Kathy to Hilary, June 13, 1972, Tehran, Iran June 13
I was just wondering how I managed to gain three pounds after eating a chili dog and a bowl of golden mushroom soup. That’s ridiculous! I slept until 7 this morning; usually I find myself up at 4:30, that’s why it’s such a struggle to stay up until 10. Ho-Hum.
Jack Lalanne 
I hope today is better than yesterday. I hope Friend drops by. I may go swimming but NOT in public, not with my lovely figure. [Drawing] I can see my mother going into convulsions downstairs--she’s doing her exercises in time with the inspiring voice of Jack LaLanne, immortalized on red and blue and yellow records. What style and grace she shows. Tsk tsk. Honor thy father and thy mother.
I had the weirdest dream--it’s that time of morning when you’re held in thrall by a dream. Let’s forget it. It was too odd.
It’s 80 already and it’s 7:19 a.m. Imagine it at 12 or 1. Ugh. We’ve been having weird weather. It rains every now and then and sometimes it gets cloudy and we have thunderstorms. That never happens here this time of year. I hear this is very abnormal weather. Last year it didn’t rain after May 11.
The weather is almost as boring a topic as my health and my grades. Sorry. It just seems as if there is nothin’ happening around here, well y’ know, the same old shit, a movie or two, a party now and then, and about a million books devoured in the meantime. And none of them are remotely useful or edifying. I rejected The Nascent Mind of Shelley for a historical novel, The Stranger Prince, about Prince Rupert. It took me a little while to figure out what Nascent meant, but I finally sussed it out after digging through the Hispano-Latin roots stored somewhere in the back of my mind. The deduction was probably wrong, but I would never stoop to using a dictionary. I should be educating myself this summer reading GOOD BOOKS instead of this trash.
This side of the paper looked so nice blank that it was a wrench to write on it. But I did and so it will stay until the paper disintegrates into tiny tiny atoms. Dumb. I regret that I will be unable to take chemistry next year as biology is two years long and I ain’t got time for it now.
I don't want to step on a sturgeon. 
We may be going to the Caspian tomorrow for awhile. There is no appeal to lying around on a dumb beach for three days, even if it is on the world’s biggest lake or inland sea or whatever it is. I have no desire to step on a nest of sturgeon eggs or a sturgeon for that matter as I hear they are pretty spiny and have teeth this ------------------> long. I also hear that it rains a lot up there. What an amazing land with sturgeons and Afghans and Greeks and little cream-colored snakes that slither away before you can get your hands on them.
As you can see, my scribbling is meandering into imbecility so I ought to quit before all this rot gets REALLY inane (or insane, if you prefer). WRITE BACK SOONER THAN I DID.
LOVE,
Since you know who it is I won’t sign the letter.
You do know, don’t you?
KAT
My favorite poem right now:
I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.
I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
“Prayer Before Birth,” Louis MacNeice
[Damn. Can't get the lines to break right--or I could if I were willing to dink with it, which I'm not. Here's a better version.]
7:28:13 AM 
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