phenomenon world." -"Asteroids", from the wonderful smattering of 20's jazz and breezy electronic beats, "The Real Tuesday Weld: When Cupid Meets Psyche".

I suppose that's a sort of predictably-favorite lyric from the gayest straight man in the world.

I've got some stray Euro sitting here on the desk. To my right, a lantern is sitting on the floor. The door doesn't work and the hinges squeal against the glass and I love it. Outside the lantern are taped two frames: inside one is a faded old love-letter. You can't read the words very well and in some parts the writing has faded completely. I can still smell the perfume on it. There's a border of feathers.

On the other side is a frame of my friend Laura, who I'm sure you've recognized from other entries. The photograph is of her standing in the ocean on the shore of Cinque Terre. The border is feathers.

On the front glass door of the lantern are two vertical rows of Italian love poetry.

Inside the lantern is a small black box. Inside that lies a green velvet interior. On a bed of feathers rests several small scrolls. These are poems and are written about the two muses who flank the lantern. They are mixed but are both my written responses to some form of love or another, be it romantic or just friendliness, but still, sub-genres of the same emotion.

On the top of the lantern reads a torn piece of paper saying "corpo".

The door has a scrap that says "mente".

The box, on the lid, has a scrap that reads "cuore".

That's body, mind, heart, respectively.

The writing was done with a glass quill that the ex-girlfriend gave me, dipped in the same bottle of ink included with the pen. The paper written on was bought in a small stationary store in Italy.

Truth be told, it's not much to look at, but the emotions just saturate it. I tried to be symmetrical although some people function better without it. I myself like the yin/yang of balance, but sometimes it seems like the sidewalk is a tightrope.

It's 12:45 and today I took a nap on my dad's den floor alone in the house in Aurora while it rained outside and the Sigur Ros song that I hastily downloaded repeated on the static-crushed office speakers. No pillow, even, but it felt good. Woke up and drove home gathering a new appriciation for Bjork's promo release of "Vespertine".

My chest feels warm. My cuts from wiping out mountain-boarding over the weekend are healing rather well. Graduation papers have been filed, and tomorrow is a long, long day. Class until 5, physics review at 6-8:30, and then a small gathering directly after that until who knows when. I have to sleep so that I can be rested for this week, though - it seems that most people give up social interactions, just for this week, and maybe it almost makes it sweeter when the work finally falls away and you're left with nothing but summer and the friends you've made. All I can say is that this final summer here will stick to me sweet like sugar or sap, like the sun on closed eyelids. It's a golden haze but at the same time I'll walk out of it like every other stage of my life, since I have to. I might go teach english in Italy at the end of the summer thanks to the prowness of Laura's job-hunting skills. I'm going somewhere. I miss the people already, but not the town. I certainly don't hate it but I need to travel more, even if just inside the USA on an anonymous road trip.

I miss you, and you, and you.

I miss my brother.

Man, everyone I've ever met, just come over.

not possibly enough space in this house for that, though,

Jared