"..just say fuck the lemons and bail."

So I've been spending the majority of my time at home thus far just lolling about, snuggling with my dogs, watching AMC, and making these wacky Frida-esque headbands. If there's one joy I get out of life, it's putting crazy shit on my head. Tomorrow I'm driving into D.C. to hang out with Joey G., the stone fox.

The sound of Ataris

God, I'm itching to get out of here (I leave on Saturday). Barrels of fun waiting for me back in the U.S. of A; cruisin' around in Lolly jamming out to the blues on her sad old speakers, trippin' roads (and face) to Wesleyan and back with L. Greco, drunken sailor chat with R. Fonticoba involving the far east and everyone we know, catting around NYC for the first time since I moved out here, job hunting (really?), getting to know our capital with Joey G., getting to know Joey G. with the capital, watching The 400 Blows on the big ass tv in my parents' house whilst munching on Whole Foods products a-plenty, sending my clothes to the dry-cleaners, giving my lacy undergarments a nice hand-washing in my lovely little rose-covered bathroom, and many other things.

I finally made it to Barry Lyndon today. T'was long. But the more I piece together the plot, in my head, the grander and more significant I find the entire story. And the film, is beautiful. We should talk about it sometime. Now is not the time nor place. But, I have never seen an actress as doll-like as Lady Lyndon; if I had a dime for every still I wish I could replicate in painting form.. well, I'd be able to pay my phone bill instead of skipping the country. Although, pft, Ryan O'Neal. Whose idea was that? On my walk home through the meadows, I saw a guy walking his ltd. edish mini-leopard cats--two of them, they must have been expensive --on leashes. They had some serious issues with the leash thing, most of them, I presume, stemming from the fact that they weren't dogs. You should have seen the guy trying to get them to cross the street. I just stopped and stared.

And we climbed out of our cars and watched in awe

I didn't make it to the film yesterday. I did, however, make it to the middle of nowhere, the place where the bus stops, and the world ends. Some rural suburb of Edinburgh unbeknownst to me geographically. I just sat there, and smoked, and eventually I got home. Actually, I got to the cinema, where I asked the young woman there if it would be possible or alright or both if I just snuck into BL a half hour late. She said no. Because she didn't know, and I didn't expect her to, and I left, I went home, and I slept.

I'm very much looking forward to going home on Saturday. My mom's invited "all my DC friends," to chez nous for Easter festivities, so that gives Fraser, Joe, and I a chance for one debaucherous reunion that will most likely involve an egg hunt, and lots of good story material.

Wish I was a Kellogg's cornflake..

Edinburgh life, in a nutshell. [Compliments to BK]

Merde, j'ai peur

Okay. So. Break is almost here. The weather is beautiful, although according to my widget, it's half raining, half snowing. I've pretty much just been catting about and counting the seconds until the Grand Eruption. Today I'm going to go see Barry Lyndon at Film House by myself. I have a Philosophy paper due Thursday. I'm tired. 

Then let his arcing wrecking ball proclaim

Okay so, Saturday. Saturday. In one week I'll be coming home! This is good news. And in, like, a week and a half, I'll be driving to see Becky and Jared, with my bitches, rocking out to this impeccable playlist I've been assembling for about a month now, snacking on peanut butter and jelly... And that's going to make me pretty effing happy. Because I haven't seen Jared in awhile, and even when I did, it was strange and alien, and I'm just ready to be everyone's favorite knee-socks wearing friend again, if you know what I'm saying.

Weather's been divine lately. Everyone in the city's made basking in the sun their number one priority. It's nice; I don't think NYorkers would ever do that. Sigh, but it's made me realize how desperately I need some sort of color on my pale, wraithlike body. My legs stick out of my skirts like white, white pipe cleaners. Yesterday Shaun and I ate ice cream after our English Lecture. It was too hard to cooperate with the pinky-sized wooden paddles Ben & Jerry's supplied as spoons. We waited, and got plastic spoons, and eventually it softened up. Later on some people attempted a casual game of frisbee in the park, and I sat and smoked a joint and looked at my big book, then we went to sign our lease, and afterwards we went out to dinner at this Greek (I think?) place and the majority of us ordered eggs. Shaun and I were going to go see The Class, but I turned too sour in the moonlight and had to stay in as to subject him not to that kind of torture. I moon walked around my room, and I smoked a good deal of weed all to myself, and I talked to my ex-boyfriend, and my mind wandered, and I missed many things.

Today we're going to the zoo, apparently.

Union Life is a happy life if you've got a Union Wife

Spring is here. I got a new sweater today. It's large and billowing and has thick red and white stripes on it. I look like Waldo, or a lifeguard from the 1940s, hanging about the beach right before closing, as the evening begins to roll in, and it starts to get breezy. Yesterday was Catherine's birthday and we all sat in the back of the Brass Monkey and watched The Breakfast Club projected onto the wall. I told Shaun, she should have made us watch The Sorrow And The Pity. Everyone was drunk off their face. I threw down White Russians like I did orange Tic-Tacs, when I was a kid. I slept in this morning and Brigid and I lolled around my bed until about half twelve watching Top Chef before emerging from my room to what can only be described as an absolutely, serenely perfect spring day. Beach weather is what Ben and I agreed it was on our way out to the hill--the three of us--to do the only appropriate thing to do on a beautiful day like today: get high, and bask in the sun. Brigid and I later did some walking around the city, but she became tired and cranky and so I got her home to nap as soon as I could. While she slept, my big ol' book and I met up with the lot, who were sprawled about on a red blanket amidst the mass human infestation that was the meadows. It was glorious, and everyone was in a state of delight; everyone I saw. Tonight is Itchy Feet, meaning I am going to get dolled up in my most fabulously ridiculous twisting and shouting attire, and boogie until I drop.

David Foster Wallace, has me taking my boredom very seriously.

The Present Continuous

Today was a day of academic crises, tea drinking, coloring, hill trekking, cliffside meditating, marijuana smoking, library dwelling, ice cream feasting, and high speed chase watching. Ugh, and presentation preparing. Humorously overdue-paper writing. Wellie wearing. Drizzle braving. Brigid loving. Infinite Jesting. Manic Hazy Shade of Winter listening. Affection craving. Self doubting. Typical Paiging.

up a private tree

'In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or Kimberly St-Simone or something like that, in was Mildred Bonk. She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter's dreamscape. Hair that Green had heard described by an overwrought teacher as "flaxen"; a body which the fickle angel of puberty--the same angel who didn't even seem to know Green's zip code--had visited, kissed, and already left, back in sixth; legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter encrusted laces could make unserious. Shy, iridescent, coltish, pelvically anfractuous, amply busted, given to diffident movements of hand brushing flaxen hair from front of dear creamy forehead, movements which drove Bruce Green up a private tree. A vision in a sundress and silly shoes. Mildred L. Bonk.' -DFW, Infinite Jest

The white undersides of my thighs

Okay, so brooding no more than minimally over, but we must take what we are given and cherish it and hope for better in the next life. I'm full of empty things to say. All I want to do is make things sound nice, and be honest. To sound nice and be honest. What a lousy thing to say.

I spent last weekend in the highlands, with my step-family, who shall hence be referred to by their surname [Ferrier]. We were there to celebrate and respectively mourn the life and subsequent death of my step-father's mother, whose ashes were being buried redundantly in a small cat-sized coffin in the ground next to her late husband's grave in a small bumbling graveyard located right at the edge of a very small, very antiquated village. It was very cold for Scotland, colder than it'd been in weeks, and the Spring that had been balefully peeking its head over the great stone wall of winter precipitation had seemingly vanished upon detecting the roar of Ferrier hooves all in unison, stampeding collectively upon the country like so many purposeful, wild-eyed Clydesdales. Well, perhaps not wild-eyed. They're fairly subdued, for the most part. Some of them even mundane. So there was a funeral for a very old woman to whom people had preemptively been saying goodbye to every time they saw her over the past ten years, and whom I only had the chance to acquaint in a time most senile for her. Yes, it was nice to see everyone. I packed like a goon and had to borrow a dress from my step-sister. It was the most questionable shade of Dynasty violet; it washed me out like a thin rag, and accentuated drunkenness, because it was deep purple, and, I don't know, what sober woman would drape herself in a color so demanding? Did some driving (walking?) through the hills, took some pictures, all of which mysteriously yet typically just didn't come out upon exposure. I became extremely carsick on the drive home. I didn't go to London as planned.

Now, there were events that occurred in the interim between the Ferriers' arrival and that of Lisa Greco. These were fairly insignificant, and I shall refer to them collectively and trivially. Errands. Productive things. Namely, schelpping a leather boot to cobblers all over the city, all of them too lazy to take a whack at its unruly zipper issue. 'It's simply too time consuming,' said one man on Nicolson. I wanted to remind him about our current economical situation, and that, unless he puts a little time in, we'll all be taking our zippers to Malaysia, where consumption of any kind is no issue at all. But, of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about, and yeah, I left, and I still have the boot, and its zipper is still broken, and it is still a fine boot, only I can't wear it, because I've no way of keeping it on my able foot.

Then Lisa came. Okay so what happened then? We ate take out Chinese and watched Sex & The City in my bed, spent an entire day drinking hot toddies in different pubs all over the city, lolled around Holyrood Park with some wine and crosswords, indulged in a homemade curry feast and singalongs with Shaun & Co., hung out with my Polish friends and drank more White Russians than I could count on my hands, tampered with mild psychedelics, wolfed down twelve New Jersey born bagels in two days, trekked all over the damn city, and slept really late, every day. Am I missing anything? Lisa bought a Ziggy Stardust mask. That was a milestone, for sure. Oh, and we watched a ridiculous movie at the film society, called Picnic At Hanging Rock. I recommend it. It's about a group of school girls living in Victorian Australia who go on a picnic, and a few of them are lured to the top of this big rock by demonic forces. And they all take off their undergarments. And one of them looks like a Botticelli angel, apparently, and there's lots of strange and creepy Freudian undertones, and in the end all these people just eat it and die. Laughs for days. T'was all around a delightful time.

March has been a strange month, in an even stranger year. Listening to lots of Sunset Rubdown, John Lee Hooker, J Dilla, and The Shins, and settling down with DFW's Infinite Jest for a very, very long time.

St. Joseph's Baby Aspirin

So, last night, I was standing up on my friend Ben's balcony, getting high, and he asks me if I'm alright. Literally, he just turns to me, and asks me directly, showing more concern than I think he ever has in our few months of friendship, 'Paige, you alright?'

The Ferriers have come and gone. As has Lisa. As has all the work I haven't done. As have the miniature, day to day existential crises. I don't remember when it became so hard to hold it all together. I'm sorry for lots of things. I want to go home, away, somewhere where I'll be permitted to waste away ruthlessly, just for a little while. This is dribble. Everything I write is dribble. I am talentless. Unloving. Selfish. We all are.

So I guess that's what I'm trying to overcome, the fact that all us unloving, selfish beings are supposed to, somehow, maintain reliable, meaningful connections with each other.

But, what are you gonna do? Brigid comes tomorrow. We're gonna get our meditation on. Perhaps I'll be back later, with a less tragic recap of the last weekish.

So if anyone wants to buy me a present, you know, for being such an ace person..

How did I not know this existed?

Well done, you.

Honestly, If I was flogged and forced to wear any label for the rest of my life, it would be Burberry Prorsum. And it would totally make up for the flogging. Definitely. Impeccable silhouettes, prints, textiles, use of outerwear.. I think I'd trade just about my entire wardrobe for a few of the pieces from the Fall '09 show. And I just about feel this way every season.