Stephanie: "Can I go out with my friends?"

Parent: "No."

Stephanie: "Why?"

Parent: "Why should I? How would that benefit me?"

Stephanie: "..."

Stephanie: "So that forty years from now, when you're old, weak, and vulnerable, I won't leave you in an old-people slash invalid's home to wallow in lonely self-hate while suffering the consequences of your prior decisions to ultimately aggravate me during my childhood without reasonable excuse?"

Parent: "Ah, fair enough."

Ah, Kylie my dear, I miss you. We should hang out sometime; your '96 minivan sounds positively splendid: very childless-soccer-mommish.

What we absolutely should do together is set up a table/booth in some public area and brandish a sign titled "Free Conversations with Kylie and Stephanie, Will Talk About Anything With Anyone."
Talk about replenishing one's creative vocabulary (:





I'm very uninspired.
So I do one of these:


1. If you were a fly for a day, how would you spend that day? (You have your mind, but you're a fly.)
Eavesdrop on strangers. Eavesdrop on non-strangers. Find rude customers in restaurants or food courts and land in their food, leave something behind if I can. Hover around a couple having sex so that they get annoyed and start trying to swat me away until eventually one slaps the other across the face (an ordeal from which I will fly away, unscathed).

2. Make a virtual sandwich. What's on it?
Whole wheat bread, chipotle mayo, bacon, lettuce, and the dreams of children when they aspire to be something great so that they may grow up to be cynical and hopeless bastards.

3. What famous person have you found yourself attracted to that you were shocked upon realizing this attraction because that person isn't your type?
Natalie Portman. Yeeah, that whole "having a vagina" thing.. not really my thing. But come on. Have you seen her in Closer? or in V for Vendetta? or when she raps?


4. What unlikely thing breaks your heart?
Lonely and senile old people, especially the ones abandoned to die in convalescent homes by their children.

5. What's the most unpleasant mess you've ever had to clean up?
A relationship.

6. Are you a mod or a rocker?
Neither, I am the offspring of a three-nippled gorilla and a goat.

7. Describe the body of your perfect dream lover.
Legs, limbs, and good looks be not necessary, but two heads most certainly are. One for thinking, and one for, well, y'know. When neither of us are thinking.
I'm not a particularly picky person when it comes to looks. Good looks won't have interesting conversations with me or give me the happy, warm fuzzies.

8. What's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten?
Pressure-cooked oxtail and peanut butter served over rice with a side of smelly pureed-shrimp paste.

9. Remember that time you climbed that thing and were kinda high up? Tell me about that.
No.

10. How do you eat a small stack of Oreos?
I scrape the icing off of every cookie with a butter knife until I have this mushy pile of white lard accumulated in a bowl: half of which is then applied evenly over my face so that only the pupils of my eyes are the only part of my head that doesn't appear white, and the remaining half is used to style my hair into liberty spikes. Then, I find all the dirty and mismatched socks whose pairs have been devoured by my abysmal washer/dryer, fashion a knee-length dress out of the cloths, and put it on backwards. You will be able to tell that the dress is backwards, because it will be the fuzzy insides of the socks showing on the outside, and not the opposite. Usually, I end by stuffing as many of the black, icing-less cookies into my mouth as I can, chew without swallowing, and then run out onto the streets and flash black&white smiles to strangers while whispering Buddhist chants into their ears with my mouth full.
It is only after I have done this to seven people that I will proceed to finish the last of the cookies in a humane manner: with a spoon.

Or, y'know. I sometimes do just bite into the cookie and wash it down with a swig of milk. Fuck taking them apart and licking the creme before eating it. That's just weird.










There were twenty other questions to this survey, but I found something more interesting to do on the internet in another window, so I just stopped.

Have a nice day.

This staying-at-home-all-day-most-days ordeal is proving hazardly.

I'm out of clever things to say.

It's two in the morning.
I've got headphones on with someone shouting into my ears, and still my room feels so disgustingly quiet.
I feel like I should make some noise. I feel like I should shout. I should shout.

My restless legs don't seem able to settle down unless I close my eyes.
I think I'm tired.

Posting just for Kylie :D
I could accidentally run over a little old lady
with my shitty driving one day, watch Kylie laugh on these videos,
and still feel like laughing myself.
Oh, Imma miss you, lady-friend.

Ortiz mentioned something about how we should have used remote mics for these videos.
Goddammit, Ortiz will always still be Ortiz.

I once told a friend that most of the wisdom I've attained on life as I see it has come not through experience, but through observation: the consequences of the mistakes my friends have made, and the rewards they've reaped from the opposite.
He told me that by doing so, I wasn't living life the way I ought to.

I argued by asking, "Then in what way 'ought' I to live? The trouble of using experience to navigate my way through living is that the effect of my decision-making comes first, then the lesson; not always will I have the ability to fix the first of the two."

He then responded, "Then, what right do you have to wish to exist as distinctly independent, if the life you choose to live is not your own?"

The good things in life are not things.

We, a sea of uniform purple gowns, passed through the main halls as students for the last time.
If my peers eventually come to understand and accept the impermanence of all things, perhaps we truly might be able to make society a better place, just like they told us.

My heart panged for the poor guy on the right.

Oh; we're all on uneven beaches of white, combing the grounds for forgotten valuables with metal detectors at hand,

standing atop millions of abandoned rare diamonds
buried from sight not even a foot beneath the sand.

These motivational posters these days: usually the words you'll read beneath an irrelevant but still colorfully beautiful photograph are the postermaker's definition of strength: "Don't give up. Never give up. Keep fast, keep strong, keep vigilant, keep persistent."

It wasn't until this year that I'd encountered people who, with their lives and stories of sad ordeals, their trials and their ne'er-fore revealed personalities, have unknowingly taught me that sometimes, it's true strength that's needed to let things gently go.

MY CHANGES, FROM THE BEGINNING OF HIGH SCHOOL TO THE END:

pre:

near-post:



Heck, what did high school do to me?
No, what did I do (or not do, hehh) for myself in high school?

Not a damn thing.

FUTURE PLANS AFTER GRADUATION:

- Get fit. Find an active sport I enjoy playing, hire a trainer, or blackmail a friend into joining my struggle. Maybe I'll stop procrastinating.
- Care about school. It's not free anymore.
- Leave home. I'm sure the world is larger than I imagine it must be, still figuring out how to sever the umbilical cord without committing unintended suicide.
- Manners? Hm. Usually only applies to 35+ adults. Lower age line?
- Care about things. Because I find that I usually don't.

That fat, grey cat that lives underneath my porch came out today.
I returned home; as I was turning the lock on my screen door I spotted it, out of the corner of my eye, squatting on one of the wooden steps by the back gate.

Didn't even run away as I moved to step inside.
Just stared at me with those unblinking, catty eyes.
I don't feed it; I wonder what it eats so much of to be so fat.

Tell them they are under attack, denounce the pacifists for leaving them vulnerable,


and they will do your bidding.

Yesterday evening, I stepped out of the house to find that one among the dozen-ish birds perched upon the pole wires above had decided to leave its legacy on the ass of my car.

I looked up at the bunch of stupid flying things, cursing whichever one had released its large, unholy splatter of white and purple.

All these damn birds had wings that enabled them to fly above the rest of the world, to see the lands from a perspective those without wings could not,
yet it was here, of all places, that they had chosen to seat themselves.


"But what right did I have to mutter indecencies at them?", I ask myself now.

I wonder: are the trivial things we forget forgotten over time, or all of an unnoticed sudden?

When despair at last floods your heart,
you will fall to your knees and look to the heavens with tears in your eyes,
screaming in voiceless agony, "What have I done to deserve this?"

and the voice that you've always prayed would respond to your sorrow
will still prefer to remain silent.

Today, I attempted to run away.
There was no wind to be felt as I walked: no cars were on the road driving past to produce any.
The long stretch of sidewalk I faced was empty, and the vacant, unkempt stores on either side of it contained no indication of recent life. Even the cracks in the concrete had no weeds sprouting forth from beneath them; they all had died long ago.

The air was hot and the world could be seen, but it made no sense, as the gray skies above revealed no sun.

I ambled onwards; my eyes would never stray from the path ahead, but would instead strain to see if the end of the road and the beginning of one new was near. I continued like this for hours; my breathing had become labored in the heat and sweat would trickle from my brow down the contours of my face when the beads got too big. Eventually, the last of the stores had been passed, and the markers on my left and my right had ceased to demand that those who walked forward turn back. I ignored the gradual barrenness as I progressed, and still the sidewalk continued on.

I never did reach the end of the path, though.
Instead, after my hundredth mile, I found myself at a crosswalk. At the other end of the crosswalk was a broken traffic light, from the pole of which hung, directly eye-level across from me, a small black box that illuminated the palm and outline of a five-fingered orange hand.

The light of the "Do Not Walk" sign never changed.
Still I'm there, waiting.

If people could speak to me and not expect an oral response in turn,
I'm almost certain I could spend the rest of my life as a mute

Queer, isn't it, that someone such as myself can be so fond of writing, can appreciate the merriment in laughter,

It's the extroverts in society that are rewarded for simply being the effortlessly open people they are; they receive the pay raise, the paramour, the invites to basketball games and late night drinks at local bars.

I, however, couldn't carry a conversation if it had two handles and Mike Tyson holding up the opposite end.

It seems these days that life must be discussed so that its beauty may be revealed.
I find that I don't have to, but that's what appears to be the problem, now, isn't it?

When encountering negativity, I find I still haven't mastered yet the task of thinking with a disciplined mind. Being capable of acknowledging this fact surely must be a small step towards so, though.

I wonder if a person such as myself, whose moral and social standards are self-set, has the right to point fingers and say an errand gone wrong is the fault of somebody else. Perhaps I don't; perhaps for such people, there is no such thing as "fault," but simply what is.

I've spent most of this week under a constant state of needless pressure that, I realize now, was not created at the fault of those around me, but rather, by my own hands. No fault can be placed upon others for my failure to breathe in deeply and accept that not all hard work will reap the benefits we seek, that not all things we wish to attain are attainable, and that not always our plans can be followed through to the end. This atypical air of impatience I've only just noticed I've had recently for everything, for everyone, I now believe has been nothing more than my ego's futile attempts to sustain this ignis fatuus of control and stability.. that and my lengthy absence from blogging, my lack of reflective thinking.

The loss of my hold on the patience I usually have at hand, as well as that frumpiness I'm not used to suppressing is, to me, just another demonstration, another reminder, of the impermanence of all things: things I forgot needed constant attention, and hopefully will handle better in the future.

Oh, the things one realizes when cooking rice in the kitchen.
I've still yet to find that peace with myself,
but at least, I think, I've found a tiny bit of it.

"You want to know who you are? Huh? You want to know whose son you are? You don't, I do, everybody does... You're the son of a thousand fathers, all bastards like you."

--The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

What a classic insult.
How could one possibly respond to that today?

The date, I can't remember specifically. It was a year or so ago: I was seated at the wooden tables beside the schoolside Vons' Starbucks, waiting for the time to crawl by faster for reason I can't remember. It was then that a dark, elderly, asian man shuffled by in house slippers to the gift card section beside me that then used to be there, but now is not.

He wore no glasses, I discovered after a few moments' worth of curious peering. The hand that gripped the cane holding the rest of his body upright shook slightly each time he leaned forward to reach for a gift card that never quite seemed to be the right one. His feet never rose more than a quarter of a centimeter from the ground each time he walked, and his thin hair stuck out from beneath a neon-pink hat that probably must have been worth something to him at the time and place where he had attained it.

I watched him for a few minutes, my interest in this seemingly uninteresting person growing as the number of cards that were picked up only to be set back down rose. Realizing at last that the one he wanted was not among those displayed, he shifted the whole of his body 90 degrees to the right, chin and arm raised slightly up so as to signal an employee for assistance.

His mouth opened without word, but rather, a barely audible squeak-grunt, so the first worker to pass him walked by without noticing that his attention was required on something elsewhere than the cardboard box he carried by the arm.

The second worker noticed him, but instead of stopping, mouthed a word that began with the letter "o," and extended his forefinger into the air to indicate a silent "one second, I'll be right with you". He never came back after that second. Or minute. Few minutes.

The third worker, this time, stopped, and asked him if he needed help. The old man replied in a voice that reminded me of fountain pens scratching ink on textured paper, "Membership cards?"

The man had come to Vons seeking out a Vons card, and instead, mistakenly went to the gift cards.
The worker chuckled, said that he would go get someone that could help him, and left.
I checked my cell phone clock every minute for ten minutes; the help that was promised never arrived.

My heart filled with sadness for the old man.

And so the small asian man, I remember, put one hand atop the other on his cane and hunched over with his head tilted to the left, waiting for someone to stop by and assist him. I watched him for a good while, pity aching my insides, when at last the time had come for me to stand and leave. I did, but not before casting a final glance by the door at the man whose head was still tilted to the left, waiting for help that I still don't know today had come or not come.

When I got home that evening, I called my boyfriend (then, my ex-boyfriend now). I felt this need to tell him about the odd old man I had come across earlier that day, so I did. I told him, "that man needed help, but no one came to give it to him."

and I remember the words Tim told me that, to this day, continue to bother me greatly:

"So, why didn't you?"



I saw a funny tree this evening.
Its thin trunk was curved, as if the weight of the leaves and branches at its head forced it to grow bending downwards.
The shape of the tree reminded me of the man and his old, curved back.

Every now and then, you'll make a new acquaintance that, for the sake of conversation, will ask you what your hobbies are.

What a breed of sick bastards we are.
Continuing to find pleasure in love does naught but coax our inner masochist slowly out of the box it was born suppressed within,

In first period Chemistry, my teacher's daily dose of wisdom went something along the lines of

"Learn not to fear death, and you also shall learn not to fear life."



..What a load of crock.

Death is like Life's final guest at the end of a long celebration, someone or something that's pre-welcomed into our lives whether we choose for it to be so or not.
I've already accepted that, and I'm still terrified of living.

I haven't lived long enough to find something worth truly living for.
I wonder if most people don't, but pretend that they do.
Adults have a habit of doing that.

The distant voice that hollered at my family and I as we stepped out of the car last evening belonged to a man who had made the abandoned area in front of a former CVS building, once reserved for shopping carts, his home.

My parents' ears aren't quite what they used to be (if at any point in their lives they were any better than they are now), so what they heard at first was a sound that greatly resembled a dog's barking. They turned to look at one another, at him, then back to each other and my dad mouthed, "Maybe he has a dog behind the wall."

The man, however, had no dog. In fact, the sound that he was making wasn't some incomprehensible nonsense, but actually the word "fuck": the 'eff' being nearly silent and the 'uh' being most discernable.

It didn't make sense to them that the "barking" stopped when they turned to look at him, and resumed only when they proceeded to walk forward.
Perhaps they thought it was a smart dog. One that could see through walls.

After multiple cups of coffee at one of the thousands of Starbucks locations in Southern California, our goodbyes with the typical Fermin/Tongson Friday group were said at the door and the Mateums headed back to the car, the one furthest from all the others and in the middle of the nearly deserted parking lot.

My parents' pace quickened as they realized that the barking had resumed as soon as they were noticed crossing beneath the light of the lot lampost, and that along with the now more coherently human snarls and yapping, the man behind the wall (that had been pissing in a nearby potted plant as the three families were parting ways) had begun to toss in a few mumbled

"..fucking fuckers.. pissing cunts, fucking pricks.. fuck you, fuck YOU" between each "bark."



As soon as we were within the safety of our locked doors and our risen windows, we remained in silence listening to him continue to deliriously rage on, though it was unknown whether his jabber was meant for us or for his own ears to hear.

"He's crazy," my mom proclaimed.

By the main door in my living room, a collection of Catholic statues reppin' Jesus, Mary, and some other members of the same country club that my parents have accumulated over the past several years, join me on the rare occasion that I turn on the tube.. their gaze heats the back of my head as I sit in the king's chair directly in front of them, and we all watch That 70's Show.

I'm not much of a believer, but the living room is certainly the last place I ever choose to sin in.

A few nights ago, there was a spider on my wall.

Being the coward I am when it comes to bugs and other crawling creatures, I stood petrified in my room, staring fixedly at the motionless black thing on the bit of wall behind my bedroom door for about fifteen minutes. Or twenty.

Heights of feet by the thousands, enclosed spaces with leg room by the inches, even stomaching down foods a starving mongrel would refuse.. I can handle these sorts of things.
But not bugs. Not crawling creatures with more than four legs, much less twice the amount, and even further less, things with black bulbous bodies and legs that run faster than the eye can see without straining. Like people with claustrophobia who hyperventilate in closed spaces, I panic in the presence of bugs, nevermind that they be thousands of times smaller than I.

A fear that often accompanies a phobia as embarrassing as mine would be the fear of killing said creatures.

The one thing that animals and bugs don't possess that very well could save their lives from the killing hands of unflinching humans is a voice, one similar to and as loud as a human voice. If all sentient creatures, not just people, had loud voices, had a clear, universal language, then they too would be just as capable as us to scream. To reason. To plead.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not a radical animal rights activist or anything.. Chickens can be rather tasty.

but, when I'm hovering over a creature smaller than I am by the thousands with a tissue ready in hand, I wonder if this thing knows that it's about to meet its impending doom, and I wonder if this thing has a voice and I just don't have the ears to hear it cry.
My hand always retracts.



I didn't kill the spider. Way to go, me.
Though, maybe it was bad of me to have chased it to my parents room.



Fuck, I'm so weird.

I really should stop using the word "and" so much.

The Left Paddle has years of routine as a Pong player. The ball is on its way back to your side of the court. It's bouncing wildly and it seems to be heading to a point above your paddle. What do you do?


a. Move your paddle up
b. Don't move your paddle
c. Move your paddle down


..Christ, I'm feeling so uninspired.

Through observation, I've learned that before we allow our mouths to retaliate, or our battered egos to stiffen our hearts,

we ought to keep in mind that the hardest people to love are often the ones that need it the most.

Gandhi:

There exists in this world a gesture of endearment that leaves lovers neither staggering with sensuality nor grinning stupidly in the wake of newfound couplishness. This gesture is not so intimate so that the public passersby may shake their heads in disgust, nor so bland so that one would have to strain their eyes to see it an act of any sentiment.. instead, it entirely is and belongs to a category of its own, when appreciated by the right people of the non-sexridden mind.

It is not a single action of physical nature that can be limited to a deep kiss or a passionate embrace, but is an act of unspoken language that can be universally heard, yet is understood by so few: such a heartbreaking group of few.




The 90+ degree weather SoCal has sweated through since the beginning of the week has fallen to a steaming 68 degrees Fahrenheit in no more than three or four days. This cloudy greyness creates such marvelous conditions for letting my favorite pair of headphones kiss my ears and sing to me the weepy ballads of indie-folk songwriters loud enough that I may slowly slip away from this noisy place.
Normally, I'd hold the cooler weather in higher esteem. Today, though, the clouds in the sky seem to be blocking more than just the sun, and the moisture in the air seems to be dampening more than just the atmosphere.


..and for some reason, this weather seems to be a painful reminder that although I still remember it exists, that at one time it made my heart soar,

I've already forgotten what that gesture of such tenderly exchanged affection felt like.

"Hey beautiful,
I'm sorry I had to put you through all this darling. I'm truly sorry.

Just thought I'll leave you with a last few words.

All I wanna say is how much I loved you, and cared for you.

You are the apple of my eye, and I will be watching over you always.

Mary-Jane, Ian, Tom, Craig, Lee, thank you all for accepting me in to be able to care for your daughter/sister.

I will not forget how nice you have been to me!

Bet now my bloody lottery numbers will come up! Ha ha.

Jane I hope you have a wonderful and fulfilling life! Get married, have children, etc!

I will love you forever and will see you again when you're old and wrinkly!

I have told my parents to leave you some money out of my insurance so have fun bbz!

Ok...gonna go now beautiful.

Love you forever.

Tony xxx"

I've found that every day, I live for tomorrow.

I plan for tomorrow. I work for tomorrow. I hope for, wish for, expect for tomorrow.

Every day, most of us live for tomorrow.

There's nothing wrong with that, I believe. It doesn't hurt to live for tomorrow, to have it set, to make sure that you get by to live today for the next.

But it struck me today as so redundantly repetitive, because every tomorrow that I have will always be yet at least one more day from being substantiated, fulfilled as its own.


The Southern California heat has begun to die down, slightly.
I'm glad.

Would it not be an amazing honor to someday sit down and have the most profoundly esoteric conversation of one's lifetime with a celebrated author?

When someone confronts you with an issue, saying things that you wouldn't like to hear, you can easily walk away.

But when the time comes for you to accept a fact, or the only realistic path to follow that you wouldn't particularly want to, it's impossible to walk away from yourself.

Therefor, if the company you may not enjoy comes down to just you with you, then you might as well be nice to yourself, and simply enjoy being.

I was considering earlier how I was brought into this world with no real intention of my own. Reality being of course that birthing one's own would be an impossible feat, and that's an acceptable concept, but for people like myself that haven't quite got a God with answers or a divine being to answer to, a certain incertitude constantly prods the side of the head. If we weren't created of our own will, what gives us the right to be our own person?

The trouble with not being religious, or being incapable of placing faith in something that can't be justified with science or reason, is that there are no answers, and that's what I find most bothering.

Being selfish as I was when I was younger, when I received gifts on special occasions that didn't quite impress me to the standard I'd expect (like most spoiled children do), a festive blowout of dust collecting for the poor item would ensue in some untouched corner of my room. Probably disguised alongside a few books in my library or stashed behind a clothes cabinet where godknows what's crawled along there. That sounds like something I'd have done at that age.

Sometime over the last seven years, I've received at least two picture frames for my birthday, separately. I never much appreciated them, never had any use for them, and what became of them's beyond me, because little less than two years ago, I at last had a picture that I deemed necessary to be framed and those frames were nowhere to be found.

I went out to the nearest dollar store in town, paid for the nicest one out of the entire shelf, put the picture in, and every night before going to bed, I'd angle it slightly so that its front was in sight when I slept on my side facing the desk it stood on. An act of justifiable masochism from the heart.

And this continued nearly every night until the week of last Thanksgiving, when I crawled into bed one night and instead of angling the frame in my direction, set it face down, so that the leg it usually propped up against erected outward into the air.

Eventually the picture with the two smiling faces was removed and hidden, and remains so even until today. Now what's left is a plastic 4x6 picture frame painted a poorly reflective imitation-silver, and the uncertainty that if I so choose to hide this gaping reminder that I haven't got anything to fill it with, it won't disappear as I'd want it to like the other picture frames I once used to own.

Re-edited the template, looking at white was too much.
Now I'll have you look at too much black.

Chose to delete my previous six entries, because I felt like it.

..Took me long enough to slap something on here again, dinnit.