He gave me back my smile, but he kept my camera to sell.

It's really comforting to know that even in times of profound emotional stress, I can still pull off A grades. Maybe being a member of the Ex-Perfectionist Downward Academic Spiral club isn't so bad after all.

"Everybody misspells the word definitely. And ridiculous. Which is ridiculous."

It's ten thirty.

I'm eating a cookie and bemoaning and/or rejoicing the fact that my black riding pants were scandalized last night while I was supposed to be writing a Women's Studies commentary on the social knowledge of disability, which I'm being forced by time constraints to write now, four hours before it's due. Bemoaning because who the hell knows when I'll next do laundry and I had wanted to wear those pants tomorrow. Rejoicing because, well, that really requires no explanation, now does it.

My life, right now, is nothing short of ridiculous. Definitely.

As long as she's got noise, she's fine.

I'm connecting really profoundly with Dar Williams right now, and I have to write a sestina in one night.

O, explosive poetry.

Yikesakimbo, folks.

Writing sestinas is scary business.

life is a sleazy stranger, and this is his favourite bar

What I would really like to know right now is where the hell my first semester work ethic went. It's all well and good to be a member of the Ex-Perfectionist Downward Academic Spiral club in theory, but shooting sophmore year to hell in a handbasket in practice is currently not looking all that appealing.

There is a trip to be made to Gabriola this weekend. Somehow, I don't think a whole lot of work will be accomplished there, but Camels will be smoked and Scrabble will be played and Caesars will be consumed. And I'll see the stars. I miss the stars. They're not the same in the city.

On the whole, though, my dear Reading Week, you are treating me rather well.

- we were just talking about what a versatile little... thing rice is.

- chelsea, i think the haulocaust is at the bottom of my tea cup.
- no more marijuana for you.

- I know. I know, right? That's coool.

Right. Cool. Cool.

that was just a dream some of us had

I put my worry stone in the wash by accident and it broke. I found one half in my pocket, but I don't know where the other is. Sucked into the Cook Street Village Laundromat fifth dimension, I guess. Sigh. I hope this isn't symbolic of something.

lol @ text messages

chelsea: I just got a T5 in the mail. What do i do?
dad: panic - just kidding - send by mail & I will process 4 U

Yeah, that's what I should do.

I'm listening to These flowers are coming up wild... and reading David McFadden and drinking wine.

This, tonight, is probably a deadly combination. Oh well. No one ever said being a masochist would be easy.

yeah i use kitchen scissors

tonight i had about eighty-five revelations
i should really give sobriety a try for a while
but it's so grim
on the bright side
there are tulips on my coffee table
all red and orange and glowing
like a slow presense
in the light of my rice paper
lamp and i bought them on my way home
from the beach this afternoon
because they were beautiful in their buckets
at the fairfield corner store and i had twenty dollars in my pocket
so what the hell
you know?
and you know
i know how sylvia felt now
exposed in the barren hospital bed

and i can't stop thinking
about the last time i had sex on the couch
i'm sitting on but
they can read my mind
these ravenous flowers and i swear i can see them
blooming
ten mouths opening
in protest

***
this is not a poem
i'm just stoned

went to a party down a red dirt road

This afternoon I should really do my laundry, but the sun is out and I slept until twelve thirty for what feels like the first time in my entire life, so I am going to the beach instead. I will probably be the only one who understands that logic.

I love reading week a lot.

The end.

Some Imagist Poets?

I really hope that after today, I can stop having anxiety dreams ridden with impossible deadlines and general academic and emotional squalor and chaos, because this is getting ridiculous.

I have these elaborate fantasies of reading week as ten days of pure bliss: me curled on my couch with tea and editing poems and doing all my readings and writing papers and watching the movies I'm advised to watch on my Women's Studies syllabus. No social contact, no getting dressed, the reestablishment of my eighty-five year-old sleep schedule. But somehow I don't think it will wind up this way. Sigh. I have never been so tired.

all these tripping iambs

The best part of today is that I'm still working under one huge deadline, and I'm not working.

LOL @ my grades getting shot to hell in a burlap sack.

Whatev, man. What the fuck ev.

White Ninja makes me LOL.

That's all.

Mad Girl's Love Song

Tonight I'm thinking about you and you, and you.

I have this theory

that whenever we break up with someone, all of the feelings we've experienced during any past breakups will also be evoked; attachment to and loss for past lovers will resurface. If this is true, it accounts for several things I've done in the last two days.

Everyone keeps asking how come they feel so terrible if terrible's in fashion.

I appear to be coming down with some form of Stress Disease. My body has always had an excellent sense of timing that way. On the bright side, if I have a full-fledged manifestation of the stomach flu by Thursday, I won't even have to paint my face white to look like T. S. Elliot for my seminar presentation.

Today: back to the library. I want to go back to the sea instead, but I don't know if there's time. There is never time for these things. So make some, you would say. Maybe I will. I slept twelve hours last night. I don't know what that has to do with anything, but it seems important.

she says, wake up. it's no use pretending.

I have accomplished no work in the last 24 hours, as per the plan. Except. I trekked up to the library this morning to distract myself from the weirdest night of my life. I found a bunch of books for my monster Women's Studies paper on endometriosis and sat on the floor in the stacks reading them and listening to the breakup playlist for almost an hour. That must rank somewhere on the Pre-Reading-Week-Productivity Scale. I took the 11 home because it was the only bus in the loop. The sun was out, my purse was full of research material, I saw some cherry blossoms, and I knew. I just knew. I'm fine. Everything is fine. The apocalypse is over and I'm still alive. And kicking. Or something.

Jesus H in the sky.

I should really know better by now than to expect anything even remotely half-decent to come out of this god forsaken month.

I want to vomit. This could be for any number of reasons.

This is probably the beginning of a hiatus.

Dear Chelsea,

Reading week starts in nine days.
Please start to plan your breakdowns accordingly so you can stop walking out half way through all your classes in hysterics.
kthnx.
Chelsea

My cards keep forecasting a new beginning. Regeneration. A new spiritual understanding. The beginning of all good things. I hope it comes soon. I hope, as much as I profess otherwise, it doesn't happen in the afterlife.

I hope I never figure out who broke your heart, and if I do...

I have to write an eight page paper on loneliness (of all things) in The Handmaid's Tale in 24 hours, and I'm out of cigarettes. I have a feeling my first all-nighter as a university will be tonight. These are the least of my problems.

If I'm not dead by tomorrow, acedemia will continue as usual.

Yep. Pretty much.

"February is like January, warmed up."
"Fucking steaming pile of shit month."

In an email to my mother:
Things are stressful. The earthquake apocalypse may have been averted, but my life is an apocalypse in every other sense of the word.

If I spend the night then I'll lose my mind.

This weekend. Ridiculous. That's all. I have eight thousand pages of Women's Studies reading to do tonight. The thing I keep forgetting about being a university student is that if you spend any extended period of time having fun, you will always, always pay for it later.

According to CBC today, the apocolypse (acopolips) isn't coming due to the mysterious halting of the imperceptable tremors under the island. Right.

*
When I'm this exhausted, it's really difficult not to take it personally.

what will you think of this little number

Tonight I'm going to an Apocolypse Party because scientists are forecasting a catastrophic earthquake to the south west coast of Vancouver Island in the very near future and we're all going to die.

My flask is full of vodka. I'm ready.

accident

we go to bed drunk on ten dollar wine
its purple grime encrusted on our skin
like scabs.....and the sheets are layers of thin
scar tissue between us.....there is a line
like a membrane dividing the sublime
from chaos.....and our contours are the grim
ambivalence between them.....we lie in
the shadows of a gap that doesn't widen

under night's white eye.....furtive through the blinds
as your fingers in my hair.....hand beneath
my head as you begin your swell and arc
against me.....our bodies hasty.....entwined
like a seam we'll rip open with our teeth
when the moon looks away and the room goes dark

I don't know what you saw.

January is over. The sun is out. The sonnet is finally finished. My life is already improving.