A smile is something special,
A ribbon is something rare...
So I'll be special
And I'll be rare,
With a smile
And a ribbon
In my hair...
- A Smile and A Ribbon, from Daniel Clowes' Ghost World

All the windows on the taskbar are making my head swirl. As are the Post-its and notebook pages, dotty broken promises. You know the way A-I judges love confusing the poor contestants until if they decide to listen to all those contradicting, fluctuating comments, they would wind up with violently orange hair, stomach ulcers and a misplaced personality. I've been travelling a la sandstorm throughout the house today, up and down the stairs, sprawled on a red-and-white cushion in the middle of my bedroom surrounded by Stable Table, a dozen pencils, Econs TYS, yellow notebook, Sloman, tin of peanut butter wafers, lecture notes... and the phone rings, vibrates, kicks off another frantic shower of papers from my schoolbag. To where I am now, only with library book, phone, Greetings Workshop CD and virtual documents instead. I don't know why I'm panicking, and that's the worst part.
I note that in the last entry I was actually frolicking around, uploading pictures. What happened in the last two weeks? I can't remember.
--
I'm supposed to be writing about what happened at the Singapore Art Museum, way back in January, for Artist's Jam, and I can't remember anything besides mutiliated animals. There was the patchwork teddybears exhibit, where it is possible to create a bear spider, if there are enough legs. There were the butterflies, little glittery pieces of them scattered across a whole wall, and not one of them was complete aside from those in the glass case. The pecan pie at Dome had too many... pecans. I must be a bloody superficial person. I don't know why only the physical descriptions, surface emotions (e.g. irritation and boredom) are the only ones that come out of my mouth.
The Last Concert looms, so Wednesdays now round up at 9. It's quite true that McDonald's does not sell actual food, has permanently oily tables and smells like cleaning fluid, but it will be an RJ heartland (if I use the word correctly). I miss it already, even when I'm sitting there. The last round-robin argument, lame joke, ice-cream fry, administrative headache, broken guitar, dynamics agreement, scribbled minute. Concerts always bring about that musical, love-everybody feeling, but this time I suspect it will be true. Yes, it's true, I don't want it to end, even though we're all slumping about in authoritative exhaustion and brow-creases. Sitting with Shulin, talking over a National Geographic omnibus, I realized there are so many levels of responsibility. Although I'll only want to see one, which is perhaps why I am panicking, after all.