Oh it�s lovely and cold and snowy outside. Bash spent all night staring longingly out the window, wagging his tail. Except for the times we went outside and gamboled together in the backyard. Lovely quieting stuff, snow. Anguish quieting, I mean. Or rage quieting? Soothes my savage breast. Or something.

I�ve been meditating on rage the last couple of days. I sometimes think I might not be a nice person at all. I can be quite judgmental and cruel, I think, about people. Most people I meet? I think horrible mean thoughts about them. I pretty much find everyone (except for my friends�I�m talking about the People of the World, you know) boring, stupid, conventional, predictable, insecure, and soulless. There. I said it. I feel a bit better having said it, actually. I am a misanthrope. I am misanthropic. That is all very true. That is so true, that I think I want to live the rest of my days on my own. People, I find, are unbearable. This is not a part of myself that I like. Nope. I want to be a kind and friendly person, but I just don�t think I�ve got it in me.

Oy, grad school. I think I may be fucked out of applying this year�I�m not sure though. It�s the old GRE scores thing. I think my scores are over five years old (I took the test in November, 1997�though the results didn�t come for a month or two after that�so maybe if I send in the application right way it�ll be ok?), and I�m pretty sure that means I have to retake it and I ain�t got no money and the damned test costs over $100 and probably there�s not enough time to take it and get my results anyway. So. I�ll call the graduate school and check, but maybe no graduate school until 2004. Sigh.

Hey, I just thought of tomorrow, which is Shawn�s birthday, Shawn who will be fourteen years old. He called me yesterday to chat. I never met a kid his age so absolutely fucking cool. Aren�t young teenagers supposed to be the most self-absorbed creatures on the planet? My folks, I think, have forgotten how miserable the rest of us were during those years because sometimes I think they�re way too hard on Shawn. They say he�s too moody and he won�t clean his room. I say, he�s perfect and leave him be. Let him be moody and just enjoy him when he�s on an upswing. He�s super fun when he�s in a good mood�he sings and dances and makes great conversation. And when he�s in a lousy mood? He stomps a bit and maybe slams a door or two and refuses to clean his room or eat his greens. That�s about as bad as it gets. I say they got it good with that kid. They always had it good with him.

Anyway. I love him like mad. I�m impressed with his age. Fourteen, my little brother is. He�s going to high school next year. Holy time warp�I just realized that all of us kids in the family will have gone to the same high school. Wow. I would not have predicted that. I also realize that Shawn has lived in the same town his entire life. Well�he was born somewhere else (the state mental hospital in Florida, to be exact�a place that was recently and finally and for good shut down because of the substandard and sometimes abusive care patients received. When Theresa, Shawn�s mum, was pregnant and in their care the idiots loaded her up with horrible birth-defect-inducing medications because she was acting, yup you guessed it, crazy. Which is why she was there in the first place. Oh man. My parents raised holy caine over that one. Happily, Shawn has turned out to be the most calm, stable, balanced human being ever to emerge from the Molu clan. Anyway. I�m glad they closed that hospital. The end).

You know, speaking of mental illness and my misanthropy, today I am deeply opposed to wacko Tia, who told me yesterday of a man at Subway who she diagnosed (with all her bloody expertise and yes, that�s my sarcastic typing) with schizophrenia. She said she was worried he was going to expose himself to her because that�s what schizophrenics do, she said. She said she was afraid to leave because she was sure he was going to follow her and she said she is never going back there again.

I kept my trap shut when she was talking about this whole incident. Who knows? Maybe she was right to feel threatened. Maybe she was right about all of what she said. But it just made me ill. I shared a room with a woman who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia until I was 15. Shawn�s biological mum, my father�s sister, my aunt Theresa. And there was always a revolving door of boyfriends who suffered from bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or an assortment of other mental illnesses. And I�m always surprised, always, by the ignorance and by the prejudice and meanness of the people of the world (yes�see�this is all part of the misanthropy. I hate people because they are so hateful�racist and prejudiced and conformist and intolerant of weirdness�that�s why I hate them and I am deeply intolerant of intolerance, see? Clear as mud).

Ah hell. I got myself all mixed up in the thicket of my tangled mind.

I�ll just say, I watched that movie About a Boy and I loved it. You should see it too.