saturday, december 30

•••    what is this; an inch of slush? no more of this!

my mother is listening to the radio -- I think public radio, because nothing else could be so weird -- and there are folky people singing folky songs about carousels and lost loves, and making onomatopoeic sound effects to go along. bing, bing, bing. twirl twirl flutter flutter don't we all feel plucky and bright while the world drowns outside in grey sop? yesyes.
3:37 PM +

•••    we're waiting.
9:48 AM +

•••    I was looking in windows as I was walking home from harvard square this evening. I try to avoid looking in windows where there are people visible inside, because that makes me feel like I'm watching animals in a zoo or ants in an ant farm or something equally uncomfortable when applied to humans, but I like looking in windows that are just still life scenes from someone's existence.

inside one window was a wall with two very large framed prints. they were exactly the same size, lined up perfectly and only a few inches apart, like those mass-produced pastel paintings that are all one picture of nothing that has been broken up into two or three to give it the illusion of increased substance, like key changes in muzak. these, however, were not one picture -- the left was red and clearly a product of mark rothko, and the right, while not something I recognized specifically, was mostly blue and decidedly french impressionist. as I walked past I thought how utterly incongruous it was, and how strange that someone who clearly had some appreciation for and possibly academic interest in art -- I mean, rothko is not exactly decorative, at least not in any conventional sense -- would intentionally create such aesthetic dissonance. and then I felt competely ridiculous because I told alison and ryan I wasn't an art person, so who am I to decide what is dissonant or not? and where would we be if diaghilev had said something like that to stravinsky? (I am a music person, even though I have never quite figured out the proper spelling of diaghilev. whatever.) I wonder if anyone is a good authority on the difference between ugly dissonance and artistic dissonance.

a few blocks away from that there's a window I've been walking past for years. it's in between my house and my high school, so I used to see it several times a week at least. during all those high school years, the windowsills were full of little plastic disney characters, the cheap little hollow ones that come in happy meals, colored slightly wrong and wrapped in antiseptic-smelling plastic. I imagine most of those toys end up either in dumpsters or in closet-bound boxes that rarely see the light of anything, as ours did. so in a backwards sort of way I was impressed with those silly little statues, because they somehow managed to avoid the fate of all the other plastic jafars and quasimodos and meekos and simbas and characters whose names you forgot because they had no good songs or funny lines. they were realizing the american dream against all odds. or something like that; at least they were beating the odds, and that has to count for something. today I looked up at the window and I saw that all the disney figurines had been replaced with sleek chic carved wooden african animals. there were lions and giraffes and zebras and elephants, and they all looked very attractive and alterna-yuppie-sophisticated, and also just wrong. somehow they managed to be more generic than a bunch of mass-produced nuggets of pop culture, and that worries me.

the most beautiful window had its venetian blinds mostly closed. the room behind it had a perfectly round chinese lantern hanging from the ceiling, and the way its light came through the slits in the blinds made it look like a full harvest moon reflecting off a windblown lake. I wonder if it was just me; if I had taken a snapshot of that entire block, would anyone else have gaped at that one window the way I did? or was it a product of the moment and the sodium in my synapses? I probably don't want to know the answer, but I like to wonder.

sooner or later, everyone comes to cambridge. when it's your turn, look at the windows.
12:00 AM +

friday, december 29

•••    first seven people were shot in boston, now seven more have been shot in philly. what's going on? what I really want to know is why this second shooting seems to be getting so much less coverage, comparatively. is it because it happened in a drug house instead of an internet firm? because the shooter hasn't been identified? because there's no neat and tidy and compelling story, just a bunch of dead bodies in a rundown building? because more of us work in office buildings than sell crack? because this already happened once this week, and they think our attention span can't handle it? what?
10:03 AM +

thursday, december 28

•••    today I feel like the entire internet has turned into a commercial. personal sites, news sites, all of it; brainwash brainwash brainwash. I don't know what's wrong with me. it's very noisy even though for once in my life I am not listening to music. or maybe it is noisy because I'm not listening to music so there's nothing to drown out the background brain activity. yeah, that's it. whoever said silence is golden must have had a very quiet mind.
11:44 PM +

•••    it's funny, and also a little disturbing, how all the high school senior college admissions gossip is much less repugnant once none of it applies to you.
12:11 PM +

•••    the temperature of my fingertips is fifty-eight degrees right now, at least six degrees colder than the surrounding air, and I'm wondering how much longer it will be before the impact of hitting the keyboard makes them shatter and fall between all the letters in little finger-shards. whenever we played with liquid nitrogen in high school science classes, I had the almost uncontrollable urge to dip my hand into the flask so that I could make it freeze and whack it against the edge of the desk. I think I expected it to flash-freeze and kill all the nerves in just the perfect way so that my hand would break into a million pieces without causing me any pain or mess. of course, that's completely unrealistic; we had enough trouble freezing a banana so that it would break cleanly. and when I was in tenth grade and we were making magnets levitate in chemistry, I turned coward the instant my teacher accidentally spilled a slosh of liquid nitrogen over my shoe. I probably set a world record for the shortest deshodding time in history.
1:47 AM +

wednesday, december 27

•••    thoughts from today:

I really must be growing up, because high school students are starting to look young to me. and I get fewer and fewer strange looks when I go to poke around on the classical floor at tower.

sometimes you see status symbols in the strangest places. I live a few blocks away from the polaroid world headquarters, which is sandwiched between a string of garages and gas stations and a cheap hotel. normally it's just a stretch of slightly dirty highway, but today there must have been something important and corporate going on at polaroid, because the little driveway in front of the building was full of polished-to-gleaming luxury cars. I have never seen so many hood ornaments in one place. I half expected the leaping jaguars to leap right off the cars and start fighting.

there must be something at least philosophically wrong with coming home from a cleaning at the dentist's and sucking on a chocolate bar for half an hour.

I think the river is frozen enough that I could crawl across it at certain spots, but I'm not brave (or stupid) enough to try it. in some places the ice is at least six inches thick by my estimate, based on the crystalline vertical lines left by the cracks that stretch like wrinkles across once-smooth skin. but as a physics student I know what water and ice can do to light, so I try not to pay too much attention to my estimates.
7:00 PM +

tuesday, december 26

•••    I took four years of computer science in high school (it wasn't until I got to college and realized I had more programming experience than most of the prospective cs majors that I realized how unusual that was). by the third year, I was the only girl in my class. that year the department purchased a bunch of brand new powermacs to replace the decrepit vax terminals we had been using. perhaps they trusted us too much, or perhaps they merely underestimated us, but we had installed a whole slew of pirated games before they put any restrictions on our user accounts. (if they had known the havoc we had been wreaking from within our vax accounts, I'm sure they would have locked up the whole system before letting us even touch the powermacs. even I, the nice girl who refused to do illegal things for their own sake and was slightly disturbed rather than excited by 2600, worked my way past the forbidden commands so that I could go mudding.) anyway, since I was in the company of nearly a dozen adolescent boys, I quickly got used to the sounds of computer-generated weaponry and death.

I'm a pacifist, and I was in high school too. then, as now, the only sort of physical aggression I took part in was on the athletic fields. (you might say that moving from soccer to rugby is not an especially pacifistic thing to do, but I say you can't make that sort of judgment unless you've played a contact sport yourself. hypocritical, maybe, but I am only human.) I couldn't make myself play the gorey games like doom, and sometimes I couldn't even make myself watch. however, I was competitive as anyone, and before long I found myself sucked into worms tournaments. the sole point of worms is to kill all the worms on the other teams, and it bugged me a little in spite of the cartoony nature of the game and the ridiculous sqeaky sound effects. still, I liked the physics-y aspect of getting the right trajectory and power, and I liked being part of the group. so I kept playing.

my brother got worms armageddon for christmas. I played a few rounds with him last night and was reminded of the lovely irresponsibility of high school (or at least of high school computer science). this morning, while I was trying to find ways to entertain myself, I started playing against the computer. my weapons of choice are grenades and cluster bombs, because they take the most aiming and timing precision. occasionally I resorted to bazookas and handguns and even the occasional minigun. lots of bombs exploded, lots of worms died.

around 11:00 this morning, twelve miles away from here, seven people were shot and killed by a man who was fully armed with a handgun, a semiautomatic shotgun, and an assault rifle. I didn't find out until early afternoon, when I was in the basement looking for clothes and I turned on the television to see breaking news coverage of the apprehended shooter being escorted away and swat teams descending on the office building. a little while later I went back to watch the district attorney give a press conference. he answered most of the questions by saying, "I'm not going to comment on that," but the tension and loss was still palpable, even through the television screen. seven people dead. afterwards I came back upstairs and finished my paused worms game, partially to convince myself it was just a game, but it felt icky.
6:26 PM +

•••    it's raining holidays: happy kwanzaa and boxing day. every year in high school I watched an assembly about kwanzaa, but all I really remember is a bunch of red and green and black candles. all the people I know who celebrate kwanzaa celebrate christmas as well, and I have to say I don't completely understand the logic of running a low-key holiday right up against a gigantic holiday on one side and a frenetic one on the other. but, as I have been informed on occasion, I am just a silly white girl who will never understand kwanzaa anyway. so I try not to worry about it. boxing day, on the other hand, is a great holiday. I don't understand why we don't celebrate it in america. we should.

so I think alison is in boston now. that's very strange for some reason, but I don't know what the reason is. lots of other people are in boston too. me, I'm alone in my house. solitude would be nice were it not so confining; I can't leave because my little brother needs someone to come home to.

I'm listening to ravel's miroirs right now, and I would tell you how beautiful it is, but it would be like trying to draw a picture of a four-dimensional object on a piece of two-dimensional paper. it would come out all flat and incomprehensible.
11:57 AM +

monday, december 25

•••    it's the aftermath that reminds you of your ordinariness in spite of all this talk of angels: picking through cast-aside wrappings, separating the reusable from the recyclable from the discardable, clearing the dirty dishes from the breakfast table, watching the animals lick at the leftover sausage grease. menial tasks in special circumstances.
3:39 PM +

•••    it's the summer of the soul in december...
happy christmas.
12:07 AM +

sunday, december 24

•••    I went to church voluntarily for the first time in almost a decade tonight. my religious experience has an unusual amount of breadth but very much lacks depth, due mostly to my repeated rejection of or at least apathy towards it, and even unitarian universalist churches make me squirm just a little. still, I try to be a quiet atheist, not a kicking and screaming one, so I went with my family to the candlelight christmas eve services. (there are unitarians who are atheists, since it's a creedless religion, but my problem is mostly that I like my spirituality to be a completely solitary pursuit. or a solitary accident, as it more often happens to be.)

the first parish meetinghouse in cambridge is pretty. there's no stained glass or arching ceilings or dark wood; it is all white and the windows are tall and clear. with the room lit only by candles and ambient nighttime city light streaming in from outside, it looked like a place where maybe there could be friendly spirits living in the rafters. I still felt a little bit like a trapped animal when I was surrounded by people and high-backed pews and recited bible verses. I focused on the signer in front, who seemed absolutely delighted with his little asl pantomime of stars and kings and jesus, and that was okay. and then the reverend read poetry, and that was okay too. there were children screaming and whispering and running up and down the aisles, but that was also okay because the reverend had said it was. what I don't understand was the adults who didn't seem to want to shut up and just listen. there was an organ and a cornet; why would you want to make even the slightest noise to cover that up?

I like listening to people sing all together. and no matter what I think about the words to religious hymns and carols, I have yet to meet one without a beautiful melody. and I like watching lights, especially flames. and I like watching babies. there were plenty of all three tonight, so it was by no means a bad experience. still, I am happy to be back home where the light comes from lamps and the music from guster, in my pajamas and wizard hat, without spirits or angels or anything else watching over me.
7:55 PM +

•••    today I am wearing a wizard hat, just because I am a dork. it is tall and pointy, black with silver moons and stars on it. at least I am a cute dork. don't disagree or I'll zap you. :)
3:04 PM +

•••    I honestly don't remember how I got the idea that I wanted a parrot, but when I was nine years old it was just about all I wanted. I did the research with my parents; I promised to be responsible; I pondered names. about a month before my tenth birthday, they took me to a breeder to pick out my hatchling. we took him home in a little cardboard box, and he didn't come out for a long time even after I put the box in his cage and left him alone. he was really ugly, all grey fuzz and black baby beak. I named him soda pop, but I really wanted to call him poppy, so I did. that worked out well because when he grew up he turned out to be one of the most brilliantly colored peachfaced lovebirds I've ever seen in captivity, with a face the color of a red poppy flower.

I was responsible. every day for months and months I worked with poppy, hand-training him so that he would perch on my finger and step from one to another when I told him to. I would stick my tongue out for him to nibble on, and I even let him put his entire head inside my mouth. lovebirds have pointy little parrotbeaks but their kiss is very gentle; soft and warm and delicate, maybe like it would feel to have a butterfly brushing up against your face. as he got holder, poppy got even uglier when his baby down mixed with the first adult feathers, and he looked like some sort of genetic accident. then the baby down was gone and he was beautiful. I still can't quite get over the bright turquoise feathers on his rump.

sometime before he was a year old, he got sick. we couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with him, but all he would do was sit in a corner of his cage, huddled up and with all his feathers puffed out for warmth. my mom hunted for a vet who knew how to deal with african lovebirds. eventually she found an exotic pet vet who had a van instead of an office. we met her in a pet store, and she gave us medicine and a long list of care instructions. so we wrapped his cage in towels and kept a bright lightbulb hanging next to it, and we wrapped him up in a towel to force medicine down his throat every day. he got better. later my mom told me she had expected him to die.

in high school I was busy and preoccupied and less responsible. my mom told me if I didn't start paying more attention to poppy and cleaning his cage more often, we would have to find another home for him. I didn't quite become a model bird owner again, but neither did he leave; we compromised by making him a family bird. I still thought of him as my baby though, even when I was whacking him away from my shoulders or my homework. his paper-shredding instincts (if not his nest-making instincts) are strong, and it's impossible to read a magazine when he's out of the cage, because it will quickly become a pile of beak-perforated strips. lovebirds in the wild store their strips in their tails, so they they can carry lots of nest materials back to the building site, but poppy can barely manage to keep one in his tail for more than thirty seconds before it falls to the tabletop. I'm not sure if that's because he didn't have a good role model to teach him, or if he just has bad nest-building genes, but either way I guess it's pretty lucky that he will never have to fend for himself in the african jungle.

he's loud and screechy some of the time, and when he's out he flies around and makes a mess. so I can't take him to school with me, as much as I would like to. I have reminders, like the never-worn bracelet made in all the colors of his feathers, and the picture my mom drew of poppy flying an airplane. so this morning I have been delighting in watching him hop about the table to chew up george bush's face on the cover of newsweek, eating french onion chip dip out of my father's bowl, exploring the depths of my godmother's strawberry blonde hair, and scuttling about my shoulders, occasionally nibbling on my ear.

no, there wasn't a reason to write any of that; I just had nothing else to write. except this: happy birthday to mallory.
11:46 AM +