saturday, november 25

•••    since I can't do anything without multitasking in one way or another, I have the tv on. jurassic park is playing on some network that has halfway decent reception. the only things that makes this a good movie are the dinosaurs and the soundtrack's title theme, but on a saturday night near the end of a break, that's enough to make it worth watching.

this was the first pg-13 movie I saw with my parents' permission. (like any normal eleven-year-old I had seen plenty of movies without their permission, but in my defense it was never my idea. and none of them were good movies.) I went with my dad to see it in the theater, and it was quite the special occasion. I remember I dressed up in classic dorky-sixth-grader fashion, with rainbow suspenders over my bright yellow t-shirt and beaded elastics holding my pigtails up. the first showing was sold out, so we waited for a later one, and I was the youngest person in the theater. it was after midnight by the time we got home.

at the time all I really got out of it was a sense of awe at the dinosaurs and a vague suspicion that the genetics weren't all there. then the next year we played the theme from jurassic park in all-city band, and I fell temporarily in love with it. I have a soft spot for music I know how to play. ;)
10:32 PM +

•••    my best college essay was the one I wrote in utter frustration without ever intending to send it in, so perhaps raza is right that college essays are crap by nature. there must be a reason I have avoided even looking at mine since the day I got an acceptance letter.

they would probably suck much less if twelfth grade english teachers would stop putting so much emphasis on them in the early months of senior year. in my class we had to write generic college essays once a month until december. at that point I was still very much in denial about the impending application deadline, and my first essay (which was supposed to answer the question, "who am I?" or rather, I suppose, "who are you?" since you are the one reading this... slippy pronouns ugh) was some nonsense about grasshoppers and the twelfth dimension and a three-year-old who never grew up. it was wholly incoherent (though entertaining, to me) and I knew it, but when we did peer editing I got a lot of penciled comments like, "I see what you're trying to do here but it's a little vague." the value of untrained peer editing is highly overestimated, I think, because I had no idea what I had been trying to do with that paper.

eventually I gave up on the assigned topics altogether (if I were a college admissions dean I would probably want to throw up on all the essays about "my favorite place" or "the person who most inspired me" or the bland-to-infinity "personal statement" essays); the essays I ultimately used were about special education and recycling bins, the latter of which I refused to let my parents read. they were not remarkable in any way so I suspect they were just as mind-numbing as all my classmates'. the good one was, surprisingly, my "why I want to go to swarthmore" essay. I sat in front of the computer for a good half hour without any idea what to say, getting more and more frustrated with my efforts to wrap myself up in a box decorated by the college board, and in a cathartic spurt of self-aggrandizement I wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay that ended with, "so accept me already!"

it ended up being the only thing I wrote that entire fall that sounded like it had come from a real live human being, rather than my robotic alter ego (which I always imagine to be polished-to-gleaming but going to pieces at the joints), so I deleted the last line and sent it in. still, you couldn't pay me to go back and read it again.

in some ways I think any writing that is composed for the purpose of being judged, whether for a grade or a book contract or as a distilled self-representation, is doomed to contrivance and overprocessing on some level. admittedly, I am self-conscious about my writing, since for many many years (beginnning in toddlerhood) I expected I would make my career with it, but I think there are very few people who are comfortable enough with themselves to write without pretense. (the same could be said for mere existence, but it's easier to inject writing with obscured phoniness than to constantly live with it.) so while the quality of ideas may correlate directly with the intended publicness of writing (I don't know about you, but I try to excise inanity from my academic work), the quality of the writing itself definitely doesn't. it's just less real.

I read somewhere that all diarists have a secret audience beyond themselves, that they are operating under the (possibly subconscious) knowledge that journals and memoirs are often discovered and even published posthumously. I can't fathom that. one of the things I have long planned to do but never actually accomplished because of its inherent morbidity is to write an informal will, and in it I have always intended to specify irreparable destruction of all my private writing.

I read somewhere else that anything you write down will eventually be read by another person, and every time I pick up a pen I try to push that thought out of my head. what a terrifying prospect. human deceptiveness being what it is, I suspect more people than I know have read some of my journallings, but oh, I hope I never have to acknowledge that.
6:47 PM +

•••    anyone know why the archive pages are only archiving the very first week of posts? (edit: never mind, I fixed it.) even I think it's boring. can you believe I've been doing this for ten months?

the flamingos across the street seem less pink today. maybe they haven't been getting enough shrimp to eat.
2:15 PM +

•••    no matter how dark and grey it is in the morning, the glass butterfly hanging in my window is always glowing.
10:37 AM +

•••    sometimes when my hands get cold, I play with puppets.

this is my chameleon kazaam.

fortunately neither of us have to catch our meals with our tongues.

hey, it's a long weekend. I'm allowed to be silly!
1:26 AM +

friday, november 24

•••    somehow this four day weekend thing is already screwing up my internal calendar.
10:37 PM +

•••    inbetween my giggles I must warn you, brenda, to be careful what you wish for: if you think your attempts to communicate with those two are futile now, can you imagine what it would be like if the only sounds they could utter were along the lines of "gobble gobble gobble" and "squawk!"?

speaking of inane conversations... as I was walking back from brunch, this completely random seventy year old man (not that I knew how old he was out the outset, but oh, I learned) decided to initiate "sociable chit chat" with me. now, I am shy and quiet and generally antisocial, but in spite of all that I think I am pretty friendly. I try, anyway. so I stopped and smiled and made small talk about college and thanksgiving, figuring once I had answered the standard questions about where I was from and what I was majoring in, I would be free to scurry home to warmth and solitude.

but no. ninety minutes later, I was still standing there, shivering in just my sweats and gloves, talking about god knows what and trying to come up with some way to disentangle myself from the conversation without instigating another storytale. it didn't work. anything I said turned into another story, or a question, or something. he asked me what my sat score was (surprisingly, I truly couldn't remember it at first, and I can't decide whether to be proud or embarrassed by that); he made me explain black holes to him; he asked me if I knew what made philly cheesesteaks great (apparently it is the good calcium-enriched water in the bread, which I find highly improbable, but whatever); he told me about some banking family in milwaukee that makes beer; he told me to invest in home depot ($38.50 a share, though he also told me there were 25 billion people in the world so I'm not sure how reliable that number is) and that a girl as smart as me should believe in god.

yeah.

I made him happy, though. "you have a nice personality," he said, three times. "not many people would stand here and shoot the breeze with me."

I committed his irish grandmother's recipe for baked macaroni to memory even though it has two ingredients I don't eat. I laughed when he told me he was a good athlete in high school -- "first string water boy!" the whole time I was squirming inside, wanting to be anywhere else in the world. I'm a bad fibber, but I'm a pretty good actress.

it's a funny thing, talking to strange old people. ninety percent of the time you have no idea what's going on and you wish it weren't, but when you look back you decide it was valuable anyway.

I remembered my sat score, too. it was better than I thought.
3:00 PM +

•••    leaving laundry in the drier overnight takes all the fun out of retrieving it.

also, beware furious nuclear explosions. I love how human emotions have so thoroughly permeated our language that even scientific descriptions aren't exempt.
8:48 AM +

thursday, november 23

•••    thanksgiving is a weird holiday. I think most americans don't really have any grasp of its meaning. I'm not sure I do, either. in grade school we learned about the pilgrims and indians by splitting up into two groups and decorating ourselves with construction paper. I never got to be an indian, and it wasn't fair because they got to wear headbands with feathers while we were stuck with dopey white collars. and since I was a girl, I didn't even get to make a black hat with a gold buckle. evil. and we made hand-tracing turkeys. in first grade we also made these strange little pilgrim paperdoll things by cutting out body parts (you know; shoes, arms, heads and clothes) and attaching them with hinge-clips so when you held their heads and shook them, their limbs would spin around like pinwheels. I got the feet backwards, so the little clogs on my pilgrim girl pointed inwards, and my teacher chided me for not knowing the difference between right and left. but I looked down at my own feet, with my curled-up toes facing each other, and I decided I had gotten it right anyway.

it took me a long time to figure out the difference between the mayflower and the nina-pinta-santamaria trio.

when I was in england my aunt took me to the mayflower's departure point to see the list of passengers. (this was significant because, aside from being an american -- they are oddly aware of american-ness in england; someone once insisted that I have my picture taken with a random building built in 1776 because it was an "important date" for me -- I am related by marriage to john and priscilla alden. the names are still in the family, by the way, having cycled through various permutations. luckily there was no charybdis alden.) the framed list was on a wall next to a very cryptic romeo and juliet poster that consisted only of a picture of a rose next to the half-quote ". . . would smell as sweet."

shortly after that my family moved to massachusetts (so I went from old england to new england, hahaha), and we spent several months doing tourist-trap things. my parents like history more than I do. I wonder if there is any place in america that has absolutely no historical significance, or if I just happened to live in places that all have clear connections with the birth and growth of america. maybe it's just that I grew up in the northeast. anyway, the best part of plimouth plantation was the native american village, with little boats hewn from logs and low-ceilinged wigwams whose walls and furniture were constructed entirely of plant parts and animal skins. in a way it was more pleasant than the dirty little plantation settlement. the people there creeped me out; they made me feel horribly out of place in my corduroy jeans and my colorado rockies hat. they told us the true story of thanksgiving, which starts out sounding like there was no thanksgiving at all but ends up making you feel silly for believing it was anything resembling a solemn affair. meanwhile in my new hyper-politically-correct school, we were busy learning how all white settlers were evil because they brought disease and, horrors, their own culture to the new world.

plymouth rock, by the way, is about the size of a small car.

that same ultra-pc school had a thanksgiving tradition that consisted of a pep rally (even though our only sports teams were intramural) and a mile race at the mit track, oh-so-cutely dubbed the turkey trot. through some odd combination of natural ability and random fate, I won the turkey trot every year I ran it. the prize was a trophy and a twenty pound turkey. there's a picture of me when I was twelve years old in which I am standing by the side of the track, holding a giant plastic bag brimming with frozen turkey. I am wearing my bright teal keds, a hat made from a paper plate and a paper bag cut and colored like a happy turkey, and an expression that says, "please don't take my picture, please?" and every year I struggled along the half-hour walk back to my house with the giant turkey even though, it being the day before thanksgiving, we already had a turkey waiting in the fridge. I think my turkeys turned into christmas dinners.

my high school football team sucked eggs, but we still made a half-witted attempt to do the normal thanksgiving game ritual. so for three years in high school (not the year I was busy feeling like a case for the morgue) I dressed in a band jacket that was so old it didn't match our football team's uniforms (for some reason I'm not quite clear on we changed school colors when we switched the team name from warriors to the much more culturally sensitive falcons -- of course, then I had to suffer the indignity of being a "lady falcon" on the soccer team, but whatever) and tried to play happybouncybandmusic even though my fingers were frozen off and our team was down by several touchdowns at least. the cheerleaders, who shockingly enough were even worse than our football players, danced along. (by the time I was a senior, the team wasn't so bad, but the thanksgiving day rivalry was one leftover from the time when my school had been a vocational school, before it merged with the college prep school next door, and we always played the state champs. so we lost, miserably, every year. we always made sure to play "rock you" very early on in the first quarter so it wouldn't sound too ridiculous.) we were not a marching band, and thanksgiving was the only halftime show we did all season, so you can imagine how pathetic it was. of course, thanksgiving in boston generally is cold enough that your saliva turns into ice inside your mouthpiece, so it wasn't all our fault. at least we got free hot chocolate. and we had chutzpah; we danced to the other band's touchdown music. when it was our school's turn to host the game, it was in harvard's old coliseum-shaped stadium, which gave the whole thing an aura of absurdity. there is nothing quite like seeing a gigantic sweatered falcon dancing to bad band music under arching ivy-covered stone. the year we played the macarena I thought the whole place might implode out of embarassment.

this is the third year in a row I haven't seen any family on thanksgiving. two years ago I was obligated to be at that stupid football game and my family was in new york, so I ate bowlfuls of tofu-pumpkin pudding my mom left me and watched the xfiles marathon in blissful solitude. last year I was still reveling in the whole living-apart-from-my-family experience, and I had no intention of leaving campus until they kicked me out at christmas. today I thought I might be a little sad about being alone on thanksgiving, but it ended up that I'm not. I promised my adviser that I wouldn't sit around by myself ("otherwise," he told me, "we are going to come pick you up and feed you at our house"). so I ate thanksgiving brunch with some rugby teammates, and between the servers informing me that "satan is vegan" (they meant seitan) and many glasses of the best apple cider ever (at a dining hall, who would have thought?) it was pretty nice. and I was glad I didn't have to worry about being a pain-in-the-neck vegan guest at someone else's thanksgiving dinner.

I have always wanted to start a thankgiving day foodfight.

whenever you play the "tell something you're thankful for" game around the dinner table, someone ends up saying they're thankful they're not the turkey. frankly I think you should always be thankful you're not a turkey. turkeys are about the stupidest animals I have ever encountered. (commercially produced turkeys are also so fat they can't copulate, but that's something else altogether. still it must suck for them.)

aside from not being a turkey, there actually are things I'm thankful for, and I suppose I might mention a few of them, trite as it is.

school, which makes me utterly crazy but has not yet made me regret anything, having given me friends and rugby and telescopes and just the right distance from my family that we can actually communicate. life here is ridiculously nice, and it seems even moreso without any unfinished physics exams hanging over my head.

all that stuff the doctors did to me that has made me an improbably healthy medical mystery, and all the hmo-wrangling they did to get me the treatment I needed. you don't realize how much pain interferes with your life until they find a way to make it disappear.

poetry, of all sorts. I could write to infinity about what this means, but if you don't already have an inkling yourself, I doubt I could explain it. maybe I am a lousy writer, but maybe there just aren't enough words.

my ever-present ability to laugh, which I have come to discover is more of a gift than I thought. other people seem to like it too. ;)

this has very long post has been brought to you today by the numbers nine and five and the letter r. I figured if I wrote long enough you would all get bored and stop reading before I got the to goopy thankfulness part. does anyone even use the word "thankful" anymore, except on thanksgiving?
4:03 PM +

•••    has anyone else ever had a post spontaneously disappear from the post window? just the text, nothing else, zapgoodbyegone. it was long, too. rar.
2:29 PM +

•••    total estimated time spent on physics exam: eleven hours.
total estimated percentage of exam done correctly: sixty.
hope for a steep curve. :P

(I did, however, figure out the ampere's law thing, and it ended up working out very elegantly, which is always a good sign. I couldn't find a good vector potential function to curl into the magnetic field, but screw it, that's just math.)

and now, finally finally finally, I am really on break... for a few hours at least. :) it doesn't feel like thanksgiving yet, but perhaps after I've had a little while to recover from my week of physics hell I will come back and do that cheesy litany-of-things-I'm-thankful-for thing. in the spirit of the holiday and all that. :)
11:03 AM +

•••    I have one problem left and I can't remember how to usefully apply ampere's law. in fact I can't make any sense of this problem at all. if I haven't finished by 11:30, I am giving up. that's a promise. and then I am going to take an entire day off from physics. I'm not going to even look at my book until saturday.

in other news... actually, there is no other news. physics is the only thing happening in my life right now. woohoo! :P
8:42 AM +

wednesday, november 22

•••    hey hey guess who is no longer failing math! me, yay! take that, universe!

of course, I have a feeling I am about to be failing physics, which seems to be a rather unfair tradeoff seeing as I actually like physics... but for now, let me have my sunshine and my dorky music and we can all be happy, okay? yep.
1:00 PM +

•••    okay, I didn't finish my physics and I did go to sleep. but see, I have an excuse.
8:08 AM +

tuesday, november 21

•••    my roommate is gone ("you could come to my house for turkey dinner," she said, "except that you don't eat turkey.") which means I don't have to feel guilty about staying up all night to work on physics. I am going to stay up all night. don't you let me fall asleep. it's bad enough that I napped all afternoon before going to the gym.

so yeah, I'm not going anywhere for thanksgiving, for a multitude of reasons. but I suppose I'll have more to say about that in a few days.

it smells like snow outside.
6:31 PM +

•••    I can make a spinning top levitate. I can make a magnet defy gravity and fall at a rate of about two centimeters per second. I can make a musical instrument and play it without touching it. I can make a swinging pendulum stop suddenly with just the flip of a switch. I can make electrons fly in a glowing purple loop. I can tell you why all those things happen.

but I cannot for the life of me figure out this stupid exam. and it is making me crazy.
1:40 PM +

•••    nothing like a silly meme to get the day started right:

What is your favorite word? why?
What is your least favorite word? liar
What turns you on? compassion
What turns you off? arrogance
What sound do you love? an orchestra tuning at the beginning of a concert, the more french horns the better.
What sound do you hate? the squealing of subway train wheels going around turns, especially coming in and out of stations (harvard square is particularly bad).
What is your favorite curse word? fuck (pure and unadulterated, if you can even say that. at least unfettered.)
What profession other than yours would you like to attempt? being a poet. so you see why it's imperative that I get good at physics sometime soon.
What profession would you not like to participate in? accounting, although pretty much anything corporate is on my nevernevernever list.
If Heaven exists what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? don't worry, it's not really eternal.
8:07 AM +

monday, november 20

•••    funny weather tonight. it rained, in the exact right volume to leave behind water droplets all over everything, and then just as the precipitation ended, the temperature dropped below freezing. so now the whole of swarthmore is covered in little bits of crystal clear ice, hanging from the tips of treebranches, halted in midslide down car windshields, sparkling on the grassblades underfoot. it's as if someone stopped the whole universe at the end of the rainstorm and we humans have become somehow unstuck from the morass of linear time, free to walk about in this frozen world like spirits from another realm.

but what I really want is snow.
11:41 PM +

•••    you know it's going to be a weird day when you look at the rising sun through a layer of dark clouds and get thoroughly confused because you think the moon is setting on the wrong side of the world...

and then the clouds blow by and you're suddenly blind. is there such a thing as a painless revelation?
9:06 AM +

•••    my roommate is watching some old black and white version of king lear, and it is so freakishly bad that even with my headphones on to keep out the sound I can't help but watch it in the periphery. in the "outdoors" shots, there are fake toy trees that sort of spontaneously break, rather like dried-up playdough coming unstuck. the scene where regan and cornwall (gosh I hope I am getting these names right -- it's been a long long time since I read king lear but I like to pretend to be at least moderately well versed in that stuff we call literature, even though I think a lot of it is vastly overrated) gouge out gloucester's eye is filmed entirely from the side, and it is painfully obvious that the actor is just sticking his thumb behind gloucester's head. it's like the old swordswallowing trick little kids do, sticking butterknives and chairlegs and whatnot down their throats (but really just next to their cheeks).

when I was little we lived in farm country and every year there was a county fair. yeah, one of those. you think they're just myths when you live in the big city, leftovers that survived in american lore because of people like laura ingalls wilder, but then you get transplanted and you realize all that stuff about "one nation" in the pledge of allegiance is a bunch of nonsense. (at least you realize it in retrospect, if you were only three when you got transplanted, which is how old I was. but I do distinctly remember one day in third grade, after I had been transplanted a second time and was busy adjusting to yet another socioeconomic strata, when we stood up to say the pledge of allegiance and I suddenly understood exactly what it was saying and decided it made no sense. indivisible? if I had learned anything by the time I was eight, it was that even within the same state people were living in completely different worlds. actually I had learned a lot of things by the time I was eight, but that was one of the more profound things, I think. I was also starting to be uncomfortable with the "under god" part by then. I wonder if my brother even knows the pledge of allegiance, liberal alternative school product that he is.)

anyway. one year at the county fair, when I was six or seven or something, they were selling these plastic swords in plastic sheaths with real fabric wrapped around the plastic hilts. I thought they were so cool. I really really wanted one, but they were four dollars, and that was an awful lot of money (four months' worth of allowance!) so I convinced myself I didn't need one. after we left the fair, though, I found myself really wishing I had given into my impulse and gotten one. (you must understand, I was always a big saver. I saved every stupid penny that I got from anywhere, and by the time I was six I had saved up about a hundred dollars. it was a big deal when I gave any of it up. I don't know what exactly I was saving it for; I just always figured that there must be something more important in the future than whatever I wanted in the present. and I didn't even know what college was then...) so I caved and asked my dad to get one for me, and he did and I paid for it and I was so thrilled with it, this silly piece of white plastic and gold-flecked fabric. it was pretty big, and when I wore it slung across my shoulder the tip of the scabbard nearly touched the floor. so you can imagine how silly I looked stretching my arm up to get the sword high enough above my mouth so that I could pretend to swallow it. I think I was damn good at that trick though. it looked convincing even in the mirror, and that's hard because you have to tip your head sideways to see yourself without making it obvious that there's nothing in your mouth.

eventually the sword broke, but not after it had survived years of playfighting and pretending it was ivory and gold in my alternate universe (entrance through the cherry tree) and one very out-of-character halloween costume the year I was a soldier. (I still can't remember why I wanted to be a soldier, but at least I was the hans christian anderson storybook kind, with white gloves and a drum, and not the kind that goes out and kills people. most of my halloween costumes were much more interesting. I would list them all for you because I'm just in that sort of babbly mood -- if you hadn't noticed, I am babbling -- but I have a feeling only a few people would care, and one of them is my mom and she already knows what my costumes were because she helped me make them -- hi, mom. but I will say that I bet not many other seven-year-olds have been postage stamps for halloween.) so I do think it was four dollars well spent. on the sword, that is; I was talking about my plastic sword. remember?

so today had free tangerines, wonderful email from two of my favorite friends, and family on the phone for the first time since august. and now: thoroughly random music on the playlist and in my headphones; bad king lear on the tv; tea and stories and lots of tangential parentheticals. it has been a nice weekend, too nice I think. a little less niceness would have resulted in probably a lot more physics being done. my penance awaits, tomorrow and I suspect straight through until wednesday. physics physics pleh.
12:01 AM +

sunday, november 19

•••    swarthmore was on the simpsons tonight. small liberal arts college, call teachers by first names. yeah. I can't decide whether that's cool or just weird. ;)
8:15 PM +

•••    screw the election results. all I really want to know is, what is up with that hat?

2:02 PM +

•••    last night I ended up somewhat by accident at a chinese food dinner party on the floor (such things are not uncommon at college, of course, but since I am a bit of a cheapskate... umm... that is, since I am careful with my money, I always use my meal credit instead of ordering stuff), and since I was with all sorts of cool people they let me open a fortune cookie even though I wasn't going to eat it.

this fortune is definitely the most depressing one I've ever seen: "life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think." it's especially strange because it's flanked by those dopey little smiley faces, sort of like it's saying, yay for empty happiness! or something like that. but weird as it is, I can't quite bring myself to throw it away. I think life is a bit of a tragedy no matter what you do. but that's okay; it's easier to write a good tragedy than a good comedy.

the best fortune I ever got says, "keep your plans secret for now." I have it taped to my computer. one of the smiley faces has a hole in its head where it was impaled by a thumbtack last year.
11:27 AM +

•••    so, I know mozart's requiem by heart, but I had never heard it performed live before tonight. I think the recording will never be the same, beautiful as it is. the concert was amazing. (and packed; I had to sit on the steps next to the door, but somehow that made it all the more romantic, peering around the corner with my legs tucked under me as if my presence there were a secret.)

I love watching the expressions on people's faces as they sing. I love watching all musicians, but there's something about the members of a chorus... their mouths all move together, but you can see something a little different in each pair of eyes. and it's just incredible, the things you see and the sounds you hear coming from all these people who sit next to you in class and bump into you in the dining hall, who seemed like mere mortals until they turned a bunch of ink on a staff into a head-to-toe case of the goosebumps.

I suppose I do that too, when I'm the one on stage. sometimes.
12:13 AM +