saturday, november 4

•••    I don't know what's gotten into me tonight. with games two days in a row and a bunch of papers and exams on the horizon, I really don't have time for screwing around this weekend. I fully intended to do some serious studying after I was finished showering, in spite of it being saturday.

instead, I played with my hair. lots of braids. after I was done I went downstairs to fill up my bottle with water from the drinking fountain, and my suitemate was there by the front door waiting for the shuttle. she was dressed in a rather strange outfit that looked positively medieval except for being at least seventy percent vinyl. she looked me over, my sweatpants and my pajama shirt and my multiple braids with too-long unbrushed ends all in corkscrew curls, and she said, "interesting look... I like it." so I'm wondering what I should make of that, given that she was wearing a shiny black lace-up bodice.

anyway, I wasn't satisfied with my time-wasting endeavor, so I finally got around to setting up the webcam that rick loaned me. I don't know what made me decide to do it now -- maybe because I thought as long as I have lots of braids I might as well show them off. ;) right now I still have my printer and zip drive cables just dangling everywhere (anyone want to buy me another parallel port?), and the cam itself is stuck on a q-tip and taped to my monitor. I'm not a big fan of having scotch tape everywhere, so I put the big question mark sticker on top. it's very cute.

so, while I haven't gotten as far as making a popup or anything, you can see my first efforts with a webcam. it is way more fun than I anticipated... my roommate came back and found me making a complete idiot of myself waving things around in front of it and watching the time-delayed picture full of ghosty images.

so it took me a while to get the color even close to right. I do not have dark hair (it's a very inbetweeny brownyblondie color -- too dark to be dirty blonde, too light to be really brown), and my eyes are really bluish grey. although I have to say I like them all dark and deep and mysterious like this.

that's my roommate's side of the room behind me. I think my walls are much more interesting, but what are you going to do? however her desk light is so bright it makes it look sort of like there's a little fire burning over there, and that's cool. I promised her I wouldn't put her picture anywhere, so you don't get to see her working back there. sorry. ;)

here are half of my braids. I think you can thank them for this whole webcam thing. also rick -- I still can't get over how nice he is to let me borrow his cam. how can you not love the internet? 11:40 PM

•••    that, I must say, was the most frustrating rugby game I've ever played in. we lost, and honestly we deserved to lose. there were some sequences that felt really good, but overall we did not play intelligent rugby. I guess it happens sometimes, but ugh. and afterwards the trainer was checking my suspiciously-swollen elbow to make sure the bone wasn't chipped or something, and just the pressure of his fingers hurt so much I thought I was going to lose consciousness.

still... it was a rugby game, and I love rugby. I flattened a couple players twice my size, got trampled under a ruck, and I didn't actually break my elbow. on the way home we listened to weird al and stopped at mcdonalds. we managed to have an entertaining conversation about politics even though I'm sick to death of this election, and I thoroughly enjoyed my snitched sweet and sour fries even though as a general rule I hate fast food. so in the end it was a good day, because saturday's a rugby day and rugby days are the best days.

we have another game tomorrow. one more shot at third place and moving on to midatlantic playoffs in the spring. I'm still excited. :) 6:24 PM

•••    this weekend we're going back to princeton for the epru playoffs (no, princeton is not in pennsylvania; I haven't figured that one out yet either). tomorrow's game is a semifinal against udel. I could go on and on about what a big deal this is, but I'll just say that I'm so excited I have psychological goosebumps. they'll probably be real tomorrow. 12:16 AM

friday, november 3

•••    sometimes I like to take my shoes off, let my hair out, and just run. 11:48 PM

•••    but but but... there are more than three blood types. those are allelic frequencies, not type percentages. I know the ab people are few and far between, but their blood isn't as useless as you might think. we always hear about how o-types are universal donors and ab-types are universal recipients, but ab-types are also universal plasma donors. and since ab blood is really disproportionally distributed (there's way more of it in the eastern hemisphere than in the western), it does make for a shortage of emergency-supply plasma. 7:52 PM

•••    I feel like I've been working on this astronomy assignment for weeks, but really it's been only three hours. I'm not doing an especially good job at it, either. grr.

it's cloudy, but the sky is still bright enough to make my eyes hurt, brighter than it would have been without the clouds. funny how that happens. one of my roommate's plants bloomed yesterday, and it looks oddly pathetic, stretching its nascent purple flowers toward the window, toward the outside world where the light is austere and grey and everything is dying in preparation for winter.

I have new sesame street bandaids. cookie monster is on my thumb. somehow I think this adds to the general incongruence of the world at the moment. I have too freaking much homework to be wearing muppets on my fingers. 9:59 AM

•••    I think someone at jpl has finally cracked: "the volcanoes on jupiter's moon io are like exotic dishes: they're hot, spicy, and have unfamiliar ingredients."

well, hmm. the thoughts in my brain are like breakfast in a diner: they're scrambled, either half-baked or overcooked, and you're better off not knowing what the ingredients are. 7:14 AM

thursday, november 2

•••    profundities from my psych prof:

"human mating is not like pigeons learning to play the piano."

"interestingly, we do sometimes call people sweet... but we don't usually call them creamy. generally." 10:42 PM

•••    I've been feeling incredibly tired and slightly sick all day, but for some reason spending two hours surrounded by hyperactive fourth graders really energized me. we learned about crystals and made rock candy, although the success of that particular activity remains to be seen.

today a bunch of kids were missing -- two had been suspended for fighting, another two had just been taken out of the class for misbehavior, and a few more were simply absent. it made the class a lot easier to deal with, and I hate to admit it but I know the lack of troublemakers was a big part of that. if only we had enough people to give all the kids one on one attention... the perpetual lamentation of teachers everywhere, right? blah. I just don't like punishing kids by telling them they can't learn.

as we were leaving today, one of the girls gave me a hug around the waist and said, "thank you miss rabi!" I could hardly see her around the box of glassware and lab books in my arms, but I hope she could see me smiling back. kids are fun. 3:33 PM

•••    right. woot! 8:07 AM

wednesday, november 1

•••    I was ridiculously teacherish tonight, going over science supply catalogues looking for new stuff for the fourth graders, testing lab experiments in the basement, looking over the kids' notebooks... when I'm in the classroom I really don't feel like much of a teacher. more like a much much older lab partner, or a moderately responsible playmate. but planning and budgeting and prepping beforehand, so far detached from the classroom, I felt oddly and almost uncomfortably authoritative. I don't especially like being in charge of things. I just like to play.

speaking of playtime -- I don't have time to read comics, but maybe you do: platypus. 9:52 PM

•••    more stickers:
queer friendly
I support the gay agenda
love and let love 5:32 PM

•••    jupiter has an ammonia ice cloud. what do you suppose that would smell like? my most memorable experience with ammonia was in seventh grade science class, when we did a silly experiment the sole purpose of which I think was to observe pH indicators at work. we blew into solutions to make them yellow (and acidic) and then we dropped ammonia into them to make them turn back blue. however it had the unfortunate side effect of illustrating the varying degrees of acidity in people's exhaled breath, and although I don't think any of us really understood why it was like that, the class was none too kind to the boy who needed a whole dropperful of ammonia to make his solution blue again. I felt bad for him; I had only used three drops. I still don't know what would have made such a big difference. maybe he blew harder than the rest of us. 8:36 AM

•••    we sat in the ampitheater surrounded by candles and fallen leaves, reading horror stories by flashlight.

the candles blew out as we walked back and for a while the wicks at the ends of the stubs I was holding had an eerie blue glow. there was melted wax running over my fingertips.

the saying goes "penny for your thoughts," but we sat in occasional silence punctuated by priceless words.

I left at two in the morning and saw a shooting star streak straight down in front of me.

my math homework still isn't finished, but somehow that doesn't seem terribly important at the moment.

happy november. 3:00 AM

tuesday, october 31

•••    I've moved several times in my life, but I've never moved to a home in orbit. can you imagine what it must be like for these guys? enamored as I am with astronomy and space, I think I would make a pretty lousy residential astronaut. I need to be planet-bound. (on the other hand, I wouldn't mind living on another planet.)

I feel like I have more to say about this, but suddenly I am very tired, and my math homework still isn't finished. 1:31 PM

•••    so far my halloween is turning out to be more like christmas, but I'm not complaining... :)

in the oxford english dictionary I found a great word: gorblin. apparently a gorblin is an unfledged bird, and in eighteenth century poems they gaped to the sky. I drew one on my door whiteboard, since it is halloween and a gorblin is a goblin with an r stuck in the middle. it doesn't have much of a sky to gape at, but it's got its beak stretched wide, squawking at my name overhead. I feel secretly connected to it, because although I am not featherless and beady-eyed, I do spend a lot of time gazing heavenward with my mouth slightly agape. we gape like gorblins to the sky. 1:24 PM

•••    happy halloween! I'm wearing my jester hat (and more fun socks, of course), and outer space is apparently wearing a scary skull mask. 8:00 AM

monday, october 30

•••    one of my physics classmates was talking about homework with me this evening, and when he looked at my notebook he said, "whoa, cool, a chick without nice handwriting!" huh. 11:57 PM

•••    it's the perfect halloween eve. the sky is full of swiftly moving clouds, and the moon is just a barelythere sliver fading in and out of eclipse. it's windy and crisp and oddly noisy, with the clattering branches overhead and crackling leaves underfoot. campus is full of swatties wearing glow sticks and neon necklaces, and sometimes all you see in the shadows in between pathlights are the little luminous circles, blue and green and purple like halos that belong to creatures from another realm. I wore mine in my hair.

at dinner there was a haunted house and lots of candy. I had a little package of necco wafers. neccos aren't the world's most scintillating candy, but I love them because there are two necco factories in cambridge, and on fresh spring days you can smell the sugar being pulverized. there's nothing quite like necco air and blue skies. quite the opposite of halloween, but lovely nonetheless. 7:42 PM

•••    I'm no libertarian, but this is excellent, if perhaps more humorous than it was intended to be. 6:45 PM

•••    it's coming out week, though I haven't figured out whether that's a swat thing or a national thing (I remember national coming out day being much earlier in the school year when I was in high school, but maybe not). the walkways are all chalked with pastel rainbows and glbt rights catchphrases. (homophobia is a social disease, love makes a family, closets are for clothes!) buttons and stickers were being distributed at lunch. I already have a pink triangle button somewhere in my room, but I love stickers, so I fished happily through the box until I found ones that I liked. I don't especially like wearing labels, so I'm afraid my stickers don't have much to do with my sexual orientation, but they are fun.

one says, "I'm not in denial." of course, I am in denial (at least I presume I am) about plenty of things, but of course I'm also in denial about being in denial, so I'm not in denial. I could go around and around with that in my head and I think it would take several hours before I got tired of it. ;)

the other is a question mark. if I don't have at least one question mark in my life, I'm not thinking hard enough. there are always question marks.

my professor in math class today: "oooh, look, rectangles, we know how to integrate this! rectangles are easy! just like... no, not going there." insert your own punchline, I guess. 1:12 PM

•••    one of the many wonderful things about astronomy is that even things that seem ordinary, like asteroids, can do something completely unexpected.

I am a big halloweeny geek today, dressed all in blue and green and khaki except for my bright orange socks. the black cats on them are glaring menacingly out at the world. no one had better mess with my socks, hm? 8:55 AM

sunday, october 29

•••    didn't I tell you I looked like the victim of a strange disease? 10:59 PM

•••    last night I was the girl who wore the universe on her arms. now I'm back to being rabi, but I'm still stuck in an alternate reality.

I have my backpack full of physics and math, and an astronomy paper I agreed to look at even though it's really not my job, written by a person whose existence I'm still not entirely confident about. I can't find her in the college directory, and the only evidence I have that she is who she says is the typewritten name at the top of her paper. all of that is still sitting untouched beside me; all I have managed to do since coming to the library is to change my .project file. I don't think anyone ever looks at them, so I don't know why I do it. maybe because I look at them. sometimes I think it would be fun to go to a school where your .plan is an important part of your persona, but probably it would be annoying.

I also have a lab requisition slip in my pocket, but it's been there for a week and so far I haven't found the motivation to go to the health center and let them gush over my terribly fascinating medical history. I keep telling myself it's a bad idea to lose a lot of blood while I'm in the middle of playing rugby, but that's silly because plenty of my teammates who have healthy normal blood donated whole pints last week for the blood drive, and my tests only take five or six tubes. maybe wednesday. never take responsibility today for something you can continue to put off, right? right.

silvershel is slowly going bald. time doesn't want to wait for me to emerge from my alternate universe. 1:18 PM

•••    no matter how late I stay up on the first night of standard time, I always wake up way too early. it makes my head hurt. 9:27 AM

•••    a few half-baked thoughts:

if my feet hurt like this after nearly four straight hours of dancing in my softest soccer shoes, what must the people who wear heels feel like?

no matter how much fruity stuff you mix it with, you just can't make cheap alcohol smell good.

it's amazing how some costumes are vastly improved when the people wearing them are utterly trashed, and others just aren't.

should I be flattered or embarassed or annoyed by idiotic pickup lines?

people are easily impressed by things that glow in the dark. they are positively mesmerised by things that glow in the dark and move around.

and I really, really like to dance. I always forget when I'm not doing it. 2:27 AM