saturday, january 6

•••    so yeah, I'm having a good day. :)

I took the dog out for a romp in the snow, and we ended up sliding out onto the frozen river. we had a snowball fight and I won, and then we had a race and she won. I came back, dripping half-discarded warm winter clothing, to find the backyard filled with cardinals and bluejays feeding on scattered birdseed. later there was a woodpecker banging furiously away at a frozen lilac branch, looking for who knows what. I sat underneath the trees and looked up at the barren branches falling away from me, and I took a picture which likely will not capture the beauty of twiggy grey angles against swirly grey clouds, but will capture the moment.

I got a present in the real mail and a particularly lovely email in my inbox, both of which made me smile. my mom french braided my hair. there was a package from my once-removed relatives who moved from cambridge to tucson last summer, with cactus candy, a picture of a puppy, and a remarkably optimistic letter. I like it when things work out better than expected.

my favorite four year old became my favorite five year old, and I went to his birthday party. (apparently I am cool enough to play with him even when his parents aren't paying me. who knew?) I sat in the corner with him and helped him open presents until he flipped from shy mode to crazy-monkey-boy mode and ran off to join the ruckus. I was introduced to the other children's parents as the "rocket scientist babysitter." when they asked me about it I did my best to smile and laugh when they rolled their eyes and threw up their hands in response to my research project description. finally the few who were actually interested and not just trying to make conversation with the random nineteen-year-old stranger sat down with me and we had a nice conversation about school and hormones and gender and evolution and children. I danced with the birthday boy and his six-month-old butterfly-eared brother, to big bad voodoo daddy. all was warm and friendly and happy.

now I'm going ice skating, which may be the closest thing to flying I can do without actually leaving the ground. my hockey skates have been rather neglected this winter. it will be a happy reunion. and blogger is working, spiffy and fast again, and there is snow still covering the ground and making it glow orange in the city lights. my bird is chirping. the world is turning.

none of which even begins to compare with mollie coming back! :) good day indeed.
7:24 PM +

•••    finally, finally, finally we have real snow! the kind you can walk through and leave tracks in and pack into snowballs. the kind that sticks to things and sticks to you and runs into its reflection in the sky at the horizon. it's still coming down, tiny bits at a time. snow makes me happy.
10:54 AM +

friday, january 5

•••    today I went into my brother's classroom to make candy houses with the third and fourth graders. it was such the antithesis of the fouth grade classroom I'm normally in. tall ceiling, kids and projects and papers flying every which way, kids without shoes, teachers speaking creole, a couch in the corner, animal cages and a fishtank along the wall, white kids and black kids and asian kids and haitian kids. public education gone right for a change. it was nice. I had fun.

and now it's snowing, so the world must like me.
11:45 PM +

•••    colors, just because:
red. I suppose if red is the color of blood, it can be the color of life as well.
orange. I love how "universal" does not include the united states.
yellow. boring, and mostly green to boot.
green. in both the pigment and the ecological sense.
blue. I can think of so many better uses for this name.
purple. I know it's not really a part of the visual spectrum, but I so love this domain. it puts indigo and violet to shame.
4:11 PM +

•••    so how come the news at yahoo lists science news after sports and entertainmnent? do most people really care more about upcoming hollywood releases (or what jennifer lopez is going to wear to the grammys, which has to be at least partly why she was nominated) than the fate of the much-maligned space station mir?

of course, yahoo also thinks hollywood stars seen encouraging youngsters to smoke is a science headline, so maybe I should just be happy that news about mir makes it onto yahoo at all.
12:26 PM +

•••    I saw some things today. (I saw lots of things, but some are more worth reporting on than others.)

a woman on the sidewalk near central square flagged the number one bus down as if she were trying to hail a taxi. the bus slowed for her, but I think it was only because she was reasonably close to the bus stop.

outside of mit there was a big blue truck that said "rain for rent." what do you suppose mit would want with rain? and aren't they smart enough that they can make their own? (this is the school where students put a cop car on the roof and successfully switched two floors of a building, elevator wiring and everything.)

on the train there was a man who looked confused. he kept getting up and walking over to the doors (through which you could see nothing but tunnely blackness) and then turning around and returning to his seat. he had a gigantic cup containing a lot of ice and the remains of a dunkaccino. when he got off at copley, I watched him through the window as the train sat in the station. he walked over to the nearest trashcan, tucked his enormous cup under his arm, and reached down into the garbage. he extracted a mcdonalds cup with its plastic-snap-cover and straw still intact. apparently it also had some sort of beverage inside, because he put the straw to his lips and sucked vigorously for a while. when the cup was empty he threw it back into the trash can and went on his way.
1:29 AM +

thursday, january 4

•••    some observations:

the clocks in my general vicinity are desynchronized in just the right way so that I can run at the speed of light along one particular route. if I put my shoes on when the kitchen clock says ten-thirty, I will run past the lifeline building when its glowing clock says ten-thirty, past the polaroid building when its attempted-avant-garde clock says ten-thirty, and across the footbridge when the nearest clock on the side of a harvard building says ten-thirty. of course then I stop and watch the river, and time starts to move forward again.

one of the ugliest sounds in the world is the noise made by a catfight. especially when it takes place ten feet away from you. (my evil cat came away with a tuft of black nice-cat fur last night.)

little kids are smarter than grownups. I was reading a history book to my favorite almost-five-year-old, the children's almanac of the twentieth century or something like that, and he stopped me in the middle and said, "why is it all about wars?" I told him that a lot of the most important things that had happened in the twentieth century were wars. he wanted to know why there were so many. we had the page open to something about world war two, so I said, "well, there are a lot of reasons, and sometimes they change during the course of the war, because some wars last for many years. but one of the reasons world war two started was because countries were fighting over territory. they wanted each other's land." and he, this possessive, demanding, excitable kid, looked at me in utter confusion and asked, "land? the earth is so big, why couldn't they just share?"

samosas for breakfast: weird. smoothie for breakfast: good.
1:05 PM +

•••    in the latest issue of atlantic monthly, there is an article about flavoring in foods. it goes off into a little tangent about food preferences:

A person's food preferences, like his or her personality, are formed during the first few years of life, through a process of socialization. Babies innately prefer sweet tastes and reject bitter ones; toddlers can learn to enjoy hot and spicy food, bland health food, or fast food, depending on what the people around them eat.

now, putting aside the question of nature vs nurture which this author has so blithely presumed to answer, I wonder if it's really true that a person's eating preferences are determined mostly by those formative toddler years. I ate a lot of health food when I was little, and for several years a substantial amount of what I ate was home grown (or killed, in some cases) or made from scratch from organic co-op food. and I really do think that eased my transition from an ovo-lacto-carno life to a vegan one; I had, after all, been consuming tofu and tempeh for years.

my mother has a story she likes to tell about the time my dad fed me sausage. I was a toddler and we were going for a car ride, or something like that. in any case we were going to be in a car for a while (though who knows what car, because I think this was before we had one. whatever. I don't actually remember this, I've just heard it a zillion times). my dad bought a big italian sausage, the kind that is fat and round and all wrapped in icky greasy plastic. he opened it up for a travel-time snack, and I started grabbing at it like a normal hyper grabby kid. now, by this time I had been raised on breastmilk and rooftop community garden vegetables and homemade whole wheat bread and all that healthy sort of stuff. (and no red meat, because we didn't start eating that until after my little sister was born.) I had juicy-juice popsicles for treats and I hadn't had much experience with processed sugar. I was a healthfood baby. so my mother assumed that it would be okay to let me grab the sausage, because I would taste it and hate it and give it up in disgust.

well. the story ends with me covered in grease and the sausage mostly gone and covered in little gnawing gum-and-teeth marks, so maternal instincts are not always to be trusted. that let-them-discover-their-aversion-for-themselves philosophy backfired on a few more occasions, such as when I liked beer and wine (and subsequently got publicly drunk at the tender age of two) and when, ten or so years later, my baby brother liked coffee. I don't like beer anymore, but maybe that's because people at college drink disgusting cheap beer. still, I have about as much inclination to taste a nice sam adams to see if I maybe like beer as I do to go chew on a greasy italian sausage to see if maybe I am missing my true carnivorous calling, which is to say no inclination whatsoever.

yeah. babblebabblebabble. (weblink via metafilter, although I feel obligated to also mention meatfilter at this point....)
2:08 AM +

wednesday, january 3

•••    I have clearly been watching too much television lately. today when I was reading all my astronomy news story stuff, this jumped out at me for all the wrong reasons: red dots may rewrite the history of the universe. what that really means is that astronomers are observing faraway galaxies (aka red dots; red because the wavelengths of visible light they're emitting are lengthened due to their high velocity away from us, dots because they're too distant to be resolved as anything else) that may be inconsistent with current hypotheses about star formation. but all I could think was that those stupid red dots from the kotex commercials were banging about the universe like balls in a pinball machine, shaking up the structure of the universe all the way from here to the cosmic microwave background.

all of which makes me think I have been paying too little attention to beauty lately. so, space and roller coasters and a late afternoon run beside the river to set me straight; I need to escape the sights and sounds and smells of this house for a while. you do too. go escape.

by the way, I am an evil minion now. maybe that accounts for what appears to be an increasing aversion to sunlight. (just don't ask how late I slept this morning, okay?) so be careful, and don't be alarmed if I start growing talons and bat wings. it's all part of the plan.
3:00 PM +

•••    so what do you think; are we more sharply pricked by the urge to communicate when the means to do so are denied us, or do we spew out nonsense just because we think someone might be listening? I can't decide whether I am more unhappy with the feeling that I have no one to talk to or the realization that my feeling is completely wrong, or at least mostly wrong. not that I have that problem right now, unless I do have it and I am just suppressing it. can you tell I've been battling with blogger lately?

and does that mean something to you? I'm not sure it is anything but words to me.

see words get me in trouble because my thoughts have nothing to do with words. I have my thoughts which are just thoughts, and I have my internal monologue which are the words I would say if I were not convinced most of them are wholly false, products of my melodrama-prone imagination and invented memories. and also if I had the missing something, whose identity I do not now and will never ever know, that prevents me from saying them regardless of truth and exaggeration and desire and frustration. because who am I kidding, if I had the guts to spew lies all the time I probably would, right? wouldn't that make life more exciting? not that my life isn't exciting, because it is. but just like you can always add one and never reach infinity, your life can always be a little more exciting before it gets to be too much. but anyway even though I am careful to keep my inventions to myself, since perception is enough of an invention already, my words get me in trouble because they are not quite what my thoughts want them to be. and also because they get stuck, and I watch them thrashing there inside my brain and I hate them for being stillborn but never buried.

I don't know -- it's after five in the morning and I am awake with very very quiet music playing so that none of it will soak through the thin walls into the neighbors' apartments, and I think the track listing on the slipcover is backwards but I can't really tell because the whole affair is in french. frenchness seems to have been permeating my existence lately in a way that I would not expect it to, given that most of the french I know is from song lyrics and proverbs and is therefore not at all useful in the real world. but they are good words; I was never taught to fight rag dolls and I sleep underwater and all cats are black at night.

seventeen days and then I get to go back home. school. home. both, neither, nothing. when I say things like that I feel twingily guilty for just a second because I know my parents read this and what right have I to blithely skip off and declare that their house is no longer my home? but so it goes and goes, and so I have gone away and grown up.

or something like that. I just remembered I also know a lot of useless french from classical music and ballet titles. we are all oiseaux tristes with our wordless songs, but soon the sun will be rising for morning and the children for school and the pets for food, so I must go to bed before I find myself at a loss for darkness. bonne nuit a tous.
5:23 AM +

tuesday, january 2

•••    underneath the top flap of my cheerios box: "once your consciousness has been raised, it can not be lowered." if only that were true.
2:46 PM +

monday, january 1

•••    so, happy new year.

I have been a student too long, with the end of my academic career too far in the unforeseeable future, for calendar years to have much meaning for me. my year starts in september with the beginning of school and ends in august after my birthday. thus the year I am a sophomore in college is the year I am nineteen years old, and there is no need for any of this january nonsense.

but. I do love new year's, because it's celebration for celebration's sake. so last night I went out into the cold night to be surrounded by noise and revelry and january nonsense. I wore my wizard's hat, because when can you wear a wizard's hat in public if not on new year's eve? it's tall and pointy, so between that and my bundled-up winter clothes, my shadow looked like some sort of circus clown gallivanting about the city sidewalks in two dimensions. all the drunk people liked me a lot.

boston has ice sculptures and music and laser shows and spotlights and random artwork and lots of people. at 12:00:01 I was on my back, sliding across the pond at the public garden, watching the lights in the sky and laughing. the fireworks in the harbor reflected off the sides of the skyscrapers and the trees were resplendant in fluttering strings of trapped confetti. the couples kissed and the children trumpeted their technicolor plastic horns, and really what more can you ask for on the first minute of the new year?
2:42 PM +

sunday, december 31

•••    things I can do with a baby on my hip:
play catch
follow-the-leader
split open a canteloupe, scoop out the seeds, and cut the slices into alligator teeth
act like a tyrannosaurus rex
repair flat tires on toy trucks
make mashy-rice-and-squash dinner
point out constellations
play raffi tapes and sing along
change an almost-five-year-old's outfit
save a christmas tree from a collision with a scooter
scrub a countertop
catch cherry tomatoes in my mouth
build a paper blimp
jigglejigglejiggle bouncebouncebounce

things I cannot do even when I have a baby on my hip
imagine myself as a competent parent.
7:16 PM +

•••    I was thinking about sheets this morning (don't ask, I don't know why either), and I realized I have no idea how to shortsheet a bed. that seems like a vital sort of information, like knowing how to make a good paper airplane and how to make fireworks in a microwave. so I looked it up, and here it is: how to shortsheet a bed. I don't have a bed to try it on, and I think I've gotten a bit old to be using my siblings as guinea pigs for my mischief-making, so I can't guarantee success. but there you go nonetheless.

we have weird squirrels living in our backyard. one of them is white. it's sitting on the ground right now, and it's whiter than the stuff that dares call itself snow, all poked-through by grass and twigs and dirt. how sad is that?
2:26 PM +

•••    so, new year's eve. somehow I didn't really feel it approaching this year, and now that it's here I'm not sure what to do about it.

sixteen years ago today my family moved from west side manhattan to north burke, new york. my six-week-old sister screamed in her carseat all the way up the state, and I read letters from a picture of alphabet soup on the last page of sesame street magazine. when we got to our new house it was snowing, and the snow was coming in the windows and making little piles on the floor. it was cold. my godmother made jiffypop for dinner, and she started crying when it got burned. I don't remember it being burned, though; I just remember the silver cover puffing up and up. at midnight we went outside and yelled some, and it was ridiculously dark and cold and empty compared to the big city.

four years ago my painkillers weren't strong enough and I had to go to the emergency room for a morphine shot. I think my family had been watching little women, but I don't really remember; I was too preoccupied with trying to ignore the frighteningly familiar feeling in my side. it was too much. the triage nurse said happy new year while I closed my eyes to try and feel the drug in my blood. I wondered if that was the closest I would ever come to being an addict. later, after they had moved me to the tenth floor, a different nurse tried to give me medicine that was meant for my roommate. we joked about it in the morning. she was a great roommate, the best of the three I had that year. her name was ryan. she was braver than me.

last year I stood with my best friend on a picnic table on the beach and watched the north shore coastline, hoping something dramatic would happen; after all, it was y2k. nothing did, but lots of fireworks went off. it was pretty. I ran into the ocean just because it was there, and because I wanted to see if my shoes were actually as waterproof as they claimed to be. I looked up and down the beach, all moonlit and haunted and empty except for the two of us, and I thought about the thousands of people in times square and I did not envy them one bit.

today I am going to play with my favorite four year old, who is less than a week shy of being my favorite five year old, and his baby brother. it's funny how neither of them have any concept of 2001 being a big year or a year that is supposed to be far in the future. I was born less than twenty years ago and it still sounds just eons away, like a time when we will have robots and buttons that make zappy noises and vacations on the moon. maybe sometime in between the toy cars and milk-filled sippy cups I will sneak a moment to think about the ending year and what transpired during its tenure. perhaps the earth's orbit is an arbitrary basis for dividing up time, and perhaps the calendar is an artificial human construct, but we need to grow our meaning somewhere, don't we?
3:07 AM +