saturday, december 9

•••    so. I am taking a break, because after this weekend it will be the end of the semester and finals and papers and stress and I will not have time to think about anything except myself and my work. and before then I need to gain a little distance and perspective.

no school, no internet, no blogging, no swarthmore. just for a little while, and then I'll be back on sunday. because prevention is the best medicine, and because sometimes you have to get your priorities deliberately wrong in order to get them right.
12:20 AM +

friday, december 8

•••    sometimes panic gets in your bloodstream like caffeine. you can feel the level rising but you think it's not really affecting you until you stop to take a breath and realize you can see your pulse in your fingertips.

you can't tell from my relative web quietness today, but I'm overflowing with nervous energy. usually running helps me leave it behind, but tonight it stayed with me even after I left all my books and work on a pile on my bed and exchanged my school clothes for sweats and sneakers, even after I sprinted away from my dorm in the direction opposite school and civilization. burning in my lungs from ambient woodsmoke, gibbous moon watching me from behind the shifting clouds, the shadow of my braid whippeting behind me, dim light reflecting off the bare treetrunks next to the trail; I became so desperate for banality that I left the woods to run through stripmall parking lots. as I walked out of cvs with a new bottle of unneeded shampoo I realized I had left my reflective jacket and its exaggerated sense of security in my closet.

it turned out I was being chased only by myself, but my heart is still pounding.
7:32 PM +

•••    this morning we suspended liquid oxygen between two magnets and sent iron rings flying five feet up in the air with the flick of a switch. sometimes physics makes me feel very powerful.

then I went to the library and worked some more on understanding lorentzian wormholes. sometimes physics makes me feel very stupid. but I think the people watching me were impressed.

dinner tonight: oranges and lovely dark chocolate from the mail. umm.
5:34 PM +

thursday, december 7

•••    in class tonight our professor told us that he thought evolutionary psychology was the key to creating a better society. I think it's a great way to attempt to justify cruel, selfish, aggressive, competitive behavior. so much for all my idealism.
11:53 PM +

•••    I got a request for this, and since I'm in a bit of a showoffy mood, well...

that would be moi, the ex-yogurt-eater. I remember virtually nothing from my modeling days, but I do have the vaguest recollection of this, the very last shoot I ever did. it's probably ninety percent retroactive memory formulated from my mother's stories about it and years of seeing myself on yellowing magazine pages inside dusty frames. still, I remember bright light, and sheer fabric, and the cup that didn't seem to really have yogurt in it.

what I don't remember is that they had to chop the silly little playsuit in half to make it possible for me to wear it. I think they had originally been looking for a younger kid, but the photographer liked me. so there was me the toddler, and the playsuit, which was designed for kids so young it still had slippery fabric coverings on the feet. they hid the big hole in the middle under the magazine. and you thought the three-quarter sleeves were a fashion statement.

I really loved yogurt until I stopped eating it. when I was little, getting individual yogurt cups like the ones in my ad was a really big treat. my little sister and I used to sit in the back of our family's hatchback car after we went grocery shopping, having our yogurt picnics and giggling about how temporarily spoiled we were.

I have this picture tacked up on the wall outside my room. it has bright orange marker across the top: "I dont eat yogurt anymore. :)" I'm still spoiled, though.
5:38 PM +

•••    we talked about string theory in astro today. I am still confused, but I think all the rest of the physicists are a little confused too, so it's okay.

try to picture this:
just after the big bang, the universe was a wonderfully unified conglomerate of forces and ten (or twenty six) dimensions.
very very soon following that, a particle quantum-tunneled its way into existence, destabilized everything (and I do mean everything -- neat how you can be all-powerful when all the known stuff everwhere fits into something the size of a proton, hm?) and sent all the dimensions above time compactifying down to the size of the planck-length.
fast forward: inflation, nuclei, atoms, molecules, galaxies, solar system, earth, life, us. so now here we are in our lovely three-space-plus-time world, completely unaware that every point in the surrounding spacetime is occupied by higher dimensions too tiny for us to percieve.

the nice thing about theoretical physics is that you don't feel too stupid for not being able to understand it, because it's all a bunch of mathematical constructs anyway. unlike, say, classical physics, where you can see everything happening and then you feel thoroughly incompetent for not being able to describe it. anyway after this, explaining wormholes should be a breeze. I hope. :)
12:29 PM +

•••    snow!
7:19 AM +

wednesday, december 6

•••    my last astro problem set for the semester is finished, stapled, and tucked safely inside my folder.

my laundry is whumming its way to dryness down in the basement.

my fingers smell of freshly broken orange peel, and my lips are citrus-tingly.

is it me, or do I simply not deserve this moment?
11:47 PM +

•••    one of the things I love about the end of the semester is that we finally get to the point where my natural science professors can talk about the things they're researching. in physics today we were talking about dielectrics, and as soon as the prof started in on electric susceptibility, he got this silly grin on his face and was practically bouncing across the floor in front of the blackboard. later in math, the professor got all excited drawing double torii and other random shapes (he's obsessed with geometry, which I will never ever understand). I usually enjoy physics lectures and I don't especially mind math lectures, but there's something special about the last few classes. it's just really fun watching people talk about stuff that fascinates them, even if it doesn't especially fascinate you. I love the way their eyes get all sparkly.

I think that's one of the reasons why my astro class is so great -- my professor seems to be fascinated by everything. and so am I, so it works out nicely. tomorrow we get to learn about superstring theory.

I am a geeky geeky geek. :)
1:10 PM +

•••    I was very proud of myself last night because I had finished all of my work due today before I got home, for I think what may have been the very first time all semester. I was going to take a quick break for email and then get a headstart on my astro homework that's due thursday.

I was tired, though, so I flopped down on my bed to read through the midterm I got back today. I was asleep within ten minutes. I spent the rest of the evening drifting in and out of consciousness, refusing to actually go to bed because that would have meant admitting I really wasn't going to do any more work. I tried to convince myself that I was "thinking" about wormholes, but even in my stupified state I wasn't that gullible. on one of the occasions when I was semiconscious, I complained to my roommate that I was being pathologically unproductive, and she reminded me that nearly every day for the past three months I have been awake when she goes to bed and gone when she gets up, so I was probably long overdue for catching up on sleep.

so I floated back and forth between daydream and nightdream states for a little while, letting my imagination and my subconscious battle for control of my brain. by that point it was such utter mush that I'm not sure why they wanted it.

I finally woke up enough to get under my blanket around five thirty in the morning, just as the sky outside was turning the blackness corner. it's always darkest just before dawn and all that nonsense. then I slept straight through until seven twenty, which is absurdly late for me.

I got dressed to go running, still fuzzyheaded with the foggy cloak of undissolved dreams. outside our door I found two of my roommate's shoes, decorated in ribbons and filled with candy. the whiteboard had a note: "the vegan shoe is rabi's." I couldn't fathom why there was a vegan shoe waiting for me until I looked up and down and saw similarly decorated shoes outside the rest of the doors, and I remembered about st. nicholas day.

it is also a concert day, and with my psychotically busy schedule I have no time to change into concert clothes during the day. so I am all dressed up in my long black skirt and snowflake sweater, with bright turquoise tights hidden under my black concert socks for warmth. and there has become something magical about this frostycold dressed-up sugary morning, as if it's just another dream, only a good one for once.
9:37 AM +

tuesday, december 5

•••    sometimes astronomy gets me in trouble.

in math, for instance, spherical coordinates have phi-values running from zero to pi. in astronomy they go from negative half-pi to positive half-pi, so that zero corresponds with the horizon instead of the zenith. anyway I didn't figure that out until after my math exam.

and now it turns out that external shocks in economics have nothing to do with gamma rays.

when you get too specialized, your vocabulary goes all narrow and useless even as its volume grows. academia is sad sad sad sometimes.
10:10 PM +

•••    and you thought it was just a bunch of red dust: mars is now the land of lakes. or it was, maybe four billion years ago. funny how we come full circle (or maybe an outward spiral, in this case): for years everyone thought mars was full of artificially constructed canals, thanks to percival lowell; then we figured out how to take real pictures and concluded that mars was some sort of desert wasteland; then we realized there was subterranean water and we found channels that looked like they had been formed by water, but we were still all flustered from that erroneous canal thing so we decided they had been formed by carbon dioxide jets; now here we are again looking at lakebeds and riverbeds and thinking maybe mars was a lot like earth, once upon a time.

I say "we" as if I were some sort of mars exploration pioneer. yeah. I'll be the figurehead on the first mars colony ship. but I take no responsibility for last year's lander doublewhammy disaster. convenient huh?

dance the boogie, dance the boogie...
8:39 AM +

•••    sit-ins, petitions, secret votes, news trucks, more special news editions, and meetings, meetings, meetings; this place is completely out of control. we are all over the radio, the local news, and now the new york times. what is happening to my school?
8:03 AM +

•••    it is cold cold cold

so why isn't it snowing?

my love affair with snow is still rapturously pure, I think because I never got a driver's license. I don't have to worry about treacherous roads or slow traffic or ice-coated windsheilds. I don't have to worry about my car getting buried by the snowplow. I have to worry only about losing my fingers or toes or noes to frostbite from staying too long in the nighttime snow, watching what the moonlight turn fields pockmarked from past snowball fights into shadowy, cratered alien landscapes. and from lying facedown to feel silence.

it had better snow soon, somewhere in one of the places I am going to be this winter. until then, I will content myself with the glittery frost on the grass and the jack-frosted ice crystals fractalling across the cars in the parking lot.
12:38 AM +

monday, december 4

•••    six hours of physics lab. I have come to like eeinem in a rather abstract, detached sort of way (meaning I like it when I don't have to do any horrible theoretical calculations), and lab is fun considering how much work it is. we rigged up our toys so that they send out electric sparks in time with the bass from our music, we always have food, and we've found that the best way to deal with impossibly convoluted and difficult circuit problems is to laugh about them. and because I'm a goon, by the time my analysis is done I've usually spent at least a few minutes standing on a chair singing.

six hours, however, is too much. under any circumstances. so I am not sorry to be done with my last ever eeinem lab.

next semester: thermodynamics. if we're lucky I won't blow anything up.
7:34 PM +

•••    one of the things that drives me completely nuts about football is that it always gets all the attention.

then again, I'm an unrecruited athlete, so my opinion must not count. and I play an unamerican sport, so no one wants to read about it. ;)

I suppose none of you especially care about this, but I do, so too bad.
8:17 AM +

sunday, december 3

•••    so I said a lot happened last night. and it did. I was on the news, on three different stations. we all were.

last february the college formed some random committee to evaluate the state of athletics and its impact on the college. there was always the question of whether they were considering actually cutting some of the programs from the athletic department, but it was never made explicit. and of course at a school like this, there is always the question of how much recruiting hurts our academic admissions standards, and how fair it is. so this semester all the varsity athletes have been wondering how much longer their sport was going to last.

yesterday evening the college president officially announced that the board of directors, together with the athletic review committee, had decided to cut three programs: football, wrestling, badminton. whammo. the football team mobilized. someone found out that the decision hadn't been made by consensus, which is the very first time that has ever happened in this history of this quaker-founded school. (according to the president, it was some sort of mutant consensus because they all voted to decide by majority, but still.) someone else called the media. I donated paper and a pen. at ten pm about two hundred of us gathered outside in the very very cold air with candles and frosty breath to sign petitions and listen while a bunch of hurt and angry people spoke about the decision. the football coach cried. it was a little unnerving. there were microphones and cameras and floodlights everywhere.

today there was a not-entirely-accurate special edition of the college newspaper being distributed, rumors flying back and forth across the dining hall like bats on speed, and a meeting that was supposed to be between the president and the affected athletes but ended up being attended by over a thousand students (that's well more than half our entire population, by the way), more local news crews, and reporters from the new york times and sixty minutes. people were nuts. the president was unhelpful and unfriendly. the parents and alumni who had come to protest were disrespectful. in the end, the president walked out flanked by security guards while a senior got up on the mic and suggested that he resign. cheers all around.

so that's the state of campus life right now. we all know beaurocracy is corrupt by nature, but I think we believed in the sanctity of quaker values at this school, which in my experience have been upheld as can best be expected. this all feels very arbitrary. the best real reason anyone can seem to come up with for the removal of the badminton team from the varsity program (they're being made a club sport) is that they needed to get rid of an exclusively women's sport to justify getting rid of the all-male football team. stupid stupid. our badminton team is good. they go to nationals every year.

I have extremely mixed feelings about the football team at swarthmore, and about recruiting in general. regardless, none of this seems fair. and I'm frustrated that my school is being shaken up by a bunch of board members who decided to toss the consensus ideal out the window once it became a little too inconvenient.
10:52 PM +

•••    a lot of things happened tonight. I think I lack the wherewithal to talk about all of them.

but. there was a banquet, the rugby banquet which is always a strange mixture of formal sophistication and college party drunkenness and bawdy rugby culture. I wore black and turquoise, tulle and ribbons and my corduroy chinese shoes, hair braided into two buns atop my head, and I was very degas. three hundred dollars worth of alcohol. I drank sparkling white wine and lots of cranberry juice but not a drop of vodka. we made ritual fun of each other ("rabi! stop bleeding!") and hugged each other about a hundred times, and then we danced. I stayed until the tired-party smell of spilled alcohol and stale smoke drove me out into the night.

and then I came home. it was frigid cold and the stars were out shining in that special way that they can only do through freezing air.

I am tired.
3:25 AM +