saturday, september 22

(a parenthetical note about email: maybe you've noticed that I haven't exactly read my wockerjabby mail in a few weeks. several weeks, actually. and before that I was still about fifty emails behind in the needs-a-reply list. that's because of this whole still-unresolved network software problem, which is making it impossible for my computer to connect to the network. stupid stupid stupid. I won't go into the ways in which that has interfered with my life, but I will apologize for being an email delinquent. sorry. I honestly don't know when I'm going to read that old email, but I finally gave in and temporarily redirected my new mail to my swarthmore address. I don't want to deal with all the junk and listmail I get showing in up in my pine inbox though, so I'm going to change the alias again pretty soon, probably to a netmail account. anyway if you want/need to talk to me, email me at wj, and for now I'll be able to read it and get back to you. I have to warn you though, I'm not the world's greatest email correspondent. too busy. okay, enough? enough. that's the story.)
16:35 ++

friday, september 21

there was an airplane in the sky tonight while we were walking back from rugby practice. it was just at the edge of the sunset, and the orange horizon-glow was reflected off its belly and wings, sparkling. it looked as if the plane were being lifted up by sunlight, carried away from the gravity that keeps us all bound to the present here on earth. I will never be afraid to fly.
21:04 ++

when I say I wish for peace
do I wish it for everyone? or do I just wish for quiet, to live momentarily in a world where the speed of light is too slow to let me ever learn how much destruction we are capable of?

I do still believe
that the world is beautiful, that humans are amazing, that the final analysis will prove that sentience is worthwhile and the scales of our existence are tipped to the side of good. but it's hard to also believe in my own right to say that, because I am granted by fortune and circumstance the privilege to devote my life to trivialities.

survival
is not my priority, because I am lucky now and I can survive without even trying. how can I say then that I refuse to believe in war, that I don't know how to hate people, that the world will get better? how can I hold convictions that can never be proved? what if all I really want is to be placated by the luxury of denial?

I have elephants on my socks and they make me smile. perhaps I haven't changed the way I was supposed to. perhaps the speed of light is slower than the speed of hope. perhaps the world will end. I think it is always ending and always beginning and always (somewhere) beautiful. like the universe, which makes us small, and like love, which makes us infinite.
16:49 ++

thursday, september 20

sometimes I don't understand how physics manages to become the entirety of my life and still be so trivial. if the towers were still there and we weren't all talking about war and I didn't have this omnipresent knot inside me, would I still care so little about geodesics and lagrange multipliers?

I think our metonymy has carried us into oblivion, or at least into a world where physics is a tool of destruction.
23:23 ++

the government is making me think about politics whether I'm ready to or not. I don't like our politics right now.

it's pretty obvious, I think, that I'm not a patriot. still, I don't hate america by any means; I'm not even all that cynical about it. I believe in it enough to vote and send letters to politicians, anyway. still, I'm a bit too much of an idealistic liberal to get along with the way the united states works all the time. I have two pictures taped to my door that I took in cambridge: one is of a painting on the sidewalk that asks "is capitalism a disease?" and the other is my reflection in the window of the gap that was vandalized with the words "must crush capitalism" and an anarchy symbol in sprayed-on acid. I like them because they're so very cambridge but I wouldn't have them on my door, next to my name, if I didn't agree with them in some way.

I have more pictures inside my desk drawer, of the american flag, also taken in cambridge, at a park near my house. the park used to be a fort, and the flag is one of the biggest I've ever seen. its pole is as big around as I am. I really like our flag; it's pretty and loaded with nice, simple symbolism. in grade school I stopped actually pledging allegiance at a certain place in lieu of just lip-synching allegiance, but I always liked the excuse to stand up and look at the flag. and so, last month when I was out walking around my neighborhood instead of packing to come back to swarthmore, I went and sat under the flagpole and took pictures of my flag rippling overhead.

last week I thought about taping one of the flag pictures to my door. I don't exactly know why I didn't -- I guess because this has felt to me to be much more about people than about politics, even though I know that's naive. I'm glad I didn't, though, because if I had put a picture up, it would be coming down now.

come on, america. let me keep liking you. please.
01:20 ++

wednesday, september 19

the air was terrible. it hit me like a slap in the face as soon as I got off the train, a sudden rush of caustic warmth, inescapable. by the time I reached fourteenth street my breathing was quick and shallow; as I made my way along the south side of canal street I found that I couldn't even swallow normally. it felt like being on fire everywhere: my lungs smouldered; my eyes stung; my lips and mouth burned; my skin prickled all across my face and hands and arms.

I haven't felt anything like fire all week. I wasn't angry or vengeful or paranoid or anything really except sad. it was strange to suddenly have my physical feelings be so out of step with my emotions, and I wondered if the fire would seep all the way inside me if I stood there long enough surrounded by smoke-singed air.

later, while the train was sitting in the station at trenton, I was listening to the radio and a man called in to say that the real problem was our lack of vigilence. that no one had noticed the terrorists bringing knives onto airplanes or driving cars full of flight manuals because it was normal, because we are used to these people running convenience stores and driving cars and going to flight school. america is a great place to hide, he said, because we got too lazy and forgot that all arab people are potential terrorists.

and then, finally, I was angry. angry at him for being a racist, angry at the media for turning this into the attack on america, angry at the politicians for turning the attack into america's new war, angry at the stock market for faltering, angry at the planes for exploding and the towers for falling and the air for burning. and mostly I was angry at the terrorists. it was a flashfire; I trembled and burned in my seat, overwhelmed, and then I was suddenly exhausted and fell asleep with my hand still clenched white-knuckled around my walkman and that stupid man on the radio.

the air here is sweet and crisp, and I'm just sad again.
17:48 ++

tuesday, september 18

the worst thing about all those photocopied missing people wasn't their faces or their names or the phone numbers. it was the present tense. I read every single one I saw, all the way from outside penn station to canal street and up through the village to union square where everything was coated in a rainbow of candle wax. I looked at the eyes of the people in the pictures, read their names and tried to think of how those names would sound spoken out loud, read everything, because even though I won't remember all the names by next week at least I will have known them for a little while. but all of them were so plaintively stuck in the present: missing loved one, twenty-eight years old, five-foot-six, one hundred forty pounds, works on floor 105, wtc1 as if the reason for everyone's absence were still a mystery and we were just waiting for those towers to reappear with all the floors intact and all the people working inside. maybe we are.
22:39 ++

my head swam with words all day but none of them were big enough to fill that gaping hole in the sky, which still manages to dwarf everything around it with emptiness alone, or heavy enough to balance the feeling in my heart when I stood alone amidst the crowd at union square, surrounded by candles and flowers and love letters written in crayon.

now everything moves in fits and starts, and anything can turn into a toy if you look at it from far enough away. I'm glad I was close for a while.
21:59 ++

monday, september 17

when I was eight years old we had just moved from upstate farm country to the albany area. at our spring recital, my tap class danced to new york, new york. (funny, the last time I mentioned that, it was the fourth of july.) after our first rehearsal, I told my teacher, "I'm from new york." no rabi, she said, the song is about new york city. I looked at her for a minute, and then I said, "I know. I'm from new york city."

yes. see you tomorrow.
22:54 ++

the baby is ten months old with soft round cheeks and olive-colored eyes and a tangle of curly brown hair. she's wearing a yellow jumpsuit printed with pink giraffes that are barely visible inside the dark green snugli that holds her cradled against you, and she's just had lots of milk to eat and now she's blinking sleepily at you from behind the tiniest slips of eyelashes. you offer her your pinkie and she grabs it, but her grip is so feather-gentle that it feels more like a butterfly alighting than like a fist closing. you look down at her and brush the hair away from her forehead and she smiles an angel-pink baby smile, because she trusts you.

you think to her, you will never remember the day new york fell down, the day the world tried to end. september eleventh will be just a history textbook date to you, one of the ones in the very last chapter that y ou never even read anyway, and this will all be just mythology and memorials and she smiles again and leans her head against your heartbeat. you feel it and you know your heart is mending, beating on in quiet persistence.
19:18 ++

sunday, september 16

somewhere out there, they can't see this, and that makes me a little bit happier.
17:16 ++

I got up early this morning and walked around the gardens, because everyone always says how silly it is that we live on this beautifully tended arboretum but we're always too busy working to stop and appreciate it. I say I appreciate it whether I bother to stop or not, but if all this were gone tomorrow I would definitely wish I had stopped more often.

I wish a lot of things.

the flowers in the rose garden are wilting, with droopy petals and brittle leaves, but they still smell amazing, like puppylove. everything is beautiful but all this intentional beauty makes me feel trapped and superficial. I keep thinking and thinking, and maybe I will go after all.

maybe.
17:09 ++

I smell like chinese food, cold night air, trains, and a little bit like peter even though the only time I actually touched him was to prove how small my hands are. it's funny how you can remember a backwards story in nothing but incidental smells, though of course you miss things that way like how I kept looking at flags in high-up windows and how the fish had no room for swimming in their tanks and how I didn't cry when the man in thirtieth street station started talking about the necessity of killing evil and how I imagined the whole building would fall down if the statue actually did start to fly.

I know that philadelphia and I will never really belong to one another, but today I was more aware than usual of how I had to turn my back on the cityglow and walk in the opposite direction up the hill to get home.
01:39 ++