• I should apologise for some things: they never should have happened. But what do you do when patterns become so deeply ingrained erasure seems impossible? I don’t know. Neither do you. But a dream last night reminded me of a few regrettable roads taken (though it took me a while to be able to say that, even).
• Don’t be disheartened. It’s not all going to be like this. Remember, there is joy in passing the torch to a fresh lung.
• Maybe the next season of Scrubs should switch the format of the show; think about it: until now J.D. has been a goofball whose largest crisis was probably his on/off relationship with Elliot. Through his eyes, the hospital is one big screwball comedy. Now, with his girlfriend pregnant, his goofy immaturity can be cast aside, the show can be filtered through the grownup eyes of the new John Dorian, and it can become an hour-long medical drama competing with House. Of course, a move that gutsy and edgy would alienate its entire core audience, all twenty-three of them
• I fail to understand why people seem constantly shocked that soldiers get killed when they go to war. Civillians also get killed. It’s just a fact. Get used to it, or do something to help. In the meantime, shut up.
• In that vein, I have a hard time mustering up any empathy for people in Lebanon and Israel: I know people are dying and incredible pain’s being absorbed by thousands of people, and on an intellectual level that fact troubles me. But if these people aren’t in my specific vicinity, I can’t really feel their pain. Does this make me a bad person? It seems as if I should feel something; the fact that those who know me say I have a healthy dose of empathy for those I can touch and can see doesn’t help. I know that already.
• That dream follows: I was kissing an old girlfriend in my dream (the most familiar thing in the world, I might add; we knew eachother like a Swiss watchmaker knows gears, to borrow a phrase), when she leaned over, saying, “I can’t believe I’m still with you.” Later, I woke up and thought, “I can’t believe she’s still with me,” smiling until I remembered she is not in fact still with me. On this morning’s drive to work, I found myself thinking I may not be as over it as I’d like to admit. You understand this is painful to throw out there: I don’t like this feeling or this admission. But I am - as always - naked and ashamed.
• My wonderful sister Elyssa is out buying coffee for me right now. Wonderful, wonderful girl.

One last thing: some lyrics for your eyes from Mae’s Embers and Envelopes.

We write to apologize. We ask to look past life as it goes by.
I know you have sacrificed time, life, love, time to fly.
Please consider all things trite, forgiveness will be the thing that gets us by.
I know to have something like this broken is hard to fix.

Embers, we’re burning bridges down. Envelopes stuffed with feelings found.
To write this down as means to reconcile.

We write to patch things up, maybe not to agree but to proclaim love.
Let’s look ahead and then we’ll see the One whose glory never ends.
And based on that we’ll see, there’ll be room for change, but gradually.
I know to have something like this broken is hard to fix.

If all is said and done and over, if we don’t have to, we’re not going to.
Make the change, it’s worth the try. What’s broken can’t be fixed tonight.

Okay it rhymes a bit. You win. That aside, the gang is back in action: coffee at Williams was wonderful, served up with a side of thunderstorm and downpour. And despite being uncomfortably damp, it was fun. Let’s all do it again shall we?

Let me say one more thing. I have some delightfully funny friends. We should really apologise to Lance Bass, though. I mean, what did he ever do to us? (Other than the music, which time will eventually relegate to the “Oh my gosh, what was I thinking?” bin of a million menopausal women and a few men with a foot or two over the Heterosexual Wall.)

Having sucked down a Red Bull and come close to finishing a very large cup of joe, I now realise that listening to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is probably not the best way to make the world feel less trippy: I feel as if I’m going to be smelling colours and seeing sounds and second now. Silibant, wasn’t that?