saturday, march 3

•••    tonight I really should be working or at least sleeping, but instead I'm going to an acapella concert and then to a formal. at dinner I had to run around dribbling a soccer ball until I found someone to score on, and then I watched various friends, acquaintances, and strangers do similar silly things. one of my friends got a hug from a guy who was blindfolded and covered in shaving cream. another got into a super soaker fight to the tune of the mission impossible theme. there were stripteases and rock climbers and shakespeare scenes and beirut champions and singing reuben sandwiches. and many other messes.

I would explain, but I have to go get dressed up. just imagine alice in wonderland goes to college. see you when I recover from whatever happens with the rest of my weekend.
6:47 PM +

friday, march 2

•••    I'm not feeling cogent enough to write, so I'll show you some pictures.

my glass butterfly from england has a stress fracture in its wings. I know how that feels sometimes. but it can still fly, and I know how that feels too.

this is the bush outside after a snowstorm. I think it looks like something that belongs in a nervous system.
10:25 PM +

•••    one of the things intro astronomy students hear over and over again is that astronomy is different from other sciences, because we can't really set up our own experiments. our lab is the sky, and we can only look at it, not touch it or design it or catalyze it or anything like that.

but maybe someday that will change. I'm not saying I want to spend my days as a research astrophysicist poking around in a windowless lab, but sometimes it would be nice to do things our way instead of the universe's way. one of my professors studies plasma physics, and a senior astro major here studies sodium dynamos with simulated stars. and now at rice university, a bunch of physicists have made a gas cloud that's sort of like a white dwarf.

speaking of astronomy -- after all that, my passport came yesterday with so little fanfare I almost thought it was a joke, and now I am definitely going to ctio in april on an observing run. whee!

also, we have gerbils now. (that has nothing to do with astronomy.) I want to name them thing one and thing two, because they look exactly alike, but my roommate apparently doesn't think that's a good idea, because she's been calling one of them flo. ;)
8:36 AM +

•••    look closely.

7:57 AM +

thursday, march 1

•••    during tonight's soccer game, someone kicked a high-arcing ball, and we all watched it spinning under the rafters. in a single motion that was so fluid you could see it sparking in the subconscious, one of my teammates whipped off his glasses, jumped up up in the air to head the ball straight to my feet, and had his glasses back on again before he hit the ground.

it's moments like that that turn existence into life.
10:59 PM +

•••    sorry for the foray into weblog banality, but I can't go another day without mentioning our kickass women's basketball team. march madness, woo!
6:55 AM +

wednesday, february 28

•••    sleeeeeep.
11:30 PM +

•••    I finished one problem. I'm pretty sure I did it right, but I'm also pretty sure my numbers are wrong. I hate that. five to go. also I still haven't read any of the poems for today's class. blah.

outside it's snowing, the kind of snow that you can only see just under the street lights, because it isn't sticking to anything except the air. it falls so so light and gently, as if it were being caressed by gravity, and if when I look at it I remember that there are murderers and rapists and even just pollutant-mutated frogs out there, it makes me feel like my head is going to split in two.
5:13 AM +

•••    at 9:00 last night I was asleep, when I was supposed to be at wind ensemble rehearsal. now it's four in the morning and I'm doing physics.

sometimes I really don't understand myself at all.
3:56 AM +

tuesday, february 27

•••    you've probably heard about the ancient microbial life on mars by now, but have you thought about modern life on mars? there will be modern life on mars someday, and it will be human. (possibly among other things, because you never know...)
12:00 PM +

•••    happy fat tuesday! strange as it seems now, I was in new orleans for mardi gras last year. it was one of those things I had fun doing once, but I wouldn't want to do again -- I have a feeling the experience would be diminished by a repeat performance.

in my room in cambridge, there's a bag full of about ten pounds of beads. they're all cheap plastic, glitzy and garish, but they look so beautiful all strung together in a row. most of them came from parades; I was much more entertained by jumping and scrambling for the trinkets thrown from floats than I was by trying to coerce drunk men on bourbon street to give me their beads. it was like someone spent three days shaking out a giant pinata on top of our heads.

there are some fun bead stories, though. on the first night after we finished playing in the tournament, which was sunday, all the freshmen went out together. everyone was dressed up to various degrees of skankiness, except me. I was in cargo shorts and a checkered cotton shirt, looking very much as if I belonged on a farm or some other midwestern place, scrubbed clean and sun-wind-burned, with just the beginnings of a black eye to hint at my shady nature.

within a few hours I was the only one not drunk (on the biggest, most disgusting hurricanes I have ever tasted). one of the other frosh caught the eye of a passing group of guys, and they struck up a conversation. everyone else who was with me was laughing and making intoxicated remarks about anything and everything, but I stood there quietly, bemused and observant. one of the guys, who was deep in negotiations about which beads were worth what kind of kiss, gestured at me and asked, "doesn't she talk?" my friend, who was picking through the beads on his chest, said "be nice to rabi. she's special."

and with that, I was the girl who didn't talk. it was great. the guy's friends started gesturing at me and trying to communicate something. I tugged on my friend's arm and invented some spontaneous sign language, which she translated as, "I can hear, I just can't talk." so soon they were telling me stupid jokes and grinning when I smiled. when we started the inevitable trading of where are you from? where do you go to school? questions, one of the guys said he was from new york city. I jumped and clapped and signed "me, too!" and he got all flustered trying to figure out exactly where. (we got as far as manhattan before he gave up.)

eventually our respective friends had finished their kiss and the ensuing bead detanglement, so we turned to go on our way. the guy said, "you're the cutest girl I've kissed all night -- and this girl who doesn't talk, she's cute too." I blushed, hopefully invisibly under the pink of my sunburn, and one of them dropped a string of purple beads around my neck.

later, when I was talking again, we found a guy who was wearing a pair of vicki's secret underwear belonging to one of our teammates on his head.
8:45 AM +

•••    I'm not seeing the witch head -- it looks looks like an angel being born to me.
12:11 AM +

monday, february 26

•••    it is a gorgeous day, the kind of day that has sorbet at lunch and songbirds in the trees and people walking up to me in the library to offer me summer research positions.

soon it is also going to be the kind of day when I spend four contiguous hours doing a take home mathy-physics midterm, but I'm not going to let that bother me.

smile. I am. :)
1:13 PM +

•••    well, it would appear that I'm skipping physics class to finish my religion paper. so much for my responsible streak. anyway, here's something for you to ponder:

poetry, drama -- almost any form of art -- risks being trivialized when its meaning is defined and paraphrased discursively.
(michael sells, in "the mystical language of unsaying.")

personally, I think he's completely wrong, and that only bad art -- such as jokes that need to have their punchlines explained -- loses meaning in description. good art is enhanced by discussion. there is, of course, such a thing as overanalysis, but that is the fault of the interpreters, and has nothing to do with the inherent nature of art itself.

what do you think?
10:09 AM +

•••    oh, oh, oh. the sun in the east through the trees and clouds looks like molten gold, running up against gravity into the cool of february morning. steam from liquid sun forms the clouds, and the trees are bathing in it. I looked out the window and I think my heart paused just enough for me to taste it.

I wonder how different life is for the people who don't see the sunrise every day.
6:54 AM +

•••    yup, my life is out of control.
6:19 AM +

sunday, february 25

•••    the hard rain on my umbrella today sounded like corn kernels in a pan full of oil, and the snow melted like the wicked witch of the west into wisps of fog.

in the grocery store there were bottles of bright blue antifreeze right next to cans of bright pink kool-aid mix, and at first I didn't notice the contrast in toxicity.

I went for a blind walk in the mist, and now when I close my eyes I can still see beams of light reaching through to me, from headlights and widows and street lamps, battling the night with photon swords.

the moisture in the air makes it hurt for me to exist, and I feel eighty years old with hot lead in my joints. the slickness of rain on a curving tree trunk and the way my hair glistens in the mirror as I shed my raincoat makes me five years old, and also immortal.
6:42 PM +