saturday, january 13

•••    since no one can see wj at the moment, and thus no one can criticize me for being banal and insipid and just like all the other 99% crap on the web, I will take this opportunity to describe my entire outfit in painstaking, minute detail.

okay, not really. but you should know that I have pink pigs on my socks. and I tried to drink frosting through a straw, but it didn't work. it was just one of those things I had to try, once the thought had occurred to me. you know? just be glad the thoughts that occur to me are mostly benign and sugary.

also, I wrote a review. it is mostly sarcastic. I used to write a lot of reviews, and they were sarcastic a lot of the time, but then college happened.
11:03 PM +

•••    the mit museum is in a science school, but it's more like an art gallery than anything else. the ai robots are presented with video interviews and information worthy of any world-class museum, and the holograms are accompanied by one of the most lucid explanations I've ever seen of how holography works, but after that it's just art. arthur ganson's engineering sculptures sit in their personal floodlights next to their title-material-year labels. of course, they also have switches and cranks and gears to make them move, but that only serves to make them look as if they dropped out of a victorian child's playroom. and then there are doc edgerton's stroboscopic photographs, lined up along the walls next to antiquated vacuum tube equipment in some sort of cluttered facsimile of the met. even the gallery of mit hacks is arranged in a sort of irreverently formal fashion, with the infamous campus police car occupying the pedastal of honor in the center of the room.

like any good geek institution with limited floorspace, the museum has stuff that can be seen only online. my scattered and assorted affiliations with mit have led me to discover that bits of their collections line the interior corridors, pictures of exploding balloons next to presidential portraits next to abstract holograms next to danger signs on chemistry lab doors. so I think mit might understand the poetry that drives physics in spite of its image. after all, they have alan lightman.
7:04 PM +

•••    I thought I didn't want to write about this, but then I discovered I actually do, or something. maybe I've been listening to the wrongs kinds of music, all confessions and intimacy swirled together in a bowl of cherry pits.

don't think too hard about that one.

anyway. on wednesday, january tenth, I went to the hospital to see one of my doctors. we went over my latest battery of blood tests together and he examined me and played show and tell with my effused knees for the med student of the day. and as I was putting my socks and shoes back on, he said I looked beautiful -- the kind of beautiful that means you are much less sick than you could be. the kind that means you're doing something right, and everything is working, and for once you're getting better instead of worse. it doesn't just look beautiful, it feels beautiful. fourteen pills a day and I am finally growing a normal anatomy. maybe one day they will start letting me donate blood.

january tenth was also the fourth anniversary of my last round of kidney surgery. what with the timing of high school and college, life seems to happen in four year chunks once you hit adolescence, so that probably feels more significant to me than it should. it doesn't matter, feelings are feelings. I was indescribably sick that year. I was still sick on the day they took my tubes out and let me go home. I was still bleeding, in fact. but I wanted to leave the hospital, and I have always been good at pretending not to feel pain. it amazes me to think that everything that happened when I was fifteen was little more than a blip in the otherwise normal lives of so many surrounding people, including most of my family, and it humbles me to think that all the blips in my life could be life-changing experiences for someone else. I think of that every time I go to the hospital and share an elevator with someone who presses the button for the tenth floor, where they keep the inpatients. there are so many children up there, surrounded by plastic and metal and technicolor zoo animals on the wallpaper, living in a different world. maybe four years from now they will be like me, back in this world with only a few scars and prescriptions to show for the adventure, and we will pass each other on the sidewalk and never know what we shared. blip, blip.
3:14 AM +

•••    some weird stuff has been happening here and I'm not sure how to explain it. after three days of completely normal functioning, the blogvoices script started making the page load with errors, at least for me in ie 5. after cutting and pasting and saving and publishing four times, I now have a non-error-causing template that is exactly the same as it was before, as far as I can tell. so I have no idea what the functional problem is here, but please let me know if you see anything weird or broken. after all I can't see what shows up on your end unless you tell me.

and speaking of that, I've gotten several emails or messages in the past few days about my archives. it seems that some people can't read them or see them or something. I have absolutely no idea what the actual problem is, though, because I can see them and load them all fine. I even cleared my cache. so this one has me stumped, at least temporarily. if I can't figure it out I will do a massive republishing of all the archives, which will suck but will be worth it if it produces archives that work for everyone.

anyway. end administrative note. I hate that part of webbing.
12:41 AM +

friday, january 12

•••    yup.

this morning I woke up fourteen times. I counted. the dog's wagging tail bangbangbanged on my door. outside my window the sky was so blue and the treebranches seemed to be reaching for it so desperately that I imagined I could see them elongating under the focus of my gaze. I wonder if taller people feel closer to the sky than I do. sometimes when I look up it all seems to be right there, and if I swung a bucket around and around my head, it would gather up the whole sky into a gleaming blue puddle folded around the wingbeats of escaped birds. when I was lying on my mattress on the floor this morning, I thought it must be ever so much harder for the trees to tolerate the sky, because they have longer, taller, reaching-er fingers and no buckets.

in school today, I let the ferrets walk up and down my arms even though they smelled like dirty llamas. you always learn more when you set aside your aversions. the ferrets were cute. I thought if I dropped one down the stairs it would flip flip flip like a slinky minus sound effects. I didn't drop them, but I did let them skitter on a slippery desk top, just for a moment.

there's a girl in my brother's class named hester. fortunately for her, she's beautiful, charismatic, and outspoken, without being at all mawkish, so the contrast just serves to heighten her more charming qualities. I think only beautiful, charismatic, quirky adults would name their baby hester, so maybe the worry that she would grow up incapable of filling in all the corners of her name is an unnecessary one. then again, that's putting a lot of faith in genetics and parental influence. I think names are given too little credit for their part in our impressions of each other. I have a hard time even naming my plants. I don't know how I could ever come up with a name for a person.
4:41 PM +

•••    isn't it funny how sometimes there are no words to describe the things you want to say, and then other times your brain is overflowing with aesthetically lovely words but you have no idea what to do with them? and both times it feels like you are trying to piece together a puzzle with no picture to guide you, so you can't be entirely sure which time is which. I am going to go talk to third- and fourth-graders now, and maybe they will set me straight.
12:55 PM +

thursday, january 11

•••    today: high school people, on purpose and by coincidence. harvard, school and square. too much television, too many fantasies, leaving me brittle and hollow. lilac-colored fleece, giving in to my springtime color type. soft. heavy eyes, heavy heart; I have failed at something though I'm not sure what. perhaps sleeping. perhaps I don't want to know. hypocrisy licking at my toes like fire. delay between heartbeat and pulsing fingertip, mortality, salty air condensing on my lips. smile, bubble, laugh, how much have I changed since high school? measure it in the wideness of my eyes. evaporated cynicism, a different kind of armor. clutter, brain and floor.

right now there is a beautiful sunrise happening somewhere, and someone's life will be fuller for it.
7:55 PM +

•••    last night as I was falling asleep I felt as if I were on a raft bobbing up and down on the ocean, rolling in synch with my heartbeat. this morning I hear the waves crashing everywhere in my head, and I need to go running to find the missing seagulls.
10:22 AM +

wednesday, january 10

•••    I'm sure you've all heard about the wacky big planets by now. (if not, the short story: there is a thing orbiting a star that is seventeen times more massive than jupiter, though about the same size as previously discovered planets. this is significantly far off the planetary growth charts astronomers had been using up until this point.) my dad told me I should read the story in the paper, but when I did so for some reason the thing I focused on was not the planets, but the name geoffrey marcy. it was about fourteen months ago that I met geoff (although I'm sure he doesn't remember my name or anything -- we were introduced after a talk at upenn, where I was one of very few freshmen in attendance. so I said very little of merit). he shook my hand, answered my dopey questions about the possibilities of detecting earth-sized planets, and chatted for a while with my professor. I had no idea then, as I stood in a slightly dingy auditorium surrounded by aging physicists filing out to the exit music provided by still-running overhead projectors and small-talking colleages, that I would see his name again and again over the next year. and I had no idea that he would eventually be saying, "we thought we understood..."

after all, he has been studying extrasolar planets for about as long as I've been alive, which is starting to feel like a reasonably largeish chunk of time in terms of an entire lifespan. when he was standing in front of us at penn, he didn't seem at all in doubt of the methods or limits or planets he was describing. of course there were unknowns, because the unknowns are so much of what define astronomy, but he was confident in which directions they lay. and now, oops, we don't understand anymore. we don't even know what we're trying to understand. and that's the best part; I didn't have any idea this would happen, and neither did he, and neither did anybody.

you see why I love astronomy?
10:54 PM +

•••    so. I am here, eating knishes with raspberry-applesauce. it sounds weird, but it tastes good. then again, I also like tofu and lots of it, so maybe you shouldn't trust me and my tastebuds.

tonight I saw the emperor's new groove, which was entertaining just for the drawing style. who knew you could put spangly eyelashes on cruella deville and have a terrific new villian? it was funny, and lightweight, and perfect for the situation. not to mention infinitely more intelligent than the fifteen minutes of dude, where's my car, which we snuck into while waiting for the previews to start. it was dumb enough to almost make me want to swear off movies entirely for the rest of my life. I came to my senses in time for disney song and dance and frivolity. I'm not sure I've ever been to the movies on a tuesday night during the school year before; there were maybe three people in every theater. which was nice because then we didn't have to worry about bothering the others watching with our half-stifled laughs and llama commentary.

I feel like I'm writing a second-grade book report. this, then this, then this. the end. ladida with a bow on top. ah, well. they can't all be analytical masterpieces. :P I just polished off an entire avocado, sliced straight out of its skin onto nori-maki crackers. so my mouth has definitely had a good day.
1:28 AM +

tuesday, january 9

•••    apparently I have enough good karma to make it into heaven, although right now I'm just missing purgatory by a smidgen. ever vigilant, yup yup yup. if I'm lucky enough to be reincarnated, I get to be reasonably intelligent with nice teeth. sounds like a pretty good lot in life, all things considered.
(via various non-weblog sources.)
2:41 PM +

•••    there is something vaguely ironic about the opthalmologist, at least for me. they ask their questions, do their tests, tell me what wonderful vision I have -- I zipped through the colorblind numbers, the amsler grid, and the 20/15 line on the eye chart. and then they proceeded to make me thoroughly blind for the next hour by making my pupils as big as marbles and making me stare into bright lights. I still can't quite read what I'm typing, and I certainly can't look outside at the freshly fallen snow. I suppose for many of you, seeing the world as a blur is part of the daily routine of removing corrective lenses, but for me it still comes as quite a shock.

on the other hand, I will never take my vision for granted after the experience of being fine one day and blind the next, or hearing every few months from my rheumatologist about how I could lose it again. without that threat, perhaps I wouldn't be so enthralled with everything I see. life is a trade-off, is it not?

speaking of loss and change -- as I was lying in bed last night, trying unsuccessfully to go to sleep so I could get up and by perky for my doctor this morning, it occurred to me that abrupt change is usually more painful at the time, but gradual change is more painful to look back upon. maybe everyone knows this and it only seemed interesting to me because I was wrapped in darkness and blankets and half-unconsciousness at the time. even positive change, or at least neutral change like growing up, hurts a little in retrospect, because you aren't quite sure what happened and you wonder if some of it happened while you weren't paying attention. there are moments in my life where I can take a magnifying glass to my memory and say, there is where this part of me came into being. snap, like the wizard of oz reaching into his bag and finding courage for the cowardly lion: snap, the universe reached into its bag of circumstances and turned me into a different person. it's the interstices that baffle me, because even when I play them backwards I can't make sense of them. maybe I need to be karyotyped.
12:48 PM +

monday, january 8

•••    wacko press release of the day: nasa's cassini listens to eerie new sounds of space near jupiter. putting aside the fact that they aren't actually sounds, just electromagnetic waves converted to sound waves, which can't propagate in space in the first place -- how on earth does the la times know what a "troop of howler monkeys battling underwater" sounds like? I thought it sounded vaguely like a slowly-pedaled tricycle with a squeaky wheel, but I am clearly lacking imagination.
11:45 PM +

•••    it is so quiet in this house that I can hear the ticking of three clocks, none of which are even in the same room as me, over the sound of the computer humming and the keyboard clicking. perhaps I am being particularly hypersensitive this morning, because I was keenly aware of the swishy sound my socks made going onto my feet, and the nearly inaudible squeak of my fingers running through my wet hair. or perhaps I am merely looking for something to fill the vacuum left by my sleeping animals, who seem to have become strangely nocturnal, and my music, which has just ended.

I've often wondered what the loss of a sense would sense like. if something happened that caused the instantaneous blindness, what would it look like? what would the nanosecond before deafness sound like? if you could somehow lose your sense of taste entirely, what would be the last thing your tastebuds registered? I can't accept the idea that it would just stop, like a record with the needle abruptly lifted off. there must be something special that happens, something like moving at the speed of infinity before crashing to a complete, final, halt.

I never really understood the question about the falling tree in the forest; that is, I always believed it would make all kinds of sounds whether or not anyone could hear them. but now that I am leaving this empty quiet house, I wonder if the tree would not be even louder in the absence of listening ears. I have a feeling the ticking clocks will begin to shout as soon as I lock the door behind me.
11:56 AM +

sunday, january 7

•••    I have an almost uncontrollable urge to write about music, but I am going to wait a day and see if I still have fireants running from my heart to my fingers, and if I do maybe then I will write. but maybe not. I am funny about music.

gangbang moved, so it is alive again. for those of you who missed it. the eagles are losing, which is sad, but I suppose expected. at dinner tonight my father referred to them as my eagles (my eagles, not his) and that sounded very funny, given that my interest in professional sports is mostly as a form of peripheral entertainment.
7:33 PM +

•••    in the killer angels, which we were supposed to read in my eleventh grade lit class but I only skimmed enough to remember quotable passages for the ap test, there is a lovely bit about the passage of time. one of the soldiers is describing how time seems to move not in a flow, but in the movement of infinitely complex little individual bits. they move in slow motion because his sensory perception is so heightened, but at the same time too quickly to really process, because so much is happening: "thick seconds, dropping like jewels" -- I wish I could remember the whole thing, because it was beautiful, but it has been three years since the ap tests and I completely avoided writing about the civil war on any of them.

anyway, right now the sun is melting the snow on the roof, and it is falling down past the windows in huge glistening water droplets. if I focus on one, it seems to fall in slow motion, and I can track its gravity-propelled path through the air to the asphalt below, as if someone had slowed the world's spinning from 45 to 33 rpm. not slow enough to be indistinguishable from normality, but just enough to be different. and then when I zoom out and look at the wide view, there are too many drops for them all to be seen, but just few enough that I think I can watch them all if I try hard enough. but I can't, so they seem to be dripping faster than they really are. and they shine and shine as they carry the upside-down sun with them to a fatal collision with the wet pavement. melting snowdrops, falling like thick seconds.

also. I added comment capabilities to the posts here. for the longest time I really thought I wasn't going to do it, because I have this thing about all the content on my website being mine, but I care more about communicating than I do about being exclusive. and maybe it will be easier to write in the little pop-up box than to send me an email, and maybe the throwaway comments that wouldn't be worthy of a post somewhere else will be worthy of a line in the pop-up box. so I hope if you have anything to say at all, you will say it. the best part of having a website is hearing from other people.
2:15 PM +

•••    did you know that you can raise your iq and your creativity level, have continual happiness and supernatural powers, and maybe even control the weather... just by thinking about it? this is not wishful thinking or new age hocus pocus. right.
2:23 AM +