It was a weird weekend, that's for sure. This journal is going to start looking like an episode of The Babysitters' Club in a couple minutes, but I swear to god it's important. To me, anyway.

So Friday was Jillian's 21st birthday party. Jill was a cornerstone of the Geek Girl Table. My original geek girl table. Long before the loser bench in high school. This was middle school. OLD school.



Oh, this picture is a classic. Pure gold. That's Amanda on the far left. I talk to her most. She's hanging on the arm of Kyle. Nobody knows what happened to Kyle. She's looking upward at a very special bespectacled little übernerd who still can't look directly at the camera to save her life. For the record, that's my natural hair color. Below my doofusy head is Lindsay with the dark hair. Nobody knows what happened to Lindsay. To the right, my arm is around a widely grinning Jillian. To the far right is Larissa. Somebody dared me to eat her Lunchables once and I ended up getting food poisoning and hurling in the sink during English class. Last I heard she was working at the Taco Bell. Sheena took the picture.

The core of our group was me, Jill, Amanda, and Sheena. We'd have sleepovers every weekend and watch early teenage nonsense like Tank Girl and Half-Baked and The Craft. Even after I moved away to San Diego, we made efforts. We went to each others' school plays and trucked it to birthdays. It's gotten harder with college, though. Until yesterday, we hadn't all been in the same room together in four years. But thanks to Jill's mom and her foresight to have a party, it happened.

Amanda drove down from Riverside to pick me up. We went to the mall to do some birthday shopping and spent gobs and gobs on ridiculous nonsense to give Jill. We called up her mom to find out what she'd like, and found out that Jill missed her plane because she was rollickingly drunk already. This was not a big surprise, and it was all good because then we had more time to shop. We still had no idea what she'd like, since we hadn't seen her in forever, so we sort of winged it. Peacock feather earrings, bracelets, Happy Bunny shot glasses, a picture frame, and a riding crop from Spencer's. Amanda bought about 30 Lord of the Ring super-rare(?) action figures for her boyfriend. There was traffic. We talked. It was groovy. By 4:00 that day, we were finally all in the same house. It was weird, it was awkward, it was awesome.



Sheena works at the Ace Hardware when she's not working for her mother's company. She is still a doormat for her mother. She was only allowed to stay for half an hour. They were having a family function and her brother needed moral support for the divorce he's going through. He called and we could hear him screaming at her over the phone. Sheena deserves better than what she gets. She says she's dating, but nobody's met the guy. As long as he's better than her family, it's good.

Jillian goes to Cal State Monterey Bay and parties hard. While not the first of the group to cash in her V-card (*cough*) she's certainly the most prolific by a long shot. She once got down with a guy in a car outside a club in Costa Rica, and refers to him as Costa Rica because she never caught his name. She has beer for breakfast and is spending the rest of her birthday weekend getting plastered with her mother in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. We hope to god that we don't end up seeing her on Girls Gone Wild.

Amanda studies creative writing at UCR and anticipates graduating in five years because she always tries to copy me at everything like the filthy conniving whore she is, but she will never succeed because I totally kicked her ass at the SATs so there.

I have an awesome jacket.

So yeah, Sheena was only allowed to stay half an hour, because her family is ridiculous and can't allow her to do anything ever that doesn't revolve around them. After she left, we headed over to Jill's grandmother's house. Amanda and I sat around awkwardly while family (barely) functioned around us. A fair amount of adult drunkeness ensued. It was odd enough to convince us to share no more than a single glass of champagne.

We were finally able to tear Jill away to the local Denny's where we could really catch up and talk about clothes and boys and school and all that really important stuff that truly, truly matters and that you absolutely cannot talk about in front of grandmothers. We hung out till after midnight, when I had to get back to my own grandmother's where I was spending the night. Jill left for New Orleans at 5 in the morning. Amanda and I got breakfast at IHOP and discussed and elaborated more. We drove back home in the afternoon.



In this picture Jill has just snapped my bra strap. Amanda has just tried to pinch Jill's ass. Jill is smiling because Amanda has just realized that Jill isn't wearing any knickers. And Sheena bella's smile is eternal. That picture sums everything up.

I'm glad I went.

In other news, I got the greatest earrings EVER from Amanda as an early birthday present.



I rule. But not as much as Pacman.

That's all for tonight. Sleep well.
Viva la geek girl table.

[xoxo]

So, for Christmas I got this camera called a Lomo ActionSampler. It has four little lenses that take a time-sequence when you push the button. It is totally hot, but an absolute bitch to use.

I took my 35mm wünderkamera out on another excursion a couple days ago, and yesterday I took the film in to be developed. It was a lot of fun taking the pictures, but apparently I got a defective roll of film. Curses!!! I'm looking at the negatives right now, and there are all sorts of lovely pictures. But the bar codes weren't printed right on the film, and so the machine refused to read. I'm going to take it somewhere else and see if anything can be done, but in the meantime, here's the lone picture it decided to print.



I rather like it, to be honest. I didn't realize before that the lenses had color filters.

I'll get the hang of it, eventually.

As for now, time to head up the road to the lovely inland valley for the birthday party of one of my best friends from middle school. I haven't seen her in over a year. This should be interesting. Full report tomorrow.

[xoxo]

Dear Internet Diary:

The highlight of my week thus far was that this morning meiner liebe got up early before work and took me to eat Phó, a.k.a. Vietnamese beef noodle soup, at this little place in Clairmont and I was very brave and this time (to my surprise) I enjoyed it!


Pho. Pronounced "Fuhhhh." Learn it. Live it.

This is as opposed to last time, when I gagged on stringy whitish flesh bits. As it turns out, it's actually pretty good as long there isn't any tripe in it and you add lime juice. Tripe makes me retch something awful. It looks like and has all the texture of chewy brittle-star starfish tentacles, only--surprise!--it's really cow stomach lining, which I'm told is somehow supposed to be more appetizing. They tried to pull that shit on me with menudo years ago, but I'm still not buying it.


Menudo: 100% tomat-- oh, wait...


Menudo: 100% tomato paste, cilantro, and cow stomach lining. Barf.

I guess just as long as the Latin-American teen pop sensation Menudo isn't involved, everything is gravy. The soup was delicous and Ricky Martin and his revolving-door list of compadres were nowhere in sight, and thus I had an excellently fabulous morning.

Work was average and school extracurriculars are scarce, which leaves me with continuing the homework news. I'm doing fairly all right. Better still with the knowledge that I'm not the only person who's a little bit behind on their epic. On Tuesday it hit me out of nowhere to write about Altamont Pass. I'd forgotten how beautiful and kind of unnervingly creepy I always thought it was. I got a good couple of verses from it.
I've also decided to intersperse mine with references to 1980's movies, just to see if people are on the same page as me. The best is building them up all dramatic when really they're something totally geeky that I shouldn't even admit to knowing quotes from. But since my whole epic involves flashbacks to when I was a kid, it's pretty fitting. Here are two chunks. (Get it? CHUNK? Like from The Goonies? AHAHAohhh shoot me.)

====================

(1.)

In 1989 I walked out of the movie theater and into the rain.
All the other summer campers screamed and punched.
I sat quietly, twisting thick ropes of dark braids
around my small wet fingers, squinting into the
vague San Gabriel Valley landscape as it faded
in and out while my eyes shifted shape and destroyed
my perspective, and even then I understood that

The only // true
wisdom // consists of
knowing // you know
nothing.

(That's us.)

====================

(2.)

There is another stretch of highway
where the dinosaurs live:
giants of paper-mache
and scrappy chicken wire
(somebody once told me
that chickens evolved
straight down from the dinosaurs)
roaming the inland valley wilderness.

One time I saw it in a movie about
a desperate searching journey.
One time I saw it in real life.
It was just as impressive.

I'm a loner, too, Dottie.
I thought to myself.
A rebel.

====================

The first person to identify the movies gets my undying respect and affection. You know you've seen them. I'll be gravely disappointed in you if you haven't.

[xoxo]

So.... here I am! Hurray! I rule.

[xoxo]