This darkness is just a suggestion

... I see myself blurred in the mirror by steam and time seems to fold over onto itself and I see myself as a layering of all my previous days and years and all the time that is coming and suddenly I feel I've become invisible.

Photograph taken by yours truly.
2006

Employment, Leibowitz and Old-Fashioned

Customer quotes of the day:
[A fair 20 minute period after same-said woman purchased cheesy romance novel and had left the store, she returned to complain:]

"I can't read this! It's a romance novel based in London. I hate novels based in London, can I return it?"

[Elderly Asian gentleman's response when I ran into him twice within the same 5 minute span and I reassured him I wasn't following him]
"I'm too old for you anyway"

---
I woke up to the rain, left for the day with a chill on my neck and three layers of my worn down sweaters. Mmm ... autumn.

Anger dwells in the bosom of fools

Thank you Jacob for sending me the Helmetfish. May Wisconsin treat you well in your last year of college.

Yesterday marked the last day of my summer of discontent, surgeries and debauchery, and I mean that in the best possible way.
There are few places I can name or think of that are more comfortable or serene than laying underneath a pine tree around sunset with a good friend. Although we were pursued by an elderly Indian gentleman on a tricked out tricycle (only in Fremont ...), just the general feeling of goofing off brought about recollections of childhood summers where our biggest concerns were sunburns and mosquito bites.
When I woke up this morning, the gray reality of my location, situation and disposition slapped me upside the head: I was running late for school and didn't have time to shower, the coffee my father made at 7:30AM was lukewarm and tasted burnt, and one of my family friends, a Dr. Alan Zacharia, had passed away on Saturday from cancer. The service is today in Daly City, my parents left shortly after I had left for class.
September never seems to be a good month for anyone close to my family; this month marks the 10 year anniversary of my uncle getting killed in a motorcycle accident outside of Mammoth Lakes. The only time I've ever been down there was on a family vacation my freshman year of high school, and I kept straining to see the exact place he died, like I would recognize it just by intuition. I couldn't, and still don't know which blind curve he and his friends went around just to find a Toyota 4Runner with a driver blacked out behind the wheel veering into their lane.

It's about this time that I believe I should take a nap, and upon waking draw some comics, and eventually get back into the responsible routine of (ugh) doing math homework.

Cheers,
c.i.

Cinq

1. Not having a cell phone has been very quiet, and actually very liberating. Also, however, really inconvenient for trying to arrange to meet people
2. The phrase "flaccid earhole" somehow best describes this week.
3. Sadly two goals I have for when I am actually employed will be to go see my brother and his fiancé Melissa and my soon-to-be niece via train. The second is to buy a proper corset just for the hell of it.
   
4. "You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to in. It seemed like a fine philosophy ... Perhaps that wasn't true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about" Hemingway (152).
   
5. I have watched Triplets of Belleville probably fifteen times this week alone, and I have yet to get tired of it. It's beautiful.