december 29, 1999
ohh it's almost y2k...i'm preparing the bomb shelter in my basement as we speak, filling it full of vegetarian chili and pokemon keychains. or at least that is what everyone was doing at wal-mart a few minutes ago. tonight i went and bought a present for my mom cos she is going to be forty-seven years old. and i also bought a big box of crayons so that we can all color together like we did when i was a little kid. just an idea..being a little kid was so cool. actually, i still am a little kid, and i'll continue to be a little kid until the day i die, even if i'm a hundred when that happens.
i don't think my mom is too thrilled about turning forty-seven. maybe it's cos society tries to tell us so much that everyone over the age of forty is half-senile and oh so out-of-style. i just don't understand that...if anything, age should be respected. rather than worrying about how many "ugly" lines we have on our faces or something shallow like that, why can't people think about how much they have gotten to see in their time here? forty-seven years is such a long time..and we're lucky to be able to stick around that long in the first place. beethoven never got to tell anyone he was forty-seven. neither did jesus. neither did my cat joe babe. anyway..it's like, there's so many ways that we could be taken away from here soo fast, and people complain about the fact that they haven't encountered any of those ways yet. my mom said in october that now i am eleven years away from being thirty, like it was something bad. but what is bad about that? especially when i think of the times when i could have been killed had one tiny little thing happened differently. i'm very thankful to be nineteen, and i will be very thankful to be thirty or forty or any age. when my tiny little violin players ask me how old i am, i won't be one to tell them their question was rude.
and an addition..i just can't wait..the person who will know me best during all those years to come is going to be sitting here this time tomorrow. we will color together under the christmas lights, i can see it! and everything will shimmer even when the lights have been turned off.

december 28, 1999
there is someone sleeping miles away who puts me in such awe...
when his eyes are locked with mine, i can't seem to wipe the smile from my face. it's permanent, just like the happiness i feel that only fades when we have to get on the interstate going in separate directions. i would have run away yesterday..far away, him by my side. and the strange thing is i've never even considered that before; but yesterday, that pull was just so strong, and today it has the same force. if we could touch our noses together and just stay there for good, my eyes would be happy forever.

december 25, 1999
i've been away..down in the lovely city (ha!) of mobile, alabama. not to offend anyone from mobile, cos most of the people i met there were living examples of southern hospitality, but that place just sucks. and on top of that our team lost the bowl game...yeah, it was definitely worth those 30-some hours on a bus.
christmas this year shone brighter than ever, thanks to the darkness of the one last year. i had begun to hate christmas..in my eyes it was just another excuse for the stores to make money. that was until an ice storm came and closed all the stores for the week of christmas. there were no gaudy decorations and no stupid commercials. there was no heat or light, either, and when you looked outside all you saw was blackness closing in on the ice crystals. on christmas eve the four of us sang carols along with our dying battery-operated radio, all curled up next to the kerosene heater. early the next morning we got up and cooked a huge christmas dinner on that heater and on the grill outside, and we brought it around to our neighbors cos they didn't have any food. and everything was so quiet that you could hear what christmas is really about. now, a year later, it's music that still rings in my ears..so for a change, i am happy today. and i hope the same is true for you, too. *merry christmas*

december 16, 1999
hi, i'm christina. i play trombone.
i went to the flea market today, you know, the one that has all the old books and wine glasses and record players? the one that is made out of an old railroad station? it is a good place to go to find national geographics from the 20's, and jazz records from the 20's, and even people from back then, too. one time i listened to a guy there. he drove a tank in world war II. a lady almost drove a minivan into my car today. we were both scared..too involved in the internal quest for the perfect food for dinner. spinach and cheese and fillo dough and music out of tune..such a great way to cap off a day. and the morning will resound in fantasy once again.
hi, i'm christina. please listen to my song.

december 6, 1999
sometimes there are storms..they might last a week or even a year. who knows, really? but something that is known is that they end. sometimes they will do nothing but slosh you around and send you off course so that you don't know exactly where you are headed. all you can think of is where you have been and you wish to get back there, but it never happens. sometimes though, it happens in reverse, when you're going the wrong way and wishing you knew how to get back to the place you were going or at least to the place from which you began. and then something comes along and changes your course. huddling up against the cold and afraid of the things you do not know for sure, waiting, and when you think you have lost something suddenly it finds you. you run right into it hard, but strangely it doesn't hurt. when everything looks to be crashing down, sometimes it is really just being rebuilt.