The Right to Bare Arms
It was the first week of July when I began to read A Farewell to Arms and I was in Vermont at the time. I began to notice soon things that I hadn't noticed before. I did not read very carefully but I read often because I did not have a lot to do in Vermont.
I came home to Massachusetts. The good weather became hotter and wetter but I did not notice.
A week after I came back I ran out of clean clothes and did the laundry in the washing machine and when I hung up my clothes they did not dry for twenty-four hours. It did not rain during that day but the constant humidity made it difficult to dry. I needed to do two batches of laundry because I could not fit all of my dirty clothes in the washing machine at once. Two days later I did the second batch of laundry and hung the clothes outside to dry and they dried in less than three hours.
Last night my father was in his bad mood. He yelled a lot and did not seem to understand the English language when it was in spoken form because he refused to listen to what I said. He insisted loudly that I clean my room the following morning and vacuum it because of the mess that was in there and I agreed because he would not be at peace otherwise. He continued to talk loudly and rudely but he stopped when I went to bed. He is in this mood often.
I woke up after a strange dream and knew from the footsteps that more than one other person was awake. Outside of my room I saw that my sister was already up and knew that it was quite late into the morning so I went to the bathroom and got dressed and retired to my room to clean it. I picked up much from the floor and found in the mess some things that I had lacked and cost me trouble in the past but were now useless. I used plastic bags to collect trash and I filled up two bags with the papers from my junior year. Too many things cluttered my big desk with drawers and I continued to pile important papers on it that were not useful immediately but had memories attached.
I did not work for long and came out of my room to view my torrent progress but my sister was on the torrenting computer so I checked the GameFAQs contest instead. My contest bracket has no chance of winning but I was happy to see that Street Fighter was winning so easily and I spent several hours gloating and then had lunch. I continued to read A Farewell to Arms but did not play piano because of the heat. I cannot progress much in piano when the weather is too hot to concentrate and today was one of such days. I hung up the second batch of laundry outside.
Before dinner I watched four episodes of Full Metal Alchemist. The series is very juvenile but the simplicity of it is appealing and I enjoyed watching it while chatting with Andrew with whom I had not talked since the 24 marathon. Then I had dinner in the kitchen. My forehead was damp and dripping and little droplets formed on the ground like the unrealistic tears in anime when characters cry, but it was my pores and not my eyes that oozed the water slowly.
Dinner was at seven-thirty and the lights were on but they only cast a yellowish tint on the kitchen because the western sun cast sufficient light into the room. While we ate the subject of my sister's room came up and my father again fell into his persisting bad mood so I tried to appease him by cleaning my room for the next two hours while my sister sat in her room and did nothing. I sorted my belongings and re-organized and cleaned out my shelves and put the Yu-Gi-Oh! cards together and the textbooks together and the binders and the pencils and the pens and in the process I filled up several more trash bags. he dust which was at dangerous levels came into my lungs and made me sneeze so much I began to regret joking about dying from dust when I looked for my learner's permit. When I breaked for the evening it was very dark and my room was cleaner than it had been since I began high school. The floor was unvacuumed still but I could at least reach my writing materials and sentimental belongings on my nightstand without knocking over useless mechanical pencils and lifting too much dust.
Tomorrow my sister will leave for her camp and I have no regrets of not seeing her. She has offended me too much in recent months for me to want to see her still.
Tomorrow is Monday.
SD
July 16, '06
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