gelsomina, no good to anyone

small_bird @ 2004-04-04T05:46:00

2004-04-04T10:58:53Z

it's absolutely disgusting that anyone with my capacity for intelligence should be half as unintelligent as i.

"i'd really rather not trip" is the title and first line to my latest opus. i hate writing personal essays but i find myself doing so more and more often as, i suppose, a result and response to having two classes on the subject and reading nothing but non-fiction. i've started infinite jest and it's reminding me of the fountainhead, which can tell you how long it's been since i've read a regular get-down-to-it novel. i finished [for the sixth time] pnin yesterday, i'm full of shit. somehow it's still different, it's still trying to educate me.

hahahaha, "she's not a faulkner girl." "should i show her, or the trees, since i cannot do both at the same time." two or three things i know about her is a sad excuse for a movie, but it paved the road to week-end, which was brilliant. you are pardoned.

i don't ever want to write for public again.
and i've decided to major in literature [some sort] and minor in french.

je ne peux pas parle mais a les gens qui sont moins intelligents que moi. i can't talk about music, i can't write for small student productions, i can barely maintain a steady journal for fear of being found out a fraud. i don't want another girl in the car, or anywhere. i am not a girl, and if you're an attractive male anywhere near my age with a better-than-average iq i'm sure you've noticed this. i am a sexless beast, and i am a giantess, a hideous and lumbering brute who can barely see and only opens its mouth to laugh, embarassed.

small_bird @ 2004-03-28T03:33:00

2004-03-28T10:00:18Z

i don't want to ruin anything at all, but i can't help thinking how nice it is to finish a project, or clean the bathroom and write a paper and listen to kids scream outside about how this is the most action your street has had all year, and to not be angry at them because i'm trying to go to sleep and they are interrupting me.

i'm also able to listen to so much music i haven't thought about in a while because i have this need to remember it within context. i'm listening to a song that i listened to for several days when i was with ryan, and it goes like this:

our lips were matched with cracked white blisters so badly rumpled that we went through three tubes of chapstick in a week between the two of us.

i don't want that, that which curtailed into a convenient relationship of quiet, easy friendship with edgy comments about fucking other people during grope-sessions [the heart slowing to a comfortable thud-thud-thud] to be the last thing i remember about youth and groping in the dark. i want there to be another jen in the other room, another jen to keep the mattress from squeaking for, and another family to hide from. i don't want to tell all my friends, invite you to barbecues and hold your hand in broad daylight.

perhaps all those people who have kept me such a secret have instilled within me this little gem. davy covertly slipping notes about the smell of my hair on his pillow into my apron pocket and ryan keeping all doors open by telling his friends the wrong things about me. i've had a dream about you specifically where i climbed into your treehouse loft and we stayed completely silent because fingers on our skin don't make noise because our skin is as soft as flat blue feathers waving like water and wind. not being able to make more high school descriptions of you is killing me, not because i've said it before but because i want to say it again and you are such a secret and it could only happen if you were drunk: because then you would think i was worth the easy fuck and it would be like a handshake to me because, as i told shannon before my computer screen and windowframe and street went black and the neighbors screamed happily, i would like to fuck all my friends.

have you seen the way people act around those they've had casual sex with? there is no animosity, there isn't even closeness, just sort of a crinkly-eyed smile and comfort because you've slid into what they now cover up with at least two layers of fabric because you don't fuck girls who go commando. it's good because no one worries about calling anyone back because it's friendship or close and you'll see them again, really. they'll show up with a girlfriend and you'll shake her hand and compliment her ring or her rack or her dali-inspired installment at the second saturday art walk and you will go home with someone else and drink the wine that's pink with pink cancer ribbon and your throat will be raw from laughing so fucking hard.

devo said: it's a beautiful world we live in.

small_bird @ 2004-03-27T18:57:00

2004-03-28T01:06:16Z

i just wandered around town for three hours, trying to find something to do, or something that would make me feel better. i want to be in the company of multiple friends tonight, people who have no expectations of me, in an environment that isn't a product of MY personality. being in my room is like sitting here with six hundred copies of myself.

the weather is so perfect i almost died on the way home. in two hours there will be a giant fete at christy's for her birthday, just like any other. she hasn't called me in a month, but she calls five hours before her party, just so she can invite us so close to the deadline that we'd probably have plans and wouldn't be able to come. if i went there would be no animosity, i'd just stand around with twenty people dancing with a drink in one hand, slowly sipping it dry and downing another in half the time, until i would be comfortable enough to take off my jacket and dance awkwardly while cody smiles at me and everyone else gets tired and sits down and i go home before two, not wanting to sit on the side of the couch and stare at the lanterns.

instead i will sit on the floor of my bedroom, listening to the saddest, frenchest music i can find, and i'll wish i could walk outside on this gorgeous midwestern evening with any destination in mind, but i can't. so i'll rot. this is a night when even entertaining the thought that i'll soon be somewhere else, and then back in california, is just too much effort.

small_bird @ 2004-03-21T15:47:00

2004-03-21T21:51:33Z

tomorrow's first class would be more than half over right now, and i'm just hatching. today begins restraint, in three distinct forms. and i think i'm going to re-start meditation or call 'round a psychiatrist, because my mental health is what leads to my weakening physical condition in most cases, anyway.

three wishes:
kind of wish i knew pilates
or that he wasn't horrible
you're soaking in it

small_bird @ 2004-03-21T02:22:00

2004-03-21T08:36:19Z

i feel like i'm wearing another person, a pock-marked, diseased bag of extra flesh. it is only when i can get out of this withered fatsuit that people will stop instant messaging me once and calling once and stopping by once. and then they're done.

i have bed of tiny roses crawling up my back and winding around my arms, crawling up my face. they are stress-related and they make me itch. my room is clean, my clothes are neat, i cannot make myself be okay.

i wish there was a different way to be this upset, or that i had stayed in california or died in the pool in the rain when the pest control guy dragged me, shivering, onto the last winter pavement. i had so many dead bugs and leaves and wet, sticky jasmine in my hair. how embarassing i am. you know i recall birthday parties from when i was eight years old, and i remember what i wore and how i acted and i am just humiliated?

i look in reflective surfaces and i want to shrink away. i say things and i never feel like anyone's better for it. i swear i wouldn't use good looks for worse things. i would just get a job at a beauty shop in nantucket and go home to my cats every night until they die and then i do. i promise. i promise. i promise. i promise.

small_bird @ 2004-03-17T11:30:00

2004-03-17T17:38:09Z

i did not sleep last night,
but now:

the house has been sterilized and i have taken the medicine, which tasted like milk of magnesia mixed with pina colada. all the linens and dirty things i have even laid my hands on in the past two weeks are scalding themselves on the hottest possible setting on the hallway washing machine. along with the remedy [and some band-aids, those pointy shoes made my feet bleed rivers] i bought olive oil pump-soap, anti-bacterial and all that. i'm pretty sure this is the beginning of a long, anal-retentive life for me.

free samples are making me smell like honeysuckle and the total blister count on my feet is seven. four still in tact.

an aside: angelina jolie is perhaps one of the most beautiful and enigmatic people i think i've ever seen in my life. i'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing all the time, but it's certainly working for me today.

small_bird @ 2004-03-17T05:09:00

2004-03-17T11:33:22Z

it seems, ladies and gentlepersons, that i am somewhat of a germiphobe.
i contracted a mysterious illness a few days ago. that is to say, i discovered that said illness was present a few days ago. irritating as it was, i had other things around distracting me, making me not notice my hellish nights by filling them with the loveliest kind of accessible erotic dream.

tonight, however, the symptoms of my phantom sickness [along with my views of the previously mentioned erotic fantasy, coincidentally] came to an intolerable head. i was so disgusted by reading the horrifying cause of my symptoms and the full nature of the illness that i became a bit hysterical.

i ran to the bathroom to shower amidst aim and phone conversations, scrubbing vigorously at all outward signs of affliction on my horrified person. i came back satisfied, finishing up all the conversations on the advent of everyone else's bedtimes, and, after about an hour of reading, retired myself.

this is where the obsessions start, were this a psychological analysis:
my head was racing from one thing to another, just to keep off of the topic of the writhing mass of uncleanliness inside of me, thus driving the roots even deeper in my brain.

things i thought about:
that lovely pair of cheekbones that works at the salon
my current doomed-never-to-be-requited love
the lovely pair of cheekbones from the salon asking me out
geoffrey rush
my hair
having sex with the cheekbones from the salon
blue-finned convertibles
getting head from the cheekbones at the salon
my current doomed-never-to-be-requited love [not cheekbones]

the complusions
though it didn't work, and after about a half hour of lying there, i started shaking and chattering with lunacy from thinking about the swarms of germs undoubtedly moving around and through me. after i crawled out of my third shower for the day, i stood dripping on the bathmat for several minutes, waiting for the air to dry my skin for fear of using the contaminated towels. [this is not just my crazy here, the usage of contaminated linens furthers this particular ailment.]

three showers later i decided it was time to seek some sort of chemical help. i chose the lesser of two evils, my choices being paxil or an atrophying joint that's been rotting for several months in the bottom of my cigar box.

things paxil does to me:
jittery
very happy
very very happy
so happy that i can't sleep and i spend all my money and chatter with joy and confess all my secrets to everyone
things weed does to me:
makes me drowsy
makes me forgetful
makes my tongue fatter
makes me less aware, mostly of myself [a fabulous thing for self-esteem]

and i've never had a problem not doing weed, but after two months of it, going off paxil gave me brain shivers. i am not entirely drowsy now, but i'm no longer sandblasting my already raggedly abused face with gritty apricot scrub, nor am i feverishly squeezing the last of what was at the beginning of this night a quarter-full tube of dove bodywash. hell, i may even get some sleep, though at this point it's sort of unreasonable. everywhere in this town opens at ten am an i will be waiting on the fucking doorstep of the drugstore and drink dran-o if they don't have the medicine i need.

and fuck writing anymore right now, i'm stoned.

small_bird @ 2004-03-15T13:51:00

2004-03-15T19:58:50Z

today is the first day of spring break.
ryan is leaving to go home.

the contents of my cabinet and fridge, total:
a small box of spaghetti noodles
half a jar of peanut butter
two packets of peach tea
seven salty soda crackers
one can of dr. pepper
a tube of pink icing
an entire box of stale munch 'ems
half a bottle of red juicy juice

today's meal will consist of [spread out through the day as to create the illusion of feast] seven saltines smeared liberally with six month old peanut butter.

today i was supposed to receive my check from the trust, go to hobby lobby and get purple velvet so that i would have at least one small project to complete, and walk to the co-op to get my food. the check did not show up and it is snowing heavily. during my spring break. i am snowbound with no food and no money and nothing to do. this is god laughing at my silly mistakes. my throat hurts and i want to die.

small_bird @ 2004-03-15T02:00:00

2004-03-15T08:03:00Z

the worst feeling, for certain:
desperately wanting someone to like you.
letting it show.
getting the distinct feeling they don't.

and then being egocentric enough to think that it matters at all.
i want to drink a bottle of turpentine.

small_bird @ 2004-02-17T05:30:00

2004-02-17T11:45:49Z

perhaps the morning journal?
this is absolutely disgusting. i went to bed at eleven, do not have a class until two, and cannot go back to sleep. what am i supposed to do for nine hours before class? i am not in the army, my productivity rate is nearly always at the lower end of the spectrum. this is when i should be going to bed.

the problem du jour: i am decidedly not okay with or used to not having any cash at all. the second i turned sixteen i got a paying job, which i worked at until school revoked my work permit. i promptly graduated, got another job, moved, quickly got another job, got fired, and subsequently slothed into a deep rut. i have gained weight. i, in as much honesty as i can muster, have the social skills of lurch or a shy lobster. my house is filled with fake animal noises or arguing, sometimes nice silence.

so i need to do sit-ups and turn in a fucking job application so i can be social and out of debt, shut-up you fucking whiner. good god, morning is an ass that i'd much prefer seeing at the tail end of my day where it belongs, ya dig?

i had to watch blue velvet again for film class and now i keep having dreams about people turning around and having their rotting brains blown out. then i think of them having their faces reconstructed by federico and i wonder when the second season of six feet under will be available for rental and how i won't rent it from rentertainment unless ross is working behind the counter.

rotting in february:
the biodegrading manatee.

small_bird @ 2004-02-04T07:53:00

2004-02-04T14:02:33Z

everything in this place is quiet and cold. in my room i'm wearing two sweaters and staring out the cracks in the white curtains out to the whiter world that's fallen down on everything that used to be colorful. do you know that i'd wear flip-flops at this time of year in california? granted the mornings would freeze my toes off but by noon it would be fine.

i really can't figure out why i get so irritated at iowa for simply being what it is, for being what i knew it would be when i came here, and sometimes with ryan for doing the same.

ryan is a friend. iowa is an icecap.

the sad thing is that i'm grateful for both, i just don't know what to do about it because neither make me very happy right now, despite their novelty and goodness. i am so unproductive here, because i feel like i'm being watched. friends are only around at the wrong times and i'm so constantly anxiety-ridden that i wonder if it doesn't actually freak people out to be around me.

and, in a move of irritating consistency, the heater will not stop creaking.

i feel like watching dead poet's society. robert sean leonard can commiserate with me.

small_bird @ 2004-02-02T23:58:00

2004-02-03T06:01:34Z

when people talk about hopeless crushes they haven't a clue what a truly hopeless crush is. mine goes against the honor code, the laws of friendship, AND my own judgement.

conversely, this rash of fellows [three in the past three weeks] asking me out on coffee and other dates has boldened me into thinking that perhaps i will put my assertive foot forth and try to speak to the philosophy major with the nice jacket. friday i boldly smiled directly at him, which is a diversion of my usual tactic of staring placidly at the ground and hoping he notices my hair.

ryan and i were frolicking and my monroe got torn through my top lip. it's back in and we're over forever.

i still wish i could afford hermitage or a cat.

tales of the franco-martin household

2004-01-31T06:02:05Z

i made sure to choose very unflattering pictures of myself because they amuse me. stories behind every one, none worth elaborating on.

i'm feeling trapped in myself, in the words that i write. i don't think a single soul on earth could say they honestly cared about me. strangely, this isn't so much a catharsis or cry for help as a relation, and one that doesn't really matter. i bought a twelve dollar italian vogue. i can't really say that i care much about anything anymore, the lack of human kindness in my life has turned me into a doormat. even when people try to talk to me i reject conversation because i've forgotten how to socialize at all. c'est la vie.

small_bird @ 2004-01-24T00:02:00

2004-01-24T06:06:30Z

you know, there's not a day that goes by in this apartment that i don't want to shred my thighs with the boxcutter.

i take jokes too far and cause everyone around me more discomfort and irritation than anything else.
"i'm going to kill myself tomorrow."

if i didn't want to die in the summer by the ocean i totally would.
and my grandmother said no to europe.
so i'm stuck in hell for at least another year and a half, with a suitemate who resents the hell out of me for containing his inner pony.

fuckeverything.

small_bird @ 2004-01-21T15:46:00

2004-01-21T21:57:33Z

i always have so much more to say here before i actually sit down to write.
i have scratches from the unhinged safety pin on my bag all over my poor hand and i've been asked several times if i have a cat and if he or she did that to me.

even when i was little i had ideas about things that were too kitschy for liking.
ex: cowboys, pirates, fantasy novels.

i still can't read fucking fantasy fiction.
BUT.

i LOVE cowboy life! and the idea of setting sail and travelling the lone islands where dreams come true and eustace becomes a dragon with a stumpy forearm. bonnie and clyde is the best thing i have ever HEARD. gangsta. on the run! stealing and smoking cigars and wearing scarves so your hair doesn't get messed up on the highway, brotha.

i cannot read ONE MORE STORY where the subtle slice-of-life sophia coppola movie atmosphere leaves me charmed and sedated.

IT IS ONE CRAZY AND GLAMOROUS WORLD AND I'LL BE DAMNED IF I'LL SIT AROUND AND MEDIOCRE ALL THE TIME.

nutty, hmm?

whenst i turn eighteen i am going to take up SMOKING and that is that.

oh, i saw ross today and he waved.
i'm going to wait for ryan to get home so he can open the mailbox.

small_bird @ 2004-01-13T03:37:00

2004-01-13T09:46:40Z

what a travesty! what an utter, utter shame.

this is when things should happen!, this time of night or day or just this. when i come home at nights i want to take a nap to clean myself off from a day of grunting and then wake up at ten and STAY UP AND LIVE UNTIL SEVEN AM, WHEN I GO TO SLEEP AND WAKE UP AT THREE PM AND START OVER.

i had so much more to say here a bit ago,
but i guess right now i'm just so frustrated at the idea that there is no profession or busying human activity that allows me to just have all my time to myself.

it was kenneth patchen who made some analagous reference to lepers and 'the men who write all through the night'. we don't write because we want to, we write because there isn't anything else for us lepers. i hate to romanticize it in such fat grubby terms, but if i am anything else but a writer, it's what i'm pretending to be, and i should be shot for lying to the world and the king's navy. at the core of the writer lies a god of war, which is why celine and patchen KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE ON ABOUT. have you met such writers? have you met such WRITERS?

where's the obligatory sregGIN?
hey there, fuckface.
hey there, fuckface.

small_bird @ 2004-01-03T16:53:00

2004-01-03T23:06:11Z

i wonder what it would be like to have someone's unearned adoration?
he and i have decided to split up, live in separate beds and day planners or something.

i'm ready to sort of start living a solitudinous way, where i don't worry about making an impression on anyone. it should be hard, but it isn't. it's always made more sense for lisa to reject the company of others rather than embrace it. were any great writers actual shut-ins? any writers i like? and if so, did they spend their entire hermit career writing about the things they had experienced before they locked the doors and windows? can someone actually write something worthwhile from the safety of a blackened closet and a laptop glow?

i feel like i'm being swindled. eloise was like this and she was useless. how depressing it is to identify so closely with a character who wrote to the company that makes loo-roll holders as an exercize in human contact and kept rotten mangoes on the windowsill.

do you remember that story about the woman who fell in love with the fifteen year old boy who mowed her lawn? she swallowed him. she went to a dinner party with her husband, boy still inside, and he found her stomach lining incredibly sexy. he began to jerk off into it, thumping and making little bumps on her belly, and when he finally ejaculated the woman spewed a stream of semen across the room.

same author as the woman who grew a tiny tooth in her belly button, it looked like a little ivory jewel. eventually her whole body turned to sediment. or the woman who fell in love with the oak tree, every night its branches would snake through the window and envelope her, tickling and holding her. she got pregnant with a baby acorn and by the end an oak tree was bourne of her ruptured, rooted body.

i'd forgotten about those.
hi anna.

small_bird @ 2004-01-03T14:12:00

2004-01-03T20:22:10Z

the most profound realizations come to me when my mouth is full of throbbing cock.

on a completely unrelated note i have a complete distaste for penetration-based sex.
and males.

that's probably not true, but i have yet to come across one [oh my, my puns are so witty i could floss]who has as much of a taste for the other person's foreplay as i do. or hell, i've never met a guy who could tell the fucking difference as long as you made the right sounds. sex is a chore i abstain from as long as possible.

i'm moving back into my room, becoming a self-sufficient little teenager again.
ryan and i are cured of whatever it is makes my heart ache.
i'm not looking for new things, and if they happen i will reject them.
i need to fucking write.

small_bird @ 2003-12-30T03:48:00

2003-12-30T11:59:34Z

it would be charming and twee to say that i want someone to wake up next to or to hold hands with, someone to stare at the door waiting for expectantly.

i feel as though i'm built for passionate romance, on a very small scale. i've felt it before, and i've been in love with him since that very first moment. i carry tattered photos in my purse when i'm away, even for small hours. at one point i believe he might have felt similarly.

now, though he loves me with a large mass of his little heart, it's love out of convenience, love in a small bedroom of a tiny apartment because there's only one blanket, and sex because every once in a while it's a riskier and therefore more pleasurable alternative than the failsafe of masturbation.

:::it's a matter of libido, not passion.
being able to identify the difference becomes a burden i'll willingly face fully when someone sees me through the window dancing around my apartment and wonders in a prince humperdink voice,
"dear GOD, what is that THING?"

only complimentary,
much like my little lust packets,
available for free with your donation of any and all affection, free time, and intellectual conversation sans any americanized french vocabulary words.

i brush my teeth five or six times a day,
and then the crucial moment just before bed comes,
and i break. i slip in and allow them to rot without proper care for the whole three hours before i get up to catch my plane.
shut down without saving, will i?
POST.

small_bird @ 2003-12-30T02:23:00

2003-12-30T10:29:58Z

"are you kidding? all that pageantry, it's like a fellini movie."

how long has it been since you heard someone call fellini's little artworks anything but "films"?

i spent most of the last hour unscrewing tiny light bulbs from the burned out strand of colored lights that trails along my window and down into the space between my bed and the wall, where the spiders lay eggs and where gum falls when i'm not thinking about it. where i huddle when the ghosties walk.

everything tonight has me on edge. i was watching six feet under and being entirely obsessed with the character that is brenda chenowith, and they have all these eerie similarities between her and who i am in my head. nothing means anything, it all means everything, i wish i had dark illustrations that i loved in my childhood. instead, i started
loving edward gorey at age twelve and by then it's too late to consider it novel or cutting edge.

my skin looks like a roadmap, utterly blemish-free but freckled with scars that make me look like the victim of a skin-grafting train wreck.

i've been guzzling down liquids, bad liquids at an alarming pace and i can feel my fleshy belly expanding. soon it will get large enough that i can slit the top, pull out the pus and fat and undigested broccoli and put my joey inside.