saturday, june 23

(I'm still here, I just seem to be having some self esteem issues today and also I have the world's ugliest knee. fantastic. back later.)
17:11 ++2

friday, june 22

I hit a car on my way home from work tonight. two, actually.

before I go on, let me reiterate a few things for those of you who aren't regular readers (or just don't pay that much attention). I ride my bike everywhere. I've been riding around this city for six years. I'm a fairly aggressive cyclist, just as anyone who spends a lot of time getting around boston by car is a fairly aggressive driver, but I follow the laws. I ride between the minimum and maximum speed limits, I stay off the sidewalks, I stop for red lights and stop signs, I stay in the bike lane when there is one and in the rightmost car lane when there isn't. I wear lights at night, reflective gear at dusk, clips to keep my pantlegs from getting caught in my chain, and a helmet always. I very much dislike cars, but I know better than to disrespect them. I got hit by a car five years ago because I was careless and the driver was speeding, so I learned my lesson.

to be honest, I don't completely remember what happened, because it was all so fast that by the time my brain started processing things it was already halfway over. but based on the second half, and the various locations of my injuries, I think I've pieced it together pretty well.

I was riding downhill, down that same hill that I raced up earlier this week. the light at the bottom was green, so I had momentum going into the level strip. I was riding a little right-of-center, to let the impatient cars pass me, but still well within the area that would have been occupied by a normal-sized car on the same road. there was a very large dark green suv double-parked next to a little yellow hatchback, which was odd because the road wasn't that wide, and it looked pretty funny, but I didn't really think about it because there was still enough room for the cars to go by alongside it.

so I was cruising at about 30 mph, with a good empty stretch ahead of me, fully aware of the line of five-fifteen-friday-evening traffic behind me, and I was right alongside the double-parked suv when the driver's side door opened about a foot in front of me.

I think I realized what had happened at the exact moment I ran into the door, because I certainly was not in any way prepared for it and yet I somehow wasn't surprised. I had been close enough behind the door that it didn't have time to open all the way, which is fortunate because I'm sure I would have broken something if it had. as it was, the edge of the door caught me right down the center, slamming my helmet against my forehead, knocking my right hand off the bicycle, and spinning the handlebars until they slammed into my stomach, perpendicular to their original position.

I used to think those silly commercials with the giantic suvs knocking down traffic lights and stuff were a little ridiculous, but now I'm not so sure. I have a cut just under the right half of my ribcage that was made by the bottom corner of the door. it's about an inch long, and you can see the faint line made by the underside of the door when my top half suddenly slowed to about half the speed of my bottom half. it's vaguely frightening that my entire bicycle wheel fit in the space between the door and the street, with room to spare.

somehow, I managed to stay on my bicycle, because I knew that falling into the path of the oncoming traffic would have been a disaster. I couldn't steer and my front wheel was at a crazy sideways angle thanks to the wrenched-around handlebars, so as soon as I had made it fully around the door, I threw my feet down and tried to knock myself in the direction away from the moving cars. that worked, but I still had enough momentum to be moving generally forwards in spite of my crooked wheel, which was spinning and grinding directly against my right knee. it was that feeling, the rubber burning into my skin, that I think let me know that there was no way I was going to gain control of the situation until I stopped.

so I stopped. my left hand was still somehow on the handlebar, even though it was way out in front of me, so I squeezed the brake and leaned sideways until I ran into a parked car. stop. end. breathe.

I looked up, and back, to assess the damage. I had managed to travel a good fifty yards beyond the suv, where the driver stood on the runningboard, looking over his door at me. my shirt was torn along my right shoulder, and my knuckles were bleeding. there were four deep cuts about two inches above my ankle, dripping dark blood like vampire wounds, from where I had slammed my leg into the spinning gears as I tried to keep from falling. my navy pants, rolled up to my calves, were covered in tire marks. my entire right forearm was black and covered in black rubber bits from the vinyl on the inside of the suv's door. it felt as if I was bleeding in several other places, but I didn't feel like stripping in the middle of a street where everyone was already focused on me to find out exactly where those places were.

I held the front tire between my legs and twisted the handlebars back into position, checking to make sure the fork was okay. the woman on the sidewalk on the other side of the car I had collided with asked if I was okay. yes, I said, I just had to make sure my bike was fine too. the man who had been driving behind me pulled up next to me and leaned over the passenger's seat to ask if I was okay. yes, I said, I'm okay. and thank you. I looked back one more time. the suv dude was still standing inside his car. I wanted to go back and talk to him, but I was supposed to be babysitting at five-thirty, and now I had a whole bunch of blood and dirt to clean up. so I rode off, adrenaline still racing, back on the horse.

and now that I've had time to settle down, get clean, and find all my scratches, I've run out of adrenaline but I'm still a little bit upset. my right knee has more melted tire rubber than skin on it. I scrubbed it with betadine until blood ran down my leg in equal measure with the tears down my face, because infections are bad news for me and my immune system, but there is still a lot of it embedded around the edges of my kneecap. I can't figure out how this happened, but my left leg has a bunch of horizontal scratches running down the back, and the entire inside of my thigh is scraped up. my ankles have both turned purple. right arm is pink and splotched from shoulder to wrist. right-side ribs are definitely not happy, and I still haven't quite gotten that cut to stop bleeding. my right hand is oddly pink and shiny, as if something glossy had been deposited in place of the scraped-off skin. the underside of my chin is rather tender. but mostly I am angry. and so, if you will indulge me (and if you won't you've probably stopped reading already), here are three open letters:

dear suv man,
   you are an idiot. I know it was an accident, and it wouldn't have happened at all if not for unfortunate timing. I would not be upset with you at all except for two things: 1) you were double parked!! in the middle of a busy street in rush hour traffic! 2) you didn't even bother to come see if I was okay. I wasn't expecting a ride to the hospital or even a smile -- just a little bit of courtesy. even if you didn't want to be nice, you could have employed some common sense -- when you whack someone with your car, it's a good idea to make sure they're all right. american people have the annoying tendency of suing people when they're not all right. I wouldn't have sued you, but if I weren't late for something else I would have come back, first to make sure you and your ugly big car were okay, and then to get your license plate number and your name and insurance information.
   as it is, I just hope you realize that you're lucky the kid who ran into your door was someone with strong legs, good instincts, and lots of experience on a bycicle. and I hope you also realize that it could have been a lot worse; with slightly different timing one of us could have ended up broken. please be careful and watch what you're doing, especially in the city. there are a lot of people on bicycles and rollerblades and skateboards and the like. they deserve your respect too, even though they probably can't dent your monstrous vehicle the way a car would if you opened a door in front of one of them.
   and also. although I was able to fix my bike and get up and ride away, and although I assured the concerned passersby that I was okay, I am not okay. I've worked really hard to maintain my upper body strength in spite of a lingering sprained elbow and torn back ligaments and a still-fractured fingerbone. now I can't walk right, I can't do pushups, and I can't even hold a baby with one arm. I do that a lot. I'm not trying to claim the moral high ground. I'm just mad at you. and you're an idiot.

dear guy in the car behind me wearing the camouflage shirt,
   thanks for slowing down. I can think of about ten different ways I could have ended up squished under your tires, and if you had been tailgating me or not paying attention to the traffic in front of you, I might be roadkill instead of just a little banged up. I owe you one.

dear rabi,
   please do not get cocky with your bike riding. just because this accident wasn't your fault doesn't mean that you could never have caused an accident, and just because you know to watch out for cars doesn't mean the cars know to watch out for you. be careful.
23:58 ++14

7 things I don't understand
1. my ridiculous lack of willpower and self discipline. I used to be such a feisty, perfectionist little kid!
2. why the mathematicians didn't just make up a new word instead of redefining "normal."
3. the guy who rollerblades down storrow drive in the wrong direction with his eyes closed and headphones on.
4. significant amounts of quantum mechanics, especially the parts with angular momentum.
5. how anyone who has kids, plans to ever have kids, or even just likes kids can truly not care about the state of the environment.
6. my grandparents. all of them, but the republican ones in particular. do you want to criticize my existence or do you want me to like you?
7. why anyone would want to steal this look. really, it's a nightmare in red.
15:11 ++11

the sky today is that oppressive grey color that makes you think it is trying to smother the planet, and all the red lights from crowded city traffic seem like fresh wounds, bleeding primary into the monochrome, defiant and too bright.
12:34 ++5

thursday, june 21

7 things on my desk
1. my inherited lava lamp, bubbling. liquid: purple; wax: red (but it looks bright pink).
2. eighty-nine cds, thirteen of which are waiting to be reviewed.
3. my keys -- one for the house, one for my bicycle lock, and two for rooms at cfa -- on a dirty clip-on keychain that my mother gave me as a going-away-to-college present. it has little green alien heads on it.
4. my arthur d. little mug, which I won along with a chunk of money and an embossed certificate for my second-place science fair project in ninth grade, full of my gelpens.
5. a photocopy of my hand that I made last year, with a winnie-the-pooh bandaid on my thumb, because I had a dime left over before the copier would give me change in even quarters.
6. the half-read summer fiction issue of the new yorker, which has smoking, drinking, laptopping babies on the cover, and two sets of alphabet blocks that seem to spell out "zebna."
7. an empty drinking glass with a translucent purple bendy drinking straw still containing two drops of leftover water, which are hanging just below the last accordian pleat of the bendy part, through which I can see the spine of a trip shakespeare cd, upside-down.
19:39 ++3

7 things to do before I die
1. go skydiving.
2. write a good poem. get it published.
3. go to new zealand. live there for a while, maybe.
4. visit a prison.
5. get my driver's license, but not a car.
6. be a foster parent.
7. tell a story.

(this one meme-spliced from infikai. as if I could resist making a list? you should know about me and lists by now. more to come, perhaps; there were eight lists, originally.)
11:14 ++7

after watching this morning's solar eclipse, live from zambia thanks to the magical internet, I stepped outside and couldn't figure out what the sun was doing there.

happy summer solstice, as well.
10:57 ++2

wednesday, june 20

there was a little girl crouched on the sidewalk, maybe six years old, visible between the parked cars for only a split-second as I rode downhill. her hair fell in ringlets around her shoulders, held up with pink ribbons like a soft satin crown at the top of her head, and one of the straps on her sundress was falling off, trapping her arm in its faded cotton snare. she was balanced on the balls of her feet, running her fingers slowly over the uneven edges of sidewalk bricks and dirty curb and the spiky weeds that pushed between them, looking straight through the air and me and everything with sightless brown eyes that blinded me as well. deep and empty, beautiful.

I live without my eyes sometimes, feeling the world surrounding me with itself: cracks in the wooden floor underfoot; cold glass curving and swelling and tapering in my sideways-cupped hand; air changing its flow over my shifting kneecaps as I walk, seeking better aerodynamics; sun falling halfway across my face, warm; the sudden unexpected tickle of an insect alighting on my bare arm; water gathering in the baby hair around the nape of my neck, pulling it down with implied heaviness. but it's not the same, because I know the worn red-brown color of the floor, the way the green-tinted glass warps the world on the other side, how air hides its power in its invisibility, how the sun leaves half my face in shadow, the faint off-grey quiver of the insect's antennae, how water makes everything glisten.

it stuns me to realize that even when my sight is gone, my memory will never let me know what it's like to be blind.
21:06 ++9

dear smithsonian institution logo, how may I not use you? let me count the ways...
12:03 ++13

tuesday, june 19

(hello to everyone who's visiting from blogger's blogs-of-note list! I'd love it if you'd leave me a comment or drop me an email; it's so strange to see hundreds of people passing through in my referral logs and not have any idea who they are. if you're looking for the typical introductory stuff, it's over there under the "hi" link, and if you want a semi-quick and not-especially-dirty history of the weblog, try the highlighted entries on the archives page. did I say hi? I did, right? hi!)

so. the person who had been sharing my office for the last two weeks has officially vacated, and she'll be flying back to tel aviv tomorrow. I've been pretty much on my own most of the time anyway, since she's only been in for a few hours every day, but now that all her stuff is gone and the only unexpected visitors will be the people who come to see me, I'm exploring.

this is the temporary office, given to interim employees and interns. it's sparsely decorated, with an illustration of sirtf and two iso posters hanging on the walls over the computers. (oddly enough, one of the iso posters is a photomontage with iso itself flying next to the eiffel tower while false-color galaxies whirl overhead pretending to be fireworks, as if it had just come back from war and were in the middle of its victory flight. the other poster is much more normal, though equally inaccurate in its depiction of two nebulae hanging above the blue curve of the earth.)

there is also a now-empty desk next to two mostly-empty metal shelves, shoved up against a very blank wall that I will have to decorate soon. one of the shelves has a stack of relevant junk, like the aas directory, which was of great amusement to me on my first day of work, and somewhat less relevant junk, like the stationery with the h-s cfa letterhead across the top and a set of commemorative dates on the bottom: harvard college observatory sesquicentennial year 1989; smithsonian astrophysical observatory centennial year 1990. the top sheet is slightly yellower than the rest, so perhaps it really has been sitting here for eleven years.

and then there's the stuff that is not at all junk, like my hst and wfpc manuals, and the cardboard box sitting on the very top shelf. I had to climb up on the desk to reach it, and I almost dropped it on my head because it was a lot heavier than I expected.

it contains several empty plastic coathangers, webster's new world dictionary, an unopened 1999 edition christmas coke, a manila envelope full of unsharpened pencils and old bandaids, an old map of harvard, some calendars, and an hp-67 pocket calculator.

the 67 in that is short for 1967, and this is a hell of a pocket calculator. it has a gigantic plug, so unless you have an electrical outlet somewhere in the vicinity of your navel I don't really know what good it does to keep the calculator in your pocket. it comes with a programming guide and a set of magnetic data cards for storing programs and constants. the owner's manual contains this little gem of a note: annotating magnetic cards with a typewriter may impair the load/record properties of the cards. ha! and, since this machine is nasa property, it comes with 20 prerecorded programs made specially for physicists. whoever actually used them also created some personalized programs, labeling the cards with titles like "blackbody w/ dilation 1/lambda optional 10/25/78" or just a giant, all-caps "ASTROMETRY" as if the completion of that program had been a huge triumph or maybe just a huge relief that it finally worked.

now is the part where I would say, "to make a long story short..." except that it is already far too late for that. but to continue a long story, this box is really cool.

the thing that really got me, though, was the stack of calendars. they date from 1991 to 1996, and they're annotated the way any good calendar is. february 1995 has what seems to be vacation details (kai + car + breakfast 160/day for three days), and may 1992 is decorated with a list of 1-800 numbers. there are a series of dates in 1991 circled in pen, sometimes connected to each other with squiggly pencil lines, sometimes isolated in their red-inked significance. I was looking them, wondering what their story was, if they were birthday anniversaries or meeting dates or perhaps something far more interesting, when it hit me that I was nine years old in 1991. these marks were made over half a lifetime ago, at least by my calendar, and yet here I am pondering about their stories.

you never think that you'll really achieve immortality with just a pen and paper, but some people manage it anyway. and maybe, if a circle on a calendar can get inside someone's head after a decade of cardboard-box-obscurity, that's not so surprising after all.
11:45 ++23

monday, june 18

if you had been driving around cambridge during rush hour this morning, you might have seen an impromptu uphill bicycle race.

there was a man dressed in two-thirds of a three-piece pinstripe suit, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his untied burgundy bowtie flapping around his neck. he also had white sneakers, a black shoulderbag, silver hair, and perfect posture. you could have tied him to a telephone pole and it wouldn't have made his back any straighter. he was riding an old red ten-speed with white plastic handlebars.

there was a girl dressed all in green, from her helmet to her clothes to her backpack. she was wearing sandals and riding a beat-up royal blue 18-speed hybrid, one of the old models from the years of gripshifting. she looked tired, but also determined. her braid was stuck between her arm and her shoulderstrap, wilting under the glare of the sun.

and there was another man, the one who came from behind and started it all, maybe twenty-five years old and definitely a jock. he had a bright yellow mountain bike with shocks and fenders, with a gleaming helmet to match. he wore spandex and a voltage yellow nike tech top. his face and forearms were shiny with sweat. it almost hurt to look at him.

it was a long hill, almost four and a half blocks from bottom to top. no words were exchanged, but everyone knew it was a race. probably no one has ever gone up that hill quite so fast before; maybe no one has ever gone down it that fast either.

can you guess who won?

[and here is the rest of the story.]

yes, I am the girl in green. at least I was this morning. and no, the spandex dude did not win. what kind of story would that make?

I was waiting at a traffic light with the middle-aged suit-man. both of us were painfully aware that there were absolutely zero cars (or pedestrians) around to get pissed off at us in addition to the zero cops around to give us citations for running a red light, but at the same time neither of us wanted to be the first person to admit we were willing to be irresponsible law-breaking cyclists in a city that has done so much to protect the rights of bikes to share the roads. so we waited, acknowledging each other's presence through our silence. eventually the light turned green and we pushed off, falling into single file formation even though there was plenty of room in the lane for us to ride side-by-side.

and then the hotshot on his yellow bike came flying in from behind, nearly clipping me with his back wheel as he passed me, and it was on.

all I really meant to do was show him up by catching him and passing him once, before the flow of traffic caught up with us. but to my amazement and secret delight, my grey-haired companion joined the race too! it was so surprising that I almost broke my pedaling rhythm. that's not to say that I think it's weird for a forty-something guy to have a competitive streak; my dad does stuff like that all the time. but he doesn't wear three piece suits, either. in fact he almost never wears suits at all.

but the suit guy did not win, because he was riding a ten-speed and he was up against a couple of athletes. and the yellow guy did not win because, well, because I already told you that. I won by about half a bike-length, and while I would like to attribute it to my rugby workouts or my daily keeping-up-with-the-cars commute, I think the real reason is this: I know how to use my gears. he stayed in top gear all the way up, and while I could never have caught him if he'd maintained his speed, he slowed down as I sped up. yay physics!

see, I'm just like bill nye, only cuter and less caffeinated.
12:54 ++16

sunday, june 17

I felt the change in the air (half a degree colder, the smell of water, sudden darkness) just before the clouds broke, and so I looked up to watch the storm. it's a funny thing to see the first few drops and realize you're watching the rain before it's even hit the ground.
16:41 ++3

it's father's day.

there was a rather large fraction of my life when my dad and I did not get along at all. when we joked about how the whole reason for me to go to college was so that he could get rid of me, it wasn't especially funny. imagine my surprise when I finally did go to college and in the process discovered that not only is my dad a pretty cool guy, he actually likes me. go figure.

he taught me to love heights by letting me jump off tall walls into his arms as soon as I was old enough to walk. he also taught me to play football and softball and tennis, even though I never really learned how to hit a tennis ball without sending it about thirty yards too far. when I was a junior in high school and I had told him he wasn't allowed to watch me play any sport ever again, he hid in the bushes in the middle of a cold november rainstorm to watch my soccer team play in the state tournament. when I was two, he helped me write stories on his typewriter. last month he gave me a stack of books to read this summer.

but before all that, there was this: my favorite picture of the two of us, taken on august sixth, 1981.

happy father's day, dad.
02:25 ++3

momentary meltdown. deep breath. cold water. fresh air. treebark. refocus. okay. it moves and moves. no more tears. onward.
01:28 ++

I. am. so. trapped.
00:03 ++4