a conversation i just had with joyce:

j: talking to the german guy's brother is like drinking water
p: then talking to me must be like drinking soy sauce
j: then talking to me must be like...something equally unhealthy
p: yo, come with me and jesse to china in the fall
j: but...i can't speak german
p: um, i don't think they speak german in china
j: i would never survive in china anyway
p: no, food is really cheap there so we'd just eat all day and get all fat and happy
j: but i thought you were supposed to be preaching the gospel, not eating all their resources
j: ...the less we have to do, the worse our conversations get

going to other people's xanga sites and seeing them have five thousand people under the sites they read makes me feel like a loser with no friends. oh well, to cheer myself up i can always go to mitc pan's xanga. i mean, cause it's so cheerful, not cause he has no friends, cause he has millions.

quote n+m+r+3 from the BHOT:

carolyn: mah bootie's the finest bootie in the world!

don't tell me you can't hear her saying that, with that little head shaking thing...mine eyes...

i tried to randomly get from west coast to east coast on people's xangas, to see if i could go from someone i know on the west coast to someone i know on the east coast. didn't work though. dunno what to make of the xanga phenomenon, love/hate i suppose, like with korean girls, just kidding. though i did notice that people from both sides are part of the asian american christian blogring, that's pretty cool.

i just realized that yesterday all i ate all day was french fries, popcorn, more french fries, crackers, cereal, and more crackers. i think i pooed one big fiber.

that little thing on the right in the picture on the xanga thing is dave's hat...no ear could be that big or stick out so narrowly. disclaimer: i joined xanga just to comment on other people's xangas. ok so it lets me get away with some self-promotion. oh, i'm shameless...and a bad father...and i'm fat too!

i love this song, don't change your plans by ben folds:

you have made me smile again
in fact, i might be sore from it

all i really wanna say
is you're the reason i wanna stay
but destiny is calling and won't hold
and when my time is up i'm outta here
all i know is i've gotta be
where my heart says i oughta be
it often makes no sense, in fact
i never understand these things,
i feel

i love you, goodbye
i love you, goodbye...


of course i have no one to apply this to, heh. and it's not like i'm going anywhere. heh. well hopefully i'll be in china next year, teaching english or something. and if so, i guess jesse could be getting a serenade...

it's 2:30 am right now and i'm worried about being able to wake up for an 11:30 lunch tomorrow. a couple days ago, me and eric went to sleep before jesse and steve came home at nite and woke up after they left the apt in the morning. i've posted on the blogspot three times this week. i am definitely a college grad with no job.

quote n + m + r + 2 from the BHOT:

eric, late at night: where's jesse? i bet he has a secret life, frolicking in the city with some girl right now
pete: no, mitch is asleep already

quote number n + m + r from the BHOT:

eric (to carolyn, on why she got together with her boyfriend in 8th grade): he was hot and you were horny

quote number n + m + r + 1:

eric: drawing a winky face on a note to somebody is basically like proposing marriage

there are three facts which juxtapose to form one inescapable conclusion:

one, my grandparents on my dad's side spoke fluent japanese, which leads me to assume that they were in taiwan during the japanese occupation of taiwan in the earlier half of the 20th century, so they preceded the chinese nationalist emigration of the 1950s.

two, the first wave of mainland chinese immigrants entering taiwan in the late 1600s was a group of chinese pirates fleeing the newly instated Qing emperor Kangxi.

three, i'm developing a ring around my stomach and getting fatter by the minute.

the conclusion: 'TIS NOT A MAN, 'TIS AN EATING MACHINE!

jesse's right, this xanga madness is too much. i know he thinks that cause he wrote it on his xanga site, not cause he said it to me. really though, it's too much.

if there's something here that doesn't seem to make sense, it's probably either a simpsons or calvin and hobbes reference.

i think i'm too much of a malcontent to ever get married. it's difficult for me to lose myself in the company of another person...experiences and stuff are valuable, but it's like i take what i can from them and then withdraw into myself, or i'm thinking 'ok...what next?' not to sound callous or bored, but it's like i'm on edge, waiting for the next milestone to happen. ok, i have no idea what the hell i'm talking about.

ok, it's like this. i was talking to someone about this the other day...i was thinking about how sometimes you have special friendships with people, no matter if you haven't seen them in a long time or haven't talked or whatever (yeah yeah, i know everybody thinks about this in college). i don't mean you're the most important person in that person's life, just that you have a special connection that's different from other relationships. maybe you have just a tiny tiny piece of that person, but it's still a piece that no one else has; the most obvious examples of these relationships to me are my family and extended family. then i wondered, maybe that's what heaven is like, and why Jesus said there's no marriage in heaven, because everyone has a special unique piece of everyone else, and it's not twisted and weird cause everything's pure and our souls will be infinite; then we will know fully and be fully known. please God don't strike me down for taking that verse out of context. the point is, maybe that's the only thing that'll make me content, to construct the perfect match for myself out of little pieces of other people. alrite, it's midnite, time to put the crack pipe away.

meanwhile, i have no job. i might go apply at peet's coffee on shattuck and vine, someone told me they have an opening. what if they hire me cause my name is pete? that would be the saddest moment of my entire existence. like after i was born, i could've stuck my head up my ass and stayed like that for 21 years and still have gotten the same job.

a strange thing happened last week when i went in to 'the other change of hobbit' (a fantasy/sci-fi book store) to apply for a job. the lady at the counter looked at me and asked me what i knew about science fiction and fantasy, so i spent the next few moments trying to convince her that i was nerdier than anyone else who'd want to work there. of course, there wasn't much source material to work with...i mean, did i say moments? i meant hours!

does eric really have to sleep naked?

a friend of mine told me a few weeks ago that the husband of our piano teacher (from 3rd grade to 9th grade, when they moved to ohio) passed away. today i got a call from my mom; she told me that he had committed suicide. she's sending me my teacher's address tomorrow so i can send her my condolences.

what should i say? i'm not sure what to make of this. i never knew him very well but he was always friendly to his wife's students. our families were on good terms; a couple of times he took me to the local tennis club and we played some tennis, just the two of us, where he toned down his game a few thousand levels. he used to be a professional tennis player but i guess he never succeeded very far. they were childless; my sister visited them a few months ago in ohio and said she got the impression that they were sad because they had no kids.

i think i'm gonna send her lament for a son, a book written by a christian professor after his son died while hiking in europe. i know it's good for grieving people but i'm not sure how much comfort she would find in it...it's such a twist that his life wasn't taken away by accident.

i spent about 20 hours over the past two days looking at a tv. yesterday i watched 5 movies in a row with jenny liu (2 more than i've ever done before) and today i drove back to philly and vegged in the house doing nothing all day. now i'm gonna eat 63 slices of american cheese and go blind.

being in the east coast makes me feel kind of like david eggers in AHWOSG (on a much smaller scale and without all the sex). ug, what a pretentious comparison. i mean, cause berkeley is so different from here, and i've run across a bunch of random people from high school and before in the past couple weeks.

can't process. time to bed.

following are my new, revised uncompromisable requirements for my future bitsy pookums (the first two are old):

1. must have a pretty name
2. must smell good
3. must love calvin and hobbes (not the philosophers)*

* if said girl is unfamiliar with calvin and hobbes, she must love them upon first reading and proceed to devour the entire series. i mean, we wouldn't even have to talk to each other! on any given day i could open up to a strip, point to it, and say, 'this is how i'm feeling about the state of my life right now.' well i guess that's talking. boo.

(that was a joke.)

(it must mean something that i felt like i had to point out the joke above, for fear that people would actually believe that i won't want to have to talk to my future pooty pie.)

(if you understand those nicknames, i want to marry you. no, not you, jesse.)

by the way, i'm done with college. it is now that i face the greatest crossroads of my life: do i open a boba truck with joan (possibly called bobalicious) and drive around the US to different college campuses, or do i move to bavaria and open a cheese farm with joyce? i think i need to pray about this.

jesse went home thursday, steve went home yesterday, and dave moved out today, which means that i'm alone in the apartment for the nite. hm, it's 3:30 in the morning and nothing gay or moronic has happened yet...oh well, there's always tomorrow nite.

Two quotes, from two great minds, along the same lines of thought:

'I have become an enigma to myself, and therein lies my sickness.'
-Augustine

'Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, Where have I gone wrong?
Then a voice says to me, This is going to take more than one night.'
-Charlie Brown

So where have I gone wrong; have I even gone wrong somewhere? Why does everything seem so bittersweet these days? That's kind of how I feel about California, like it's a land of mystery, most of which I'll never discover. Stuart Hampshire, the priggish English philosopher we're forced to read for Philosophy 2, actually had an interesting point about how certain places, or certain sights, or certain scenes freeze in our mind and make us feel happy and yearning at the same time, as if they touch some long-lost and possibly never-realized part of our memory. Maybe it's sweet because of the good times I had with people, or myself, and bitter cause they're unrecoverable.

I used to go up to the top of the Campanile (before it closed down) and stare across the bay at Mt Tamalpais. Sometimes the bottom half would be covered in clouds or fog so only the top was showing, floating in the sky, and it felt like something magical must have been happening on the mountain. Later I would drive there and hike to the edge of the ocean and stare across the water. The sea was always so calm and expansive and I wondered if there was a giant Poseidon-type guy who lived miles offshore and made really huge splashes in the water, just for fun, when nobody was looking. The point of this silliness is that sometimes it feels like the exciting, mystical things are on the edge of my vision, and I can never turn my head quite fast enough to catch them.

I just realized that I've been capitalizing the beginning of every sentence...I must be in a damn serious mood...better stop before somebody gets injured.