saturday, april 14

•••    today feels bittersweet, like chocolate that melts silky across your tongue but leaves you thirsty with a hollow aftertaste in your mouth.

today's rugby match was our last home game of the season, which means it will be the last time we play on this pitch. as soon as commencement is finished in june, the construction companies are coming to rip up the pieces of campus surrounding the science building, and for the next six years or so it will live in a state of flux, as things are torn down and built up, shiny newness and pure unsullied whiteboards on top of old walls and the foundation that was laid forty-whatever years ago. we science majors will be shuffled through a series of temporary solutions to the space crunch problem; those of us who spend more time on the quiet floor of the science library than in our own rooms will learn to work with the drone of construction omnipresent in the background; those of us who play rugby will see our field, the oldest and by far the prettiest athletic field on campus, paved over and turned into a place for all the backhoes and bulldozers to park.

it was a terrific game, and we won 18-5. we ran a new play in which I am the key element, the surprise attacker on a weak-side split, and the other team's bafflement was so palpable I wanted to wrap myself in it and laugh. it was sunny and the mud was warm, and I love my team. but afterwards as I stood on the sidelines, watching our b-side play the prettiest rugby I've ever seen from them, I couldn't help but feel sadly nostalgic. I'm only a sophomore; I shouldn't have to think in terms of the things I will never do again.
10:04 PM +

•••    could there be a more perfect day for rugby? could anyone have imagined that simple things like a ball and a team would make me so happy? when I come back I will be sunburned and bruised, but smiling.
8:44 AM +

friday, april 13

•••    I never really went looking for that thing I wanted, but I found it today anyway. or it found me. and now I am happy.

my roommate and her posse decided they were sick of trying to be good christians in the dining hall (I am not entirely clear on what you are not allowed to eat during lent, but I can't imagine it is that much more restrictive than being vegan... who knows), so they went out and bought good food at the co-op, and we had angelhair dairy-free-pesto pasta for dinner, with veggies sauteed in olive oil and lots of fresh fruit for dessert. it's been so long since I ate newly-cut pineapple, I forgot how it makes my tongue burn, and how it's so completely worth the pain. I tried to play twinkle, twinkle little star by blowing across the open mouth of the sparkling cider bottle, but I got dizzy and the entire endeavor ended in a fit of giggles. it's a good night.

what is it about fridays that make life seem so much more manageable, anyway? this weekend I have to write two problem sets, an exam, a paper, a lab report, a poem, and three idl programs, not to mention... well, everything else, including my taxes and a ton of website stuff. but at the moment I'm feeling perfectly content and in control, as if the only thing in my future were tomorrow's rugby match. maybe it is. I am full of food and contentment.
8:43 PM +

•••    okay, I am over myself, at least a little bit. it stopped raining and the sun came out, so now the wet earth and blooming flowers are making everything smell fresh and alive. on the way to school this morning I was mesmerized by all the bright umbrellas moving radially inward through the damp grey world, pink and turquoise and green and screen-printed monet and orange stripes, bordered the yellow edge of my own bright duck-handled umbrella, all converging on end-of-the-week academia. and when I shook the rain off before folding my umbrella up, a cloud of little wet cherry blossoms fell to the ground as well. nothing can be interminably sad when there are flowers in the air.
12:49 PM +

•••    storms on the sun, storms in the clouds, storms in my head; at least we can draw parallel lines. this is the center of thunderweather.
7:20 AM +

•••    yes yes happy good friday the thirteenth. isn't that fun?
6:48 AM +

thursday, april 12

•••    so many things that have always seemed like intangible eventualities are becoming real and concrete. maybe it only seems like it is happening all at once because I was gone for a week and so I have gotten eight days' worth of mail in a single paper avalanche, or maybe it's because it's the time of year when time seems to lose its sense of rhythm and go skidding into a frenzy of inconsistency and instability. or maybe I am afraid of growing up, but I am still reluctant to admit that to myself.

letters from the physics and psychology departments, in different fonts with different letterheads, one signed yours sincerely and one sincerely yours, but with the same message: I am now officially an astrophysics major with a minor in cognitive science. even the registrar knows it. my life for the next two years has been etched in something -- if not stone, then at least a good solid piece of wood. these words will go on my diploma, and eventually no one will care.

emails in my inbox, mostly from people I've never met: I've been officially offered a summer position at the harvard-smithsonian center for astrophysics, which is a twenty-minute bike ride from my family's house in cambridge. star formation and hubble data and stuff like that. now they need my resume, which is scary, because it means I'll have to update it and watch the past two years of my life be consolidated into so many lines of text. and then I'll have to realize that I am halfway through with college, and that my glib proclamation in eighth grade that I was going to be an astrophysist when I grew up has turned into a reality, and thus I must be growing up in spite of myself.

a form-printed card, with my name and a number: I have a damn good housing lottery choosing number, and in just eleven days I will know where my home will be next year. it will be a single, on-campus, somewhere I actually want to be instead of somewhere I got stuck because my number sucked. and it will mean that there will be a next year, and that before that there will be an end to this year, when people will graduate and I will hate them, temporarily, for feeling my absence in their new lives less acutely than I will feel theirs in my same old life.

the world is unbalanced, always, and some days I feel it. you do too, I know.
10:12 PM +

•••    life seems to be going beautifully, and yet I feel conflicted. at least blogger is working again.

last night, after the rain, I saw a giant earthworm schlepping its way across the parking lot. it was longer than my foot, which is admittedly small, but a size six worm is still pretty impressive.

tell me something happy?
1:48 PM +

wednesday, april 11

•••    don't you hate it when you say (or think) something that you really don't mean, but that is so funny and witty that you wish you did mean it?

of course, funny and witty is subjective. there was one time when I was ten years old and my mom and I were shopping together, looking for a present for one of my classmates whose sleepover birthday party I had been invited to. we were friendly but not exactly friends, and I was a little baffled as to why she had bothered to invite me. I had this vague suspicion that she had done so out of some sense of obligation, since we both played the clarinet, and her cousins shared my backyard. anyway, I didn't have a good enough grip on either her personality or preteen pop culture to know what to give her, so we were at the bookstore, because I thought that deep within the soul of anyone who knew how to read must be some intrinsic love for literature. and also because my mom thought a book would make a good present.

we were going through the children's section, mom suggesting books and me rejecting them almost before she could get them off the shelves. "no," I was saying repeatedly, "that just doesn't fit brooke's personality." I wanted to find something superficially shallow, but actually meaningful and insightful for the people who bothered to look. I think that may have been a rather self-centered reading of brooke's personality, but being an antisocial fifth-grader with good self esteem takes a little bit of self-centeredness, anyway. I was on my knees at the bottom of the c-author-section, and my mother and a few other adults were towering over me in the e and f sections. I pulled out the newest beverly cleary book, because I thought brooke might have read all the older ones, and waved it over my head while I asked my mother, "what about this one?" she frowned a tiny bit, shook her head and said, "eh... I think beverly cleary went downhill with 'muggie maggie.'"

instantly and desperately I wanted to reply, "well, god went downhill on brooke." but I couldn't, because it was mean, and not even remotely true, and I didn't think it was very right or respectful of me to even imply that I had any connection with god just for the sake of a zingy comeback. I think mostly I was annoyed that my mother had shot down my suggestion so blithely, as if she knew as well as I did what brooke would like. and I was annoyed at my brain for only being clever when it was also being evil. (eventually we settled on mr. popper's penguins, which was a decent enough choice, I think. brooke thanked me very politely and cheerfully, which is probably as much as you can hope for when you give someone a book for her eleventh birthday. and then we made prank phone calls and said dirty words in baby voices while the people on the other end sputtered in sleepy indignation, and we ate buttered pasta wheels in front of mario brothers at three in the morning. I was very quiet during all of this, but it was worth it for the chocolate donuts the next morning.)

and now that I have hopefully given you reason enough to believe that I try to avoid saying untrue things, I feel compelled to tell peter (and the rest of you) that he is wrong when he says he doesn't listen to sexy music. aside from the fact that tori amos et. al. are extremely sexy, so he is therefore wrong already, he writes sexy music. and you should go listen to it.

(that's sexy in the best way, not sexy in a slutty or sketchy way.)

I am still surprised by the rain, and the green, and by school. routine is just routine until it isn't. or something like that.
4:54 PM +

•••    today is going to be the day of fifty thousand. (that is, the day when the fifty-thousandth visitor clicks through my stats counter.) kismet?
9:46 AM +

•••    "later" wasn't supposed to mean "tomorrow," but I guess that's just what happens sometimes. that's okay. I needed to sleep. after I got home, I posted my poem for the week, checked my email, took a shower, and immediately spiked a fever, which I think was my immune system rebelling against the shoddy treatment I'd been giving it for the previous forty-whatever hours. no sleep, twenty-seven hours in cars and airplanes and airports, weird food, medicine at all the wrong times; I think it was justified. anyway I'm fine now, if a little spacey.

so. chile was amazing. I know new things, about new stars, and maybe about myself too, because it isn't every day that I go do real astronomy with a real telescope in a foreign country. actually, it isn't ever that I do that, except for last week. one thing that surprised me, once I thought about it, was how little I missed the pretty pictures. nasa's pr is full of colorful images of stars and nebulae and other hubble stuff, but most of astronomy research is done with data that is much less aesthetically pleasing. what I was doing was reducing raw ccd images to one-dimensional absorption and emission spectra. so there were really no pretty pictures to be had; it was all black and white stripes from the spectrograph, or jaggy lines on my wavelength plots. and I didn't miss the pictures in the slightest, because every jag meant something real about the star we were looking at. it's all about context, I guess. so all night(s) I was sitting in front of a computer, looking for that little spike at 6708 angstroms, and in spite of being overwhelmingly sleep-deprived, I was completely enthralled by what I was doing. and I'm probably boring everyone with this, hm? :)

more about chile another time. there are only so many stories you can tell in one post. now I am home and there are flowers everywhere, and I've gone from the end of summer to the beginning of spring just like that, from red rocks and yellowing leaves outside my mountaintop window to green buds and pink blossoms outside my suburban college dorm window. the house across the street, with its emerald green lawn and perfectly manicured hedges, seems to have once again spawned pink plastic flamingos, which are now sitting pretty amidst a bed of pastel flowers. it's funny to see dampness again.

I need to finish unpacking and get ready to go to my first class in a week. if I seem crazy from now until the end of the semester, it's because I am crazy. I'm a college girl, you know?

also, I think miami is really a foreign country that just hasn't bothered to secede.
9:07 AM +

tuesday, april 10

•••    home. tired. happy. dirty. shower time. write, later.
6:02 PM +

monday, april 9

•••    i never have time, it seems, to do the important things anymore. i don't see the old friends, the ones who aren't in my classes. i don't read books or respond to emails or post to gangbang. i don't clean my apartment or pay my bills or balance my checkbook or do laundry or wash dishes. i don't go out on wednesday nights with classmates or return the calls of old friends who are lonely in small towns. i don't drink wine with phil or take walks with rob or watch movies with ryan. i don't get my hands and clothing messy with the bits and pieces of real, tangible projects.

i procrastinate. i read websites i don't even like. i take apart years-broken vcrs to try to get at the tape inside, leaving dusty guts and shrapnel strewn across the floor, guts and shrapnel that will not be picked up or put away or thrown away. i watch the x-files. i talk to faraway exes on the phone. i bleach my hair, dye it, bleach it again. i take naps, dreaming of internet lives interspersed with real ones, and shoes i've had since 1997.

i eat tuna straight from the can. - a
3:10 PM +

sunday, april 8

•••    i, too, dodge bouquets. i've been to at least fifteen weddings, and at four of them i was old enough to get shoved into a perfumed cluster with the other women, as they stood poised to catch airborne flowers. my standard operating procedure thus far has been to stand in the back of the group, with my hands behind my back, and duck at the precise moment that the petals are hurled. it's not pretty, but it works.

perhaps i'm oversensitive, but i think the entire process is a bit insulting. why is it assumed that it is every woman's absolute dream to get themselves married off as soon as possible? - a
12:29 PM +