sunday, july 29

now it's three in the afternoon, and it's almost as if no time at all has passed even though I feel like I've been sitting here forever, because outside everything looks exactly the same as it did when I made that first post. I am, perhaps, a little softer, a little more sensitive to gravity's pull than I was twenty-four hours ago. perhaps. I feel it, and it doesn't feel so bad, now.
14:59 ++7

I want to avoid saying "the end," but that's where we are, yes? and so: thanks to cat for the organization, to every single one of my sponsors, to my parents and next door neighbors for putting up with my ceaseless activity tonight, to my entire family for being so cute and excited about this thing, to everyone who uploaded music, especially peter and gina for the pretty guitars and julie for the hilarious reminder of what roller rink parties used to sound like, to everyone who came back and commented, especially stenny who went above and beyond the call of duty, and finally to martha for being an absolute trip all night long.

one more? I think so.
14:54 ++6

martha, i said, tell me what to write about! and she said, write about your hair. so i am writing about my hair.

actually, this is sort of embarrassing, but i've been thinking about my hair lately. i never wear it down. know why? it is too damn long. i don't have nice thick long hair like some people. my hair never really outgrew the eight-year-old stage, and it is very fine, very soft, and very easily tangled. if i leave it down, it turns into a mess quickly. plus it gets in my face.

so, it is always in a braid or in a bun or in something where it really makes no difference whether it's ten feet or ten inches long. yeah, i really like my long braid, but what exactly is it there for? would it make any difference if it were a foot shorter? would anyone even notice? it would still be long to them, even if it weren't stunningly long. would I be happier with hair that could be worn loose, or in a ponytail, or in a braid that would wrap around my head and not have six inches left over, than i am with a braid that is just really long? if you had threatened me with shorter hair two years ago i would have been so indignant at the very suggestion that i might have put you on my mental beware-of list. now even i am thinking about doing it to myself.

i dunno. should i cut my hair? i am certainly not going to make it short any time in the near future, because i enjoy my hair, but i no longer feel like the point is to let it be as long as possible with total disregard for how healthy and pretty and useful it actually is. i want it to be unusual, but i don't want it to be a personality crutch or anything.

on the other hand, it is really cool to stand in the shower and lean back and feel my hair brushing against the backs of my knees.
14:35 ++8

oh, I thought of one. I wear my star earrings between thanksgiving and christmas. and that's pretty much the only time of the year that I wear any jewelry at all.
14:09 ++4

I have rituals too, but none of them involve my shoes.

let's see. most athelete have rituals, or superstitions, or whatever. I've heard a zillion things about baseball players that hide chicken bones inside their uniforms to give them good luck or something equally unsavory. (um. good luck is not unsavory, but chicken bones are.) teams usually have rituals that they take part in all together; my team huddles on the field and yells the lyrics to a guns 'n' roses song before every game. those sorts of rituals are the ones you just fall into without really thinking about it, because it's what everyone does and when you're on a team you're a part of the everyone.

I wonder if I have rituals of my own, not inherited from anyone else?
14:03 ++5

brenda is too busy at mathcamp to actually talk about mathcamp, so I am here to tell you all about brenda at mathcamp!

right now it is the weekend, so brenda is on a field trip. or something like that. she is white water rafting, and oops she has no paddles, but that's okay because she's headed over a waterfall and the paddles wouldn't do her much good anyway. it doesn't matter, though, because she knows how torque and stuff works... oh no wait, that's physics camp. but don't worry, she's going to be fine.

except... look out brenda, you have a make-believe photosynthesizing fish in the raft behind you!! they have those at mathcamp, you know.

there are also numbers at math camp, because you need numbers to do math I think, even if a lot of the time they only get to be exponents and stuff. those numbers are integers. integers are good, but we never get to use them in physics and astronomy, I guess because the mathies are more perfect than we are and they don't have to worry about the wrongness in their instruments, because they don't have instruments, because they don't bother calculating anything about the real world. that's why there are photosynthesizing fish, because they don't exist in the real world, so they have to go live at math camp.

the mountains at math camp are conic sections, I think. something like that, anyway. they are definitely pink and purple. that is called proof by obviousness. underneath you can see a reflection in the water, and in linear algebra you call that kind of transformation a reflection. makes sense, right? it's one of the nice math words that means the same thing in english as it does in math, so learn it well! but there is a problem, because the reflection is there but the thing it's reflecting is nowhere to be seen! that means the reflection is imaginary. that is called proof by imagination, or maybe it is called proof by complete nonsense. oh, martha says it's called proof by postmodernism; that's much better I think. brenda is good at proving stuff so she does that a lot at math camp.

math camp is in new england this year. therefore all the ducks at math camp are from new england. all new england ducks are cute. therefore all the ducks at mathcamp are cute. that is called proof by definition. and see how cute that duck is? so cute! so all the other ducks are necessarily cute too. that is called proof by generalization. we would do that a lot in physics, except that we never prove things in physics; we just sort of wave our hands at them. isn't it a good thing brenda is at mathcamp and not physics camp? she would probably go crazy!

aside from ducks, brenda also lives with lots of other wildlife at mathcamp, including moose, bears, high school students, and pizza delivery people. and aside from going on field trips, brenda also does a lot of math at mathcamp. that's why they call it mathcamp, of course! sounds like fun, doesn't it? mathcamp is fun.
13:40 ++11

this is the last one, kids, because I sure don't want to end on number nine (too close to ten not to be ten, plus I want to actually be present for the end of the blogathon!).

collage #8: brenda at mathcamp.
13:00 ++13

right, does anyone know how many times I've posted? cause I sure don't. I stopped making check marks next to my little schedule about thirteen hours ago, and now I can't tell if I'm behind or ahead, but it can't be on time because this is not a multiple of thirty.
12:40 ++5

two things about whales:

free willy shuns freedom! eat the whales!

I guess if I had known captivity for as long as I could remember, I would be a little intimidated by the wild too. and even if I could bring myself to eat something like whale meat while remaining completely vegetarian in all other respects, I wouldn't do it. I hate peta. did you hear that peta? you suck!
12:08 ++8

i went outside! and it was bright, so bright and ahh! right in my eyes! but if felt good, and the geraniums were red not just red and the sunflowers heralded my return to sunlight, and i ran limp-hopped around the backyard because i thought, if i can just make my feet touch the grass enough i will become part of this world again. but then it was time to post, and i came back in, and only as i turned to leave did i see that the laundry on the neighbor's second-stpru clothesline that connects to my climbing tree had changed; no more blue cotton panties or pink tank tops, but now a long worn-out yellow sleepshirt and two frayed grey towels that were probably a color once, but have forgotten what it was. now i am in, and inbetween, because my energy belongs outside but i too have forgotten, and i am incapable of physically existing in a world where things grow instead of sit and get soft and softer.
11:35 ++10

this one's for susie:

when we lived in manhattan, the turntable was a big part of my life. we had no television, so records and tapes were about it for my exposure to pop culture. we lived near columbus circle, and my mom used to take me on walks to the music library at lincoln center. I'm sure I remember music from before then, but when I think of childhood music I think of lincoln center, with its seventies-colored interior decorations and the course blue fabric on the chairs and the big plastic headphones that sat heavy across the crown of my head and brought sesame street and oliver! and annie and more sesame street into the world just for me.

I always wanted to bring sesame street home. we had other records that I liked -- woodie guthrie's songs to grow on in the orange slipcover, harry belafonte singing dayo! to the banana-tally-man -- but sesame street was the best, because it had "c is for cookie" and "I love trash" and "somebody come and play," and the best part ever which was when big bird and snuffleupagus sang about how snuffleupagus was a nobody but really he wasn't, because he was big bird's best imaginary friend.

later my grandmother found that record at a garage sale and bought it for me, but somehow in a little part of my mind it still belongs in lincoln center, and I still feel like I have itchy-hot (but happy in a familiar way) plastic cupping the music against my ears.
11:03 ++7

this is the story of cyberman.

one day cyberman was sitting at home wishing he had something fun to do. outside it was raining, pouring really, and with all the thunder and lightning it just wasn't safe to leave the house. he was feeling bored, as he often did due to his puny brain that couldn't even fill half his cybernetic skull, so he decided to take a cue from the latest aphex twin album and go for some drug use of his own. a little psilocybin would be just the thing to spice the world up a little. plus he had those nice radioactive green-glowing shrooms and he couldn't let them go to waste! soon he was having the greatest trip ever, and he came up with a plan to dismember all the annoying people who worked in the fashion industry, because they were annoying as hell. but not the girl who juggled oranges, because she belonged in the circus, and not the chick with the red socks because she was really hot.

(responsibility for this post belongs to dane, who while not quite as insane as dave, definitely knows how to make a unique request. bonus points to anyone who can figure out what that particular request was...)
10:28 ++7

collage #7: all tied together.
10:05 ++5

we are into full-fledged daytime, now; outside the grass is drenched in sunlight and the squirrels are out for a day of scrounging and romping and taunting the neighborhood cats. I feel very strange, since breakfast is absolutely the most important meal of the day to me, but I am still far too full of all the candy and fruit I was eating all night long to even think about putting more food in my stomach, as much as I would love to have it in my mouth. humans are silly like that, I guess. the sky is beautiful, beautiful and I will have to go outside at least once more before this is all over so as not to let it slip into evening without me lifting my face to drink it in properly and fully.
09:37 ++5

in my world, it's not the next day until you take a shower. you can stay awake for as many hours as you like, and the dates and times can change, but it is still the same day until you take a shower. this is very helpful for things like final papers, when you say to yourself I am going to finish this paper today and then you work on it for thirty hours straight and by the time you're finished the sun has risen and fallen a few times at least, but you did finish it today because you never took a shower to turn it into tomorrow.

I did just take a shower, because I went outside and it felt all new and clean and I felt out of time, so now I am here wrapped in a towel and cool fresh air, trying very hard not to drip on any of my collage cuttings. now I have been doing this since yesterday, since a long time ago really, and I think I need to go put some clothes on. but hello and welcome to tomorrow, which is now today, and aren't the flowers and leaves and birds pretty in the morning sun?
08:43 ++8

this picture of the ring nebula looks just like all these pictures of hot springs I've been flipping through all night in old issues of natgeo. it is very disconcerting. where is the desert? where is the sky?
08:20 ++8

several people have asked about this tonight, notably meep and lynne. and so, words.

if you're a longtime or even a short-time reader, you've noticed I have a bit of a thing for words. in some ways I have more of a thing for words than I do for stories, which is not to say I don't love them both, but there's something artistic and real about words on a pure visceral level that sentences bogged down by meaning and context will never really have. when I was little, or so I'm told since I was still in the ages counted by months instead of years and I don't really remember myself, I wanted to know the words for everything. our apartment was covered with red-lettered signs labeling everything with the proper word: door; stove; crib; pantry; bathroom; shelf; sink; desk; closet; window; so on and so on. I didn't learn the alphabet so much as I learned the words they fell into, the shapes of the ascenders and descenders mirroring each other diagonally in "dog", the way "eye" was symmetrical and still a little unbalanced, the way "rolling" looked sharp even though it meant and sounded like something very round.

I still like the way words look as much as I like the way they sound or feel. one of my favorite words ever is anemone. not a single wasted letter! and it is little, all the same height, and everywhere round and soft, just like real anemones. it's nearly symmetrical, sonically, but not quite, so that it's still a small surprise every time that last syllable turns wide and smiling, eee. in some ways I am always sad when I think how infrequently there is occasion to use it, but when I think about it I realize that might make it less special and perfect-feeling when it does find its way into the air.
07:47 ++5

okay, so, I have two more collages that I am definitely going to do, but first I'm going to read and write for a little while. I want to get to some of the good topics I've been sent even though I am too uninspired to figure out how to illustrate them in pasted-together pictures. of course I'll make and send something to everyone who deserves it, but now I want to bask in the early-morning blogathon before it's over. my ankle needs to sit still and be iced for a while, too.

I don't know where you guys get the idea that I'm coherent. I've glued about ten different things to the floor. on the other hand, still caffeine free! yay!
07:10 ++9

martha gets the prize for being the latest person to turn in a topic and still get a collage, but she deserves it because she's been talking to me all night. ;)

anyway, the title/subject is flight, but I'm sure you've noticed some creatures there that are not-so-much known for flying. the frog and lizard are from borneo, where there are lots of big trees, so they jump around and glide. that counts as flying in my book. also, there are fish. if you don't think fish can fly, you haven't watched enough fishtanks. plus there's that raffi song: the fish are swimming in the air, and the birds are flying in the sea. or is it that the birds are swimming in the air and the fish are flying in the sea? either way, there's something involving fish and airyness.

and really, it's very important that the fish can fly, because I want to fly too. I've always wanted to fly; if I had a selfish genie wish that would be the first thing I would spend it on, no question. I have a hard time sitting near the top of a tree or standing on the edge of a cliff without giving in to the urge to hurl myself into space and be surrounded by nothing solid. and if fish can fly, why not me? maybe it won't be with a davincian wing-machine, but I will fly someday.
07:05 ++6

why no, daybreak didn't affect this collage at all!

collage #6: flight.
06:33 ++11

yes, the sun is up and I just polished off a bag of hapi snack mix crazy crackers, which came in an orange plastic bag with an evil-looking drawing of a cross-eyed japanese kabuki man on the front. surreality has nothing on me.
06:03 ++10

this is tom's topic, and I haven't figured out how to make a collage for it, but I want to write about it anyway because it's a really good one. (and I'll make you something else, tom. I owe you mail for the great big sea album too.)

I have comfort smells from every stage of my life, including this one. my sensory perception is incredibly good, so I form associations with such things quickly, and they really never wear off. during freshman year I could tell who was home on the hall with their doors open as soon as I came in from the stairwell, because I was that good at discerning people-smells. the ways my best friends smell have always made me feel very safe, and the way I can still smell them in my clothes after they hug me makes me feel loved.

most of the smells I remember from childhood are food-related, like most people's are, I imagine. pretty much all our food was homegrown or homemade, though, so the smell of food was always in the air. when we baked bread, there was first the clean, cool smell of loose flour, then the yeasty, almost musty smell while it sat rising, then the warm, sweet scent of the dough baking in the oven. oh, it was so good. I do think half of what makes fresh bread so good is the smell. maybe more.

during the summers we would pick wildberries for jamming and canning. my mother cut off the tops of old milk jugs for collecting them. I wore little pint-sized (literally) pitchers attached to my belt by the plastic handles, and I wandered along the edges of the blackberry bushes, depositing about one berry in my pitcher for every ten or so I put in my mouth. later the berries would be boiled into mush, a transformation I always found rather tragic, and spooned into glass canning jars to be saved for winter. that smell was so very much summer, hot and sweet and stickyfull, tinged with the cool metallic smell of the canning rings and covers, and just thinking about it brings me straight back to that kitchen where I sat at the dark wooden table under a dirty yellow strip of flypaper, watching my mother stir the big silver pot full of dark purple-black berry mush.

I also like the smell of subways, but I think I am maybe alone on that one.
05:41 ++11

I'm thinking my family didn't mean to give me a set of almanacs and a world atlas to cut up... but my charity's website is working again! yay! if you're a new sponsor and you never got to see it, or if you're curious, or whatever, go check it out!

in other news, I am not tired at all. that's kinda fun.
05:01 ++6

right. so dave is nuts, and he also has a thing for potatos. that title is the topic he sent me, verbatim.

I'm not sure what more can be said about this topic (except that I tend to not put anything on my baked potatoes, and I also tend not to eat baked potatoes in general because I'd rather eat broccoli, but sometimes if I am feeling not like myself I will eat a baked potato with lots of margarine and salt), so I'll give you a quick tour of the collage itself. that is, surprisingly enough, not me in the picture. my hair is much longer than that. the baked potato, my face, the sombrero, and the word-blocks are all from an article about ancient egypt. the potato is really sand. the rest of it is various parts of the sky and the sun. of course, that is not the real sombrero galaxy, but it's much more fun this way, isn't it? I'm not so sure about the background to this thing, but I think it has something to do with the apocalypse. I certainly can't think of anything good that would come of eating a galaxy, anyway.
04:26 ++13

collage #5: "how the sombrero galaxy determines what I put on a baked potato" by rabi whitaker.
04:19 ++8

when sheana sent me her topic, which consisted of one word, I thought: change? what would a collage about that look like? I had all these ideas about what change meant to me, in my life, especially in relation to college (which has definitely changed me) and stuff. but then, as I was downstairs finding clean clothes to wear this morning, I flipped on the tv and there was an old black and white movie on the sci fi channel.

it had a strapping young hero who talked.... like! this! and turned his head from side to side dashingly. it had a blonde buxom heroine who got sucked in by a man-eating plant and screamed and screamed about how ohhhh, it was horrible, just horrible! and it had a dinosaur that walked upright on two legs, CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP like king kong. or rather, like a man in a rubber suit.

I cracked up.

looking at dinosaurs (or rather, their fossils) is a pretty big reminder of how much the world has changed, and how short human tenure has been on this planet. it's stunning just how much homo has changed, and when you stop to think about what came before us... it's like those astronomy numbers I was talking about before, almost impossible to comprehend. the dinosaurs lived how long ago? a long long time.

but looking at a movie that was made only a few decades ago and seeing how thoroughly our science has been revised is even more startling. the stomping, tail-dragging dinosaurs might as well be a completely different species from the birdlike dinos from the jurassic park movies. I was at the harvard museums a few weeks ago, where there are some old fossils that are for some reason half-embedded in the walls (I asked the curator about it and she said it was the style in the seventies), and they're standing in completely the wrong positions.

hence, here is a clueless human in a snazzy exploration suit examining a dino fossil, oblivious to the way things actually happened.

it makes you think about how future species will see us, or even how we will see ourselves in a little while, and the knowledge we thought we had.
03:35 ++13

okay, this one's less about aesthetics and more about me being amused.

collage #4: change. also dinosaurs.
03:17 ++9

jesus. halfway.

since I have done only four collages (out of eleven promised and planned), I need to get faster, yeah? yeah. that means I'm going to stop with the frivolous posts. I've never been one to write when I didn't have something to say, anyway.
03:03 ++4

the thing that's really making me crazy here is that I actually have things to say, but I can't because then I will be late and also I won't be gluing things onto paper. hey, want to meet my computer? it doesn't have a name yet, but we're quickly becoming accustomed to one another.

it's a custom-built hp. I've never had an hp before, but I figured I really like my scanner and my printer so why not go the whole way and be a one-brand computer chick? it has a 1.5 ghz p4 processor, 40 gig hard drive, 256 ram megs, a 24x (? something way faster than my old 2x cd drive, at least) dvd drive, a cd-r drive that I totally forget the speeds of, about a zillion (okay, 6) usb ports that I'm enjoying quite a bit, one of those wonky internet keyboards with a whole lot of useless stuff on it (why can't they make normal sized keyboards anymore? macs have those itty bitty things and now all the pcs come with gigantoboards with all those hotbuttons that no one uses! or at least I don't), an optical scrolling mouse that I love (my old mouse had only two buttons! and a sticky trackball), middle-of-the-line polk speakers with a subwoofer that puts my cd player to shame, and my old ffiteen inch sony trinitron monitor that has been great for the last four years and is still going strong. I would love to have a seventeen inch flatscreen monitor, but for now I'm very, very, very happy with just a new computer. oh, and a new scanner (hp 2200c to replace my 500c), which you've all met already, because I've been scanning the collages on it all night. woo!
02:33 ++14

best. cover. ever.
02:04 ++3

mollie didn't get to pick her own topic, so I'm picking one for her.

there are three things in that collage: the milky way galaxy, a dew-coated spiderweb, and jellyfish. yup, jellyfish. even the stuff on the bottom (which is actually the left-hand side, the way I see it). have you ever watched a jellyfish? at the new england aquarium there's a jelly tank right inside the front doors, so it's the first thing you see when you enter. the water is completely black, and the jellyfish themselves are all glowy-translucent, daring you to believe in their existence. and when they move it's the most amazingly graceful thing, because they just sort of ripple and undulate and somehow they're swimming. they're so delicate-looking and so ephemeral that it's hard to imagine them streaking through the ocean or devouring fish, and yet they do both of those things.

spider webs sort of remind me of jellyfish. aside from the obvious aesthetic similarities, they're things that look like they should be easily broken when that's completely not true. have you ever tried to knock down a spider web? there was one night last fall when I was walking home from campus much much later than I should have been, and it was really dark out, and I passed a fresh spiderweb where a trapped lightning bug was being devoured by the spider. it was one of the most intensely disturbing and breathtaking things I've ever seen: the strands of the spidersilk glowed from the flourescence emanating from the lightning bug; the whole web trembled a little with the trapped insect's efforts to free itself; and the spider sat calmly in the middle, just being a spider.

galaxies are not so much like jellyfish, but it is amazing to me that something that's mostly empty space can have so much structure and light and gravity. besides, it's astronomy!

anyway. in one of her recent emails to me, mollie told me I make beautiful things. I'm not so sure; I only make things, and it takes beautiful people to make them anything more than that.
01:34 ++6

collage #3: strength and beauty in unexpected places.
01:01 ++7

I am a big sucker for piano rock. tom is clearly inhuman. collage number three is halfway done. (look at that, I just wasted three potential filler posts right there.) my family is going to bed, which I think will drastically change the way this whole thing feels. they've been surprisingly enthusiastic about it. they went out and bought me food this afternoon, they brought me a gigantic stack of new (well, old, but you know) magazines when I started running out of interesting and relevant pictures, and they actually seem genuinely interested in this whole thing, which is unusual for them when it comes to my internet stuff. it's weird, but nice.

plus, they sponsored me. so I have to say nice things about them. :)
00:29 ++5

so, as if there weren't enough things to keep me occupied already, I have a sprained ankle.

I thought it was just twisted, which is why I've been walking around on it and not icing it particularly diligently. but now it's turning decidedly purple and becoming more and more painful to put any weight on, so it's definitely sprained. blah.

it's been a while since I had a real sprained ankle. my tendons are so messed up that I can do just about anything to them and roll right off them. they often hurt after I play rugby, but they're usually fine, structurally. the last time I had a real, limp-inducing sprained ankle was my junior year in high school. I got that one playing soccer.

I got this one falling off the sidewalk this morning.

how pathetic is that?
00:03 ++12

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 ++10

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 ++13

collage #2: fire and clouds.
22:29 ++13

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 ++5

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 ++14

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 ++5

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 ++7

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 ++3

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 ++14

collage #1: I am a vegan. and I go to college.
18:59 ++11

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 ++12

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 ++9

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 ++9

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 ++20

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 ++7

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 ++2

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 ++10

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 ++9