saturday, february 3

•••    I came home and it was dark, except it wasn't. the lights were all off and the computers were asleep and the silence was thick as ice, but all around the perimeter of the room there were little glowing points from printers and clocks and monitors and voice messages and zip drives and radios and power strips. the plants on the windowsill looked like monsters, swathed in red light inside and the pale yellow of domesticated nighttime outside, casting spiky twisted shadows up the walls and across the ceiling.

I sat immersed in eeriness for a while, letting my eyes adjust to the dark and my brain adjust to the blatant exposure of my flaws that comes when external distractions are absent. when I went out I was nearly blinded by lights and people and the xfl game on tv, but it felt good.
10:07 PM +

•••    I never thought I would be so glad to have a day off from fitness. my legs have felt like they belong on someone else's body since saturday. you know how you can work something so hard it almost loses meaning, like when you say a word over and over until it sounds like nothing more than a collection of letters? I think the same thing happens with muscles -- use them too much, and they lose all cohesion.

in a way my legs aren't quite mine -- they're stuck in the past. the fragility of my blood and the paleness of my skin is such that serious bruises never quite go away anymore. you would think that this is a bad combination with rugby, and it is, but honestly my most prominent permanent bruises have nothing to do with that. I have a dented strip across my left thigh from a collision with a guardrail, and a dark splotch just below the back of my knee from getting sucked into a drainpipe.

I wonder if I will tell stories when I am old, to whatever little children feel like humoring me by listening, about the various decorations on my body. here's where I sliced my scalp on a trailer hitch; here's where I tried to jump over a barbed wire fence; here's where I was hit by a car; here's where a really big rugby player walked across me. it's like an automatic life-history-filter, picking out the moments that make exciting or funny or at least embarassing stories. better than tattoos.
10:23 AM +

•••    I got fed up with blogger's insatiable archives-appetite, so I took matters of wockerjabby history into my own hands.

of course, this means that I'll have to manually update the page every so often, and I might not be especially vigilant about that. but I have a feeling the automatically generated archives will keep adding new stuff even though they seem to have completely lost track of the old stuff. so goes it.
1:57 AM +

friday, february 2

•••    so I got a nice dose of reality-smack this afternoon: there is so much to plan and decide and arrange, and I need to start doing it. all I know right now is that I'm going to be an astrophysics major, and sometime between now and early march I have to nail down a whole bunch of other stuff. am I going abroad? am I going to concentrate in cognitive science? am I going to be an honors major? am I going to do a creative writing project? am I going to do astronomy research this summer? am I going to do volunteer work?

the real problem with these questions, of course, is not what is possible for me to do, but what I actually want to do. and honestly, I have no idea. it's a problem. I think I've devised a way to study neuroscience without cutting up or brain-damaging or otherwise abusing little rodents, but I don't know if that's as important as studying lots of different things. I think I could go abroad without too much curriculum-rearrangement, but what would I do without my rugby team? I know my grad school applications will want to be full of internships and grants and research positions, but I also know my heart needs to be full of something more than that. I get antsy if I go too long without feeling that I'm making a difference for the world, and for people. and I'm stuck.

but I will say this: sometime soon, before I become an adult with a job and a real-world life, I will go to new zealand. when I do get a job, it will have something to do with astrophysics. and some other time in my life, I will write something (non-academic) worth publishing.

maybe that sounds self-important and overconfident, but you have to start somewhere, right? and I am feeling particularly powerful because I just got my very own key to the astronomy research lab. yay.
7:26 PM +

•••    is it me, or is "insect-like space structure" a terrible description for something as mutable and ephemeral as a nebula? I was picturing something much more solid and angular and man-made.

also, I think it looks more like a member of coleoptera than hymenoptera, what with that huge round abdomen and apparent lack of a thorax... but that's probably just the leftover entomology geek in me talking. most of the beetles I ever saw were either in cryostasis or ground into little liquid-helium-frozen bits, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about.
9:06 AM +

•••    so, the gender test correctly determined that I'm a chick, but based on the examples it gave I have no idea how it managed that. apparently most women would prefer to be lonely forever than to bleed to death. what's up with that? I'd choose short-lived physical pain over everlasting emotional pain any day (so it's probably good that it's not a real choice, or I'd be dead or something).

to be fair in my criticism, I wasn't very far across the halfway point of the spectrum. maybe it was the belief in world peace thing that clued them in.
12:19 AM +

thursday, february 1

•••    we are surrounded by dark matter. you see how much there is left for me (and you and us) to discover?

I'm going to eat a cookie for breakfast now. just try and stop me.
8:08 AM +

•••    I won a dollar fifty! yow. I feel like I should say something. um.

so yeah, it's a popularity contest. did you know the first ever popularity contest I was in ended in a tie? I was in fifth grade, and I don't remember how but somehow I ended up on student council. we had to elect a president, and in an unprecedented moment of confidence I said sure, I'll run for president. how much work could it be? I was a fifth-grader, one of the big kids in the school, and I had been there for three whole years -- an eternity to someone who had already accepted perpetually being the new kid as a way of life -- and I was finally getting used to the idea that people knew who I was.

well. we had to give speeches and it was terrifying. I am not exactly inhibited; some past performances of mine have involved karaoke and disney songs and even kamikaze elephants. but I am shy, and I get all trembly and tongue-tied when I recite rehearsed things in front of people. and I was ten years old, a tiny ten year old running for student council president against a huge, smiley, easygoing guy with red hair and freckles and a nickname. silly. somehow it was harder in front of the little kids, because they asked pointed questions without meaning to, unaware of the invisible boundaries they were crossing. one first grader asked me how I could possibly do as good a job as a boy. I was breathtakingly incoherent in my response, so I'm sure I didn't alleviate his fears any.

I remember giving my speech to the special ed class. I was wearing my sweater with the teddy bears running up and down stairs on it, with little neon-colored pom-poms sticking out. my pants were purple. the rubber bands on my braces were blue. I ran through my presidential shpiel, what I cared about, why I was running, yadablahdablah. and when I was finished, a little girl with crimped hair and thick-lensed glasses sliding down her nose asked me if she could touch the fluffies on my sweater.

they counted the ballots twice to be sure, but there was no mistake: we had each gotten one hundred and forty three votes. I had voted for the boy who ran against me, because I felt dirty even looking at the little box next to my name, and I wondered how he had cast his ballot. anyway in a precedent-setting move, the student council decided it could have co-presidents. in the end it was good, because I could do the responsible organizing things, and he could do the public relations thi