(An interlude: I wrote an entry earlier today. I wonder if I should keep it posted? There's something freaky about leaving such a stark naked confession out for the whole world to see, but, hey, I suppose I've bought in to our culture. No piece of dirty laundry is too inane, too idiotic for our brave new world of blogs and reality shows.)

Now back to our regularly scheduled program. I promise, promise, promise to stop being so deadly serious all the time.

See, the problem here is that I was exposed to way too much Disney when I was a kid. Some of the earliest songs I know are "It's A Small World After All" and the opening credit song for "Robin Hood" Up until I was 23 years old, I think I pretty much went to Disneyland every year. I had mouse ears, two stuffed Mickey Mouses, a Mickey Mouse telephone, a (cheapo) Mickey Mouse watch, a huge Winnie the Pooh, Figment the Dragon from Epcot Center, Little Mermaid sheets (OK I exaggerate, they're my sister's. I swear!) just all sorts of ridiculous Disney crap. I watched "The Little Mermaid" in the movie theater. I was obsessed with "Beauty and the Beast." I think I watched Disney animated movies up until "Hercules." (And I've just recently watched "Lilo and Stitch" which I'm also completely obsessed with.)

I finally broke out of my obsession after writing a paper about how Disneyland recapitulates the imperial history of the United States. It's all fun and games until you realize how very much like soma it all is. And, like everything else, the corporate culture has sucked whatever little creativity was in it anyways.

But this is all besides the point. What I feel happened here is that, despite my discovery as a sophomore in high school of American Romanticism and the twisted, utterly warped, dark, morbid, perverse endings to stories written by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, I still somehow manage to turn my own stories into saccharine-sweet, Disney-styled slash fan-fic. (OK, I exaggerate about the slash part. I don't think I could write a homoerotic scene that rang true to life.) In the sense that somehow things work out, and while it may not have a happy ending in a conventional sense, still, all the odds and ends get tied up. So much for my aspirations of writing avant-garde prose.

Which is probably the reason that I have never really ever finished a short story.

Which brings me, however deliriously, to this episode today:

(So, yeah, I know, I know. They are women, not girls. But there is something about this kind of thing that make me think of people as boys and girls, and not as men and women. Maybe it's because I went to a Catholic all-boys high school, and so evolution of the way I interact with the opposite sex has arrested at the junior high stage. So, in any case, I will use the diminuitive "girl.")

Anyway.

So I am sitting by myself eating my lunch when this cute girl walks over and sits next to this guy two tables away from me. From the patches on their white coats, I assume they are classmates, and they are chatting away, but somehow, the girl's glance intersects with my absent gaze, and it's like a physical sensation.

Ffft! Ffft! Aaah! (Like poison darts whirling through the air.)

Leave it to me to make these things melodramatic.

Of course my gaze is completely locked, and I'm wondering if she's flirting with that guy, and of course every so often, her eyes veer towards me, and it just gets me right there, in the chest, and I start getting paranoid, wondering if she knows that I'm watching her. (I am convinced that they always know. And no, I really am not normally the stalker-type. Not normally.)

And then some big fat guy sits in the table between us, obscuring my view, breaking the lock (and I am somewhat relieved), but still, I catch her eyes every so often, and I flush. I try to not look obvious that I am trying not to look, which of course instantly becomes obvious, and eventually I finish my drink and get up to leave, and coincidentally at the same time she gets up too and walks away, and I can't help but get the crazy thought that maybe I should've walked in her direction, and said something vacuous and stupid like "Uh, hi."

Fun fact about delirium. It is derived from a Latin word roughly meaning "off-track" or "out of line." In other words, non-linear.

Addendum: 2003 Jul 15

"Fftt! Fftt! Aaah!" My A.P. U.S. History teacher would always do this whenever someone went off on a rather eccentric tangent during discussion. His admonition would be "It's a jungle out there. Stay with the main party."

OK, so the first part of this post doesn't really make any sense of thte second part of the post, but what I was merely trying to say is that, no matter what I do, everything that I write ends up being really cheesy and syrupy, a la Disney. (I thought I'd makes this clear, as I'm pretty sure it will cease to be clear to me in time.)