As nice as it is to be back, I can't help missing the sunny 80º weather and palm trees. Not missed: living out of a backpack and waiting an hour for everything. Solution: move to California and become rich and famous.

Anaheim bound!

Now playing:
The Darkness, I Believe In A Thing Called Love


So I really doubt anyone is reading this now, but that's ok. It still makes me feel better.

I'm doing much better with everything: diet, exercise (though maybe the "much" isn't deserved there), and even getting things done. However, it seems that things still manage to sneak up on me when I let my guard down. The problem, then, is to figure out how not to let my guard down...

And dammit, I'm getting antsy again, and I haven't even had syrup (a veiled movie reference, is it meow?). I'm starting to imagine interests and think too much on what they could become. I need to either chill or do something. Somehow I can't see myself "chilling," but at the same time I don't think this is the most opportune moment for a relationship. Then again, it's never an opportune time to get sick, but we deal anyway. Not to compare the effects and the sensation of the two, but I do equate the helplessness of the situation - you feel yourself falling into it, but you can't do anything about it even if you try. What's more, they sneak up on you. Looks like it's back to the old drawing board...

"He went like one that hath been stunned
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn."
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

I find that I sigh a lot these days.

"You'll say that we've got nothing in common
No common ground to start from
And we're falling apart"
- Breakfast at Tiffany's

Not-exact Quote of the moment:
"This is for a kid who thinks he hasn't seen anything good today." -Ferris Bueller

I'm in a confused mood right now. I feel like I'm somewhere between the end of the beginning and whatever comes next. I don't have time for life. I don't have time for the life I used to live, and I'm not ready to make time for the life I need to live. I feel like an ant under a glass, like I'm increasingly constricted and the only way to escape is to draw the walls in even closer. There is a feeling that I can't escape, only postpone when I stay busy or absorb myself in something brainless, that it never gets any better than it is now. Little enough encouragement that may be, but despite it I feel that I ought to make more of my life now rather than fret about the future. But I can't. The future hunts me like a fugitive, as a force of nature that never relents, only waits for the next opportunity to strike. The past haunts me when I let it, and every time I try to take a lesson from the past to guide my future, I only sink into those transgressions further, or make greater mistakes. I want more than anything to love and to be loved in return, and I let exactly that slip through my fingers. I let the best parts of everything slip through my fingers, leaving a skeletal existence, dancing disjointed from sadness to sadness. Where is the marrow of life? I am merely on the journey from innocence to experience, and already I wish to reclaim all that has been lost, but I am pushed forward and the only way to go smoothly is to want it, to revel in it. I have to want to let go of more things that I cherish now and will miss in the future. Life requires forward movement, and in it a transition from happiness to sadness. Say if you will that I am missing the positive in all this, but when the only moments in a day that I have to think about my life leave me "a wiser and a sadder man," I find it hard to be positive. Reading Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge may not be helping, but not reading can't hide me from the truth: life moves on, regardless of whether I'm with it. It's just days like these that make me wish I could just let it go on a while without me. It's days like this I'd rather let somebody else be the hero.


"There goes my hero
Watch him as he goes
There goes my hero
He's ordinary"
- Foo Fighters

Now playing:
Random lazy-ish guitar music on the silly Genetics video on Saccharomyces

Who wants to go home? Three guesses.

Now playing:
Jennifer Paige, Stranded
(not really, I didn't rip the CD, but it's playing in my head... or so the voices tell me)



At the library trying to get something done.

So not getting anything done.

And I've been recently thinking about changing the name back to "The End of the Beginning (or Vice Versa)." While I don't think this is at all the beginning of The End, things are beginning to end - my carefree (ie careless) outlook on life, my obsession with electronic entertainment, my overdone and generally unrealistic approach to relationships - though I will find love eventually... - and sadly, many things I cherished in childhood. However, these ends simply add up to the true End of the Beginning, and though I know many aspects of my past and current life will not truly fade as long as I live, I do realize that I can't hold on to everything. Just as I perpetually have to clean my room, I have to let go of the old to let in the new... and so far, there's plenty of good new to let in. So to sum up, the name may change back, because if there's one thing I'm letting go of, it's a nihilistic outlook.

Now playing:
Cake, Short Skirt, Long Jacket

"I want a girl with a short skirt
and a loooooooong jacket..." ;)

In other news, B-day ball rocked all sorts of ways. Better than freshman year, where I was mortified by my date's (i.e. girlfriend's) grandparents' presence at the ball. Better than last year, where dinner was poorly executed, prepartying was rushed, it was freezing cold and pouring rain, and I was all dopey for being dateless. Instead: excellent dinner plans, complete with goofy pictures before and wonderful lovely delicious cheesecake after; excellent prepartying, with fun and crazy roommates who didn't once bring up the fact that I didn't have a date (for that and much much more, you guys are awesome, and damn cool), excellent mudslides, and the requisite Fresca; and a wicked awesome ball, where I danced with the lovely ladies, chilled with previously mentioned roommates, friends, and respective significant others, and only wished I had brought a date a little bit (as opposed to the entire preceding week). Best Birthday Ball ever, and I have a feeling that things are still on the way up.

PS - if the person (names need not be mentioned) who stole Robin's camera happens to be reading this by some wierd twist of fate, for God's sake, return it to Public Safety or something, before Dan breaks both your legs...

Fwahahahaha, someone remembered my existence! =D Anna, I think I lost track of you on IM, and since I first set it to auto-block non-buddies, then experienced permanent computer failure (meaning I'm seriously never online), I have not had the means to talk to you for some time. If you'd like, you can email me at tstromberg2@washcoll.edu, and give me your IM or such so that I can talk to you if I log on at a public terminal.

If it's any consolation, I didn't forget that you exist... 0:)

heh... guess who finally remembered that this (and thus, you) existed?

I won't say I've read all your back entries (yet)... but I remember a time when I thought we were kindred spirits, and we talked all the time.

What happened to that?

Now Playing (at completely too high volume):

[My room]: [techno beat]
[Andrew's room]: "Du Hast!"
[Dan's room]: "Sweet home Alabama..."
[Andrew's room]: [heavy metal guitar riff]
[Dan's room]: "...Lord I'm comin' home to you..."
[My room]: "Smack my bitch up!"


So I was in a little bit of a funk, but the combination of Prodigy, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Rammstein is simply too much. Let's hope that there isn't nearly as much temptation to do nothing tomorrow as there was today. (Reason # 1 why I have to let go of this: I can't take a funk every week!!!!)

A breath of wind now leaves me cold
To watch the dying embers float
Like hope upon the evening breeze -
The spark of love, now scatter'd free.

Now Playing:

What is love?
Baby don't hurt me
Don't hurt me
No more
- Haddaway


And so it is that once again there is no one with whom I would start a relationship, only those who I cannot have a relationship with and those who I could have had a relationship with. God damn being single.

Now Playing:
Lenny Kravitz, If I Could Fall In Love

In the greatest of ironies I could imagine, when I finally find someone for whom I desperately want to end my exile from relationhips, I must forsake all my hopes. If I do not abandon my feelings for her, it can only lead to anger, jealousy, and the end of the only way I can be near her. I know it is the right thing to do, as well as the only way "someday" can ever come to be. Why then does it pain me so deeply to let her out of my heart?

Now playing:
Puff Daddy (back in the day), Come With Me
Saliva, Click Click Boom
...and the rest of my motivational playlist.


Gym today, much fun and pumping of iron, and I did cardio without hacking up a lung! (first time in months!!!) Now if I can only remember a water bottle next time...

Busy start to the week, looks like a busy weekend as well. Time to go enjoy the calm spot while I have it. "France is like, 'Fire Ze Missiles!' '...but I am le tired...' 'OK, then take a nap. THEN FIRE ZE MISSILES!!!" (completely unrelated) "Check out my knife!" "You call that a knife? Now this is a knife!" "No it's not, that's a spoon!" "Ah, I see you've played knifey-spooney before..."

Oh, and it looks like we're back to arial. Wahoo.

Work? I have work? Who authorized this????

Now Playing:
Play That Funky Music White Boy

You never know what an hour is until they are too few.

Now Playing:
Sublime, What I Got

Feeling fun and fanciful, possibly due to the Froot Loops for breakfast. The bastards were refilling the Cheerios (standard healthy breakfast fare) but I thought they were just out, so I tried to substitute. It was tasty, though it is certain that not all round cereals with holes are created equal. Just similar.

More likely, feeling fun and fanciful due to having a great time last night. Maybe I'm having a case of selective amnesia again (which wouldn't necessarily be as bad as last time I did that) but no matter how it happened, all the fears and worries and everything bad that was going through my head in recent days has melted away like so much morning fog under a brilliant sun. I like a girl and she likes me. Life is good.