saturday, january 27

•••    so my roommate with the snazzy dvd player borrowed the big lebowski from the library. it's not like I was understanding physics anyway. and while I fear the subtleties of the plot were lost on me, it was about the most visually amusing thing I've seen all year. bowling! ha.

and now I can wear my calmer than you shirt with pride and understanding. yup.
10:07 PM +

•••    the britney spears guide to semiconductor physics. I really have nothing more to say.
7:39 PM +

•••    trick-or-treating skeletons on my socks, holes in my jeans, raspberry on my lips, and physics in my backpack. if you take the derivative of life with respect to time, do you get minutiae or marginalia?
11:19 AM +

•••    ah, weekend.

not that I have time to play. weekends are just forty-eight hours of trying to understand school without the help of knowledgeable adults. mine will be full of differential equations and waves, plus some poetry and vedic hymns for dessert (because really, homework that you get to read is a complete treat after slogging through equations for hours on end). and then of course there is the superbowl, which I will inevitably watch at least part of in spite of myself and the game's slow-as-molasses nature. (rugby has spoiled me.)

after one week of classes, I can safely say that friday is my crazy day. that might be a bit of misnomer, because it implies that I have un-crazy days, but friday is just absurdly full of physics commitments, and bookended as it is by rugby runs and practice, it may turn out to feel rather interminable. now that I'm a sophomore about to declare as an astrophysics major (scary scary!) colloquia attendance is required. that means numerical methods lab is followed by a couple hours of schmoozing with food and sitting in a dark room listening to things that are over my head. here and now I say I will always get enough sleep on thursday nights (right).

yesterday afternoon we saw a talk about the kinetics of protein folding. apparently you can measure such things with lots of lasers and ions. I was a little sad to realize that I understand biology a lot better than I do thermodynamics, but hopefully that will change by the end of the semester. or maybe I am just in the wrong department.

so yeah, homework and work-work, because life is expensive. but first a star trek video, because it is the weekend. and I deserve a little bit of weekend, don't I?
9:09 AM +

friday, january 26

•••    sometimes, when I'm walking home in the moments after sunset, I come to the top of the hill in the center of campus and it's just so crystalline-perfect. the trees and fields stretch out and away, the lamplights float above the landscape like glowing soapbubbles, and the orange haze of philadelphia emanates through the steam from the physical plant, pricked here and there by the brighter points atop the skyscrapers. tonight there was the tiniest stripe of blood-brilliant red outlining the horizon, leftover from the sunset and tying the night up like a present you get for no good reason, except that every day you're alive is a special occasion. and even though I had spent nearly the entire day doing physics of one kind or another, holed up in the classroom and the science library and the computer lab and the classroom again, talking about numbers and functions and structures, I looked at it and I thought, wow. I live in such a fairy world.
7:12 PM +

•••    look how spiffy: microorganisms in the middle of the ocean. (makes you want to go for a nice long swim, doesn't it? ha.) it amazes me that we have this whole gigantic slosh of water covering practically half our planet, and it never before occurred to us that there might be lots of stuff living in the middle of it.

I'm telling you, if there is any possible way for life to exist, it will. it does it here on earth and, in the event that it would make it possible to know the answer, I would literally bet my life on the existence of other life somewhere else in the universe. and I'm not much of a gambler.
8:48 AM +

thursday, january 25

•••    I want to tell you something, but I can't.

I used to be such a night person. I am a night person; I don't know what it is right now that's making me wish so hard for the sun. my roommate is listening to the 1812 overture, which we are playing in wind ensemble this semester, and it is about the saddest thing I've ever heard. I never realized before. you always hear the end and you think, oh what joyous celebratory marchy thing, but in the middle it is all frantic and desperate and mournful. I think. I also think that the end with all those clanging bells and cannons sounds pretty much out of control. it certainly feels out of control when you play it; the woodwind part is six pages of sixteenth notes and accidentals for a three-line payoff of melody. it makes my thumbs hurt. tchaikovsky is overrated, even though his name is fun to say. I think that's the key to being a successful composer (unless you're one of the staples who makes it into music for dummies, in which case it doesn't matter) -- you must have a good, poetic, multi-syllabic name. debussy and sibelius and mendelssohn all get more than their fair share of attention, and then no one ever mentions say, lizst. of course he was extraordinarily unphotogenic so maybe that had something to do with it.

you'll have to forgive my stream of consciousness tonight; it's therapeutic. hugs leave their happy residue, but nine hours is a long time for contemplation and distraction and division. sometimes I think too much. you know what that's like, don't you? it is so dark outside, and all I can see is the illuminated post of the streetlamp. it's ugly, grey and hard in the middle of all that furry black, like a staple in an animal pelt. it doesn't belong but it's sticking there anyway, unnaturalness forcing its way in and in. if the night could bleed, it would be bleeding right now. maybe it is and I just can't tell. maybe that's why I am waiting for sunrise.

when I close my eyes, I can feel my blood, all kept safely inside. it pulses with the same misleadingly dull intensity of an electric fence, marking boundaries and insides and secrets. thump, you're alive.

if I died tonight, would I be a happy phantom? would you?
11:50 PM +

•••    as my dad says, uncle stan is at it again. even if I never make any important astronomical discoveries or get a book published, I'll always have a claim to fame: I'm related to the nutty guy who's been to every single superbowl. (you see where my obsessive athletic genes come from? ha.)
1:09 PM +

•••    you owe your existence to supernovae. all the heavy elements that make up your body and your planet were formed in explosions from dying stars. but now it seems that the galaxy may owe its existence, or at least its structure, to a supernova as well. neat universe we live in, isn't it?
8:25 AM +

wednesday, january 24

•••    I want to kill you:

that's what it says in the little thought bubble over the man's head: I want to kill you. a new skyscraper is being built in downtown boston, and of course there is the standard jungle of metal and plywood and bare lightbulbs surrounding the affair. the walls around the construction site have all these vinyl-printed technicolor people on them, cheerfully engaged in daily tasks like carrying their groceries home or drilling holes in concrete. a few of them have been enhanced with white-out pen. a burly, angular construction worker in bright green overalls and an orange hardhat has a smoking cigar painted on to his lips. this businessman is giving a sidewalk passerby an evil gaze that betrays his homicidal intentions. when I walked by, the juxtaposition between their bright clothing and jaunty postures with his menacing thoughts was striking and funny. but when I framed it in my viewfinder, it became suddenly sinister; the woman who had been practically dancing along seemed to be trying to fend off an intruder, and the man who who had been striding down the sidewalk seemed to be zeroing in on his prey with a frightening intensity.

perception is everything.

(more pictures of boston and cambridge here, at the bottom of the list, if you really want to see them.)
9:28 PM +

•••    I ran for over an hour today, hard, and I didn't get high at all. what is my endurance coming to?
7:09 PM +

•••    I seem to have struck some sort of chord with my blithering last night about transmitting feelings by touch, because I've gotten more responses than I have on anything except my request for a vegan blueberry muffin recipe. ;)

anyway. yes, you are all right, feelings can be transmitted by touch -- but it's only with certain people, and it's still not enough. I want to be able to take you inside my head, you and the stranger on the subway and the people I have all my classes with and everyone in between, and make you experience everything that happens in the little menage a trois between my heart and my mind and my brain.

you can hold someone's hand for an hour and say more than you could in a hundred years of talking, but you can't trade perceptions. I used to pretend there was a little person that lived in my fingertips. she was electric and articulate and seductive, and she knew how to be in love in a way that the rest of me hadn't quite figured out yet. but she could only communicate with people who had complementary hands that fit mine just right, and she made me realize the depth I was missing in everyone.

special connections are glorious things and I wouldn't have them taken away for anything, not even deeper understanding between everyone, but I think one of the sad parts of human nature is how little we understand each others' experiences even though we all feel the same basic emotions. I suppose that makes for an efficient evolutionary model; if we had different emotional responses to everything they would be neither useful nor practical, and our brains would have imploded by now. but it makes us sadly opaque to one another. on bad days I'm glad of that, and I don't think we could handle knowing so much about each other; better to be confused than dead from the overwhelming enormity of human consciousness. but on other days...

I want to know what I'm missing. and when I look at my aloe plant, at its faintly glowing spots and its little spikes poking up timidly along the edges, and the gentle gentle curve right at the tip of its thickest blade that makes it look as if it's trying to lap up all the flyaway bits of the world, I want to let you know what you're missing. it tingles and exhilarates and awes and calms and comforts me, and of course a thousand other things that can only be described as indescribable, and I want to share it.

I am terrific at looking everywhere but into people's eyes (and consequently I know more about the shape of everyone's eyelashes than anyone should). sharing a gaze scares me because it makes me begin to sense how much of each other we are missing, and also because it is so much harder to keep up a mask of pretense. I am afraid of revealing parts of myself because it makes me vulnerable, and I am afraid of failing to understand people because it makes us vulnerable. so it is quite the little duel. but if I could just take one little moment and trade it with one of your little moments, it would be like seeing everything anew, and maybe we would be a tiny bit less alone.

algernonette is basking in the early sunlight, and the tiniest new spikes on the ends of its youngest growth, which are slender as a mouse's whisker but stiffer than tin toy soldiers, are reaching out to explore the universe.
8:47 AM +

•••    there is no feeling quite like the moment you overcome your shyness and get rewarded for your bravery. I know my friends like me, but sometimes that doesn't translate into thinking they'll be happy to see me. I'm notorious for my inability to initiate contact with people. it's kind of sad, really. but tonight instead of coming straight home after wind ensemble, I took a detour and knocked on someone's door. I got smiles and chocolate and warm fuzzies for my trouble. did you know friends are the most amazing invention ever? I always forget in the interstices between connections.

lately I feel like I can do anything at all if I keep smiling. I sang out loud all the way back to my room. it's moments like that, when you know your spirit is in the right place, that make you believe in the world. I imagine if I could see the right wavelengths, my reflection in the mirror would have a glowing spot right around my heart, a la e.t., and my eyes really would be twinkling. of course they never are, but I imagine. I imagine lots of things; today in rehearsal I imagined there were little monkeys playing in the organ pipes. it was a regular miniature-monkey jungle gym.

I wish we could transmit feelings by touch. words have enough appeal of their own that I think they would live on, and then we woulnd't have to worry about their inadequacies so much. I wish I could make you feel what the world does to me sometimes.

the shadows in my room are all soft and luminous at the same time, like the fuzzy edges of a baby chick in sunlight. sort of there, sort of not. I am reading about sacred space. according to eliade, religious people can percieve differences in space, because some places are more spiritually significant or whatever, and non-religious people can't because the world is all the same to them. at first I thought that wasn't true, because I am about as unreligious as they come and I percieve all kinds of specialness in time and space. but then I realized it was right; my world is homogenous. I don't have thresholds between the sacred spaces and the profane spaces because everything is sacred, or maybe everything is profane but still unrelentingly wondrous.

maybe college has turned me into a complete fluffball; I have the hardest time hanging onto my old cloak of cynicism that now just barely reaches around my shoulders. but it was heavy, and if I don't drop the heavy things I'll never learn to fly.
1:06 AM +

tuesday, january 23

•••    "...that's why physics is an easy subject, unlike say sociology. you put three different personalities in a room, you have no idea what's going to happen. you put three waves in a room and you can just add them up!" -- my thermodynamics professor in (our first) class this morning

scientists are always saying dopey things like that without bothering to acknowledge that no one expects you to be able to say for certain what three people in a room are going to do, whereas knowing how to describe the interactions of particles and forces is a necessary skill for anyone who claims to be a physicist. and that, in my experience, makes physics a hard subject. I've never actually studied sociology, but in general I have a much tougher time with natural sciences than anything else. that's what makes it so worthwhile though. people don't seem to quite get that; I love physics not because it is easy or clear to me, but because it is so amazing when I work it out and suddenly understand how I can describe the motion of waves in a room, or molecules in a star, or even a yo-yo on a string.

it also makes me appreciate the mysteries more. if it takes me two semesters of studying and an infinity of headache and revelations just to understand how one little molecule works, imagine what must happen to start a war or to give me goosebumps when I listen to threnody in x. or to create a galaxy, or a universe, or a thought.
5:05 PM +

•••    I had kidney surgery when I was two years old. I remember a lot about it: the iv embedded in my arm; the gas mask that I got to take home with me; the stickywickies that my friends brought as a present; the tubes coming out of my side; the day I stood in the sunny garden outside, holding on to my stuffed koala and wanting to go home. I know all those memories are right because I have objects or reliable parents for corroboration, and that's sort of a comfort, being sure that I remember the important parts of my life properly. I worry about that, you know. there is one bit of that memory has always frustrated me because I am the only person who was there to see it, so I have no way of knowing whether I imagined it. I remember the recovery room had orange walls. I remember waking up and seeing them, and I have always always told my parents that, or really anyone else who for some reason ended up hearing the kidney saga, and always with great conviction: the recovery room had orange walls.

still, I've always harbored this little secret bit of doubt in the back of my mind. why on earth would a recovery room have orange walls, anyway? I remember the rest of that hospital as being mostly green and white, although to be honest I wasn't cognizant of much except the rails on my bed when it came to my immediate surroundings. my parents never saw me there, and I don't even know which nurse it was who brought me out one step closer to the real world. besides, I had just been anaesthetized and kept drugged and unconscious for hours.

yesterday afternoon I walked through the snow and dirt to the bookstore to peruse the three-dollar calendar clearance racks. I have no instinctive sense of time in either direction, so I go crazy if I can't see it displayed neatly for me on my walls and clocks and planners. (that may seem like an odd thing to say, considering I don't own a watch, but I almost never find myself somewhere without a timekeeper of some kind.) I bought a madeline calendar, which marks the first time in about five years that my calendar has had absolutely nothing to do with space or science fiction. I have a certain affinity for madeline, and in fact when I was little I identified with her because she too had endured a hospital stay and gotten a scar as a souvenir.

this morning as I was reading my email I glanced up at it. the january picture is a nighttime scene with madeline looking out a window onto a lamp-lit paris street. it is mostly greeny-grey and yellow, and the only real spot of color is redheaded madeline's hair. the sunlight was hitting it in a just-perfect way, and her hair appeared the exact shade of orange that I remember from the hospital walls. my sense of recognition was startlingly sudden and strong, and I think I am sure now. the recovery room had orange walls.
9:35 AM +

•••    well look at where my little dragon is! I still have mixed feelings about the bloggies, since it seems to be the same weblogs over and over, but it's pretty neat seeing my own site there. I hope we get an unedited list of all the nominees at some point, though I imagine that would be a lot of work to put together. anyway, I voted. thanks to everyone who nominated me; it really was a happy surprise to find all those bloggie-referrals in my log this morning. whee!
8:40 AM +

monday, january 22

•••    lest you think from my last few days' posts that I watch too much television, let me assure you that I don't. (most television is much less entertaining than music.) however, I was just directed to a website that makes me want to watch infomercials, because it makes them seem so amusing! what would we do without the internet?
10:39 PM +

•••    so on ally mcbeal tonight, which my roommate is watching now and I am paying occasional attention to, richard asked ally why she puts on makeup every day. lipstick, rogue, blush, it can't all be for the benefit of your intellect: that was the general idea, anyway.

it would be a less troubling question if ally's makeup were not so frightening. or maybe it's just her mouth that's frightening. am I the only one who thinks so?

also, that so-called puffy woman is pretty. she has better makeup than most of the other people in the courtoom, too. not that any of that matters of course. :P
9:48 PM +

•••    here's a brilliant statement: amazon roads may lead to peril for rainforest -- you think? if someone were planning to take a human being and slice little pieces out of it, no one would be saying it "may lead to peril." they would be saying, "hey! what are you, nuts? you're going to kill that human!" but somehow just about everyone seems happy to overlook the fact that, hey! we're going to kill that rainforest! which is a point of view I really don't understand.

I do understand the need for economic growth and sustenance, but I don't know how humans are going to keep surviving with such a spectacularly shortsighted focus. would you trade prosperity today for death in ten years, or would you rather take your chances with a lifelong struggle? I'm trying really hard not to make a road of life metaphor, but I will say I'd rather slog through some muck than walk along a beautiful path that ends in a plunge off a cliff.
9:57 AM +

•••    well! after seeing fiona's new site, nothing but nothing is going to turn this into a bad day. whee!
8:07 AM +

•••    the sun is doing some really weird and cool in my window, and I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what because I can't look directly at it for more than about a microsecond. it looks like there are two suns side by side. and when I move my head around, they change their relative positions. there's the bright sun behind the trees, which I assume is the real thing, and next to that there's a little glowing dot that is the exact size the sun would be if it didn't have all that flaring glare around it. the dot is criss-crossed with little black lines that look like treebranches, so I think what's happening is the reflection of the sun is somehow being trapped inside my windowpane, complete with the obsctructed bits from the treebranches that are between me and the real sun. when I move my head back and forth, the reflected sun sort of orbits around the real sun, which makes me pretty sure the reflected sun is actually physically closer to me somehow, and not just an artifact. I can actually make the little reflection spot sit on top of the telephone pole outside, complete with its branch shadows, which don't change in shape or pattern no matter how I look at it.

another neat thing I just noticed is that you can make the sun green if you look straight back at it before the previous afterimage has faded. this is probably pretty good evidence that I'm damaging my eyes, so I'm going to stop now, but it looks really neat with as a little green circle surrounded by flaming bright lightrays.
8:03 AM +

sunday, january 21

•••    yeah, I still have no idea what that little man on the xfiles was up to.
10:09 PM +

•••    books!

the good
books are such nice, substantial things. say what you will about the convenience of ebooks and lecture notes on the internet; nothing can compare to having an object with foldable, flippable pages waiting to be marked up in technicolor-pen notes, or just to be savored.

my religion class has fourteen books. I'd say at least ten of them look interesting, enough so that I would pick them up out of curiosity if someone were to give me the time to read as many books as I wished. one of them is a lovely little copy of the tao te ching, in a much more poetic form than I've ever seen. (sobering how much translation matters, isn't it?) it also has the whole thing written in chinese, illustrated with ink paintings and calligraphy. I'm having a good time simply looking at it; hopefully I won't have to overanalyze it too much. recognize beauty and ugliness is born.

another religion book, in praise of krishna, is full of names I recognize from the songs my mother used to sing to me. I rather doubt they are any of the same songs, though I have no way to tell because these are in english and those were in hindi. being sadly unilingual, and especially clueless about eastern languages, I can't make any sort of meaningful comparison. still, it was a nice surprise, seeing familiar words in an unfamiliar context.

I was worried that thermodynamics was going to be to chemistryish, chem being the only natural science I am perfectly happy never to study again, but my quantum physics book looks not only sufficiently physicsy but also comprehensible, which is a big plus. we like things we can understand. besides, quantum dynamics was one of the few bits of chemistry I got really excited about (you have to admit it is really neat when you can describe the state of matter right down to its leptons and quarks).

I have a for-credit excuse to read and write poetry. amazing.

the bad
my other physics books are terrifying. according to this editorial review, this one is "structured so that even those who are weak in math can master it." I expect it to live up to that statement, and I expect it to start living up to it on the very first page (which I unfortunately have to read tonight, since we're supposed to have the first chapter done for tomorrow's class).

I do not like history, I have deliberately avoided taking any history classes since I finished with ap us three years ago, and I am not pleased that I now have to read about the history of anything, even if that anything is religion in china. I wish I knew what my problem with history is, because it's one of those things that's really fascinating until you bring it into the classroom, when it turns dry and lifeless and crumbly.

besides, I am never going to read all this stuff in one semester. or if I do, I won't sleep at all. and I miss having astronomy textbooks on my currently-in-use shelf.

the ugly
four hundred seventeen dollars and fifty two cents, for eighteen books, almost half of which are plastered with yellow used-book stickers. I realize that comes out to a not-so-bad average cost, and I know exorbitant prices are a fact of academic life, but it still hurts. I have two jobs this semester, and it's pretty frustrating to realize that basically all of the money I earn before midterms will go towards replenishing the textbook-pile-sized hole in my bank account.

also, my math handbook really is ugly. it looks like an sat prep book. and it has lots of elliptic functions, which makes me further un-enamored of it. sigh.

but
I am still looking forward to going to class tomorrow. I am ready to be in school again. let's go, hm?
2:47 PM +

•••    it would seem that all I needed to do to get back into my up-before-eight sleep routine was come back to my bed. it's so strange waking up to see the sunrise instead of trying race into sleep before it takes the darkness away. the sun is burning through the clouds now, spreading its glow like a virus across the sky.

there is a substantial amount of snow -- not a lot, but enough -- and it is holding on to everything from all sides, as if to say I am making this world mine. there is something similar about the sun and the snow outside and the warm sticky oatmeal inside, but I'm not quite sure what. across the street, my comrades in suburbia are snowblowing their driveway clear. the plume of flying snow is huge and arcing right up in front of the sun, lighting up like a mouthful of gin shot over an open flame. it's one of those things that is so gorgeous and so unnatural that all you can do is stare and try not to blink.
8:19 AM +

•••    every time it snows I feel like I'm watching the world die in reverse. (that is not the same thing as watching it being born; springtime is birth.) the snow comes and takes away all the ugly tired deadness until it's just clean and peaceful. maybe that's more like watching the world enter the afterlife, but my grip on metaphysics isn't that strong.

anyway, it's pretty. I am trying to play the recorder part from labour of love, and that's pretty too, despite my ineptitude. tonight I like my prison of circumstance.
12:01 AM +