A friend of mine once asked me why I don't post about everything I do.

This is why:

I dragged myself out of bed this morning at about 10:30 am. It was a bit rough since I hadn't gone to sleep until four. I hadn't been up late for academic reasons, like most of my friends. I had been up reading The Briar King by Greg Keyes that he had given me at the Comic-Convention. (Admission to the Con: $50 dollars. Cafeteria-style food court pizza: $5. Watching Mr. Keyes show a little too much interest in Brian Young: Priceless.)

I took a shower. I scrounged up some breakfast. I put on Puccini's La Boheme (the opera I think Moulin Rouge is very loosely based on) and cracked open my Italian homework. After about 20 minutes of La Boheme I got annoyed and put on Verdi's Aida. I'm really not familiar with opera at all but I do know that I am starting to dig this Verdi guy. I'm sure he'll go far.

So I completed my Italian homework, but barely. I'm in 201 but I have forgotten more than I'm even sure I learned. ("So what do your people call all these noodles with meatballs in tomato sauce?") My class begins at 1:00, so I head out at about 12:30. It's not a very interesting drive, all freeway. But I rock out as best as I can on my way there. It is difficult since all my speakers are blown except for on my front driver's side, but that's all I need. (Note: Watch MTV with the volume turned all the way down. This is what you look like when you are singing in your car.)

Class goes fairly well. I learn a lot (it's called spaghetti.) There is a girl in my class, Erin, who has sort of a tribal sea turtle tattooed on her foot. I like it. It makes me think a tribal sea turtle might look pretty hip on my right shoulder. Maybe.

Back in Real Time: My roommate's cat Sashimi has just gotten stuck to the Batman costume hanging up in my closet. That's what you get, cat. Her brother, Rorshak, which is mine, knows better than to paw at my stuff. You would think Rorshak would know better than to try to keep getting outside, but no, he still tries to leap out of the door everytime I come in the house and I have to punt him back inside like a little furry football. (Note: This is the same Batman costume that Eric Piatkowski would run across Mill Avenue in back in the old apartment days.

So class ends, I go home, pick up my resume and go apply for a job. It seems to go well. They ask me why I was fired from my last job. I stick to my story in case they check with my past employers.

I stop by my parent's house on my way home. No one is there. Undaunted, I fix myself an early dinner and watch the end of "That 70's Show" while I eat. The quiet of the house gets to me. A couple of weeks ago when my younger brother Donaldo was home on leave the place had been downright bustling, just lousy with family. A couple of days after he left for Fort Benning, Georgia, my little sister, Barbara, had left to go to college in Mexico for six months. Now the Lopez children in the state of Arizona number only three. It sucks. A lot.

Ah, well, more food for me.

I returned to my home. I posted something, I think. Then I fell asleep. It wasn't a very good sleep.

I dream: I wake up in a hospital bed, completely alone. The palms of my hands are all torn up, but don't appear to have been treated at all. They aren't even bandaged. I leave the hospital and wander the city streets. Night is falling. I wander aimlessly, holding my hands palms up and away from my body so that blood doesn't get on my pajama bottoms. No one else is around, it's just me trudging down the streets. An IV bag is still attached to me somewhere, and it trails on the ground behind me. From a distance I might look like a pathetic little kid stubbornly dragging along a deflated red balloon.

My hands hurt, not dream hurt but an actual burning and I don't like it. I realize I'm dreaming at this point and my hands shouldn't really be hurting so I try to wake up using a trick I learned. I shut my eyes tight and then open them again. Usually this causes me to open them in real life as well since I'm a pseudo-sleepwalker.

It doesn't work this time.

I awake eventually, of course. It's almost 11:00 pm when I do. Mai-linh and I watch Futurama. "If rubbin' frozen dirt in your crotch is wrong, then I don't wanna be right." Heh heh, penguins with guns are also funny.

I head over to Brian Young's house where I should have been earlier since we all go to Rock Bottom off of Ray and the I-10 almost every Thursday (Pint Night.) It's right by Brian's house so we usually walk over there and then stumble back. I drop off an application I picked up for my friend David Dobell and in exchange he returns my copy of From Hell, which I grudgingly take back. It's not bad, technically it's amazing, but it really doesn't appeal to me. It's also nothing like the movie, I'm told (and I believe it, since I've seen and was incredibly disappointed by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, based on another Alan Moore work by the same name.)

I stopped by my parent's house again to find my older brother Miguel still awake. He lent me a copy of 1602 by Neil Gaiman. (These are all comics, by the way; everything I've mentioned with the exception of the Briar King is a comic.)

So I read that, and some more Briar King. I'm still halfway through The Art of Happiness that Dan Roche gave me. It's unusual for me to leave a book unfinished. I can count how many times on one hand: Six. But Dan still has my Dostoyevsky, so I'm holding the Dalai Lama for ransom. I got yer non-violence right here!

Then I laid in bed thinking about another book, The Truth About Taffy Sinclair. It's a book I read a long time ago about a girl in fifth grade who is an aspiring actress/model and is disliked by some of her peers but believes herself to be just "misunderstood." Misunderstood. Ha. There are words for girls like her.

But I was thinking about this book because I have acquired my sister's book collection since she left. It's an eclectic mix, much like my little library, ranging from Brave New World, The Chronicles of Narnia, Oedipus the King, My Teacher Glows in the Dark, and a whole bunch of Goosebumps books and a lot of sci-fi stuff by Hugo-award winning Orson Scott Card.

And of course, our old friend Taffy Sinclair.

But that book stands out because I read it at the same time as I read The Prophecies of Nostradamus and Life After Life ( a book that claimed to offer proof of life after death.) I was quite the indiscriminate reader. Taffy Sinclair and Nostradamus were on equal footing at that time in my life, both offering their take on what life and the world were all about.

I guess all those books had a common thread: they scared me.

And now I'm still at my house, writing. It's almost 6:00 am.

Again, in answer to your question, this is why I don't post about everything I do.