so i was a little upset last night.

i'm not gonna apologize for it. i don't think i did anything or said anything truly hurtful. i was hurting and mostly i left everyone else the fuck alone without putting my problems on them. maybe on kevin, but he's working on coding a game and therefore unavailable to get sucked into my emotional hijinks.

here is what i did last night:

got home from work around 5:20. see yesterday's first entry if you didn't see the rest of that story.

thought about something to do. couldn't get ahold of chris to see if he was going to the bob log III show. sat on computer going, "i am going to freak out if i end up doing nothing again tonight." did not feel much like eating but made myself a pot of black cinnamon coffee in hopes that the caffiene would lift my spirits just a tad. found grounds in my cup at the end of the pot. ptooie.

chris called. he had the wrong day for the show and, as such, couldn't go. surprise! but i can't bitch at people for not knowing, right? just because *i'm* being needy and annoying doesn't mean i get to impose on my friends.

i talked to my mom on aim for awhile. she ws equally bored and irritated with her evening. i suggested she come up here and we'd bake brie and eat it with toast. she thought this sounded like a good idea, but felt too much responsibility to leave home at the time. she made me laugh, which mom is good for, as well as knowing someone gives a fuck enough to speak in words, until she decided she was tired of sitting at the computer and went to bed.

ate leftover tempeh and blck rice stir fry. was still hungry.

turned on the tv. watched "greetings from tucson," which sucked. watched "antiques roadshow" (from seattle!) and ate a box of red vines. watched "egg" for the first time and marvelled at some really cool water-related pictures. also, gratuitous surf footage!! discovered a cache of trashy dating shows was airing on the wb. watched "elimidate" in horror. watched "blind date," which is art. began watching "the fifth wheel," which seems to have lost the cool host and has dumber-looking captions in addition to being, y'know trashy like elimidate. jenny came home. "i have no life," i informed her. "yeah, well, i hope you're enjoying your DATING SHOWS!" "fuck you." she laughed. it's odd that few of my friends are actively offended by my telling them that.

went back into my room. said some things to kevin. felt extremely lonely and isolated and began to cry. i haven't cried in a long time, so i guess it was due. the feelings of isolation and whatnot are hardly isolated, but it's not unlikely they're increased by what i suspect is pms. i don't think that makes them less valid, but it sure did have a way of exaggerating them.

i cried for awhile about a lot of things, i don't know. i realized the other day that i have a lot of pent-up hostility. not sure where it's from, but there seems to be no acceptable escape for it. it leaks out when i'm walking home alone and i swear at motorists and i swear at myself for various stupid shit or whatever. people probably think i'm insane if they see me swearing at myself. so i'm angry and lonely and unhappy. what can i do?

listening: bjork - cover me (dillinja mix)

whinebitchmoan.

ok, this is pathetic, and it happens every fucking friday. every week there is no one to 'blame.' i just expect too much, apparently, of my usual-suspect friends. i wanna DO THINGS. we never go do things that are not (1) taking walks (2) eating (3) watching tv/movies. people are busy, i appreciate that. i'm busy, too. but, you know. i like to have fun. there are things i want to do that are fun that involve, oh, seeing live music i've never previously experienced, dancing, or something of that nature. people have other plans. granted, sometimes they invite me along and i decline (my fault) because they are things i'm not interested in. the things i want to do, though, at least for some people are things they have expressed an interest in.

if some of you are reading this and thinking, what the fuck! you never ask me! well, that's probably true. because! i do ask sometimes. and there are always other plans, so sorry. so then when i think, i should ask people! they aren't around to ask! so! that makes it difficult.

and then i rely too much on my boyfriend, who is great in many ways, for off-time social interaction. he's not much for going out. that's fine sometimes, but sometimes i wanna go out and it takes entirely too much convincing--in fact, more than i've been able to conjure thus far--to go out to a show. he has tickets to see death cab for cutie later this month, and that'll be the first show we go to since he's moved here. (nitpicking: never mind that any time we'd hung out prior to his moving here we'd gone to shows. i met him at bumbershoot for the first time, for chrissakes. he went all four days!)

anyway. i am consistently frustrated by my lack of a fun life because it seems like something i should be able to do something about and yet i can't. or don't, or whatever the fact of the matter is.

so every friday and/or saturday, i'm sitting here thinking, i'd sure like to go have fun! here are like three things i'd like to go do! and i can't find anyone to go with me. and that's fucking lame.

i spend a lot of time not having fun. i should pull myself up and go by my-fucking-self, i suppose, but that's hard. it's cold and lonely and it gets lonesome, especially when i think of the people i want to be there, enjoying themselves with me. it's just not that easy.

there are very few occasions i wish jenny and i had gone for a 2-bath unit.

this is one of them.

as i left work half an hour ago, i thought, gee, i should use the bathroom! nahhh, i'll just go when i get home!

foolish.

jenny's boyfriend alex was here when i got home, i could tell. his suitcases were plopped down across the living room floor. i could hear jenny on the phone in her room, but the shower was running. hmm... so alex was takin' a shower. and that boy does love him some hygiene! he loves hygiene for a good 20+ minutes! so he loves his hygiene and i sit here going, "i have to pee. i have to pee! ihavetopeepeepee!!"

when he gets out of the bathroom, maintenance shows up. someone reported sink troubles, he said. true, jenny did request maintenance on our bathroom sink, which seems to drain slowly when it didn't used to. so i let him in to fix the sink. which he is still doing. and i still have to pee.

and he just left! wooohoooo! i will celebrate my urination with the telling of a story!

last night, i took the 44 out to ballard so i could stay at kevin's. his house is warm, unlike mine. and, you know, i get to share a bed with my boyfriend, always a plus. i sat in the articulated section of the bus. just after clearing the intersection at fremont and 46th, we hear a loud CRASH as the bus comes to a sudden halt. looking out the back of the bus, we see the wires flailing wildly in midair. evidently the bus has been forcibly unhooked from the power grid, but it's more than that. a small crowd has gathered on the street corner. i hear them say something like, "look at that car!" someone else says something about a traffic light that's fallen. sure enough, a freaking *traffic light* has fallen from its rightful place on the pole over the street and is blocking traffic on the right lane going the opposite direction. cars are still going, of course. the intersection is insane. the bus driver reattaches the wires and boom, we're back on the road. no explanation.

that's my story and i'm stickin' to it.

j-school trauma and other oddities

winnie has been doing titles for her entries lately, and that's a format i've always liked to have the option of doing, but i never seem to do it since it isn't formally part of the whole template shindig... but anyway. title there is.

picture it: a sunny but cold--i swear it's cold--february afternoon in seattle. i'm bundled up in several layers and walking home from class. waiting on the corner of 42nd and 11th, a guy, about fifty, wearing a baseball cap and driving a beater of a tan dodge spirit, turns up his radio. it's nirvana, "lithium." he starts singing along and zooms ahead when the light changes.

do fifty-year-old guys love nirvana anywhere but here?

i was so preoccupied yesterday with finishing my city council story and working on the stupidonlineclass project that i plum forgot to study for my weekly com&envir quiz. i realized it this morning as i was walking into the building where my reporting class meets this week. "oh, shit." figured i could study over my lunch hour. surely the obvious question choice would emerge.

reporting class today featured several actors playing the part of people somehow involved in a u-dist apartment fire. there were five groups of us reporters, each with a coach who was somehow knowledgeable in dealing with trauma. my group was coached by the only non-journalist, a crisis/grief counselor who is very nice and good at dealing with people. you can tell from her eyes that she's seen a lot of people in hard times and tough situations. one of our encounters would be filmed (from the group, not for each person in the group), and we would take turns being the interviewer, meaning we'd each do 1-2 interviews.

our first encounter was a guy who was looking for his friend, who fell down the stairs as they were running out of the building. he was upset, but he was willing to talk to my groupmate. there was another guy, a homeless advocate, who was aggressively trying to interrupt the poor guy and tell the reporter about his conspiracy theory that the city set the building on fire to get rid of homeless as part of the ave revitalization or something like that. my groupmate was having a hard time, and i was trying to get myself pumped up to interview someone, thinking, yeah, i could do this, i can be aggressive and make that other guy bugger off or something, maybe!

the next encounter for our group was to take place on camera, and the coach said i should do it. oh, great. being filmed = nervous. then my interview subject turned out to be... very upset! because! she suspected that her husband was killed in the fire and she didn't wanna talk to me (duh!) and she wanted a coat and she wanted to go to the morgue. she yelled at me for looking at her. i wasn't sure what the do, but eventually i decided to play along and 'help' by grabbing an invisble coat and putting it around her shoulders. this got her to talk a little more and tell me why she wanted to go to the morgue. then i pretended to call a cab and she told me her name and i pretended to give her my card.

there was an awful lot of pretend, but damn. she was good. scared the fucking shit out of me because i hadn't a clue how to react or talk to her, especially because i was on camera. when other groups encountered this character, they had the ability to sit down, to move, etc. but not so on camera. i must've looked terrified, because i was. later a woman, one of the camera operators, came up to me and said i looked great on film, which amused me. i think she wanted to show me, but i bolted after class and really don't like seeing myself on film anyway.

the other interview subjects were people who weren't in the building at the time of the fire: a girl who lived there, but had gone down the street to a coffee shop and missed it but couldn't find her brother; another girl who was the apartment manager; the hospital's public information officer. these were all much calmer subjects, more willing to talk and give relevant information, etc.

but oh my fucking god. mine was terrifying. i still feel weird, just walking around and entering my apartment building and stuff. remembering our fire alarms. but this was a simulation! what the hell.

anyway. lunch came and went and i didn't study. i looked at the questions and none were immediately ones i considered THE question, and there has tended to be one like that. i went to my philosophy class and listened to lecture. i decided to skip my quiz since i hadn't prepared for it at all and that takes up the bulk of class on thursdays, so a girl i know from reporting (and my first newswriting class, and i swear i've had something else with her) and philosophy walked through campus to 15th with me and we talked.

another story i've been telling lately is that of my com&envir prof singing the song about global warming that he wrote for us, but i don't feel like telling it in writing now, so it'll have to wait for another time...

ok, i am now writing, and quite productively and maybe even decently if i do say so myself. this does not detract from my initial observation that the meeting was boring, nor does it mean my prof will like it. hell, it might even technically be late. i'm not really sure, since the whole timetable has been screwed up by the columbia explosion. (he was supposed to be in houston this week, teaching reporters there to do, well, what they are probably doing right now with talking to survivors and covering trauma.) anyway, must go finish, then edit my stupidonlinecourse groupmates' paper and put it neatly on the intarweb. rah.

listening: bjork - it's not up to you

i am now everyone's webmonkey. well, not everyone, but, you know. a lot of people, all of a sudden. which is odd and amusing because i haven't exactly been webmonkeying a whole lot for at least three years now, but i guess some skills never die. i used to be better, though.

i mean, four years ago, i probably would've made the template of this damn page myself. today, i'm far too frickin' lazy.

don't mind me. i'm just notwriting my city council story. it's hard to write, so i'm notwriting. sounds simple, doesn't it? it sure is. all you have to do is take the anxiety about deadlines and being a decent writer and getting your facts straight, push it deep down in your stomach until it's a little ball, and then pick up some zen philosophy (or pretend to) and do nothing. ah, bliss.

i hate thinking. and philosophy and art. and cold. and typing. and war. and stuff.

can't there be no words and just beats once in awhile? time ticking in sweet syncopation.

listening: dj krush - inorganizm

today is another day with nothing to report. it's been a busy, productive, and pleasantly social monday. i went to work for two hours, took a bus downtown, attended the city council meeting and mayor nickels' state of the city address, came home briefly to finish the snacks i'd packed (bread, tomato, hummus, applesauce, carrots) and down some coffee before heading to the harem for gilmore girls. (yes, the show airs tuesdays, but we tape it because some people can't come on tuesdays. this works out well.)

after the show, the same group as last week--josie, chris, jesse, and i--went out to dinner, this time to new china express. it's always good to have dinner with these guys. afterwards i picked up the latest issue of bitch magazine and punk planet because i felt bad for charging only the one magazine on my card.

becky showed me this, which completely cracked my shit up.

margaret cho, one of the four people i can think of that i strongly admire, at least as of this past bumbershoot (the others being... i don't remember, but i know janeanse garofalo was up there, but i digress), has a new show and is about to embark on a tour. whee! i am considering blowing mad $$$ to see her when she comes to benaroya hall in may. it's $30+charges for the cheapest seats and jenny doesn't think she can afford it, and she'd be my number one person to go with. alas!

in other "emily wastes money for no real reason except that it's just money, right? and i might as well while i still have the disposable income" news, i ordered a zippo lighter and some lunapads yesterday. the latter is decidedly TMI for those of you with female squickiness, and the former is because kevin continually rags on me that i should use a lighter instead of matches to light my candles. i hate normal disposable lighters and love matches; lighers baffle me and hurt my thumbs, but i admit that matches are "wasteful." so i ordered a fancypants lighter. i know, silly, but whatever. it's not like it's gold-plated platinum with some sort of fancy carving or anything, but it does seem more like an investment than a trivial item.

do i have anything else to talk about? not really. the city council meeting was so boring. they spent at least 20 goddamn minutes discussing a new offleash area in westcrest park in west seattle, and apparently this was the big issue in the papers as well. nick licata noted in his comment--EVERY councilmember commented on this--that this is one issue where he knows people on both sides, and it's not a liberal or conservative thing. well, yeah, cos it's about fuckin' dogs in the park, right? real and serious issue there. anyway, there were a lot of other things that did seem valuable to me, though i don't think any actual *action* will be taken based on today's votes.

i think...that is enough. back to the independent press and, then, sleep.

listening: death by chocolate - the salvador dali murder mystery