wockerjabby!

saturday, july 28

would you be mad at me if I abandoned the half hour rule? because, this is ridiculous. I want to read what other people are saying, too!
23:30

++

this might sound kind of strange coming from someone who is so conspicuously in love with rain and snow, but my favorite kind of weather is actually fire. (shut up. fire is weather.) and my other favorite (though slightly less exciting) thing that the weather does is make clouds.

it all goes back to light, I think. I am so... I don't even have a word for what light does to me. there was one time last semester when I went to watch a job candidate teach astro 1, and I ended up sitting next to the regular professor (who is also my professor, of course, since there are only two of them). the guest teacher did his entire class on telescopes, for some reason (I understand the importance of explaining how telescopes work in an intro astro class, but I'm not sure anyone needs to see slides of all the big telescopes in the world). at the beginning of the lecture he said, "light is like a drug for astronomers. you'll do almost anything to get it, and even after you get it you always need more." my professor leaned over and whispered to me, "I never thought of it that way, but that's pretty true!"

I never thought of it that way either, exactly, but it is true -- but not because of astronomy, for me. looking at sunlight makes me feel high, or like I'm in love, or something. just plain old sunlight. fire is something else altogether. it's hypnotic. I almost burned down my house once because I let my candle experiments get out of control, and I almost burned down someone else's house once because we were playing with fire and our college junk mail. fire is light and power and I am mesmerized by it.

clouds, on the other hand, are sort of always there, and it's not the clouds themselves that I care about so much as what they do to their surroundings. look at the bottom (well, right-hand in the scan) picture in the collage -- those are shadows of trees extending up through the clouds. and when the clouds come down and make fog, and make everything all glowy and fairy-like, or when they get in the way of the sun just enough so that the light comes streaming around the edges and makes even me think that heaven might exist, it makes me feel so small and so big and so special all at the same time that I think I cannot possibly be just a person.

thanks to jackie for the topic!
23:01 ++

collage #2: fire and clouds.
22:29 ++

dear national geographic, why would you do two stories about fungi in the same year? do you think a lot of people make collages of spores and mushrooms? agh.
22:02 ++

I can't decide whether it's stranger that I can post something and have people reading it in austria and singapore and germany within minutes, or that I can post something and walk thirty feet and see my mother reading it on the computer in the next room.
21:30 ++

you all remember my crazily named plants, right? well, the baby christmas cactus has finally been christened. or named, at least.

about a week ago, it started sprouting a new leaf. for those of you who've never seen a christmas cactus, stop picturing one of those spiny desert things and start picturing a plant with thin, blocky-ovoid, shiny leaves that grow one on top of another like the sections on a baby-toy caterpiller. (in other words, each branch is a series of leaves joined at the narrow parts.) the new leaf growing out the top is smaller than the rest, naturally, and like the leaves of most succulent plants, has a bunch of little threadlike spikes sticking out near the tops and sides. it reminds me of a transformer.

hence, megatron the christmas cactus. I'm sure it will be suitably embarrassed when it starts flowering.
20:57 ++

sitting at the table with my family and a plate full of potatoes in front of me just now was a singularly alien experience. also, eating food this fast can not be a good thing. anyway, here I am, back in front of the computer and my pile of magazine clippings. (I brought the salad with me.)
20:30 ++

arg, this half hour time limit is doing bad things to my writing. I could have gone on for another hour about that vegan stuff (and been much clearer about it, so don't start clapping just yet) ... but what can you do? anyway, I'm an hour behind on this, but I wanted to point out that peter did a beautiful version of colorblind, which is one of my favorites of his for reasons I haven't yet figured out...
20:13 ++

amanda said: it would be cool if you wrote about how to be vegan while eating in a college dining hall. I can't imagine how you do it without resorting to salad and cereal all the time.

I am lucky enough to go to a college that, due to its very nature, is full of vegetarians. and, due to its astronomical enrollment pricetag, it has money to spend on making its students happy, or at least trying to. the dining hall has a veggie bar where all the food is guaranteed to be vegetarian; the grill is stocked with veggie burgers and tofu pups; the salad bar has tofu and beans and non-iceberg-lettuce greens. still, finding good vegan food can be a challenge, because there aren't a whole lot of us (I know of at least ten other strict vegans, but that's a very small percentage in a total student population of 1500) and because most people just don't really understand what it means to be vegan. you can't eat marshmallows? they'll say, or ...but the bees like making honey! even the dining hall staff seem to be a little confused about whether you can put honey in a dessert and still call it vegan.

on my first day at freshman orientation, I was wandering the halls while my roommate and her family unpacked her stuff, and I ran into my ra talking with one of the housekeepers. I wasn't in any mood to get into a conversation, but I was in even less of a mood to be impolite to someone I had just met. somehow it came up that I'm vegan, and my ra told me not to worry, because there was always the wok. and the pasta machines. I had no idea what she was talking about.

on the first day of classes, when she found me wandering the halls again, she asked how my classes were. they're fine, I said, but I am really sick of eating rice twice a day. she laughed and told me I needed to explore a little. then she said, "you know, clara's a vegetarian. she could probably give you some good advice. except that would mean you would both have to talk, so that might not work out." (clara was a junior on our hall. I was disturbed by how quickly my ra had picked up on my quietness.)

as it turned out, exploration was the key to happy vegan dining. this may sound like an odd thing for someone with such a selective diet to say, but I love food, and I love being creative with my food. I found the wok, and with it the answer to evil vegan main courses like tofu joes which, I swear, taste like formaldehyde and okra. even on days when none of the prepared food appealed to me, I could always load up my plate with broccoli and sprouts and tofu from the salad bar to make a nice stir fry. I also liked to make meals by seeing what I could combine with applesauce. I had fun with the toasters. I learned how to make salad ten different ways so that I wouldn't get sick of it. most significantly, though, I learned how to say no, I don't eat that and please stop trying to convince me otherwise without feeling bad about it.

right, so, the collage. when people ask me what I eat, my standard response is: "plants and soy and grains!" one thing college has taught me is that mushrooms are good. I used to hate them, and now I eat them happily, though not with the same enthusiasm that I eat things like broccoli and red peppers. the dining hall is very nice about providing us with rice and soymilk. on the other hand, it is often full of things like fried chicken -- sometimes being surrounded by food that I find vaguely repulsive makes it harder to eat than the lack of vegan-friendly food does.

the other thing that's a real challenge is making sure I'm not eating any hidden animals. I've gotten good at figuring how where there might be hidden egg whites or casein, but genetically modified foods are something else entirely. (hence the tomato and the dna strand.) I've gone into the dining hall kitchen to read labels on vegetables so that I can do my own research. every time they introduce a new vegan food, I ask to see the ingredients list. it requires constant effort, but fortunately the staff is (mostly) nice about it. every so often, they even go out of their way and get tofutti or sorbet for dessert, even though they know most people are just going to complain about how there are fewer ice cream flavors available.

sometimes, though, it is just frustrating. and that's where my nice people come in. I don't have access to things like chocolate at school, because dark chocolate isn't really a dining hall staple and I have neither the time nor the money to go on junk food expeditions. nothing makes my day more than getting a package in the mail and finding a carefully wrapped chocolate bar inside, or a package of fruit gems, or maybe some dried cranberries. (most of these come from my mom, but the aforementioned too-perceptive-for-her-own-good ra has also been known to send me fun mail.) college has made mealtimes a little more difficult for me, but it's also made me really appreciate the special foods I don't always get to eat, so really I have nothing to complain about.
19:43 ++

collage #1: I am a vegan. and I go to college.
18:59 ++

for those of you who are curious, which I'm sure is none of you, I don't even have an ftp client. I do all my web stuff in an old-fashioned dos terminal. (I realize windows will do drag-and-drop ftp, but drag-and-drop is ew.) I did have ws_ftp on my old computer, but I rarely used it, so I didn't bother transferring it to the new one (and I can't get a new free, non-le version until I go back to school).

anyway, it's making this whole frenetic process that much more interesting.
18:34 ++

you know how some things are only supposed to happen in comic strips or roald dahl books?

a bird pooped on my face this morning.

really. I was lying in the backyard grass under a tree, looking at nothing except maybe the air, and then almost-but-not-quite simultaneously, the leaves above me fluttered and I felt something warm and wet smack onto my forehead. I was pretty sure I knew what it was, but I reached up and stuck my finger in it anyway for the purposes of visual analysis. slimy, grey, slightly granular. yup.

I have a pet bird of my own, who I've lived with for ten years now, so I'm used to bird poop. and honestly I'm not that easily grossed out by anything (physical). still, I didn't waste any time getting inside to a sink and then, once I found more of the stuff in my hair, into the shower.

yet more evidence that my life was supposed to be a paperback book in the childrens' section of your local library, I think.
18:02 ++

I don't know how some of you are managing to chat and post and read other posts and comment on other posts all at the same time. glue is drying on collage number one.
17:30 ++

look at me, I'm worth five dons (out of eight). that's better than I've done on a significant number of math tests in the last few years...

is it silly of me to actually spend time on my archives (with the abridged-version entries and the manually updated weekly list) and then hide the link way down on my sidebar? I rather like my unintrusive other-parts-of-this-site section, especially since it hides my wildly inconsistent design urges, but if a lot of people wanted me to move it I would. thoughts?
17:00 ++

star with midriff bulge eyed by astronomers. at least we know astronomers care more about personality than looks, or something. this press release has a great quote:

Measuring the shape of this star, Altair, was as difficult as standing in Los Angeles, looking at a hen's egg in New York, and trying to prove that it's oval-shaped and not circular.

one of the things about astronomy that's difficult for everyone to grasp, including astronomers, is just how huge the numbers are. three hundred parsecs? fifty thousand kelvin? ten billion years? what what? altair is a nearby star, relatively speaking, and even so it's like an egg in los angeles. it constantly amazes me that we can know things (or at least make intelligent guesses about things, since not much of science involves knowing anything without a whole lot of guessing first) about objects that exist in other galaxies, and processes that took place before humans even existed.

(for those of you who are new here, hi, and now you know about me and astronomy. I'm an astrophysics major.)

whose idea was this once every half hour thing, anyway? oy.
16:32 ++

speaking of sleep, I am perfectly capable of being awake and dreaming at the same time. not daydreaming, not hallucinating (both of which I also do), but experiencing a world that is clearly other and very much involuntary. this morning at the same time I was lying in bed listening to the birds outside, I was standing on a field of asphalt, looking down while a scientist unzipped a giant white canvas bag with a rusty, oversized zipper. he had a hook for a hand, and the point was stuck through the square hole in the top of the zipperpullthing, and every time he gave it a yank he grimaced a little, as if the hook extended all the way inside his arm and were being tugged away from its tendons.

I don't know why I didn't offer to help. maybe if I had been really asleep I would have been all the way present in the dream and I would have been able to reach down and open the bag myself. as it was I just stood there, watching. there was a pile of dark purple turnips inside, dusted with fresh garden dirt.

(collage update: I've got all the pictures ripped for my first one. on to scissors and glue.)
16:06 ++

this morning I woke up way too early. all week long I've been staying up later than I intended, going to bed at three or four in the morning instead of midnight like I always planned. last semester at school I actually fell into a reasonably workable sleeping rhythm, where I would go to bed between one and two and get up consistently before seven the next morning, but somehow since I've been home I've wanted to be nocturnal. my earliest class this spring started at 9:55, which meant I had to leave my room at 9:40, so there was really no need for me to be up any time before nine, yet I did it anyway. and now here I am, ostensibly working nine to five, and it's almost painful to get out of bed before eight thirty every morning. I generally get to work in time for my ten am meeting and then I stay until six, so that works out fine, but still.

right. so last night I was trying to stay up late to help shift my biological clock back a few hours and hopefully make it easier to stay up through the whole night and into tomorrow afternoon. but no, I fell asleep on the floor (not even on my bed, on the floor! which is ridiculous since the amount of floor in my room that isn't covered by my bed is about the same size as my little mattress itself) around one am, only to wake up just before three, steaming inside my heavy rugby sweatshirt with my face pressed up against the edge of my bookshelf. (incidentally, or perhaps not, that particular part of the shelf is still covered in potting soil from my move back home for the summer, because I halfway-dropped one of my plants. I managed to rescue the plant itself before it crashed to the ground, but some of the dirt escaped, and cleaning it up proved to require more effort than I was willing to exert, especially since it didn't actually touch any of my precious books.)

after that I moved to my bed, but I only managed to sleep for three more hours before I woke up at six. I haven't really been asleep since then. that means that if I make it through this whole thing without any catnaps, I'll have been awake for thirty three hours. when I say it like that it actually doesn't sound so long... I've done much worse things to myself during finals weeks at school. ha!

I tried to sleep, really. I stayed in bed under my quilt (have I mentioned that the temperature dropped thirty-five degrees between wednesday and thursday?), curled around my penguin, and I really tried to sleep. I almost made it, I think. you know that moment when you know you're about to fall asleep and you can feel your mind slipping away, as if your connection to it were only an illusion in the first place, but you can still percieve the world around you so you know you're conscious in some way? I was like that for four hours. every time I inhaled I could feel my conscious mind tightening its grip a little, and every time I exhaled I felt the fuzziness of dreams speading through my brain, and so it went back and forth and back and forth, like tides on a beach, rocking me gently but never quite pulling me under.
15:45 ++

so, here we go!

for the record, I'm doing this one hundred percent free of prewriting, precutting, prepasting, or anything like that. I've got a list of topics people have sent me (thank you!), a stack of old magazines, my scissors, glue, and what may very well turn out to be not enough paper. I'm also doing this one hundred percent caffeine-free, which will likely be much more of a challenge. :P my sibs and mom went out and bought me a bunch of sugar, so I won't exactly be doing it substance free, but there will be no brain stimulants involved except for my already-pumping adrenaline.

whee!
15:02 ++

friday, july 27

hey. do any of you know of a good freeware program that will remap keys in win-me? I had one on my old computer, but like most of the freeware on my old computer, it was written for win95 and hasn't been updated in years.
22:59

++

I really do like this job, but my favorite part of the workweek comes on friday at five pm.

to kick off the weekend, one of boston's nondescript radio stations plays blur's song 2 followed by that todd rundgren song, bang on the drum all day (you know the one), and people call in to "bang on the drum," which basically means they yell "BANG BANG BANG!!" into the phone. it is absolutely hilarious imagining these people in their suits and ties and skirts, sitting in their cars, hollering into their cellphones. (meanwhile, I am bouncing in my chair with my headphones on, pretending my papermate ballpoint pens are maracas, so I'm just as ridiculous.) and the weekend anticipation is absolutely palpable. it's great.

if I have so much fun with this, what must it be like for people have jobs they need instead of jobs they like?

I don't want to work; I just want to bang on the drum all day! whee, weekend!
16:58 ++

great. "sponsor" has completely ceased to be a word. I hate that, especially when it happens to my own name. rabi. rabi rabi rabi. sponsor.

okay, enough. bear with my mess, please.
16:14 ++

[hi. don't worry, the sidebar is supposed to look weird.]
15:51 ++

thursday, july 26

the blogathon page is updated. sponsors, send me your topics! please please :)
20:35

++

new pictures of a star-forming region in the large magellanic cloud. how's that for a next-door neighbor?
13:06

wednesday, july 25

gradualism vs punctuated equilibrium: two decades in words, evolving.

well, almost two decades. the discussion of how my writing has changed over the last year prompted me to explore how my writing has changed over my entire lifetime. the weblog itself is not a good measure of that, since its purpose and its place in my life have shifted drastically several times over the course of its existence: it started as an excuse to play with css and to see what all the blogger hype was about; grew into a place for me to share science and snarkiness with the few who cared to listen; turned into a forum for my amateur storytelling; and only in the last semester became an excuse to simply write.

anyway, I've always liked to write. my story notebooks seem to have disappeared into the ether, though I'm sure they're just hiding somewhere in the dust-drenched basement, but I've saved all my old journals myself to protect them from the too-curious eyes of my parents. they frighten me. here are pieces, mostly from journals, some from stories, all real and unedited. in any case, I have come a long way from the crayon-illustrated stories written when I was two, which is where we start:

march, 1984: zeno and the other animals were playing in daddy's room. zeno came out into the living room and bit misha's nose! misha was scared. she slept under the blanket. who was under the blanket with her? ME and YOU! "be quiet, misha," we said. "zeno won't hurt you."
[zeno is an imaginary whale. misha was our real labrador retriever. other stories from this period featured lego characters playing on the typewriter and dumbo dancing on the roof of our apartment.]

june, 1985: here are the ovens where they bake. they bake bread. they especially like raisin bread. a cat suddenly came into the room! rufus is the cat's name. he chases bernard and bianca! they run into the oven. it's so hot in there. bernard and bianca are going to get cooked. then rufus will eat them. he'll eat them with ketchup, as if they were french fried. poor bernard and bianca. they got eaten by rufus and now they live in his stomach.
[mastery of tenses eluded me for a long time. bonus points if you recognize the names.]

february, 1986: it should snow more because I want to wear my new moon boots to school and not my ugly rainboots in the slush. when we do gymnastics I am the best at forward roles and backward roles. we did cartwheels too.
[one of the rare pre-kindergarten instances where I wrote about myself in the first person rather than the third. I must have asked someone how to spell "gymnastics."]

may, 1987: I wonder if people know that they're getting old. I wish people didn't have to die and get old. I wish you could just pick the age you wanted to be and stay there. if it were boring then you could keep getting older and stop again when you found an age you liked. I would be ten. maybe that wouldn't work then. you couldn't have very good birthdays.
[this was prompted by a visit with my grandparents just after my grandmother stopped using wigs and dye to pretend her hair wasn't as white as the feathers on a swan. apparently I wasn't satisfied with being five years old. as it turned out, being ten was pretty good. I am a bit shocked by my correct use of the subjunctive here, because I managed to forget how it worked sometime between this and several high school papers.]

august, 1988: on a hot day in august, I am a stick of butter, and the sun is a golden piece of corn on the cob that is slowly melting me away.
[so you see, I have always been a little weird with my metaphors.]

april, 1989: when I was three years old, we moved from new york city to burke. I remember we moved on new year's eve. zoey was only a few months old, and she had cried most of the way. we went into the cold, bare house, and it seemed almost colder than the air outside. my godmother jill made some jiffy-pop for dinner. I remember watching the silver top get bigger and bigger, not believing there could be more room underneath. she burned the popcorn and cried because she thought it was ruined. at 11:58 my father and my godfather arrived in the moving van, just in time to ring in the new year. even zoey woke up to add her screams to our noise.
[we slept on little mats on the floor that night, and when we woke up there was snow coming in the windows. it was definitely the most exciting of my many moving days. I think I've only watched one of those jiffy pop things three times in my entire life. just seeing them sitting on the grocery store shelf reminds me of that night and the smell of burned popcorn and dirty linoleum. also, I apparently thought half a month was enough to justify pluralizing, since my sister was only six weeks old when we left the city. that was a long car ride.]

march, 1990: moonlight stopped and look longingly towards the night sky. all the unicorns were flying across the moon. all the unicorns, that is, except the ones that didn't have wings. every month the head unicorn would choose two unicorns to recieve wings. the best would get a golden pair and the other would get a silver pair. then the happy unicorns would prance off until the next full moon, when they were allowed to fly. it was a great honor to be chosen. and the great wing ceremony was the very next day! the next morning moonlight combed his mane and put a new ribbon in his hair. when he got to the ceremony, it was already crowded. after the unicorns had shown off their skills, the head unicorn stepped up. "the first place winner is starburst!" a cheer went up from the crowd. "the second place winner is snowflower!" moonlight's heart sank. he had wanted those wings! but he had gotten third place, which meant he could choose to be any color he liked. he chose pale yellow, to match the wings he was going to try for next year.
[color coordinated unicorns with hippie names -- can you say eight-year-old girl? the story actually does have paragraph breaks, but I don't think they make much difference. I'm about ready for some punctuation in this equilibrium; you?]

july, 1991: today at the children's museum I saw an exhibit called "shooting back." it was a whole bunch of pictures taken by homeless children. some of the pictures were sad and dark like you think pictures of homeless people should be -- a family in an alley, huddled together in front of a dumpster, trying to fool you into thinking they're smiling -- but mostly they were happy and alive. there is one of a boy getting splashed with water thrown from a plastic 7-11 cup, and you know he is laughing for real because he's not even looking at the camera and the water is right there hanging in the middle of the air, and you can't pose pictures like that.
[the children's museum was in denver. I haven't been there since that visit. at a certain point you just have to realize that you have become too old to see things the way you used to, and it's better to keep seeing them happily in your memory than to try and contend with your own unwelcome maturity.]

july, 1992: after lunch I was out in the garden when I was surprised by the arrival of someone familiar -- plop! he was back, and with him were two baby blackbirds! small fat balls of feathers, with hardly any tails at all, and pale little beaks almost disappearing into their hatchling fuzz. while we were watching in fascination and exclaiming of their cuteness, one of the babies actually came into the kitchen and began to eat crumbs off the floor under bird's cage. (bird was rather indignant.)
[this was in london. plop is, as you may have guessed, a blackbird. bird is an african grey parrot whose real name is cyrano, and who can whistle the opening bars of the star spangled banner. also, "exclaiming of their cuteness"?]

april, 1993: how can I save the earth by myself? I want to keep it, know it, save it, but not just for me. quetzal. isn't that a wonderful songlike sound? quetzals are lovely birds. elegant, but still so genial, not at all stuck up the way peacocks are. if only I had time and money, what I could do! I could save all the quetzals, adopt a thousand whales, buy a million acres of rainforest, and never again be reluctant to call myself human.
[up until sixth grade I knew I would grow up to be a novelist, and then suddenly I found myself wanting to be an ornithologist. that was short-lived, but I still think quetzals have the best bird-name ever. on the other hand, I am no longer embarassed by my humanity.]

january, 1994: it is so hard to comprehend, the delicate fragility of happiness. we take it for granted, and then act bewildered and offended if something goes wrong. we are angry if something happens to take it away. war has been declared, and yet I just sit here writing. my mind is numb. I feel so small and insignificant, helpless to defend myself. it seems almost as though all life should end right here. we are all utterly defenseless against the cold cruel world surrounding us in spite of our weapons and pens, and a single word has shattered the frail shell surrounding our happiness. that word, that awful, despicable word, is war.
[this one started in my own journal and turned into part of a school project for my seventh-grade social studies course. the war was the russian revolution, and of course in my journal it was something else entirely, but the rest of the words are the same.]

[everything I wrote in eighth and ninth grade was in a secret alphabet. at the time it was as easy as english; now I can barely make out simple words like "the" and "you." that's one way to protect yourself from remembering who you used to be...]

august, 1996: the words chased me flanked by two thin dogs, dark except for amber eyes -- deceptively warm, and i was so amazed at how, despite the amoebic frail transparency in profile, they were deeper than all the shoveled-out holes to china that i forgot to run, and the words caught me. they poured and i reeled back and back: those words made me rice paper fragile, and somewhere in the middle of their brilliant hurricane i dazzled in confusion. i watched ponderous creatures swim across my eyes while my fingers froze in the cold.
[this went on for a while, actually. I've always had a thing for words as living entities, but this is a little ridiculous. I like it anyway. nostalgia.]

june, 1997: you hurt me with your hypocrisy and deliberate ignorance and if you want to do that please just tell me so i stop letting my awful beautiful hope stay raw and bleeding beating at the surface? you made a promise and unless you have rewritten the laws of the universe, forever is not up yet.
[high school melodrama, complete with lowercase i. adolescence is not good for writing; it makes us all sound the same even as we believe that we've discovered new dimensions of human emotions. fortunately this melodrama resolved itself happily.]

[most of what I wrote during the last two years of high school was poetry. my journal morphed into a series of handwritten notes to my best friend, and all I have left of those are her handwritten responses.]

december, 1999: for mile after outward-radiating mile, the only directions are to new york and away from new york. inside, I stand in front of the mirror, swaying gently with the relentless motion of the train, cataloging the souvenirs I have picked up from my first semester at college: tired lines around my eyes; soft baby-fat under my chin; my brand-new sweatshirt, with that deep garnet color that fairly screams academia and white letters yet to be cracked or worn by the rigors of the spin cycle. I wonder fleetingly how I transitioned from girl's soccer to women's rugby with so little fanfare, or for that matter anything else that would have better qualified me to so conspicuously announce my status as a woman. outside, the world rushes by in the wrong direction: expensive suvs parked outside little row houses, fenced-off lots with aboveground pools -- they try so hard to maintain the illusion of luxury and creature comfort, but stuck in those little yards, forcing the garbage cans to live on the landings outside backdoors, they achieve only the effect of middle-class pretension and delusion. plastic pools and shiny cars, a testament to american sucker-commercial culture, trapped where they were never meant to belong, trapping us with them.
[nothing makes me so acutely aware of my inability to properly capture the world as a long end-of-semester train ride.]

july, 2000: look at all the dead animals all over everyone's feet, in the glue of bindings and shoesoles. we will all get old and die; maybe someday we will all be shoes on an alien's feet, our whole species held in the layer between dirt and heel, perpetually trodden on, until we wear out and fall apart, all atatter, lives and pain forgotten and obscured by dust and wear and tear. we are all frayed and unraveling: they will cut us into pieces and sew us back together into something wholly different, but once again whole with neat edges and stitching that betray our complications.
[sometimes I stop sleeping entirely. that is my only explanation.]

and now we are here, and I still say you are all crazy.
21:45 ++

1) five(ish) days until the blogathon! if I'm counting right, I'm going to make forty-nine posts over the course of twenty-four hours. that's a lot. I have some ideas for things I want to write about, but not forty-nine! and that's where you come in.

I promised art in the mail to anyone who sponsors me. now I invite you, my sponsors, to send me something to write about. it can be a single word, a question, whatever you want. I'm not going to to any prewriting, because then you won't have the fun of watching me get increasingly incoherent as the twenty-four hours progress, but I'll do some pre-thinking and I'll post something in response to everything you send me. and your collage will be an illustration of my post, in some way or another. think of it as a commission. email me sometime before saturday morning with your topic and we'll be good to go.

(also, dear spacecheese sponsor, do I know you?)

2) and that brings me to my next request, something I've wanted to do for a while. my list of links over there in the sidebar is simultaneously too long and woefully incomplete. so, if you're a regular reader and I don't have you over there in the sidebar, could you email me with your url? please? or post it here, if you want the free advertising. :) I'm not running a reciprocal links program here, but if you are part of my audience I definitely want to be part of yours. and now I have a new computer with all kinds of room for new bookmarks!
22:57 ++

the beach always leaves me feeling slightly damaged, with skin prickly and burning beneath layers of sun and sand, hair sticky and matted, lungs shallow and tightening after too much time in the water. lying on the towel, looking through my arm (made transparent by binocular vision) at the piles of dried-black seaweed and empty plastic soda bottles on the sand beside me, I felt the fragility of all my parts and wondered: is this what it feels like to be old?
21:31 ++

I feel like I'm teething. it really must be an unhappy thing for babies, to suddenly have a mouthful of strange sharp halfway-there objects and no promise that they'll be permanently removed in a matter of weeks. eruption is not quite the right word for teeth, I think; it feels more like a reverse fault, slow and hot and tight in the places where there was supposed to be space but is now only unrelenting pressure. they're pieces of your body! my mother said when I objected to the idea that their extraction is more like invasive surgery than it is like digging out a splinter, but I still think they are alien entities, sown years ago in fertile ground and now spreading their roots too far, destroying the native ecosystem and waiting to take over. today is mixed metaphor day. anyway I refuse to give them the dignity of proper surgery or the power to invade my brain, however indirectly: a horrific operating room experience has made me forever averse to nitrous oxide, and so I will be fully conscious and alert and I will listen to my teeth breaking inside my head, and I will bid them good riddance.

I am never malicious toward other people, but teeth are apparently another story.
14:12 ++

I hate that I have to do this, but here is some pertinent administrative junk:

so I got the new computer all hooked up and stuff, and yay it works and is ridiculously fast, but I still haven't gotten the internet connection configured. to be honest I don't really know what the hell I'm doing in that department, since all I have is this cable modem and really no idea what sort of account details I need. hopefully tomorrow there will be some point at which my parents and I are awake and home at the same time, and we can get that straightened out; hopefully it will be easily straightened and everything will work right and I will not need to get anything new. I could, technically, set up my aol account and use the normal modem, but I desperately want to keep that computer unblemished by aolness as long as possible. until the computer is internet-happy, I won't be able to download the new drivers and software for my zip drive, and so won't be able to access any of the old stuff I was working on. I can still read all my mail, but replies will be sporadic and probably from a different account entirely (although you might not notice unless you look closely at the headers) -- I don't really feel like dealing with having a bunch of my outgoing mail stored on the family computer (don't worry, my outlook identity is password protected and most of my family members are trustworthy [not to mention about as computer savvy as earthworms -- sorry guys!] so they won't be reading anything you send me, either). and, well, I think you can figure out what this arrangement will do to my online omnipresence.

I'll gush about my computer and regale you all with the specs after I make it work all the way, and after I turn it into my computer and not a box with a bunch of predefined event sounds and desktop patterns.

onto other stuff:

I have a piece of glass embedded in my foot. it's interesting. sort of. also, since all my taxed income was from pennsylvania last year, my rebate letter was mailed to swarthmore and only just got forwarded here today. surprise surprise, I will not be getting a rebate at this time. thank you so much president george w. bush, and I suppose you worked your ass off in college too? I talked about college a lot this evening when I went to babysit for a family that for some reason still really really likes me even though I've only seen them once in the last twelve months. astrophysics, cognitive science, rugby, yes I love it, blah blah blah: always when I say those things I marvel at how utterly incomplete they are, yet still true. the returning students envelope came this week, just another installment in my paper relationship with swarthmore that started after I took the psats and I imagine will continue until they can no longer track me down to try and guilt trip me into donating money by reminding me what I happy alumna I am, or I will be, or whatever tense I'm supposed to be using at this point. it makes me sad (the orange construction fence is back, this time around the science buildings; while the letter didn't mention it, I know that the rugby pitch is now a parking lot dressed in asphalt and trimmed in barbed wire) and a little bit nervous (construction is not the only thing that will be different next year), but mostly I am excited (in six weeks I will be settled with a new room and new textbooks and new hallmates, and I am closer to being back at swat than I am from leaving it behind).

I promise you I have much more interesting things to say, but sometimes updates are simply necessary. expect a few more soon about various weblog-related things. hopefully after that I will be able to write again, instead of just talking through my fingers.
03:29 ++

saturday, july 28

friday, july 27

thursday, july 26

wednesday, july 25

tuesday, july 24

monday, july 23

sunday, july 22