my new subaru theory

i traded cars with jeff today. i got to drive his early 90's subary legacy wagon. i needed to haul out a powerboat and my car doesn't have the balls to pull it up the ramp. i nearly burned his clutch out, but i did it. anyway, i noticed how the shifter always just floats back to the middle and there's no way to tell if it's in gear by looking at it. When you shift, it feels like you're really just poking about randomly, but nevertheless, it's in gear and it's totally cool. I didn't miss a shift, but i felt like i was just jiggling the stick. considering that all the people i know that have driven with subaru stick shifts for a while, have attitudes and personalities akin to that stick shift. They just poke around randomly completely confident that they're in the right gear, and rarely have reason to believe otherwise. It's strange what sorts of thoughts you have after sitting in traffic for hours.

Fuck Dickler

Sometimes it haunts me. It certainly wasn't my only institutional experience, nor was it, by most tangible measures, the worst.

I dreamed about my roommates again last night. I dreamed about the three other people who stood beside me. We dug our ditches together, we washed dishes together, we sat up late at night having silent parties. Putting on headphones and dancing silently in the dark. We would sneak behind the science building for a cigarette in the middle of the night. We would turn all the shower heads on hot and sit in the middle in lawn chairs, reading aloud to each other and revelling in a dip of Kodiak. We always had our eyes and ears focused on a glimpse of the Sergeant Major. We relayed our intelligence flawlessly. We always knew where he was, and he appreciated that. One by one we were eliminated from the student population. I was the first to go, and then the third. Seneca was the first to leave without an ambulance, followed by my break-in to the office to retrieve my car keys and speed away forever. Richard ended up back in Bermuda after a run-in with the girls' dorm RA. Nick ended up in the Army. They were my only allies on antagonist hill. We watched each other lose our last grips of sanity. We watched each other's self-will engorge and lash out. We resisted. And once we finally escaped, never fucking looked back.

Now I get to choose when to take a shit. I take my cigarette breaks at my leisure. I don't tuck in my shirt either, but I'm always looking over my shoulder for a Sergeant Major.

I have a splinter in my foot. It's a tiny pissant splinter, but it hurts like a bastard.

(That seriously just took me half an hour to figure out how to make circles, lines, and resize text in GIMP. You'd think open source would make software more intuitive.)

At first I thought it was glass because it was bloody and I couldn't see it. Then I soaked it and Katie said she didn't think anything was in there. So the next morning I wake up and I''m getting shooting pains from my foot when I stand up. I go to the bathroom and see that it's a tiny splinter. I went after it with some tweezers, but the damn thing broke when I finally got ahold of it and I only managed to get the half that was closest to the surface. It doesn't hurt every time my foot hits the ground now, but when it hits just right... it hurts... and it hurts deep. (p. s. michael, thoses ellipses are for you.) I can't get to the rest of it and Katie couldn't find a sewing needle to dig it out with. Maybe tonight we'll get drunk and find a needle, that way it won't hurt so badly.

The beerfest was surprisingly fun. I was pouring the Saint Louis Lambic Frambozen. It's a weird belgian raspberry beer that is way too sweet and not alcoholic enough. A group of middle aged southern women showed up around 12:30 and started pounding them. I kept them until 6:45 at which point they were hammered and tipping me with beer tickets. It turnedserving into a pretty good party despite the 4oz glasses of beer.

Fiona Apple is the hardcore Avril Lavigne. That was my major revelation last night. Pretty sad.

Well, maybe I'm just pretty sad. I've been sleeping in 'til 3 in the afternoon, not eating 'til 10, and trying to ignore the 50 or so voicemails that I haven't returned as well as the asshole who emailed the entire board that I had put his son in the wrong class and he was going to take legal action to shut down the sailing club, then is all nice on the phone and now he's offering suggestions to the board about how better to manage the club. I hope they realize he's an asshole, too.

I can't believe how much I hate myself right now. Last night when I was walking home I really wanted to jump off the Hawthorne Bridge where it goes over the industrial district. I didn't want to kill myself or anything, and I doubt that fall would kill me unless I landed on my head. It just seemed like it would be great to break both of my legs and feel some tangible pain that I deserved so I can get out of this emotional limbo. Fuck posting to blogs. I can't believe I still get myself in trouble with this shit.

We went sailing on the fastest boat I've ever sailed. The 29er is without a doubt my new favorite toy, or rather, my new favorite one of James's toys.
We took it up to Yale lake in Cougar, WA and got the shit beat out of us for a couple of days on the water, with me 6 feet out on the trapeze wire and James on the helm (not the smartest combination, but that's the way we want it to be so we may as well train that way). After two full nights of rest my body has finally stopped aching which is good because we're about to load up the boat and head up to the Gorge to sail it with Jeff today and hopefully get some pointers from the world class sailors that should be training out there in preparation for the championship this weekend.

Otherwise, it's same ol' same ol'. The sailing school is in a shambles and everyone is in denial which is fine with me because once they acknowledge what a mess it is they'll be asking me for answers. I still haven't registered for classes or decided what I'm going to take or if I'm even going to be able to go school full time and sail competitively now that I have to teach sailing classes for Reed 3 days a week, but that's cool, I get to put on my resume that I was an adjunct professor of sailing at Reed College. That's pretty much the most haughty job title I could possibly get for showing a bunch of burnouts how to rig an outdated boat and how to drift around the Willamette while reading magazines on a powerboat.
Hell yeah.

i'm still cringing.