I feel compelled to make my usual opening comments about my unreliability as a writer who contributes to the daily mess that is the internet, but I'll try to restrain myself. I can just see myself, three years from now, reading over entries and thinking, "How annoying that I opened every entry with an apology." I was reading through one of my first journals the other night, and I ended every entry with something to the effect of "Well...yeah...I guess I didn't really have anything to write about in the first place. Sorry I'm boring." After a while I caught on and would follow those last lines with,"I say that every time. How dumb," but I can't say that that helped redeem me. I suppose I'm admitting to myself that this, too, will one day be a crummy old journal with lame excuses and handwriting that seems foreign. (Too bad I've used Verdana my whole internet life. There was, of course, the switch to regular capitalization.)

Nothing that I've done this week has been completed more than an hour before it's due. Tomorrow, for example: an essay contrasting Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini due first period. Not even a sentence yet. I don't even know where my time goes.

But there has been Mrs. Brown in Film Class (after Psycho, Citizen Kane, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Paper Moon). Perhaps I should note that each of those films requires two to three pages of writing that I also have not done.

Really, I don't know what to tell you. I feel like I spend a lot of my time here writing "But here has been"-type openings to long lists of romanticized activities -- a way to justify my sometimes mundane existence. I distinguish my days by which pair of shoes I'm wearing or how long it takes me to pick out a CD for my morning drive to school. Every week that passes brings more and more spite for Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday and Friday and I are going to run away together and start a new week. Maybe Thursday can come too, if he's cool about it. The weekend, of course, is invited. I loathe Mondays and Tuesdays.

The only way I can think to describe it is "blah." It's this mood that permeates my entire existence once it arrives. There is frustration, but not enough to be expressed outwardly. There's loneliness, but not enough to complain about. There are just a lot of small spaces that don't amount to anything -- just a lot of dead pockets of air that I can't seem to fill up. It isn't exactly emptiness. There's no implication that it will ever entirely fill (or even that it needs filling in the first place). With hollowness, there is a distinction to be made between a void and a cavity.

I've just been grappling a lot with the idea of absence, lately. In terms of everything. Maybe it will be out of my system soon.


PS: New pictures and a new poem.