(the comments still work, they just don't count themselves right now. I suppose it's like trying to put on makeup without a mirror -- better just to leave it off.)
[ 29.6.03]  ·  [ ]



I have my own rules of baseball, the sort that let you know right away that I have no idea how to mark a scorecard (besides the K) and no real investment in the outcome of most games. 1. the shortstop is my favorite player by default, unless he does something stupid. this is, of course, because I played shortstop for most of the three years that I was on a softball team (interspersed with a few games at third base and one at second, which I hated). I always finagled my way into that position when I played wiith the boys or the grownups; my proudest moment as a shortstop was not during one of the league games when I wore my green uniform, but at the newspaper company picnic when I was nine. there was a teenage boy playing on the other team, but otherwise I was the only kid amidst the reporters and copy editors on the field. one of the big guys slugged a line drive straight between me and the third baseman, and I reached across and snagged it, backhanded, with the tip of my glove. (I then threw it wildly over the head of the first baseman, whose runner had failed to even consider tagging up, but only my father seemed to think that made my spectacular catch less impressive.) I couldn't name even half of the red sox starting pitchers since 1992 (when we moved to cambridge), but I remember the name of every single starting shortstop and many of the extras, too, even back to when jeff richardson and tim naehring played single-digit games when I was in sixth grade. the shortstop for the tri-city valley cats was an idiot who seemed to trip over the ball every time it came to him, but without that the cyclones probably never would have won, so I decided I could like him anyway. 2. watch the catcher, not the pitcher. pitchers are boring. they do that same windup thing every time. but catchers crouch and shuffle and throw their masks off backwards and bounce on their toes and send covert signals, and sometimes if they're especially deficient in the balance department, they fall over in the middle of a play. catchers are about the funniest thing on a baseball diamond if you discount the universally unflattering umpire uniforms. those mutated mitts and full-body armor suits make them the closest thing we have to a homo crustacien, and they're right next to the batter, so you'll never miss a swing. 3. grade-school boys do not know what they're talking about, no matter how authoritative they pretend to be. I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, but so far I haven't found any, at least not inside a stadium and especially not in the bleachers. for instance, when the boy who has eaten three ice cream cones, two hotdogs, and a whole plate of nachos over the course of just five innings yells, "nice bunt!" the batter will be thrown out before he's halfway to first base. when the kid sitting next to him, who's spent every break between innings heckling party marty, says "that is gone," the ball will drop right into the center of the outfield. (at a minor league game, this is no guarantee that the centerfielder will catfch it, but that's okay.) however, when the boys get excited about the strange numerological implications of a scoreboard covered in 3s -- three balls, three strikes pitched to number thirty-three for the third out in a game tied at three -- it's okay to turn around and smile at them. what are your rules?
[ 27.6.03]  ·  [ ]



my roommate's grandmother does not speak english; only mandarin. we went to see her yesterday, walking from city hall to chinatown in the pouring sun. it was early evening and the air smelled sweet and rancid from the bags of garbage that had accumulated outside restaurants and grocery stores over the course of the day. in the hallways of the apartment building, everything smelled musty and oily. we took the elevator up and waved to the people watching the security camera. a number of the doors had chinese flags and charms hanging on the front, along with a few paper renditions of the stars and stripes. the door we knocked on was bare, but seemed to have been recently repainted. the brown paint was shiny and a little bit sticky under my knuckles, as if it were starting to melt. inside, we took off our shoes and sat on the brown vinyl couch, slouching so that not too much of our bare skin would be pressed against it. my roommate's grandmother sat across from us, watching a grainy television and fanning herself with a green bamboo fan. my roommate told me about how one time she bought her grandmother a sunhat that folded into a fan from a sidewalk vendor on mott street, but her grandmother said it was too weird and wouldn't wear it. now she pointed at my bare feet and said something in rapid, quiet chinese. "she said be careful on the floor, because there are splinters," my roommate told me. "she wants to give you slippers but those things are hot and gross." I smiled and wiggled my toes to mean that they were happy being out in the air. the old woman got up and walked into the kitchen, stepping slowly inside her own quilted, embroidered slippers. we were discussing harry potter when she came back out and dropped something at my feet with a clattery thud. I looked down. plastic dollar-store slide sandals, with snot-green molded straps. much too big for my size-six feet. I glanced around helplessly for a few moments, at the bowls of papaya on the floor and the stacks of old national geographics in the corner, and then I slipped my feet into the sandals. my left foot didn't seem to fit -- the sandal kept falling out from under my heel. "she gave me two right feet!" I whispered into my roommate's ear, forgetting that I could just as well have talked aloud and let the language barrier take the place of silence. we collapsed on the couch giggling, and her grandmother smiled from across the room, nodding her approval and waving her fan so that her fine white hair flew up off her forehead with each beat of air.
[ 26.6.03]  ·  [ ]



when I'm in manhattan it feels so utterly normal that I forget it's been eighteen years since I last had a mailing address in the city. even encountering intersections for the first time, which still happens occasionally as I explore the world south of canal street and beyond the broadways, I feel as familiar with the city as I do with the sneakers on my feet or a keyboard under my fingers. if I found social belonging at swarthmore, however briefly, at least I can replace it with geographical belonging. it's not until I get home to brooklyn that I remember it's been only three weeks since I moved here, that I am a new yorker not still but again. both are rather lovely feelings so I think it doesn't matter which I am, or when. what I do feel, suddenly, is short -- perhaps because this is the most vertical city in the country, but mostly because it is so crowded on the ground level. at slightly more than sixty three inches I am only a bit shorter than the average female, but in mixed company I am at least half a food shorter than most people. during rush hour I stand in the center of the subway car with the crease of someone's newspaper balanced on the top of my forehead, or with my nose nearly buried in a businessman's armpit. friends standing on opposite sides of me will push me gently down, the way you might push a jack-in-the-box back into his spring-loaded hole, so they can talk directly across me. at the knit tonight I grew tired of standing on my tiptoes, so I wiggled to find holes in the dark-sillhouetted crowd: I watched jonathan richman's left hand and ear through the hole under the chins of a cuddly, kissy couple; I watched his face and the red collar of his shirt through the hole ringed by an arm raising a beer bottle to its owners lips. I sang along and my quiet imitated melodies ran smack into the middle back of a man in a navy polo shirt and feathered blond hair. my eyes never poke above the shouldered landscape unless I am in the company of preadolescents. I am surrounded by vertical walls, whether they belong to the skyscrapers lining the streets or the humans crowding the sidewalks, train platforms, and elevators. I do like it this way.
[ 23.6.03]  ·  [ ]



di-al-ed-up at some-hundred-k -- how did anything ever get done at 2400 bps? but then I had also forgotten how the modem makes that hiss-and-howl noise, that mechanical whine like the protests of two microphones too close together, and how the internet makes the telephone stop working. we had to unplug the phone to connect the computer, because the piles of boxes and unarranged furniture make it impossible to reach any jacks except the one high up on the kitchen wall, which irks me because it promises we will always have wires dangling above the microwave. and this less than forty-eight hours after we finally figured out how to make the answering machine pick up calls, and we recorded an outgoing message to the world -- which made my father say, "what was that?" but he didn't hear the first five attempts, abridged by squeals of laughter and the receiver dropping to the floor and, in one demonstration of a spectacular inability to read a script, the time I tried to say "please leave" and came out with "pleave" instead -- but even the slowest net connection trumps the need to actually speak to people, and besides we have a cellphone anyway, like good members of our restless twenty-first-century society. I feel like I'm twelve years old again, watching the numbers play across the screen (only now they start with 718 instead of 617, so I am moving forward it seems in spite of this backward digital-molasses version of the online world) and listening to the tones touched by invisible fingers. it doesn't seem so long ago until I remember that my brother, born a decade and some days after me, will be turning twelve at the end of the summer. at least it will save us from having to venture to the library in these torrents of cold flood-rain. I overheard two women talking under their soggy raincoats in the bookstore this afternoon, and they said that only twenty-four days of the forty were over, but the weather report says it will be sunny and eighty by monday; I prefer to believe that. and so I do.
[ 21.6.03]  ·  [ ]



I know I should be studying on the train, and I do now and then, but I still like watching the people so much that I can't keep my eyes on my pages of test review for very long. this is the first time I've ever been a city-subway commuter and it's making me want to do nothing but ride the train all day writing down everything about the people I see. white men in corduroy sport jackets read the nation; black men in power ties read the post; men in workboots read the daily news; and most women seem to read novels, often in alphabets I don't understand. sometimes I read childhood psychology articles or geology prep sheets or the advertisements on the walls, but mostly I read people. I want to know who you see. tell me.
[ 19.6.03]  ·  [ ]



this morning, after an early express-train commute to lincoln center, I sat in avery fisher hall and watched the fifth-grade student band from p.s. 176 play on the same stage that is normally occupied by the new york philharmonic. the articulation in the trombones was muddy at best; the clarinets were flat in the throat tones almost completely without exception. (the ten-year-old playing the bass drum, however, had the perfect timing of a computer combined with the exuberance of a circus clown, and I am sure that he was at least fifty percent of the reason the band stayed together at all.) they sounded, I'm sure, about as bad as my band did at our first concert, which happened in the auditorium of the high school at the end of my fourth-grade year; I remember feeling nervous and dizzy and completely thrilled by the rush of applause from our parents, who would have clapped for us even if we had been playing kazoos and slide whistles. today I watched the girls in the trumpet section bounce in their seats in time to their rest measures, and I'm certain that I never did anything nearly as impressive as playing out-of-tune beginner band music in lincoln center. I imagine it will be months before I see anything so fabulous again.
[ 16.6.03]  ·  [ ]



I was half-asleep on the couch just before midnight, wearing a sundress under my pajama shirt, when someone ran by and pounded on my door. the porch was empty by the time I got outside, but the sirens I had been hearing seemed to be converging on my block, and so I found my flip flops and went out, clutching my housekeys in my fist. there were throngs of people on the sidewalk, which was especially strange after the overwhelming silence of saturday sabbath, all herding sleepily down to a house halfway down the street, whose open front door was spilling clouds of white smoke and black-suited firemen out into the night. the neighbors ignored me -- I'm still the new kid here, and one of the few non-russians -- but I listened to them chatting as we all stood in the street behind the fdny ladder truck. "all these houses are connected... if one burns down, they'll all go." my house has a pair of driveways separating it from the row where the fire engines were parked, but the space is definitely smaller than the tallest flames I've seen. the house that was on fire seemed mostly to be done burning, and was merely smoking, but still as I stood there between the gawking old women and the teenagers who wished out loud that they could climb the ladder to the roof, I felt rather small and unprotected. when I got home I pulled down all the blinds, not because they are particularly fireproof, but because at least they could keep the walls of my room from flashing red with reflected firetruck lights. I thought about sixth grade when we had listed the things we were afraid of for a writing assignment -- my list was two items long: 1. cars 2. fire and when I was littler than that I had sat quiet in bed while I watched imaginary flames lick up my bedroom walls, and I had practiced my escape route a thousand times in my head, so that I knew exactly how it would feel to lower myself out my bedroom window with just my hands gripping the sill. of course I was also mesmerised by fire. I followed fire trucks and watched burning buildings the way I watched the sea turtles in the aquarium or the toy commercials on the long-forbidden cartoon saturday mornings. when I was nine, a factory near our house burned down in the middle of the night, and it was months before I stopped being angry with my parents for failing to wake me up to see it. yesterday my mother called and told me about an armed robbery that happened two blocks from my family's house, on the heels of a broad-daylight shooting in a kfc parking lot, a carjacking during which one of the assailants was about to attack a man with a crowbar before the police chased him away, and a string of nighttime attacks and burglaries in our quiet little neighborhood of one-way streets and brick sidewalks. it is scary of course, but there is some kind of pride we can take in the rough edges of the city's character: this is no utopia, but we would rather live in the midst of urban imperfection than behind white pickets and long driveways. (well, I would anyway.) the fire, though, doesn't care if I'm city-bred. it doesn't make me tough. and truth be told, I'm still kind of afraid of cars.
[ 15.6.03]  ·  [ ]



you would think that this library thing would pressure me into prioritizing, so that I could decide on the one most important thing that happened to me each day, or at least the thing I most need to record. especially these days, when I am alone in the house, I talk to no one on the bus because I am carefully watching out the window to keep track of the city lurching by, and all my conversations are with principals who think I am too young to have graduated from college even when I am wearing ridiculous pinstriped shirts with darts in the seams that make me look thinner, taller, and more put together than I will ever be. they say it like an accusation: "you're young." but looking at them I am terrified not to be; how many years of teaching the illiterate kids from the projects will it take before my jaw sets hard like that and I can talk for half an hour without smiling once? I haven't unpacked any of my bookshelf boxes yet, because clothes and pillowcases seemed like more of a priority, so my paper journal is still tucked away somewhere between a stack of seminar binders and astronomy textbooks. the few people who hear more of my feelings and fears than those handstitched pages have all managed to take simultaneous vacations, and so I am doing my best to ignore how leaving things naked, without the swaddling words that let me send them out into the world, makes me feel tight and dizzy. I dream of swarthmore, but it's strange and wrong, with all the students wearing evil panda costumes, and trees sprouting from inside the dining hall, leaving holes in the roof for the diving swarms of poisonous dragonflies. I watch all the people I encounter, taking care to remember the woman who filled an entire shopping cart with drinking glasses at amazing savings and the boy who ate the paper wrapper off his drinking straw at the bagel shop, but I don't know what to do with them. I just haven't settled yet.
[ 13.6.03]  ·  [ ]



we have birds living in our house. (not our pet bird, though he lives right in the living room.) they fly in and out of a hole behind a broken siding shingle, and they nest between the in and out sides of the back stairwell wall. that's what I want: a safe place high above the ground, a door for me and the sunlight, and the wings to carry me across the air outside. and maybe love, too. love would be good.
[ 8.6.03]  ·  [ ]



about nine police officers arrested one black kid on the street outside my house at four o'clock this morning. my sister and I stood in our open doorway, but behind the screen, listening to them talking. the victim... the watch... the man .... orange and green. we couldn't figure out what had happened. one cop had his shirttails hanging out from the struggle. when the paddywagon came, flashing its array of blue and white lights with the same unforgiving abruptness as a strobe, the cops let the kid get up off the asphalt and surrounded him as they walked him over to the truck. he was wearing a sweatband and a basketball jersey, but it was too dark for me to see which team's colors he liked. as they reached the edge of the sidewalk, he made a sudden move to bolt, and two of the officers slammed him down hard on the hood of a car. "so you're still trying to get away?" one, a thick, mustached cop ("he's an asshole," my sister said; "he breaks up a lot of parties") dug his elbow into the kid's back. "duh," muttered my sister, who is not quite sixty-two inches tall. "I'd try to get away too." I was pretty sure I wouldn't, but I didn't say so. three cops had the kid by the shoulders and the wrists now, and they threw him inside the paddywagon and quickly slammed the cage doors shut, two of them on each side, holding them closed against the kid's banging from the inside. then they locked up the back and the truck drove away, silent but still flashing those cold lights down the length of our block, across the tops of all the parked cars and through the leaves of our summer trees.
[ 7.6.03]  ·  [ ]



it's nearly impossible to enter a greenline station in downtown boston during rush hour without missing a train, even if you have a token in reserve and can skip right through the turnstile without waiting in line to slip your dollar bill through to the worker in her dark booth. if you get close enough to the tracks before the train leaves, you can see which letter it is, and if it's one of the three that you didn't want to take you can congratulate yourself for something over which you had no control and that really doesn't matter anyway, since the trains come only thirty seconds apart and before you even have time to find an empty part of the wall to lean on you'll be squirming through the crowd in the stairwell of one of the little lightrail cars, trying to find at least enough footing so that you won't fall backwards until after the doors have accordion-closed behind you. I will never -- or at least I hope I never -- cease to thrill at the way I can hop across the world with nothing more than a credit card (or, today, a metrocard and a few twenties), my feet, and the occasional map. today from my brooklyn bedroom to the q to the 2 to the northeast corrider regional to the green b to my cambridge kitchen, where everything is familiar (the pots dangling from the pegboard on the wall, the little shudder of the plastic second hand after every tick, the way my brother hunches crooked over his dinner plate) but the details are so slightly different (the pictures on the fridge, the level of liquid in the bottle of brandy I bought at christmas, the length of my brother's fingers). I love how traveling inflates me with love even more. and it's so much better than moving. I have started to feel that the smell of cardboard boxes and clear packing tape, musty and plastic all at the same time, is permanently ingrained into my palms, if not into the very air around me. unpacking, at least, makes me think about things besides how I am gone, those last words imparted to me in all their sonorous seriousness and I remember almost none, because I was huddled in my robe marveling at how I could see the fog of my breath in june -- june! -- but of course I do remember the important parts, like all the people who hugged me and how at the end of the day I leaned out a window to scatter the petals of my rose into the sky. and it makes me take stock of the worth of my posessions in strange ways: I always say that my clarinet is the single most valuable object I own, but it wasn't until I was hunting amongst the boxes of my clothes and books for the plastic bag in which it was packed (with all my music books) that I realized how I wouldn't have a reason to buy a new one, if it were lost, and how much I would miss it.
[ 5.6.03]  ·  [ ]



on a timer and a differently-abled browser at the brooklyn public library and I already spent so many minutes reading my email, looking up amtrak schedules, signing up to get fingerprinted. what can I say that would not take me hours to write down? rules for computer usage on adult floor: no games on adult floor computers no more than ten pages printed no rap music or cheat codes while we were crossing kings highway we saw two middle-school girls get into a fistfight, tussling on the wet sidewalk while their friends crowded around in a tangle of slick dripping umbrellas and high-pitched pre-puberty yelling. I am happy to be here in a new neighborhood with the subway around the corner and the fruit spilling out onto the sidewalks under yellow green and red awnings, but when the richest city in the country can't afford to recycle glass bottles and I see the ocean only through barbed-wire fences, how can it not seem like the world is crumbling beneath my feet?
[ 4.6.03]  ·  [ ]



hello, brooklyn.
[ 3.6.03]  ·  [ ]



goodbye, swarthmore.
[ 1.6.03]  ·  [ ]





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