April 2010 Archives

Thursday
Yep, traffic court. I think that was the result of the 48 in a 30 I got busted for. I pleaded guilty/no contest and was ordered to attend traffic school. Fun.

I went to a poetry critique at Nikki's that night; you can probably guess which poem I read.

Friday
Heh, so easily plans change. The BHS chapter of the National Honor Society (of which I was not a member, thanks to my basically blowing off homework much of my freshman year) was to hold a college rejection letter bonfire tonight, but it was postponed because of a time change on a surprise party several members were attending. I'm not sure if it was ever rescheduled.

Tuesday
So there you go -- more about Nikki and my thoughts therein. I guess maybe we didn't start dating right away after all. (In case you're wondering, I really am writing about these pages as I come to them. Memory is sometimes an unreliable guide, which is why having a document like this is such a treasure -- especially when I actually wrote down what happened.) My note at the bottom of the page, "(See Tue., April 6)," is in reference to my poem, "Atlas' Monologue," about getting shit on all the time. Yeah, self-pity over the girl I'm not currently dating saying she just wants to be friends.

Actually, it's even worse. Ladies, telling a guy that he's like a brother is interpreted as pretty much the kiss of death: that guy writes off any chance of dating you when he hears those words. Unless that's what you're after, that is.

Off on the right, you'll find quite an admission: I don't (often) write down my feelings, for fear of evidence. Instead I speak them, because then the evidence is blown away on the wind. To a certain degree, that's still true: If you go back through the archives on me3dia.com, you'll find I don't write about how I'm feeling very often. Even here in 1954, I skirt around that quite a bit. Cinnamon commented to me recently that this is the first time she's seen me write about emotion on a frequent basis, and I'm still not doing it as much as I could. We'll see if this changes over time.

Wednesday
Happy birthday, Mike!

Chad and I woke Mike up at his house early in the morning before school, and I guess we made him wear polyester bell-bottom pants. I dunno. We went to the Bread Basket, the village diner, for breakfast, and Chad and I shared an order of bacon, I think. It was fun.

I was pretty happy with the Inferno illustration here, despite it running into the text. My friend Brandon and I had discussed teaming up to create an illustrated copy of Dante's Inferno, and this was a sketch for the cover. In my sketchbook, I started drawing lots of trees with faces in them for the Wood of Self-Murders (suicides).

I imagine the "Iverson Perennials" quip meant something back then, but I have no idea who it refers to now. Probably something relating to Phelan's Logic & Rhet class.

Sunday
The writing on this page is all from Monday (other than Heather's birthday, naturally) so I'll write about it there.

The sketch in pen was something I drew in Gaby's living room. I was there along with several of our friends, hanging out on a grey April day. It's of a person coming to a door to find some people laying on the floor in a room. It's imagined, not from life; I no longer remember quite why I drew it. But I remember I was pretty withdrawn that day. I tend to be very quiet on Sundays in general -- like it's a mental day of rest.

Monday
The story that carried from Sunday over to Monday was written that way because it was the last thing to appear on the page. It's an anecdote from a night at Baloney's, the sandwich shop I worked at in downtown Barrington. I conclude it rather awkwardly (and quite a bit more flippantly than it deserved -- probably as much due to space constraints as to my not-very-well-formed racial awareness) but in retrospect, I don't think the encounter had anything to do with race. I have a feeling the man in question was mentally ill. Calling me racist for giving him a larger size coffee than he paid for, after waiting for a new pot to be brewed and being told that we were going to close soon, doesn't exactly follow.

He was one of the only customers all night, too. As noted in the little shaded box, it rained heavily all day and night, which meant not many people stopped in, and nobody went outside during lunch or open hours. You'd have to be pretty crazy to go out in that weather-- oh, wait.

I'm not sure who wrote the little quote that leads off with "This may come as no surprise..." (it's a Duran Duran lyric), but the little quote just above it is significant. "Let's got to bed... sleep that is." Remember my mentioning Nikki a couple days back? Tonight I talked for a long time on the phone with her. We flirted up a hell of a storm. There's nothing like an actor for some thrilling, flirty talk. At the end of the conversation, it was quite late, and I said that quote. I didn't mean for it to be a line, but it totally ended up being one. We dated for a month or two after this.

Unfortunately, at that time, I was dating Melissa. Despite that going pretty well, I ended up breaking up with her for Nikki. The reasons were many -- at least mostly because I was fickle, always after the next, potentially better thing. But one more concrete reason was because I felt too comfortable with Melissa, too natural, if that makes sense. It felt like I'd known her forever, and that made it somehow less interesting than the possibilities. I later learned that was a big mistake. But we have some time before that realization.

Friday
Good day for random quotes.

Mr. Engle and Mr. Wolnski were two teachers at BHS (I say "were" because I don't think they're both still there). Not only that, but they were close friends and taught Interrelated Arts, the sophomore year honors English program which incorporated art content (Engle was an art teacher). And they share a birthday.

The odd drawing was inspired by Renee Magritte's Le Double Secret.

Note at the top -- P.I.P. was the play I filled in for my friend Kyle in. I have absolutely no recollection of the show, other than its location and that I had to wear a suit. Then again, I only had a couple weeks to learn the part, rather than a couple months like everyone else.

Saturday
The red stamp here was a test print I made with an old newspaper printing block. It's a Sherwin Williams painter bowing, presumably after a paint job well done.

Hmm, that quote at the top right -- "There is always an audience." That's from Nikki, a girl in the P.I.P. play with me. That quote says a lot about her. She acted a little like she was on stage all the time. Not that unusual among theater folks, actually.

The anecdote about the bug was inspired by the comment about hunting down what you love if it doesn't come back to you. I thought it was pretty poignant.

Wednesday
It's true: "When you blow air into a Jello snack cup with a straw, it attempts to explode, and makes a rude, flatulating sound."

Those are directions to a party, but I don't remember whose.

Thursday
Christian got into MICA. He got a lot of financial aid. He's still screwed.

I think that's someone asking me on a date just above the POW.

Interesting list of songs there, too: Suzanne Vega, The Replacements, Frank Zappa, The Beatles and Snow? If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say these were songs that popped into my head at various points during the day. Pretty random, but just the sort of songs that might pop up on my internal radio station.

Monday
I found this "Destroy Fascism" wheatpaste sticker in an alley in Lakeview -- the alley, actually, the one The Alley is named after -- during another photo class field trip. Thought it was pretty cool.

Tuesday
I have no idea why the nose of this dinosaur has fallen off. I just drew it that way. He's obviously not happy about it.

Secret writing:

Speaking of people I'll know for the rest of my life, I think Gabriela will be in that category. Above Brooke on that list, even. The relationship we have is so love-hate that it could not help but last.

Funny, that. While I don't speak to Brooke anymore (all my fault, I admit -- more about that when I head off to college) I have kept in contact with Gaby off and on over the years. Currently, we're on.

Oh Mitch. You were hilarious.

Saturday
I spent a second night hanging out with Heather and Leslie -- and maybe Melissa too? I don't remember -- but I have no recollection of what we did.

The note headed "To bring to P.I.P." is in reference to a last-minute fill in I did for my friend Kyle in a show at Palatine's community theater. I don't think I found a foam spiked ball, nor do I remember what it was for, but I'm sure the rest of my costume was easily taken care of. I sometimes found it easier to memorize my lines if I wrote them out -- a trick that came in handy on this occasion.

Sunday
Every so often my birthday is on Easter. It's only happened twice: once when I was really young and once when I turned 18. Hasn't happened since, as far as I know.

I loved the double meaning of "Death to life in the Lord," the sign outside our church on Easter. I think this was the last time I attended Easter service, and one of the very last times I went to church for anything other than a wedding or funeral.

It was a grey, dreary day, and I remember it snowing a little bit as I drove to Denny's after church for my free birthday breakfast.

It's funny to see my prediction that Greg, Tim and I would remain friends. Greg drifted away after this year (he already lived up in Wisconsin, so we didn't see each other much), but Tim and I have stayed in touch, if not remained best friends. He's out in Galena now, so I see him only rarely, but I hope we don't lose touch.

Thursday
Yow, there's a mess of a page.

Note the scribbled "I'll kill Soumyaa!" That's from Mike, because Soumyaa told his girlfriend at the time -- who I believe was his now-wife, Emily -- that he'd cheated on her. I don't recall whether that was true -- I think she had heard something wrong through the grapevine (she was known as a bit of a ditz) -- but it didn't matter. Emily broke up with him anyway.

The "he's she's they're... outta control" thing is an inside joke among the small group of yearbook staff members who actually produced the yearbook -- as opposed to the other kids in the class (yes, yearbook was a class, not just a club) who didn't do much of anything. We got it printed on t-shirts, along with "Our book, not yours." We thought it was really funny.

Secret writing:

Gabriela and I had another talk today. We talked about what we wanted and about why we are the way we are. She says she wants to help me. I know I wouldn't, but I feel as if -- if I told her any of my feelings, it would hurt her as much as it hurts me... She's afraid of being kissed. I want to kiss her just once. I asked her to marry me in six years. She said, "We'll see," which is as close to a yes as need. I love her so much.

Wow. So much to talk about there. Setting aside the WTF of asking her to marry me in six years (which would have been when she graduated college, assuming she did it in four), the bit about not wanting to tell her my feelings is actually more worth focusing on.

I have always been a very good listener. One of the byproducts of that is that I heard a lot of people's deep, dark secrets. For instance, one of my girlfriends told me about being raped when she was a 11. Other friends told me about their awful home life. As a result, I had, stored in my head, a whole lot of other people's fear and anxiety and shame and whatever, and no way to let it out. That was tough to deal with sometimes.

Coupled with this was my own experience of being bullied in late elementary school and early middle school. My parents' advice at the time was to keep a stiff upper lip and not let my bullies know they were hurting me. I did my best, and eventually got very good at remaining stone-faced while getting my head slammed into the side of the bus. (I finally snapped and fought back one day in seventh grade -- and surprisingly that put an end to it. Had I known it would just take me shoving back, I would have done it years sooner, and more forcefully.) The unfortunate side effect was that I had trouble showing or sharing any emotion. That's an issue I still have to work on on occasion.

Friday
Secret writing:

Melissa and I screwed around tonight. I don't regret it, but I don't know what to do now. What to do, what to do...

Woah, did I give you whiplash? Here I am, in the space of a day, asking a girl to marry me someday to making out with some other girl? Craziness. But that was so me. I was talking with Cinnamon about this earlier: reading through these pages more closely than I have in years, especially the secret messages, I'm struck at how messed up I was. I ping-ponged between crushes and emotions and opinions on a daily basis. I suppose that's what being a teenager is about -- hormones wracking your body and brain -- but no wonder my parents didn't know how to handle me.

So, some explanation. Heather, Leslie and Melissa were freshmen and were in the West Side Story dance chorus. I became friends with them, and at some point we decided we'd all go bowling. (I probably told them about how that was a regular thing among my friends.) So it ended up that I picked them up, along with Mitch, another cast member, and met Mike at the alley in Lake Zurich. We had a lot of fun, and afterward went to the McDonald's at Ela and Route 12 for a bite to eat. It was a beautiful night, so we ended up hanging out outside -- and I got the great idea to climb the outside of the enclosed playground jungle gym thing and sit on top. Everybody joined me, and we hung out till one of the employees finally caught wind and kicked us out. From there, on Melissa's recommendation, we went to a two-story-tall berm that had been built to shield a new subdivision from the traffic noise at 22 and 59 and watched the moon rise. Melissa and I had been flirting all night, and had held hands on top of the jungle gym, and so I made my move. She was an incredible kisser. I was smitten. You can expect to read a lot more about her in the coming months.

I'm still really proud of the bowling drawing.

Tuesday
Interesting list of films I was supposed to see. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy didn't become a movie for more than a decade, so I think I was supposed to track down and watch the old BBC TV show.

I did end up reading Einstein's Dreams during the summer, while I worked the ballfield concession stand in the park district. It blew my mind. I've ended up buying it at least two more times since, because I never got back the copies I lent to people.

Here you see another example of my poetry from back then. Most were about relationships in some fashion. "Atlas' Monologue" was one I was particularly proud of, but looking back on it, it wasn't very good -- the rhythm is poor, as you can tell from the beat counts I made, and it pulls in too many disparate metaphors (Greek mythology, toilets, masks?). I do still like "I will curse and swear off love" though.

Wednesday
BHS's theatre department allowed a couple seniors each semester to direct their own plays, which were called "experimentals," short for experimental theatre. Kyle B. and I took the opportunity the last semester of high school to do that.

Kyle's play was Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Mine was titled Dialogues but was simply a collection of dialogs I liked -- passages from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, On the Open Road and others. I also did a bit of creative work turning the closing monologues from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest into a dialogue of sorts -- the actors took turns reading their lines, blending the monologues together in what I thought was an insightful way. It was a challenge for the actors, but it came off really well in performance. The cast list you see here lists which days they were available to rehearse after school.

Val Mazzenga is no longer with the Tribune, but appears to be a professor at University of Illinois.

Sunday
Like I said, Saturday night turned into a party, so Sunday was pretty quiet.

Monday
My friend Katrina tried out for The Jungal Book [sic] and pretty much blew everyone away. I opted not to try out for that show, but a lot of my friends did. It was fun watching a play from the audience for the first time since my freshman year.

I don't know whether it was true that more Europeans visited Barrington that spring, but it sure seemed like it. Foreign languages were a rarity in that neck of the woods.

And speaking of foreign languages, my friend Suzanne send me a letter letting me know she was in Oslo. She had graduated a year early so she could spend a year studying abroad. She was hoping for Germany, but ended up in Finland because Finnish was supposedly relatively easy for someone fluent in German to pick up. She mostly hated it. I think she spent a semester there, then traveled for a couple months, starting with Oslo (I think; Suz, correct me if I'm wrong), before coming home. It was neat getting updates from her -- they usually had a somewhat cheerfully resigned tone.

Friday
Tori was a couple years younger than me, and I had this weird attraction-repulsion thing with her. She was frequently hyper to the point of being a spaz, but I found her attractive anyway. We messed around casually a couple times before life diverged our paths.

I loved the idea of the freshman class board brainstorming "new ideas on how to end the school year." Like, as opposed to finals, or what?

Saturday
As I teased a couple days ago, B.A.S.H. and S.E.A.L. were mortal enemies. The antagonization came to a head at the Earth Day festival held at the high school on Saturday. While S.E.A.L. got all earnest inside, distributing pamphlets about vivisection, B.A.S.H. set up a Smoky Joe outside and sold hotdogs and hamburgers to attendees, proffered on paper plates with silly slogans and cartoons on them (many by Brandon).

I spent Saturday night at Mike's house. His parents were often out of town (his dad was a salesman on the road a lot, and they had a house on Marco Island, Florida), so Mike and his older sister were often given free run of the house. My parents didn't know this, of course -- they just knew I had never gotten in trouble when I was over there. I "slept over" at Mike's a number of times as cover for some other thing I was up to. (Sorry, mom and dad.)

On this particular evening, a bunch of people were over and we were having a good time down in the basement, which was pretty much his domain. Unexpectedly, the doorbell rang. We weren't expecting anyone, so it was a big surprise when we opened to door to find my brother Pete and his friend Pat. They were both freshmen, and apparently had been drinking beer by the middle school a few blocks away. The cops rousted them from there, and Pete remembered I was nearby. The only trouble was, he'd never been to Mike's house -- so he and Pat wandered the neighborhood, obviously tipsy, ringing doorbells and asking whoever answered if they knew where Mike lived.

This of course sent everyone into hysterics, convinced the police would be showing up at any minute, sent there by some concerned (or annoyed) adult. The house was made to look unoccupied above ground, and the vague paranoia of teenaged partiers took hold for awhile. Eventually, it was determined that the coast was clear, and we got back to partying. It was one of the few times that year that Pete and I hung out together and got along well.

Pete and Pat spent the night there along with me, and accompanied Mike, Chad, me and a couple other people at Denny's the next morning to tend to our hangovers.

The irony of Pat's quote in the middle of this page is that he ended up puking all over the coffee table in the living room in the middle of the night.