I miss my sisters. I like having sisters because you can hug them and sit on them and pick them up and lie on them and dance with them and jump on their backs and run into them and fox fight with them and give them big smooches on the cheek and race them to the shower and do their hair and do their makeup and go to the movies and make cookies and clean the dishes and talk to them in spanish or french or jibberish and imagine what the world would be like if it were upside down and lie on the stairs and pretend to be sleeping and try and sleep in the same bed but always fail and sing the national anthem. But mostly lie on them. I like that about sisters.

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So there was this fish, his name was Callisto. He came into my life at the very beginning of sophomore year when I bought him at the slightly sketchy pet shop down the road. He wasn't the biggest or most elaborate, but I chose him because I liked his color and his attitude. Oh, did that fish have an attitude. Together we weathered heat waves, fin rot, traveling over thousands of miles, a new tank, months of separation, reunion, travel, separation, travel, fun times, sad time. They say that bettas are the only fish (with the possible exception of chiclids) that can recognize their owners, and I believe it. My dad and I could even make Callisto dance. No matter what was wrong or how much trouble he'd been through, he was always hungry, up until the last couple of weeks of his life. He was old and a little sick already, but then his swim bladder got ruptured and he couldn't regulate his buoyancy. I had to put him in a shallow bowl so he could reach his food. Then he couldn't even swim up that far and I had to bring his food down to him on the end of a probe. He still tried to swim to me if I came around, and he seemed to just like it if I put my hand on the side of the bowl where he was lying. Maybe it was the heat that my hand brought to the water. Then a couple of days ago he got dropsy. It's the most fatal betta disease that there is, and there is no known cure. Some people speculate that it is somehow related to kidney failure. A fish with dropsy has a couple of days at most.

I had to leave to go on my geology field trip. I felt a little helpless... but I can imagine what my professor would have said if I had asked him if I could sit out on the field trip so that I could spend more time with my fish.

Anyway, when I came back from my field trip, he was dead. I could use a million euphemisms, but they all come back to the same thing. It was just his body that was dead, anyway. It was clear that the entity that was Callisto was not there anymore. It seemed to linger just a little bit, though, until today, when we buried him in the soft ground outside of my dorm from sophomore year. We decided that that was where he lived his happiest days. Lisa, Ranor, Kristina, Joanna and Akla came too. It meant a lot to me that they came, even though sundays are busy days for everyone. And the really nice thing was that people wanted to come not only to support me when I was sad, but also because they liked Callisto himself. Callisto had a personality very much his own, and people just liked him. They had made memories with him the same as I had. He had become a fixture in our lives in some small and immeasurable important way. We put a little rock on top of his grave and Joanna and Kristina fashioned a little bouquet of purple flowers which looked really nice. Ranor said that the rock I'd chosen looked like a heart if you turned it a certain way, and he was right. So we turned it that way. It was sunny but crisp, my favorite kind of day. All we'd really need is some colored leaves of fall and a little bit of softball and a drive home from high school with the windows rolled down and the promise of a little snow....

I can't go to grad school in California. There are no seasons! Get me off the west coast! But the west coast is pretty great. Maybe I'll try the south-west or the east coast for grad school. Mix it up. See different parts of the country, you know.

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I
feel
like
hell.

time to take a midterm!

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Some drunkards broke my hammock that I brought home from Vietnam. I had it hanging in the tree outside my room and today I went out and it's just totally destroyed. You must have had to put some three or four people in the hammock to do that. It made me really sad. When am I ever in my life going to return to Vietnam? I wish they had left a note. I wouldn't have charged them money- the hammock only cost $6, after all, but I spent months getting it home and it's only been up for two weeks. It was my happiest place, just sitting in the hammock and looking up at the sky through the shady tree and playing soft songs on my guitar. And they ruined it all, because they were drunk and stupid. I hate that. I hate it so much. It's not a valid excuse for doing anything....

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This is my one chord song
It's easy to sing along
There ain't much I can do with the melody
because I'm stuck within the confines of a single key: G

-Keith Urban

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Why a yak is the perfect substitute for a boyfriend:

Keeps you warm when you are cold
Carries all of your crap for you
Makes you sweaters and mittens
Is strong and muscle-bound
Does not talk
Finds his own food
Gives you a ride if you need a ride
Protects you from wolves
If you're really hungry, you can eat him.

Now if only yaks gave back rubs, the need for boyfriends would be completely eliminated.

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my

body


hurts.

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If you could see these tears I'm crying
Touch these hands that can't stop shaking
Hear my heart that's barely beating...

Today in dance class there were only four or so couples and nearly even ratios, which hardly ever happens. It was good because I always had a boy to dance with, but bad because I always had a boy to dance with.
You see, though I love dancing very much, I do no actually appear to be that gifted at it. My toes tend to point in, for example, instead of out. Toes that point in look "simply horrifying". Part of it can be attributed to the fact that I'm rather knock-kneed, and I like to think my knock-kneed legs are part of the reason I was so fast throughout my youth, (thus leading me to spend more time on soccer and track and less on ballet, tragically). My professor told me last year that he'd like to saw off my legs at the knees and reattach them pointing out. He gets a little frustrated with my slow progress sometimes.
Today he was especially frustrated because I didn't know how to do the "shadow bota-fogas" that he was trying to do. I told him that I was sorry that I couldn't do them, but I had missed the last class so I didn't know that part of the routine. He snapped and said that despite not knowing the routine, I should know how to do a bota foga from BRONZE (the lowest level... three years ago) and that WHATEVER I just did was definitely NOT anything resembling a SIMPLE bota foga. geez. So he kept getting on my case, and then this boy I really despise in class started ragging on me too, telling me where to put my feet and hands, talking to me in this voice that drips with condescension. He always does that, it drives me crazy and makes me dance even worse. So at one point, I began to lose it. My eyes started to tear up, my face began to contort- I didn't understand it.... here I was, a senior in college, and I was about to start crying because I couldn't properly cross my right foot in front of my left in SAMBA CLASS. I blinked it back in time, I nodded vigorously at all my professor was saying, I couldn't say anything because my voice was shaking. Everytime I thought about that mean boy the tears would rush back... one question was running through my head... why am I here?

Almost all the other people in that class are on the ballroom dance team... mostly on the tour team and/or competition team, the highest teams there are. I've never been on either team and I only half-heartedly tried out once sometime during sophomore year. Why? Because I'm not good, that's why. The only reason I'm taking the class at all is because I love dancing and I think it's fun, not because I want to get my toe pressed at exactly a 60-40 weight distribution. I already took all the classes lower than this... this is my natural progression. If he didn't want me there he should have failed me during silver latin last fall.

This class is not fun.

I couldn't understand it though... despite my misgivings about the class, it is nothing to start crying about. I felt like my emotions were completely out of my control. It was really embarrassing, I was very close to having to run out of the gym and spend the rest of the period in the bathroom, quietly crying to myself, sad probably mostly because I was frustrated at not being able to rein in my sadness and look presentable. Instead I turned away briefly ("Laura... are you even following me? You're the one who is having trouble with this") and put a half-smile on my face. Some nicer boys showed up towards the end which made me happier.

What is WRONG with me? Who the heck just starts crying during class for absolutely no reason? Am I projecting some other kind of life tragedy onto this ballroom class? Or am I just upset that no matter how hard I try, I just don't seem to be getting any better? Maybe I'll just drop the class. That would teach... somebody.

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