!!!

shelly has a livejournal!
this has all officially become too eerie.
i want A.I., it's on the in-house movie channel when i wake up in the middle of the night.
i want Home Alone, it's playing on TBS the following evening.
i want multivitamins, and there in the boonies of Butler Plaza the GNC neon sign winks at me in invite right next to Barnes&Noble.
i want to play Tribal Dance, it's in the new machine in the Reitz Arcade.
i want to call home, and very literally the next second my phone rings and it's my mum on the other end.
i want to ask jack to track down one of the few truly cool people i've met in a long time, and she e-mails me with a livejournal comment.

not that i'm complaining, mind any and all who's listening. it's just, i don't know, eerie to think that someone may well in fact be watching,...

on being -digitally- fingerprinted at the joint INS/FBI office

they just clean my fingers with some Windex and individually put them on a clear plate on what looks for all the world like a Xerox machine and there it is, on the screen, the things perhaps the most unique about me in all the world. there was even a special red-tinted plate for my thumbs and index fingers. can't even begin to guess what else besides my fingerprints that can read.
they say you can tell what part of Earth a person is from by the features of their fingerprints. i wonder if i have typically eastern european fingerprints.
...i wonder how much of what we see in the movies is simply a figment of someone's imagination.

thoughts over shrimp linguini

so i'm sitting here in red lobster drafting my linguistics paper over lunch, and my waitress, who regardless of my having completed my meal at least 10 minutes ago and already paid my bill, keeps swinging by: would i like some more water, was everything alright with the food, etc. and not in that irksome manner that some try to veil with niceties and false concerns as to our satisfaction so they can get the table cleared already; she was genuinely earnest and kind, truly out for others' happiness. she's making me ashamed of my own sarcastic ways even as i'm trying to compose a paper just on that topic. she seems so patiently set on being able to help me if i could only figure out what's missing. and i wonder about that, if we were all a little more like that, less dismissive and irrespective of others' needs, wants, humanity even. it's one of the things i didn't like about atlanta - everyone walked either with their head up, looking straight ahead at some unseen destination but striving toward it relentlessly nonetheless, or with their eyes turned down on the sidewalk in front of their feet. either way, no one smiled, no one greeted, no one spoke or laughed or, god forbid, actually looked at anyone. so many looked broken or tired, the fire of dreams that lights up people's eyes gone from theirs, and no one caring enough to notice, too wrapped up in trying to keep the same thing from happening to them. i can't think of a big city as heartless like that though, and so i'll go on another idealistic diatribe and keep at the hoping against hope bit. because that's what i do.