Krister's Day:

Starts off pretty easy. Woke up at Timstyn's, drove Rachel home. Went into school and watched El Hijo de la Novia which was so sweet and wonderful. I cried in the lab, which is kinda awkward. Sitting there with my headphones on watching a movie no one else can hear. There was a girl sitting next to me and I just kinda tried and turn myself away from her.

Reporter meeting, free pizza. I made a joke no one got but then they laughed when I explained it. I think I'm learning how to write for a paper, and by "I think" I mean "I am."

Played Ultimate Frisbee (with a bunch of random children!) until I fucked up my foot. Maybe even fucked up up. It hurts right now and the accident happened at quarter of nine or so. We were playing and I was trying to stop myself from a full sprint and I planted my foot and my other leg collided with it and somehow I wound up falling over and my knee popped really loudly and all of the sudden I was in a lot of pain from my knee on down on my right leg. I was really worried during the game that one of the college kids was going to plow over a kid and he'd wind up dead or crying or something. Guess my fears went unfounded. Also, when I hurt my foot everyone scattered, it was pretty amusing.

Tim got some EMTs to come over and the looked at it and I have shaved legs from halloween and nail polish from the last night and everyone who saw my leg this whole night probably thinks I'm a transvestite. It's amusing.

After the EMTs left Ben, my ride, said "I'm not driving him home." Because he was going to see a band, Que Pasa, we've seen them dozens of times before, at the RITZ. Thanks, Ben, for your selfless and kind attitude.

Tristyn drove me. My original plan was to just go home, but I got in Tristyn's car and decided that the hospital might be a better idea. So, she drove me to the hospital and waited with me in the emergency room and the hallways and the radiology center. The doctors looked at the X-Rays and determined that my foot isn't broken, it's just a lot of soft tissue damage and will heal in time. They hooked me up with a spiffy Ace bandage and simple cast and crutches.

Tristyn and I went to what was formerly the City Cafe Diner and is now the Mykonos cafe. We met up with Tim, Butler, Steve and some ButlerFriends. I had a pretty good steak sandwich and mashed potatoes. And tried to pay for Tristyn's meal for being so nice and driving me all over creation but she didn't let me get all of it.

Women.

She dropped me off at home and I showered and watched the rest of 28 Days Later (Hooray!) and am now about to go to bed.

Some notes about foot pains:
1. It makes EVERYTHING harder. I can't put weight on it, so I can't step over things, like the edge of the shower. I can't go up/down stairs so good.
2. Boxers and pants need to be redesigned for people who can't lift up one of their legs.
3. I can't drive. This is my right foot, my gas/brake foot. I can't use it.
4. It fucking sucks.

To sum up: See Hijo de la Novia, Don't fuck up your foot, see 28 Days Later, give Tristyn hugs for being a great person.

Tim was also helpful.

It's recently been decided by a group of impartial peers that I apparently belong in Gryffindor house. Go me! And Fuck You OKCupid for thinking I didn't really belong anywhere at Hogwarts. Clearly that site is full of shit.

On an unrelated note, I just came up with a brilliant name for a song: "There's a Cold Place on my Heart Where Your Foot Used to Be." And I think I've figured out a way to make it singable.

Batman Begins is quite good. Ditto Fifth Element. I've been watching more movies lately. I have to pick two genre movies and analyze a scene from each for my Thesis script. Romance movies. I'm going to try and pick me some off-beat ones, because a zombie movie romance story can't be anything but off-beat, especially when it's written by me, I should hope.

Anyway, I think my laundry's done and I'm off to watch a flick.

Krister out.

All right, she doesn't completely hate me anymore. We've talked and hung out and she knocked my box and that makes me feel a little better. Still bummed she got so bummed.

Other news! More articles to be published in The Reporter. This week, something about Jesus! I'm pretty proud of it. Next week, a scathing attack on police responsibility.

Also, I've recently found out that I'm STD free. Not that I was too worried, mind you, I've only slept with three women and have safe practices. But the clinic is free and Tristyn said she'd feel better knowing I was clean, as the girl before her was, you know, Melissa.

Not that I think Melissa's necessarily infected or the type to be infected. I just think that she might have that aura to others because of the cheating, you know?

Anyway, mostly I'm writing because somehow it's cathartic and I was just feeling a powerful and uncharacteristic loneliness working it's way through me. I think it might be related to the nap I just had, though.

I just tried Magic Hat # 9 and it gets my staunch approval.

That is all.

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.