saturday, august 12

•••    we were like a sitcom family at dinner tonight. everyone was contentious, obnoxious (my sister served herself rice and veggies with her fingers), geeky (I babbled about the difference between cellphones and radios, and the inherent dangers of sticking them next to your ear), or completely clueless (my father dumped a bottle of wildberry vinegar all over his plate). the entire half hour was a combination of circular conversation and slapstick with cutlery and yet everything ended up being hysterically funny. we provided the laugh track. the only things missing were flawless skin, perfect hair, and commercial breaks.

it's nice to realize the real world is still nicer than television. ;)
8:41 PM +

•••    

I actually do read kafka, but still.
4:06 PM +

•••    wow, this is just about the most not cool thing I have ever heard: a spectator at a rugby match tackles a player to prevent him from scoring, causing the game to end in a draw. "grossly disruptive and unsporting" doesn't even begin to cover it! I would have been mad at this guy even if I was on the team that was about to lose.

of course, I am the only athlete I know who would rather play in front of empty sidelines than have a bunch of cheering spectators. maybe now I will appreciate our fans more - at least they're well-behaved. most of the time. :)
3:30 PM +

•••    remember that mountain climbing essay I was talking about? I finally found it. and posted it, so that it wouldn't get lost again. chameleon eyes is starting to feel almost vintage, but I love it anyway.
4:50 AM +

•••    I agree that in the big scheme of things, clinton was a decent president, although this article conveniently leaves out some of the monumentally stupid his administration did (and in some cases, didn't) do. but now that the election is almost upon us, every clinton retrospective I read reminds me that I am nineteen years old and I have only known three presidents. somehow that seems like not very many.

I remember I first got upset with politics in 1984 when the soviet union and company boycotted the summer olympics in los angeles. I was the most unpatriotic fourth grader around when the whole mess in the persian gulf was going on. and, well, just look at me now. I want activism and uprising, not three presidents in two decades! I hate "not broken, don't fix it" politicking. and even if I approve of clinton to some degree, I never want to think this is the best we can do in this incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful, incredibly influential country. our priorities suck right now. it makes me disgruntled.

do you suppose there are any secret service agents reading this? maybe I can start something here. :P
2:40 AM +

•••    happy roller coaster birthday, zal! :)
12:57 AM +

friday, august 11

•••    I have new shoes. :)

I've been trolling the web looking up shoe specifics, and my mom asked me if I was going to blog any of it. I told her, no one cares about my shoes. but she said so what, and I guess she's right. besides, I know it will make her smile if she happens to read this.

I love new shoes, but I have a really hard time finding them. I know everyone says it's hard to find shoes that fit, but I have a bunch of restrictions to meet, imposed by my doctors (arch support! arch support!) and my own hyperactive sense of morality. that means no animal components like leather, no supporting the ridiculous celebrity endorsement industry, and as little sweatshop involvement as possible. in a women's size 6d or a child's size 4.5w (I have fat little feet).

for years and years and years I wore nothing but soccer flats, for everything from playing in the snow to tromping up and down the stairs at school to gym class to actual indoor soccer games... but I'm not a soccer player anymore, and I think it might be a good idea to protect my older-than-their-years knees and ankles. wearing the same shoes for everything is not the way to do it, especially when I'm doing some sort of training every day. (let me tell you, when I was a four-season soccer player in high school, I never thought that college would make me more serious about athletics. ah, rugby.) so, for the first time ever in my life, I have two new pairs of sneakers.

my cross trainers have fun reflective blue zigzags that I can't stop looking at. my running shoes were made in the usa from mostly domestic materials, and came with a tag printed on recycled paper. (I like newbalance.) they're also the most lightweight, glovelike shoes I've ever worn. I love them. I can't decide whether to run in them tonight or wait until I get to philadelphia for their christening.

I hang onto shoes well after they've worn out their day-to-day usefulness, for things like scrogging around after rugby practice, running in bad weather, watersports (I would never wear new sneakers in a river, but my old ones could go through a swamp and I wouldn't care) and plain old sentimentality. and now, somehow, I have exactly ten pairs of footwear. four years ago I had two; cleats and flats. I guess that's what happens when you stop outgrowing things and start being responsible with your feet all at once.

now you know much more than you ever wanted to know about my shoes (unless you are so fascinated that you actually want a list of all ten). blame my mother. :)
5:44 PM +

•••    I watched the rescuers down under this morning. (I have a thing for the rescuers. they were my imaginary friends when I was little. and hey, I am on vacation!) it always makes me want to fly...

also, I am perpetually shocked that someone as thickheaded as percival c. mcleach was clever enough to name his goanna lizard joanna. joanna the goanna. I love joanna. :) even if she is a slimeball.

you know, for such magnanimous little rodents, bernard and bianca were responsible for an awful lot of mischief about seventeen years ago. ;) I rarely blamed them for my bad behavior, but my inability to satisfactorily control my emotions was usually their fault. if I was crying in public, bernard and bianca were stomping in my eyes. if I was angry, it was because bernard and bianca forgot to go to the store. in my stories, they were always doing things like destroying houses, getting flushed down toilets, or getting trapped under typewriter keys.

and I wonder if they know that for halloween in 1983, miss bianca was dressed as a candle and bernard as a wick?
11:34 AM +

•••    this is my favorite misguided search result ever, hot from the wockerjabby referral logs: cybering tips. read the little snippet of text it picked out - I sound awfully kinky, don't I? :D
12:16 AM +

thursday, august 10

•••    ahh! the secret of the eban numbers sequence just dawned on me. I wasn't even reading weblogs, but I must have been subconsciously still thinking about them and then bang. too bad I'm not a cartoon character. I bet I would look at least a little cute with a lightbulb suddenly materializing above my head. ;)

incidentally, I have always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with sequences of any sort. it started with the first aptitude test I ever had to take - something that happened well before I was in school, unfortunately. I thought the patterns of shapes were incredibly interesting, and I loved figuring out what came next... but I could not pronounce the word "pattern" correctly to save my life. (I learned to read early enough that I encountered a lot of words in print before I heard them spoken. that led to some interesting communication problems later.) I said "patterin." everyone thought that was adorable, and everyone kept mentioning it. it made me want to cry. I felt helplessly stupid, because even though I could hear the difference between my patterins and everyone else's patterns, I couldn't make the connection between my symbolic mentalese name for what I saw on a paper and the word that everyone else was saying. patterns and series and sequences of any sort still remind me of that feeling, even though mathematically (or linguistically, or artistically, or whatever) I think they're a lot of fun.
11:45 PM +

•••    "the unexamined life may not be worth living, but the unedited life is not worth watching."
     -- nancy franklin, in the august 14 new yorker

I think it is, as long as you're watching from the right place. in front of a screen, computer, television, or otherwise, is the wrong place.
4:56 PM +

•••    you know how puppies are incapable of holding a grudge?

you feed them and scratch their heads and tell them how cute they are. you give them chew toys and laugh at their antics. you take them out to play. you greet them with a smile. when they're scared of something, you pat them and show them that there's really nothing to be afraid of. when they're about to do something stupid, you hold them back. you protect them from the parts of the world that are too big and dangerous for them to navigate alone. you give them the things they really need. they give you friendship.

as far as puppies are concerned, you are their moral compass and their emotional anchor. they depend on you, and they have no real concept of life without you there. but then, inevitably, you leave them alone. maybe it's just for the day while you work overtime, maybe it's for a week while you're on vacation. but you're gone. the puppies don't know why you're gone. they can't think of any reason why they're being punished, but abandonment sure feels like punishment, however temporary. they whine and whimper and skitter around, waiting for you to return. they curl up in a corner to sulk. they worry that they're going to be left alone for the rest of their lives. they wonder if you ever really cared about them in the first place.

but then, when you finally come back from wherever you disappeared to, they're so happy to see you that they forget all about being upset. they jump all over you and lick your face and give you that big puppy grin that says, oh I missed you soooo much now let's go play! it doesn't occur to them that you might go off and disappear again, any more than it occurs to them that five minutes earlier they were in the depths of puppy despair and it was all your fault.

no matter how many times you disappear, no matter how many times they whine to themselves about being left alone, they are always always always ecstatic to see you when you return. and they still trust you to protect them, provide for them, and be there whenever they go looking for you.

sometimes I am just like a puppy (not the jumping and licking part, the happy and trusting part). it's cute in a canine. in a human, it's sort of pathetic.
4:02 PM +

•••    there is something karmically weird about the universe when I don't touch a computer until after two o'clock in the afternoon.
2:24 PM +

wednesday, august 9

•••    so, this kid is writing a postcard to a friend of his, joking around about life and politics and other nonsense, and at one point he writes "bomb the president!"

the postmaster catches a glimpse of this as he's processing the postcard and notifies some authorities.

the secret service puts a tag on the kid and trails him for five days before arresting him and taking him in for questioning. they keep him overnight and release him the next day.

true story. (my father knows the kid's mother.) I have no real opinion on this, I just think it's incredibly weird. and I have to wonder, could I get myself a secret service stalking posse if I wrote a postcard? it would make for good dinner party storytelling...
8:38 PM +

•••    thank goodness for blogger safe mode. I apologize to everyone who had to read that mess that was up here all afternoon. who would have thought a single apostrophe could screw things up so much? grrr.
7:24 PM +

•••    rebecca is prolific (not prol, prolific). check her out. :)
2:25 PM +

•••    this morning was a little more exciting than usual. I was babysitting my favorite four year old, and we went to the water park to play in the sprinklers. (this park, by the way, epitomizes what I love about cambridge: there are handmade, laminated, spiral-bound copies of children's books permanently wired to all the benches that line the outside of the park. and there are copies in eight languages other than english.) the weather was looking a little ominous, and the air was feeling more and more moist, so we struck out for home a little ahead of schedule. I did my usual routine - pretending the stroller was out of control, racing down the sidewalk, making pretzels mysteriously appear out of thin air. it was a good walk, in spite of intermittent drizzle.

we got back to his house just as it started to really come down. I unpacked and folded the stroller as fast as I could, dashed up the stairs, noted with some consternation that the screen door was ajar, unlocked the door and dragged everything in out of the rain. I was shaking the water out of my eyelashes when I noticed a high-pitched whining sound. I looked on the wall next to me and saw the house alarm monitor blinking. I opened it up and pushed a couple buttons, wondering how to convince it I wasn't a burgler.

the whine stopped.

the siren started.

it was as loud as a fire engine, emanating from a speaker at the top of the third floor staircase and from a box on the outside of the house. the four year old, of course, flipped out. I was trying to figure out what I had done to make the house think I was trying to break into it. remembering the screen door, I wondered if maybe someone had tried to break in. I did the incredibly stupid, incredibly useless mad-dash-criminal-search, looking behind doors and around corners - if there had been an intruder, I would probably be toast by this point. but there wasn't one, and I once I was satisfied that the only immediate danger was of everyone in the neighborhood going deaf, I paged the four year old's mother.

fifteen minutes later she still hadn't called back, and I was beginning to worry that a police cruiser was going to show up. getting arrested is not the most responsible thing you can do while you're in charge of a little kid and his house. I looked at the alarm box, wondering if there was some number I could call to get instructions for turning it off. then I realized that it wasn't my house, it wasn't my system, and there was no way I could convince anyone I called that I hadn't legitimately tripped the alarm. calling the police probably would have been even worse - what was I going to say? don't worry if someone tells you there's a house alarm going off, I'm inside and even though I don't know how to turn it off I promise I'm not doing anything wrong? so I shut all the windows to try and muffle the sound, wrapped the four year old's ears in a blanket, and sat with him next to the phone, hoping that his mother actually had her pager.

she did. she called. I turned the alarm off. we made lunch and drew a bunch of trucks in green crayon. the rain stopped. all normal.

I still feel like a bit of a criminal, though. ;)
1:53 PM +

•••    !!!!!!!
(something seems to have stolen my breath away, and I'm having a bit of trouble catching it back again.)
12:39 AM +

tuesday, august 8

•••    I went running tonight for the first time in weeks. it felt really really good, even though I could barely breathe by the end. and my sneakers got rescued from the side pocket of my half-unpacked luggage, finally.

there was the most beautiful thing at the pedestrian bridge. it was late, after nine, so the sky was dark and the streetlights were all on. I was sitting on the railing of the ped bridge with my legs hanging over the water, just looking around, and I noticed that one of the trees along the riverbank was kind of . . . shimmering. shimmering and waving, covered in little bits of light that were floating and sliding across its leaves. it took me a minute before I figured out the light from one of the lamps at the end of the bridge was reflecting off the rippling surface of the river onto the tree. it looked like it belonged in some alternate universe, where fish can fly and fantasy novels are a way of life.
11:43 PM +

•••    I think someone needs to update fractalcow...

said the girl who has updated her personal site exactly once all summer.

also, I think my parents have misplaced one of our cats. :P
8:32 PM +

•••    I love the tagline for amnesia & deja vu: forget it all over again. isn't that great? (yes.)
6:39 PM +

•••    I changed my mind. the first movement of the weber sounded ridiculous without a piano, so now I'm playing a brahms sonata. I haven't decided which one yet, but it's definitely going to be brahms because I just went to the library and looked up a couple recordings. it's still too easy, and the conductor isn't going to be impressed, but at least it's something new. so I'm less of a wimp.

on a completely unrelated note, my pet peeve of the day: drivers who think the bike lane is there so they have space to stretch their right-side wheels. invariably the same people who like to say that bicycles don't belong in the street at all (apparently we should be on the sidewalks, mowing down all the pedestrians). I'm fast. I follow traffic laws. I have lights. I even use hand signals! I don't understand why it's so hard to back off and let me do my part to save the environment. that's really all I ask.
6:20 PM +

•••    why would we want a capital of the world anyway? (I think it should be geneva, but that wasn't a choice so I voted for warsaw. warsaw backwards is wasraw. I like that.) and what is the capital of the world, aside from being meaningless enough that it gets decided by a cgi script?
(via isomorphisms)
3:14 PM +

•••    I'm such a wimp.

I need an audition piece for wind ensemble and chamber group and other such things, something that I can get ready before I go back to school (in sixteen days, ha). I literally have not played my clarinet at all since the last concert in the spring. (I am a very lazy musician when I don't have something specific and challenging to work on, and I have come to terms with my utterly wasted potential even though certain other people haven't. ;) I got out all the music I have with me at home, which isn't much because I packed light for the summer, and flipped through it looking for something new. I flipped right past anything with more than three flats or sharps in the key signature. I took anything with an unusual key signature out of consideration. lots of syncopation? gone. weird alternate fingerings? no. mozart? no. (I performed my first mozart concerto when I was eleven. I've had enough of him.) really high notes? absolutely not.

wimp.

and my final decision? the same thing I played last year (but a different movement). weber's grand duo concertant for clarinet and piano, which is in f major and cut time. it was my senior recital solo - I haven't played the first movement in fourteen months, but that still makes it about a thousand times easier than learning something brand new. I just hope no one I audition for notices, because then I'll feel even more pathetic. sigh.
2:52 PM +

•••    lots of august babies running around bloggerland . . . happy birthday mollie!
1:19 PM +

•••    now they have knocked the official number of new planets down to three . . . but that still makes forty four known planets outside our solar system. that's a lot. just wait until we get good enough to really detect earthlike planets. (I haven't given up on the idea of meeting an alien someday.)
9:07 AM +

monday, august 7

•••    eek, I almost missed it! happy birthday elise!
10:57 PM +

•••    okay, so in principle I'm completely against screwing with people's heads. it's not nice (yes, I am a bleeding heart). but the bug jar never fails to make me smile . . . and then I feel guilty. I also feel a little envious; pretense is not my strong suit. I'm good at deception by omission, but when it comes to outright lying you won't find anyone more inept. I could never pull off shenanigans like this. and somewhere, in some devious corner of my mind, that makes me a tiny bit sad.
10:15 PM +

•••    I was going to make scrambled tofu for dinner (and eat it with an okara burger - I have my own versions of junk food, see) but now that I found a whole new page of vegan recipes I am having all sorts of second thoughts. I'm intrigued by the concept of a tofu sandwich. I've eaten tofu in lots of different ways, but never inside a roll. decisions, decisions.
7:28 PM +

•••    I have the nicest pediatric rheumatologist in the world. I'm his only rocket scientist. he's my favorite doctor (and I have a lot of really great doctors, from my specialists at children's to my general practitioner - can you imagine, a doctor I see only once a year!). his hands are always warm and his bobby-pinned yarmulke is always slightly askew. he smiles at everyone even though he sees hundreds of kids every week. if things are going wrong, it's his responsibility; if things are going right it's something for the patient to be proud of. (never mind that it's probably more about the drugs than anything else.) his offhand comments are perfect. I have sandal tan stripes on my feet; today when he examined my ankles he said, "nice stripes! you have a tiger in your tank." you bet I do.

when you have an incurable disease, you learn to appreciate the good days, and you learn to wait out the bad days. you develop certain mantras. nothing can keep me from smiling. at least I can still (fill in the blank). hey, it makes me special. there's no such thing as a normal life.

I am absolutely thrilled with my abnormal life right now, because I'm doing better than expected. my xrays are good. my platelet and red blood cell counts are up. the mri of my hands was beautiful. that means no new restrictions, no new tests, and best of all, no new steroids. status quo. it's a beautiful thing.

doctors, tiger stripes, life. I'm a lucky chickie, you know.
6:05 PM +

•••    today is judgment day for me at the hospital. aieee.
12:57 PM +

•••    woo! we like new planets. :) (there seems to be some controversy over how many new planets there are, but any sort of plural planets make me happy.)
12:31 PM +

sunday, august 6

•••    dumbass parenting 101:

"I think it's a great first car for a kid. they can't destroy it, and they'll be the envy of all their friends."

this is a father talking about buying hummers (the ones with wheels :P) for his kids when they turn sixteen. first of all, calling a military vehicle a "car" is a little silly. treating it like a car is sillier. but my real problem is with the idea that a great first car is one they can't destroy. think I'm being judgmental? tough.

it's fine to give your kids indestructible toys when they're six months old. but sixteen years? how do you destroy a normal car? that's right, you crash it into something. and if you crash a hummer into something, that other thing doesn't stand much of a chance. hummers are big. and heavy. and high off the ground.

"I think it's a great first car for a kid. even if they get into a crash they won't get hurt, because after all they're driving a tank. too bad any normal car they run into will get pulverized."

don't you want to run away screaming?
8:03 PM +

•••    I had mashed up pears and raspberries for dessert. baby food is such good stuff. I don't see what the big deal is about solid food. it's sad that growing up means eating pureed food from little glass jars is no longer socially acceptable. (not that it stops me, obviously.)
6:50 PM +

•••    I climbed mount sneffles when I was fifteen. (mount sneffles sounds like it should be the name of some muppet, doesn't it? or at least a muppet mountain?) that mountain tried to kill me. I wrote an essay about it, for my ap lit class. I'm trying to find it, but I think it might be on a disk at school. grrr. :P
5:00 PM +

•••    I finally saw american beauty last night. I'm really not a movie person; I go to the theater probably twice a year at most. I miss a lot of jokes and pop culture references because I haven't seen enough movies. (I didn't watch austin powers until two years after it came out, so you can imagine how initially perplexed I was when all my classmates started dropping ridiculous faux-british slang into all their sentences.) but for whatever reason, american beauty was one of those movies I decided I would watch if the opportunity ever presented itself.

so two days ago my dad rented it, and last night I watched it. I think so many absurdly pretty people should not be allowed to walk around in close proximity. it probably does something really unhealthy to the balance of the entire universe. even the gay neighbors who had about five combined lines were pretty. as for the story... I don't know. there were zero surprises in the major character development, the basic plotline or even the subverted symbolism. no revelations, just expectations met exactly the way I wanted them not to be. in some ways that's more gut-wrenching than an actual unpleasant surprise.

I think, though, that what made this movie good (and it was good) was not the characters or the acting or the story or the dark humor or any of that. the movie was good because it looked incredible. I am a big sucker for things that are aesthetically interesting. american beauty sucked me right in and it hasn't spit me out again. I don't have any deep thoughts or lasting impressions about the characters, but I can't get that stupid dead bird out of my head. or the blood. if I could be there to see it, or see a picture of it, or something, I would want to die in my own bloodpool reflection.

is that really weird?
2:36 PM +

•••    it's today already . . . that was fast.
I think I'm going to sleep through it.
1:46 AM +