Things I like:

• Pretending to be Martha Stewart (sans jail time)
• Dollar theaters
• Homemade kettle corn with cardamom and cinnamon
• Fresh produce
• Very inappropriate swear words
• Fixing grammatical errors
• Good music
• My very own apartment
• My creative writing class
• My new job
• The cake I baked out of boredom

Things I do not like:

• The fact that I baked a cake out of boredom
• That there is nothing on the television
• That I have little to no monies, despite having a great job
• The fact that I went to the dollar theater and saw Toy Story 3, resulting in me bawling like a baby in public

The end. Better posts to come when I have time for them. Really.

I can’t remember why I stopped writing here. There’s something cathartic in the idea of my words lingering in cyberspace, waiting for the next pair of bored eyes to drift over their type.

I’m home for the summer now. The first year of college… it could have been better, I suppose. A lot happened. I grew up a lot. I experienced a lot. For the first time, I encountered true heartbreak–that was this past Friday, actually. But this too shall pass, and I’m prepared to be a newer, wiser person.

Tears are pointless things. I’m done with them for now, I think. I suppose my fear was, for a while, that I would never be able to find someone that I liked, and who liked me in return. There’s hope in the fact that I managed to do just that. Though the relationship ended, I’m happy to count my blessings where I can.

Next year will be different, I think. I’m going to go into it with a new attitude–a new approach. I’ll be a go-getter. Take no prisoners. That sort of thing.

Off to Disney World tomorrow. Never before have I so needed a vacation.

I used to think photographs are for people who can’t remember their own lives. I still do. The only difference is that now I realize that I am one of these people.

There are so many things I’m saving for. Money continues to be excruciatingly tight, and there’s still so much I need to do. I just signed a lease on my first apartment. I don’t have enough hours in the day to keep myself comfortable, and I feel horrible asking my parents for money when I know they’re having worse, harder difficulties back home.

But I think I need a camera. I feel like I breeze through life, never stopping to pay attention to the wonders surrounding me. I live in a beautiful place and it never occurs to me to make the time to stop, and to savor it. I want to always be able to remember the good times, the times when I’m with friends and someone’s just told a joke and we’re laughing and laughing and laughing, and I want to be able to cherish these images, and turn to them when something horrible has happened, which occurs with rapidly increasing frequency. I need something to distract me, to move my mind from something painful to something wonderful, perhaps getting me to the point where my mind automatically refuses to linger on the sad times, the hard times, and the lean times. Where I don’t think about these things at all.

Cameras, it finally occurs to me, are not for remembering the good times; they are for forgetting the bad times. And I’m going to get one, someday.

–

Does your heartbeat ever just speed up at random? This happens a lot to me. I won’t even be exercising, either. I’ll just be sitting in class or watching a movie, and I’ll feel my heart start to race. I don’t understand it, and it typically makes me feel like I’m about to have a heart attack. Does this happen to people who are not me?

–

I’ve decided to drop my Art major, and just be a Journalism major (perhaps with a creative writing minor). I’ve come to the conclusion that, when I’m not doing the one specific thing that I love, I genuinely despise what I’m doing.

I’ve always liked creative writing. It’s taken me a while to reach this conclusion, but I think I’d much rather be spending my time with that than wiping charcoal dust from my eyes.

Below the jump is a piece of flash fiction I wrote for the Intro to Writing Fiction class I took last term. It got a good grade.

The Other Things

Moths had devoured the couch.

Mark didn’t really care, so long as he could still sit on it, or, on occasion, lie on it. This was one of those occasions. The full weight of his wide body sank into the stained cushion, his girth cradled in the dented foam. He entertained the notion of playing a game, and his watery eyes scanned the stacks of cartridges and discs across from him, next to the television. There was nothing that interested him, for once.

“Well, Mother,” he croaked, and a short, rasping chuckle pushed briefly from his lips, “you never thought this day would come.”

There were other things he could do. He could watch a television show. He could read a book. He could pick up that telephone, which had been ringing, ringing, ringing since noon.

None of that interested him, least of all the telephone. He didn’t know who it would be, but he knew what whoever it was would say, and he didn’t want to hear it.

He stared at the ceiling, tracing the cracks with his gaze. Maybe the roof would come down on him. Maybe the earth would tremble and shake and the plaster rain down upon him and blanket him and he would die on the couch, his cheeks stuffed with powder.

Ringing, ringing, ringing.

If that racket didn’t bring down the ceiling, then it would bring down the heavens!

Sometimes, Mark’s mother would talk like that. Really grandly, calling upon the angels and God and the heavens for every little thing.

“Mom, if I don’t hang up, I’m going to die,” he had grunted the other day, frantically jamming his thumb from the B button to the A button and back.

“From your lips to God’s ears, Mark,” she had warned him.

Ringing, ringing, ringing.

“Shut up,” he mumbled, but the telephone did not listen. Perhaps it did not hear him.

“Shut up!” he commanded it sternly, and he leapt to his feet, moving faster than he had ever moved before. He jerked the receiver from the wall and yanked it to his lips.

“What?” he demanded, and the questions started, just like he thought they would, and he answered just like he had planned to.

“I’m here. I’m home.”

“No, I’m not coming.”

“I feel sick. I can’t come.”

“No. No. Goodbye.”

The moment he pressed the phone to its base, the nagging picked up once more, ringing, ringing, ringing. There was an easy solution; he could see it now. In one swift motion, he wrenched the cradle from the wall and let it fall to the discolored, grimy carpet. The ringing stopped, but he could still hear it echoing in his ears. It sounded like his mother, always nagging.

She had stopped visiting a few months ago, and he had been vaguely hurt, but he supposed that meant fewer interruptions, so he had chosen to view it as a positive change.

Maybe Mark could have visited her. But he didn’t like to leave his apartment. She knew that. She couldn’t have been angry with him. She hadn’t been. He was certain of it.

Restlessly, he paced the room, his fingers toying with the hem of his old t-shirt and smoothing his pants and running through his greasy hair, over and over and over and over.

He could still hear the ringing. It beat against his ears, marching back and forth like an army. The cries of the trumpets were loud and shrill and painful and they would not stop and he knew they would not stop until he left, until he went where they wanted him to go. And he paced, and he considered this.

Mark stumbled over the telephone, and the edges dug into the tender flesh of his foot, forcing a pained hiss from his lips. It was a bad sign. He knew he needed to go, but it was a bad sign.

He leaned heavily against the wall, staring into the empty space before him, then moved back to the couch.

Mark did not go to the funeral.

I’m sure the mundanities of my life interest no one but myself. I am not the sort of narcissist who truly believes that the world is interested in what I had for breakfast (a grande one-pump gingerbread nonfat chai latte from Starbucks) or how many hours I spent in the car today as my family meandered Vegas-ward (five hours) or what I did in this horribly long car trip (watched Hercules and three episodes of Bones).

Instead, I will simply offer this: I’m sort of glad I don’t have much to write about anymore. Things do still concern me, of course. I am human, after all. I breathe, I bleed, I cry. My mother and I fight, my roommate bothers me, and my phone won’t hold a charge, I have yet to acquire a boyfriend, but that’s life, and I realize that.

Now is the first time I’ve been truly happy in a long time. I’ve been building toward it and finally, finally, I think I’ve reached it.

I am, right now, in a hotel room in Bakersfield, CA, the halfway point between my tiny podunk town and Las Vegas, where my grandparents live. Tonight, the family played Clue, and I won. Things are good.

A preview of topics to be discussed: my certainly impending career as a romance novelist, my first term at college, Hannukkah with the fam, and more!

This is a complete, grammatically-correct sentence.