saturday, june 2

it's raining but windless, and the raindrops are falling with such perfect uniform steadiness that you'd think they were pouring through a sieve instead of from a cloud. the leaves outside my window shudder slightly when the rain hits them, so the tree looks like some sort of organic player piano, with shiny green keys tripping in time with the water's rhythm. (I wonder what that would sound like. I could imagine, but I think my sounds would be all wrong.)
12:53 ++

friday, june 1

more on growing up, since that seems to be a dominant theme lately:

somehow in spite of being displaced and in between homes (because it sounds silly to say I'm homeless), I've reached another inbetween place where no one assumes I don't belong. newbury street in boston features daily culture collisions between the rebellious punk rock emokids and the urbane city sophisticates and the wannabes on both sides; the music stores are no exception. it used to be that I couldn't make my scrounging rounds without getting a funny look from someone.

but today -- today, I sang along to the music playing in cd spins, where I often have to cover my ears; the guy at mars showed me the latest vinyl arrivals from france and japan without his usual and-you-care-about-this-why? look; I didn't choke on the air at smash city, and the guy with the clothespin through his lip smiled at me when I came in. no one ever gives me a second glance at newbury comics, because I'm undeniably part of their target demographic, but today one of the employees struck up a conversation with me about local labels.

so I was feeling pretty happy about my place in the music world. I always end my trips to newbury street by heading to the third floor of tower records, where the classical music department lives. I love it there; the air is quiet, the listening stations all have perfectly-working headphones, the ceiling is covered in polished-but-dimpled metal surrounded by bright blue lights for an unearthly warped-mirror effect, the chairs are soft and purple and big enough for two of me, and there are always brand-new classical releases in the cd changers. there are also always grey-haired people sitting quietly in the big purple chairs and knowledgeable salespeople behind the counters, and they always give me puzzled looks when I come in wearing a backwards baseball cap, carrying my stacks of underground newsletters and indie flyers accumulated from all the other stores. part patronizing are you lost, little girl?, part friendly-but-bemused well this is certainly unusual, part hostile away away! you're poisoning the atmosphere!, but always confused.

this afternoon I had no baseball cap, but I did have dirt-stained knees and a handful of free magazines. I dropped my backpack on the floor, dragged a big purple chair up next to the new twentieth-century rack, and sat curled up sideways while I listened to an unremarkable but still beautiful rendition of the 1910 firebird by the london symphony. that's the thing about stravinsky: even in his rimsky-korsakov ripoff days, even through fairly conventional interpretations, he manages to shine. and then sometimes he is absolutely transcendant. so I was sitting there, watching my headphoned reflection in the ceiling, mouth open trying to breathe the music, and for once no one was looking at me as if I were in the wrong place, or even taking much notice of me. it was unnerving, but also nice. so what is this? now that I am almost done with teenagerhood, it's okay for me to listen to classical music? just like it's okay for me to carry babies around and have a nine-to-five job and read the international news section? and yet it's still okay for me to go to children's hospital and shop in stores that sell neon hair dye with translucent thongs in matching colors? I feel out-of-time, not because I think all those things can't coexist, but because I have thought they could for years and now all of a sudden the rest of the world agrees with me for no apparent reason except that I am growing up. at least I think that's what I'm doing.

I rode my bike back home the long way, on the boston side of the charles, so I could watch my own city slip by in wideview across the water, and try to see where I fit inside it. and then I sprinted the last two miles in eighteenth gear, just because I can.

(don't worry, I will keep most of my music gibberish over at corlog. also, the discussion in the gay human rights thread is pretty interesting and still going, for those of you who care.)
22:42 ++

dear netscape,

I would be lying if I said I never loved you in the first place, but honestly I can't stand you anymore. you never put my stuff where it belongs and you don't even apologize when you break things. you keep sending me nasty messages, and I've had enough. I know I said I felt funny about ie at first, but it's been so much nicer to me than you ever were. besides, I've had opera on the side all these years. I won't forget you, but I've moved on. and I don't really need all these reminders of why sometimes I hate doing this for money. so if you would go away and leave me alone, at least for a few days, I'd be ever so grateful.

rabi

p.s. -- they're called standards. it wouldn't kill you to use them once in a while.
14:39 ++

thursday, may 31

weird day. lacking proper punctuation:

less than four hours of sleep for the first time since I came back to cambridge; screaming siblings pillow over my head alarm clock and I had forgotten how the light comes from a different direction in the morning. cheerios for breakfast towel still wet from showering last night hair in a braid do I look professional enough? clean at least? bike needs new air, chain reattached, grease all over me. screw professionalism.

at the harvard-smithsonian center for astrophysics there is a computing center six laser printers alphabetized dispatch boxes toner smell just like at school, only moreso. I will have an office three computers my name on the door a photo id a nice man who knows a lot of astronomy telling me what to do; am I ready for this? bicycle grease across my knees helmet hanging from my shoulderbag building is a maze and so many people!

four new cds. all coverless advance copies illegal with random facts printed on the back for clueless djs to repeat on air criminal am I criminal? and while I ponder there are two friends I haven't seen in two years, on the sidewalk in front of me saying hi hugging me as if twenty four months were a day. my reflection in passing suv windows my words same as ever: swarthmore astronomy school rugby yes I love it there, surprised as always by how much I mean them. shoestore salesmen follow me around trailing leathersmell showing me all the things I will never wear nikes ecco clarks imported but I just wanted to try things on for size. no commission for you sorry! and then later, vegetarian shoes on the internet and new music playing in the background.

kids in my house pillowfight balloons pets the baby in the dog dish. five year old asks me, where is your bed? and then he says oh let me guess, you sleep on the couch and I am absolutely speechless. I sleep on the floor not on the couch! tarzan music and we danced around around, my partner the baby who looks like me to everyone except me and my brother singing monotone from the top bunk. they eat hot dogs for dinner and later I eat tofu.

now I shiver still from my bowl full of frozen strawberries mango-tangerine sorbet and the way my pajamas smell reminding me of someone maybe I will never see again.
23:59 ++

okay, I know eleven hours isn't very long, but I told you I was impatient. here are the stories behind my ten things -- don't read them if you don't want to know, and read the list first if you don't want to be spoiled.

1. true -- I stayed with some of my relatives in london for a while when I was ten years old; one of them was, for some reason that I was never told, friends with colin wilson. we went to a little dinner party at his house, and I was the only child there. colin very quickly sensed that I was bored, and pulled me into the tv room, where he had a fantastic collection of old science fiction movies. we watched the thief of baghdad while we nibbled and chatted. he left me to watch the forbidden planet by myself, but he came back later with a stack of autographed books for me. he was really very sweet, and so I ate the lox to be polite even though I thought it was revolting.

2. true -- seventh grade was sort of a difficult year for me, and while I am not usually a fan of destroying school property, I was a bit caught up in the joy of being finished. I was friends with a group of boys who did not get along with the teachers and made a habit of seeing how much they could get away with, which made me a bit of a black sheep on just about every count. on the last day of school, one of them started keeping a record of everything that had been defenestrated; included were several spanish textbooks, a sopping wet sponge, a broken chalkboard compass, a squadron of paper airplanes, fifteen superballs, and more erasers than anyone had bothered to count. I wanted to do it too.

the very last class of the day was science. I like science a lot, but I hated class that year; I did not get along with my teacher at all. on one occasion when she was handing back papers she forced me -- in the middle of class -- to define a list of words before she would give mine back, to prove that I actually knew what they meant and hadn't simply plagiarized them. I knew them all and I very angrily recounted not only their definitions but also the context in which I had used them. she apologized to the class for the interruption, but not to me for her accusation. later that year she threw me out of class for discovering that cow corneas bounce. so I had some pent-up frustration with school and science and teachers and everything, and I stole the little clock from the front lab table and dropped it out the window onto the parking lot below. it made a very satisfying crash.

3. true -- another one of my adventures in europe. the orange juice was from a london sainsbury's, where juice comes in strange cardboard packages. the ferry was going from dover to belgium, and fortunately by the time we got to brugge I was totally fine. belgian orange juice is weird, though. their lemonade was much better.

4. true -- a rib, a finger, and my nose, none of which would have healed any faster with the help of a cast. thank you, contact sports and people who are bigger than me. to those of you who thought that three bones is a small number for me, rest assured that I've sprained and torn ligaments or tendons in most of the normal places and some of the not-so-normal ones. I have good strong bones; don't let anyone tell you that drinking milk is the only way to get calcium!

5. true -- somehow it seems that I always get to play the part of the annoying grownup. (when my special class staged a scene from johnny tremain, I was mr. jonathan lyte, because I was the only person who would enunciate and be loud enough, or something like that. so I was the bad guy and I had to be a man and wear a ridiculous lace collar, and the girl who was twice as big as me got to be the cute little girl with pigtails and a pretty name.) anyway, we looked ridiculous, and I wore lots of things with blue stripes for my costume, which ended up not matching at all, and we sang various mary poppins songs in a thoroughly off key manner. but I guess we were cute, because all four-year-olds are cute.

I am the little blonde one with the umbrella and the feet turned the wrong way. my teacher tried so hard to get me to stand with my feet turned out, like mary poppins did when she flew under her umbrella as if she were a ballerina stuck in first position, but my shyness won out and my feet remained stubbornly toe-to-toe. at this particular moment I believe I am singing about that spoonful of sugar thing, which has always seemed like a terrible idea, medicine or not. I've eaten sugar straight out of the package before, but I always regret it in the end.

6. true -- I know, it's weird, espcially since spaghetti with hot tomato sauce is one of my favorite things in the world, and plain tomatoes don't bother me at all. but I honestly cannot be in the same room when someone is making pizza or anything else that involves having the prego out on the counter with the jar lid off. and cold pizza is just a disaster. (this is yet another thing that veganism has saved me from.)

7. true -- kissing girls isn't a requirement for playing rugby, but playing rugby certainly makes it a lot easier to kiss girls. sometimes we play spin the bottle at banquets. I'm known for my refusal to participate in various rugby traditions; I did not streak after I scored my first try, and I drink juice at socials. so everyone expected me to play the shy innocent little freshman role, and I figured I wouldn't. girls are pretty good at kissing.

8. false -- this is what my mother wanted me to do in the talent show, but I didn't think I could quite make myself do it. I've actually never been in a talent show at all; I kind of like performing in groups, but solo is a whole different story. (as a reasonably good musician I was forced into several solos by my instrument teachers, and I shook like a leaf at every single one of them, which frankly made it really hard to play. I finally got over that, mostly, at my eighth grade graduation, when I was playing a mozart divertimento and the american flag caught a gust of wind, flapped towards me, and whacked my hat off. it was funny enough that I loosened up, and when I smiled at the end of that performance I really truly meant it.) but anyway, as for that first talent show, my mother thought it would be very cute and very funny for all the people who actually lived through the groovy years, and I thought it would be embarassing. so I didn't do it. but a bunch of teachers got together and sang chapel of love, which seems like a very strange choice in retrospect. I'm pretty sure they were all married.

9. true -- yes, yes, yes, I know this is the one you were all waiting for. and I know you probably stopped paying attention to that last one as soon as I said it was false. anyway, physics. e&m. I've always struggled with e&m, and I think I really understood it for the first time last fall, at the end of the semester. just as I finished my final, in fact. but anyway, this was eleventh grade, the middle of the multiple choice section on the ap test. I was feeling shaky because I knew I had screwed up the calculus in the last free response question in the mechanics section, and just shaky in general because I'm not the world's greatest test-taker, and my teacher liked to spend classtime making us laugh instead of making us learn. but I had spent the better part of the week reading ap prep books on the top floor of the harvard coop, marking up my notebook and my old tests, and even going through our atrocity of a textbook, so I was tearing through the questions without too much trouble. and then I got to an optics question. I'm a sophomore in college, ostensibly a physics major, and you know what? I still don't really know anything about optics. I sat there for a good ten minutes pondering the question, poking under my fingernails with my pencil, poking at my eyeballs with my fingers. I thought the answer was c, but did I really think that or was I just trying to convince myself of it because c was the default answer? I filled in the c bubble. I went back to the question booklet and crossed out some answers. I couldn't cross all of them out. I erased the c bubble. I circled the entire question several times, to remind myself that it wasn't finished, and went along to the next one.

and then, the boy sitting next to me flipped his answer sheet over and right into my lap. there were only five of us taking the test, so we were seated around a conference table with only occasional supervision. (it still amazes me that anyone thought a bunch of high school students who were all looking towards some fairly high-stakes college applications were that trustworthy, but apparently if you get good grades people automatically assume you're a good person, and we were left alone.) so no one except the other students saw it, and I grabbed the sheet as fast as I could to give it back to its rightful owner. but I had seen a whole chunk of answers. (my friends used to play games with me at lunch, flashing their bags of chips and whatnot at me and then hiding them and making me recite the ingredients; 20/15 vision and a near-photographic memory made me very good at tricks like that.) I had the answers there in my head, and as much as it is a cliche I very much felt as if they were burning a hole in my brain. there was little chance that they were wrong; this was the boy who took ap calculus as a sophomore and was a westinghouse finalist and thought 99 was a bad grade. I wrote them down on the side of my booklet, realized what I was doing, and crossed them all out. went along, ignored them, answered the questions myself. it was really hard.

and I had a problem, which was that one of the answers went with the optics question that had given me so much trouble. c. at first I thought, yay I got it right! but then I thought, oh god, did I really get it myself? and I went back and looked at my erased answer, and I looked at the question, and I just didn't know what I would have done if I hadn't seen my classmate's answer sheet. I probably would have gone with c, I told myself, because that was what I thought in the first place. but it's easy to say that now, I told myself back, when you know you agree with the resident genius. but what could I do? leave it blank? you should leave it blank, I thought. but that's not fair! I thought back, because it's not my fault I saw the answers and I wasn't going to leave it blank in the first place! back and forth. I was going to run out of time. I bit my lip and re-filled in the c circle and moved along. and then the proctor came back and made us put our pencils down and the next thing I knew I was handing in a sheet with a stolen answer.

(as for the rest of the test, I would just like to give a big :P to everyone who said it was too easy. I left the free-response section of my e&m test ninety percent blank -- that's right, blank -- and I still got a 4. so I have to wonder what the three-thousand-something people who did worse than that put on their tests. and I have to wonder how close I was to a 3. I thought about discussing it with our ap coordinator, to see if I could make the college board void just one of my answers. but I thought he wouldn't take me very seriously -- I had extra time on the american history test to accomodate my arthritic hands, which at that point were really incapable of writing for more than twenty minutes or so at a time; when the coordinator came to check up at me at the end of my fifth hour and found me crying as I struggled through the dbq, he suggested that I go home and finish it the next day. and I don't care how disabled they had called me on my official school report forms; there is no way that could be construed as fair or legal. so mr. coordinator would probably have thought I was being silly, and maybe you do too, but I thought it was cheating and I still do. I felt sick for a week afterwards.)

10. true -- hello and welcome to the anticlimax of the day. I promise this one won't be so long. anyway, I used to like to draw a lot, and people used to think I was a pretty good artist. the paintings were all things I did in school. five of them were displayed along with the rest of my classmates' in a harvard gallery. they were all about how our families had come to cambridge. even with several months spent on the project in art class, I had (true to form) run out of time, so my paintings had some interesting gaps in time and concept. the first three depicted my great-grandfather at age fourteen getting in a fight with his potato-farming family in ireland, getting on a boat, and arriving at ellis island with the glinting copper statue of liberty in the background. the fourth was a family whose identity I had never quite settled on. the fifth was my own family, dancing around the kitchen because my father had just won a fellowship at mit. and so to cambridge we went. I had a half-painted moving van still sitting in the art room at school.

the sixth painting was one I did in eighth grade, and was selected by a committee to be in a citywide student art show completely without my knowledge. it's mostly green and black blobby acrylic, a semi-abstract representation of mangrove trees with three very detailed exotic animals -- a tree frog, a lizard, and a scarlet macaw whose reflection completely breaks the laws of physics by appearing in a plant-filled river off to the side. and it looks shockingly artistic surrounded by the white matte and the shiny black frame that the gallery people put on it. my principal offered me fifty dollars for it, but that creeped me out so I kept it and now it's hanging in our house next to a bunch of computers.

the drawing was printed in cricket magazine because I won first prize in the monthly art contest. I had never even thought about submitting a drawing before, but for some reason I was inspired one evening, and I got out a big piece of art paper and charcoal pencils and the good kneaded eraser, and I did a drawing. mailed it off, didn't really think about it.I nearly fainted when I got a certificate and a prize package in the mail; the way I called my mother to look at it made her think something was terribly wrong with me because my voice was shaking so much. in retrospect I don't know what the big deal was, but it seemed like a fairly big deal at the time. it didn't help that my principal called me a celebrity, had the picture laminated, and made me pose with it for the yearbook. my hair was in the middle of growing out and I look like a complete ragamuffin in the picture. the laminated drawing is collecting dust somewhere in a box in the basement, but I still have my copy of the magazine on my bookshelf.

the category was "special treasures," which makes this drawing all the more ridiculous. I had no idea what my special treasures were, so I just drew things that I thought would look interesting. the teddy bear belonged to my mother. we called him one-eyed bear for lack of a better name, and he was terrifically floppy and worn and loved-looking. the sea urchin was missing most of its spines. the little shoes were ceramic clogs that my grandparents had brought back from holland; while I wasn't especially fond of them I did think it was cool that they were from holland. the thing that looks like a slug is actually a very smooth, shiny rock whose origin was a mystery to me. and the heart locket actually is fairly special, because it's very old and very delicate and no longer fits around my neck. it has the finest chain I've ever seen, and my drawing doesn't do it justice.

(so. there you go. I'll have you know I was all freaked out by everyone's faith in my morals, and only slightly less freaked out by everyone's confidence in my physics ability. have I painted such an idealistic picture of myself? at a science team party once, near the end of my senior year, we were playing I never and one of the statements was "I never cheated on a test." and every single person on the team, including the aforementioned genius boy, his genius little sister and one of our coaches, had to take a drink in admission that yes, we had cheated on tests. I was somewhat shocked. but you guys are all either as naive as I was or you have some crazy faith in my honesty.)
03:23 ++

wednesday, may 30

for the first time ever, I think, I saw something truly interesting on mtv news this afternoon: gay teenagers are often subjected to so much bullying in u.s. schools that they do not receive an adequate education.

for anyone who's been in high school during the last half-century or so, that probably seems obvious. what's interesting is that the human rights watch has published a report based on hundreds of interviews concluding that this bullying is a human rights violation. I think it is, too -- but what does that really say? how far does it go? what about other kinds of harrassment? sexism and racism are fairly ubiquitous in public school hallways (and I imagine most private school hallways as well, but I've never been to one of those); just because we have laws against them doesn't mean they're not as real as ever. I didn't escape school without getting molested and beaten up more than a few times, and I live in a ridiculously liberal city with a disfunctional but equally liberal school system. my high school had a very active glbt-straight alliance, festive coming out day celebrations every year, lots of openly gay and bi students (and lots more still in the closet), and a transgendered student who was actually rather popular. we had boys who wore dresses to the prom and girls who didn't shave, and for the most part everyone accepted it.

but. but. there were always the undercurrents, the knowledge that some hallways were safer than others, the nasty rumors, and sometimes the full-blown attacks. even at this incredibly tolerant school in a progressive community, I saw plenty of homophobia, and I saw it almost every day. the same is true at college, as much as people like to pretend it isn't. I suppose I have a unique perspective on this since swarthmore is much less diverse in just about every way than my high school was, and people are more willing to turn a blind eye towards discrimination -- I think because they refuse to believe it could exist in our little liberal arts utopia. whatever.

some people argue that kids will be kids, and backstabbing nastiness is part of growing up and learning to deal with the real world. I don't know how to change human nature, but that seems just plain wrong to me. if kids are allowed to be mean to each other, how can we expect them to be nice adults? and so, in spite of my reservations about the ineffectiveness of laws, I hope this does result in some sort of anti-discrimination legislation. being a fairly normal, well-liked high schooler was hard enough; I can't imagine how I would have survived if I had been a gay kid in a less politically-correct community. I don't especially care what anyone thinks about homosexuality, but I do think that schools and the government and all of us should be responsible for making sure that those thoughts don't cause anyone to be deprived of an education, or a job, or a life.

how about you? want to write a letter? and after that, since everyone who at least dabbles in realism knows that laws don't always come with enforcement included, see what kind of changes you yourself can make. I'm working on this one too. I have a couple pink triangle pins and things like that, but I think that's a bit too easy.
22:02 ++

nine things about me that are true and one that isn't
1. I shared lox and bagels and watched the thief of baghdad with colin wilson, at his house in the english countryside.
2. I threw a working clock out of our fourth-floor english classroom on the last day of seventh grade.
3. I got food poisoning from orange juice and threw up on the floor of a ferryboat, but I drank (different) orange juice again the next day.
4. I've broken three bones, but I've never had a cast.
5. I was mary poppins in our preschool play, and jane and michael were bigger than me.
6. the smell of cold tomato sauce makes me gag.
7. I've kissed girls. with tongue.
8. I sang the 59th street bridge song at a grade school talent show, wearing a tie-dyed shirt and a beaded necklace.
9. I cheated on my ap physics test.
10. six of my paintings have been in art shows, and one of my drawings was printed in a magazine.

how well do you know me? go ahead, guess! (parents, you are not allowed to participate.) hurry up before I get impatient and post the answers...

(this, the most interesting meme to come along in awhile, via bluelikethat.)
16:01 ++

every thing I do takes up a fraction of forever, and I think if we added all the fractions up the sum would still be something very close to zero. but not zero.

I need to start working out again. I know it, but still I don't do it. I have excuses -- there will be no upper body work until my sprained and torn and broken bits are fully healed -- but I haven't gone on a single serious run since I came home, and I'm feeling it. I hate it. running for me is like reading: I forget how much I love it until I'm actually in the middle of doing it, and it's so easy to find other things to do that I keep not getting to the middle of anything.

if you add something to forever it's still forever, but if you take away some of the fractions their sum gets closer to zero. sometimes I need to fit more into my fractions, but the need is so great that it paralyzes me and leaves all of us empty. it's watching the emptiness slide by that makes me do dangerous things.

when I was in seventh grade I used to climb a maple tree in our backyard and hang from the branches. it grows in the corner where our lot touches three others, and there is a neat little cross of concrete and wire and chain and spiked wood where all the fences meet. I would climb all the way to the top of the tree, which is taller than the most of the nearby two- and three-story houses, and I'd reach my hands up so that they were higher than the topmost twigs and I was balancing with just the sides of my feet on branches that didn't want to hold me. I would find horizontal branches strong enough that they didn't crack under my weight, and I would lean out as far from the trunk as I could to grab on. I would hang by just one hand, watching my feet swing through the empty air that flowed between the naturemade branches and the manmade backlots, knowing I was inhabiting a space where I didn't belong, wondering why I had been born clumsy and heavy and wingless. I would let go with one hand and fall a tiny bit before I caught the branch with the fingertips of my other hand, and even though they were almost imperceptibly short, those fractions were so big and full and real that they almost wouldn't fit inside my life, but at the same time they made my life big and full and real, too. once I closed my eyes and hung by a single finger.

I can't do that anymore. I've tried a few times and it scares me too much, just like most of my other dangerous ex-habits. sometimes I think I'm losing my daredevil side as I grow up, but maybe I'm really getting better at seeing how much I like my life. I will go running tomorrow, to remind myself that I have no right to share who I was with who I am. I like who I am, I do. it's just easier to believe when there is adrenaline in my blood.

want to know something funny? nothing goes better with the movements of my lava lamp than the slow quiet parts of piano concerti.
01:49 ++

tuesday, may 29

while I was out this afternoon with my favorite five-year-old and his eleven-month-old brother, no fewer than three people assumed they were mine. one old woman came up to our bench and sat down next to me as I was flying goldfish into the baby's mouth with one hand and buckling the kid's bicycle helmet with the other. I whispered something into the baby's ear and he dutifully waved hello while the five-year-old scootered off into the grass. the woman laughed, clearly charmed by my charges, so I said hi and introduced myself. we talked for a few minutes and then she said, "this one's quite a cutie... he looks just like you!" and I suppose he does, as much as any half-irish blue-eyed, fair-skinned baby would look like a quarter-irish girl who still has chubby cheeks. it always takes me by surprise when people see me as a mother, though, because babysitting always makes me feel like such a kid.

of course I know that I am theoretically old enough to be the mother to both these children -- I had pregnant friends by the time I was in eighth grade, and the reality that it could just as well have been me was certainly never lost on me. still, as much as I love playing with kids and even just being with them, whether they're happy or cranky or dirty or hungry or teething, if babysitting has taught me anything it's that I am nowhere near ready to be a parent. sometimes when I'm busy cooking dinner and balancing a baby on my hip and trying to clean up the latest mess and telling the kid that no, he can't watch any more nickelodeon today, I think wow, I really love this and maybe I could grow up and be a parent and be happy. but then my slightly-less-biologically-motivated brain kicks in and gives me a little mental slap, and I get over it. those little moments scare me in retrospect, the same way it scares me that my mother coos and smiles when she sees me with babies, and when my neighbors joke that I go away to college and come home with children. me, with children? no no no.

so in the end it usually makes me happy to be just the babysitter, to hand over the kids at the end of the day and go off by myself. but this evening as I was walking home I passed three little boys and their mother getting ready to go out to dinner. I've seen them around the neighborhood before, but I don't really know them. the two older boys were poking each other while their mother screamed that she was going to kick their asses if they didn't get in the backseat right away, and the toddler was being dragged along by one arm. he climbed into his carseat in the front while his brothers continued to whack at each other in the back, and they drove off without buckling a single seatbelt. I almost wanted to jump in front of the car and say please, please at least strap in the little one! but I thought that would be a bit presumptuous of me, so I didn't. still, I couldn't help but think that I could be a better parent than that -- which is completely unfair, of course; my family has certainly had its ugly moments in public. when I was little, though, I was so sure I would never ever ever even think about being a mom, and the fact that I've already betrayed my littler self scares me too.
21:01 ++

and once again it is six am and the sun is sliding over the rooftops into the summergreen leaves outside my window and I have not yet gone to sleep. but I played with scissors and glue and old notebooks and happily colored gel-pens, making something pretty that I will give away, so it was worth it I think. nothing like productivity to make insomnia seem worthwhile.
06:13 ++

monday, may 28

so, you know me -- I can't redesign anything without babbling about it later. (I do the same thing in real life; when I made a collage out of old national geographics last fall to hang in our room, I had to give everyone who looked at it the complete tour because I knew they would miss the details otherwise. I love that thing -- it has the drake equation and the secret sex life of peppermint shrimp separated by just thirteen inches of paper and glue!)

anyway. yes, this is uncharacteristically patriotic and uncharacteristically timely, especially for me. it didn't really start out that way, nor did I intend to have it ready exactly on memorial day; I was just playing with photos and dingbats and this sort of happened. I like this picture. I like stars. I like the color blue (a lot). (the colors were inspired, as you can see, by the geography and geology of arches national park, which I suppose is pretty american. click on the picture for links and such.) I also like that font over there, especially the way the r and the j curve up against each other. I think I could name a kid r.j. if he (she, it?) would promise always to write his (her, its) name like that, with the letters mirroring each other upside-down. and I like having my links all sprawled out again, and in a brand-new order so it feels like they are almost brand-new themselves.

I've fallen back on tables for layout because old netscape chokes on absolute css positioning, but all the stylistic aspects are stylesheeted. I have no macs or internet-capable unix machines at my immediate disposal at the moment, but I've checked the page in opera, ie, netscape, and various resolutions and everything seems okay and fairly liquid. (not perfect; opera wants margins no matter what I do and netscape doesn't like empty table cells, but I think I can fix that.) please tell me if you see anything screwy, especially if you know how to fix it.

rest assured, though, that this is a summer redesign and will be replaced in september. so have fun with it while it's here, and do send me your feedback because I love getting feedback.
15:54 ++

...or maybe not tomorrow. as soon as I turned off the computer and got into bed, my old programming instincts kicked in and I was mentally debugging even as I tried to go to sleep, and lo and behold, I figured it out. stupid subconscious, always making me work! but now, now it should all be good.
05:38 ++

well... everything is working, at least in this web brower, except for the comments script. and that's sort of working, though in a very half-assed manner, and I guess I shouldn't have expected my disregard for the DO NOT EDIT THIS PART message to go unpunished. but the sun is almost up, and the birds are chirping, so I am going to sleep and I will try to fix this tomorrow. whee.
05:06 ++

okay. not sure how this is all going to turn out, but let's give it a shot...
[take 1: 3stars in the wrong place, dates the wrong color, timestamp too big.]
[take 2: date too high, indents, dotcomments screwy]
[take 3: um, forgot about the date, date too small for stars, popup size]
[take 4: more popup tweaking. dotcomments...uh?]
[take 5: one more pixel, some forgotten titles, still messing with the date size]
04:30 ++

sunday, may 27

why I log: mine is near the bottom. please ignore the stupid writing mistakes; it was four in the morning and I was doing several things at once (as you may have noticed...). you should also read the rest of them, by the way.
16:13 ++

sometimes I am doing too many things at once so I end up really doing nothing at all. you probably know what that's like. the thing I always wonder is if I did all these things one at a time, finishing each before I started the next, would I get them all done faster? or would I get fed up with trying to make my multi-track mind do exactly one task and not finish anything?

right now I have sixteen windows open, containing two live conversations, three bits of artwork, a page full of rudimentary php and another one full of dysfunctional javascript, half-finished email, notes on rugby workouts, other peoples' webpages, a shockingly unhappy story I wrote three years ago in the second person, and various other things whose identities have been obscured by too many little boxes in the taskbar; my lap is full of slips of paper and the pair of scissors that liberated them from my old notebook, and they are all sitting there I think waiting for me to feel more inspired so I can conceive their second life; the desktop has my black paper book full of something that wants to be a poem but isn't, yet, folksong lyrics printed out in purple for me to follow along, a stack of pictures that need to go somewhere before I forget why they are important, and a mostly-empty glass of water that is much too cold and smooth and transparent to be the embodiment of one of my rare triumphs over myself (I want to have something else in my mouth but the doctors keep telling me I will end up dead if I don't stop making my fingers bleed).

and I am singing, as quietly as I can because there is someone asleep on the other side of the wall behind me, but still hearing every single word. words have been knocking me over lately. silly little insubstantial things but you feel them, just like you feel pebbles underfoot and beestings and fingers that belong to not-your hands.

according to something I read two years ago, people who are especially good at mental multitasking -- though I would not say I am so much good at it as dependent on it -- are easier to hypnotize. maybe hypnotism is just some form of perpetual distraction. I am very good at being distracted, too. and I just deleted two paragraphs because I thought that if I included them I would have to preface this entire webpage or maybe my entire existence with a disclaimer: dear mom and dad, please do not worry -- I am okay. I think I've forgotten again how to divide up my writing into the places it belongs, and it's all because of finals keeping me from journalling, probably, so now I've forgotten how to properly do that and it's just like when you haven't held a baby in a long time and you sort of are afraid you are going to forget where to put your hands so that nothing breaks, so you can't hold the baby yet because if you do and something happens then you'll never be able to hold another baby again, and it just goes around and around.

my sentences are out. of. control. (maybe I am already hypnotized!)
02:30 ++