saturday, september 23

•••    creepy referring url of the day: a google search for "under+14+in+bikinis."

okay you weirdopeople, cut it out. I'm 19, I am not going to show you my bikinis, and pedophilia is just trouble. as if kids who haven't even reached high school don't have enough to worry about. (normally these searches-gone-wrong are amusing, but the under 14 thing makes me angry.)
6:05 PM +

•••    west chester university has a big, mean, nationally ranked women's rugby team. last weekend they won their opening game 85-0. they have zero respect for us. they've beaten us for three straight years, so no one on our current roster had ever won a west chester game... until today.

it was raining on and off all morning, a little on the cold side, and everything felt sluggish during warmups. (including my brain.) there was mud sticking in my cleats and flying off the ball. I was short on breath thanks to my bruised left ribcage, lightheaded and jittery thanks to my inhaler, stiff and achy thanks to the weather combined with a lack of sleep; in other words, not at all ready to go out and play. mentally, I was somewhere else. (for some sports this is only inconvenient. with rugby it is absolutely disastrous, and I knew that, even as I was muddling through pregame.)

I'm not one of those scream-and-jump-and-cheer athletes. I'm quiet on the pitch the same way I am in (most of) the rest of life. I have to struggle to remember that I need to actually communicate verbally with the rest of my team, even with little things like pregame cheers. to me there's no difference between screaming the cheer and merely thinking it, but that's not the way a team operates. so I scream, I stick my hand into the central mass (you can always tell which is mine because of the bandaids), and in the end I enjoy it -- but all my psyching up and preparation goes on inside my head. I often feel that I am operating on a bit of a different psychological plane than the rest of my team is. that can be a really good thing, if the team is faltering, but it can also be a really bad thing. today I wasn't sure how I was going to get my head in the game.

before the match, we stood together on the sidelines, shoulder to shoulder and arms linked behind us. I looked at all of our cleated feet, I listened to our captains talk, and I was surprised all over again that I am really a part of a team -- this team, my team. I've been an athlete for most of my life, a pretty hardcore athlete all things considered, but I am always amazed to find myself part of a team. and I've never had a team like this one. so I was standing there watching everything, thinking to myself that I had to find a way to be a part of the game, and act like part of the team. (easier thought than done.)

the very first thing I did, less than thirty seconds after kickoff, was incredibly stupid. (a knock-on within ten meters of our tryline, for those of you who know anything about rugby.) but our forward captain ran back, gave me a big grin, and said, "hey! it's okay!" I don't know why, but that did it. I was in the game. and, by the end of the eightieth minute, it was what I think has been one of my best games ever at fullback.

do you have any idea how good it feels to go up against a team that thinks you're inferior and shove it right down their throat? do you? in high school science team competitions, the victories against our suburban private school opponents were just a little sweeter than the rest, because by and large they regarded us public-city-schoolers as a step below us on the ladder of life. (after all, we didn't have to pass any fancy entrance exams before we were allowed to enroll in high school.) and now, here, there are still some big teams like west chester that think that just because we are a little liberal arts school with no real athletic clout, we don't deserve any respect on the pitch. I hope we shook them up a little.

really, though, winning feels good not because we are handing someone else a defeat, but because we work so hard together. it was a close game, 7-5 and super intense throughout. I wish I were just a little less shy, so that I could tell my teammates how much I admire the way they play, and so I could listen to their compliments without turning bright pink and feeling the inescapable need to stare really hard at the grass. I had more fun on the pitch today than I have so far this season, even though I started the game in sort of a slothful, distracted state. that's why this sport, and this team, are so special.

the weather is as gloomy as I think is weatherly possible, grey and damp and dreary. I still hurt. breathing in all the way is not at all fun. my floor is decorated with muddy clothes and little clumps of grass, and my legs (and arms and sides and face) are decorated with brand new bruises. but this kind of hurting is the kind that hurts so good, because no matter what your body is feeling, your heart is about a hundred miles high in the sky. (and, if you've been sucking ventolin on a regular basis, so is your head. :)

(I didn't mean to write so much, but sometimes once I get going... are you analyzing me yet?)
5:39 PM +

friday, september 22

•••    a lot happened today, but I have a feeling that no one especially wants to hear about it. it would be all plot summary and no analysis, anyhow.
11:40 PM +

•••    the story behind this is long and silly, so I won't waste your time. but I had to point out the brilliance of babelfish when I stumbled across this little gem:
"street urchin" translated to german = "Straίenbengel"
"Straίenbengel" translated to english = "road rascal."

I reeeeeally want to use that in conversation now... road rascal. I can't stop laughing. :D
3:40 PM +

•••    I'm not a huge red sox fan, but I have to admit there is something bizarrely fascinating and endearing about the city's devotion to a team that consistently beats the odds and chokes.
1:51 PM +

•••    understanding how the world works is nice, but the real reason I'm a physics geek is for the toys. :)

in class today we played with a vandegraaff generator. most of you have probably seen one at one point or another, whether in high school physics or a science museum (the mos in boston has the biggest indoor vdg machine in the world, yay!), but you can't fully appreciate them until you get to really play with them.

we put a pie plate full of styrofoam packing peanuts on top of the sphere and watched them fly up in a staticy pink fountain. we stacked the pie plates one on top of another and made them levitate until the charge buildup sent them crashing into the wall. we made the machine wear a halloween witch wig; on the most successful attempt, all the hair was sticking radially outward before the wig itself finally flew off. we made sparks. you can actually feel the repulsive force in the spark when you pull all the charge off the sphere, even though the spark itself is only five or so centimeters long. (we're talking about a tabletop vdg machine here.)

finally we ended up all throwing handfulls of packing styrofoam at the machine and watching it fly around the room in insane trajectories. I don't think I even know enough physics to describe or explain all the motion, but it was really fun to watch. sometimes the peanuts would get negatively charged and would go flying in towards the sphere, only to get thrown back off as soon as the two came into contact. other times they wouldn't even make it as far as the sphere before the static electricity sent them spinning off into uncharged air. they were like little lightweight superballs, flying every which way. one of them built up enough charge that it flew into the blackboard and stuck there for the rest of class. our professor did the electric field force calculations carefully, so as not to knock it off.
12:43 PM +

•••    hey, I want to explore black holes too! I love how we anthropomorphize everything... now we are going to "peer down the mouths of voracious black holes." hehehe.

when you stop and think about it, this technology is really amazing. can you imagine being able to find a frisbee on the surface of the sun? that has to be a thousand times harder than finding a needle in a haystack, but our telescopes can do it.

and someday they will be mine to play with! :D
9:01 AM +

•••    it is already a beautiful day.
8:12 AM +

thursday, september 21

•••    on tonight's news: some philadelphia guy has been charged and convicted of criminal mischief. this mischief, specifically, was squeezing and poking baked goods in a grocery store.

I just don't know what to think about that.
11:32 PM +

•••    I have another reason why thursdays are the best day of the school week: fourth graders!

would you believe that less than three miles from swat, one of the most affluent and rigorous (sorry, I had to say it) undergraduate schools in the country, there is a public school with classrooms full of fourth graders who can barely read and write?

there is. we go there and teach them science. I'll tell you about it later; now I'm late for rugby practice. but yeah, fourth graders are fun. :)
4:00 PM +

wednesday, september 20

•••    yet another thing I wasn't going to comment on until I discovered I couldn't push it out of my mind: animals in zoos.

as a vegan (among other things), I can't condone the imprisonment of animals solely for human entertainment. that makes circuses bad (which is really sad, because I have some wonderful memories of the big apple circus from my toddler days). no matter how much care is supposedly taken to ensure the well-being of the animals, they are still trapped in an environment that simply isn't suited to their needs. dogs make good pets. elephants don't.

however, zoos are a little fuzzier. (peta's official stance is anti-zoo, but you should know by now how I feel about peta.) under-funded, under-staffed, ill-designed zoos like the one patti described are almost uniformly horrible. I don't really know why people visit them; they're so depressing. on the other hand, some cage zoos have made the transition from old school animals-on-display to new school animals-being-conserved with at least a semblance of grace. the philadelphia zoo, for instance, which is the oldest zoo in the country, does a lot of conservation and education work. it's still a cage zoo, but it's trying.

it's just not as simple as leaving the animals in their natural habitat, because thanks mostly to humans, their natural habitat is now full of completely unnatural dangers. where would you rather see an endangered tiger -- in the sumatran jungle, dead from a poacher's gunshot, or in a free-run zoo? in a perfect world, all conservation efforts would go towards preserving natural habitats, but a perfect world would not include people killing animals whose species are on the verge of extinction. sometimes even idealists have to work in little steps rather than taking the compassion and common sense of the human race for granted.

I personally won't go to cage zoos, but aquaria and conservation zoos aren't such an easy call. I don't think it's okay for us to just sit back and let nature run its course after we've so thoroughly disrupted it. in some ways it's a lose-lose situation, at least for the animals.

I wish meat packing plants and chicken farms and tanneries were all open to the public just like zoos. then maybe we would get more of this gut feeling stuff about eating animals as well as about imprisoning animals. different kinds of torture, I suppose, but still torture. I know I wouldn't want to be eaten. ;)

also, if I might leave you with a quote from hobbes: if people could put rainbows in zoos, they'd do it.
9:25 PM +

•••    I listed wockerjabby at blogstart, but that search function is making me think it could be sosososososo much more. guess I'll have to write some email later. (after I go work out, ha. my life is so ridiculous sometimes... I never thought I would be the kind of person who spends a couple hours in a brand-spanking-new gym and then goes home to email internet proliferates like zannah. I guess I still don't think I'm that kind of person. but off I go anyway.)
4:18 PM +

•••    I don't think smog clouds should be allowed to have silver linings.
9:53 AM +

tuesday, september 19

•••    something you -- yes, you -- should do at least once in your lifetime: take a shower with all your clothes on. do it on one of those days where it's been raining and raining, and you're already all wet and muddy. your clothes are drenched, and you're going to have to wash them anyway. you think they can't get any wetter, but once you get in the shower you discover you were wrong. you also discover your clothes have more places for hiding dirt than you imagined; even after you've been letting the water run for a few minutes, it still puddles brown around your feet. and then, when you peel your clothes off, you can shed all that dirt and grass and fabric and water all at once, and it feels so clean.

if you're one of those people who never gets muddy and sopping wet, well, now you have a good excuse. :)
11:26 PM +

•••    this is either nonsense or a very remarkable thing.
         -- gustav kirchhoff, upon observing absorption lines in gas spectra instead of the expected emission peaks...

but I think it applies pretty well to the rest of the universe, too. (except that a lot of things in life can be nonsense and very remarkable, which is generally not the case in physics.)
12:57 PM +

•••    she lives down the hall from me. (and her webpage doesn't suck.)
8:57 AM +

•••    why there's no life on the martian surface: the soil actively destroys organic molecules. whee! killer planet!

(the real culprit is uv radiation, unsurprisingly, so maybe that will be a warning to everyone who thinks it is okay to go around destroying the atmosphere... but probably not. sigh.)
8:48 AM +

monday, september 18

•••    well. my roommate definitely does have mono. which really sucks for her. :( of course, being my germophobic self, I have been reading everything I can find about it, trying to figure out if there's anything I can do at this point to decrease my chances of getting it. some things say risk factors include "being a college student" (wonderful). others say "you've probably already had it." some say moist exhaled air carries the virus. others say you can only get it if you do some serious body-fluid swapping. so I think the best I can to is to stay sympathetic (this is something that used to be really hard for me, but I think I've gotten significantly better at it, especially since coming to college. you would think being sick so much as a little kid would have made me more sympathetic, but it mostly made me paranoid).

I'm not worried. I'm not worried. I'm not worried. I'm not sick. I'm not sick. I'm not sick. (mantra, mantra, mantra.)
11:44 PM +

•••    today, on three separate occasions, people asked me how much it costs to fly from philadelphia to boston. aside from the fact that I have never actually done it (the train is cheaper and more accessible), I was a little perplexed as to where anyone had gotten the idea that I was some sort of boston transportation expert...

until I looked down and realized I had worn my cambridge athletics shirt to go running. sometimes I am really dense. (I still don't know how much plane fare is, either.)
6:35 PM +

•••    most of the time I love living in the middle of an arboretum. some days, however, I would happily trade my little pocket of horticulturally enhanced suburbia for something ugly and boring, or at least ordinary. I don't know much about arboretums, but ours is apparently more accessible and user-friendly than most, which I guess makes since since it was designed with teaching in mind. (it has a special teaching garden in addition to the normal labeled-plants-everywhere routine, although I have to say I'm not exactly sure what makes it a teaching garden other than its proximity to the arboretum house.) anyway, all of that plus being so close to philadelphia makes this a prime spot for conventions, symposiums, and other gatherings of inordinate amounts of adults. (real adults, not college student adults.)

so. today the entire campus is full of people from the garden writers association of america. they all have name tags, symposium passes around their necks, and matching red nylon backpacks. they're dripping with cameras. they keep stopping right in the middle of courtyards and pathways so they can bend over and stroke the leaves of some exotic foreign plant. none of that would bother me except that there are so many of them, and they all seem a little miffed at us for wanting to rush about and conduct business as usual. (okay, maybe not all of them. but there was one little group that gave me a nasty collective look when I squeezed through them on my way to a meeting with an econ professor, even though I tried to be polite about it. they were blocking the entire walkway!)

you know what, garden writers? we live here. we work here. we play here. for the most part we are happy to share, but when a bunch of overgrown fireants (the backpacks are bright red) start swarming all over the place, it is only natural for us to get a little frustrated. you may know more about plants than we do, but you aren't just walking through our campus gardens, you're walking through our lives. and dammit, you are in the way.

grr. okay, now I feel better.
3:03 PM +

•••    my sleep patterns are in such disarray. I wonder if all those so-called experts who like to pontificate about the benefits of getting up at the same time every day ever do it. I also wonder if they were ever college students.

(my bedsheets are also in disarray, but you can't tell because the blanket on top is spread out nice and smooth, with the corners tucked under and everything. I think that's a rather apt metaphor for the rest of my life at the moment.)
8:29 AM +

sunday, september 17

•••    the recorded version of the star spangled banner they are using in sydney is truly awful. it is so pedantic. sounds like a synthesized orchestra that just wants to get the whole thing over with. I don't think our national anthem is especially pretty, but it usually has at least a slight air of majesty and pomp about it. the olympics are making it sound flat.

at least this explains why I have been thinking all the other anthems are boring -- the recordings must all suck. why would the ioc do that? uck.
11:00 PM +

•••    I don't know what it is about sundays but I never seem to get any homework done. I have fun. I accomplish things. just none of it is homework. maybe that's because sunday is the one day of the week when I have nothing scheduled, no obligations, no structure, no expectations... it's my airing-out day. I have this mental picture of my brain crawling out of my skull and unrolling, slowly slowly until it spreads all over the floor, shaking the kinks out and letting all the dark corners catch a bit of sun. and all the ideas and passing thoughts that have been trapped behind the necessities of daily school life stretch and float up like evaporating rainwater so that I can have the tiniest glimpse of them before they disperse and dissipate.

I'm not sure it's justified though. and there's never enough time, anyway.
8:22 PM +

•••    I had a little trouble deciding how to calculate my ecological footprint, because for eight months out of the year I live at school (so I don't have a household and I'm not responsible for purchasing the food I eat)... but after careful consideration and some experimenting, I came up with a total footprint of 2.3 hectares -- which is apparently still too much. like brenda, I'd like to get it down at least a little, although I'm a bit of a loss as to how I can reduce it further, unless I move off campus into a one-room apartment.

I suppose I could eat less. eating in a dining hall is perpetually frustrating for me, because almost everyone I know leaves food on their plates. people laugh at me for being such a thorough eater, chasing rice grains around with my fork until they've all been impaled and consumed, but wasting food is something I just can't do. it's not just an intellectual decision, the way recycling and water conservation are; I actually feel guilty if I throw food away. maybe that comes from years of watching my mother work to feed us. I ate home-grown vegetables and co-op bulk-purchased grains, helped gather wild berries (inefficiently, because I was more interested in eating them right off the bush than in saving them), ran down the road to buy eggs from the nearest farm, watched the piles in the freezer dwindle as the winter wore on... but I don't think I got neurotic about wasting food until after we became a supermarket-fed affluent city family. so I don't know.

in any case, I am just a little disturbed every time I put my tray on the conveyor to the washing room (at least I hope they get washed :P), because it is always surrounded by plates full of leftovers, half-eaten bowls of salad, picked-at chicken, and other uneaten things. I'm sure I don't have any real concept of how much it costs the planet to provide a bunch of college students with enough food for them to throw half of it away without a second thought -- in fact I bet I don't even understand how much it costs to provide me with my cereal and rice milk every morning -- but I know there are some people, lots of people, who would eat every damn thing we throw away without a moment's hesitation. and I know that the food on our plates is much more than just the food on our plates; it is also water and land and work and death to one degree or another. so there is something wrong here.

my mother never pulled the "there are starving children in africa" guilt trip on me. the rule was simply this: eat what's on your plate, and you're entitled to more. don't and you're not. no dessert without finishing your dinner. no second helpings until you've eaten all your firsts. it seems like a pretty simple concept, but somewhere along the way we have all abandoned it. being a united-states-american is frustrating in its own unique ways. I suppose feeling bad about wasted food is really an indication of how ridiculously privileged and full of abundance my life is.
2:02 PM +

•••    the shortest route between my dorm and campus cuts through the parking lot behind a church. during the week it's full of little children at daycare, but on sundays I have to walk through throngs of dressed-up churchgoers on my way to brunch. for some reason I feel monumentally uncomfortable in my sunday supercasual, surrounded by senior citizens in their sunday best, as if I'm somehow being disrespectful. organized religion and I have no use for one another, but I don't have any real objections to its existence. so I'm not sure what engenders this feeling that if I come too close, the whole institution will self-destruct. maybe it's just because any proximity to an actual religious ceremony or even a simple gathering gives me the sense that I am imploding in slow motion.

anyway, I always walk through the parking lot as quickly as I can, head down, eyes ahead, concentrating very hard on the music in my headphones. and I see a lot of shoes. people wear funny shoes to church. there is a disproportionate amount of white leather and tassels, but my favorites are the two-toned oxfords that look like overgrown saddle shoes. in this parking lot at least, they're a sure indicator of skinny old white men with funny outfits. you have to wonder what happens inside someone's brain to take a semi-conservative, utterly conventional suburbanite and turn him into the kind of person who will wear bright green pants and polka-dotted seersucker shirt to church.
12:59 PM +