Whenever I walk my pets, people are like, "GIMME THOSE!!@!#1!!$!"

so i get lots of work to take home on this internship, meaning i'm reading every spare second i get. we don't get much sci-fi, but we do get a lot of YA and fantasy submissions, so can you just imagine the heaven i'm in? i'm reduced to a gooey mush! i'm unpaid but still, it's my job to read this stuff.

i love reading. and i love what i'm reading.

and i also love "researching," which means spending hours at bookstores checking out the competition, reading first chapters of books in the different genres. so far, i've familiarized myself with mysteries/thrillers, YA, romance, and historical fiction, since those were my past assignments. no sci-fi but next time, i'll def just see what's up for my own interest...

i just have so many questions, i wanna learn everything! O Wise One, teach me the ways of literary management. Make me your little protege. You won't regret it, I promise!

and is it just me or does the birthday cake on the LiVEJOURNAL banner make your mouth water too?! this poverty-induced diet is going to have me and Gren begging on the streets in no time. usually, Gren gets a 30-50% cut of whatever I eat, and lately he's been really annoyed, begging for food we don't have. I'm like, "Gren! Do you see me eating?! There's nothing to eat! At least you have your dog food!" At this rate, I'm the one who's going to be asking for scraps of his Eukanuba and Milkbone :(

~Jo-dee-ta

so the first major project for this comedy class is to write a one-act play and i am SO excited because i'll get to make characters and dialogue and everything! AND THEN on the train home i came up with this great idea: I CAN MAKE IT A MUSICAL!

you know, like with music!

so i need to start brainstorming a theme, and scenarios, and characters and then start making songs and lyrics. W00T.

also, i love my internship even though it's working my butt off. i'm learning so much. lovelvoelove :)

and also, it's official that i only get 1 hr of sleep every monday night in preparation for all the work due tuesday. and only 3 hrs sleep on thurs for fri's work. but lack of sleep actually makes me alert and happy. i could barely contain my giddiness today!

and finally, due to lack of funds, i don't eat much. today i had 600 calories of food. i'm ravenous, and finished a foot-long meatball hero in 6 minutes. this proved to be enough to prevent my transformation into a mean hungry bitch.

recap: decrease in sleep makes jude happy.
            decrease in food makes jude kill people.

I. 3 hrs sleep last night. you think this hard work will pay off one day?

II. Walked home from the train at 730pm in my business attire. felt pretty cool as I passed by the young whippersnappers in line for the movie theatre. HA! movies. who has time for THAT nowadays?

III. Get home. Don't have keys. Empty house. Brother's cell phone is always off and kept in his room. Spent 30 min trying to break into my house. Picture this: girl in dress and heels climbing banisters, struggling with windows, and THEN this is the best part: stacking all the bricks and garbage cans, balancing on the edge of the can to hoooooooooiiiist herself up onto the fence. it was a very precarious situation, straddling that rickety wooden fence. I broke one of the tips of the fence and scraped my ass on the way down. So I can't exactly see what's going on back there, but I think i have this cut on the back of my thigh, and who knows how many splinters are buried in my ass.

So now i'm in the backyard, liberating Gren. I tie a wire to his collar and use that as a leash as I try to break into the back windows/door of my house. The basement window is easily opened, but too small for me to squeeze into. The door, my last hope, is locked. Godfuckingdamnitmutherfucker.

So we circle back to the front and I'm tiptoeing on the railing again (in heels cuz I didn't want to take them off or else I'd be stepping on the RUSTY railing and might get tetanus!!!) and i'm pushing and shoving this window and finally, I make a tiny incision where the little stub is on the inside so maybe i can open it that way. But my father, my brilliant father, made the house SO thief-proof that he nailed the screen in place. So I said, fuck it and just ripped the whole screen open, a giant vertical gash and just stepped through into my house. I was so angry, that I almost broke a window just for the hell of it. Just smash everything. And my brother's car. How much you wanna bet that my dad and bro won't ever notice the gash in the screen?

My favorite part in all this is that we live across from this apartment building, where a robber must live cuz there's lots of robberies on my street, so someone is def peering through one of the many windows, keeping tabs on us. I really hope he enjoyed & learned something from watching me break into my own house.

IV. Then I took Gren out for a date at pizza hut and we split a family order of breadsticks, eating it outside.

V. Friday night 9pm. Time to hit the books.

elitist, misanthropic cannibal.

I was thinking of becoming vegetarian on Saturday when I saw the dude from Man vs. Wild kill a pig on TV (whyyyy would he do that?! so unnecessary), but then I had to concede that I can't live without meat. And today, something happened in class that made me realize that I should just satisfy my daily serving of protein with the meat of dumb humans.

Trust me, I'd love to explain what exactly happened in class, but see, I'm trying to rise above it. It doesn't matter. She's a moron. So is most of the world. So now I'm a cannibal. End of story.

things to do today:
-80 pgs of history textbook
-start at least 1 book on Lolita
-finish reading the unpublished manuscript for my internship
-watch Dr. Strangelove for history class
-walk Gren
-do dishes

So I'm up to the first thing on that list, but I can't concentrate. I'm stuck in a daydream of what would happen if I could relive my life from 3rd grade and on knowing everything I know now. And all these forgotten details from my childhood are washing up and for a few seconds here and there, I'm convinced that my mom is still alive and she's bustling around in the house and will poke her head in my room any second. Mostly, I'm brought back to reality when I want to ask her a random question, like "Why did I stop taking piano lessons with Inez and switch to Maggie? Was it because she became too busy? Or she kept increasing her price? Or did we just think it was time to learn from someone else?" And now I'll never know because no one knows the answer to that except my mom. She knew little details about my past that my dad was never even aware of, and my siblings definitely don't know either. She's got this key to me and my past and now it's just gone.

If I could go back, it would be awesome because little Jude would tell Mom to get her breasts checked with a sonogram each year, even if insurance doesn't cover it, because mammograms aren't accurate. I mean, they probably are for 99% of the female population, but for some reason, some glitch in the universe, my mom had the obscure variant of breast cancer that slipped by for years undetected by mammograms. The cancer cells grew in sheets, in layers, rather than dense clumps or cysts. So when it was finally found, she was already in stage 3 or 4. So if I could, 8-year-old Jude would nag her mom and make damnfuckingsure that she got sonograms for her breasts, even though doctors and insurance companies would probably insist that a mammogram is enough. And if somehow, the laws of fate forbid me from saving my mom from death, then at least 8-year-old Jude would know that she only has 11 more years with her mother, so I'd savor each time we crossed the street holding hands, each meal, each fight, each...

Her cooking. That's another thing that I'll never taste. How many recipes have gone with her to the grave?

While driving home from rob's last night, I was also convinced for a few seconds that she was still alive. What if I just pretend that she is? What's the harm in that? I'll just tell myself she went to the Philippines to visit her relatives for awhile.

I like writing about her. I wrote about her for one of the assignments for my prose poetry/flash fiction class, and I really really liked reading and editing it. Because each time I re-read it, it was like she was alive. And I KNOW HOW TRITE THIS SOUNDS, the whole "it's like she's alive in my writing/songs blahblah her memory is kept alive" but I actually was transported to a time when she was still breathing. It felt amazing. I don't know, I could just feel it in my chest.

But stupid Time. Always forward forward forward, when I just want to go back. Or stand still.

And of course, if I went back, I wouldn't be selfish. I'd try to warn people about 9/11 too. And if the authorities don't listen, I'd call all the friends I've yet to meet who lost someone that day and tell them not to go into the city that day.

I don't like this. I don't like this at all.