After the sun goes nova, vaporizes the earth and sheds its envelopes of matter into the universe, it will dwindle into a little dwarf star and eventually die a quiet death. My recycled bones will, in billions of years, disintegrate along with the rest of the planet and the molecules will reduce to atoms and perhaps some sub-atomic bits. Our carbon will float among the rest of the stellar discharge, everything from my fingers to the entire body of literature. Will the next archeology be an alien race reconstructing our art microscopic fragment by microscopic fragment? Will they learn our languages and piece together adolescent diaries and masterful sonnets? Will they eventually be defunded when their civilization goes to war? Or will we make up their world until the universe freezes in total entropy?

This is my kitchen, as drawn by me. With my new favorite toy.

ETA: It looks lamer than it did before. Suddenly, perhaps because it's public, I'm as proud of it. This ultimately goes back to something Lynda Barry wrote about why kids stop drawing. They start asking whether it's good or not. To avoid those questions, she contends, is to create great stuff because it's not constrained. So to that end, I'm still keepin' it up.

Thanks for bearing with the previous angst-o-rama/stressoutapalooza. Things are much less melodramatic now. In fact, I saw a fellow ardently playing a didgeridoo while walking down the street today.

Everyday my walk to school takes me past the ambulance area of Sacred Heart hospital. This doesn't affect me -- hospitals are necessary, and I'm not at all the type to be unnerved by them. Today, though, the hoity-toity restaurant across 13th Ave. from the hospital had declared war. Excelsior (the restaurant) incensed the air with garlic and cloves, and Sacred Heart responded in kind with vomit. Then SH upped the ante with a siren. A wave of laughter swept through Excelsior. Sacred Heart won, with a clattering gurney and a moaning young man. But it felt to me that Excelsior pulled out because it lost interest; the wine arrived, perhaps, or the waiter told a charming joke. I entered Deutsch feeling more contemplative than usual.

BAH to paperwork. BAH to UO. BAH to bureaucracy and departments telling me what I can and cannot do.

No, fuck YOU. It doesn't matter how well anyone knows me -- my elastic frustration at myself often puts me in that long-suffering mood that most people tend to shed in junior high. I could hurl myself off of my balcony right now, but not before writing an angry diatribe, filled to the brim with self-righteous and self-hating rhetoric battling for supremacy. I'm just that pissed, and the reason pisses me off still more because it's really not a legitimate impetus for leaving an Erica-shaped dent in either the parking lot or that red Jetta.

So I missed an organizational meeting for one of my classes yesterday. The one I was most excited about, actually. I completely fucking blanked it, even though I had, not two hours prior to the meeting, lamented leaving Espresso Roma for my apartment because I'd only have to walk that way again in a scant hour and change. I also spaced out the Literary Society meeting. Everything is getting hazier in my mental appointment calendar, when I was once actually reliable. I had an organizer last year. I eventually stopped using it, as I always do. Last term, I forgot a meeting with an artist for work. I felt shitty for days. Work in general tends to slide out of my brain now. I'm behind on my meaningless paperwork, and even though I honestly don't give any form of a shit, I still feel guilty. And a little bit like I'm breaking, falling into obsolescence.

I got theory-whacked in my classes this term. My comp lit class on madness has been especially difficult so far, not having read much Nietzsche or dense theory in a while. I never taught myself to read this stuff. I can do it, it's another challenge, but the conceptual arena is not a place that I should get stuck. Maybe it has something to do with my cerebral reaction to the university or my own disconnection from everything that doesn't feel like home, but my head keeps rolling away.

So I get a "fuck you" email. I don't know how she means it, but I know nothing will end. We've been friends for way too long to just give the cowardly dramatic flourish of a two word e-missive as the sign. And I know that Joe passed away. And I know that I want to talk to Jordan. But what she knows (not Jordan, but the previous she) is that she's Jordan's protector and sister, and whatever she interprets my actions to mean. There's some gut reaction of hers that I'm not understanding, and fuck-all if I ever will entirely. But I am very transparent (she knows this) and I say what I mean about 95% of the time now.

Then I read the news, and I think the world isn't such a very bad place. It's just filled with assholes bent on ruining it. The scandal du jour and the rehash of the prior ones makes my stomach fucking turn.

In short, I want to cry. And I've wasted my day not doing it or anything else.

Doing some overhauls, now that I have time to do so. (Ahhh...free time.)

State of the Erica: BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! Thank you, and god bless America.

Work broad-sided me when I got back. I'm sort of treading water for now, and all of those good intentions I had for the term (not blowing off homework, for starters) got knee-capped right out of the gate.

I miss everyone. A metric fuckload.

I dare you to match or beat me. Oxfam now has twenty of my American dollars, to be used for tsunami relief. If you're feeling guilty, indulge that little nag in your head and donate. A dose of antibotics costs a quarter.

Other areas need relief too. I started to type a list of countries off the top of my head, but it got too long. I'm going to keep this short because it's way preachy, and I'm well aware of the hypocrisy of seasonal charity (help is needed after Christmas too, although that didn't stop my mother and I from baking pies for Bean's -- I kind of thought it would be more appropriate in February when it's still fucking freezing, but no one feels compelled to help.) But America is proving its stinginess by bumping aid numbers only when criticized for being cheap. (From $15 mil to $35 mil to $350 mil...look up corporate campaign contributions and prepare to be disgusted. If I were prez or a congresslady, I'd propose tax breaks to companies that donate X tons of supplies. But that's just crazy me.)

In other news, I'm back in Eugene. Classes start monday, and I'm kind of lonely.