Dream

Cal was exhausted.

He'd gone to bed with a headache and managed, somehow, to drop off quickly. Sometime in the night, he awoke, head pounding. He stared vaguely at the shadows on the wall until sleep came again.

He was on a suburban street, the sky blue, the sun bright, the grass green. He was walking, shouting hellos to any friend that populated every doorstep.

"Hey," he said, walking up to a new, old friend, "What's up?"

"Nothing much," she replied, "You?"

Cal looked up, catchphrase on the tip of his tongue.

The sky. The sky was up. Why didn't he just say it?

Instead, he frowned, pointing just above the infinite rooftop horizon.

"What's that?"

There were two rings, two pink-shaded wisps of clouds joined together, two looking-glasses, side-by-side. Through one, the sky brightened. Through the other, twilight deepened.

She frowned.

"It's probably nothing, just--"

A drone split the air, a heavy groan that rolled back the clouds into smoke, spilling the twilight across the sky. The blue rippled into black, and twilight swallowed the sun.

"Oh, my God--"

"--we should get inside--"

But they stood rooted the ground. Cal wondered if this was a dream.

A terrible roar split the air, and the twilight became darkness itself, empty and hungry. The tiles flew off the roofs, drawn straight up into the heavens.

Cal felt it clawing at him, tearing at his feet, thrumming through his heart. Cars flew by overhead, and she screamed. Cal was blown off his feet, and with terror, he realized that he was going to die.

Strong arms seized him around the shoulders, warm and solid. The roaring intensified, and he began to slip. Up, up up.

"Let me go!" he shouted.

Her feet remained firmly on the ground as the sidewalk flew past him, as earth and everything else rushed up to oblivion.

Cal screamed at her, struggling wildly in that grip which was slowly, slowly slipping away.

"Let me go! Let me go! I want to go--"

Cal broke away, flew up, up, up

and fell awake.

He remained frozen, tangled in his stale blanket, for hours.

He wanted to die.

Running Rememory

I went running this morning to break in my new running shoes. It was so ridiculously painful. I don't remember ever having this much trouble breaking a pair of shoes before, but I guess it'll just take a while. And I'm out of shape. 

Anyways, I ended up running by my middle school, and though it was way early in the morning, I saw my old band director's car in the lot and decided to stop by. I got some weird looks as I burst onto campus, sweating from nearly every bodily orifice, but I made my way to the band room, knocked my shave-and-a-haircut on the familiar door, and waited. 

Of course he was there, and we talked for a while about everything that was going on. Nothing had changed between us, even though it's been six years since I graduated, a fact I pointed out to him when he mentioned his age.

And in return, seemingly inevitably, he turned the conversation to my dating life (or lack thereof) and said I would one day marry some nice Chinese boy and have lots of babies.

I looked around for something to throw at him, but his office, as always, was spotless.

So I laughed instead and said I'd sooner bring home some white guy from the Midwest.

It was his turn to look for something to throw at me.

Yeah. Nothing's changed.

Out of all the teachers I've ever had, I owe him the most. If I hadn't had him as a band director, I would never have picked up the bassoon or the bari sax or the French horn or the clarinet. I wouldn't have survived my last two years of horrid CM testing. Worse still, I probably would have hated music for the rest of my life. I wouldn't still be running through my classical pieces to keep in shape musically. I wouldn't be piecing songs together by ear. I probably wouldn't ever have touched the piano again, much less hankered after a guitar, gotten one, and sung on stage.

He made music real, something more than triads and intervals and arpeggiated seventh chords squiggling about on staff paper. I don't know how he did it, but through those two strange, most painful middle school years, I grew up a lot, and he made sure that with music, I would never be alone.

I still enjoy the silence, the peace from time to time. Silence is good when the thoughts that fill it are warm, fuzzy things full of inconsequential thoughts and questions. I turn the music on when I start drowning. 

And when I just want someone to shut up. There's that too.

So here's to cats in a blender.

May they and all the horn sections in the world live long and prosperous lives.

Writing... Again

This is what my desk looks like right now:

Have I mentioned that I've been working on a monster of a story? This thing has nearly consumed my life. I wrote about fifty pages during this last summer session, and I wrote myself into such a tight corner (surprise, surprise!) that I decided enough was enough.

And so over the past two days, I've constructed a complete timeline. Though I should probably say timelines. This is the dangerous part of writing for me. Once I plan everything out, I usually lose interest in actually writing the darn thing because - hey, I actually know what's going to happen so why bother?

But. I'm really hoping I didn't kill all these trees for nothing. 

Besides, even with the timelines, I'm a little foggy on some bits, so I'll just write myself into and out of those messes when I get to them. But now... Now, i'm taking a break. My brain has been broiled from the inside out.

Wheels

I don't remember the last time I got so attached to a fictional character.

I was rather fond of Bartimaeus in that Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus (+1) Trilogy. Bartimaeus was funny. And I did enjoy being insulted by footnotes. I don't believe i would have known what footnotes were otherwise.

Aragorn, son of Arathorn, was pretty cool, too. But, boy, was that a long time ago.

I only have four Asimov books left, and I'm midway through Robots and Empire (so maybe that should be three-and-a-half books). For some reason, it absolutely gutted me that Elijah Baley wasn't at the center of this mess. I'd kind of started taking him and his Holmesian deductive powers for granted over the course of the last three books. 

Too bad that two hundred Galactic Standard Years have passed since the last one.

And yet Asimov keeps bringing him up, throwing in little flashbacks that hint at the greater half of Baley's life that was left untold, each one ending with a heavy finality that is thwarted by the next flashback, killing and reviving in one breath. It's like Baley's ghost haunts these stories. Elijah Baley was mentioned in the last book of the Foundation series, thousands and thousands of Galactic Standard Years in the fictional future of the galaxy, and yet Foundation was started several real Earth-years before Elijah Baley was ever written to life.

So, in a way, Lije Baley never really dies, just as Daneel Olivaw never really lives.

I guess there's comfort in knowing that. Always the wheels of time spin forward, yet to the eye, they backwards sometimes turn. 

Writing...

I had an almost solid three-hour block of writing time today.

Writing time? You ask.

Yes. Writing time, I reply.

Amongst my strange, widely varying dreams of last night (one of which involved physics homework), I dreamed of a brightly lit room filled with colorful, floating plastic balls.

I've got eight scrawling handwritten pages on it, and it feels like a slow burn. Whether or not this thing goes anywhere is again another fairly large question mark, though I have wrangled the first coherent piece of exposition from my writing brain in a while.

I'm inordinately proud of writing coherent things.

I already call this a win.

It's Been A Long Day

My lab went overtime tonight. It's been a long day.

I forgot that today is one of my used-to-be-close-friend's birthday. I just fired off a message and, scrolling up, found that the last time we'd spoken had been on July 14, 2013. Hers was the only phone number I had memorized in elementary school besides my own. She was the keeper to my striker and the reason the only shots I ever netted were chips. She and I understood everything, from skimming, lethal handball slices to the never-ending volleys against The Cage to Aragorn, son of Arathorn, to Master Chief and back.

We fired spit balls at our fifth grade teacher from the back row. We wreaked havoc during kickball games. We devoured Brian Jacques together and cried Eulalia at the faintest sign of battle. We kept our hair tied, our jeans loose, our shoes double-laced and ready to go.

Seven years later, and we've now spent more years apart than together. I guess the friendships that seemed so important when we were young really couldn't last because we just didn't understand enough to work beyond just friendship to develop a respect I still can't quite grasp. 

I still wish her a happy birthday, though. When I happen to remember.

Family Ties

I got an email about two weeks ago from my parents. Once I saw the subject line, I knew that it had happened.

I've been lucky enough to grow up with two sets of healthy grandparents. My dad's parents live about three miles away-they were a big help in keeping my brother and me out of afterschool day cares back when my mom used to work. My mom's parents are back in Taiwan and used to fly over to spend summer vacation with us. All were key parts of my childhood, their lives full of stories and histories that will never be understood outside the family.

As I grew older, I began pushing them away. It began unconsciously, of course-I was just copying my brother, who, at four-and-a-half years my senior, was an idol. Then, when I finally realized the rift that had grown between us, I was too scared, too surprised to make an effort to bridge it. Language became a huge barrier. Chinese had been both my brother's and my first language because we'd grown up around our grandparents, but after that first year in school, the home videos no longer prompt internal subtitles. Chinese was awkward and heavy on my sharp tongue, and I resented the way it made me feel like someone who didn't belong.

So we drifted, drawing no further apart yet with an ocean between us. My mother's parents were pushing ninety and found the thirteen-hour trip to the States too draining. Soon all the communication I had with them were obligatory ni hao's and zai jian's on the telephone once a week. To be honest, I didn't miss them. They were tied to a childhood filled with tightly braided hair and plastic beads strung on cheap, fraying twine. I was grown up. Growing up. I didn't need that anymore. Sometimes, though, I'd come across an old Wal-Mart-developed photo from my grandfather's camera, and I'd see him crouching unashamedly in the middle of the sidewalk, holding up traffic in both directions as he took picture after picture of our uncomfortable smiles, freezing us in time. 

We used to visit my dad's parents every other Saturday night. They'd come see us every other Saturday morning. My brother and I would loll around on the carpet, tossing happy-face-imprinted stress balls into the little plastic basketball hoop we had hanging off the bookshelf if we were at home, indulging in a game of handball-against-the-kitchen-counter if we were at the grandparents'. We'd get together for meals on the holidays and birthdays-usually at the same two or three Chinese restaurants around town. My grandfather's been hard of hearing for as long as I can remember, and our Asian-level shouting in his presence (and his blissful ignorance) has been a long-running Chen family joke:

Scene: Outside the Chen family home

Father (to Grandfather): Thanks for coming! Drive safely!

Gandfather (to Grandmother): Why is the mail here so early?

When my brother went off to college, I became the only child, and these visits were quieter and more uncomfortable without my brother's brash presence distracting the adults from my hopeless social inadequacy. When my brother finished college and came back home, I thought the magic would return. We had both changed too much, though, and these visits were a chore, distracting me from my writing, him from his friends. My grandparents started coming over every Saturday morning when I moved out, a fact that disturbed me for some strange reason when I went back home the first few times. Something was wrong, and I tapped furiously at my laptop as the adults conversed over my head.

My mom's been going back to Taiwan a lot more recently, partly because she doesn't need to shuttle any more children to and from school, but mostly because her parents are getting old and still live in the apartment my grandfather built when my mom was four. My grandmother, who once sprinted out the front door into the pouring rain to hand my much-detested piano teacher an umbrella, has a bad back and is slowly going blind. There's a reason our entire family wears glasses. My grandfather's well over ninety now, and he had surgery after a bad fall earlier this year. What's the worst, though, is that his mind's going. Nothing hurts my mom more than that. I'm too old now to pretend that I don't understand, that I don't worry, that I'm not calling my mom twice a week to make sure everything's going as okay as things can go. But I try.

It only seemed like a matter of time before things tipped one way or the other and everyone suddenly dies and I realize what a terrible granddaughter I've been.

All this flashed through my mind when I opened the email.

My great-aunt had always scared the hell out of me. She wore enough perfume to stun a rhinoceros, and I believed that the gold and jade bangles on her arms dated back to the Second World War (or maybe the Paleozoic Era-who knows). She was the oldest of three sisters on my dad's side, and as such, demanded great respect by her very presence. She collected large, porcelain dolls and arranged them around her flower vases. I know this because she took pictures of these arrangements and sent them to her youngest sister, my dad's mother, who then passed them on to us with no little laughter at the perplexed looks on our faces. 

I last saw her two summers ago in Taiwan when we went out for a long, fairly painful lunch together. I understood about half of the conversation that took place and wished for a quick end to our time together. 

She'd been sick for about a year, drifting in and out of the hospital, defiantly living on her own and denying dementia, stubbornly holding onto her independence and large, creepy porcelain dolls. Everything went downhill quite quickly in the past few months, though I only received sporadic updates when I happened to be home. About a month ago, there was talk about heart surgery. 

Then I went back to school and heard nothing more until this email, which said nothing but that she'd died. 

I knew it. I knew it was coming. Like a train barrelling around the corner, there was no avoiding it. I knew it was coming. I knew it. I knew it. Still, my stomach dropped. God only knew how my grandmother was dealing with this, gentle soul that she is. My mother, staunchly holding everything together and waiting for news of a funeral she hopes won't hit a little closer to home. 

I was a litle sad, yes, to hear that she'd died, but I was more scared than sad. What did this mean for everyone else? I know they're all going to die, that it will most likely be soon, and that it'll tear apart the meticulously manufactured perfection of the Chen family, but I'd always held onto some distant hope that I could isolate myself from it, run away and hide at school, let relationships shrivel up and die so that I wouldn't feel anything when the actual end came. 

But my creepy, somewhat neurotic great-aunt died and I realized that forgetting just wasn't possible. 

I waited two weeks to write about this so I could go about it with a level head and not turn it into a piece of sentimental Good-Lord-I'll-Miss-Her-So-Much-We-Were-So-Close-She-Was-The-Best-Great-Aunt-Ever gobbledygook because that just wouldn't be true. Yeah, she was my great-aunt. Yeah, we got on alright. Yeah, she gave me lots of strange, sometimes interesting jewelry whenever I saw her, but we were never close, so I won't pretend that she meant as much to me as I would have liked. Whose fault is that? Mine and mine alone.

Death is coming at a million miles an hour, and every day I wait for a call, an email, a text from back home telling me that someone else is soon going to be pushing daisies. Mending fences is a little hard when you refuse to acknowledge that the fences even exist. Adages are easy to spit out but hard to swallow. 

I just needed a sense of reassurance, some sense that my great-aunt didn't regret not knowing me as much as I regret not knowing her. I'm pretty sure that was the case. In fact, I'm pretty sure she didn't remember me at all. 

That, oddly enough, is a comfort.

Random Word Generator #1

Random Word Generator: Six words, 20 minutes

frozen, cola, alien, improper, sparkle, lock

The glass was frozen. In space, but not time. It hung suspended in the air, the drops of cola with it, casting glittering light across the hard-angled shadows on the wood floor. The man stared at it as if he, too, had been caught in the moment, captured, a breathing photograph. He reached out a tentative hand, reaching through space, through time, fingers trembling as he brushed the frosted edge of the glass. Something resonated deep within him, a note, low and strong, and an alien sense of power surged through his very being, leaving him swirling along in its invisible eddies.

He reached out again, seizing the glass with one decisive swipe of his hand, and the spell was broken. The cola splashed wetly back into the shadows, and the glass was again no more than a glass in his hand, ordinary, unassuming. The improper laws of physics resumed, heedless of the new gravity of truth. 

He set the glass down on the floor almost reverently, admiring the way the frosted edges caught the sun and harnessed the sparkle of intangible life. An immense satisfaction filled him, and he sank to the ground beside the glass, leaning back on his haunches to survey his prize again. He flicked a stray lock of hair out of his narrowed eyes. The symmetry. The perfect symmetry. That must have been it. He pressed his cheek to the cool wooden panels, devouring the sight as his eyes slipped closed. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Time and Age and Distance

There's never enough time. 

Or maybe there's just too much of it, Cal thought, legs drawn to his chest, bare feet curling in the carpet. He fixed his eyes on the television, but his ears strained to listen in on the conversation behind him, the distant words crackling through the speaker, the low rumble of his father's reply. He picked absently at a rough strand of carpet fluff, twirling it between his fingers. Cal belatedly realized that the man on screen was frozen and had been so for some time.

Guiltily, he whirled around to look up at his father, who held the telephone loosely in one hand, the other setting the television remote down beside him.

Cal had come to appreciate these nightly telephone calls, the only connection he had across fifteen time zones to a dim memory of heritage. The words coming through the speaker were not reassuring, though. There were sad words and quiet words. Regretful words. Hospital words.

Cal tried not to remember hearing his mother screaming.

He turned back to the television and the sleeping dog that lay curled up in front of the subwoofer. The carpet fluff continued to unravel in his hand.

The words finally reached a lull, and Cal turned around again, unconsciously rising into a crouch. He reached out and took the phone from his father, pitching some happiness into his voice as the distance briefly disappeared, and he pretended he was still a child clutching his mother's hand on the subway before time and age and distance had come to take it all away.

He forced himself to laugh, high and breathy. He told stories about school and cooking and accidentally setting things on fire. And when he handed the phone back to his father, he meant it when he said, "I love you."

It had taken nineteen years.

The carpet fibers slipped through his fingers and fell, shapeless, back to the earth.

The World is a Better Place than It was 2500 Years Ago

About 2500 years ago, there was this family. The House of Atreus.

I could insert a picture of the family tree here, but it all just gets too complicated and doesn't really convey the truly astonishing number of affairs and murders that occurred within the family itself. So you can go Google it yourself if you really need it.

Anyways. The whole shebang kind of started when these two brothers, Atreus and Thyestes, murdered their half brother and were exiled. And then Atreus' wife Aeropes had an affair with Thyestes, so Atreus killed Thyestes' kids and tricked him into eating his own kids. And so Thystes was banished (for cannibalism) and Atreus became king.

But that's not all.

Thyestes was pretty pissed about this, so he asked some trusty old oracle what to do and came away with the idea that he needed to have a kid by his own daughter, Pelopia. And so Aegisthus was born. Unfortunately, Pelopia was so ashamed of this that she gave Aegisthus away to some shepherd, who gave the baby to Atreus (Oedipus, anyone?). When Aegisthus found out about all this, he responded in the logical fashion by killing Atreus.

Atreus had two sons before he died, Menelaus (who married Helen, aka Helen of Troy) and Agamemnon, who married Clytemnestra, Helen's sister. Then Helen was "kidnapped" and the Trojan War happened, but there was no wind for Agamemnon to set sail for Troy, and some old dude told him that he'd pissed off Artemis and would have to sacrifice what he considered his most precious belonging to appease her. And so Agamemnon killed his oldest daughter, Iphigenia, which really pissed off his wife (understandably).

While Agamemnon was away at war, Clytemnestra hopped into bed with Aegisthus and decided to kill Agamemnon when he returned. And so they did.

But then Agamemnon's exiled son Orestes returned and killed both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, his own mother. Orestes was cleared of the murder charge by a split vote among the Athenian elders in a court presided by Athena herself. And this was the origin of "innocent until proven guilty." Or something like that.

You see, the world is kind of becoming a better place. It's actually a pretty wonderful place if you take the story of the house of Atreus at face value. We're not chopping up people's kids and eating them. Or murdering our mothers. And we don't run to oracles for sage advice. Not really, at least.

There is hope.

Whose Eyes?

This evening, I was finalizing my chair application for BruinMUN next year when I decided to skim through my MUN Monday posts again to see if I'd forgotten anything.

I've forgotten a lot.

Man, why can't things be the way they used to be? Hotel rooms and airplane rides with a massive group people we called family. Now, I sit here, wracked with uncertainty and disappointment about what the future holds. I didn't understand reality then, and I'm sure that, when I look back on this in a few years, I'll wish I could afford to be so uncertain about little things like summer plans and internship applications. The world just keeps getting bigger, and I'm scared that it's all just going to pop one day and collapse like a punctured hot air balloon.

At that moment, then, I'll wonder what it is that I've actually done with my life. Stuff that wouldn't fit on a resume, stuff that doesn't go in the "Would you like to add anything else?" box at the end of online applications. Stuff that means something.

It's vague, uncertain, sure. In anyone's eyes but mine, these things mean nothing. But I am I and I am.

So I have this box. It's a sort of white-ish, green-ish color. Small-ish. Shiny. Ish. It was a gift from the mother of perhaps my oldest friend. It's got a lock on it, which made up for the swirly little butterflies engraved across the surface. I started putting stuff in there when I started middle school. Deflated balloons from a birthday. old movie tickets. A shotgun shell. Gradually, stuff began to pile up in the little box. A foam chili pepper. A tiny FM radio. A dried out strip of leather. A letter stained blue from riding around in the back pocket of my jeans. It was a mess, really. It is a mess. It's a terribly cluttered analogy for everything I've done, gaudy on the outside, but locked tight, jumbled on the inside.

This box is shoved deep into the bowels of my old desk at home, the one with the metal drawers that screech and groan. I still carry the key with me even though I once picked the lock with a bobby pin. Keys mean something, just as boxes do. Something. Some stuff.

Some time.

Send Me A Tree

I miserably, miserably, miserably failed my math final today.

I sat there in the lecture hall, flipped through all ten questions, and came up dry. My BS meter just about busted the roof. By the end of those three hours, it'd pretty much reached the stratosphere. I took a long walk afterwards to clear my head, eventually wandering all the way down to the botanical gardens.

I tripped down the dirt paths, wobbling in my oxfords across a stream and through several stands of bamboo. It was blessedly cool down there under the shade of the large trees, the overgrown bushes. I meandered around, not entirely certain what I was doing mucking about in my imaginary Sherwood Forest, just knowing that I was looking for something I couldn't quite understand.

And then I turned a corner and saw this.

It was like something out of a Hallmark movie. Sun shining through the cherry blossoms, a gentle breeze. I almost forgot about the cars whizzing by on the other side of the gate. And the nagging grind of construction. Almost.

I kind of stood a bit. Stared. Just to make sure this was a real cherry tree and not some creation of my fried brain. I looked some more. It was real.

I turned around and hiked back up, sunshine warming my back.

Laundry

One should not underestimate the relaxing qualities of laundry-folding. 

It's quiet, repetetive. Grab the shoulders, flip the sleeves back. Tuck. Drop. Done. Move on. 

With only the humming of the dryer finishing up heavier items, an empty laundry room is a place to take a breath and let the mind wander, gather itself, and categorize a to-do list. It's neat, orderly. Just like the individual stacks of polos and shorts and shirts that line the counter. 

Folding laundry is like piecing together a puzzle you know will fit together because you've done it so many times. There are no questions, no mischance. Except, perhaps, a missing sock.

Never underestimate the power of static cling.

Once everything is sorted, then, all the pieces disappear into their own drawers, each in its rightful place. Socks reunited with their mates. Handkerchiefs pressed and folded. Towels hung up to hide bare walls.

It's perfect, really. What more is there to wish for?

From order to chaos to order. Neatly defined. Plainly made. 

Sleeping is Hard

Cal decided that sleeping was difficult. At night, he'd lie in bed, drift off, maybe fall asleep for a few minutes. Start halfway-dreaming. Then twitch awake. Then he'd drift off again. And dream. And twitch awake. Sleep. Dream. Twitch. Repeat.

As if flinching awake every few moments wasn't irritating enough, the half-dreams-or what fragments of fragments he remembered the next morning-left him with images he couldn't shake.

Like shadowed doorways and snatches of sunlight on barren concrete. Like friends long-buried.

And every time Cal flinched awake, he felt the fresh grief of leaving again.

Running: Revised

I went running today on a surprisingly scenic lap around an industrial park near my house. It seems as if the city planners put all their landscaping mojo into that little two-mile square plot of land, building gently sloping little hills lined with grass and trees up against some bland concrete buildings. They even threw in some now-defunct railroad tracks half-buried under the remains of autumn's leaves. How considerate. It's all very picturesque if you can ignore the main thoroughfare that was thankfully quite deserted on this Sunday afternoon.

It's not often that I feel so happy while out running. Lately, I've been dragging myself all over the hills of Westwood, mostly down cracked concrete beside angry L.A. traffic. Running, for me, has become a way to maintain my individuality because in all honesty, I'm a crap runner. I like to think that I'm one of those incredibly fit maniacs who live off of salad and brown rice, but I've got a one-pack of adipose and I regularly eat salad because I'm literally allergic to everything else in the dining hall downstairs.

I guess my reasons for running have changed.

I'm running now because I want to prove I'm not like everyone else. I'm not running to get in shape or stay in shape. Neither's going to happen any time soon. I'm not running because I want to be a healthy person. With all the exhaust I breathe in on my runs, I'm pretty sure I'm killing something in my lungs. I'm not running to look good. God knows it'll take a lot more than running for that to happen.

I'm running to clear my head. I'm running to focus. There's a reason I never go out running with headphones. Running is a time to think, and music distracts me because I get so caught up in the beat.

Plus I can't hear anything around me when I run, so I'd probably get hit by a car. Or hit a car while running. Or something equally uncoordinated.

I'm running so I can feel good about myself. What better way to enjoy this self-imposed isolation than by flaunting it? Hey. Yeah. I'm running. I'm running alone. All. By. Myself. Got a problem? No one's ever got a problem.

Running's the only time I'm not thinking about how many problem sets I have left to do. When I run, I think about how I'm feeling, both physically and emotionally. It's only when I'm running that I realize that both of these are important.

This is running.

Friends

Among my friends, I am known as a bit of a party animal. 

I'm a beast on the dance floor. I can carry a conversation without the use of pronouns. I stay out until the crack of dawn. I wear skirts and combat boots. Makeup is my friend. I drive my parents' BMW and top it off whenever I feel like it. Everyone likes me. 

I think guys are awesome because guys are always on my mind because all I can think about are guys and guys and guys and more hot guys. The world revolves around attracting the attention of the opposite gender. 

My world. 

Which is everyone else's world, of course.

Among my friends, I am known as a bit of a brat. 

I grind like there's no tomorrow. I speak incessantly about nothing at all. I sleep in class. I like advertising my skin. Pasting layers of crap on my face is fun. I don't understand the concept of making my own way in the world. Everyone puts up with me. 

Among my friends (if I really even have any friends), I feel like maybe there's something missing. 

To be honest, I don't think I have any friends.

If I were my friend, I wouldn't like me. 

Thank goodness I haven't got any.

Friends. 

Or me. 

Ghosts

The man in the trench coat ghosted through pools of light, shoulders hunched, satchel in hand. The orange glow that fell on him brought with it a sense of other-worldliness, as if this man did not quite belong.

He didn't.

On this unseasonably warm winter's night, he was a monster, his silhouette a lumpy creature of the darkness into which he melted with almost a sigh of relief.

This was a thing caught between imagination and reality, Cal decided, unzipping his jacket in a show of defiance. There was no man.

All the same, he turned, almost against his will, to look over his shoulder. Darkness. Just darkness.

Cal shivered.

Chance

Today's sermon was about baptism.

I frankly don't remember very much of it. I never really do. As the message began, I resigned myself to another round of let's-try-not-to-fall-asleep-this-time!

About halfway through the message, a young man walked up the center aisle. Purple T-shirt. Tight black jeans. He stood right in front of the stage and looked up at the pastor.

"My name's Collin," he said, "I want to get baptized."

There was a collective intake of breath across the auditorium.

"Uh... Can you wait until tomorrow?" the pastor said, mid-message.

"No," Collin said, "I want to get baptized today."

The pastor froze. I shifted uncomfortably, sleep forgotten.

"Why don't you take a seat over there?" the pastor said, "We'll work something out."

Collin turned, walking straight past the seats to the back of the auditorium. At the door, he bolted and ran.

I sat, thinking, how many more have we lost?

My Running Companion

I've started talking to myself on my runs.

I read somewhere that the ideal long run pace is one at which you can maintain a casual conversation. Even though I'm a lonely hermit with no one to run with, I've still managed to maintain casual conversation... with myself.

I'm pretty sure some people driving down Marquart the other day heard some really odd snatches of one-sided conversation involving crunchy leaves. Today, I spent about half my run screaming about kidneys. 

It's quite liberating, really. To go out running and screaming at the same time, knowing that (hopefully) no one will be able to make sense of what you're saying (or notice, perhaps, that you're talking to yourself). That's something you can't do on a treadmill.

This is War

My brother and I just had an all-out stuffed animal war.

He started it.

I only defended my dignity, which was badly damaged by an ambush in the bathroom whilst flouride-gargling.

I nailed him with a well-placed pink dinosaur. He retaliated with a rather large, overstuffed horse as I dove out of the bathroom, still dutifully gargling, into a pile of quite corporeal, fuzzy childhood memories.

It was all-out war for the next few minutes until I decided that I was in serious danger of ingesting my mouthwash and beat a hasty retreat back to the bathroom. My mouth minty-fresh, I turned to jump back into the fray, but was beaten back by a maelstrom of large, stuffed, Christmas-themed dogs.

Our great war spilled over into the long upstairs hallway as my brother barricaded himself in the master bedroom and I took shelter in the little nook just outside his room. There were several long moments of tension as we peeked at each other from around our respective corners, then all hell broke loose again as we ran at each other like five-year-olds pumped full of sugar, hurling little furry fish and teddy bears and seahorses at each other.

I backed him up to the stairs, and suddenly my stuffed pig could fly as it sailed downstairs.

From below, my mother screeched in protest.

We froze.

And decided on a truce.