saturday, october 28

•••    so, halloween. I'm dressed in my smallest black tank top and covered from hairline to waistline with glow-in-the-dark star stickers. in normal light I look like I have some funny pockish disease, but without it I look damn cool, albeit a little freaky. my freckles were the blueprints for constellations, and the brilliant magenta bruise on my shoulder is a nebula. it looks like something straight out of the large magellanic cloud.

party time. :) I'll be in the blacklight. 10:24 PM

•••    and now it's cold, but that's okay because I don't have to leave again tonight. (the party will be downstairs.)

I actually have no idea who won the football game. I left when the score was 6-7 in favor of f&m to go watch the men's rugby team lose by a ridiculously large amount to widener. saturday's a rugby day whether or not I have a game. I did get to show of my bruises. I have one just to the side of my right eye, which is only faintly visible as an irregular swash of pale purple. I can feel it when my eyes crinkle from smiling too wide.

I suppose I wasn't entirely in the mood for watching sports. for the past two days I have been largely preoccupied with torey hayden books. I mentioned offhand in an email a little while ago that I had read one child, and lo and behold yesterday afternoon I got a package in the mail with four more books. I've gone through two of them since then, and I'm all worn out, but still all I want to do is read. I should be working, but oh... I don't know. I'm so zoned out from being in this completely other world of emotionally disturbed kids and classrooms from decades past that I only just noticed I've had the same song on repeat for over an hour.

I think the reason I stopped liking movies for a long long time in high school (basically for all of high school) was that I always walked away from them in a complete daze. I never wanted to see movies with my friends, and I think they assumed I found them boring. maybe I told them that, I don't know. but it wasn't that I was bored, it was that I always got so sucked in that I had trouble finding my way out again. I hate that dissociated feeling where you're not sure if you're even in the right existential plane. I would get sucked into books, too, but it was different... books grab you intellectually (if they're good books, that is), but movies grab you with sensory details. books live inside your head, but you live inside movies. or I do. I still do, even though I don't read as incessantly as I used to. (the internet and science sort of got in the way.) anyway, I have all these books and children and horror stories living inside my head right now, and they are making it hard for my brain to reach out and communicate with the rest of the world. I feel like all my words are bouncing back at me at all angles and scattering into an indecipherable jumble of lonely individual letters.

let's stick with something mundane. I had fermented bean curd for the first time today. I was informed that it's an acquired taste, but I discovered that I really like it in tiny doses blended with sushi rice.

meanwhile, erk and double erk. 8:12 PM

•••    good gosh it's hot. what happened to the end of october? at least this means I won't be too uncomfortable running around tonight in a tank top. supposedly we're getting snow flurries tomorrow night. who can fathom weather anyhow? (not the meteorologists, that's for sure. :P)

today is homecoming. since I don't have a rugby game, I'm going to show a little school spirit or something and visit all the home games. our football team is playing franklin & marshall, which I've heard means they actually have a chance of winning. I can't say I especially care about the football team, especially since it is an eternal source of frustration for club athletes how much money and attention gets poured into their program. I don't feel bitter about it the way some people do, but it's a little hard to watch them play on their beautifully tended field in their brand new uniforms with their matching warmups all lined up on the benches, especially after coming from games where we've had to use paper cups to bail out the puddles on our own pitch. still, I hope they win today, or at least do something interesting for me to watch.

I have to say I don't entirely understand the concept of homecoming. who is coming home, and why? and where? at swat we don't have any of that parade-and-party stuff, just a bunch of home games and a picnic where I can't eat anything. it's also our observed halloween, since real halloween is in the middle of the week. so tonight there will parents and drunk costumed people everywhere, which I think is a pretty strange combination. not that college isn't a strange combination of things already. 10:43 AM

friday, october 27

•••    I love rugby so much.

we played the university of delaware. in a way it felt like my first time playing them; last fall our game at del was a week after I broke my nose, so I just watched, and last spring I got a concussion when a delaware player landed hard on my head. I have two memories from that game: the actual collision, and a moment near the end of the game when I was running laterally and I had this sudden feeling of complete detachment from the entire world, as if I was trapped in a virtual reality pod and I had only just remembered that the world wasn't real. and then my head hurt.

so this was pretty much a new opponent for me. most teams have a pretty distinctive style of play, and that tends to affect me a lot at fullback. during some games I'm alone on defense ninety percent of the time even if the rest of my team isn't; in other games I'm practically a member of the back line. tonight I was a drifter, running back and forth to catch the overload, in support on offense but rarely involved in the actual play. it felt like a game where I didn't have much direct influence on the outcome. that isn't to say it wasn't fun; I had a wonderful time and I felt really good about my few significant contributions to the game. we lost, 15-8, but it was by far our best game of the season and two of their tries were the results of two ridiculously stupid moments that I don't feel reflected the general quality of our play. so it was okay. we scored about halfway through the second half, just as the setting sun was starting to color the clouds orange.

by the time we started the b-side game, it was nearly all the way dark. the lights on the practice field are only on one side, so they don't exactly illuminate the whole thing. it felt almost noirish, with the long shadows stretching across the field like phantoms, and the back line forming off the scrum behind me just a group of faceless sillhouettes. it was a great game. I don't know if it's because I'm getting to be a better scrumhalf so I really know what I'm doing, or if the team has really coalesced this year, or if something completely different is happening... but our b-side games have started to feel really good, almost polished, if there is even such a thing as polished rugby. we're a real team. sometimes I feel like my heart is still with the b-side. a lot of us were rookies together.

after rugby games I am always in the most ridiculous euphoric mood. as I was walking back to my room, I found myself behind a family with three small costumed children. (apparently halloween came four days early in some places.) the father dropped something as he bent down to take the hand of one of his children, and I picked it up to give it back. shy as I am, this gave me a moment of butterflies and skipped heartbeats, but I called out to him and smiled as I held it out. it turned out to be the cat-eared hat that went along with one of the costumes, and as he tucked it under his arm he looked down at his kid and said, "isn't that lucky, the nice lady rescued your hat?"

the thought of me, a scrappy rugger in dirty shorts, with scarlet-bruised shoulders and hair in a chaotic tangle, being anything that even resembles a "nice lady" was almost unbearably funny. but I waited until I was out of earshot to start giggling. 11:11 PM

•••    we have a rugby game at 5:00 tonight. that's a whole big ordeal on its own, because our field doesn't have lights, so we have to use the football practice field. that field has lights but no uprights. yesterday the team built uprights out of pvc pipe, bamboo, and lots of glue and duct tape. we are resourceful. :P anyway thanks to my psycho schedule, I have no time in between my first class and game time to change, so I'm already dressed in my rugby uniform. I feel like a walking publicity stunt.

today is also the dash for cash, which is not my favorite thing in the world. one of the few things I dislike about rugby is how all our fundraisers involve nudity. at least this one's over quickly (and no, I don't dash, I just go to collect the money). the people who do it all say it is one of the biggest adrenaline rushes ever, but I think I get high enough just from playing rugby.

on a completely unrelated note, doesn't "molecule that detects touch" sound like it should be a little cluster of atoms with protonic feelers waving around everywhere? 9:02 AM

thursday, october 26

•••    tonight I went with my psychology class to see a talk by lila gleitman on how language affects thought. (short answer: it doesn't; chomsky is right and whorf was thoroughly wrong.)

it made me think. psychology studies, which are admittedly a little sketchy at times by their very nature, have shown that people don't actually think in words. yet most people seem to believe, by virtue of introspection I suppose, that they do think in words. somewhere during the course of high school I stopped feeling like my thoughts were formed from words. I think in thoughts, and sometimes I feel like I can actually track the transition from thoughts to words or thoughts to pictures or thoughts to music, or any of those internal translation subroutines. it's a funny feeling.

anyhow, during her lecture, lila (yes I am on a first name basis with all the psycholinguists I have never actually met) talked about a story from through the looking glass. alice is walking with a fawn through a dark woods with no words, and she has her arm around the fawn in a sort of mutually protective posture. then they reach a bright sunny meadow with words, and the fawn looks at alice and says, "I am a fawn, and you are a human child!" and dashes off in fright.

you see, my untalkative tendencies are good and pure, even if I have to live in the dark woods with no words. and my thoughts are more true and real before they get contorted into the shape of words. remember that the next time you think I'm being distant and detached just because I'm not talking. 11:36 PM

•••    today in fourth grade we talked about phases of matter. we brought dry ice and the kids all wanted to touch it, lick it, sniff it... at one point I found myself standing in the center of a pack of chaotic nine-year-olds, holding an erlenmeyer flask full of dry ice at arm's length over my head so they couldn't jump up and touch it. behavior was just a bit of an issue today.

I don't know if I can blame them for getting a little out of hand, though. we made oobleck and let them play with it. I don't think any of them had ever seen a non-newtonian fluid before. I've played with oobleck dozens of times and it's always even more fun (and bizarre) than I remember. they poured it, cut it, dropped pennies in it, and rolled it into little balls. liquid or solid? we don't know. ;) but anyway, after I spent the better part of an hour mixing corn starch and water, and turning my hands into a blotchy food coloring mess, I decided I deserved to have some of my own oobleck. so now I have these two little cups of yellow goo, the exact color of extra thick eggnog, sitting next to me on the computer table. I have no idea what I'm going to do with them, or how I'm going to transport them home on my bike, but they're making me happy.

I also have little bitty spots of iodine all over my shirt from setting up the liquid to gas phase transitiong demonstration. one of the nice things about iodine is that you can still see it when it turns into a gas. one of the not so nice things about it is that it turns everything that nasy brownish yellow color. any thoughts on removing iodine droplets from a light blue shirt? let me know. :P

I had a funny thought today while we were in the classroom: my little brother is a fourth-grader, too. nine years old, just like most of these kids. in public school, just like them. still, I can't even begin to contend with the idea that according to the numbers, he's on the same level as the kids I teach. he can read, and write, and spell. he knows how to share. I don't think he's ever had his right to learn taken away as a form of discipline. I'm pretty sure the child:adult ratio in his classroom is less than 30:1 (though it wasn't in my fourth grade class, and I knew how to read and write and spell too). he has resources like computers and books and art supplies, and I don't think his teachers bought them all out of their own pockets.

granted, my brother is a smart cookie. school had very little to do with his learning to read. but he also goes to a school that got some ridiculous award as the best public elementary school in the country, where many of the parents are as involved in its operation as the principal (or at least they try to be), where the amount of tax money that goes toward education is way above the national average, and the teacher's starting salaries are actually competitive. my fourth graders go to a public school where the classrooms aren't even separated from the hallways, teachers fly as fast as they can to the comparatively affluent inner city philadelphia schools, and even substitute teachers are hard to come by. the teacher of this particular class told the district last spring that she needed a substitute for one week this november because she's getting married. they still haven't been able to find anyone -- not because the subs don't exist, but because none of them want to come contend with this particular school. so for that week, the kids will be split up into groups and sent into other classrooms, where they will sit alone in corners doing busy work all day long.

I don't know. it doesn't seem especially fair, does it? at least they got to play with oobleck today. 3:51 PM

•••    on the way to class this morning, I kept trying to brush the fog away from in front of my eyes. it didn't work. now all that thickness seems to have plastered itself against the atmosphere. the sky is white but bright, and I had to put the evil vinyl windowshades up so that the sunlight wouldn't reflect off my monitor and make it impossible to read the paper I'm supposedly writing. but there are sour punch twists in the plastic orange jack o'lantern and good songs in the playlist, so there are things to smile about. my paper is almost finished, too. woot. :) 11:53 AM

•••    the morning is thick with mist, and the trees on the other side of the street are barely visible, their newly bare branches fractalling off into the grey as if the fog was bleeding slowly out from the tips of the twigs. I feel like I'm living in a haunted swamp. it's a perfect day for halloween socks. 8:12 AM

wednesday, october 25

•••    I'm not too popular around here right now because I tend to cheer any time anything exciting happens, no matter which team is up at bat. I suppose I would rather see the mets win the series because at this point it would be a pretty impressive comeback, but aside from that I just want to watch good baseball. so we have the mets fans (including my roommate) who yell at me for cheering on the yankees, the yankees fans who yell at me for getting excited when the mets get hits, and the red sox fans who are just plain mad at me. apparently the whole concept of a subway series should be offensive to someone who lives within walking distance of fenway park. 11:54 PM

•••    I realize this is contingent on a litany of contrivances, but if I filled my pants pocket with a black hole it would be 3.38 times as massive as the earth! the whole planet, times three! and it could be squished enough that it would fit inside my pocket. you learn over and over and over again that most matter is empty space, that if an atom's nucleus was the size of a tennis ball the first electron would be miles away, that if all the particles in your body were condensed together you would be smaller than a grain of sand... but as many times as I've heard it, I can't quite wrap my brain around the concept. three earths in my pocket. the earth seems pretty big and heavy and solid, and still it is mostly empty space. of course, if I had a black hole in my pocket I wouldn't be able to put my hand in there anymore, and I also probably wouldn't be able to move, but it would still be cool. ;)

(really what I calculated was the maximum mass of a black hole with a schwarzchild radius of three centimeters, in case any of you think I am being horribly unscientific. I know I couldn't keep a black hole in my pocket.) 8:54 PM

•••    ... and after that rather depressing start, I actually had a great day. sometimes friends make all the difference. 7:45 PM

•••    I'm going to get in trouble very quickly if I don't start doing more of my homework. did anyone see where I dropped my self discipline? I'm just drifting this week. sometimes in the mornings I think maybe if I stood in the shower long enough I could rinse off all my apathy and my prejudice and my discontent, watch it swirl away into the scuzzy underworld where it belongs. I know that somewhere under all my misplaced priorities I do care a lot about school, and not just astronomy, which is all I have been doing lately. astronomy and rugby. it's a good life, just not responsible. so I need to get clean... but if I spent such a long time in the shower I would be late for class, so maybe that's the wrong solution.

I think the pagan holiday season is getting to me. I am an imp. a quiet one.

happy birthday to raza. twenty three is a long way from nineteen, but I don't know if it's long enough. I'm already nineteen. 8:44 AM

tuesday, october 24

•••    tonight: blood, baseball, bagels, bad poetry. 11:26 PM

•••    without getting too thickly ensconced in metaphor, I would like to point out that light doesn't just stop when you turn out turn out a lightbulb (or any other lightsource, for that matter). the reason you don't see light anymore is because it moves really fast (c = 300,000,000 meters per second, remember), not because it ceases to exist. there's no new light being produced, but the old light is zipping around somewhere (or being absorbed by something, or being transformed into another kind of energy, whatever).

think about your car's headlights (or your bike headlight if you're like me). you're going up a hill along an open road, lights on in the middle of the night. as you reach the top of the hill, for an instant the beam of light projects directly out into space. you drive over the crest, head down the other side of the hill, come to a stop, park your car, turn off your headlights... and then, darkness. your headlights aren't producing any new lightwaves.

that beam that was sent out from the top of the hill is still going, though. it will keep going, flying away from earth at the speed of light until it hits something. maybe that something will be a piece of debris in orbit around earth; maybe it will be an object in the kuiper belt; maybe it will be the atmosphere of a faraway planet that harbors primordial life. the lights we see in the sky is hundreds and millions and billions of years old, depending on how far it has to travel; the stars we watch at night might not even be there now. when do their lives end? when the star stops radiating light, or when we stop seeing it? you can turn the lightbulb off, but once it's been on there can never be darkness everywhere.

not that I think life is like a lightbulb, but it is pretty hard to be alive without leaving some sort of residual effect that is felt even after you're dead. maybe you can't feel it, but someone does. who needs an afterlife when there are other people with hearts and minds and memories?

besides. a photon gun is really just a flashlight. 1:12 PM

•••    it smells really good in my room right now, like freshly fallen pine needles. and I'm wearing my pretty striped socks. little things. 12:42 PM

•••    my alarm clock was set to go off at 7:30, but I woke up nearly an hour before that, as I have been doing lately for no good reason. I stayed in bed, curled up with my eyes squeezed shut, as if that would somehow convince my brain it was supposed to be asleep. it didn't work at all; I ended up giving myself a headache instead.

once I opened my eyes and the entire sky was bright pink. not just the bottom of the sky, the whole thing, or at least the wholeness that I could see through my window. no clouds, no birds, nothing but deep pinky orange. it was like being on mars.

the next time I opened my eyes, the sky was blue beneath an upside-down blanket of fat, shadowy clouds. I wonder if I imagined it. and now wondering so hard has made me late for breakfast. 7:50 AM

monday, october 23

•••    I've been reading with caution, but I think I have to admit that I'm hooked. I have a new favorite webcomic. it's called infelicity, and it's not funny so much as gripping. and atmospheric and beautiful... it makes me want to draw again.

infelicity. isn't that a good word? trips off your tongue, slips through your teeth. I like words that feel good in my mouth, but also feel like what they mean. we need a word for that, like onomatopoeia but for sensory associations instead of aural. anyway, it's slippery and shadowy and sad, and you should start at the beginning. 11:39 PM

•••    if the virtual reality cybersphere can really make life more like star trek... I don't know whether to be frightened or thrilled. ;) sometimes I think my life is virtual enough already. 8:54 AM

•••    we have school today. deepbreath. sigh. 8:32 AM

sunday, october 22

•••    hey! did you see roger clemens hurl the piece of shattered bat at mike piazza? how is that even remotely kosher? it was so obviously not an accident -- he grabbed it off the ground and threw it right at the baseline where piazza was running. a few feet closer and he would have actually hit him -- with a piece of sharp, jagged, pointed wood!

people say that agression and hostility are a natural part of sports, because after all sports are just a structured form of fighting. (although that argument holds a lot better for, say, wrestling than for something like curling. but whatever.) still, isn't the reason we have structured sports because we know, or at least we think, that unbridled agression towards other people is morally reprehensible? isn't good sportsmanship part of the beauty of athletics? I think hockey is a great sport, but it's completely ruined by all the fighting. and I don't care what kind of nasty words were thrown around in the scrum, I don't like the way rugby sometimes degenerates into a game of who can throw more punches while the referee isn't looking.

besides, these guys are professionals. if roger clemens (who, by the way, shares my birthday) feels like attacking people with pointy objects, maybe he should find a sport where that's part of the structure. fencing or something. meanwhile I don't think the mets, or the rest of us for that matter, should have to put up with stuff like this. 8:35 PM

•••    I dunno... I have a hard time believing anyone could be this bad at proofreading. seems much more likely there's a big-time cynic at the billboard agency. producing political propaganda all the would definitely turn me into one, and then I could go around making sarcastic comments, trying to ignore the remains of my starry-eyed idealism trailing on the ground behind me... (via metafilter) 6:28 PM

•••    I don't think I really realized that we have school tomorrow until my roommate got back and started unloading all her textbooks. this isn't my room where I live alone and spend my days mucking about the internet. this is our room where we both do work.

we have school tomorrow.

in addition to textbooks, my roommate also brought back a rug, halloween candy, new plants, and about a gallon of soap. so we will be full of sugar, but our fingers won't be sticky. or something. I need more sleep. 5:11 PM

•••    it's not yet ten am on a sunday morning, the last day of my fall break, and I've been awake for more than six hours already. how wrong is that?

we flew out of burlington at six and chased the sunrise to philadelphia. the city was still in shadows as we landed, illuminated by streetlamps and headlights and the early pink glow of the sun reflecting off the smog clouds. the oil refineries were all aflame, and off in the distance a collection of antennas pointed skyward, blinking red spires that looked like an alien communications array through the double-plastic airplane windows and the haze of sleeplessness around my head. you can see swarthmore from the air too, three towers amidst the patchy green of the arboretum trees.

last night as we were walking back from dinner to meet our professors, we stopped in the center of middlebury's campus to watch the space shuttle make an orbiting pass on our side of the sky. at 7:56, a bright spot appeared just above the treeline, moving across the sky at a reasonably fast pace. a few moments later, another spot appeared a few degrees behind it, and they flew together up through the bowl of the big dipper before blinking out as they were eclipsed by the earth's shadow. the second dot turned out to be the space station itself, which we hadn't been sure we were going to see. it was pretty neat. when the international space station is complete, it will have so many solar panels (six acres, I think) that it will be the brightest object in the sky, even brighter than jupiter. the shuttle is landing soon, but you can still catch a glimpse of the iss on a good clear night. and then someday, when you have grandchildren and they have all grown up with an extra bright spot in their sky, you can tell them about how you saw the space station when it was barely a twinkle.

the radioman says it is a beautiful night out there. it is usually a beautiful night. 9:51 AM