creative writing story

i wrote this creative writing and just need to see if it's even worth turning in. for those of you who haven't read my recent style, this piece is not really supposed to have a "real" conflict/plot, so keep that in mind.

so, i want to know what you think.

The moon was the color of pine nuts and the birds were chained to the sky. I was impersonating like a halibut. The air smelled of lemons. The clouds in the sky were like ropes and were hung just below the ozone layer to dry, still dripping with rain. It was the last day of today.

The street lights were on: flickering, yellow cones of light that marred the night sky. When I was young, I wanted to be a trapeze artist. But all I could now was disappear every time I passed a streetlamp.

I was going to the grocery store to pick up a sandwich.

The aisles smelled like saltwater and shampoo. It was the type of smell that reminded me of stainless steel. I zig-zagged through the aisles, arms out to the side, fingertips grazing the flimsy cardboard boxes. I wasn’t wearing shoes and the floor was gritty.

There was a man in aisle eight.

He hobbled instead of walked, feet clunking against the floor in an uneven rhythm, and wore socks with sandals and a neon hunting vest. He carried a bottle of ketchup in one fist. He handed me a box of cereal.

“Here.”

There were marshmallows in it.

I thought that was nice of him.

He had five o’clock shadow even though it wasn’t five o’clock. It looked like he had a toupee on, but I didn’t ask. He wouldn’t have liked it if I’d asked.

I peeled open the top of the box and tore opened up the bag. The cereal dissolved into wet newspaper on my tongue. I saved the marshmallows for last.

When I stepped past the registers towards the empty moon-lit street, a store clerk wearing a red vest stopped me. His name tag said his name was Simon.

“Hey!”

I glanced at him as I swallowed the final remnants of the marshmallows. They tasted like rainbows and partially-hydrogenated corn syrup. Simon’s face was splotched with pimples and he was trying desperately to grow a mustache. He smelled of cleaning supplies. “Did you pay for that?” He gestured at my cereal box.

I swallowed but kept my pace, toes slapping against the floor. “No.”

He cleared his throat and spat a wad a phlegm into the trash can behind him. “You’re going to have to.”

I paused and flickered my eyes from the box to his face. “Okay.”

The cereal was a gift from the man in aisle eight, but I didn’t tell him that. He wouldn’t have cared.

If I were him, I wouldn’t have cared either.

I walked to the register and handed the cereal box to him. He rung it up.

It was four dollars and fifty-nine cents. I handed him a five from my back pocket with fingers dusted with cereal crumbs.

I paid for an empty box.

He handed the box to me without a bag and I looked at it for a moment before passing it back into his fleshy, pale fingers. His skin looked moldy. I was sure not to touch it. “Could you throw it away for me?”

He threw me a look, watery eyes rimmed with bright red veins, and snorted. “You just bought it.”
"I know.” Wrong answer.

I watched him toss it into the trash can, licking the marshmallow dust off my fingers, before turning towards the exit. The marshmallows tasted like the plastic bag they were sealed in. I swallowed and felt my mouth dissolving into a pool of saliva and nausea and hurled myself into the bathroom. I flung open a stall door and vomited into a toilet bowl.

It was rainbow colored.

I wiped my lips against the back of my hand and inhaled away the scent of bile. I flushed the toilet with my foot and watched the rainbow disappeared into the white porcelain. I threw the stall door back open, listening to the satisfying screech of the hinges, and walked to the sink. My stomach clenched in a fist before settling.

I rinsed my mouth out with the tap water. It tasted like bleach.

I hope it wasn’t.

I braced myself against the sink, fingers clenched around the sides, and coughed up a pale rainbow into the ceramic bowl. I turned on the water, swishing away my spit with my fingertips. I wiped them on my jeans and glanced up into the mirror.

My eyes were red.

I threw my palm flat against the mirror and turned on my heel towards the door, feeling my skin smudge the glass.

I limped out of the bathroom and tasted the faint strands and threads of bile filtering through my mouth.

It was the first and last day of today.

I walked of the store into the spray paint moonlight.

I wish there were a word for this kind of disappointment.

clocks and watermelons

well... this is going to be quite the post. first off, updates:

1. 13 days of school left until the end of the school year!

2. with the combined efforts of myself and my dad, we have gone back five generations into our family ancestry and learned that i have roots in spain, poland, germany, france, england, and russia. pretty cool stuff.

3. editing my novel - am in the process of transfering it to the program ywriter (free program used for writing novels) but am usually editing about a page or two a day with all my homework/bullshit/stuff.

new quotes that i like:

"You see, Elaine, the key to eating a black and white cookie is that you wanna get some black and some white in each bite. Nothing mixes better than vanilla and chocolate. And yet still somehow racial harmony eludes us. If people would only look to the cookie, all our problems would be solved." - seinfeld

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - albert einstein

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." - groucho marx

"In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - douglas adams

hot library smut:

i want a library like this in my dream house - spiral staircases, the works. that would pretty much make my life.

and pretty much the best decision-making tool ever:

so yeah. my life has been filled with bullshit, drama, crushed hopes, breakdowns, break dancing, clocks, watermelons, bob dylan, etc. this menagerie of randomness is nothing more than a release of some images that float through my head on a daily basis.

and, by the way, it's almost summer here even though we had snow earlier this week.

more does not equal less, but less equals more?

confusing stuff. anyways, more updates/plans/shit that can take my mind off of pc high, etc:

more plans for the year after i graduate:

1. build an electric car with my dad. well, not so much build, but rather assemble an electric motor in a lightweight car without a kit. just beginning the research, but i'm totally into it (especially now while i am waiting to recieve my driver's ed. book). the only 'bad' thing about it is that it can get only about 50 miles per charge, so if i go anywhere outside pc, i'd just have to stash some really long extension cords in my trunk.

2. create a zine. i was at the coffee garden the other day (after seeing my friends from realms who i haven't seen in over a month!) and i picked up a zine from the back shelf: the salt lake rag. essays written by teenagers about stuff that actually matters. amazing. the best part was, of course, the condom taped to the front (donated by the aids foundation!). nah... just kidding. but seriously, if i could take that as my inspiration, beef it up with some more art stuff, and add more written pieces from people i know, that could be a fantastic project, no?


updates:

1. started using my moleskine again. god, i love that thing.

2. been setting daily and weekly goals for myself. very helpful, i can tell you that. i had a whole lot of shit to do today and actually writing it down made me realize how important it was to not just store that kind of stuff in the back of your brain, where it can hide behind all your other thoughts (like: "what kind of wood are clipboards made out of?").

3. i finished my homework today! it is actually very exciting since i had a shitload to do:

- finish my english essay analyzing how elizabeth bennet's (from pride and prejudice) responses to mr. collins' and mr. darcy's proposal speak about her character and what i would do in the same situations.
- complete my creative writing story (children's book about what we've learned in school) with about fifteen+ drawings. most of them look good.
- study spanish so i can retake that test and get more than an 8.5/20 on it.
- world civ. homework that i should have had done long ago but never did it.
- study math so i can take that test on wednesday and not fail.

4. i designed a desktop background for class of 2009:

5. i started rereading what i have edited from my novel so far (only 19 pages so far, unfortunately) and DAMN. i'm a good writer.

one last thing to leave you with: why do people use so many exclamation marks when they're not even exclaiming anything!!!!!

evolution of dance

just a quick video. hilarious.

locks of love

i am planning to chop off most of my hair this summer. for one thing, my hair is a bitch during the summer and also, i don't want to pay for bleaching and dyeing my 24" long hair blue. it's just not economical no matter how cool it is. so, i planned to donate about of a foot of my hair to locks of love, the non-profit organization that makes wigs of donated hair for alopecia areata/cancer patients. fortunately, i did my research and found:
- locks of love receives more hair that it can make wigs then sells the surplus hair ($352,401 in 2005)
- most of the hair is sold to commercial wigmakers rather than given to patients
- the wigs are not always free; they charge juvenile patients according to their parent's income level
- the kids have to jump through hoops to receive a wig (get letters of recommendation from teachers, write essays)
- charity navigator (largest independent charity evaluator in the united states) reports that 81.1% of their donations go to program costs, 12.7% go to administrative costs, and 6.1% go to fund raising costs.

i did find some good, honest organizations for hair donations though. i would advise you to check them out:
1. pantene - beautiful lengths although i'm a little hesitant to donate to pantene, i think that it's at least better than having a foot of my hair turned into a hairpiece, no?
2. wigs for kids
3. zichron menachem

as a final note: i wish i had this hair.

plans/planes.

as the school days start winding down into the lemonade-scented oblivion called summer vacation, i am estatic to tell you that i can graduate next year as a junior! my academic plan for the upcoming 2008/09 year is as follows:
- take financial literacy, computer tech., and .5 credit of u.s. history during the summer
- english courses: a.p. language and english 12
- history courses: government (.5 credit)/psychology (.5 credit)
- math course: 1060/pre-calc.
- science course: physics OR physics with technology
- CTE course: photography
- electives: creative writing (1 credit) and drawing (.5 credit)/painting (.5 credit)

after graduation, i'm planning to do unschooling for a year while living at home. i started making a list of things that i'd like to complete/explore during that time:

1. working on a farm: there's a handful of organic peach farms in northern california that i'd like to take a look at. i had been planning on doing this for the upcoming summer vacation, but if i wait a year, i can do it for a longer period of time without the looming expectation of school.

2. writing: i'd like to at least finish editing my novel from nanowrimo and possibly complete a collection of short stories that i could submit to magazines, etc. i have finally broken through that dry spell of no creativity at all (and just in time to illustrate a children's book for creative writing) so if it keeps up, i should be able to keep writing and improving.

3. start a baking business. my great uncle and great-grandfather are/were bakers so i guess it runs in my genes.

4. traveling. i-to-i has a fantastic program in south africa to work with lions... but unfortunately, the age requirement is 18. i'd love to find another program that resonates so deeply with me and have another experience like the bali trip last year.

psst... do you like my template change?

i stumbled upon this website of strange and beautiful objects. here are a couple of my favorites.

disclaimer: sorry this post doesn't have a lot of my thoughts, etc., but you'll have to deal.

this daisy vase, hand-blown from a bic ballpoint pen. pretty, clean, simple lines, and recycled - who could ask for more in such an object?






















handmade pencil sea urchins - what else is there to say?















this twig bench is not only aesthetically beautiful, but is also environmentally friendly. it pretty much blows my mind.