You know what I did on Friday afternoon? I spent fifteen minutes staring at a shrubbery. It was rather extraordinary, or maybe I'm on psychotropic drugs, but as I was looking at the shrubbery, it began to look to me like the side of a tree covered mountain. Each sprig on the shrubbery, instead of being just a sprig, was a little evergreen tree, and I could "see" birds' nests and pinecones. And very clear in my mind's eye were roads winding around the mountain which I half expected to see if I were just to part the little sprigs, and hikers appeared as pinpricks of color occasionally walking along the side of the road, overtaken by cars and buses. They would, if they had really existed, appear as flashes of light as they travelled along the sunny stretches of the road, and then go dark again as they drove under the shade. I saw birds circling over the pines, and, with my mind's eye dipping under the leafy canopy, saw mats of pine needles, underbrush and topsoil, and along the steep sections of the mountain, a grey rock face with loose sections, where occasionally a hiker would, with his shoe, dislodge some pebbles that would go pingpingping! all the way down.

But sometimes a shrubbery is just a shrubbery.

For the rest of the duration of the walk, I'd see other shrubbery, and it'd appear to me as a spreading oak hung with lanterns by which a hundred or so revellers would be eating barbecue and chatting (the children would be chasing each other) on a summer evening (it was about 3 pm after school, in reality), or I'd look at a tree and see a redwood on a knoll that could serve as a house, with round doors and windows carved into the bark, or I'd see a shrubbery that looked like a tree on a patch of hilly and cheerful farmland under which I could sit and read, or I'd see somebody's lawn and see plains shaking under the weight of a stampeding herd of bison. I lost all sense of scale- what was one inch, or six inches, could be the height of a human, or a buffalo, or a tree. It was like I was looking at a bansai world, with my mind inserting special effects.

My imagination riots against the IB.

Too many tests tomorrow..

Too many textbooks dragged home today.. I think I really will subcumb to the evil and use one of those incredibly square wheeled backpacks that scream IB!!!! from twelve miles away.

Textbook History

The yellow highlighter trails neon butter
on gunmetal print.
The wind turns paper leaves.

A pink cardboard
rebound covers the rubel as fall
covers an unstable Earth.
Over the wide girth of Mr Thomas
writing, the war is on.

First piece of Palmer fanfiction. I want the IB to take over fanfiction.net. That's my goal. I'm not really this pretentious in my writing- I was parodying something. Kudos if you know what it is.

Quote of the day:

"It's been swell. But the swelling's gone down."

Possibly a good answer for when people ask you about your relationship, or your experience in the IB or something.

The Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony was quite... tacky... blah. I mean, the national anthemn and the flag and the president would have been enough. But a good opening ceremony anyways. Zifei was there. Did I mention? Yes I did. Cool. It was real cool when the skater lit the Olympic rings on fire with his flaming skates. I want flaming skates. If only the NBC people didn't jabber like demented monkeys when they brought in the flag from Ground Zero. God knows everyone ELSE in the stadium was respectfilly silent.

The Olympics make me feel inferior. (What a stupid statement.) But I mean, I'M not doing anything to be faster, stronger, blah blah however it goes. It makes me feel like such a dumbass. Look at the IB, with its Debate Team and Young Demorepublindependents and Young Black Leaders and Model UN and Mock Trial and you can see the little midget professionals sprout into the next generation's lawyers and politicians and lobbyists and diplomats like fucking chia pets. The IB is for people who want to pursue Arete.

See, see, my ambition is to be a hermit and sit on my ass in a small hut with food and a garden.

Ways to tell that you're in the IB. A contribution to Nick's list. After I smack him in advance for not bringing Discworld tomorrow so I get to sit at the ride-on bus stop all cold and lonely with that weird guy with the creepy eyebrows.

You know you're IB when you're bourgeois and you can spell it.

(not that I can)