1.16.01 - 9:32:26

angie bought me a red phone for christmas. she had it shipped. when i opened it, melissa was here. we didn't get it. i thought there was some sort of joke. i said, melissa, this IS my favorite color of red, so if that's what she was going for, she's right on target...but i feel that there's some larger joke that i'm missing. melissa said, i agree. but in the end, it seems that i had expressed desire for a red phone at some point in the semester. that's how you know you really have everything you need. you don't even remember what you want anymore.

have i said anything about temptation island yet? i don't think i have. can you think of a worse idea for a show? i thought change of heart was a bad idea. i thought who wants to marry a millionaire was a bad idea. but this is absolutely terrible. what's the next show going to be about? the american public is completely nuts. as are the people who come up with this stuff. who are part of the american public.

listening to aerosmith, dream on. how random.

watched crouching tiger, hidden dragon last night. oh. my. god. what an amazing movie. you HAVE to go see it. the kung fu scenes were unbelievable. i've never wanted to fly so badly. it's so perfectly choreographed. it becomes a deeper, faster, more intense form of the dance. there's a reason why they call it martial arts. i can't say enough good things about it. incredibly visually exciting. AND there's a plot. a pretty good one. what's with all these good movies coming out lately? i need to go see o brother, where art thou? next. and then traffic. and then snatch. and then i bet there won't be any good movies for the rest of the year. i mean, there are only so many possibilities.

freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose...we saw this old guy with a white bushy beard play 'me and bobby mcgee' in the neighbor's living room once. he wore one of those fishing hats, the ones made out of khaki canvas. there was actually a gap between his teeth where he'd held his pipe for the past forty some-odd years. he had on a pair of old man's wire-rimmed glasses in a shape between oval and rectangular, and they weren't bifocals even though we were all pretty sure he needed them. he was wearing a plaid shirt with maroon and dark green and khaki and navy blue in it and a pair of jeans that almost had holes in it, spattered with white paint. he wore suspenders, i swear, rainbow suspenders that made me think of mork and mindy, though i couldn't remember if rainbow suspenders had anything to do with that show or not. i think i can faintly recollect mork wearing rainbow suspenders, but i was what, 8? 9? the last time i saw that show and i wouldn't put money on it. but anyway, he wore rainbow suspenders. for real. and workboots. the kind that are worked so hard and made of leather so old that you can't really tell what color they were when they were new, some shade of brown, that's all you can tell. there was paint on his boots, too, and the laces were frayed and broken so that they weren't long enough to lace through all the holes anymore, and the top two holes of each boot sat there, empty, and the flaps at the top of his boots spread a little wider there. he played a guitar with a brown strap; it could have been made out of the same leather as his work boots, there was no way to tell. there was some sort of design tooled into the leather, maybe vines, maybe curlicues, but over the years the leather had worn and it was difficult to distinguish the tooling now from the rest of the strap. and the guitar, the guitar was a color somewhere between pine and cherry, and its polished body didn't agree with the rest of the old man, all dusty and worn. but when he put his rough fingers to it, it became part of him somehow and maybe the light didn't hit the shiny surface quite as hard. and he told us about the first time he saw kris kristofferson play this song, somewhere out in the country, probably in a field. somehow, i'm sure he got there in a truck with patches of primer showing. you could see him go back to that place as he told it, and i wondered who had been with him in the truck or who he might have met in that field, listening to kris kristofferson play 'me and bobby mcgee.' and then he played. he played, and he sang, and i heard him singing, and i heard him singing, 'freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,' and it made me wonder if maybe there was freedom in that field. it made me wonder how you're there, and then you start picking up things, slowly, and years later you're back in that field and you realize you're not free anymore. you've got nothing left to lose until you start picking things up again, i suppose. i would finish the story by telling you how i had a tear in my eye, or how the old man had a tear in his eye, or maybe how everyone in the room had a tear in their eye, but the truth is that i didn't, and the old man was smiling, and i don't really know what the rest of the room was doing. he was smiling, and his teeth were yellow from cigarettes and dip, but it was ok because they belonged to him, and that's when i really wished that his guitar weren't quite so shiny.

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