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it's 4:46 in the afternoon and i'm chewing a big wad of gum that's lost its flavor. it's kind of gross. i have all these weird associations with chewing gum, i think. like, it's nice occasionally, but usually i'm not a big gum chewer. i tend to prefer suckable things, mints, lollipops... (people? why go there.) cigars. my first memory of feeling guilty, or at least the first one that's popping into my mind right now, is about gum. i must have been all of 5 at the time, and i was sitting in my grandparents' car, in the parking lot of shop n save, in boothbay harbor, in the summer and my mom had gone in to get groceries and left me in the car to wait. so i'd been having this fantasy for a long time of eating one of those huge gumballs, the ones that are 25 whole cents, and i'd been practicing at home shoving stick after stick of gum in my mouth to see if my mouth was big enough, but it just wasn't the same, i wanted one of those big mother gumballs. so i stole a quarter out of my grandparents' car, (the grey plymouth with the burgundy velveteen seats, the one that always breaks down) and carefully crossed the parking lot over to the row of gumball machines. well, it turned out that despite all that practicing, my mouth really wasn't big enough to fit this huge purple gumball. i was trying to wedge it into my mouth, and my loose tooth was wiggling and it started bleeding and that's how my mom found me when she came out of the store, standing there with purple drool and blood running down my chin and this huge thing sticking out of my mouth. yes, i learned at a very early age that crime doesn't pay...
and i've still got this gross gum in my mouth. yuck. spit it out. i just remembered again that i'm writing this on the web, and it's just so funny. i really don't know why. what a letdown it must be to find my journal and expect it to be juicy and find instead only stories about gum. ah well. those are the breaks. so yeah, i find myself being very self-conscious right now about the fact that i'm writing something that i'm going to put on the web. i'm not always that way. in fact, yesterday, in my entry, i don't think i really thought about that element of it at all. maybe because it was so late, and i was so tired. whereas now... well, i'm still tired... i realized that at the trainers when i had my leg in a freezing cold whirlpool and my eyes were closing. you know you're sleepy when not even having body parts submerged in an icebath is keeping you awake. but it's a good kind of sleepy, because i have time to sleep, if i want to. i took my greek final today, and i almost jumped up and down when i left because that class is finally over. jumping up and down, unfortunately, is something i won't be too good at for a little while. not until my ankle is better. my paragraph breaks are totally random. alexis and i, when we'd write each other those long confessional letters pretending we were Bertie and CeeCee from Beaches, we gave up on paragraphs. it was nice to have a penpal. now i hardly even email, except for logistical reasons and such. i was talking to allegra last night about that, actually. there have been times in the past when email hs been so exciting... like senior spring when geoff and i were emailing each other, i'd come home from school everyday excited to read what he'd written me. i don't have crushes over email anymore. but i do have crushes again, after so long of not having them, or not being allowed to have them, or whatever... it's nice. the sort of giddiness of seeing people i think are cuties. hm. i don't like the way that looks when i write it, "cuties." it's not a very attractive word. but i like saying it about people... "she is such a cutie, he is such a cutie." maybe it's in the intonation. who knows. there are lots of little flies hanging around. maybe they're from our plants... most likely they're from bob, who is our worm bin. talia personified him to make him easier to deal with. but he still gets flies. the room smells all good because of the lilacs my mom sent. it was a complete fiasco trying to get them from the mailroom, what with crutches and all, but now they're here, and they're getting wilty, but damn do they smell good. i have this urge now to put bits of old journals on the web, so maybe i'll go do that for a while. perhaps i'll come write more later, perhaps not. what a weird entry this has been. |