I need to stop going to bed at four. I always end up sleeping on the floor.

We celebrated my birthday yesterday. I soaked up ambience and made several unreasonable requests. ::waves at Millie::

I got really cool stuff. I got a bunch of Sabretooth comics, and an X-Men movie screen still, and a whole lot of *nsync stuff. White made me a necklace that says "I love pah."

So far I have watched the *NSYNC Live At Madison Square Garden video twice. The boys dance and sing, and there's this totally random interlude, where JC plays chess with a monkey. And this oddly profound speech by a clown, who talks about how temporary everything is.

The boys have soul. They work _hard_.

And I thought:

I am late by years
in discovering how my body moves.
But things are different in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains.
Time is slower. People are calmer.
Vision is peripheral.
And so
I am twenty-something
and for the first time
I am playing music,
your music, which means movement
and raises the hands of millions--
and I am shifting my weight from foot to foot,
and gazing warily into the bathroom mirror,
thinking,
"This is my life.

That shoulder, this rib.
This is my life. This is my business."

Your eyes water when you chop onions
or lose an eyelash,
and this is not a lesser form of crying,
because everything is a sense memory, in the end.
Your body is your archive
and the music-- any music-- you move it with
is sacred.

--Alestar
***
"Sleater-Kinney probably wouldn't have even tried to rescue Bart and Homer. See, and *that* is the whole allure of NSYNC."