friday, november 2 • • •

→    I was small when we moved from manhattan to farm country, but old enough that my life had already become a continuum, and I can trace time backwards from now until then without too many stutter-steps. I was excited and apprehensive about the move, but I didn't quite get it. while I knew that I would be leaving my friends, my playgrounds, my apartment, and my libraries all behind, I didn't understand what it meant to be leaving the city. the city was a constant for me: sirens all night long; crosstown buses; crowded sidewalks; orange night sky. the sky itself was not so much its own entity as simply the thing beyond the skyscrapers, the way a ceiling was merely the top part of a room.

the funny thing is, I don't remember what it was like to leave. all the other times I've moved, I've been acutely and painfully aware of how different empty rooms look, how they echo as if to cleanse themselves of all the accumulated traces of you. but I don't remember our emptied apartment, or my packed-up storybook tapes, or how it felt to drive away from the electric bustle of the city.

I remember arriving to emptiness, though. it was the last day in december, and it started snowing as we drove north. I watched the snowflakes appear from nowhere out of the dark, flying towards our windshielf, and I thought they looked like stars. everything outside the car was empty except for the snowstars, which whipped around us and slid across the windshield without leaving the slightest trace of their presence. the house was empty, falling down, big with twice as many rooms as our tenth-avenue apartment, rattly and cold. and the sky. the sky was so big, and it didn't just lie quietly above everything the way I thought: it came swooping down to meet the horizon, holding us inside its embrace, wrapping around everywhere. I couldn't fathom how something so enormous could be that serene. not even the ocean could keep so perfectly still.

just after midnight, the sky started to clear, and suddenly there were more stars in just the little peeking-through patches than I had ever even tried to count. we sang I wish I may I wish I might count the stars I see tonight but they just went on and on and on. the new year felt new to me for the first time, ushered in by our new house, new sky, new life. I watched the aurora in that sky, and halley's comet, and the meteor showers every year. it didn't occur to me until a decade later that I could study the things in the sky instead of just writing about them, but the love affair started there and I still haven't figured out how to go outside without first looking up. I hope I never do.
03:45  ...

→    so really, the reason to be an astronomer is so that you can go on trips in the middle of the semester. we're going to spend a few days at williams, where we will be surrounded by new england autumn and the berkshire mountains and dark skies and maybe even some hot tub water. and we get to talk about astro! does it get any better?
01:52  ...

thursday, november 1 • • •

→    I learn things in physics:

a) complex math is easy -- the term with the i in front is the imaginary one!

2) if you eat a smartie after you eat a sweet tart, the smartie will taste like soap.

iii) maybe dinosaurs went extinct because their jacuzzi was too hot! they weren't ready for the steam. it could happen.

:) chocolate is good.
22:54  ...

wednesday, october 31 • • •

→    I could try to explain to you just how much time I spend working, how much there is always work left to do, how impossibly thin I am spread and how how much I still wish I could do more. I could try, but it would just sound silly and pretentious and busier-than-thou, and I don't think it would really make either of us understand. perhaps you've noticed, though, that I've been having a hard time holding on to my enthusiasm for school lately. physics has been beating me down with an endless stream of incomprehensible problems, and the thing that makes me feel really defeated is I know I would understand so much more if I could take the time to actually pay attention to the physics instead of just watching it all fly by in the rush of math I can barely do, because there's always always always another problem waiting, keeping me awake and exhausted and confused. physics is fun, but physics all the time is miserable, and I feel like someone is trying to teach me to swim by holding my head underwater until I flail so hard that sheer desperation gets me a single furtive breath before the hand pushes me back down. I've become only the most marginal of activists; my rugby coach keeps telling me to get some god damn sleep; for the first time I've dropped chamber group completely and my friends are still trying to convince me that it's not enough and I need to quit wind ensemble as well. as much as I know that this is a rigorous school and mine is a particularly hardcore major I can't help but feel that it's wrong that the very things that got me in to swarthmore are slowly being taken away.

there is probably more homework left to do before seminar now than there are hours left in which to do it. I have a presentation to give on something I can't even pronounce. I still haven't even finished last week's homework assignment. homework homework everywhere... and so I went trick or treating. I went to a real house and ate real food, and then I went out to trail behind a group of children decked out in beautiful homemade costumes and smeary facepaint and unbridled enthusiasm. I twirled under the gaze of the full moon, watching the shadow of my cape flare and float, remembering how it felt when all those little details -- the way my costume felt foreign and special lying against my skin, the treat instead of trick, the search for the next orange flicker inside a welcoming jack o'lantern, the slowly-growing heft of candy in my bag -- were the most important pieces of the present. I spent too many hours playing with a sugar-stuffed four-year-old, watching a snake wind her way around my wrists and waist, listening to not-my music, blinking at the too-bright moon through a telescope, talking about things that were not physics or homework or obligations, and they were exactly the right things to be doing.

I still love astronomy more than anything I've ever done in school, but if I can't stop being a stressed-out student and just be a person for five hours of halloween, it's not worth it. and I do still think it is; I know it is. I just need to take the time to stop and believe it.

happy halloween. you know?
22:56  ...

→    ... why yes, I am going to wear my costume all day. and yes, I am having fun!
07:54  ...

→    the sky lightens. again. slow. and it's halloween. I love sunlight but just for one day I would love even more for everything to stay like this, half-formed, blueblack. we could catch the moon as it dips to the horizon, all dusky glowing orange, and hang it from the tallest tree. howl if you walk underneath. I wonder sometimes if these nights without sleep are fueling my imagination or smothering it, but I am sure I could find goblins and imps if I went beating through the underbrush right now. a bat just flew by. if I think hard I can make all my flesh fall away until I am just a skeleton with knobby fingerjoints and a misshapen skull.

happy halloween, peoplecreatures.
06:15  ...

tuesday, october 30 • • •

→    how soon until we have anthrax drills, then? and how soon after that until we start ignoring them because they've become so ordinary?

(I know that in afghanistan, land mines are ordinary, but I can't imagine it.)
09:59  ...

→    outside is dark and I can't tell whether it's the last remnants of night refusing to be swept away or if the clouds are just thicker than they seem, all stretched low and blue across the sky, clinging with those long wispy-wet fingers to the shadowed horizon. all the tree trunks and branches and twigs are showing through the thinning swath of limp, mist-dampened leaves, and they look like twisty black arteries and capillaries, sluggishly pushing our lifeblood out into the air. inside the air is dry and burns the corners of my lips, eyes, fingertips; underneath my pale skin the blue veins cross and cross again, mapping out my life in a series of forks and fusions, pulsing with a persistence I haven't yet figured out how to capture in my brain. it is too early to be awake, too late to go to sleep, too dark to be morning, too light to be nighttime. no stars and no sun.
06:56  ...

monday, october 29 • • •

→    the sky today was so perfectly crystalline-blue that all morning I worried that the wind wouldn't be careful and the sharp twigs atop the atumnal trees would make it shatter and rain down around us in a storm of translucent glass, leaving the other side of the universe vulnerable and exposed for all of us to gawk at. the sky is always falling, somehow.
19:00  ...

→    some days the holes where the things I'm leaving out belong are so big you could drive a truck through them.
02:23  ...

sunday, october 28 • • •

→    I made a shopping list this morning.

it shouldn't be a big deal, but it is. I'm a list-maker; I even have a notebook that is just for lists. for almost seven weeks, I've been keeping my lists in more temporary places: on my whiteboard, pencilled in the margins of a newspaper, creeping from the back of my hand all the way up my forearm in illegible green pen, hanging in midair in imaginary glowing pink letters. for almost seven weeks, I've flipped through my notebook looking for the first blank page and stopped before I got there, on a list dated 11.sept.01 and titled people in new york, two columns of bright turquoise names, two columns of checkmarks made in red pen as if the names were the correct answers on a history test, and one left quietly, inconspicuously unmarked. the absurdity of listing impending homework assignments on the next page cowed me, and so I didn't. for almost seven weeks that dark world between pages has been stuck on one day.

and now it's not. and it's okay. that's all.
12:37  ...