It's a nice thing to wake up in the morning and realize that you like your feet. I think a person's level of respect for themself can be usually be guaged by their attitude towards their feet, unless they just have really, really hideous ones or unbelievably perfect ones, in which case their attitude is probably just rational. It's a good indicator because nobody can see what their feet actually look like after living with them for so long, and because the whole thing is so subjective anyway.

Despite this realization, I'm getting my period again, I might also be getting sick, and my last few days in the city are already so packed that I'm blowing people off, snapping at Harry, trying to get my relatives to do my errands and getting a bit tense in general. I like my feet, but I've been abusing them trying to break in sandals and cover hundreds of blocks at the same time.

I'd rather be busy than bored, though, and it looks like the rest of my summer will continue in the same fashion.

I've seen some really beautiful tattoos lately. I have such an itch to get a small sweet black tattoo in some elegant secret place! But I wouldn't trust any artist with my body who would be willing to do the job, since I'm underage and there's no way my parents would ever sign a permission slip for me. When I'm eighteen I'll go to a convention and find an artist who I trust and flip my ID and show my pattern and grit my teeth and do it.

When I was a freshman I wrote a series of stories about a man driving a blue car across America and all of the strange people he encounters. I found a few of them the other day and was shocked at how well I could see their flaws. They were conceptually strong, but I could have made them so much more subtle and enticing with a few small changes, maybe a shift in perspective, refined metaphors, etc. It's easy to forget that you've been writing seriously for four years, not four weeks, and that you may have changed over that interval. I hadn't realized how much I'd improved.

My roommate at Iowa calls herself a sci-fi screenwriter. I don't know what to expect. The email she sent me was somewhat blunt, but I made sure to send a nice one back to make her know that I'm not going to judge her for her subject matter.

Anyway, I have to go to work.