"Q: What do the Enron execs eat for a breakfast? A: Shredded Wheats," said the homeless man who asked rebecca and i for money. we didn't give him any.

running so so behind. and yeah that is nothing new. not at all. but today, it was about twenty minutes behind the time that i needed to leave that i finally left my house for work. roaring down the streets, trying to get to the metro, knowing that i would just miss a train if i did not hurry, ignoring the low coolant warning light blinking like mad. my car is really bobo and on its last legs, and has a hole in something important and expensive (the two are not neccesarily synonomous). and so every time i have to drive, i have to refill it with coolant. and if i don't, the car overheats, steams like mad, or just stops running. basically trouble. big trouble. and, i was praying that none of these horrible things would happen since i was already so so late. and none of them did, thank god.

i get there and a train is just pulling up. ready to get on the train, waiting for it to come to a stop and - "CHARLIE!" - turn around real confused to see who is calling my name and of all people, i see ty. i mentally rolled my eyes, dreading having to talk to ty on the metro, but smiled and said hi, knowing that i would have to talk to him on the metro.

it wasn't that bad talking to him. it was actually pretty fun, and he even gave me a sort of compliment, saying that i looked grown-up, but quickly followed by saying that i didn't look like a little boy anymore. thanks ty. ty was on his way to work too. appearantly he is a ballroom dance instructor at arthur-murray's, which seems very weird. we talked about mary, who appearantly is moving back to va permanently to live with ty. and she was in rehab for a semester last year, unbeknowest to me, but ty, never one to concern himself with privacy, spilled all the details about mary's life to me.

i only got to work about ten mintues late, which is not so bad. no granola boy today. but sharon was working, this little hippy girl who just graduated from gwu. she's such a rad girl. rebecca thinks she's so cool, and likes to talk about her a lot. cause she's that nice and cool. but today was the last day that i am going to work with her since she is starting a real 9-5 job at the end of this week.

rebecca came to visit me at work and asked if i wanted to go see a movie. fucks yeah. so, i spent a good half an hour talking to rebecca, looking at the movie listings, and then talking to rebecca and sharon. it had to be a movie that would get out before twelve and also at a theater near a metro stop. we decided to go see metropolis at foundry (the $3 theater). i said something about the rossyln stop, and sharon was like oh no no, you get off at foggy bottom, and so we got her to give us directions from foggy bottom to the movies. she said is was just a 5 minute walk.

i worked for a couple more hours, and then met rebecca at the foggy bottom metro stop. i pulled out the map sharon drew for us, we walked three blocks to our right, made a left for a block, and then walked three blocks to our left. visualize this. it is a big circle and a big waste of time, and sharon's directions were grade a not helpful. we eventually made it to the theater, and watched this really fun anime japanese film. rebecca dozed off during parts. if i was more tired i probably would have too. some of the scenes in the middle were just plain unexciting. but most of them was kick-ass awesome. and it dealt with fun old noir issues of the city and dealt with paranoia about machinery, and insecurity about the role of man in an industrial world. real fun stuff. and there are so many things i want to talk about with this movie, but i doubt anyone's seen it and so my comments would be sort of boring.

but whatever, the robot that they build to be the ruler of their city is a blonde, blue-eyed girl. all the other characters are dark-haired and dark-eyed. fun construtction of ideals of beauty issues here. some really awesome comic-book style extended still shots. and the last line of the movie: "who am i?" - subtitles allowed the movie to get away with this. could you imagine an american movie trying to end with "who am i?," people would huff and puff and laugh like they knew better under their breath, and just think it was real cheesy - subtitles always give films an air of gravitas - and i know that this lies completely with my own fucked-up self for thinking that foriegn equals better, but i know i'm not the only one, i think everyone grants subtitled films more dignity or something. but anyways this movie pulled off the existential line so well.

and we walked back to the metro station, no trees around, cars zooming by us on m street, throngs of impersonal people, buildings built on top of one another, road crew doing construction on the road with big loud machines, and i was somewhere amongst all of this, i don't know where - i don't know if my identity was compromised by the urban chaos around me, and this is all so pre-WWII, but whatever - that's my favorite era for movies - and the question still remains, an unanswered i love you, the pause to think about the beauty of the statement and whether or not it should be responded to with another i love you, or if it should just be left to float out there in the air, a slowly passing cloud or a lingering fart - either way, the question remains: who am i?