wockerjabby [stars for summer]

saturday, september 8

I think it was the summer between seventh and eighth grades (1994) when my family went to martha's vineyard for the first time. we did the tourist things (rings from the carousel; chocolates in chilmark; the gay head lighthouse; gingerbread houses in oak bluffs), but mostly we went to the beach. after all, why spend a week on an island if you're not going to swim? usually we went to the long, calm beach a few miles from our rented house, which was very tame except for the crabs on the sandbar (one grabbed my foot and wouldn't let go) and the stinging insects that flew around the rosehips separating the beach from the road. we dug holes in the sand and played paddleball along the edge of the water and my sister and I even let people take pictures of us in our matching blue-and-white-striped seersucker bathing suits. and we swam, but if not for the salt and the baby jellyfish, you would never have known it wasn't swimming pool water, because it so thoroughly lacked turbulence. I wanted waves.

so. one day, near the end of the week, we went to moshup beach, on the southeastern tip of the vineyard. it's sandy and falls steeply into the water, the first thing that breaks the rush of the ocean currents that come from the south, and it had waves that could swallow me if I stood beneath them. when we ducked under the waves and swam beyond the breaking point, the beach turned into a faraway stage that we watched from our intermittent seats atop the crests before we plunged back into the green-water-walled valley. my father, diving down, reported that the ocean floor was too deep to be touched.

I've lived near or next to water all my life, and I know what to do in it. I'm the best body surfer I've ever met: even in shallow water with two-foot waves I can ride more than fifty feet; on the rare occasions that I get to swim in real waves (I'm an eastcoast girl, remember), I can go farther and faster than the people with bodyboards or surfboards. so while the sun was setting orange across the ocean, I was flying back and forth, landing hands-first on the beach and spinning around to dive back in dolphin-style, never touching the rocks underneath the breakers.

I still don't remember exactly what happened differently -- I stood up too early? I caught the wave too late? -- but I was suddenly knee-deep in fiercely rushing water and then just as suddenly I was flat on my back, caught in the undertow. I was too surprised to think to close my eyes, and so I saw the sky shimmering pale evening pink above me, too bright for something on the other side of five feet of ocean water. it looked so close, but when I tried to reach up I found my arms were pinned to my sides, and when I felt slippery rocks bumping past my legs I realized I was being pulled out into the deep water, and the sky was fading into a green blur...

in that moment I think I understood more fully than I ever have before or since that I was completely, completely helpless. there was nothing I could do to escape until the ocean was ready to let me, because the water was so much stronger than I that it was impossible for me to even move my limbs, let alone flail them around the way a drowning person would do in the movies. it occurred to me fleetingly that I was flying, just upside-down and underwater, but thoughts were quickly eclipsed by oxygen-deprived panic and in spite of the expanse of the ocean around me and the sky above, I was trapped. trapped. flying and trapped.

and then, shockingly, I was breathing air and blinking away the blinding glare of reflected sunlight. I must have been fighting the whole time to get up even though it was futile, because I don't remember deciding to try again or even thinking that the surface was in reach, just that one second I was on my back and the next second I wasn't anymore. I swam back to shore, careful in the lull between the waves this time so that I could keep my head above the water, and I stood on the sand for a few minutes watching the water slide up and down the hill of beach, up and down and rhythmic like a sinister hypnotic lullabye. then I ran, hard and splashing to break the spell, and dove back into the waves.
17:47 ++

friday, september 7

I want words with hard edges, solid foundations, and no desire for beauty. I want words that are thick but not sweet, that burn a little going down but will keep you warm for hours. I want words that lack melody, words that thunder like drumbeats and echo in canyons. I want words that fight back, I want to spar, and I want to win. I want words that understand: sometimes what you say is more important than how you say it.

the trouble with me is I think I'm a poet. what shall I tell a story about?
20:18 ++

so, seminars, oh my god. with the exception of rugby practice, the fifteen minutes I spent paying attention in logic this morning, a few meals, moments stolen at public computers, and a little less than five hours spent sleeping, I have been doing classical dynamics work for the past twenty-nine hours. up late last night; up early this morning; working out quadratics on my lap while the philosophy people drew truth-value tables; running back and forth between offices and libraries and photocopiers; writing three idl programs in thirty-six minutes (graphs too!); finally falling in five directions across the hallway floor, penning last-minute presentation notes (no algebra mistakes? axes labeled?) while the copier overhead spit out my transparencies. it was a sweet adrenaline rush when I sat down and looked at my just-finished double-checked work, but there must be a better way to do this. (mondays and wednesdays are seminar days too, but less out of control I hope because behindness tends to accumulate.) if I don't figure it out, I will probably age ten years in the next four semesters, because this triple-seminar thing is the pattern for the foreseeable future... yay for astrophysics. ha.

(supposedly in ten weeks I will be able to understand einstein, or something, but that seems highly doubtful. also supposedly I will be able to describe the motion of a particle attached to a string attached to a spring attached to another string attached to a rolling cart on an inclined elastic surface, or any other problem contrived to be as ugly as possible in newtonian mechanics, but that seems highly doubtful as well. also highly impractical, although it would probably make a good amusement park ride.)

somehow all our arguments in logic today revolved around the new college rankings, and I wouldn't have even known that the rankings were new again or that ours has changed (again, although I'm not sure a half-position move should count for anything) if not for premise: swarthmore drops to number fifteen in the rankings, so I'm a little annoyed with myself for continuing to think about it. I wonder if the administrators go through the same denial rituals that we do (who cares what number we are? that's not why we came here, right?) or if they just go ahead and admit that yeah, they want to be number one. in a way, I think that's more honest; perhaps we are bigger snobs for pretending that we're above rankings than we would be if we just said yay us and got over it. perhaps not, though? I'm not always sure that the battle between pragmatism and idealism is worthwhile, but it does seem to be always necessary.

school school school. I think there are no such thing as weekends here. I love it anyway.
16:27 ++

right now there are bright lights overhead (behind plastic panels sectioned like dragonfly eyes to send the light spreading everywhere) and cinderblock on all four sides (painted white but not smooth and dotted here and there with bits of leftover tape) and bright purple carpet underneath my chair (covered in tracks from library-ladder wheels and scuffed sneakers) but those are just eyes and skin and hair. the life is in the faint rhythmic clunks from the plumbing, the pervasive tremolo of power running through the walls, the rattles in the vents, and the way all the air smells like paper and electricity. it takes this, on the quiet floor of the science library, to make me take stock in my own life: my pulse pushing through my wrists; thoughts whirling somewhere in glorious asynchrony; the soft rush of oxygen to my lungs; that oily-sweet smell that could belong only to a human animal.

I have spent so very much time in this building in the past two years, perhaps more than I've spent anywhere else and certainly more than I've spent in any of my rooms, that I often think of it as my home, the place I am supposed to always return to. now it is changing on the outside, but inside it is still the same (except for the new computers). tonight, though, in the quiet-noise of building life, it feels more like a womb, and I am sitting here inside the swath of muffled hums and glowing lights, waiting to be born.

where are you?
23:10 ++

I was walking up the hill after dinner, the same hill with the same asphalt path that I've walked up so many times in the past two years, when suddenly I was hit by something, like cupid's arrow but softer, and I wasn't just walking up the hill anymore. I was standing amidst perfection, surrounded by acoustic guitar coming from somewhere invisible inside the fragrance garden and cloudlight on the edges of purple and the steadfast arm of the belltower reaching up and up into the cathedral-sky, and I think for just that second I was perfect too, and I couldn't imagine wanting to be anywhere else in the world, or in myself.

sometimes, even though I remember why I'm an atheist, I can't quite figure out how that ever happened. maybe this just pulls it tighter, though, because in all my life I never did anything to deserve such moments. somewhere in the past though I did learn to stop feeling guilty for basking in them, and somewhere in the future I will find a way to pay the universe back.
00:16 ++

monday, september 3

we are silly at swarthmore and we start classes on labor day, and so I sat crosslegged on the floor at nine-thirty this morning because there weren't enough chairs in the room yet thinking that even symbolic logic is remarkably unlike science, and then for three hours in the seminar room this afternoon physics looked remarkably like math until it was my turn to do a problem at the board at which point it all turned into absolute gibberish, and how something as simple as transforming a vector function from spherical into cartesian coordinates could suddenly collapse into a jumble of meaningless syllables is beyond me, but now my entire right palm is covered with yellow chalkdust because I was too disoriented trying to find x and y to even locate the eraser...

I am still not even unpacked and already it's like vacation never existed, because my life is three meetings so far and homework for all my classes and wind ensemble rehearsals and rugby practice tomorrow (run today; I should be changing) and dining hall hours to remember and everything everything, but still last semester feels infinitely far away because people are just enough different to make me shy again, and I suppose I am different too even though I only recognize it when I stop to feel, and I realize maybe I have forgotten how to think? I keep seeing my life stop, freezeframe, and the words this is not trauma come crashing down in blocky white, all over everything. it is so true that I have to laugh.
16:44 ++

sunday, september 2

there's something about early-evening light that makes everything look security-blanket-safe and jungle-wild all at once. I want to live inside it. dust specks are supposed to be insignificant, I think, but how perfect would it be just to float in a stream of light, buoyed by golden warmth, too small to cast a shadow and so touched everwhere all at once by something pure? I think you could be motionless and still dancing at the same time. I almost am, watching.
19:18

saturday, september 8

friday, september 7

thursday, september 6

wednesday, september 5

tuesday, september 4

monday, september 3

sunday, september 2