Another missed month. Here's how I feel right now:

I'm vacilating between pissed off and depressed for the same reason: Tristyn is pissed off at me. The reason is that I've met a girl who I think I'd like to pursue a relationship with.

Pissed off: Where the fuck does Tristyn get off being mad at me? She made this bed at the end of last year when she dumped me. I've been terrified of moving on, half out of not being over her and half out of fear that I'd lose her completely as a friend, something I don't want to happen in any way. Tristyn thinks I only have hung out with her of late from pity. That's fucking bullshit. I wouldn't hang out with anyone out of pity because it's a shitty way to be someone's friend. I hang out with Tristyn because I like her, same as Tim, Ben and all those other fuckers. That's another reason she's mad, she's now the "same as Tim, Ben and all those other fuckers." Well, of course that's not now nor ever will be entirely true. We had an intimate and largely enjoyable relationship for a little over a year. I love her in a way that I will never love any of my other friends. But our friendship can't be what it once was because we're no longer dating. It's not fucking fair, she dumped me and I'm moving on, she has to accept that, dammit. Can't she let me do it without the guilt? I'm not leaving her behind same as I'm not leaving behind Tim, Ben and all those other fuckers.

Depressed: I'm causing a whole lot of grief in the life of one of my dearest friends. She still means a lot to me in a completely different way than any of my other friends can. She's seen me at or near my worst and she's made me my happiest. I've shared a lot of important experiences with her and now she feels alone and deserted at a time when I'm meeting someone new who will mean something different for me than anyone else ever has. No two relationships are the same. I wish she knew the pain that I feel when she doesn't believe me, when she tells me that I don't understand, and when she says she hates me.

So, anyway. That kinda sucks.

Wow, it's been a while. Completely missed the month of August, there.

Let's see...august...august. Well, work let out at the end of July and school didn't start until yesterday, so I basically had off the month of August. It was a pretty good time. Ben and I moved into our new house here at 108 Barton Street during the first week. We mounted an expedition to the strange northern land of Toronto. It was a good trip.

I went home for a bit. My grandmother was in a terrible car accident and flirting with death for pretty much the whole of the month. It was a scary time, we aren't ready to lose her just yet. And certainly not for such a nasty reason as a car accident.

My grandmother dog sits for my aunt and thus often has three or four shin-high beasts scampering around and exploring her gardens and fields. One of them found a toad one day and started barking at it. This got the others barking as well. In an effort to save the toad my grandmother shuffled the dogs into the nearest enclosed space they would get in, her new car. Since they were in there and excited about it, she decided to take them for a drive.

On the way back she ran into a tree. It wasn't a drive of more than a mile and she was within spitting distance of her house. We figure she had turned away momentarily to keep a dog from misbehaving and slipped off the road. I can't emphasize the importance of wearing a seat belt, here, my grandmother wasn't and she barely survived.

But my family really pulled together. She was in ICU for three and a half to four weeks and for the duration of that time the longest she was without a family member in that room is ten or fifteen minutes. And that was usually for a "Code Brown." My uncle coined that term. We were always there for her because she's always been there for us and the support really paid off. Doctors and nurses all have commented that she probably wouldn't have made it if it weren't for our constant presence.

So, hooray for love and all that jazz.

It's disarming to walk into the hospital room and see your grandmother loaded up with tubes and a ventilator, swollen and bruised. Her bed hissed and moved so she wouldn't get bed sores and she had these special booties that kept her tendons from tightening. She was Techno-nana.

All of my family and a lot of family friends showed up. I had an uncle who was on a large fishing boat in the middle of the Pacific when it happened. He worked his way to shore as fast as he could and hadn't been on land 18 hours before he was flying home. My uncle from New Orleans flew up, my uncle from Michigan packed his wife and three children into a car and drove. My cousin's flew in from New Zealand and Guam. People were practically crawling out of the woodworks and it was great to see them but also sad. Hopefully we'll all be together again for an occasion of less hurt.

Our family is a matriarchy, and my little grandmother is the Queen. I'd had the thought before, but it never struck me harder than this last month.

I love you, Grammy.

On to some other topic. We found this bar called The Lux Lounge. They have PBR and PBJ night on tuesdays. Pabst Blue Ribbon is a buck and you get free PBJ sandwiches. They have a movie night on wednesday and I hear they do a craft night of some sort, too. It's cool.

School has begun. It's going well. I'm doing something completely different for my thesis. I'm writing a script now. I think it still involves zombies, but it's now a road movie.

That's about it. But here's a test I recently took that informed me that I am death.

This is spam mail I recently received.

This is an automatically generated error message.
Please do not reply to this Email.

---- Unable to resolve MX domain entry ----

The line beginning with ">>>>" describes the specific
reason your e-mail could not be delivered.

The next line contains a second error message which is a general
translation for other e-mail servers.

>>>> RCPT TO: kbarollins@yahoo.com
<<<< 592 NO MX RECORD FOUND
592 Can't resolve MX domain entry

The following message was discarded:

How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think,
to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by
some dazzling aphorism.
If I've got correct goals, and if I keep pursuing them the best way I
know how, everything else falls into line. If I do the right thing
right, I'm going to succeed.


Weird, huh? How often does spam philosophy?

All right, it's really hot and humid in my room, so I stripped down to my skivvies.
Then my contacts start bugging me. That means I have to go to the bathroom and take them out, and that's as far as possible in this suite. Plus there are kids sleeping and I'm in my boxers. I decide to take them out right here.
So, I reach into my toilettry bag and fish around for my contact stuff. Suddenly I realize my finger hurts and I remember that a moment before I'd touched something metal briefly. Safety razor. Damn. I pull my finger out and it's already bleeding a lot. Yuck. The safety razor has a couple good sized chunks of my right ring fingertip in it. God damn it.
I don't have any band-aids or bandages, but I do find a wife beater I don't like wearing anymore (too small) so I rip it up and wrap my finger. And it looks really cool. I think my zombie make up will include this.
Of course, it makes my fingertip huge, so typing is somewhat more difficult. And it's already soaking through.
Damn.

Is it too late in life to change my favorite color? I can't imagine it could be, I'm only 21. It's not too late to change my major or my gender, color can't be that fixed early on.
The only reason I'm asking is that I'm a blue person. I've been blue for a very long time, before then it was green for about half a year and purple for about half a year and nothing memorable before that. But blue ever since. Now, though, I'm starting to notice that red is looking pretty good. It can be very emotive and exciting, but at the same time sensual or soothing. It's a lot of fun.
So, if it's OK with the universe and the powers-that-be, I think I'd like to convert.
OK? OK.
Here we go.

Sunday. Noon. Hung over.
I pull into a Shell and park next to a shirtless hillbilly in an abused truck with a natty beard and a cough that sounds like his lungs are full of pudding. The reek of fermenting shit bites my nostrils and I choke back bile. The stench reminds me of camping at Lake Azicahos and the latrine we dug there, except worse. This is the foul shit of too much alcohol and meat and cigarettes.
I look under my hood. My car needs coolant. Although the temp gauge is fine, the reservoir is empty. I decide to give it some time, see if maybe it's in the engine and will flow back to the reservoir as it cools. I go inside the store, look around for a bit. Buy a map of Charlottesville and a notepad. Think about smoking. It might be a good way to pass the time, but I'm scared to after last time. So I write in the new notepad before I check the coolant, blast some music and ease on down to Charlottesville.

Krister's Blog: Now with comments! Not just for you snooty Live Journal posers anymore.

Also, here is an account of traveling I've gone through for my summer job. idtravels.blogspot.com. Enjoy more than I have. Although, it's really not such a negative experience.

Tim is no longer living with us next year. So we gotta find a new roommate and soon. Tim's not living with us because of any spite or dislike or distrust or whatever, he just doesn't think our lifestyles (those of the rich and famous) will coincide with his (the self-proclaimed Neat Freak). And he is, I can definitely see him being miserable in the apartment. So, his move will probably save our friendship.

And that's cool.

Plus it solved the dilemma Tristyn was having with housing, as she is now his roommate. At the apartment Ben and Tim used to share. Rachel is leaving for Caitlin's house and Karen's looking for a place of her own. Or maybe it's with Kevin? I don't know.

Almost done packing and cleaning. Just gotta put my clothes in their final spots, vacuum, wash the walls a bit and drop off one more load of crap at Max and Derek's. Which is soon to be Krister, Jeremy and Ben's.

Neat.

It's the end of the quarter. Which is good. It's been a long year, and I've had a lot of stress. But now, things are quieting down. But this last weekend wasn't without it's woes.

Tristyn and I are officially broken up. I'm depressed, but I saw it coming about a week and a half ago, so I've been coming to terms with it for a while. We're still friends and I still love her, and I think she still loves me, but she can't have a relationship right now. Which I can accept.

It still hurts, but I'm not so crushed. Most of that happened when we started our break.

My car is broken. I need to fix the CV Joint. Probably before I can drive home. So that's no good.

My bike got stolen. It was old and didn't work completely right, but dad gave it to me. It had sentimental value more than anything else. I imagine it left with someone, and that's why it was stolen at the end of the year.

But it's the end of the year. That's cool. I'm looking forward to the summer. I get 7 weeks of work at $500 a week. Plus training and some compensation for that. The job starts the 12th. Of June. I'll be done by August and that's cool because that is when my lease starts on the house that Ben, Tim, Jeremy and I are renting. That means I can get started on thesis early on, get actors, get locations, get rehearsing. Get a job, I'll need an actual job next year, not sportszone. Something with a schedule.

So that's that.

What's yer dialect, son?

Or daughter.