5:30pm: Julien
i want to write something but realize you would have put it better, want to tell a story i know would be funnier coming from you, want to talk to all the people who knew you, but i don't know them all. i want to live my life as best i can because you didn't get to finish yours, but a part of me knows even that you would have done with more compassion, more spontaneity, more of a thousand other things than i ever could. you were my devil's advocate, my breath of fresh air, the one who saw me for what i was and understood it was the only way i knew how to be. i didn't know you as well as a lot of other people, but you knew me better than almost anyone. and while it breaks my heart to know you're gone, it breaks it even more to think that there were so many people who never got to meet you, who will never understand that you were more than one of a kind, more than unique, you were unlike anything any of us had ever known and are likely to ever know again. you were stronger than i ever pretended to be, kinder than you let on, smarter than any of us who actually opened our school books and are the only person i've ever known who could transition from the most refined sarcastic wit to potty humor in a manner of seconds. you were a hero to me, and i love you for that. i just wish i had let you know how amazing you were when you were still alive, instead of letting everyone else know now. even though i wasn't as close to you after we moved away to college i feel a little bit more lost, and a little bit more alone just knowing that you're gone. you got me Julien, and not many people do. i'm going to try and be more kind, more outgoing, i'm going to try to live my life to the fullest and be more open with the ones i love, because of all the things i gained from knowing you the one i needed the most was the desire to be a better person, and the knowledge that it's possible. i just hope you're up there debating the merits of heaven with god and trying to convince him to let you come back down here to be reborn as a transient, since that's what you aspired to be after graduating UCLA. just in case you win the argument i'll carry around some spare one dollar bills. the next 40's on me. <3 amy
8:25pm: name change
If I ever wrote a book I’d change the names of everyone I know. Not out of a desire to protect their privacy; I fro one have always gotten off on the idea of having my exploits handed to the public to criticize and contemplate. It’s more because I don’t think they would recognize themselves without the names. Besides a few give-away events or telling physical descriptions I’m convinced very few people would see their role in my life as the same as that of their character in the book; people who weren’t included would grant themselves a more major role in the form of someone else, and some of the main characters would fail to recognize themselves in anything beyond a bit part. Those I hate would identify with the characters that are loved and those I adore would find no connection with the objects of the narrator’s affections. And everyone would ask, “Which one am I?” And I would never tell. Its passive aggressive I know, telling people how you really feel in the third person, framing them in a plot they never knew existed and including only the aspects of their lives that interact with my own. But it’s appealing nonetheless. Finding myself in my own words and leaving everyone to turn the pages to find themselves. At least those who’d care to look.
10:38pm: wrong about "strong"
i don't quite get if people telling you you're "strong" is a compliment or one of those things that you tell someone when there's nothing else you can really say. the only situation this ever really seems to come up in is when soemthing shitty happens, no one tells you you're strong when everything's going ok, cause there's no use being strong if everything's ok. it seems like it's just a euphemism for "wow, most people'd be a mess right now if their life was as fucked as yours, but you seem to be handling it pretty well", ummm...thanks? there's something i wish people would catch onto- there's a difference between strength and numbness, and there's a difference between being strong and being accustomed to life being fucked. it's not always about being strong. being strong is how good you are at not getting hurt or even how good you are at dealing with getting hurt, not how good you are at hiding it.
9:16pm: covering the roots
she's dying her hair black again and singing that old song, the scissors're coming out again so something must be wrong. she can't change anything else about her life, it's out of her control. so she changes everything about herself; cutting pieces 'til she's whole. the dye all washes down the drain and the hair falls in the sink, she's dying her hair black again; this way she doesn't have to think.
11:08pm:
is it the person you think about when you hear the song or the one who knows every word just as well as you? it seems like they're never the same person. so it has to be one, or the other.
3:27pm:
so while awkward moments can at times be enjoyable in the past week i've discovered that after prolonged awkwardness or, even better, several consecutive awkward moments it starts to get a little less funny, and a little well... awkward.
8:52pm: a poem
she stood in front of the guns of war as they tallied the dead, keeping score; stood there saying, "For all your praying you just seem to be losing more..." "Well, little girl," they all replied, "we're fighting on the righteous side; the war is long but our God is strong." She stood there and watched as they died.
10:01pm: Twelve Steps Is Entirely Too Many
i'm downloading aim onto my parents computer. is this the point i realize i have an addiction? i have already begun to come to terms with my mass-text-messaging problem, and so this may be the moment to acknowledge that perhaps for thsoe of us with addictive personalities, or less complex difficulties with moderation, all technology may not be good. well shit. if i actually had to talk to people in person, instead of via internet notes or cell phone literature i am beginning to doubt i'd have much to say. and perhaps that means i shouldn't be typing anything either, maybe superfluous communication is not only unnecessary and time-consuming but at times too much information. maybe there are aspects of our personalities people don't need to read, thoughts that may be drifting around our heads at around 3 am that don't need to be transmitted to several other people's cell phones (on silent since for some strange reason, they're sleeping at that time).
or maybe they love hearing about it. cause maybe they have a problem too. i don't know how to finish it, but i've got the beginning down... "Hi, my name is Amy..."
6:15pm:
i think i insert too many asterisks into my life, every 'maybe' followed by an 'if only' and every statement made conditional with endless conditions and exemptions.
the footnotes are going to end up being longer than the book.
8:34pm: oh. well i feel like an idiot.
i hate it when all the pieces fall into place but the puzzle doesn't make the picture you thought it would. i'd rather stay uninformed than find out it's not how i wanted it to be. because yes, sometimes ignorance, even to someone who overanalyzes and overthinks everything as much as i do, is indeed bliss. or something nearer it than this. eh, i've got enough what-ifs to keep me from feeling the withdrawl from this one. it was one of my finer theoretical creations however. it had real promise.
this is what i get for distracting myself from my paper.
if i would've known the picture was coming i would've spent a bit more time on my hair... but still, i'm pretty much famous. even if it is on a cover that showcases the fact that yes, we are indeed the whitest UC in the system. though i must say, my tan has staying power.
11:26pm: things that remind me of what i miss
...the smell of certain cologne, eating at Dennys late at night, self portraits, vodka shots, conversations in parked cars, the Matches, black and white pictures, red lipstick, callous disregard, Costco (Price Club if you're cool), In'N'Out, driving Coast Highway from Oceanside to Carlsbad, "clearly", Rubio's fish tacos, my prom dress, doing math by hand, the sound of boys singing acapella, KISS, Cucumber Melon body spray, 5 am, those little mini quiche, uneventful nights, Houston Texas, any discussion of religion, Call and Return, the Get Up Kids, squirrels, being called Amelia, studying at Starbucks, dramatic drunken conversations, Right Guard deodorant, red wine, french braids, Curious George, quality boy-hugs
these homeless guys were hanging out on my neighbors couch one night. the one on the left is Pirate, he's a local celebrity (notice the picture on his shirt). i hung out with them for like 20 minutes singing Jackson Five choruses until my roomies called me back upstairs. probably for my own good. they're nice guys though. I hear Pirate can smoke through his eye, or the hole where one used to be. That's pretty impressive.
this is me accidentally taking a picture of myself somewhere between freebirds and del playa. in a tie, which matched my outfit in the beginning of the night at least. mexican food sounded good after water-ballooning freshmen (jessica has amazing aim- she's the one with the deflated beach ball in her hand) and that's tyson- you can't see it but his shirt's tied around his head like a turban. we were just generally a pretty stylin bunch. fuck yeah for tuesday nights and my nappy ass hair.
this is the rooftop fist pump, most often done to Journey's greatest hits. one of many reasons why 6525 rocks your socks. it was also name tag night, added bonus. look forward to many more random pictures because photobucket and i are friends. and i'm a fan of randomness in general.
3:03am: example 1
this is why people delete these accounts. they fail to live up to what we hope of them. just as they were bound to do from the beginning.
12:30pm: finals, deadly explosions and the dog downstairs
i finish my final. i walk home. only to find an ambulance, two firetrucks, and about six cops standing around the yellow police line draped across my entire street. did my house burn down? did someone get shot up on the mean streets of isla vista? but there's no smoke. no white sheeted body. it was some sort of a gas leak brought on my the renovations of a lot a few houses down from me. apparently a large enough leak that 6525 could explode. so that meant i wasn't allowed to go home, of course some of my neighbors downstairs hadn't heard the cops knocking and were still asleep (evacuations seem incredibly efficient as of late) but that didn't seem to bother the police much. apparently my life was more important since they still refused to let me cross. i guess i should take it as a compliment. they said it'd take half an hour to fix, since i knew they really meant three hours by this i thought i'd save myself the trouble of walking back and forth to the office againand just wait it out. and hope my house is still standing when i get back. it'd suck if it blew up- i mean cool story to tell, i'm sure it'd make it into that pinnacle of journalism we all call the News Press, but it'd still suck. unless oprah had me on her show and replaced all my stuff with nicer versions of it... so i guess i'm really fifty-fifty on my house exploding. the pro-con list could go either way, except that if my house exploded the cute dog that lives downstairs would also combust, and that would be sad.
i just wish i was at home reading in bed instead of here, writing this on an overly noisy keyboard.
2:28pm: from the desk of amy frey
i'm still in mourning over the loss of my hardrive, and thus computer. it was saved from being a complete disaster by the fact that my external hard drive was apparently not affected (read my music, pictures and important documents will live to see another computer). yes, i do recognize the irony and shallowness of referring to computer deaths as "disasters" in current situations but i don't feel like affecting political correctness, it's never been one of my strong points. affectation has become lately both a huge pet peeve and a vice i guess i need to admit i have. oh well. i miss ariel, and with everything she's going through i just want to down in oceanside for a while. i feel like i don't make it down there enough and i'm slowly losing touch with everything i still love down there- including my dad. it's becoming easier to just not think about it, it hasn't been home since freshman year. now i'm in my third year. man, where was i when that happened? still going through some issues with letting people matter too much, or matter at all, but i'm a girl and they're boys so it seems to be the natural progression of things i guess.
all in all i'm happy. i think. at least i know i should be.
i'm off to take the staple gun home so that amanda and i can staple a plaster flamingo to our roof. his name's Pinky. we have dubbed it "Operation Flamingo", obviously we're very creative people.
7:02pm: oh happy day...when uhh yeah, the rest of the song doesn't really apply...
today was good. and because i don't think that i ever feel the need to document good days with the same consistency as i document the bad ones i felt that i'd share, that today, was indeed, a good day. not for any specific reason, maybe i guess because of the absence of a few, but none that i can name, or even maliciously allude to.
but hey, it's still nor-cal: the beautiful thing is i didn't see the street sign til i went to take a picture of the two flags. and yes, that is a yellow smiley face.
