saturday, august 26

•••    I want to make liquid bridges! see, physics is better than magic.
11:45 PM +

•••    busy busy busy. we had campus adviser training today - and we learned how to play lots of silly icebreaker games. my favorite was kamikaze elephant cow. because we're here a week early, we all have these ridiculous gold id cards, which are temporary and cost fifty dollars each to replace. I've been checking my pockets a lot.

I think I spent more time today on my old hall (sigh) than my new one. but I have almost started thinking of this room as home. almost.
11:42 PM +

friday, august 25

•••    of all the things you should bring to college to you, what do you think is the most vital? the thing you need right away? don't even think about underwear - it's your ethernet cable. without it you can't connect to the school network, which means you can't get online at all.

of all the things I could have forgotten, what do you think I left behind?

yup. without the internet I am worse than a fish out of water, plus I had an online commitment tonight at nine and no way of even telling anyone if I wasn't going to be able to make it. I was in panic mode for a good three hours before I finally got all my boxes into my room and I could call my mother to ask if she knew where it might be. it was in the basement in cambridge. I panicked some more, and then I went to radioshack to get a replacement. (when I got there I discovered I had forgotten my wallet, so I had to bike back to my dorm and get it. all on hills and highways, neither of which are my favorite places to go bike riding. plus these philly suburbanites seem to have even more issues with the road-sharing laws than bostonians do. one honked at me. it didn't help my sanity any.)

all radioshack stores seem perpetually understaffed no matter where in they country they are. I waited for about half an hour while the person behind the counter helped the customer in front of me pick out a headset for his carphone. this customer had the longest, most diagonal feet I have ever seen - his big toe was at least six inches farther away from his heel than his little toe. I thought his fisherman's sandals made them look vaguely like alligators. he looked sort of like shaq, and he was wearing a sage green rayon pants-and-shirt-set, and going on and on and on about how he didn't want to fry his phone. so at least he was a somewhat interesting person to be stuck behind. I was not too big on being stuck just then, however. stuck behind alligator-foot guy, stuck without the internet. especially after spending all night packing, no time sleeping, and six hours in the car, I didn't want to be stuck.

I am also stuck a good fifteen minute walk from the main part of campus, which I am not exactly thrilled about. and the difficulties I'm having in arranging the furniture so it's possible to walk across the room (and open all the doors and open all the drawers) aren't helping. I miss my old room with the woods and the creek outside. on the other hand, our hall theme is comics, which I think is very cool. yay cool themes.

anyway, I am very very tired but happy to be reunited with the internet. back to unpacking.
10:24 PM +

•••    so far I'm two for two on having the first day at college be way more stressful than it should be. more later. I'm trying to break the laws of physics and fit all the furniture against the walls when there is clearly not enough room for that to happen...
7:32 PM +

•••    half an hour ago I said goodbye to my little brother. he kissed my cheek. he's getting to be not so little anymore...

I was ten when he was born; now he's three days shy of being nine years old. this summer I have been perpetually surprised by how he is no longer a little kid. he's a big kid, with big kid clothes and a big kid vocabulary. he's skinny and angular with cropped, spiked hair and sticking-out ears. he's saving up for a razor (scooter). he refers to red sox players by their first names. I feel like I somehow missed the transition. it's as if one moment he was the tousle-haired little kid who spilled crackers all over the floor of my new dorm room on my first day at college and the next time I turned around he was hanging out with friends and proving how cool he is by making fun of nearby adults. I've become a part-time sibling.

I'll probably see him only twice before next summer, when he'll be almost ten. and then maybe once or twice before he's almost eleven. in between now and the time when he becomes a teenager, I will have been with him for a total of perhaps eight months. I will be gone, living somewhere else full-time and going to grad school, a full-fledged adult. by that time he will probably forget that once he cried when he said goodbye to me, but I won't.
12:17 AM +

thursday, august 24

•••    whee! my computer is all speedy now! :D
9:41 PM +

•••    I think a merunicorn is pretty creative for someone who had trouble finding pictures in clouds - but that's not what it is. ;) it's a picture I drew (longhand in marker, but digitally cleaned and smoothed) based on a tattoo design I saw. it's a dragon. the thing that looks like a horn is a wing, and the curviness comprises various other body-and-tail-parts. the feet are in the lower left, the neck curves backwards over the shoulder, and the face has whiskers. :)

(my computer is strewn across the floor in a bunch of parts connected by tangled cables - it looks like the victim of some sloppy dissection experiment. all the peripherals are disconnected, and now I am about to unplug the whole thing. packpackpackpackpack. aiee!)
2:45 PM +

•••    I am supposed to be leaving for school in twenty four hours. twenty four! I have not packed at all. I have not filled out any of the paperwork I was supposed to deal with months ago. I haven't done laundry. I haven't finished mending and washing all the stuff that needs to be fixed before it can go anywhere. I haven't bought enough reeds to last me through the end of the week. I haven't taken my computer apart and given it the extra ram it so desperately needs. I haven't gotten my newest prescription filled or my old prescriptions refilled. I haven't even made a list of all the stuff I need to take back to me, and somehow it is all supposed to be in the car ready to go at four a.m. tomorrow? I believe this maneuver is called the procrastination-crash-and-burn. watch closely, everyone.
4:08 AM +

•••    I think the college of the atlantic looks like a really neat place. not that I am studying ecology or humans, and not that I don't adore swarthmore, but I would love to go to a college with a community garden. not to mention whales!
1:17 AM +

wednesday, august 23

•••    tonight I went out to dinner with some relatives who live in the area. I don't see them very much, mostly because of some awkward family feuds that have nothing to do with me, so there was a bit of underlying tension. my cousin (by marriage, not blood) and his girlfriend went with us, though, and that was really good. I've only seen him a few times in my life (he's much older than I am), but he's an incredibly nice person, and he's the only cousin I have who's a trekker like me. supercool. we babbled for a while about science fiction and the end of deep space nine.

my uncle is a chef, and now also a professor at chef school, so eating out with him is something of an experience. of course we went to one of those upscale restaurants where you have four glasses and three forks, the waiters balance six plates along their arms and say "thank you" every time you do something, and the food is so artfully prepared it looks like it belongs in a museum. the good thing about restaurants like that is you can have things really tailor-made, so strict vegetarian eating habits aren't an issue. the bad thing about them is you're always afraid you're eating with the wrong utensil. my uncle sampled a bunch of different wines before he found one he liked. I don't know a whole lot about wines except to avoid the ones that are filtered with isinglass, but it was about the best red wine I've ever tasted. the first sip went straight to my head.

I was adventurous with dessert: chamomile and vanilla bean soup with fresh melon. it was very odd but very good. the soup was cool, sweet, and full of little tiny bits of cantaloupe, honeydew, and mint leaves. there was a scoop of pureed melon in the middle that looked disarmingly like sherbet at first, but ended up being pure fruit. it was like nothing I've ever seen before; it came with two spoons and a doily. then when I came home there was a vegan hydrox cake waiting for me in the freezer as a going-back-to-school present. it has frozen soymilk and chocolate cookies, and I am determined to somehow eat it before I leave at four am on friday morning. so I have been way overdosing on sugar tonight. um. :)
11:23 PM +

•••    look at me, I have my own 404 page! (okay, stop laughing at me - I've never done this before.) go ahead, try anything. how about ceramic-ufo? hahaha, not found! :D
3:17 PM +

•••    okay. I know, I know. I wasn't expecting this either.

and in case you were wondering, I still don't have enough money for this. I'm not completely sure what happened. so far, though, it's ten times more fun than I was anticipating. and isn't the url so much prettier than that /users/03/rabi/blog stuff? whee. :) I've spent the last few nights (when I should have been packing, if not sleeping) making new interior pages and moving everything around. I know it's bad form to have a bunch of mismatched pages, which you will see mine are if you look around . . . but I don't care. the original point of this whole weblog thing was to have a place to play and experiment, and I've been doing that. it feels really really good.

all the interior page designs actually have a bit of a story behind them, and I'll share one. the archives page has a scan of one of my prescription drugs. I made it one day to show a friend, because I was having trouble describing the pills, and I ended up keeping it because I thought it looked cool. this particular drug is celebrex, one of the brand-newest arthritis drugs on the market. although my kind of arthritis (rheumatoid) is usually diagnosed in early to mid-adulthood, most people still think of arthritis as a senior citizen's disease, because of the prevalence of osteoarthritis. I was first diagnosed with ra when I was two years old; I look like a kid, and I act like a kid, but I've always had this old person's disease. I'm older than I look.

my archives only date back to early march of this year - about five and a half months ago. that date looks recent, but it feels ancient. in five months my mindset about this whole blogging thing has changed immeasurably, in ways that I am almost unconditionally happy about. the site itself has changed. it's older than it looks, too.

also, celebrex is my favorite prescription. it doesn't taste nasty, it slides down easily, it doesn't make me sick, it has cool blue stripes, and it has this marvelous effect where it sucks pain away like no other medicine I've ever taken. at four dollars a pill, it also sucks money out of the bank. sort of like this new domain thing. I am not my diseases and I am not my weblog, but they have more in common than you might think. so my archives are older than they look, and younger than they feel, but I try to keep them happy and medicated. :)

I know all the old links to permanent posts (which turn out to be not so permanent) at the old site are going to be broken now. if anyone knows how to make that somehow an automatic redirect to the proper address, I would love to hear about it. in fact, email if you find anything else that doesn't work, because I probably did miss something in all this mad scrambling to move. or email if you think this is as incredibly cool as I do. :) (if you don't think it's cool, blame alison - she was the one who told me long ago that I should register wockerjabby.com. alison has the best ideas.)
12:53 PM +

•••    if I were going to be in the next star wars movie, its title would be star wars episode II: the angry jawa. (hey. if I only used part of my name, it would be episode II: the revenge of the phantom tusken raider. so don't knock the angry jawas!)
10:17 AM +

monday, august 21

•••    :: does the principal cellist happy dance routine too:: woo! :)
(to clarify, I am neither a cellist nor a principal anything, but that is because I am a slacker and I suck - well, not really, because I play the clarinet, but you know. :P I just think it's cool. yay mollie!)
6:25 PM +

•••    okay, I know everything is sort of a mess right now. what happened is all our web-docs were restored to whatever they were back in the middle of july, which I guess is the last time anything was backed up. that's why the inside pages are a little funny. don't worry about it, I'm going to fix it all, soon. as well as a lot of other things.

thank you to everyone who was concerned and missed me while I was gone. I am pretty sure I wrote to everyone who emailed me, and I tried to email everyone who mentioned me somewhere - if I didn't, I apologize. things have been a little nuts. :P I was surprised at how many people actually noticed my disappearance, and even more surprised at how many people cared. so that was the silver lining, I guess. anyway, it's all ancient history now.
11:25 AM +

•••    rebuilding is really annoying.
9:34 AM +

•••    I'm back! stay tuned. I've been feeling a little crazy lately.
9:31 AM +

sunday, august 20

•••    this is excellent, excellent, excellent: marilyn is wrong! yeah! there is little more annoying than someone who flaunts a high iq. and there is something just plain icky about marilyn vos savant. can that possibly be her real name?
7:59 PM +

•••    ohgoshIamoutofmymind...
7:16 PM +

•••    more gymnastics - men's this time. I want both of those hamm twins on the team. here's my team: blaine wilson (duh), jamie natalie, sean townsend, paul and morgan hamm, steven mccain. screw the selection committee. :)
12:18 PM +