I want to not be sick anymore. I came home from Reno with a now-familiar and extremely attractive bronchial wheeze. Yuck.

I want that dolt in my Shakespeare class to pay me a quarter every time she uses the word "like" extra-grammatically.

I want ice cream.

I want to understand the concept of growth and decay factors for my math class.

I want to rewrite my in-class mid-term essay for Shakespeare. I got an A on the test, but when I looked back at the essay I was absolutely appalled. Usually, I pride myself on my grammar and diction. But expository writing is definitely not my cup of tea, and I didn't have very much time, so I ended up shifting tenses a lot. I find that terribly upsetting.

I want to get rid of the feeling of having kicked a stray puppy. Every time I see him he has a look of abject misery on his face. I want to scream at him, "IS THERE ANY WAY YOU COULD BE CONVINCED TO GROW THE FUCK UP?" I want to erase that experience from my memory. I want it to be gone. I want it to never have happened, for his sake and mine.

I want to go back in time and see what might have been with that one leading man, even if he was six years older than me.

I want the receptionist job I'm going to apply for tomorrow.

I want a good night's sleep, and to remember my dreams.

Why, hello.

If you're reading this, you're probably either a friend of mine, or a complete stranger. If you fall into the former category, you can probably go ahead and skip this entry, because all I'm going to do is tell the people in the latter category stuff about me that you already know. For instance, that my name is Jamie, and I'm 21 years old, and I'm going to be a writer when I grow up. Right now, I'm attending a local community college in pursuit of that goal. I love Italian food, my mommy, and geeky little piano men. When I was a year old, the lenses were removed from my eyes because medical technology had not advanced far enough to be able to separate a cataract from a lens. I was in the hospital for a week. It's an outpatient procedure now. Bastards.

I don't drive, and since I live out in the middle of Bumblefuck, that really sucks. I recently quit my job at a gym, which required me to get up at 3:30 am in order to be at work by 5:15. That's not the reason I quit, though--y'know the feeling of having reached your crap-saturation level? That's why I quit. I took a trip to Reno last weekend, and after seeing about 50,000 wrinkled, faded, withered old women, playing the nickel slots, chain-smoking, and ordering Scotch-on-the-rocks after martini after whiskey-and-water, I've also decided to quit smoking. Being in that town was an unbelievable eye-opener. My best friend and I, along with my older sister and sixteen of my best friend's female family members, stayed at the Hilton and walked the strip until around 3:00 am for two consecutive days. Constantly bombarded by cigarette smoke, horny drunk guys, offers of free alcohol, and my best friend's aunt's loud, blatantly sexual comments, I yearned for the relative quiet of our 27th-floor hotel room. Don't get me wrong--I had a great time. I flirted with cute bartenders, caught some pretty nice buzzes, ate some great food and saw some really cool stuff (anyone ever been to the Pepper Mill? Everything's blue and green neon lights and disco-ball-looking ceilings, and they have a bar with fish tanks full of exotic fish all along the walls, and a bar with a fire pit, and there's a waterfall every twenty minutes in the buffet area). But I never want to smell another cigarette again. I'm not going into a bar for a very long time, and I'm not going to drink for a very long time.

So now that you know a little bit about me, I'm going to leave you in suspense, not knowing what my next entry will contain, nor even my political and religious affiliations. So there.

Now get out of my house.