I know somewhere deep inside of me I am excited for everything I am doing this weekend, I just need a nap.

I hate to say it, but I was really bored watching the royal wedding.

My thoughts on MFA programs: Oh look, they offer reading and writing, I love reading and writing, this is obviously the right program for me.

Repeat times 1 million.

Speaking of writing, here's the next section of the story I am working on. I realize the pets are similarly named to pets I have had, but this is still a complete work of fiction besides the addition of Caramel.

Here's sections one, two, three, and four

When I was nine my parents allowed me to purchase two gerbils. Gerbils tend to be bigger than mice, but smaller than rats. I’ve heard people call them mean. My first pet was a goldfish that was given to me by a friend for my fifth birthday. I gave it a lot of food, so that it would not be hungry. I found it the next day floating on its side in the bowl. I later learned that fish do not have a mechanism to signal that they are full, they just continue eating until their stomach explodes or whatever happens after excess consumption. I did not obtain another pet until several years later when I bought my gerbils, Chocolate Brownie and Brownie, which I named as such because they were brown and I thought animals ought to be named after foods they were similarly colored to, hence the later naming of my golden retriever, Caramel.

I don’t know how long I had Chocolate Brownie and Brownie for. Their existence does not stand out in my memories except for the day that I peered into their cage to find Chocolate Brownie picking meat off the exposed ribcage of the dead Brownie. I proceeded to scream in a manner which is rarely done sincerely, causing my parents to rush to my room and haul off the cage with the offending animal inside. I don’t recall what happened to Chocolate Brownie after this, only that several years later my younger brother took up his own interest in rodents and purchased two mice, one of whom routinely killed his cage mates. My father released this mouse into the backyard, chuckling over its future amongst the squirrels and cats that roamed the neighborhood.

Freshman year I got two fish. One, large and golden which I named Kant and the other black and verbose named Nietzsche. I kept their bowl next to my bed and spent a good amount of time staring into their bowl and worrying about them unnecessarily when I spent the night in my boyfriend’s room and calling my roommate to make sure they were fed. On the way home for winter break, Kant started swimming very slowly in the plastic bag I had placed him in for the journey. He died the next day, the shock of being returned to his bowl killing him almost instantly. Nietzche survived the break, but when he finally passed it was with slow painful observance as I was packing to return to school. It was as if he somehow sensed the upcoming journey and was simply refusing to go. Like his bowl mate, his swimming started to become lethargic and every so often he would turn onto his side. I tried to nurture him back to health by peering into the bowl as often as I could, which about all anyone can do in the death of a fish, but nothing worked and the next morning when I fetched the little green net to fish his body out of the bowl and into the bag, he was very nearly passed and I spent the car ride tearful as his body limply floated to the surface. 

Looking at MFA programs. I have slowly been building up my tolerance against the waves of nausea that fill me every time I try to do research. Whenever I tell people that they seem slightly baffled as to why I am applying. I don't feel sick because I don't want to do it, I feel sick because I want it so bad. It's like how you felt sick before telling your crush that you liked them in Jr. High and then the crushed awful feeling afterwards is how I will feel if I don't get accepted. I am going to try not to get too attached to any one program and focus on general feels I want from programs and apply to a good number of them. Funding is important though. Funding is really important.

I am looking up plane flights for June 1st. I probably won't book one, but it makes me feel better.

In Slovenia, they have graffiti with my name on it, which causes me to grin absurdly.  

I haven't had a conversation out loud since Friday. I don't think I've ever gone this long without talking to another human being. Last night I had another atrocious crying dream, but even worse. I am not going to describe it. The dreams of other people are  never interesting.

This is a beautiful picture of Robin Metz.

Here's the next section of the story I am working on. It'll probably still make sense if you don't read the other sections. I'm not really one of those people who uses plot.

Here are links to sections one, two, and three.

 “I tried to kill myself when I was sixteen.”

            We are in the alley behind the bar. The ground is littered with cigarettes. We add to the pile, making statues out of ash.

            “I told myself if I didn’t have a girlfriend by my sixteenth birthday, I would do it.”

            Paul in the basement. Paul with a razorblade in hand, a belt, a gun. Maybe a pile of pills with the indicative empty orange bottle lying open on the floor.

            “My parents came home. I had the belt in my hand and I was putting the chair into position and my fucking parents came home. I couldn’t stand the thought of them finding me. That’s why I didn’t do it.” He pauses, smokes his cigarette. I’ve already finished two. My pack is almost empty. I take out another one. My stomach will hurt later. I will wake up smelling like cigarettes and want to vomit.

            “Adam noticed your wrists first,” he says.

            I smile. “That’s just how my arms look,” I say. I used to not inhale when I smoked, but I like the dizzy feeling it gives me.

            Paul climbing off his chair. Paul curling up in his bed in what he imagines to be a melancholic position, but actually looks pathetic, the fat of his stomach drooping onto his bed. Some people have a penchant for devotion. Paul is one of them. He likes to pledge to things, his parents, god, his fraternity, beer. He gets tattoos without wondering if he will regret them. He has already devoted himself to the ink.

            He confides in me because he thinks I understand the deep and heavy depression that he felt that day in his room and maybe still feels twinges of on bad days. The undying need of the depressed person to try to explain, make even just one other human being understand the unimaginable depth of what they felt. He’s not depressed now though, even if I sort of want him to be. His chatter is reminiscent and solemn. The way people who were formerly poor talk about starving as if it were beautiful.

 “I got a girlfriend a few months later,” he says. “I loved her and it was stupid. She broke up with me sophomore year. I guess I knew it was coming. We were going to get married. I proposed to her in the back of a car.”

The only time I’ve had sex in a car, it was a two door. We had to climb into the backseat. It was purposeful. Everyone knew what we were going back there for.

“I was with someone for a long time,” I tell him. “I didn’t break up with him because I didn’t love him. I broke up with him because I needed to be by myself. I can’t even remember who I was when we were together. I feel like I am a totally different person now, though I am probably exactly the same.”

He is not listening. He is thinking about his girlfriend. When we get into bed later that night he tells me, “I don’t want to hear about your ex-boyfriends.”

In drawing class we work on drawing spheres. We pin giant pieces of paper to the wall and draw long ovals.

“No footballs,” the teacher says as she walks around the room.

I am fairly certain I have drawn a stack of footballs. I want to go back to naked bodies. The teacher walks by my charcoal covered paper and tells me I am drawing footballs. We had a homework assignment to do reproduction of a Matisse self-portrait. I spent hours in the drawing studio drawing to reproduce his face with the same smudges. When she hands the drawing back to me, it has good job written in pencil in the corner. I am better at this, reproductions. As a child when hand a sheet of paper and a pencil I would always draw tornados. Giants tornados so full of swirling wind there was no room left for houses. I liked to draw tornados because  I felt my drawings were an accurate representation of reality. I liked doing this; reproducing reality as if simply having reality were not enough and I needed to create it again and again.

The professor says coming to the Midwest did something different to her art. She did not know something could be so flat and continue for seemingly forever until she moved here. She tried to depict this in watercolors. I think her paintings are boring. There is something reminiscent of elementary school gym class in these footballs stacked upon one another. 

I finished The Pale King. One of the more satisfying parts of reading is finishing what you are reading. For instance there is a section of The Pale King where he describes how his father mows the lawn in sections. He never understood why his father did this until he realized his father found satisfaction in finishing things and that if he mowed the lawn in sections then he could have the finished feeling fourteen times, versus once. The problem with a novel is that unlike a lawn, once a novel is done, it does not grow again.

I'm sorry I sound so bummed today. If you would just read The Pale King, you would understand the horrible consequences of boredom.

I am downloading two television shows so that I will have something to do on Easter.

I feel sad because writing feels fruitless and the thought of going home and writing sounds so terribly painful to me. If I still had my house this would be better. I really loved my house.

I like this poem and the picture on it.

They ate all of those hamburgers.

I really like this post about how it's okay to like things other people like.

I feel like crying.

Whoa, a table of four just ordered 12 hamburgers.

I've been having a reoccurring  dream where I sit and cry over my mom's house. I don't cry when I'm awake. Just when I'm sleeping.

My ankle has collapsed twice in the past two days and I have fallen to the ground.

I can see a man wearing leather pants.

Walking to the grocery store today I saw a man wearing short shorts with skinny little legs and a giant beer belly hanging over his shorts.

I have four days to spend alone in Freistadt. Four days and I am having dreams where I sit and cry.