Mayumi and I have a PF Chang's addiction. And oh Chang, what an expensive and fattening mistress you are.

It's hot as hell. Reading " A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" in my bathtub with a pillow because it's the coolest room in the apartment where the a/c is never fixed. It's OK so far, very descriptive about how being poor in NY sucked in the early 1900's.

When I was 12-13 I had an obsession with the Beatles, namely John Lennon. I know that's kind of weird because he died before I was born. I guess my interest sprang from the release of the " Beatles Anthology" series on tv and the compilation cds. All my friends had hippie 60's parents, so it's all I ever heard in the carpool minivans on the way home from school. My mom was single and was a decade younger than my friends' moms. She alternated listening to Bon Jovi, Robert Palmer, and then now what I call 'softcockrock' like Richard Marx ballads and Sting. ( But I do so like Sting :) ) So I started listening to the Beatles when I was at my friends' houses. Jessie's parents had every Beatles' albums on vinyl. They would let us play with the little paper cut-outs that came with the Seargent Pepper's album. Soon, when other girls had glossies from "Tiger Beat" on their binders ( ~*JTT*~ or that dude from 'blossom' ) , I had little pictures of the Beatles that I would print off in black-and-white from our CD rom of encycolpedia britanica. ( Because even in 1994, and even tho my dad was a programmer, we didn't have a cool computer. ) But then it got worse. I went from listening to the bubble-gummy stuff like " strawberry fields forever" or " help" to listening to "revolution" "let it be" or "imagine". On a school night in 7th grade I set my alarm for 2 am to watch the Imagine documentary on Vh1. After I had seen this hairy British man in hazy white with his little Japanese wife, I knew I was in love. I idolized this man. I never told anyone because it was embarrassing to have a crush on a dead hippie who was old enough to be my grandpa even. I learned the chords to a lot of his songs and played them on my cassio keyboard ad nauseum. I had this saintly ideal of this guy...that all he *really* wanted was world peace and that everyone was lying when he said he did drugs. ( I was a really, really, really, naive & sheltered kid ). This secret crush lasted until 9th grade when I guess I started to like "real boys". In my developmental psyc class they said stuff like this is totally normal, esp. with some girls. They either a) sublimate into other activities, b) find older boys to whore themselves out to or c) have these imaginary crushes. This is why crap magazines like Tiger Beat are still in exsistance. I would so much like to forget middle school ever exsisted, but I know that even though I think my experience was so weird and lonely ( read: John Coker stealing my winnie-the-pooh keychain and making a fur coat for his power ranger i'll never forget that you bastard ), I shouldn't discount it because it shaped who I am today. I feel more empathy for kids that age. I think I would be suited well to work with kids that age since the memory of what that age was like is still fresh even though it was 10-12 years ago.

So that was random. Just something I was thinking about last night when I couldn't sleep in my 85 degree bedroom.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.