the past two weeks.

Two Sundays ago it quaked again. It was 10.30; I was sound asleep, my room still in night, except for bright stripes from between window blinds cutting through. And then I heard loud squeaks: err-ee-err-ee-err-ee. I awoke from dreaming with the words: "the walls are jacking off each other." This half of the building is on stilts over the parking lot; I'm pretty sure a big quake will send me down the hill. It's probably also why I feel quakes so easily these days.

The following Tuesday I dreamt I was sitting with Oprah. I kept stretching a wig over her head that made it look like she had a crew cut. It looked good and real on her, and I said she should wear it all the time, but she didn’t like it. Sometimes I’d grab the end of it from the front of her head and stretch it over my knees, and Oprah would get upset and say she couldn’t see anything.

That same Tuesday I was dumped twice. Neither was unexpected. Yes, I was sad, the way you look when you have to flush your dead goldfish down the toilet. Tod once told me he loves no better a feeling than of saying goodbye and leaving, and I don't share that feeling in common. But I won't miss the smell of rotting meat coming from your dog's mouth, nor the way you rocked yourself back and forth to dismiss yourself from social realities, nor the awkward pauses between fits of would-be-laughter that I mistook for affection. I received both dumpings by text message on the way to Ron's house in West Hollywood. Ron is an older friend of mine who experienced and remembers gay life in 1970s New York like no other. Ron made me orange juice by juicing real oranges. Then we watched a video about time, and then Bill Clinton. And then Ron turned on his slot machines, and we gambled.

Thursday the sixth I signed up for classes. At CalArts you actually sign up: the professors sit behind long rows of tables and wait for you to queue and fill in the spaces, first come first serve. I slept gracefully through my alarm, but still managed to get into everything I wanted. The "experiments in autobiography" professor let me in even though the class was full, because she said otherwise the class would be all girls. Another needed grad students; as I wrote my name down I thought to myself, 'I won't be showing up.' Eric was standing with me in line for one, and he asked which professor I was waiting for. I said, "the lady in green. She looks smart, doesn't she." He looked over and said she looked like a sweet lady. Then I looked back and saw he was looking at some old little biddy, and I pointed over at the right lady. Then I joked, "at least you didn't think I was referring to that lady in green," and then pointed at a balding man in green sitting alone with the sign "Bunn" over his head, hopefully indicating his last name. In a cutesy voice, I said, "Aww, no one wants Bunn." Eric replies: "Well I want Bunn." And then a cooing noise followed. Later, after indecision and consulting my mentor Sara and reading through the entire course catalog with her, I wound up signing up for Bunn's class, "After Archive (from institutional map to subjective occupation)" and talking to him and I think I'm in love with yet another professor.

Friday I went to an art exhibit called "Golden Gals Gone Wild"—entirely artwork of Golden Girls characters naked and/or being sexual. We ran into this fellow by the name of Merlin, whom I made infamous amongst close friends as "the 19th-Century guy," partly in result of his grandfather outfits, his budding opera singing career and his reliquary of an apartment full of taxidermies, antiquated furnishings and miscellany. But for the most part, it was because of his weird accent in casual conversation, best exemplified in a message he left that I saved and still replay all the time, in which he says, "a quarter-past-seven on Mundee." Returning to the lascivious Golden Girls party, he said 'hi' to us and then removed himself from the event completely, perhaps acknowledging his own self-distaste for not wanting to have anything to do with me after learning I wouldn't want to get sadomasochistic with him. Later I photographed a gay man dressed up as a clown in front of a collage of Blanche Devereaux made with make-up kits, condoms and other red and purple oddments. And we went to Popeye's and saw a passed-out man get carried away to an ambulance, reluctant to get on the stretcher probably because of the huge bill he's gonna get.

Last Saturday Alex C and I went to Scoops again. This is becoming an unhealthy habit, but it's just so cheap and the flavors so unpredictable. The manager, Tai, invited Alex and me to go to a bar with him and one of the scoopers. We did, and reconvened with them in the dank deep recesses of Akbar. Tai's employee, the scooper, couldn't stop gabbing, mostly whiningly, especially after I mentioned communes. Communes are apparently always places for rich spoiled white kids to feel superior to everyone around them by denying the reality of our world. Afterwards, we went out for Korean food with them, too. Tai paid for everything—mojito, marinated beef, jello cubes of rice—which was weird to me since it probably added up to about how much I've ever spent at Scoops, the generosity also bringing me to wonder his motivations. He and the scooper laughed over kimchi about a co-worker's greeting/explanation to customers, "one scoop equals two balls."

Wednesday I had the new Britney Spears song stuck in my head all day from the moment I watched it several times to try to find any clue that she was fat. Yesterday I had the music from this video stuck in my head all day. I'm not allowing myself to listen to popular music for the month of September (Britney discounted, that was research), so now I'm much more susceptible to catchy music from other walks of life. I took a career test online, which suggested I be a parole officer.

I slept twelve hours today. I dreamt I was on a date with a guy who was stuck in a wheelchair. It was my duty to push him around everywhere we went. I had to prop him up and help him so that he could enjoy getting on toys with me at the toy store. We flew around in a plastic contraption. He looked and acted like one of the in-real-life dumpers, but was nicer and funnier, smiled a lot and liked me. Then we went to West Hollywood, and it was flooded like a tide pool at a beach. The water was really warm and replaced where the road was. I glided us through it like a manta ray. Then it switched to being with Alex C, and the warm water became snow. Alex was sitting atop a random jeep, while I had been making snowballs with little pictures I found on the ground in them, making pictures into objects. A man came out of a house along Santa Monica Boulevard, the owner of the jeep. He said he didn't mind that we were crawling all over his jeep, so then he went back into his house to get "McDonald's and some drinks" for us. Then I thought about an episode of the Golden Girls where Rose, Blance and Dorothy were wondering where Sophia was. They turned on their flat screen for a video conference call, and Sophia was communicatig with them on it from that same man's house. The others were furious because he was one of their exes. We were about to hang out and eat with that man, and I couldn't believe it.