16/10/2001 - 6:22 p.m.

People who live in glass houses...

I finally know how much a stone is: 14lbs! (To anyone unenlightened in the US, I'm sorry you don't understand. To anyone enlightened in the UK, I'm sorry, nobody told me before.) I have absolutely no idea where the term comes from, but now I know what it means when I hear it, and that makes me happy.

I'm very easily made happy. Really, on days that are just basically shitty, I used to head over to www.easilyamused.com and watch paint peel or grass grow, or some other stupid thing, and go extremely happy because of it.

I want to learn to write things that sound gorgeous when they're read. I can't do that. I can write things that sound funny, and dialouge, but I can't write descriptions that are more sensory than placement detailed, and I wish I could. Everything comes out reading like stage direction or like a cheap-o romance novel, and I want to find a middle ground, a lovely lyric quality that makes things read well. It's not enough to have a good story, it has to sound lovely too. (In case you haven't guessed, I've been reading Gatsby again.)

It really bothers me when people do things so seriously hypocritical- they can't behave for two minutes and then expect everyone else to, or they don't know a damn thing they're supposed to be doing but are concered about what everybody else is doing. It drives me up the wall that people will toss themselves around everybody like they were suddenly proclaimed God and everybody just better fucking bow. I mean, Achilleus got by with the snobbish "I am God" thing in ancient Greece because the hero was allowed to know he was the hero and to act like it (and hell, his mom was a goddess), but you know, guys gave up Greek dresses years ago, and with that they have given up the priviledge of acting like a bigshot. Ohh, how about this? If they want to be bigshots, they can put the dresses on and do it that way. Yeah, I like the sound of that.

OK, that was good enough. I feel better now.