I work at a summer camp from 7:30 every morning until 5:30 every night. Alex works at the Mountaire Chicken factory every day from 4:30pm until 3 in the morning. We never see each other but each day I get a pretty good idea of what he's been doing based on my Firefox history.

Here is a list of some of the best google or wiki searches in recent days:

(google search)
Does alcohol make you charismatic?
Drunk charisma
Does drinking give you more confidence?
How to talk to people
Top 6 ways to overcome shyness
What is the meaning of life
Pam is lame
I hate pam from the office club
Zooey Deschanel naked pic
She and Him
grills (for teeth)
my basset hound keeps shaking his head
ramen noodle recipes
recipes using ramen
chords for Sheryl Crowe favorite mistake*

(wikipedia article)
Meaning of Life
Quarterlife Crisis

*I'm at a loss here.

The underside of my arm is really really soft. I realized this today while I was driving. I tried to focus all of my senses on how my skin felt against my fingertips. I tried not to feel my fingertips against my inner arm. I do things like this often, try to separate myself from myself. When I did this today my inner arm became really ticklish. I guess because I was focusing too much on not focusing and the nerve endings were standing at attention because they were being paid such close attention to.

When I was younger I used to stare in the mirror at my face until it stopped making sense. I would smile really big and if I kept staring suddenly my face became insanely foreign and I wouldn't recognize myself at all. This was around the age that I would try to sit still and think of nothing. I would close my eyes and tell myself to clear my mind. Then I would begin to argue in my head that if I was telling myself to clear my mind then my mind wasn't clear or focused because I was focused on clearing it, or telling myself to clear it, and then I'd start to get confused and things would feel really unfocused. After awhile I would be able to see the blood vessels in my inner eye lid. They were sort of a neon orangey reddish over a blackish. I guess I used to meditate at age 7, that's what I was doing right? That's the point of meditation...to clear your mind. I still find it just as impossible as I did then, but I appreciate the necessity for such pursuits just the same.

All last week I was convinced I had heart disease because my left shoulder ached. I googled "Left Shoulder Pain" and sent myself spiraling down a well of irrational fear. Suddenly whenever I breathed in my chest was tight or heavy, like an elephant was standing on it gingerly. Over the next few days my shoulder pain had spread across my entire upper back. I was convinced I would die in my sleep and began to have heart palpitations. In the back of my mind I knew how irrational I was being but the pain was real. I went to the library and got a book called Mind Over Back Pain. I read it during my lunch break and my coworkers made fun of me.

The book said that something like 70 percent of back pain is in our heads. In the 1970's doctors saw an influx of patients with stomach issues, and they began to relate them to stress. Since then, it's become widely known that stress can lead to things like ulcers and sour stomach, and the simple knowledge of this has decreased the frequency of stomach problems. Apparently now we store our tension in our shoulders and back. I'm sure someday it will manifest somewhere else. I'll probably get cancer from worrying. Anyway, ever since I read that book my back pain has been gone.

I think that River Phoenix's brother had the hardest name to spell ever.

I can see better out of my periphery

purr

I've been reading Richard Brautigan again and my thoughts have begun to form a similar structure to his narrative technique. They are short, matter-of-fact, dreamy, sometimes pretty and of little consequence. My mind is so easily changed, not in conviction but in pattern. It's like after I've played Tetris for 2 hours in a row and I walk around fitting everything I see into some sort of puzzle, unending, and unnerving because it's not fast enough and the music has heightened. It takes simple things, word in a row, blocks falling quickly, and these formations reform my thought process. It's interesting, but I'm not sure what it is, or what i mean.

But I like Richard Brautigan. In Watermelon Sugar always conjures pleasant sensory images of crusty houses made of Watermelon Sugar;, sticky and sweet cities. Very nice and pretty and pleasant and many other adjectives that are sort of vague but overall positive. That's what the novella is like.

In other news, I saw a picture of a slice of pizza topped with pizza bites. A metapizza. So clever, and scrumptious. The world is too much sometimes. I like it here.

Unrelated: lately I've been feeling the way I feel after I leave a movie theater late at night, and it's really silent in the parking lot, and dark, and cold, and I'm not sure if I'm alive or walking in a dream - things seem echoey and surreal. The light from the streetlamps stretch in long shafts like hazy sun rays, and my eyes feel blurry and tired, like my mind. Day in and day out, this feeling that I'm disconnected from something tangible that I can't put my finger on. It's all ironic. Maybe I mean to be confusing. Maybe none of my thoughts are genuine and my sentences are just structured to look complex and sound introspective. But that's just it, I don't know myself really, or my intentions. It's like I'm walking from a dark theater into a dark night with blurry eyes and sleepy limbs.

Love

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
- Kurt Vonnegut

This Week in History

Sun Slats

I love you most very early in the morning
when your face is as relaxed as the way a pipe hit
used to make me feel,
melted and heavy and clear
like a lucid dream
like i am so numb i feel everything
I stare, marveling at how your cheeks are drawn
and cold as my grandfather's corpse
when i found the nerve to press my
lips to the half-dried clay mask that death molded him into....
(After, I absently licked them and tasted makeup
but was not revolted, only surprised - my gut chiming like when you hit your elbow)
but you - sleepy and alive
are regrettably malleable under the pecked pressure
of my needy kisses
you turn away
and you arch your back and make a z of your body
I'd rather compare it to a question mark
because it makes this easier to write, more symbolic and
metaphorical.
only, you aren't a question mark in the morning.
which is why i love you most then

soon though, the gauzy sheath of dawn and its balmyness is jostled ajar by the dull
hottness of my mouth
sun warmed stones,
and quietly - like elitist theater goers who
suddenly realize the philistinian nature of a show
and are embarrassed at their indiscretion, guiltily, when the lights dim
brush past knees whispering
"'scuse me, I'm sorry, sorry, 'scuse me"
and then slip out the back exit - relieved,
your brows seem to burrow almost by reflex
and a mountable wall affixes itself to your shoulders
a sandwich board with too many big words and compound sentences
making it impossible to read past the first line,
and it stops being easy to pin you down, the corpse of a monarch
so i roll back towards the wall and blink my eyes until the pictures
become blurry impressionist paintings that i don't understand
and sleep comes again, a white horse.