saturday, october 14

•••    on carpet:

we don't have one. in our room last year, the carpet was only a year old, but it already had a few funny spots. some more got added during the course of our tenure in the room; on one occasion my next door neighbor threw up all over the hall just outside our door, and partly inside it as well. I think it was the cleaning fluid that caused the permanent carpet color change, but one of the posters was stained with little pink drops and for some reason no one bothered to clean it up. I guess because there wasn't enough of it to smell bad. the carpet smelled awful.

there was quintessential beverly cleary bit in one of the ramona books about carpets. I forget which one, but I do know it was in the same book where beezus got her hair done at a beauty parlor and ended up with forty-year-old hair. anyway, ramona was wondering why "carpet" didn't mean "car pet," like a pet that lives in the car. now that I think about it, I have no idea what the etymology of the word carpet is. it took me a long long time to figure out the difference between a carpet and a rug. I think rug is a much better word than carpet anyway. I refer to one of my jackets as my rug (I forget whether it was my sister or my best friends who initially decided the jacket looked like a rug; it's grey and fuzzy but I have to say the rug comparison is a big of a stretch), mostly because I like the word. it rhymes with zug, and while I don't remember where "zug" comes from, it is definitely something that should make more frequent appearances. I'm sure there are several doctor suess books that contain the word zug. maybe there's a zug under the rug in "there's a wocket in my pocket." if I had a rug, I would want a zug to live under it. but I don't want a zug in my rug, because then there wouldn't be room for me.

(three minutes, fifty two seconds.) 10:48 PM

•••    on kissing:

one night last spring I was walking hand-in-hand across campus with one of my friends. she was slightly drunk and we were both dressed up. she's also very, very hot (as opposed to me; I'm perpetually cute). anyway, we got to her dorm, and there were a few guys sitting around outside waiting for a van (I think they weren't swatties, but I'm not completely sure). I said goodnight, and she leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek, which I returned. as I turned to go back to my side of campus, one of the guys gave me a look that clearly said, "what, no tongue?" normally I would have been annoyed; I hated it in high school when my guy friends would tell me how great it would be if I would just hook up with some other cute chick... but all I could do was laugh, because it was just so pathetic. if he had seen us dancing he probably would have hyperventilated.

(one minute fifteen seconds. I do have other thoughts on kissing, but I'm not really into publicizing them. lucky you.) 10:36 PM

•••    on pineapple:

on my hall last year, one of the major factors that decided the quality of a study break was how much real fruit there was to eat. ("real fruit" is the sort of thing that isn't easily had at the dining hall -- good, fresh melon is real fruit; strawberries are real fruit; snappy red seedless grapes are real fruit. apples are not "real fruit.") pineapple was quite the delicacy. most people bought freshly cut pineapple packed in little tubs, but the truly adventurous bought whole pineapples. good cutlery is as much of a rarity in dorms as real fruit is, so we usually ended up hacking bits off the pineapple with dented steak knives. pineapple makes my tongue sting and swell up, but it's worth it. besides, there is something very satisfying about taking a spiny, tough-skinned pineapple and finding the sweetest spots of flesh inside. even fruit snobs have those latent primal hunting instincts, I suppose. I miss my old hall. I had some kindred spirits there.

(two minutes, thirty seven seconds.) 8:27 PM

•••    the hogwarts house selector says I belong in ravenclaw. (my results went ravenclaw, gryffindor, hufflepuff, slytherin, which I have to say is exactly how I would have rated them myself: I care much more about wisdom than courage; I am not especially hard-working; and I am certainly not cunning. plus I look good in blue. ;) 8:06 PM

•••    well, apparently that's how. 7:14 PM

•••    on different kinds of soap:

the soap in our bathroom now is softsoap, the clear kind with aquarium animals on the bottle, and on a little plastic insert inside. it seems like maybe a bit of a waste of plastic, but it looks really cool, and it's just a little bit of plastic I suppose . . . thoughts like that make me guilty, but not guilty enough to deny my suitemates cool-looking soap. it's also antibacterial, which people keep saying is really not necessary and maybe even bad, but whatever. all the soap in public places here is also antibacterial, and green. it must not be too hard on bacteria though, because the label says "light duty hand cleanser" on it. the label also says "all-in-one dispener, package, and label," which I think is really funny, as if the label was the truly important part. maybe to be heavy duty hand cleanser it would have to be something like betadine. I remember the first time we had betadine in our house was because my little sister had impetigo or something, and to keep it from spreading we all had to wash our hands with betadine and dry them on separate towels. betadine smells really gross and dyes your skin a sort of jaundiced shade of yellow, and it's not viscous like normal soap. it's liquid and somehow the way it splashes all dark and swirly in the sink reminds me of blood. it makes bubbles, little yellow bubbles that aren't especially satisfying. I like big bubbles.

I haven't used bar soap in a long time, but I used to when I was little. it's fun to squirt the soap around in the bathtub. when I babysit and I have to bathe the kids, I always play with the soap. I make a big show of chasing it around the tub, never quite catching it, and then being full of mock-indignation when the giggling children outchase me by capturing the soap and holding it up like a slippery little trophy. it's good that I don't let myself spend too much time with the soap in my hands, because my inclination is always to squish it. I like watching it ooze out between my fingers... but that really is wasteful. still, sometimes... I wrote a poem once about squishing soap. it was also about shampoo. coincidentally, the person who suggested this soap thing is the same person for whom I wrote the poem, or something like that. I don't actually remember (it was several years ago), I just know I told him about the shower and then later I wrote a poem about it. I don't know if it's an especially good poem. I think my favorite part is the title, but that's true a lot about many things I do. which is weird, because I used to be terrible at coming up with titles for things.

and now I'm sufficiently off track that I think it's time to stop. for the record, that freewrite took just under four minutes. the poem is here if you want to read it: revelation in soap. 7:03 PM

•••    I feel like telling a story, but I don't know what to talk about. anyone want to give me a free-association word? (something I don't usually write about here -- school and rugby and activism are all out. I want something random.) my freewriting is usually pretty entertaining. 5:38 PM

•••    can anyone explain to me why http://1076466390/ is actually blogger, and how on earth that works? I've never seen anything like it before. 4:22 PM

•••    it is now officially fall break! woooooooooo! I promised myself I wouldn't do any schoolwork for three whole days, so I have until tuesday to muck around and leisure read and go to philly. YAY! 3:29 PM

friday, october 13

•••    the full moon is outside my window...

I have this memory of a picture book about the man in the moon, but it's not clear enough for me to remember the name of the book or much of the story. I think I got it from the bookmobile, or maybe the public library, because I know I read it repeatedly. it was about how the man in the moon somehow escaped from the moon, and he went running around on earth. he was very excited and happy to get to explore earth, because he had been stuck in the moon all his life, but then something bad happened and he got stuck in jail. (for some reason I think this involved dancing, but why would anyone get arrested for dancing? maybe he was arrested for leaving the moon.)

so the man in the moon (but I guess not so much in the moon anymore) was sitting in his cell, and looking up at the faceless moon through the bars on the window. I remember that clearly, the shadows from the cell bench and the terribly dejected look on the moon man's face. the illustrations were done in block colors, no gradients and no shading, so it was all very flat-looking, but somehow the color of the moon behind the bars made the whole scene look eerie and ethereal. it gave me good spine-tingles.

eventually the man in the moon escaped jail in some exciting and inspirational way, got back up to the moon, and realized that he was really content in the place where he belonged, and didn't have any need to run away to earth all the time. on the last page of the book, he had this funny smile on his face, contented but also a little wistful, as if he wished he could still be dancing.

I often think of that book when I see the full moon, even though the actual expression on the moon's face is neither contented nor wistful. it looks to me like the man in the moon is trying to suck the atmosphere right off the earth, which makes me wonder why we would ever be happy to see him. but we are, nonetheless. 10:42 PM

•••    aw, not another cliffhanger...

though I suppose some suspense is good. it's the only thing keeping this year's election interesting.

(via mefi) 8:37 PM

•••    my physics midterm is finished. it was horrible, but now it's over.

my backpack is cleaner than it's ever been, after a trip through the washing machine. it even smells good.

my knee hurts a little, but I can bend it again.

my calculator is functioning again. it's sticky and the keys make funny noises when I press them, but its math abilities don't seem to have been compromised.

and my bicycle... my bicycle is found! as I was walking to campus today, I saw it leaning up against the outside of the fieldhouse. it wasn't locked up (because I have the key and I didn't put it there!), but it was safe and there and mine. now it's happily locked up on campus, and I don't even care who was stupid enough to steal (borrow?) my bike without telling me. I'm just incredibly relieved to have it back.

I told you today would be better! one more class, one more practice, one more away game, and then I will be on break. 1:14 PM

•••    today has to be better than yesterday, so woohoo for friday the thirteenth! may all your cats be calico. 7:58 AM

thursday, october 12

•••    okay. generally I think I am pretty good about staying all big-picturish and not getting too worked up about superficial things. but when my bike is stolen, and the entire interior of my backpack -- complete with textbooks, notebooks, papers, my walkman and my calculator -- takes a bath in sixteen fluid ounces of orange juice, and we are two days away from a big important game but I still can't bend my knee all the way, and I have a physics midterm sitting on my floor that I don't understand half of, and at the same time I get reminded that in spite of all this my life is so fucking charmed compared to other people's lives, not to mention certain bygone bits of my own life...

::deep breath::

...all in the course of six hours, I start to lose a little perspective. 11:32 PM

•••    I would like to know where the hell people get off bitching about the quality of public education in america when some union contract crap takes such precedence over learning that it is okay for some guy to stand outside the window of a fourth grade classroom and BANG ON IT WITH A HAMMER for an hour.

yes, I am going to make a value judgment right now. I am going to say that your time as a construction guy with a hammer is less important than classroom time. it's not less important than my time as a teacher, but it is far less important than the fourth graders' time as students. I don't care what your contract says, I don't care what your union says, and I don't care if it is inconvenient for you to work later hours -- your time is less valuable than theirs.

I am not an education expert, and I don't know what the best teaching philosophy is. but I am pretty sure that every child should be entitled to an education in an environment without really loud, distracting, unrelenting adult-produced noises. I have my issues with this dirt-poor disciplinarian school district, but I have never witnessed such a blatant lack of respect or even pretense. I cringe watching the lunch moniters scream at the kids, I hate listening to their teachers threaten them and tell them how awful they are, and I try not to even think about the ridiculous expulsion policies (you can't afford your vaccinations? oops, no school for you!) -- but I have always thought that all the people involved in this impoverished little school system were at least trying to work in the childrens' best interest, albeit with as little effort as possible in some cases. there is no way BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG ad nauseum could be interpreted as conducive to learning, or even benign.

I just wish some people would get their priorities straight. that said, the kids were duly impressed with magnesium vaporizing in hydrochloric acid despite the noise, although they were a little out of hand all afternoon. so, the lesson I learned today? stupid adults bad. science good. 3:47 PM

•••    this morning I was halfway out of the shower before I realized I had washed my face twice and my hair not at all. 8:21 AM

wednesday, october 11

•••    oh. my. head. 10:54 PM

•••    I have lightning in my veins! woot woot woot buzz buzz buzz! 10:16 PM

•••    I have always been a little disappointed by the minimal effect caffeine has on me. it seems like all some people have to do is drink half a can of coke and it's like they're powered by rocket fuel; me, I can down three or four mugs of green tea before I really start feeling caffeinated. in a world where all-nighters are more frequent than they should be and staying awake through seminar sometimes seems like a bigger struggle than balancing the national budget, that's downright inconvenient.

perhaps it is because of this that I don't consume much caffeine. I never drink soda, except for the occasional squirt of sprite to give my orange-cranberry concoction a little fizz. I have always thought coffee is disgusting, although I might not have come to that conclusion if I had ever tried it black. (I always drank my tea straight up, milk-free, which I think is why I liked it. I had tea with milk at a party once, before I was vegan, and I could barely swallow it.) I do like tea, especially when it involves cranberries or mint, but I like juice better. I only drink tea when I'm really cold or really tired.

tonight, though, I accidentally ate about 200 grams of chocolate covered espresso beans. (the eating itself wasn't accidental, but the amount was. the container was next to me and I was busy paying attention to my astronomy textbook; it was rather a surprise when I looked over and found that I had half-emptied it. I don't much like the taste of the beans themselves, but the chocolate is so, so worth it. and I do like the way the beans feel rolling around on my tongue.) if you don't have a good grasp on metric weights, think about one measuring-cup-full. and... well, how do you people who are affected by caffeine stand it? my heart feels like it's trying to escape the confines of my pulmonary cavity, like those birds that insist on careening into windows over and over again because they just can't figure out that there's no way to fly through. it's all the physical symptoms of an adrenaline rush without the euphoria.

excuse me while I go work on my superball impression... ahhh!!! ! ! ! 8:26 PM

•••    in the latest painfully simplistic article about blogging, all those bigwig celebrity types get paraphrased as saying that the audience doesn't really matter, doesn't really influence what they write on a daily basis.

fine and dandy. however, I would like to say that you, my audience, do matter a great deal. if no one read wockerjabby, I wouldn't do it, simple as that. this is more than simple self-expression; I have my shiny blue journals and my fat little notebooks for that. I am very very aware that everything I write here can be seen (and is seen) by hundreds of people, including my parents and some of my schoolmates. wockerjabby isn't just a public record of my life. it's also public discourse. it's communication.

that's not to say it isn't also narcissistic, because it is. it's entirely self-serving, and for the most part very satisfying. I would say that maybe eighty percent of my blogging satisfaction comes from the simple act of writing, but the other twenty percent comes from the contact I make with other people. that's not an insignificant number, and none of you are insignificant readers. thank you for coming. 7:03 PM

•••    I miss mallory already. sigh. 6:03 PM

•••    it's always nice when your paycheck comes earlier than you expect it to... and just in time for buying fall break groceries, woo. today was a good mail day. :)

the weather is gorgeous. the sky today matches my shirt and my eyes. the hour of my physics midterm is fast approaching. there are always clouds somewhere... 1:08 PM

•••    well, this is weird. the bottom of my package was lined with a few pages of the cambridge chronicle, our local weekly paper. mostly out of curiosity, but also because I have a hard time resisting the urge to read everything I see (I was one of those kids who read the backs, sides, tops, and bottoms of cereal boxes over breakfast), I flattened them out and glanced over the articles. mostly stuff about schools, meetings, typical people's republic beaurocracy... but there was a little box that caught my attention: man gets five years for attempted rape.

this "man" is a former classmate of mine. he's big, cocky, swaggering, and foulmouthed. I have never seen his eyes hold even the slightest hint of sincerity, or his lips form a genuine smile. he dominated the basketball courts at recess in seventh grade. he was better than everyone, and he knew it.

the first time I ever said "fuck you" to a real person, it was directed at him. I don't even remember why I said it, just that it felt strange and foreign and ugly in my mouth. I don't say fuck very much. the only time I pair it with "you" is in rugby, because that's the name of a penalty play.

there was one day in gym class when we were playing basketball, which is far and away my least favorite sport, and one of the few that I am really bad at. lots of my classmates were really good at it; basketball is the quintessential city sport because it doesn't require grass or large open spaces. when we were forced to play in gym, I generally tried to stay out of the way. somehow on this particular day, I was the only girl in a group of post-pubescent twelve year old boys, all of whom were at least a foot taller than me. it was a complete joke. I made a halfhearted effort to run back and forth in parallel with the ball, but that was about it.

until something truly bizarre happened. he had the ball, this classmate, and he was dribbling up the court directly towards me. maybe I was such a non-threat that my presence didn't even register for him, because his eyes were on the hoop, not on me. and so, as he passed, I reached out my hand, and in one swift, instinctual movement, I stole the ball mid-dribble.

we were all shocked, but I was the most shocked of anyone. I hadn't even really thought I was going to touch the ball, just that I should attempt to pretend I was playing. but there I was, on a breakaway, having just nicked the ball from the best basketball player in the seventh grade. I panicked and threw a horrible layup that barely grazed the edge of the backboard, which cracked the moment a little but didn't shatter it. the whole court was silent as I retrieved the ball and passed it off to one of my more competent teammates. I was sort of proud, sort of terrified, sort of hoping he hadn't noticed any of what had just transpired.

later he punched me in the stomach and cursed me out in spanglish.

now he's in jail. it's weird, but I can't quite fathom that. one of my classmates, one of my elementary school bullies, is a man in jail. he was convicted of assaulting someone who lives in my neighborhood. in our eighth grade class picture, he is standing in the row behind me, three people to my right. he is looking down his nose at the camera, sneering a little, and he's thirteen years old.

now he's nineteen, and he's in jail, and I wonder if he will ever learn to smile properly. 12:10 AM

tuesday, october 10

•••    ironically enough, I think my least favorite part of a fourteen-hour day (that is, fourteen hours between the time I leave my room in the morning and I time I get back to it at night) is returning to my room, because I have to unpack all my junk, and it inevitably takes upwards of fifteen minutes. I want to tell my dirty rugby clothes and my dangling sneakers and my textbooks that they should just take care of themselves, after I spent all day lugging them around, but the problem with inanimate objects is that they lack ears. and brains. and other things vital to communication and mobility.

anyhow. a few minutes ago I thought my computer was finally going completely haywire, because when I typed with the caps lock light off EVERYTHING CAME OUT LIKE THIS, and when I typed with it on everything came out normal; when I clicked on links they kept opening new windows, even when I knew they weren't supposed to; my instant messages wouldn't send; aol wouldn't recognize my password despite my very careful typing... and then I realized I had dropped a sunflower seed on my keyboard and it was keeping the shift key stuck down. sigh.

our writing assignment for friday got halved, as a compromise, so I am feeling friendlier towards my overzealous writing prof. it is still too much, but everything here is too much at one time or another. 11:22 PM

•••    oooohhhh.... I got chocolate in the mail today! lots and lots of chocolate! organic chocolate, no less.

also socks (but not chocolate socks).

unexpected packages are the best kind. :) expect me to be on an extended sugar high for the next few days. 3:50 PM

•••    I was completely slap-happy in astro this morning, and I have no idea why. we were talking about stellar evolution -- white dwarfs and neutron stars and black holes and stuff like that -- which, while interesting, is not usually all that funny. but at one point during the discussion, the professor said, "so how do we get there?" meaning how does a star go from living on the main sequence to being a black hole, except that I interpreted it as, "how do we actually fly in space to a black hole?" and I said as much. one of my classmates joked that we could take the magic school bus. after that I just couldn't escape the image of the magic school bus flying towards a black hole, getting all stretched out into an infinitely long spaghetti noodle shape, with everyone inside moving in slower and slower motion, and ms. frizzle's hair stretching out behind her in a big orange streak. I kept laughing even though I was biting my lip to try and stay quiet.

my professor was no help when he drew the main sequence stars with smily faces and the degenerate stars with frowny faces. later in the class there were miniscule black holes zipping around (but fortunately none of them plowed through my head, which might have been painful even though they were theoretical) and planet-gobbling red giants, and by the end I had this ridiculous picture of outer space full of singlularities and stars engaged in a game of interstellar tag, booby trapped by supernovae and intermittently illuminated by pulsars. how do I ever learn anything? 12:14 PM

•••    is it really only tuesday? 8:45 AM

monday, october 9

•••    well... gosh. thank you, brenda. avoiding a nervous breakdown would be nice, though I fear I have been recovering from one for the past week without really acknowledging it.

I'm not the only one with tons of work -- there have been more papers coming in to the writing center on every night this week than we usually get in an entire week. I stayed an extra hour after my shift was over to try and help with the backlog of papers waiting to be edited. (no, I don't get paid for overtime.) it's that time of the semester... (but I do seem to have more than most people, probably because of my fifth class and my endless extracurriculars. my roommate is playing computer solitaire right now, and while I may not be accomplishing much more, the thought of playing a game is unfathomable.)

I think my writing class is going to revolt against our overzealous professor, or at least try and tell her that this is completely ridiculous. we've been emailing each other back and forth all night since we got her latest assignment. I'll keep you updated.

and I'll try to hang on to my un-bitterness. at least in that regard I'm resilient, I think. (intelligence may turn out to be another matter altogether.) 11:57 PM

•••    the graphic symbol search is way, waaaay more entertaining than it ought to be. I like the asymmetric, open and closed, straight and soft, lines crossing symbols. however, my favorite is the stylized plow with two oxen (maybe) from 800 bc.

who does this stuff, anyway? is there such a thing as symbologist? can I be one? 7:00 PM

•••    someone needs to tell my writing professor -- remember, this is a non-departmental credit required for my campus job, not a real course -- that it is not okay to assign work due friday on a monday afternoon during a week of midterms. she did it last week and now she did it again this week.

someone else needs to tell my physics professor that it is not okay to make us take a midterm in one hour, whether or not he can do it in under fifteen minutes, when most of us have never finished a single problem from the nightly homework in that amount of time.

someone needs to tell my astronomy professor that his thirty minutes is apparently our two hours, because that's how long he estimated our test would take and how long it actually took me, respectively. but it was a fair test otherwise, so I'm not really complaining. and even with all this work, the class keeps reminding me that I like school a lot, in spite of everything. still, what kind of weird spacetime continuum does he live in?

someone also needs to tell my psychology professor that he should be grateful to be spared the wrath of all these anonymous someones, as I have sucked up my mildly injured feelings and realized that his late paper policy is pretty reasonable, even if he made a point of agreeing with me when I said I didn't have a particularly good excuse for not finishing it on time.

unfortunately, I am the one who has to tell my math professor that I am not as incompetent as I appeared on the midterm, somehow without coming off as a total slacker. what on earth can I say -- I can do this stuff, I just don't want to? I would have done fine if I had bothered to study, or at least spend more than a few hours on the homework? no I don't feel confused, I feel unmotivated? I hated math so much last semester it made me wish I was an english major? no matter what, it's not going to be fun.

someone needs to tell me I can make it four nights and four days until break. that isn't so long, right? 6:44 PM

•••    dumbass press release headline of the week: powerful telescope array will study the stars.

as opposed to "powerful telescope array will study cell membranes," or maybe "powerful telescope array will study fossil formations."

(sometimes being tired makes me sarcastic.) 1:59 PM

•••    not that you really need to know this, but in the course of this six-page paper, I have not once managed to type "tantric sex" without misspelling it "tantrix," or without hearing that stupid line about sting and snickers.

(even hardcore natural science majors write really fluffy papers once in a while, you know. I had to buy a copy of redbook for this assignment.) 9:57 AM

•••    so I'm sitting here, ostensibly writing a paper, and watching the houses across the street as one by one the garage doors open to reveal two cars, one by one the people emerge from within their homes to take quick stock of the pre-dawn sapphire blush in the sky, one by one they tuck their coats around their legs as they step into their cars, one by one the driveways are lit by red brake lights, and one by one the cars slide off into the still-dark morning as the garage doors drop down behind them. and then it's black again, except for the street lights and the blue that is slowly bleeding into the sky from behind the sillhouettes of trees and telephone poles.

suburbia. I live in the middle of upper-class suburbia, and sometimes it frightens me. if I ever have a garage with two cars and a carefully pressed suit, remind me of this day so I can be sufficiently embarassed. and so I can wave to the early morning spies. 6:34 AM

•••    I just realized as I typed the date at the top of my psychology paper that today is my father's birthday. (it seems like it hasn't been long enough since he dropped me off in august, but here we are with october on the calendar and the trees all aflame.) so, happy birthday dad! I owe you an email. 12:16 AM

sunday, october 8

•••    it really felt like autumn for the first time today, cold and brambish and crackling. I know the leaves have been falling for a while, but for some reason their presence on the ground never registered with me until this morning, when I noticed that there was more brown than green lining the sidewalks. it's pumpkin-and-apples weather. today would have been a perfect day to spend wearing overalls, climbing over hay bales, and watching the premature orange sunset turn your shadows into ghosts.

one more week until break. maybe then I will get to spend some quality time with my shadow. for now, though, back to work. 7:33 PM

•••    the clichι flaw for gore is that he exaggerates. bush's clichι flaw is dimness.

but you know what? they're not just clichιs! welcome to america, where the dominant political party (you know, the demreps) is a bunch of lying idiots in different masks but matching outfits.

with just thirty days left before november seventh, politics are heating up all over campus. the republicans are vastly outnumbered and widely ridiculed, the third-party supporters are over-represented and also ridiculed, and the democrats have somehow teamed up with earthlust (the environmentalist group), apparently on the theory that pretending to care about the environment is better than nothing.

if not for editorial cartoons, I would never want to hear about either gore or bush again. but, sad as it is, this whole election would make for a pretty good comedy routine... if only it weren't for real. 2:40 PM

•••    for some reason my shower thoughts this morning kept turning to an old memory of the first time I was in a car accident. I don't know why, really... my dreams had nothing to do with cars, and my first two conscious thoughts of the day (discounting the rugby morning after "ouch") were about brunch and how much work I have to do.

I have a pretty near eidetic memory. there is a point in my chronology of memories when they switch from photographs to videotapes, around where I was three years old. I remember a lot of my very early childhood, all the way back to about seven months, but most of it is in frozen moments rather than actual events.

this memory is over a year into videotape territory, but for some reason it doesn't play anymore. I know it used to. now it's in two parts. I remember the beginning of the day, before the accident, in complete fluid sequence. I remember I didn't want to go with my father into town, I think to the hardware store, but somehow I was convinced to go anyway. I remember looking down at my mother's fingers fastening the snaps on my faded sage green down jacket. I remember being in the car just after we pulled out of the driveway, looking at the fake leather cover around the bottom of the stick shift, looking at the emergency brake, looking out the window at all the snow. it was the middle of winter in upstate new york; there was a lot of snow, and the sky was all grey-white and sunless, but still bright from the diffused light that was pushing its way through the clouds. I remember the motion of the car, the way I had my hands in my lap, the way a little bit of my hair kept getting in my eyes, as if it was just this morning, or even right now.

after that my memories are all broken up into individual frames, and I can't make them run together. I can only advance one by one, like a flipbook in slow motion. it was snowing. I was sleeping in my carseat. then I remember the way the windshield turned into a spiderweb, (flip) the hands on my shoulders pulling my out of my harness, (flip) staring down at the linoleum on some stranger's kitchen floor, which had become spotted with blood, (flip) the stranger saying the word "ambulance" into the phone. and then I have two frozen-moment picture-perfect memories from some indeterminate time later. in the first, I am putting my pajamas on and looking down at the bruises on my chest left by my carseat harness straps. in the second, I am sitting on the living room floor, looking up at my father, who was standing braced against the doorframe with his injured knee wrapped up. somehow I remember it looking dirty, as if the whole picture is being made dirty by something emanating from that bandage. and I remember my father looked very tired.

I know what the context for those memories is. I know he was knocked unconcscious in the crash, which was head-on in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. I know the stranger who pulled me out of the car was actually the other driver. I know we went to the hospital and I was pronounced okay save for the bruises across my front. my father had a kneecap that was broken or dislocated or something.

I also know I spent several nights after that reliving the whole thing in perfect horrifying video detail, especially watching the windshield crack in a hundred directions all at once. I was completely obsessed with the idea that I hadn't wanted to go, that somehow something had forced me to go against my will, and if everyone had just listened to me I never would have been in a car accident at all. I kept watching it over and over, getting myself all worked up over every detail.

this morning in the shower, I felt detached, like it was so far away I might as well have been looking at a photo album. I remember the images, but not so much the terror I know I felt. I remember feeling it, but not the way it felt. and I'm curious as to why my video turns into a flipbook just at that collision point, when everything leading up to it still plays beautifully and seamlessly. defense mechanism? brain disfunction? did I hit my head? did it just stop mattering to me at some point? and where did it come from this morning?

brains are weird. I think this is the one conclusion I can draw from life as a whole. 12:21 PM