I still have no idea what to write for my short story assignment. It's due this Friday.

I'm screwed.

Yesterday, I wrote my English teacher a mildly amusing (but in hindsight pathetic) e-mail that began with "Sorry to bother you, but should I be at all worried that I still have absolutely no idea what to write for my short story assignment?" As expected, he responded along the lines of "I know you can do it, I have faith in you." Which was deliberately unhelpful, since I didn't explain that I'm incapable of creating anything these days, and that humans (and stories concerning them) no longer interest me, and that literature as a whole (aside from the masters, like Edgar Allan Poe) is replete with crap that either disgusts or alienates me, and that I can't understand romantic love (I laugh at those anguished morons), and that everything I read is devoted to the nature and experiences of mainstream society (that is, people in love with money, family, religion/fairy tales, stars, sex, and other people), and that my own ability sucks in that anything I put down sounds bogus and lame, and that the two characters haunting me are only phantoms, with nothing to motivate them, and that every female lead I invent somehow becomes lesbian, or at least bisexual — but you can probably see why I didn't tell him that, over a line of communication that could be monitored by other people.

A narrative about hamsters did occur to me, which at any rate is indicative of my desperation… but as I sat by myself in the library, once again, the storyline became tragic, the protagonist was alone and forgotten, and I nearly cried at the thought of the poor Señor, huddled in a corner of his cage, resigning his tiny, beating heart and closing his liquid eyes…

By the way, I have a nonrenewable House DVD that I borrowed from the library, and it's overdue, and I'm racking up $1 USD per day in fines, not including the $10 I already owe them, and it's pathetic.