High Score: 196!

Before moving here I never would have imagined that anyone could or would want to have so many conversations about San Diego. I'm not even sure how or why they come up but they always do, as if living here entails existing on such a different plane that it really warrants its own conversations. Do you think people in Kentucky or Ohio or New Hampshire have these kinds of discussions? I'm not even sure what there is left to say, except that I am always feeling very heartsick for snow from going up to the mountains. The funny thing is that it's been so long since I've really felt winter that I'm beginning to wonder if I'd still be any good at enjoying it.

I'm playing the This Time Last Year game a lot lately, feeling fragile/invincible at the thought of how much things can change.

On a somewhat related note, my new secret talent is underhandedly winning online scrabble games.

Art Appreciation

Nearly this time last year, I was dragging someone to the art museum to look at William Blake etchings with me. Given that the exhibit was my idea, I felt sort of ridiculous about the fact that I somehow restlessly, impatiently finished looking at the pieces too quickly, and had to wait several minutes for the person I had gone with to finish looking at them, too.

I wonder if other people have this problem, of having a genuine enthusiasm about art and being able to stare at prints in books for a long while, but sometimes feeling a strange pressure when in an art museum and in front of a painting, feeling like a certain amount of time is supposed to be spent admiring it, or a that there's a certain reaction you are obligated to have, etc. Performance is I guess the word I'm looking for.

I remember once planning a trip to the Hirshhorn with a boy who hoped to eventually be able to make a living off the strangely staged, cryptic photographs he took. Instead we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. It felt sort of scary at the time, to suddenly find myself in an art museum with an artist whose work I didn't understand, looking at pieces of artwork I didn't understand. I remember finishing looking at a particular photograph too quickly, and he smiled one of those smiles that isn't really a smile at all, and said I seemed to be having an awful time. It wasn't true, but I remember thinking, grimly, psychically, that it wasn't going to work with us, he wasn't possibly going to be able to handle me as an only friend.

The real point of this entry, though, is this, and I wonder (worry) about it maybe more than I should: Where do people go when they stop updating their journals, anyway?

The Lily Pads

I've always loved these sorts of pictures when I was younger, somber ghosts of men and women, their expressions never quite acknowledging the strangeness of full grown adults standing on top of lily pads. These photos gave me all sorts of ideas when I was a kid, but what they fail to mention in the captions is that even if you take the trouble of slogging your way through the sticky summer heat to get to the garden, you still won't be allowed to actually stand on the lily pads. Do you think there was a specific time and date when lily pad loitering was outlawed? This is the sort of stuff they never tell you.

Anyway, I want a time machine.