i went to this event with Rita and her friend Lisa from california. it was at singer farm naturals in appleton, ny... saw some people i know, actually :) i made a pinwheel and a wind catcher! i felt 5 years old again - i've always loved a good pinwheel. i also met the sweetest dog. he was my pal, we totally chillaxed and i scratched his ears ^,^! later there were speakers. all threee were very good. the woman with 350.org was from fiji and presented a lot about climate change and the niagara-erie bicounty region (how it will affect) and i was very grabbed by it.

the night before, i came over and we went out on amherst st. it was interesting for sure. we got into this long conversation at an old man... anyone else would have ignored him or asked him to go away, but i deiced to carry on a conversation with him, and it paid off. the amount of entertaining things he had to say was innumerable. his anecdotal stories about te safety of biking vs the dangers of walker were pretty hilarious. i slept at her place after we left rohal's corner (or however you spell it)

after the relay for renewables we ended up hanging out at Olcott Beach, which was more of a town on a beach than it was so much an actual beach. it was really cute. i wanna go back when it's warmer to see the shops and things.

i babysat my nepphew on saturday, i think?

he's such a cute lil' guy. i love seeing him be a tiny human, discovering complex reactions to simple decisions.

he gave me such attitude! he's growing way too fast... i can't wait to meet adult Elliott.

i feel like these last 4 days have been a blur. what even happened?

i worked, and went to school wed - fri... well, except thursday. i have no school.

I've been really making an attempt to get up earlier. I usually wake up around 10 - 12 noon. but i have been setting my alarm for 7... and getting up by 8:30 - 9. it's an improvement, i guess. I decided to make an honest effort when i slept for 15ish hours straight and woke up at 7 something and realized how productive i felt in that early morning sunshine. it really does make a difference, and as much of a morning person that i am not, i felt for the first time in so long that maybe i could turn into one? i mean, i still cannot talk to anyone for the first 30 - 45 minutes, or really function, but it felt good to actually get a series of things done and walk around the city running errands, and then have the rest of my day ahead of me to do yet even more things that i don't even have planned. if i woke up early enough, i could actually have time to do all the things i thought only retired people have time to do. (or people who haven't been sleeping in until 2pm for the majority of their lives)

i know it seems pretty basic, but i have been such a late riser for my entire life, like, sleep until 1 - 3 pm late riser. if you could see the amount of absences and tardies on my high school transcripts i just recently got in the mail, you would most likely judge me. i used to sleep straight through my alarm for hours. I was so unbelievably difficult to wake up my mother literally gave up on me. sometimes i wouldn't even wake up to cold water. i've made significant strides since then. if i set my alarm early enough, then i can get up only sort of late.

at least it's an accomplishment to me... haha!

I finally completed all the steps for applying to UB. the last thing i was putting off was writing them a letter explaining my gap between schooling. I just didn't feel like i could write it until i got this one assigment done, and it just really made no sense at all. i could have done it two weeks ago, really. i'm such a procrastinator. I also finally filled out my application for the UB school of dental medicine (to be a patient) so now all i need is the 50 dollar application fee. can't it be waived??? c'mon.

I helped (e:paul) bust up the bathroom a bit today after stopping over and having some lunchyfood. i'm still getting plaster out of my ears. I'm always amazed at how much stuff (e:terry) and paul get done in a day, especially since they work such long hours. I'm practically spent after a 5 - 6 hour shift. I'm so easy going, but sometimes i think it might be better to have more of a "get it done" attitude about things. I think a tendency towards escapism also does not help. I can find 98734698736 things to do on the internet when an assignment is due.

__

i had been sort of talking to a few different people recently but i'm pretty over it. I was never really invested to begin with, and i just really can't give much of a shit at the moment. I just don't have it in me yet, i guess.

there just seems to be this perpetual pattern of miss-matchedness of wants/needs with myself and other people. they want from me what i don't want from them, or i want from them what they do not want from me, whether it be physical/emotional/mental... it just seems i can never find that meeting point, or if i can, there's some sort of element of impossibility to it. this has been happening, really, since i've been old enough to be with another person physically or romantically. It even happens within my relationships, even though they typically seem to be going perfectly from the outside perspective.

I guess I really can't look at it as a factor of "what's wrong with me?" because that's never really totally it, and self-blame is really only self-destructive. i could chalk it up to "shit happens" but it's difficult to not wonder why this happens.

__

i've been debating about my study abroad. I really want to go to europe but i hate iberian spanish. i really want to go to south america, but it just seems so unstable in a lot of parts. oh, spanish major.

I wanna go somewhere but i'm afraid of student loans. I need to do it for myself. for my own sense of expansion. my own sense of accomplishment.

oh, life. always lifeing.

I'm always fascinated the characters you see on busses.

you can't see it well, but as this woman sat in front of me, she abruptly turned to write GOD 4LYF on the window condensation.

it was just a private moment of quiet amusement.

friday was all kinds of crazy. I met with a friend for a glass of wine and got to see a cute baby, then i went to Stevie's master thesis exhibition and had more to drink, and then with rita, i went to (e:xandra)'s birthday extravaganza. i ended up getting 4.5ish hours of sleep and went to work at 10 am, and felt fine-ish by 12, got out by 3, and slept for 15 hours straight.

and that was how friday bled into sunday. i ended up getting a lot done that day. then we had friends over for dinner :) spaghetti sunday. April works with the hottest ginger man, and he came over for dinner. it was painful to look at him. ugh...

monday, i did a lot... read that poem in between classes, and then i went to a friend's apartment to read a few lines for her play she's written and i got the part. I will play a very flamboyant gay man, and will have to wear drag at some point. i'm incredibly frightened to do it, but i'm gonna just do it.

I was surprisingly comfortable reading for her. I tried for a few characters, but i guess it was an even split with any of them. the guy in the couple i'm playing opposite did not read as well as i did, so i guess she just threw me the part with more lines? idk, i hope i can do it.

I guess it starts in august.

it's glbt themed play mostly about the different flavors of relationships or how they happen the same as hetero but with different nuances etc...

I then had a test to go to for social problems. weirdly enough, i felt like it was the least important thing i had to do all day. I was tested in other important ways that day, and i feel like the personal gratification i derived from them was far more valuable to me than this scan-tron crap test.i mean i still think i did well, but...

immediately after, i went to see part of the movie Bidder 70 it was kinda cool, but i really felt like a lot of it was devoted to performing fellatio on him and how awesome he is for doing what he did. which was awesome, but... idk. it wasn't really about the bigger issues of fracking for gas and oil, mountain top removal... he covered some of the economic impact of it (creating poverty and destroying property values) but a lot of it was about him and his activist organization he's a part of. I wish it was more about the issue at hand than some sort of promotion for him or his group. I'm sure they didn't mean it to be that way, but it's how it seemed. Rita and I didn't finish it. We went to Mezza for dinner with her brother Raad instead. it was so good, but i think i like Rita's better. I got the falafel panini, but the wrap as definitely superior. it was all yummy.

her brother is actually a pretty cool guy, just a bit of a negative nancy.

today is another gorgeous day, and hopefully I get even more done.

I made raw strawberry pie.

i learned it from Jónsi and Alex! It looked just like the fucking picture. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.



Mine


from the cook book (okay so it only kind of looked like the picture, but still...)

i have to read this. there's no mic. I'm gonna die.

i pray that i have the wrong date and that it's really on Wednesday.

so many questions... but mostly just why??

went out to coffee today with someone i have not seen in ages! She just had a baby in january, and now he's all alert and cute... I wish i would have gotten a photo. I wanted to hold him forever.

I really would like children one day. :( I wonder if it'll ever happen?

so besides the wonderfulness that was the beautiful weather, and a brief visit with my sister and nephew, wednesday was ridiculous.

at the laundromat i normally go to, the water was off. luckily i got a ride to a close-ish one, but i still had to carry it all back a farther distance than i normally would have. my hands killed from the plastic basket digging into them.

so i was going to be late for work because of that set back, but then as i waited at the bus stop, calling to let work know i was going to be late, the bus came.... and went. without me on it. it just whizzed by! i guess it was so full they couldn't stop. so i walked, and was even later than i thought.

no one seems to ever care? i guess i'm lucky that way.

but then workwas just all kinds of weird. I ate something that sent me to the bathroom multiple times during important parts of service ( i was on a banquet, not normal dinner service) and no one could really seem to get it together. service went really weird and jumbled up, people got yelled at, former mayor Giuliani gave a speech that had me in a rage while only having heard about less than 5 minutes of it... his speech was basically "capitalism helps the poor, and we need to be fracking more, or else the US is gonna get left behind! there's no contamination, and we can clean the streams and it doesn't cause earth quakes!" seriously?! i had to leave the room so i could find somewhere to laugh. if i didn't laugh, i would have called him out. the US getting left behind? tell me more about this, as more countries around the world ban this practice while we allow it to destroy the fabric of communities and the environment nationwide. ugh, i wanted to slap the waddle right off his stupid neck. I knew a lot of people disliked him, but i had never really looked him up and discovered his stances on things. some woman basically fellated as he stood at the podium while she stood up to praise him for the way he handled the 9/11 situation. I don't know much but i know that since that happened, civilian volunteers as well as firefighters and police officers who rushed to the scene to dig out survivors, etc are still without basic healthcare (now, not all of them. i'm sure plenty have healthcare to deal with medical expenses, but i've heard the testimonials of those who do not) as they struggle with the adverse health effects of having breathed in all that debris and toxic smog.That's how we take care of courageous people who rushed to the aide of those in desperate need, without a second thought to their own well-being. Good job, indeed, giuliani. good job.

eventually, the weirdness ended and i visted tanya across the street from work once i got out. We talked about her new job and how training was going. she gave me yummy, yummy tea.

(feel free to call me out on anything i wrote. i mean, i could be plenty out of date on the struggling volunteer stuff.)