Serina and I returned to the apartment, only to find three used rigs (hypodermic syringes) and needle caps, a spoon, and a half empty baggy of meth scattered across the coffee table. Seattle was hunched over Copper untying a tourniquet on her upper arm. Tommy had apparently already become too antsy to hang around, and Seattle told us that he had just left. I awkwardly said we'd come back later, and Serina and I went back to Gameworks to continue spare changing. I wish I had given more thought to how intently Serina had been eying the points on the table.

Over the following two months, life at the Elektra went from basically fine to utterly out of control. Seattle and Copper started going out, and he immediately ceased to bring in any money, instead just keeping her too doped up to notice that he was only stealing her money, then giving it back to her. Tommy would disappear for days, then reappear with bags of "scores" that were really just garbage he'd dug out of a dumpster. This left a much larger burden on Serina, 'Roid, and me, and when we couldn't pull through, we'd hear about it from Seattle. Over these two months, I never saw Copper, not once. I knew only that most of the money that Serina and I brought in was going into her, Seattle's, and Tommy's arms. I didn't have time to be too concerned for her though. Serina and I decided that, in the interest of covering more ground, I should take the bus to pastures greener everyday, and she'd stay where we normally used to set up. By the way: It might sound irresponsible of me to have left a thirteen-year-old alone downtown, and well, I guess it was. She could've been killed or worse, and it would've been my fault. But we couldn't cover the costs of food anymore and the utilities were going to be shut off, and to have sent her elsewhere might've been more dangerous, because then you risk not only the usual freaks and mashers, but also angry encounters with the folks whose turf you've invaded. I guess I still shouldn't have left her, but, I mean, what should I have done?

At any rate, this new system, irresponsible and inexcusable though it may have been, was making a small difference. We were at least able to cover the bills and cost of food for out little group. On one unseasonably sunny day, I finished early, having made almost forty bucks (nearly twice my goal) before noon. I hopped on a bus and went to get Serina, thinking we could go grab some McDonald's 49 cent cheeseburgers (I shudder at the thought of what I used to eat....argh...borf).

Normally, I would stop and claim Serina on my way back to the apartment, but when I got to the usual spot this day, she was nowhere to be found. 'Okay...Humpf... Just be cool,' I thought, 'She's probably just gone to the loo or something.' So I waited. And waited. When two o'clock rolled by, I panicked and beat feet back up to Copper's apartment, trying to think of how I could explain having lost Tommy's girlfriend. Headlines of "Dead Missing Teen Found in Viaduct" and "Other Teen Arrested Under Suspicion of Causing the Death of First Dead Teen" screamed in my ears as I tore down the the street.

Racing down the hall to Copper's apartment, I overshot the door, and in one swooping motion caught the doorknob in my left hand as I passed, and swung the right around to knock. Bang-Bang-Bang! A small, shrill voice inside shrieked in surprise, and was followed by heavy irritated footsteps. The peep hole went black, and after a tense moment, I heard the lock click and the chain slide out. A very agitated Seattle flung the door open and stalked back into his and Copper's bedroom, cursing me for sounding like the cops.

I ignored him, instead addressing the living room, "Where's Serina!? I left her at Barnes and Noble-- She should've still been there... Have any of you see-- "

"Hey, I'm here, sheezus, don't freak out, or something..."

"Serina!"

Serina strolled out of the bedroom behind me, rubbing the inside of her elbow. "Hey," I returned, trying to appear cool and composed again, as quickly as possible, "Argh, heh heh, don't do that... I thought you got popped or something, you know?"

"Nahuh." She kept shifting her weight back and forth, and was biting her nails, "Cops did drop by tho'; said to kick rocks. I figured I'd just come back here." I looked at her closer, her pupils were almost completely dialated.

"What's the matter with you? You look like you're trippin' or something."

Seattle, who'd overheard this exchange laughed from the bedroom, "She ain't trippin', man, she's mad spun. Bought some good stuff from me when she got back. Now, only one here ain't on a rig's you, hahaha!"

"You did what?!" I hissed at Serina.

"Yeah, he sold me a real fat twamp. (A "twamp" is a bag of dope, any dope, but in this case meth, worth twenty dollars. I believe at the time it was about a quarter gram. -ed.) You want some? 'Course it's too much for just me."

I punched her in her face. With every last fiber of muscle in my body. I've never hit anyone before or since (well... sorta) and doubt I ever will again, and certainly not that hard, since I am basically a pacifist. I guess she probably dropped, being the small fragile-ish kid she was, or maybe not-- even then I was pretty wimpy-- but I don't know, because I spun around on my heel and stormed out of the building, not to be seen again for a week. When I came back, Serina and Tommy had both gone, after Tommy had had some sort of falling out with Seattle over their stash of speed. I never saw Serina again, though a month or so later, Tommy came back to wreak further havoc at the Elektra.

It was all downhill from here.

Well, it's official. I am now past the 25% marker of my lifetime. That's nice. I thought now would be a good time to take an inventory of the things that are under my belt, so to say, but it'd be whiney-sounding, even if I only meant it in jest. That's why I decided not to prattle an about my very short list of accomplishments, but instead to offer this nice, succinct version...:

-- I completed half of the eighth grade, then disappeared for five years.

-- I did not die while I was missing. Nor did I become physically dependent on anything or a Toad-of-the-Night.

-- However, I did become hyper-dependent on hyphenations. Curse it, Moriarty. You yellow-bellied, lilly-livered rat-fink.

-- I have a GED-- It's a very pretty shade of blue. With some pink... I hear they make great bookmarks.

-- I'm in college now.

-- I have a bike. I ride it into poles.

-- I have a flute and a piccolo. I play them, poorly.

-- I got an A on that chorale I was talking about the other day. You know, the one I waited until midnight-something to start. Amazing. (Kidding... Please don't flunk me Mr C.)

...And instead to give the down and dirty on what I hope to do over the next twenty years, along with each item's current status (in progress, not happening, maybe happening, yeah right, etc.):

-- I want to transfer to a different school. In other words, I do not want to be a terminal case at S. College. This is a two-year school, yet there are people who've been there five years and more. I just don't get it, and I don't want to either. Status: In progress. I am applying to various universities, even as we speak. Possibilities: Boston University (large campus, near the most wicked-pisser-awesomest burrito-joint ever) (hyphen, hyphen, hyphen keep those hyphens hyphen, hyphen!), Boston College (did you know the buildings there are exact replicas of those at Oxford? My so-called Oxford bag would finally be at home), North Eastern (anything describing itself as a "co-op" works for me. I wonder if they sell that organic tofu spread that I eat by the pound), UMass Amherst (not first choice, but, eh. I like Massachusetts), Smith or Wellesley (hello ladies...how you doin'? ....Uhh...I'd like that last bit stricken from the records please), and Harvard (Duh. Harvard). But, really, I meant it when I said I was applying "even as we speak." I'm on the phone with the dean of admissions at Harvard right now.... I laugh in the face of your pathetic restraining orders, Mr "I control who comes here and who doesn't." I'm also going to apply to Cornell, because they keep sending me promotional stuff in the mail. I originally assumed it was all junk mail, and that they were sending it to everybody, but as it turns out, that's not the case. So I figure I ought to apply there, because they might give me money. That would rock.

-- I want to major in English and either German Studies or Linguistics, depending on the school I wind up at. Status: In progress, see above. I am really just looking for a degree that will take me to live abroad. If all else fails, I will major in Canadianese.

-- I want to write a blog entry without using the format of a list. Status: Bah. Lists make life easier. No tough segues, no tricky transitions, no nothing but change-the-topic and use-the-hyphens.

-- I am considering joining Peace Corps if I can't get financial aid from my transfer school. Status: In Limbo. This is a likely scenario; I am not eligible for aid due to issues involving my being under 24, not a veteran, and with one parent left. (The issue with the parent is that I am unable to provide his tax info on the FAFSA, and thus, the FAFSA does not smile upon me. O' Great and Wise and Holy FAFSA, I know it is you who understands and knows all, for you have been so ingeniously designed as to provide for all young scholars who need providing for...) And I wouldn't mind spending a couple years living in a shack in Tanzania. Actually, I think I have a little bit of a jones to do something like that. So nyah, stupid FAFSA.

-- I want to make it through a Wind Ensemble rehearsal without missing any entrances, on my birthday, because it is so lame to have one's birthday fall on a Tuesday that this is the only thing that could ever hope to make up for it. Status: HAH! Completed. Well...mostly. We didn't get to the Piccolo entrance in the crazy 2 1/2 over 4 piece. But I think I was counting right, up to where we stopped. I just wanted an excuse to bring up today's rehearsal, because any rehearsal in which I am not about to be stabbed in the eye with a baton is a good rehearsal for me.

-- I want to post this before midnight. Status: Ahhh, two down, a few to go, and I will die content in my bed.

PS: I made the Fat Cyclist's Best Cake in the World. Well, okay, my grandmother made it. I wanted to, but I don't think she trusts me not to light something on fire. I'm just wondering if this looks about right. It's very good, anyway.

Ugh. The first Wind Ensemble rehearsal of the semester was yesterday. I don't think I made one single entrance the first time through, and I had terrible intonation throughout, and gawd knows what else I did poorly. I have to wake up at five (not long from now) to make it to S College in time for this dubious thing I have volunteered to do. Like so many things I involuntarily volunteer for, I haven't the foggiest what it entails. Sigh... .... Okay, enough about that. I'm going to go lawn-think.

Hey, I'm back. Imagine that. Miraculous. It occurs to me that none of you have any idea what the hell I'm talking about. Eh, nobody ever does anyway (...shhh...it's a secret, but, I rarely make sense...it's hereditary). At any rate, I thought that after I came back, I'd explain a bit about lawn-thinking.

I was laying down in my Felix the Cat pajamas, out on the front lawn last night (as is often my wont, and may have something to do with why the neighbors take exception to me), enjoying a cool wind and staring up at the dull, black skies. I was quite zoned out and half asleep, drifting with my thoughts, anchored in consciousness by only the porch light, like a tin boat tied to a dock with a single strand of flimsy cord. (This is lawn-thinking.) No stars shone, nor did the moon, and I could smell the rain that was yet to fall, suspended miles above in the dark gray blanket of storm clouds I knew to be there. I like that smell. And I like to lay in the grass and smell that smell. You know the scent; it's something of a cross between damp pavement, water, and dirt, and recalls memories of any number of things in any number of people.

Inevitably, I am always drawn to my travels in Seattle. Sometimes good things comeback, more often though, just rainy, random things. Despite that I may not have been living like a human being while I was there, I do like that town immensely, and, somehow, it always seemed more real to me than the suburbs out here in Upstate New York. Of course, this is probably because when I was there, the amount of reality I would get in a month was a bit higher than here. But there, I felt like I could reach down to the ground and touch the city, a location-- a real point in space and time, that existed. Here, I feel like I am in a huge hamster ball, just rolling around, knocking into things, bouncing off of the people and places I encounter, knowing that there is a real world grinding on just outside the this thick plastic barrier, but unable to interact with it. I don't say that I dislike it here, mind you, but there are times when the 'burb in which I live grows sterile-- sheltered, devoid of personality, wanting in character; it is as though when the industrialists pulled out of the town, they took its guts with them. All that remains is a shell of a city full of economic depression, surrounded by soulless 'burbs. I mean, good lord, Cheever would have a field day.

Those are the times when I get back to this habit of laying out on the lawn to think. The "at night" part is more just me avoiding the neighbors, but the habit itself comes from my days in Seattle, not surprisingly. I was trekking along a path in Ravenna Park one day, and got caught in a pretty good downpour. It couldn't have been worse timing, my pack was stolen by a tweeker, with all my gear and clothes in it. I had no cash at all. I had no coffee, no cigarettes (I quit about a couple years later), no food. The one helpmate I had at the time was in prison somewhere, and I couldn't see how I could possibly stand a chance at making it another two years (I left in '99, and was waiting for 2003, the year I'd be eighteen), if days such as these would continue to be peppered throughout. Much less could I ever expect to see the inside of a classroom again. And now I was getting pelted with big blob-sized rain drops.

"...damnit..." I muttered, and something in that made me angry, and I repeated myself until I had worked it up to a healthy roar, "Damnit, DAMN IT, GAWD DAMN IT!" I started running. Running, and screaming, with a clump of hair twisted in each hand, and tears and snot and rain water streaming down my face. I looked quite mad, I should think. Visions of my future life in future festering apartments, with future friends who think only of surviving until tomorrow chased me from behind. I shut my eyes and listened to the heavy stomping of my boots on the ground. Eventually, I wound up tearing through the actual park part of Ravenna, where I only stopped running because I nearly collided with a tree. In the grass, in the rain, exhausted and drained, I laid down. I didn't care anymore; I was just tired. I wished that I would either sleep right there for another two years, or never wake up again. But I did wake up, and I was still fifteen and soaking, it was still cloudy, and I still had no clothes or gear to speak of. The rain had ceased, though, so that was good. I felt the earlier hysteria and frustration begin to subside, and as it did, this smell really hit me. Like the smell was replacing all the bad vibes. The rainwater was steaming up out of the ground, and it carried with it this earthy, rainy, muddy smell. Of course, I'd smelled it before, who hasn't, but maybe never from ground level, and never when quite so...erm... distressed. Regardless of the exact "Why" of it all, laying on the grass with this rain-smell had some kind of therapeutic effect, and ever since then, it's just sort of acquired a sort of weird semi-mystical significance to me. I like to "Lawn-Think" any night, but if it's just rained or just about to, it's like I can almost hypnotize myself, and then all kinds of stuff start coming back out of nowhere.

Laying out on the lawn last night, I remembered the brass pig in Pike Place market. I remembered walking from that pig to Broadway (I don't actually know the area that's in, we just called it Broadway), to University Way (oddly called "The Ave") in the U-District, and from there, walking towards the Sound, towards the docks, by the Zymo plant. I had been all over looking for a squat (a place to sleep), and had finally been told there was one around there that only girls could use because to access it, you needed to first wiggle under a fence, then over some rocks, after which you should arrive at a spot, out of sight, where you could just barely squish-up between the freeway and where it met the ground. The folks who told me about it said that it could be dangerous, say, if there were another earthquake, because you really had only a couple inches between you and concrete, and, of course, your presence there was totally unknown, but just for one night they thought it would be fine. Besides, it was cold and rainy outside, but warm and dry under there. However, by the time I got to where it was supposed to be it was long dark, and I couldn't see anything. Instead, I trudged down Mercer street to the 24-hour Denny's to try and get some coffee and rest up a bit. That was a long walk. I don't remember a lot of it, just that I was wishing for a bus. In the end, I loitered at Denny's on a bottomless cup of coffee until about six in the morning, then left to walk back to The Ave.

Bottomless and cheaply refilled coffees were a staple, well, and probably still are a staple of the street kids. I used to lounge on the deck at the Espresso Roma with other kids in the U-District, for hours, drinking refills on a single cup of coffee. I listened to the sound of the rain on the green awning. We used to act like the owners were the enemy, because, eventually, they'd have to ask us to clear out. We were idiots. What can I say? I guess we felt like since we had each scrounged up the buck-fifty to buy a coffee in the first place, we were customers, and had some kind of dibs on the deck. Some of the kids were even younger than I was, only twelve or thirteen, and to them everybody was the Man and therefore also the enemy. I couldn't stand those guys. They'd cause all sorts of mischief, get bored, and go home, leaving the police to come down hard on everybody else. Overall though, we were just so far down the food chain-- "Here we are, hungry, broke, and tired, and it's raining, and you're kicking us out?" that I never considered how nice it was of them to let us urchins hang out there for even a little while, basically free of charge.

I used to resent some of those younger kids. In particular, the ones who really seemed to be having a blast. Running away was a badge of honor for them, not the greatest set-back of their lives. I remembered stepping off the Greyhound at the station in downtown Seattle. I was thirteen, and terrified. I had an enormous black pack (in which I had a couple writing pads, basic toiletries, a box of Wheat Thins, and clothing, including a large trenchcoat and a spare pair of shoes, in case something might happen to my trusty boots) slung over my shoulders and clutching a small denim bag. The denim bag held a collection of my best pens and pencils, what money I had, my contact lenses, a travel alarm clock, and a small photo album (yes, that IS corny, but it's also true). It must've been around February, and naturally, it was raining. The station was alarmingly full, but I think as many people were passengers waiting for a bus as were homeless, waiting for I don't know what. The heavy smell of soggy humans pervaded the air. But I didn't want to hang around there anyway, I needed to keep moving. I stepped out into the street, and looked up. And up. I know there are bigger cities, like, L.A., from whence I had just come, but I had never seen one alone before. That city looked Big. Eventually, I got on a random bus and took it somewhere. I got off when the driver announced the end of the Free-Ride Zone.

Yeah, lawn-thinking. I dig it. It lets me put my thoughts together. One of these days, I'll go find a huge lawn, one too big for anybody to find me on, and I'll just stay there, lawn-thinking, until I've thought about everything I need to think about. The only problem is that it's inconvenient to have to wait until one in the AM to gain uninhibited access to the front lawn.

There are other things I should be writing about right now. Personally, I have a shiner and a magnificent headache, the new brakes I ordered for the Trundler should be here soon, and already, even at this early date in the semester, I am quite bogged down with homework. Nationally, the south is yet underwater (donate to the Red Cross Here), the death of Chief Justice Renquist has brought the number of openings in the Supreme Court to two, we are yet the top polluters on the planet, and oil prices remain rather higher than is usual. Globally, crises continue to plague various poor African countries, the German economy, once the best in Europe, is making a slow recovery at best, Iraq is, well, Iraq... in a nutshell, the world is falling apart. But these are not the issues discussed within today's entry.

Random and wildly inappropriate though it may be, I'd like to discuss the situation with my bed (on so many levels this is inappropriate, and I will be wracked with guilt later, to be sure). My bed is about to croak. It's a dire situation. Using my infallible skills of college trigonometry, I discovered that, as one side is almost six inches lower than the other, representing a drop of six inches over about fifty, and since a-squared plus b-squared is c-squared, thus c-squared is 2,536 and c is about 50.38, at this point I'm actually sleeping upside down. This is causing fanastic back pains, and is entirely the fault of my associate, Ja'ar.

While he was visiting last December, Ja'ar, who is roughly twelve feet tall, took it upon himself to leap onto my poor toad-sized bed. It promptly imploded, and has never been the same since. Thanks Ja'ar, well done. It was just peachy explaining how the bed had mysteriously collapsed during your visit. (By the way, my grandmother remains under the impression there is some kind of engagement between us.) The difference between one side and the other has become so great that I am having a real time of it trying to sleep. So, it's time for a new bed, and, as is always the case when I want new furniture, this means that it is Ikea time. Yay! I love Ikea, I love the "quaint" Swedish names given to all the furniture, I love the smell of an Ikea warehouse, I even love the blue and yellow design of the store. Ahh, Ikea...

Ikea makes great little sofa beds, and one in particular, the Grankulla/Munkarp combo set, is just the thing. It's not too big, it folds up, and it's cheap. Wicked cheap. Cheapness might be my strongest motivation here. The problem is that the nearest Ikea is down on Long Island. There's no way I could get anything up here from Long Island, especially seeing as how I have neither a car nor a license. I went online, to try and order the Grankulla/Munkarp, but it is only available in-store. So I did the only thing I could do, I wrote to Ikea.

I don't remember exactly what all I said, but it was along the lines of, "O' great and powerful, glorious Ikea, of furniture inexpensive yet possessing your stylin' Swedish design, it would be so cool if you'd open up an Ikea in Upstate New York, preferably somewhere in S. County. And if you could get it right around the M. Mall, off of B. Road, wow, I mean, that would just be super." And I noticed today when checking the e-mail, that Ikea has responded, though perhaps not as we would expect. It seems that the off-handed comments I made in a response to a question regarding the nationality of CNN's American Morning host, Soledad O'Brien, have turned out to be eerily on target. (Toad Pizza cannot ensure that the following letter has been reproduced with any accuracy at all):

Hello A. Toad,

Thank you for your interest in IKEA. We are always happy to hear from our customers. We see that our planted robot, Soledad O'Brien, is doing her job well.

IKEA plans to open 5 new stores a year for 10 years as part of an aggressive expansion plan of 50 new stores. We will use the hordes of those brain-washed by 90-Second Pop as slave-labor to build these stores. We will initially focus on serving our existing markets, and then move into new markets that we believe are compatible with the unique IKEA concept of the domination of Michigan. We already are on track for this year with the following new store openings, and soon our plans to conquer Michigan will be complete:

Bolingbrook, IL Fall 2005

Stoughton, MA Fall 2005

West Sacramento, CA Spring 2006

Canton, MI Summer 2006

At this time, we do not have specific opening dates; when detailed information becomes available, it will be posted on our website.

IKEA is also in the process of proposing stores that would open in 2006 and 2007, also to be constructed by masses of "Pop-ified" viewers of American Morning. Be sure to visit our website and stay tuned for store locations as our plans (to build an IKEA over the entire State of Michigan) become definite. For your convenience, we have also provided the link to our store locator where you can volunteer your services to the IKEA, Michigan Project:

http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/ikny_splash.html

You can be the first to hear about special offers, the latest web exclusives and Soledad Bots by subscribing to IKEA's email list:

http://info.ikea-usa.com/IkeaOptin/Registration.aspx

We hope this information has been helpful.

Hail, IKEA,

IKEA Customer Care Center

Well, wonderful as this all is, I still am in need of my Grankulla/Munkarp. I think I can get to the Stoughton, Mass store when it opens, as I have a relation near there who has alluded to a willingness to drive me and my new Grankulla home, but I just went to Ikea.com and found that this won't be until November. Until then, I guess I will be sleeping on a pile of newspapers in the corner. Weak.

Photo: A Grankulla/Munkarp

Once upon a time, a young Toad left her home in California when she was thirteen, without her father's leave. She stayed on the lam for five years, living under an assumed name in Seattle. The year she was to turn eighteen, she left Seattle and moved to New York to live with her grandparents and go to college. Said Toad was, of course, me. I had reasons. Those are not today's topic, however.

Thus far, I think all I've ever said about my life as a Seattlite, I mean besides the two accounts of the mayhem and destruction wrought upon me by the altered states of consciousness that come with 1) an accidental overdose of Robitussin and a fever and 2) extreme sleep deprivation, was that I used to buy used, obsolete text books to study out of from a now defunct U-District book store. The rest is shrouded in mystery....woooooOOOOoooo....(that was a mysterious noise.)

The two most common questions I have been asked since I've been re-assimilated into society are "Did you ever, like, sell crack or something?" and "So were you ever, you know, a hooker?" The answer to both is, "Uhh, No." Probably the tenth or eleventh most frequently asked question is "But, if you weren't a hooker, a drug dealer, a paid hitman, or with the circus, what did you do for work?" Ah. And that's what today's entry will answer, because I have nothing new to say. I'm borrowing Amazon.com's helpful rating system of one-to-five gold stars, however, instead of gold stars, I'll be talking in terms of golden busts of Charles Dickens and instead of one meaning "This CD skips," and five meaning "I loved this DVD, and the special features alone make it worth buying," one now means, "Very unlike a workhouse, indeed," and five means, "They used to beat us, and we were paid in stale bread."

My first "Job." 4 Golden Dickens.

The first job I ever had was "spare-changing"...erm.. it's like self-employment, except instead of doing a useful service or supplying a needed item that people were willing to pay for, I would just ask them for some money. It doesn't work nearly as well as most people think it does for the exact reason that most people think it works very well. An incredibly amazing day could pull in twenty bucks, an average day would see gains of around seven or eight, and a bad day nil. Luckily, as it turns out, one can get a fiver to last a few days if need be, simply by eating Top Ramen, stealing blackberries off of people's bushes, and going to the Food Bank. Though, and I don't know why, I didn't make nearly as much use of the Food Bank or other, similar services, as I should've. I think I felt like I didn't need them or something. Okay, so "spare-changing" was a low and depressing business, and while not the only job where I have been spit on, threatened with violence, and otherwise misused, it is the only job that, at the end of one hard week, consisted of asking exiting restaurant patrons for their leftovers. For this, I give the vocation "Spare-Changer" four golden Dickens.

Lumper. 1 Golden Dickens.

Mercifully, my career as a professional "Spare-Changer" could not last forever. It took a some months, but I finally made some trusty friends, many of whom lived at the Fester Pad. It was through these connections that I found a position as a wine-truck lumper for one JB, the "owner" of a wine cellar in Downtown Seattle. "Owner" is in quotation marks because JB had been busted smuggling stuff at some point in his life and was apparently forbidden to own a business evermore. So it was his cellar, but his attorney was the legal owner. Lumping the trucks consists of first pulling all the crates of wine from the container, then hauling them down into the cellar to be stacked, upside down. A single container holds between 250 and 1500 crates, and each crate weighs between thirty and fifty pounds. A crew of around fifteen can get the job done in three hours. I would usually be one of the ones stacking in the cellar. This was grueling work, and once I got one crate into the wrong stack and had to take the whole thing (several hundred crates) apart to find the missing crate. But I liked it there. I liked JB and his crazy wife, the atmosphere was casual, pay was good enough, and often JB would hand out bottles of wine as bonuses. Wine is good and excuses all the various pulled muscles. One golden Dickens.

Independent Contractor. 5+ Golden Dickens.

Well, the contract I signed every week SAID independent contractor, but really this job consisted of me walking around in front of a Sleep Country USA store wearing a big, irritating yellow sandwich-board for a rival store. This is another job in which, during its execution, I have been spit on, threatened, etc. Sign-holder has the distinction of being the least comfortable job I;ve ever held. We worked eight-hour days, sometimes twelve, with only one one-hour break and one fifteen-minute break. We were not allowed to sit or squat at all if not on a break, nor was one even allowed to stop walking for more than sixty seconds. That last one has to do with loitering laws though, not store policy. I was getting paid less than half of what the veteran sign-holders made (they only made fifteen or sixteen an hour), yet because I was new, I always had the worst spots: In the sun, in high-traffic areas, or the worst; near the Sleep Country's main entrance, where they'd call the cops on you if they could catch you for loitering. Every pedestrian you met, you were contractually obligated to hand a flyer to, so they all hated you; they'd push and shove you out of their ways, make rude comments and/or threats on your life... and, I mean, rightfully so, for harassing them when they just wanted a friggin' mattress. But it was awful. My boss hated me because he thought I wasn't working as hard as the men, my coworkers hated me because I handed out more flyers than them, and I certainly was not too happy with me either. After all, good lord, what kind of idiot was I to be walking around looking like a giant wedge of cheese all day, so degraded as to have even lost the right to stop moving? The place almost sacked me for collapsing from heat exhaustion once. I was out of breaks and water, and the sun had been out, and the next thing, tunnel vision, and then fade to black. I'm giving this just five golden Dickens, but it'd be much more if I had not arbitrarily set the max at five. It does, however, also merit three golden Kafkas, due to unbelievable feelings of alienation and despair brought on by working a job so stupid and monotonous it becomes hazardous to your physical and mental health.

Field Technician for a Local Archeological Firm. 2 Golden Dickens

Completely legitimate work. Doesn't really belong here, as I didn't work for these guys until after I was in New York. I started with them as an intern, and was later invited to join the team. I have to admit, this was one cool job. A lot of work, but it was great. I'll probably have more to say about it some other time. Anyway, it's here mainly because this was the other job where I was routinely tormented and misused by the public. I might be digging a test pit somewhere, that just happened to be on the edge of a front lawn, and the owner of said lawn would come out sreaming and brandishing a shotgun. There was nothing I could do about it, we worked for the state, which had rights to that edge of lawn, and, well, they told me to dig there. I give it two gold Dickens, because during a specific case, an angry owner went to the project director to complain that I dug a hole on the edge of his lawn without telling him first, and the PD, who was responsible for notifying all the home owners what was up, and had TOLD me that he had done this already, said that he'd sack me. Also, I did work in the conservation lab too, under the impression that I could work my way up to being a paid Lab Tech, but actually, all I got to do was wash broken window glass from 1870 and be on the receiving end of the unwelcome, and slightly disturbing, come-ons of one older employee. (Dude had a daughter my age! Cree-py.)

PS: Actually there was one new thing today. Density 21.5 by Edgard Varése, an a-tonal piece for solo flute, rife with nightmarish rhythms and intervals, as played by me, for a placement audition in the wind-ensemble. Why, you ask? Because it was the only thing I worked on over the summer. It's stressful to play under any circumstance, and much more so in front of Mr. B. But you know what? He said that it was good, needed way more work, but good so far, and that he could tell a lot of hard work had gone into it. So, Yay. I love the piece, but I definitely needed more than three weeks at the end of summer to work through it seriously. For any of you with iTunes, I would suggest looking it up and giving it a listen. It's only a dollar, and they've got a nice recording of Laurel Zucker playing it. For any of you not with iTunes, you can go listen to thirty seconds of it by the Asko Ensemble's flute at Amazon (it's track 11, disc 2). You know, Edgard Varése is credited with the invention of the percussion ensemble? See if you can guess the meter, hahaha.

Photo: My work space on a dig last year, See? I'm tellin' ya, that was an awesome job. I really only quit because of school...Otherwise I would've kept right on working for nothing.

Around a year and a half after the "Fishy" incident, I was rooming with my esteemed colleague, Ja'ar in a new apartment near Green Lake. Ja'ar was a barista at the time, though it was not long until Starbucks would buy the lot out from beneath the espresso stand at which he worked. But that's another thing altogether. I don't know if this account is so much a documentation of the effects of sleep deprivation, so much as it is of our own, ahem, stupidity, but, here it is, as promised....

Account #2

It was Friday, December 13, 2002 around six o’ clock in the evening. The sun had already set, though the sky was not quite dark. Ja'ar, my roommate, and I had just bought groceries—including two bottles of No-Dose, a case of Red Bull, and three pounds of the darkest espresso the Fred Meyer’s had to offer—and we were on our way home. We had designated this to be house-cleaning day. The plan was to restore the apartment to its original condition, but first to get good and caffeinated so that it would take only hours to do it rather than days. This way we would be done by that night and could spend the weekend on more important endeavors, such as eating quesadillas and drinking black berry soda.

Once we were home, like two soldiers readying themselves for deployment, we made one last check of all our supplies and equipment for the evening. Ja'ar set about making his special brew, a truly foul mixture he called his, “Over the Counter Cocktail,” (I have come to suspect there is more than espresso, No-Dose, and Red Bull in this), while I busied myself on the computer, setting it up to play about sixteen hours of Grateful Dead, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and others so we would have something to work to.

We gulped down shot upon shot of Ja'ar’s thick, black concoction. Before long, we were spiraling down the descent to caffeinated delirium. I felt the corners of my mouth turn up into a permanent grin, and my pulse began to pound in my ears. I knew my teeth were grinding, but couldn’t make them stop. Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life was blasting through the computer’s tiny speakers. After exchanging a quick look, Ja'ar and I each tucked a roll of paper towels under our arms, hooked a bottle of Windex into our belt loops, and zipped off to the back bedroom and bathroom respectively.

The night flew by, in fact two nights flew by, and after a dozen more rounds of the monstrous OTCC, we were well into our second-winds. We tore through the house at mach speeds, spontaneously erupting into fits of spasmodic twitching and giggling as we went. The house and been cleansed top to bottom within the first five hours of the first day, but we hadn’t noticed. Our many books had found their own ways back to their rightful places on the shelves. The bathroom tiles and grout must’ve scrubbed themselves with toothbrushes, because we certainly didn’t recall doing it. Oddly enough, the whole house took care of itself in this way, which was decent of it, because by this point the caffeine had worked itself not only into our veins and nerves, but also into our thoughts and speech (at some point we had even started using British accents), and we were in no shape to be doing much of anything.

“Look! Look at that!” I cried.

“What? What is it? Is it moving?! Damn it, Toad, speak!” Ja'ar looked at me searchingly, trying to follow my gaze.

“The couch! It shouldn’t be there; has it always been there? Awful! What’s it doing over there anyway?” I thrust an accusatory finger at the couch eying it suspiciously, “HARGH!”

“Yes! We shall move it at once! Rah! Have at you!” He sprang out of the kitchen pantry where he had been organizing the cans of beans and enchilada sauce for an hour, grabbed up a fly swatter and brandished it at the couch. He then leapt over the small dinette table and right into a philodendron hanging by the sliding glass door.

“Yahhhhhhhhh!” He spun ‘round on his heel to glare at the plant, “Toad, do you see this? Swine! I’ll do you for that!” He assailed the plant with a barrage of threats to compel the offender to battle, but eventually he lost interest and apologized whole-heartedly. Meanwhile, I was engaged in my own struggle with the enormous couch. I had finally managed to drag it several feet towards the adjacent wall, despite the fact that it not only would not offer any help, but also cursed and insulted me the whole time.

“Toad! Toad, you bloody tart,” flapped the couch’s cushions, “You’re not moving me anywheres. Piss off!”

“We’ll see about that, you. Just look out, or you’ll be in the fire place in pieces tomorrow!”

“Yeah? Let’s see you try, then, ya nancy!”

“Dude. Did you just call me a nancy?”

Things went on like this for some time. It was a terribly inert couch. When after one last great effort on my part it still didn’t budge, I flopped down on the floor with an exasperated grunt. It was from this vantage point, sprawled out on the carpet, that I spied, tucked next to the fireplace, Ja'ar’s toolbox. I raised an eyebrow.

“Ja'ar!” I cried, and dove for the toolbox. “Ja'ar, look—” I held the toolbox above my head, letting the sun, now fully out and streaming in through the three big living room windows, glint and sparkle off its shining red surface. He looked up from the coffee table he was drawing on with Sharpie markers and smiled knowingly. The following hours of our sleep-deprived, caffeine-induced madness were marked by not just the need to build, but also by the discovery that we actually could. In minutes, we had fully stripped a rocking chair, a recliner, and the computer chair, and were busily reassembling them into a swing chair and a hammock, which we eventually hung from the ceiling. Soon after that, we had reupholstered the futon and two end tables with blue shag, though I haven’t the foggiest where it came from, and had started making a picture frame with spare pieces of wood from the recliner. We had no saw, but Ja'ar was good enough to cut the pieces with a steak knife.

About three days into our little building frenzy, the hallucinations took hold of our minds. Scrap shag and bits of fabric and wood littered the living room. Ja'ar crouched in the center of all this, staring intently at a large pile of discarded shag on which he had carelessly thrown the steak knife.

“Toad, give that gremlin a radius. It’s armed. It’s trying to kill me, but I’m too smart for it,” he tapped his temple, and turning to the pile, “Isn’t that right? You’d like to come and get me wouldn’t you? Well bring it on! HAH!” He lunged at the fuzzy blue pile and wrested the knife from it. I took no notice of this; I was too busy gaping at the carpet. Was I sinking in it? It was surprisingly like oatmeal—and it was hissing at me.

This business with the carpet was the last straw. I decided to go sit in the pantry. That would be a good place for me to take a moment to reflect. Besides, I was suddenly overcome with a feeling of complete enlightenment, and had the incredible urge to write down my thoughts lest I forget them. Taking my notebook and a pencil, I slowly backed down the hallway, keeping a watchful eye on the floor all the while, and locked myself in the little room at the end of the kitchen to write my memoirs.

Hours, or maybe days passed, and I heard many people come and go. I emerged from the pantry in a daze, a notebook full of important revelations in hand. Completely stupefied, I was about to collapse. Ja'ar was gone, though a life-size cardboard cut out of Marilyn Monroe wearing Mardi gras beads had appeared next to the computer and there was a large woman passed out upside down on the futon. She looked like she might become violent if disturbed, so I tried to steer myself clear of her. The stomach was angry, the legs were unsteady and, to make things worse, the whole apartment moved every time I took a step.

I stumbled past the bathroom, there was a young man wearing a red sweatshirt unconscious in a pool of vomit in the bathtub, but the grout was still sparkling white, so I was happy. A pink feather boa trailed out of the kitchen. I went to investigate. The refrigerator door hung open, and inside there was a note. I picked it up and sniffed it; it was written in enchilada sauce:

HAVE GONE TO MT. RANIER

PS: WE’RE OUT OF CHEESE

I replaced the note, closed the refrigerator door, and decided it was time to go to bed. The house was dirty; didn’t we just clean it? I could have sworn that we did. Well, we could make time for that this weekend. Maybe get some coffee and No-Dose and power through the whole thing in a day. All I knew was that I needed to make it to bed. The hallway seemed longer than usual. Everything was growing darker as I walked. My legs ground to a halt like the rusted pistons of an ancient machine, I felt myself sway back an forth a moment, and then—I was falling! Not falling, floating. Floating towards the soft white carpet. The carpet rose upward toward my face, but I was out long before I hit the ground.

Well, well, well. The flies were cleverer than I had at first suspected. Instead of opting simply to allow their spawn to devour the meat of my calf, they have left behind their germs to devour the soft, vulnerable tissues at the back of my throat. Using that as their base of operations, the germs have now spread throughout my head and chest. Granted, given that the ingested flies of two days ago were from the bike trail, that people also walk their dogs on the bike trail, and that we all are aware of what flies eat, I don't suppose it's at all surprising that I have become a veritable breeding ground of fly-transmitted dog-shit germs. Yes, I suppose it is also possible that I just have the same head cold that has been going around lately, but it's more exciting to have fly-transmitted dog-shit germs taking over your respiratory system.

With less than a week until the fall term begins, I couldn't have picked a worse time to get sick. Well, be fair, I guess I could get sick the day before classes start, or the first day of class; that'd be pretty lame. Or if I caught cold not now, but instead four months from now, in finals week-- Now THERE would be a disaster! Or what if I were to get sick right before I had to take control of a passenger airplane right after the pilot suffered a coronary? With my head all full of Robotussin the way it is now, I might start thinking tangentially, ignoring the radio tower's commands and then-- Ohh! I don't even want to think about it. Did you all hear about that Air France plane-- when was that, then? Two weeks ago? I ha-- What was I talking about? Let's see... Oh that's right. I was just about to introduce today's topic: Two Brief Accounts of Things I Have Seen-- well, it's written right up there in the heading, anyway. I'm doing this in two parts, mercifully. Just please excuse me if I get all ramble-y, sometimes 'Tussin does that to a person.

Account #1

About four years ago I awoke with a start in the middle of the night, covered in a slimy, sweaty film, and for a moment I couldn't recall where I was. And then it hit me. The stench. The stench of a lice-ridden studio apartment in Seattle's U-District, the so-callled "Fester Pad." It was a mixture of Nag Champa incense, patchouli oil, the garbage, stacked to the ceiling in the kitchen, and the sour sweetness of too many humans in a small space. I remembered the fifteen people I was sharing the single room with. The bizarre patties of gray food-bank tube-meat that one of these people, Steve, had recently been eating between slices of a mysterious brown fruitcake-like brick (though, as far as we could tell, there was no fruit in it). Also from the food-bank, the brick had only a single label dubiously marked, "Food Loaf." It all came back. Literally.

I had to hurl, and I had to hurl, NOW. I blindly lurched towards the bathroom, forgetting I was still in my sleeping bag, which caused me to trip and stumble over the bodies of the slumbering Fester Pad-ites. I won't go into the messy details, but I will say only that I never knew with just how much force a stomach could project a can's worth of Spaghetti-O's.

The next day, I didn't dare to move. I laid in my designated corner, zipped my sleeping bag shut over my head, and, grateful that the 'Pad was empty for once, quietly awaited death. I tried to keep track of the time between the chills that were running from my spine to my limbs by my pulse, but I can't say how long I laid that way after waking. I do know that at two-thirty in the afternoon, Raff, another of the Fester Pad's denizens, presented me with a large bottle of Robotussin. Half out the delirium of fever, and half out of a juvenile urge to impress just how dire I felt my situation to be, I downed the whole bottle in a matter of seconds. I then thanked Raff and returned to my nylon cocoon.

Back in the darkness of the sleeping bag, I gradually became aware of a bubbling sound. Like in an aquarium. As I searched the blackness for the source of this sound, things started to take shape before my eyes. At first they didn't look like anything recognizable, but as they drew closer, they grew ever more vivid. Small yellow blobs, off in the distance, moving, no, swimming towards me. They were fish. A small school of brightly glowing, yellow fish. "What the-- HEY!" I shouted. But the little fish didn't go away, in fact they continued to draw nearer, I could almost have touched them, but they didn't seem to want to get within arm's reach of me, and I couldn't quite focus my eyes on them.

"Hey fishy," I crooned, in my best crooning voice, "Hey there fishy, 'sokay...I don't eat fishies...hey, c'mere, fishy fishy..."

I reached out my hand to them so they'd see that I wasn't dangerous, but it was of no use, they wouldn't come to me. They just waited there, a little school of yellow, luminescent fish. Everything was still black, except for the fish. From some far away place I could hear what sounded like a submarine's sonar ping-noise. The fish didn't like that sound and at every ping they'd swim backwards a little.

"Don't go fishies... Wait--I just want to talk to you..."

Ping!

"Hey fishy, come back here...No, wait, where are you going...?"

Ping!

I swam, or rather tried to swim, after the fish, but found I was unable to follow. Meanwhile, the ping had become deafening, resounding in my skull like a bell. 'Like my head IS a bell,' I thought, 'I am Diving Bell Head. I don't want to be Diving Bell Head...' PING! I could feel the hammer striking just behind my forehead. PING! I thought my eyes were going to pop out. I watched the fish backing further into the blackness. PING! I couldn't let the fish go, if they got away, I might never escape the ping, I might be Diving Bell Head for eternity! PING! I lunged from my knees with all my strength, "FISHY!" I cried, shooting out both hands, madly grabbing at the fish.

It worked, and I moved, not much, but enough to grab one of the fish. It's cold, greasy body squished between my fingers, and it vanished instantly, along with all the others, the bubbling sound, and the ping, but I didn't care; I could still feel the fish in my hands, and hugged it tight to my chest, it could save me from being Diving Bell Head for ever. It was my talisman, it was my savior. It...smelled of pepperoni? The odor was overpowering. I grunted my disapproval and passed out.

When I finally regained something like consciousness the following evening, I found myself clutching a very old slice of three-cheese pizza. It had been four days since we ordered pizza. Somebody had carelessly tossed the old box into my corner. Luckliy for me, my roomates told me that besides when I actually screamed "FISHY!" I was essentially quiet, and none of them noticed when I grabbed the stale slice. This was not the proudest moment in my life.

Ahh, the obligatory awkward introduction...

It seems that everyone has a blog these days, recording their comments of the day, views, accomplishments, etc. So I thought, why not start one myself? An unfortunate question to ask, as I soon realized just how many good reasons there were.

One, who cares about some wee toad like me? I'm not famous, nor am I any kind of expert or specialist, so I probably don't have anything to say not already being said by someone else, somewhere out there on the 'Net. Two, I am utterly dull. I live to go to school, study music, and cycle. Dull. No wild and crazy parties, no run-ins with the police, and, as far as I know, I am fairly psychologically stable, making it unlikely that I can even offer up some good, juicy human interest to the so-called Blogosphere. Three, I am notorious for starting and stopping at least one diary/journal/day runner per annum. I can't even keep my address book up-to-date. Mightn't it just be a plain bad idea for me to start posting in a public forum like this? It sounds like one of those things that I am totally gung-ho about for a few months and then forget entirely because I am lazy or preoccupied with classes (like when I was collecting pictures of people's hands, or when I was determined to gather samples of every type of plant along the Mohawk-Hudson bike trail last year, identify them, and record their statistics in a notebook. Oh yeah, that lasted a long time for sure.) And isn't this just the perfect place for me to say things that I will immediately regret having said? Ahh, I love the taste of foot-in-mouth in the morning...

The list went on and on. I was pretty convinced that I was the last person alive who should be considering starting a blog. But, then, on the other hand, if nobody cares about my blog, then it doesn't matter if it's dull, or lacking juicy gossip, or if I miss a day (or a week or a month) here and there. Besides, my life wasn't always dull, there were a few years there when it was touch-and-go, and I have honestly had some adventures in my short twenty (okay, 19.92) years. Now, I just had to figure out what to make the main purpose of this blog.

So, here 'tis. Toad Pizza. The real-life record of one toad trying to find its way in the age of the information superhighway without getting squashed. This is my story as I move from the gutter (literally) to a successful collegiate career (with luck). The story picks up midway through, I suppose, since rock bottom was already some three or four years ago, and I am already in junior college, with what, I think, is a decent GPA of 3.91 after over fifty credits. This will be sort of my academic journal, as I study for finals, apply to schools, prepare for concerts and so on. Hopefully, it won't ultimately end in public embarrassment and the utter destruction of my ego with rejection letter upon rejection letter. Well, we'll see.

Yours, A. Toad

PS: I have just discovered that, since I am running a Mac, and am therefore despised by Bill Gates, apparently I am unable to show paragraph breaks. I have no clue why this should be, I know only that it is so. I promise that whenever I am within an arm's reach of a Windows based computer, I'll do what I can to make my entries more intelligible.