saturday, february 24

•••    my knees are wet.

so I have this religion paper I'm supposed to be writing, but I wasn't feeling even the slightest bit inspired. I had my camera out because I told a friend I would take pictures of my spike! lightbulb for her -- yes, we do strange things at this strange little college of ours. the snow beckoned, so I went, and I took my camera with me.

the streets here are all dimlit with philly-cityglow and streetlamps just too far apart for double shadows, lined with big houses and bigger trees. the ground is covered in treebranch shadows that slide across the snow with the movement of passing headlights. I walked to the end of the block, listening to spanish love songs on the radio, watching the tips of the twigs poke at the cloudy night sky.

I almost missed them. I was busy looking up, but as I turned the corner I almost ran into the mailbox, and so I turned my eyes back to the street. there were three deer standing on the sidewalk, so still I almost thought they weren't real. just two blocks behind them, the neon and noise of the highway whirled in complete contrast to the trees and shadows and snow. I watched, frozen, until one of them ducked its head and I knew it was alive. then I crept forward in slow motion, holding my breath, until I was close enough to take a picture. the flash didn't startle them, but I guess my footsteps did, because in unison they turned and bounded off into the woods.

I walked down the path until I stood where the deer had been, and I looked back and tried to imagine what I must have looked like to them, in my tassel hat with my various battery-powered gadgets, alone under the arch of naked trees. then I got down on my knees and took a picture of our prints, my sneaker tread next to the sharp points of little cloven hooves.
10:10 PM +

•••    I read lots and lots this afternoon, and I was going to share some of the better bits with you, but then I came across this: subtle supplanters of serious sayings -- and I thought it much more worthy.

I am being very academic, though, reading things with titles like "mysticism and philosophical analysis," which in my opinion is a pretentious way of saying "bullshit," so I may have some quotes for you later in any case.

(ps -- here are more sayings, with automatic translations.)
5:20 PM +

•••    my face doesn't like me this morning, so I'm ignoring it. I started clearing off the mess on my desk that's been piling up since the beginning of the semester, because I just couldn't focus on doing work with the threat of a paper avalanche looming in the corner. about halfway down, in between an old bank statement and the final version of my registrar-approved spring course schedule, I found my valentine's day love letters. funny how the littlest things are the most enduring.

last night I planned the rest of my college life. it fits on one page, and it still looked reasonable this morning, so I think I'm happy with it. from here forward it will be all astrophysics and psychology, with the exception of two philosophy courses and one english course. so yeah, I'm choosing depth over breadth, and I'll probably be writing two theses. perhaps I should have known this would happen when I decided on a special major with seventeen credits, but I'm still a little sad that my days of random fluff courses are numbered. maybe I'll change my mind again and spend my senior taking dance and studio art, but probably not. I'm a scientist.

I really am a scientist. how scary is that?

today: poetry, religion paper, physics reading, astro research, further pursuit of cleanliness. I need lists to keep me honest, especially after a morning spent mostly journal-drawing and helping my roommate with her study abroad applications.
11:25 AM +

friday, february 23

•••    oh, someone find me some motivation --

I am going to write in my journal about all the things that are bothering me tonight, so that you don't have to hear about them.

sometime soon I am going to attack my three-page list. but before that I am going to empty a gel pen, because I need to make things cleaner in my head.

fridays shouldn't be so hard.
11:40 PM +

•••    in religion today I made a list of all the things I have to do this weekend, and it took up three pages.

the guy who gave today's astro talk was pretty cool. he had stick spock and stick picard in his diagrams, observing microlensing events in the galactic halo. (he mostly talked about gravitational waves and how we could theoretically detect them if anyone would give us enough money to build lisa, which led to much whispering and note-passing between me and my lab partner and the two astro professors sitting behind me. we have such a fun department. take a look at that lisa thing, by the way. it is enormous -- or it will be, if it ever gets built. for now the gravity physicists are just going to have to make do with ligo and hope that not too many alligators run into the arms. that's not the sort of problem you expect physicists to have to deal with, is it?)

sometimes everything just feels like it exists inside a set of parentheses...

I am trying to drown out the sounds of bedsprings and terminator 2 with collective soul, and it's only sort of working.
10:07 PM +

•••    this, for some reason, is really cool: the brain will focus on a few people singing in unison even in a room full of lots of people talking. I am going to have to incorporate the phrase "neuronal choir" into my working vocabulary.

right now my neuronal choir is singing the march of the killer tomatoes. they're gooey, gushy, squishy mushy, rotten to the core!
8:43 AM +

thursday, february 22

•••    today my heart is made of helium, and it is pulling me along, blissfully hapless and helplessly smiling. eight inches of snow and still it falls, and still there are puddles on the floor that I left two hours ago when I came in, frosted like a sherpa and grinning like an idiot.

did I say I would be working? I meant to say I would be catching snowflakes in my mouth, tackling my rugby teammates and bowling for snow angels, finding the large magellanic cloud on the ceiling of the science building, tumbling across the floor of the field house after a soccer ball, giggling with my two favorite seniors, and dancing in the middle of a dark white field to the music of pattering snowfall.

I'm working now, though. promise. in the dark your brain glows.
10:39 PM +

•••    I was determined to sleep late this morning (late meaning past 7:30, which is when my alarm clock is normally set for, although I'm typically up at least half an hour before that), because lately I've been too tired at night to get any serious work done. I turned my alarm clock off entirely. I pulled the blankets up and buried my face in between my pillows and my penguin so it wouldn't be exposed to the creeping morning light.

at 6:45 am I woke up just in time to see the red burn across the horizon dissolve into a burnished-gold sliver of sun, with no one is really beautiful playing accompaniment in my head. I think it was worth it.

if I'm scarce for the next few weeks, assume it's because I'm working. that's what I should be doing. meanwhile, here's your nasa press release for the day: mystery boulders on mars. the cool thing is they were discovered accidentally by students. hurray for serendipity.
8:05 AM +

wednesday, february 21

•••    chandra finds most distant x-ray cluster -- good old nasa. they had a slew of stupid moments last year, and I know I like to make fun of their dopey press release headers, but when it comes right down to it you have to admit they find some damn cool stuff. yay.
9:10 AM +

•••    so yes, the story:

today I had to go to chester center. I went early, hoping I would be back in time for my morning physics class, caught the bus at the edge of campus, and took it all the way to the end of the line. I felt uncomfortable as soon as I stepped off. I've lived through my share of poverty and I've walked through my share of shady neighborhoods. I think I'm reasonably street smart and reasonably capable of taking care of myself. but standing there, in broad sunny daylight, I had an overwhelming sense that I was neither safe nor even slightly capable of blending in.

I'm not from around here, and my experience with the philadelphia area is pretty much limited to swarthmore, philly proper, and the sundry outlying bits. I don't know if my reading of chester was at all accurate, or if I was just overreacting to something internal projected outwards. the city was dirty, boarded up in patches and wrapped in barbed wire, but it usually takes more than a little grunge and grime to scare me off. I was getting looks from all sides as I walked down the street, but I couldn't blame anyone for doing a double take; I was the only white person under the age of sixty in the vicinity, and I clearly belonged to another world. I felt like a target that wasn't moving fast enough.

so I was feeling a little skittery to begin with. I was at the post office, and all I needed to do was prove my citizenship and my identity. I've done this a billion times; I had the usual more-than-necessary documents: my birth certificate, my passport, my massachusetts state id, and a couple random paper bits to prove my residence in both cambridge and swarthmore.

now. if you've poked around or been around here a while, you know that my name is a bit complicated. I have two first names, one (the first, ironically) of which was added several weeks after I was born. however, I go by the second of those two first names. as far as swarthmore college is concerned, I am rabi steele whitaker, and nothing else. one bank knows me as audrey r. whitaker, another as rabi s. whitaker. it's just the way stuff happens. but herein lies the problem: all my current photo identification cards have my name as just rabi. all my old documents, the ones that prove I was born here and stuff like that, have my name as audrey rabi. to top it off, when my name was changed, it was just crossed out and rewritten on my birth certificate. so my name is rabi audrey rabi-steele whitaker. (the health commisioner was clearly a little confused. who gives their child a hyphenated middle name? not even my parents are that wacky.)

presented with all this mishmash evidence, the guy at the post office decided I was trying to pass myself off as someone I'm not, took my stuff, and called the police. so there I was in this bad-vibey town, having just had all my vital documents confiscated, trying not to panic. it didn't go so well. meanwhile mr. sensitive post office guy was telling me stories about the last few people who tried to get fake id past him; apparently one is in jail and another has been deported. the cop came. he looked at my birth certificate, which fortunately is the original copy with the embossed seal and not any of the duplicates that have been made over the years. he compared the signature on my passport with the signature on my student id with the signature on my state id with the signature I wrote on a blank piece of paper. (I haven't written "audrey" in about six years, so that part almost did look forged.) he scrutinized my photos, the earliest of which dates from may of 92. I think I've looked pretty much like myself throughout my entire life, what with my little nose and chubby cheeks, but maybe that's harder to see if you haven't been there for the transition. he said the comparison wasn't good enough, that the validity of my birth certificate was questionable, that there was no reason he should believe the rabi whitaker who lives in massachusetts is the same person as the audrey rabi whitaker who was apparently born in manhattan. (he actually said that! "apparently" born!) and then he told me that the minimum jail sentence for a fraud conviction was twenty years. good way to finish out my college career, hmm?

I wasn't exactly crying, but I wasn't exactly calm either. and I hate to admit it, but I think my borderline breakdown generated a lot of sympathy, because everyone started treating me much more compassionately. I felt scuzzy for using my girlie tears for sympathy, however inadvertantly, but I was glad for the reprieve. and finally, they decided I was okay, probably not trying to break any laws, and they let me finish filling out my new passport application. (they also said I might get called to court to prove for the passport people that I am myself, which would just be superfun at this point.) throughout the entire ordeal everyone had been calling me audrey, which had me half gone with identity crisis craziness even without the rest of it, and I almost couldn't do it. I filled out my entire full name for the first time since my eighth grade standardized test battery, signed the application "audrey rabi whitaker," stopped crying. then I realized I didn't dare pay for it with a check, because those are from the bank that thinks I'm rabi, not audrey, and I wouldn't even begin to know how to explain that. so I had to go to an atm (one of the helpful post office people warned me to be careful taking my card out, because people get jumped there all the time) to withdraw cash for a money order. signed that "audrey rabi whitaker" as well. meanwhile the post office guy decided he was going to be my friend again and was regaling me with stories of his various trips abroad, including the first time he went back to vietnam after the war and got his head smashed in with an ak-47 because he looked at a girl the wrong way.

I was glad to leave.

as if my nerves weren't shot enough, I also had a lovely conversation with a nurse at the health center about how much fun I am going to have trying to get health insurance once I grow up and move beyond the protective shell of family and school affiliations, with my litany of pre-existing conditions and my history of seeing expensive specialists. how silly is it that the people who need insurance are the ones who don't get it? it makes me worried about humanity.

so there you go. the story of my scary morning. I had a terrific afternoon, playing with fourth graders and agarose gel and bacteria, flying through physics homework by the seat of my pants and getting the right answer anyway, and running around at a gloriously muddy rugby practice. the air was warm and fresh-smelling, the clouds were big, the sunset glowed, and after I finished my fitness sprints I stayed lying facedown, breathing hard and smelling the goodness of the grass and earth.
1:08 AM +

tuesday, february 20

•••    I'm having a scary morning. I almost got arrested for identification fraud, among other things. consider that a teaser; I have a poem to write and it's not going to be about my jailbird alterego. story later.

on the way back from this morning's misadventure I stopped at goodwill, looking for a rugby shirt, but I ended up buying a six dollar dress instead. it's shiny wine-colored red, short and flared, and it will fit me perfectly as soon as I take in the straps and get rid of the ridiculous floppy rosette on the back.

at cvs the combination of grown up things and juvenile things (blue's clues bandaids) in my basket almost made me cry, but the cashier didn't give any of it a second glance.

I haven't bitten my right middle fingernail in almost four days.
11:36 AM +

•••    just look.
7:04 AM +

monday, february 19

•••    this afternoon I saw a really good talk about supersymmetry by one of the physics professor candidates. I would be lying if I said I could wrap my brain completely around the theory, but I love all its constituent parts, and more specifically, words: slepton, squark, superpartner. I couldn't help but hear it with flair and fanfare: superpart-nerrrr! so I was very happy with the whole thing.

it would be entirely in keeping with my perspective on reality if all the fundamental particles were zooming around in superhero costumes zapping evil with their superpowers.

squark!
6:20 PM +

•••    the tunnel that I walk through on my way home from campus was coated in ice tonight. corrugated metal dripping with coldhard shine and trembling under the stress of the train passing overhead, me singing she's always out the window when it comes to making dreams into the fog of my own breath, venus in the east grazing the tips of the trees.

I feel like I am pinned to the universe the way a dead insect is pinned to a specimen card, sharp and careful straight through the abdomen. it doesn't hurt, but I can feel the stuckness. in a billion years someone in another dimension will marvel at the curl of my eyelashes and miss the point entirely.
12:29 AM +

sunday, february 18

•••    it is sunny and spring-looking outside, with only the clouds of vapor trailing after cars to indicate the true temperature. it's always warm in my room, thanks to the curtainless east-facing windows, and there is a huge bouqet of flowers that my roommate's parents sent her sitting behind me, so I'm pretending it's spring anyway.

yesterday was good and perfectly weekendish. I spent the morning at bryn mawr visiting one of the birthday girls, tromping around in mud, eating angelhair pasta and feeling slightly out of place amongst all her new housemate friends, but not minding too much. came back to swat, and was delighted at how much it felt like home, even though my first stop was the library and a stack of religion reading.

last night we watched ghost, because it was on tv, and it was better than homework. I have funny fuzzy memories of ghost that I'm sure are mostly innacurate. I was nine when it came out, and I know my parents went to see it, because I remember my mother describing it to me. but I also have some weird memory of seeing it on a big screen in the park, outside on top of a hill, and I have no idea why. I do know I've seen it before, and I vaguely remember there being some controversy as to whether I was old enough. in my memory of the movie, the clay scene ends up with a lot less clothing and a lot more clay, so maybe I wasn't old enough.

after that I made a rare appearance at a rugby party, where we played word games and sang songs. it's quite the recipe for laryngitis: cheap alcohol, wafting smoke, endless singing, and one classic game that is little more than a shouting match. all in good fun. I've filled my big-group-social quota for the month, I think.

the best part of the day was when I was sitting in the library, and a friend leaned over to me, handed me her headphones, and said "rabi, listen to this."
10:30 AM +