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Simon Owens
Mar. 2nd, 2007
Jul. 19th, 2006
May. 15th, 2006
04:18 pm - LitHaven relaunching
LitHaven is now officially relaunching. Even though its previous focus dealt a lot with reviews, it will now primarily focus on writer markets and interviews with writers and publishers (about writing craft and submissions). Please spread the word.
Apr. 16th, 2006
Oct. 27th, 2005
11:27 pm - Party Girl
I'm scheduled for two parties this weekend.
I'm going to have a lot of calories to burn.
I played pool with Frankenfield for awhile tonight. It was just an excuse to talk, to line up a ball that might or might not make it to where you intended and just let something come out of your lips. When you speak, you hum, and speaking is just a matter of your tongue doing some things while you hum. And sometimes when you do this organized humming something really powerful comes out. Tonight we hummed a few nice things to each other, and that bonding experience happened that only happens with a few people in your life.
11:33 am - Paper
At some point today I'm going to have to write a paper that I've been putting off that's due tomorrow. And this isn't one of those things that I can wait until 8 at night to do.
I also need to schedule for next semester.
And I'm going to be taking a risk at some point tonight.
01:06 am
Went to Market Cross bar tonight with Frankenfield and Sarah. The air pocket opens up and I find myself in this cloud of quirk, and when I look at my watch and see it's midnight, I realize that if I know what's good for me there's not a chance in hell that I'm leaving, now. So I stayed.
We wait for these accents in life, these crescendos.
The heat is on at my house, and tomorrow I go in to get a new job at a place that'll pay better than the last one.
Man I'm a good speller.
Oct. 25th, 2005
11:48 am
I'm fucking freezing and I have the air-conditioner fan blowing cold air from outside into my bedroom, simply because I need a constant sound at all times.
Maybe it's time to go down in the basement and get one of my fans.
11:15 am - Facebook
I finally broke down and got a facebook account a few days ago. It's odd to see all these faces again, these left-over remnants from high school that I've been trying to bury in the back of my mind for so long. But now that they're in the front again I don't mind so much--seeing these faces doesn't bring on a sense of nostalgia, but it gets you in this group mindset that in some ways, despite how much I hated high school, we were like a big family who went through puberty together.
High school was shit. At least for me it was. Intelligence mixed with adolescent immaturity didn't go well for me and I drifted from group to group feeling out of place. Uninterested in the things these people were interested in and at the same time sexually charged. It was hell, especially my junior year, and when I left for college I pretty much didn't look back.
But here I am again, spending an hour flipping through webpage after webpage looking at these faces, adding them as friends and wondering how much these people matured, or if we're really just all the same.
Oct. 24th, 2005
01:27 pm - Sweater season
Sweater Season officially begins today. I've always been really big on sweaters:
01:14 pm - Cigarette
Around my room there are at least four packs of cigarettes. Marlboro Mediums. Each one is almost completely full with only a few missing. And of those few, only half were smoked by me. I leave them behind me when I go to bars so that I can say that line, "Oh, I forgot my cigarettes at home," and buy a whole new pack-- a pack I can eventually bring back to my room and discard with the rest. One sits on my desk. Another on my night stand and two on my book shelf.
They are sentries, cancer sticks standing guard, ready to be there when I need them. Sometimes I'll take one out when I'm sitting in front of my computer and play with it--slide it in and out of the box, put it to my lips for a second and just hold it there. I let it sag briefly until my upper lip is just barely holding on and then I stick the filter between my teeth and bite down lightly.
Then it's back into the box. These cigarettes are not for smoking. They are guards, always watching over me, always ready to be lit, though they never will be.
11:36 am - Punching bag
The people who live upstairs have a punching bag connected to what I assume to be a support beam of some kind in the attic. Last night at around 10:45, one of them decided to have a go at it. Whenever he does this it shakes the entire house to the point where it feels like there's an earthquake. And for some reason my room gets the worst of it.
So at a 11 at night I'm lying in bed as the whole house shakes around me.
Oct. 23rd, 2005
03:40 pm - Career
I pretty much decided within the last few days that I'm going to pursue an MFA for creative writing and hopefully one day be a creative writing professor. I was kind of steering away from this for a long while because I didn't know if I wanted my entire life to be about writing, stuck in this creative void in the very workshop setting that I sometimes hate.
But I think I finally just kind of sat down and said to myself, "Simon, you're only 21 years old and you've had a good amount of success already and showed that you're already writing at a competitive level. You should go for this because you might have a better shot than most people your age of finding placement at a university."
I know these things are subject to change, but as of right now, I'm going to go forward with this goal in mind. Start looking at schools and whatnot.
Oct. 21st, 2005
05:58 pm - Air pockets of orange
I'm beginning to see these brief pockets of time during the day when I feel completely normal, when I'm having this bit of conversation or watching a movie (Go see The History of Violence, it's amazing) or drinking coffee and I feel this slight buzzing notion that things are going to be fine, Simon.
This is Time. Part of depression is being able to feel every filament passing, even when you're doing something busy; you're just waiting for the next busy thing to happen. But as the depression lessens in these air pockets of normalcy, whatever tear in me that allows me to feel time so intimately briefly closes and I feel like I'm living instead of going through the motions.
On Sunday it will be the four-week anniversary of us breaking up. I've had four weeks to move over the denial stage and then glance briefly at the anger stage (anger didn't hold much interest for me, I loved her too much to be angry for long) before progressing towards what we have now. This dull loneliness which is slowly dissipating. It's a fog, it really is. And if we can just extend this metaphor a little further, please, then I'll say that now I'm starting to see figures in the fog, a house here, a person walking his dog there. Can we go even further with this metaphor? No? That's fine.
When I look in the mirror I'm starting to see a much different Simon. Physically. Because of dieting and running I'm starting to become thin and defined. I'm taking better care of myself and dressing well. I'm drinking a lot less and since the only time I smoke is when I drink, I'm smoking a ton less as well. My caffeine intake has lessened dramatically (I only drink coffee maybe once a week rather than every day) and I've been taking multi-vitamins.
And sometimes, I think maybe, just maybe, I'm going to pull through this. There will be scars, yes, and perhaps a little lingering resentment. But at some point I'm going to be able to look back at this and feel like it was somebody else's depression, somebody else's pain.
***
I think this is a good time to officially change my favorite color. When I was a kid, my favorite color was blue. Sometime in high school I changed it to green. But the whole green scene hasn't been doing it lately, and I've really been attracted to the color orange. I have a couple different pieces of clothing that have orange in them, and I've been wearing an orange Longhorns hat for years. Not the same one, I've actually gone through a couple. The first was given to me by a girl I was dating in high school. I've gone through like one or two more recently and my most recent one was purchased by Ashlie right before we broke up. I guess whoever my next girlfriend is will have to buy me one to continue the tradition. Here's the one I wear now:
03:46 pm
Man, I'm actually considering driving all the way to Villa Nova tonight (2 hour trip) to see a friend just so I can get out of this god damn house.
Oct. 20th, 2005
11:56 pm - Girl
Tonight I went to the third party in a little over a week. At some point I found myself making out with a girl, briefly. And as we stand there, all I can think is, What are you doing? You're not deriving any pleasure out of this. And I open my eyes for just a moment and look at her while it's happening and wonder if there's any pleasure for her either, or if this is just it, the end of the line for this party existence.
I made my way towards the keg pretty quickly after that. I don't even remember what I said to her to leave. And here is my life running into this cup, yellow Natural Light Beer, three dollars a cup.
There's a reason I left this life behind me after my freshman year. And yet here I am returning to it. Tomorrow I'll go to it again, and again.
And again.
10:00 pm - Why it feels this way.
It feels this way because it feels like we're not supposed to lose people like this, when they're living. I've been sheltered most my life from loss. I'm 21 years old, it's only a matter of time before people begin to go. First I will watch both my grandparents leave me, stand at their funerals and remember to the time when I was a kid and my grandmother spoke of death and I said, "You're not going to die. Don't die." and then she said, "Ok, Simon. I'm not going to die." Just like that, I believed her, and yet I'll still stand there and she'll still lie there.
Statistics tell me that sometime, maybe soon, maybe not, somebody close to me will reach an untimely death. Will I have to sit there with my mother crying over my brother's death? Or perhaps a girlfriend or a wife or possibly a child of my own. Eventually, if the natural order of things carries through I will have to say goodbye to my mother and my father. I will have to watch one of them live without the other. It's a scary thought that if you marry someone, one of you is going to have to watch the other die. Is it not? One will leave the other alone for some amount of time, it's inevitable unless you die together.
This is why it feels so wrong, to lose someone you love so deeply when she is still alive. In time other people will be falling and here we are, both still alive, both breathing, both conscious, both still loving the other, and yet separated. Life shouldn't be like this. Our relationship shouldn't have ended like this. In time I'm going to have to lose people forever, so why are we so quick to end things when both of us are still here?
Life must be ignorant of its own existence--its own brevity--in order to come to terms with itself.
Oct. 19th, 2005
08:26 pm - Car
I went to the mechanic today to pick up my car and pay him 37 dollars so he could simply tell me that once again, the light was triggered by one of the gas sensors in my car. He turned it off and it'll probably be fine for a few more months and randomly turn on again.
Trying to figure out when I can drive up to hang out with Hannah. It's a 7 hour drive so it'll probably mean I'll have to leave Thursday and skip Friday classes. A little nervous about the car. It's not an old car, it's a 99 Maxima, but it's getting to the age where I feel nervous taking long trips with it.
05:23 pm
Simon: I got a new haircut
Marla: that's what asian women do when they mourn the loss of a lover. they cut off their hair symbolically to say they're moving on. it's quite an obnoxious action for them
Simon : i like that. It's romantic.
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