ok if anyone even understood what I was getting at...I apologize for being corny.

Just ate more steak, potato, and corn than my stomach felt like handling while watching Singlesfor like...the millionith time. Everytime I get back home from visiting Seattle I just can't help but relive it a bit. Add to that my new "real" DVD player that I bought on Saturday...now I don't hafta worry about it locking up my computer and crashing it every half hour or so ! Yay me!

A few notes on it this time around...First off, the fountain at the Flat was either a plant, or it isn't there anymore...
 

Second of all, the bench in the Gasworks Park scene was also planted...the real bench (which is pegged into cemet) is a bit west of where the one in the movie is.

OK...so that is super super anal. You see a movie like that so many times and these little things really hit you.

My Section had a diagnostic PT test today...while I have become slower as I've gotten older ( did the 2 mile run in 13:45 when I used to run it more like 12:45) It was nice to note I can do 89 pushups in two minutes even after having been on vacation and not doing any upper body for about two months. Still shocked to discover I can still do 60 situps after the same interval.

Got tagged for a chopper blast tomorrow. UH 60s (Blackhawks.) With the forecasted weather being winds of 14 knots and gusts to 24, as well as a chance of rain...i honestly wonder if the jump won't get kanked at the last second.

Hrmmmm I am trying to upload some seattle pictures to slip in here but I can't find any webpages/webspace that I haven't shut down by choice or had shut down on me. Xoom, Topcities, Earthlink (although, oddly enough, a simple redirect page I set up before canceling my earthlink accoutn is there...of course it links to the nonexistant Xoom page!), and for whatever reason my OWN ISP isn't letting me log in to use THAT space. grrrrrrrr. 
Wow this is hideously frustrating. 

current mood:  frustrated
current music: Lou Reed _Set the Twilight Reeling_ 

gaaaaaaaa!!!!

my ENTIRE Earthlink account is still online. Fat load of good it does me! 
 

Hoooooooah!

I can't believe how much CRAP I've gone through over the years in terms of ISPs and servers. First it was Sorrel at HSU, Geocities, Xoom, Earthlink, Konnect, Topcities, and god can only IMAGINE how many I've completely forgotten about.

Geocities is still active. Go figure. That was one I'd completely forgotten until I stumbled on a random geocities url. SO yay me! I have a place to dump files into again. gawds! OK so here is a deluge of snapshots:

Pops and Katrina

"I'm going Hungryyyyyyyyyyyyy!"

jpgs don't do this view justice...

Again...had to see it IRL

Me and Joe and the "flat". Notice the missing fountain...

the jpg does this one more justice than it's worth in this case ;P

OK, that's all for the pix...

Reading through old entries...I hurt for the emotions I used to pour into my journal. It's like all my best writing is behind me, flapping in the wind. When was the last time I waxed philosophical? Where are the pangs over my present condition, the depictions of myself clawing myself out of the dank, dirty, engulfing maw of despair of yesteryear? Where is the unbridled joy I feel running through Yomitan, realizing I am over 5000 miles from San Francisco, living times I never dreamed. No where here, not on paper, not digitized. I'm falling back into what forced me to end My Earthly Shell...lack of meaning.

How have I encapsulated the excitement and wonder of being 80 feet below the surface of the Sea of China? By struggling through a tired and worn depiction of my momentary panic at being swept about like a rag doll, of feeling myself beign dragged from the safe, calm shore and out into the biggest, baddest, most unrelenting force on this planet--the ocean. Did I mention my awe of this force? so beyond our control and our imagination?

I have too much control over myself and my life now...It seems that I have paid such a hefty price for that control--my ability to cry and to laugh and to just feel ALIVE! I feel closed off and unable to truly know myself or my surroundings. I am only 26 years old and right now I just feel so old, so wasted. In the past few years I have grown so much and I have come to understand myself, my role in life, and where I seem to be heading. Gone is uncertaintly over just about everything. Gone is an all encompassing sense of wonder.

Now I just go out and live my life. I don't question it. I don't dwell on it. I don't pontificate over my issues or my dilemnas or my choices.

I read old entires from anywhere between 1996 and 2000 and I feel such a loss. I want to write like that again! I want the ability to just sit down here at this keyboard and let it all flow out of me, unchecked, unbridled, and uncensored. I can't craft words here like I used to. I can try...I am trying now...it just doesn't feel the same. Five years from now this will probably be an entry I gance at and wonder about the trip to Seattle and imagine being back at Jimi's Grave or discovery park or the Queen Anne. Perhaps I'll recall that Australian girl I met and had the hugest crush on. Perhaps I'll look back and think that those years are so behind me, that the best years of my life have fled.

I have an emotion now. It's one that I haven't felt, besides sunday at Onna point, in many many months...and that emotion is pure fear. I am losing who I was and I see myself replacing it with just another one of "them", the mindless faces of our populace, automatons...getting up, going to work, and coming home to sit in front of the TV, drinking beer, getting hugely out of shape...

Five years from now will I have seen "The Raft of the Medusa" hanging in the Louvre? If I have, will I still have this never ending thirst for travel, for new sites, new faces. If I haven't been to Paris...and this is more frightening, will I even still have the desire to go there? Will I see Venice as my dear mother once wrote to me that I would? I have been saying for quite some time now that I have seen all of the states I want to see, with only a few exceptions. How soon before I say that of the world? How soon before those "exceptions" are dismissed as unimportant, not worth the trouble?

Will I one day give up on traveling hundreds and thousands of miles to see Pearl Jam, or Tori, Tool, or some other band yet to be named? How long before I grow so accustomed to the Warfield and Slim's that I stop going as religiously as I dream of going once I am back in the states?

Complacency. That word is what I am afraid of right now. Fat and "happy" and narrow minded and resistant to change...

But on the same token, am I being resistant to change by following my lives past patterns? Am I resisting change by refusing to "grow up" and stop goin on these wild concert trips? Am I resisting change by being afraid now of settling down? For so long now I have been so happy to have things planned out, to have my life seeming to fit together like the hugest jigsaw puzzle I ever took apart, recut, and then put back together? 

Sigh. Tomorrow will I reread this and even scold myself for it? Will I laugh about my naivete and shake my head at how foolish I am being right now? Here I am...and despite all my bad luck lately, I am one of the few lucky ones to come through all my adversities stronger, more prepared for life, and in a stable condition. Here I am, everything worked out, steady income, paying off bills even while trying to be adventurous and spending money on SCUBA gear and new DAT decks and what not...Here I am, always buying things with an eye on the future--a microwave, a vacuum cleaner, various ornamental pieces...

I have come through all my desperation. I have finally come out of that pit. The sun shines brightly on me, making me feel warm, secure, and safe...and here I am wishing I was back down at the bottom of the pit. Then I had purpose, life had meaning...just *living* was an accomplishment. I remember many years ago I had this dream of hitting rock bottom...of just completely destroying my life -- just so I could have a new start, something fresh...to experience utter and complete failure. I wanted what I ultimately got. And now I'm back...I am scared, and I am different. Mostly better yes...but there are no obsticles to focus on it seems. I no longer feel like I have meaning in my life, something to live FOR. Used to be that just being alive was enough. Now I need something more...but what? 

And i SWEAR...I did NOT purposefully put this CD on. I picked it up off a bargain rack in Seattle...saw 'em opening for Ben Harper in San Jose way back in 1996 and thought they were worth looking more into sometime... 

current mood:  indescribable
current music: The Philopher Kings _The Philopher Kings_  

 I hate subjects :) 
taliana 
2001-11-05 10:05 
Now that you recognize your life going in a direction you aren't quite happy with, work at changing that. Recognizing is half the battle. As for your writing..just keep trying. I thought I had more to say than this...guess the 3 hours of sleep b/c of the World Series last night is affecting my brain. :/ RYN: Yea..I have a journal elsewhere that I keep updated. If yer interested, it's at opendiary.com. My name there is Stargazing. Take care, 

 
sockgirl 
2001-11-05 20:41  
Ah yes, the Philosopher Kings, talented bunch of Ontarians...broke up because two of them started a side project where they were a cartoon band called Prozzak. Prozzak are now huger in Canada than the Kings ever were. 

I know the feeling...because no good writing ever came out of happy people, or it always sounds trite when it does. 

My comment is to forget about just living to live. Live to get the most out of it, to have as much fun and as much meaning and as much learning as you can get in the next 50-60 years...don't ever, EVER find yourself killing time, waiting, just surviving. To get as much as possible out of every single day...I skip sleep for it. That's the obstacle that most people *never* get over because they're always waiting for things to change. And enjoy your youth, and screw growing up, so long as it doesn't affect the rest of your goals :) 
 

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