"Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons."

^ Nietzsche. I dig it.


I read an article today about the woman who wrote all those lite fm love songs like "I Will Always Love You" and "How Do I Live Without You." She's a millionaire who says that she's never been in love. She also mentions that her best friend is her pet parrot, and that she's 50.










See what I mean?

They all need to be the cause

^ The emo lyrics just keep on coming. This time they're courtesy of Broken Social Scene, who I think pull off that whole 'I'm confused and pissed off' thing pretty gracefully.

I'm typing this from my mom's laptop. She's been in meetings all day, leaving me to the Double Dare worthy challenge of amusing myself with roughly four dollars and fifteen cents in Washington DC. I even had one of those oragami style fold up maps in case I got lost.

First thing I did was burn the four dollars on a metro pass. I made an appointment last week at George Washington University. My tour group consisted of a handful of mouth breathers and ugg boot wearers. The parents asked all the questions.

The metro ride might have been the most enlightening part. It's a cross section of all walks of population- Six foot something black guys in Day Glo sweatshirts next to ancient wrinkled ladies in manly 'power suits' next to six year old mini tourists, stumbling to find balance between the stops and starts of the car with the acuity of a surfer. Somehow I managed to find the right metro back to where I wanted to be, and proceeded to walk around aimlessly in loopy, intersecting circles. The streets here are either numbers or states; Massachusets, Rhode Island, Michigan...

I think there's a code that keeps the buildings from being too high. It gives the streets a perpetual feeling of neighborhood-ness, without the gentirfication for the most part. Of course, there's a Starbucks and a Brook's Brothers on the same street I'm staying on, but it seems like the opposite of a place like New York where the buildings work to form mammoth glistening windtraps you can't see your way out of. In midtown, anyway. The officies are more like ornate brick and iron jewel boxes juxtaposed neatly, solemnly, gold plaques stating their purpose: Embassy de Peru, Wexler, Smitt, and Ryan, United Black Caucus...

Eighty percent of the people on the sidewalks here are in suits. And every other car has those mysterious 'DIPLOMAT' liscense plates. Even most of the grafitti has a dominantly political overtone. The slogans range from the obvious and chiding (GET OUT OF IRAQ NOW), to the overwhelmingly imperative (INVADE IRAN). Either way, still more poignant than the grafitti I recently bumped into back home, which stated quite simply- 'FUCK YOU'.

This is my happiness and it freaks me out

^ Some spectacularly emo lyrics, no? It's part of a Fall song I caught while I was driving around the other day and stuck with me. Please, if you never listen to anything else I say, secure yourself a copy of This Nation's Saving Grace. Here, I'll even make it easy for you : http://www.amazon.com/This-Nations-Saving-Grace-Fall/dp/B00000189I/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8308037-3835338?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1176066441&sr=8-1

Easter is usually at my house and is again this year. Only my aunt and her fiance came. I haven't been keeping track, but I think she's had about a bottle of eight dollar grocery store wine. It makes the idea of being a writer to me seem a little less glamorous, less big. Not that she is one, but every writer seems to have a run in with alcoholism at one point or another. That or schizophrenia.

If she can drink that much I can sneak off to my room to type something. This weekend has been inordinately depressing. All the parties don't seem like parties. Just kids running from something ugly. Getting drunk not in a 'fuck it, lets have fun' way. More like they're trying to fill up divets and pock marks, hoping no one will notice the clumsiness of the math. Me too. I need a cigarette and to leave, but I can't. The emotions of everyone at my house seem bundled up tight by some kind of holiday observance code. Everyone's paperdolls with quaint, accessory-like problems and hobbies.

My dad's cousin usually comes to our house on major holidays. He is an only child, and the rest of his family apart from us is dead. My grandmother is his aunt, but she never lets him come to her house. Something about him seems to offend everybody. My dad swears the girlfriend he talks about whevener he visits only exists in pictures, and those pictures are the ones that come inside the frames when you buy them. I like him, asthetic inconsistancies aside. He always talks about something bizarre, unfitting, somehow, like his Polish grandfather, his experience on the Princeton horseshoe team, or the tenure of Tolstoy's stint in a Siberian prison. Its a welcome respite to me from all the vanilla conversations about the weather, summer vacations, and silent preening and general 'look how socially accpetable I am' contest every holiday is at my house. I seem in the minority. My parents constantly remind me to keep on his good side. "He went to Princeton, you know! He could write you a letter." I wonder how he got to be so hated.

Usually on holidays I see a movie with my brother and my dad, just to get out of the house and leave my mom alone. We saw Blades of Glory. I got the impression that it was written in a conference room of giggly movie writers trying to one-up each other. It made me want to try my hand at it, like trying to watch someone open a stuck jar or unlock a stubborn door. You get the secret, resolute feeling if someone just gives you the opportunity, you could take on whatever shit other people drown in.

Tomorrow I go to Washington DC with my mom. She has a business trip down there and asked me if I wanted to tag along. Going with her on business trips is like a seminar in efficacy. There are no missing papers and frantic questions, each day is like a checklist where everything gets crossed off, one by one, with a thick black line.

I'm going on the parlance of visiting colleges, which lately, has seemed to me a colossal joke and misunderstanding. Scores and volunteering opportunities and pyramid schemes that build up to something insurmountable, some peak so zaftig and high, nothing short of death could drag you back down to normalcy, to failure. Getting into college seems like some bourgeoisie caste system, where you can assign a mathematic value to an 18 year old based on where they study political science or Russian short stories.

Traveling is enough of an excuse to go to Washington for me. Seeing people and guessing which ones wake up to coffee and newspapers, which ones have grandchildren, which ones wish they were somewhere else entirely, it makes my confusion seem more reassuring. I get the feeling there is a paint by numbers sensibility to things like careers and opinions. Something you work towards that ends up finished and done.