The greyness is creeping like tendrils into my consciousness. But stealthily, steadily. And at the edge of my soul, I feel a nagging, a discomfort somehow.

I'm not happy with the pears. In fact, I hate them. Another student (who is an artist) gave me some tips on how to fix them, but I'm not optimistic.

I think that's the hardest thing about life. You go on your way, making mistakes, and you never get to erase them or to tear up the paper or shatter the badly formed pottery and make a new one. People talk about second chances, but this is an illusion, because it isn't a new canvas, it's the same one smeared with layers of old, despicable mistakes, and you can't paint something new and fresh, you can only add to what's already there. It's supremely frustrating.

People who know me well always say that I don't talk enough. I think I talk entirely too much. I think out loud. I don't censor my thoughts before I say them. They're disjointed. Or sometimes, I substitute entire words, unintentionally. Spoken language is a very difficult media.

Hope. People talk a lot about hope, as though it's some panacea for mankind. Frankly, I'm skeptical. I think hope is like the promise of a new beginning, more or less the same thing. Which is to say, it doesn't really exist. Hopeful promising things don't fall out of the sky and save our ass or bring new meaning to life and help evrything to make sense. What happens is that occasionally we get a slightly different color for our palette and we're so godawful excited about it that we feel liberated, until reality sets in again.

I think I need to cut my hair.