saturday, december 2

•••    I can't post my whole list of what ifs, because, well, people read this. so I'll just do one, in the spirit of self-indulgence.

what if I had gone to columbia instead of swarthmore?
it seems unimaginable now, doesn't it? but when I was a junior in high school and my classmates were all rushing around visiting colleges and researching programs, I was busy being disgusted with the whole process. I had already gotten enough propaganda mail to fill three laundry baskets, and I was resolved not to support an industry whose main objective seemed to be killing trees and bankrupting families. (I think I hit my cynicism peak when I was sixteen.) I really had no idea where I wanted to go to school, or even what I wanted in a college. all I knew was that I wanted to study astronomy.

I spent part of that summer working in new york city. although I had by that time renounced most of the ivy league and the cutthroat tech school circuit, I hadn't given up on the idea of going to college in new york. (quick primer: I was born there. I miss it.) one night I went walking around manhattan with my godfather, and we took an uptown detour through morningside heights. I spent an hour in a little bookstore across from columbia's main campus, reading independent poetry and drinking mango juice. by the time I returned to boston later that week, I was pretty sure I wanted to go to columbia.

I still don't know what made me decide swarthmore would be a better choice. in retrospect it seems extremely random. I had never visited it (and once I had been accepted I refused to visit because I didn't want to discover anything bad about it), I had never even heard of it until halfway through high school, and I thought its prospectus book was vaguely obnoxious. I think mostly I decided that choosing a school because it was in new york was stupid, and of all the non-ivies that I came up with as alternatives, swarthmore had the advantage of being close to a city, and a supernice alumni who interviewed me.

so now that I have longwindedly established how lackadaisical my college decision process was, what if it had gone the other way?

I wouldn't be playing rugby, which I contend is one of the best things to happen to me, ever. I wouldn't be doing astronomy research. I wouldn't be in a class with only two other people. I probably wouldn't be getting credit to write poetry next semester. I wouldn't be teaching a bunch of fourth graders just how cool science is. I wouldn't be able to recognize every one of my classmates on sight. I would be surrounded by concrete instead of flowers.

I wouldn't live in the suburbs. I wouldn't look out the window wistfully everytime my train pulled through penn station. I wouldn't have to worry about all of my classmates being able to recognize me on sight. I wouldn't have to explain that swarthmore has always been coed or that "liberal arts" does not mean "fuzzy science." I probably wouldn't have come to the conclusion that a C is a perfectly okay grade. (I probably shouldn't have come to that conclusion here either, but it makes life less stressful, at least temporarily. grad school applications are far far away.)

... none of which compares to the fact that I would know an entirely different set of people. just because it's an inevitable consequence of every decision you make doesn't make it any less impossible to imagine. where you go to school may determine the quality of your academic education, but what you learn about yourself has far more to do with the people you meet. I think.
2:06 PM +

•••    the universe seems to have been conspiring to make me happy for the past few days, ever since my all night psychology adventure. remind me of that the next time I start complaining about how nothing is going right. there is always equilibrium if you look at a big enough picture.
the sun on the monitor is making it hard to read, so I think that's my cue to get out into the freezing air for a run. I will have something worthwhile to say at some point in the future, really.

9:48 AM +

•••    there must be something to say.

it's the weekend. :)
1:00 AM +

friday, december 1

•••    the scary thing about days or even months dedicated to things (like world aids day, international human rights day, or national women's history week, which I'm probably more qualified to comment on) is that they make it too easy for the casual observers to make it the only time they think about the issues. just as any action is better than none, some thought is better than none. but more is also better than some.

this isn't something I want to be judgmental about, but in light of that I think sharing is better than silent vigil.

me, I don't have anything share, not about this. but other people do: * * * * *

you have to choose your battles, yes. no one can volunteer for every worthy cause out there. the world will do much better, though, if you dedicate one day a month to a single cause, rather than one day a month to the high profile cause of the moment. maybe I feel unqualified to participate in day without weblogs because aids isn't one of my battles, and then I would be giving credibility to all the cynics who say nothing is really accomplished by this sort of temporary activism. we are all imperfect.
8:44 PM +

•••    so yeah, it's that day. the one without weblogs, and more importantly, world aids day. and true to character, I still can't decide what I think of it -- in terms of me, that is. I have no words of condemnation or praise for dww itself. it's just about me.

as a vegan I have a weird relationship with mainstream (though I use that term lightly here) disease-awareness campaigns. as a person I have a weird relationship with my conscience because of it.

let me tell you a story. actually it's a psychology study, but whatever. this psychologist was doing a study on irrational aversion responses. he would bring people into a room and offer them five dollars to eat an insect. of course all the people would say no, yuck! and he would ask, why not? it's dirty, they would say, it's germy. who knows where that insect has been. so he would bring out another insect, and ask, will you eat this one hundred percent clean insect that has been washed and sterilized if I give you ten dollars? and again, no, they wouldn't eat the insect. people just don't want to eat bugs.

then he would bring out a sweater. this sweater belonged to a convicted murderer, he told them, who was executed last year. will you wear it? and they would look horrified and refuse. it's been washed, he would assure them. washed and dry cleaned and air freshened, and after all that guy has been dead for a while. I'll give you ten dollars. will you wear it? and they all said no, again. people just don't want to have anything to do with murderers.

then he would bring out another sweater.
this sweater belonged to an aids patient, he said. will you wear it?
no.
it's been washed fifty times since the person died of aids. it's not dangerous, don't you remember those hug me I've got aids posters? and look, it's cold in here, and this is a nice warm sweater. ten dollars. will you wear it?
no.

(would you wear it? the people had no problem wearing clothes that belonged to cancer patients, by the way.)
8:22 AM +

•••    never mind. I am hyper. I had an awful lot of two year oldish fun in psychology. I gave up on note-taking after the first page and just drew pictures (stick figures and swirlies and freeassociationthingamajiggers that really need a better name, but no one can do them as well as I can, which is not saying so much if you know what they are). I always draw in psych, but today I didn't even pretend to be doing anything else. the people sitting around me always sneak looks at my margins, but today they didn't even pretend to be staring off into space when I looked up.

this is my favorite one --
(if you know what was running through my head all day, yay for you :)

anyway I thought on more than one occasion that I had finally hit the wall and was going to slide into unconsciousness, but I was saved by my friend in the next seat who pulled me up. and then I hit my adrenaline wave and it was just a big technicolor rush, and everything was funny and bright and bouncy. at the end of class I turned in my paper, over the word limit by twelve not counting title, subheads, in-text references, or any of my endnotes which took up an entire page in ten-point times, and I was giddy jumping down the stairs. I squeaked when I fell off the sidwalk, laughed and laughed at the silly stories, and then we stood outside in the cold. I felt like I was made of antigravity. two hugs and my scarf tucked around my head (I was a little purple babushka) and promises to sleep tonight. I walked home singing, high as a kite on the beach.

who needs controlled substances? goodness. I think my head might explode. sleep deprivation and adrenaline and friends encouraging my silliness are about all I can handle.

so I fell off the crest of the wave a while ago, and the tide is ebbing. I can body surf a wave (literal here for a minute; it's not all metaphor you know!) longer than just about anyone I've met, and the best ones drop you feather-light in the bit washes up on the sand beyond the crashing point. I caught my wave perfectly tonight (the metaphorical one, now) and I think it's time to put my feet down.

I don't know why you people put up with this. go see something pretty.
12:05 AM +

thursday, november 30

•••    thirty seven hours without a wink of sleep and still going! no caffeine since seven thirty, paper finished, astro homework not so finished but the professor was nice about it, made snow with the fourth graders and paid attention through a whole talk about baryons and and quasistellar objects in the dark without falling asleep, forget the rest of what happened today, forty five minutes until the three hour battle to stay awake for psychology.

I'm not really hyper, my brain has just sort of fallen off the edge of the complete sentences cliff.

I was trying so hard this morning not to waste any time that I didn't bother doing anything to my hair -- just brushed it through once and stuck a couple clips in -- talk about futile, my hair never stays where I put it. and then the nine-year-olds were practically swinging on it. they were almost out of control today; their teacher just got back from her honeymoon with a new name, they're already counting down the days until winter vacation (seventeen), and they hadn't seen us in two weeks. so it was mayhem with crayons and frozen nitrogen and my hair all tangled up in the middle of everything.

sometimes when I'm sleep deprived my emotions get painfully heightened and wound tighter than the coil around a probe magnet. (if you've never had the pleasure of making a probe magnet, just know that it usually takes several attempts at wiretwisting before you get all the way to the end without snapping the whole thing in half.) other times they go into hibernation and I'm left with this impossibly thin shell of vapid cheeriness, while my real self has gone into radially inward freefall. at some point it will all collide and rebound to fly out in all directions, shattering my shell and probably my composure as well, but until them I am a smiley little robot.

tonight I have a feeling I am going to break into a quadrillion pieces, and they will fall in chaotic disarray all over my math homework. and then I will have no closed surface over which to integrate, and all will be lost and the stormy pinkness will come to consume the solar system.
6:33 PM +

•••    I am running out of wordspace. do you think it's justified to not count words in footnotes? maybe I could make my whole paper one big footnote attached to the title. wouldn't that be avant garde and post modern and liberal artsy of me. ha.

speaking of footnotes, supernovae could save the universe.

my candyland melted down to syrup.
7:13 AM +

•••    yes, I am the person who was reading your webpage at foursomething in the morning. no, I am not finished with anything. but I am getting there.

why is it that my brain is always so overflowing with other things when I have avalanching amounts of schoolwork? don't tell me my brain is always overflowing, because that isn't true. right now I feel like I've had this need to write (for me, not for you, and not here) for a week at least, and it's gotten to the point where my words are battering against the inside of my skull trying to escape to the semipermanence and relative quiet of paper before they get lost in the cacophany. that can't be healthy.

it is very very black outside. I wish it would snow. there's something about snow in the middle of the night that reminds me of o holy night, which we always danced to at christmastime in my ballet class, and to which I'm sure we did horrible artistic injustice. if all religion were expressed through music, maybe I wouldn't have such a rocky relationship with it.

ordinary people, it's okay; you don't have to wear those wings. I'm an angel, you're an angel, sitting on each other's shoulders.

right. back to psychology.
4:52 AM +

wednesday, november 29

•••    (to be accomplished before various deadlines between now and 10:30 a.m. friday: psychology paper, around five hundred pages of reading on gender differences, astronomy problem set, math problem set, physics problem set, energy transfer lab for the fourth graders, haydn trio rehearsal, rugby workout, physics lab analysis, wormhole research, thirty pages of reading concerning technical points on galactic structure, normal class and colloquium attendance, possibly occasional naps. therein lies my excuse for all to come, whatever it proves itself to be.)
6:57 PM +

•••    no one is normal. some people are just better at pretending.
1:53 PM +

•••    I read an article relatively recently in some psychology journal that said dreams aren't really a conglomeration of our conscious memories dredged up and rearranged by some indescribable function of our subconscious, contrary to common brainlore. (we've all been suckered by the berenstain bears, surprise surprise.) the article used some data comparing people with alzheimer's (or some other problem that causes memory deficiency) to normal people. the basic upshot of the study was that there was no discernable difference in dream subject matter between the two groups, even though when they were awake, the alzheimer's people couldn't remember what had happened to them the day before, and the other people could without trouble.

basically it said, "you know what you thought about the meaning of your dreams? that's all wrong."

I'm not convinced. sometimes dreams have this infuriating ability to perfectly articulate and manifest your abstract fears in ways that words or even your imagination could never manage. you know what I'm talking about, don't you? how could they do that if they didn't know all the dirty intimate details of the things that happened to you over the course of a day? maybe they only need to know what you thought throughout the day, and they don't care about the actual events themselves. do people with alzheimer's have good emotional memory? (does that even exist? I know I can't remember events without feelings the emotions that were attached to them, but can you remember a specific instance of feeling something without having the slightest inkling what triggered your feelings? that still wouldn't solve my dream dilemma, anyhow.)

the sun is struggling to make it over the horizon this morning. it looks like the light is leaking out sideways along the bottom edge of a cloud cover that is just too heavy to push through. the sun will win though; it always does.
7:17 AM +

tuesday, november 28

•••    do you think if I tell my psych professor the reason my paper isn't finished is because I was playing with the muppets, he'll believe me?

you know how you can have memories that are really vivid in themselves, but have no real connection with linear time? and you just can't tell where they belong in your life, or even anything about yourself in relation to the memory formation? I have a muppet memory like that. (no, not a memory like a muppet. I doubt they remember much; they're just fabric full of fingers.) in the muppets take manhattan, kermit gets hit by a taxicab as he's crossing the street. I remember that sequence perfectly, the squealing tires and the thump and kermit lying on the asphalt. and miss piggie in her infinite overbearing annoyingness, eyes wide and curly hair bouncing everywhere, screaming "kermie!" and then the rest of the movie is a big blur of lights and dishwashing steam. or maybe it's subway steam, I'm not sure.

I wonder if anyone who wasn't spawned in a city likes that stale subway smell. I love it; it's one of my comfort smells. everyone else seems to think it's just another form of uncleanliness.
11:03 PM +

•••    oh, I don't know. for the first time ever I deleted a post, because I didn't like the way it was and couldn't find a way to salvage it. I feel a little like some evil government operative going around disappearing people simply because I don't approve of their existence.

today has been one of those days where you feel like the air is made of molasses.
10:32 PM +

•••    I've been walking to school lately because the tires on my bicycle have gotten all soft. normally I listen to the radio on my walkman, but this morning the batteries were near the absolute end of their sad little lives (they are always either encased in plastic or inside something dark and stuffy, they last barely a month if they're lucky, and then they're toxic waste! don't tell me that isn't a sad existence), so I had to make the pre-bookstore leg of the trip with my ears exposed and the ambient music generated solely by my brain.

so, for the first time in a long time, I listened to the world as I trotted (I was a little behind schedule) up the hill. as I passed a big bushy tree covered in red berries, I noticed with some consternation that the it was making crackly crunching noises, rather like the sound a piece of bubble wrap makes when you twist it between your hands. so I stopped (curiousity always wins out over fear of tardiness, and I have vast amounts of overconfidence in my sprinting ability) and examined the tree to figure out what it was doing.

it wasn't obvious at first. it looked like any twiggy tree sprouting little red berries might look. it was wobbling a little, but I thought that was just because of the breeze. then I pulled back some of the branches to look inside, and I found the source of the noise. dozens and dozens of squirrels were perched on the interior branches, nibbling away at the berries and looking for all the world as if they had grown there like little furry tumors protruding from the treebark. the collective jiggling from their vigorous chewing was making the whole tree shake. it almost looked like they were possessed, this absurdly large number of rodents attacking the tree's fruits as if they were the last source of food on earth.

if I ever write a horror story about creepy little demon-animals that grow on trees, you'll know where I got the idea. not that I would ever write a horror story.
1:17 PM +

•••    in my dream this morning there was an alarm clock set for 3:55 am (in addition to many other less normal things, of course), and since I really didn't want to get up at 3:55 I put on a set of purple earmuffs to drown out the sound. I was reasonably sure that if I couldn't hear it going off, it would just stop eventually once it realized its beeping was just a futile waste of energy.

then I opened my eyes to the real world, which was still mostly dark, and my real alarm clock was beeping too. I reached up and flipped it off, thinking fast and furiously that my electronic devices should not be able to siphon off bits of my dreams like that, and just because it could tell what my brain was doing even through the purple earmuffs didn't give my alarm clock the right to keep squawking at me.

ten seconds. think think. oh.

it seems we are getting closer to the fantastic voyage every day. if I had a little submarine inside me, I would be really mad that I couldn't ride around inside it. we would need some serious time warping to pull that one off, hm?
8:40 AM +

•••    the thing about reckless flying is that eventually you run into a piece of glass you thought to be open sky.

hard thud, cold glass. but soft landing, and now quiet and comfortable lying here in the grounded dark of impending reality. also work, so so much work but you know what? I am actually looking forward to it, if only I can find the time. I think I convinced my astro professor to let me teach our class about wormholes and hyperspace physics; I am already drooling all over my research. practically. I have to talk about all the mathy parts of it, of course (einstein's field equations, erk), but it is really the concept alone that makes me go all flutterhearted.

I would invite you to live in my closet, mallory, but I suspect the smell of my only-occasionally-washed rugby workout clothes would drive you out.

I don't suppose I am going to get any more work done tonight. sighs and sleep.
2:19 AM +

monday, november 27

•••    well, school is back with a vengeance! and in extra-high gear. as I left physics lab (an hour after we were supposed to get out, and still not finished with my analysis) I had the sudden romantic thought that this was quintessential college, this day full of running to catch up with my schedule and crashing recklessly through the overcrowded dining hall and shocking myself with purple electricity from a tesla coil and singing along to the beach boys and debating politics and philosophy over boards full of ac circuits and dropping in on professors to talk about presentations only to find comics mysteriously filed in theoretical physics folders and telnetting from every every public place on campus and, and and and...

and then I realized that every day is going to be like this for the next three weeks until I crash on a train bound for boston, every molecule in my body relieved to be finished with the semester and just wanting to be hypnotized into oblivion by the rocking of the train. so my life is out of control, but right now it is gloriously so, trapped inside an endless run-on sentence that drops subordinate clauses and missed deadlines like pennies into a wishing well as it flies towards the sunset...

I am high on something, but I don't know if it's denial or adrenaline. and now I am off for a fast run in the dark, so I imagine I will only get worse. if you see me... if you can see me... just let me keep flying for now.
6:44 PM +

•••    the flamingos are gone! I know I imagine things a lot, but I don't usually imagine the same things in the same exact place for two weeks straight. do you suppose they were just a decorating experiment, and the people who live there suddenly came to their upper-class, two-luxury-cars-and-long-wool-coats senses?

it would be much more exciting if someone had come and spirited them away in the dead of night. that sounds like a good case for encyclopedia brown, doesn't it? the mystery of the disappearing flamingos. of course, the best encyclopedia brown case was never published in a book...

I can already tell I'm going to have a hard time paying attention in class today.
8:29 AM +

sunday, november 26

•••    I hate to say it, but I'm with bush on this one -- let's just let the election be over. I'd rather watch bush grapple with this foredoomed-to-failure presidency than see florida get turned over to gore because of forever-going recounts, because he would spend four years not getting anything done and then the country would blame a miserable term on the only politician who seems to even pretend to give a whit about the environment.

it would be one thing if all these irregularities in florida were abnormal, but they're not. yeah, probably a thousand people in palm accidentally voted for buchanan, but what are you going to do about it now? and yeah, not everyone punched their ballot all the way through, and yeah maybe the machines couldn't determine intentionality... but where in the country is everything right with the voting process? it's stupid that bush won the electoral vote without the popular vote, but the margin by which he lost the popular vote is so small that I don't think you can say we are going against the will of the american people or anything.

on the other hand, I do think you can say a whole lot of american people are... well, insert your own adjective. I wouldn't want to offend anyone. bah. :P (but I will say this: every single republican who has generously offered to answer my political inquiries -- except the one who said he couldn't vote republican this election because bush is too stupid -- has said that no, they don't care that bush is going to let corporations continue to destroy the environment. people, what the hell are you thinking?)

okay, no more politics.
10:19 PM +

•••    my roommate is back. she always returns from vacation bearing plants (which I end up taking care of, but I'm a little obsessive about living things) food, and toys of one sort or another -- this time it's a violet, instant oatmeal, and the toy story 2-pack on dvd. it's like a mini-christmas at the end of every break. at the risk of sounding materialist, I have to say that the show-and-tell-excitment helps take away the sting of relinquishing my aloneness. at this point maybe it's more of an expected sting; I've gotten used to living with a roommate and even though I always look forward to having the room to myself, I was glad to see her return today. I'm a social hypochondriac.

she also brought her dog, who jumped up to lick my face and ended up with his tongue behind my teeth. (I was laughing; I don't usually let dogs snog with me.) no matter what your friends or your third grade science teacher told you, dogs do not have cleaner mouths than humans, so I spent a good long time brushing mine.
4:30 PM +

•••    now that I am awake and free from the spell of romanticism and melodrama that late night solitude always casts over me, I need to amend that wish for storms: we had better get lots of exciting weather that in no way threatens the people traveling back from thanksgiving break.

how did it get to be sunday already? only twelve days classdays left in the semester. it makes me nervous. I think time moves faster at college than it does in the rest of the world, and not just because I'm getting older. it's already such an artificial construct, this little city full of impetuous kids being shoved over the threshold of adulthood, conspicuously colored by nonsectarian quakerness, equal opportunity and all the other earmarks of attempted utopia that would never last in the real world; it may as well have its own spacetime continuum too.

I need to be writing a paper. I feel like I've been a student forever. if I believed in reincarnation I would say that my soul has always lived inside academians (in which case I am probably not living up to my past very well), but I don't so I guess I am just losing perspective.
9:37 AM +

•••    all week when it was twenty degrees every day the most exciting weather we got was a lot of wind, but as soon as the thermometer climbs above forty degrees, rain rain rain and more rain... not that I have anything against rain, but I want snow! doesn't the universe know that? there had better be some really beautiful storms tomorrow.
1:23 AM +