saturday, march 10

•••    life is not supposed to be this much fun, I think. but for now, I won't argue...

this morning we had a rugby game against the college of new jersey. we didn't really know anything about them, and since they're a division three team, I think some people weren't taking them terribly seriously. during warmups, though, they looked good and we were dropping balls all over the place. it was bittercold, the ground was scratchy and muddy at the same time, and I wanted to be asleep. I thought I might have forgotten how to play fullback.

but then the game started, the sun came out, and I remembered that I am a pretty damn good rugby player on an amazing team. and it was just the best, just like it always is, because hey, it's rugby. near the end of the first half I got grub-kicked in the hand as I was trying to pick the ball up, so I finished the game and played the entire next one with fingers buddy-taped and the back of my hand mummified under padding and bandages. it made me feel tough. (now my hand is purple.)

also, we won. that was nice. afterwards we had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because now that we're on break we can't get the school to feed us, and we sang songs. tcnj turned out to be a really nice team, and they stayed and partied for a while while they gushed over how beautiful our campus is. it really is. I forget sometimes.

after I decided I felt too worn out from sun and wind and pain and watching other people drink, I went to take care of the rabbit I'm petsitting this week. we danced around the room together, (sunburned)cheek-to-(furrywhite)cheek, and I gave her a tummy rub. I had rabbits of my own, once, a long time ago. then I came home and washed all the dirt out of the cuts on my legs, and I danced around some more, by myself this time, because it's break! and I have friends and rugby and a working computer and astronomy and my cup is so far past runneth overing that I think the floor is flooded.

tonight has been full of collegey food, the kind you can cook with nothing but boiling water, toy story two on dvd, and trashy magazines, because I am on break and I earned it, one hundred percent. dance with me?
11:31 PM +

•••    tell the mermaid I am a goddess! a computer goddess! I fixed it I fixed it I fixed it!!!!

I still am not really sure what went wrong. a complete and thorough dissection and reconnection of everything restored keyboard function, but after that the network card seemed to be trying to read some corrupted system files, or something. I don't know. I reinstalled the drivers, which was like trying to forcefeed strained eggplant to an eight-month old or something, and it still didn't work. I ran diagnostics. I shut down windows and tried to fix the i/o sysfiles in dos. I ran safe mode. and in the end, there it was, my beautiful little alert box: you have been successfully logged on...

who knows which of my remedies actually worked and which were incidental, but I don't care at this point. I suppose I should think about investing in a computer that isn't three and a half years old and completely abused, given that this is the second time since september that this thing has given me reason to think it's never going to work right again. for now, though, I am basking in the glow of my own monitor, and reveling in the familiarity of the pressure against my palms when I reach inside my desk drawer to type on my own keyboard.

yay me. I fixed it!
12:09 AM +

friday, march 9

•••    hold your breath and cross your fingers...
11:23 PM +

•••    it started snowing during rugby practice, from only one cloud. I looked behind me and saw the air full of glowing particles, rushing towards me helter-skelter like a white-tutu-clad beginning ballet class, and for a moment I thought there was someone sitting on top of the barn blowing at hundreds of overripe dandelions.
6:41 PM +

•••    hey parents: don't worry. I'm fine. my eyes are better, at least enough to get me through the day, I took my medicine this morning, and I am going to get plenty of sleep tonight.

hey classmates: how good does this feel? yay for easy midterms and spring break!

hey people: hey. :) in fourth grade this afternoon we made a white carnation turn blue. neat, yes?

I'm exhausted, but now I'm going to go play rugby and eat my last dining hall meal for the week and try to fix my computer and flop unconscious on my bed. order yet to be determined.
3:16 PM +

•••    on her way out the door this morning, my roommate leaned over and said, "hey rabi. you're sleeping with your alarm clock." and so I was, not even realizing I had turned it off.
10:04 AM +

•••    what I meant to say: it is damn near impossible sometimes to find the right path between minefields. did you know my parents read this, and also my classmates and some people I've never met? a lot of those, actually. and I am a world-class procrastinator; I bet I could win a competition. seriously. I feel like I'm in high school again, when I used to always leave my papers until three o'clock (or sometimes six o'clock) on the mornings they were due. it shouldn't be so hard to write something when I know exactly what I want to say, but somehow the thought of turning in a document about how existence is like the ineffable essence inside a fig seed, with my name attached to it, is giving me trouble. this paper needs to be a page and a half longer than it is now, and that should only take forty minutes at most if I bother to go back and tighten up my already-written conclusion, but at the rate I'm going it will take me literally until saturday morning. what the hell is that? I looked down just now at my foot, and there's a funny scar on the back of my right heel in the shape of a shark tooth. I can't figure out where it came from. all the people in my paper have unpronounceable transliterated names like yajnavalkya and svetaketu. unless you know sanskrit or something, I promise you those do not sound the way you think they do. so you see. quite ridiculous. I think I will be skipping physics tomorrow morning.
2:31 AM +

•••    this is ridiculous! all of this!
2:13 AM +

thursday, march 8

•••    I deserve this, I do.

for not trying harder to find someone to fix my computer, and maybe for not taking good enough care of it in the first place. for getting cocky and skipping two days of medicine because I couldn't be bothered to take time out of my busy schedule for all those horrible prescription bottle caps. for letting my eyedrops run all the way out without running five blocks to get more. for reading email first, and writing my paper second. for leaving so much until the last night, for sleeping instead of studying, for learning about superconductors when I should have been learning vedic vocabulary. for thinking I could cool the burning behind my eyelids with a water-soaked paper towel, even though all it really does is decorate my eyelashes with little flecks of off-white fiber. for thinking I could do anything, really. for forgetting I am just as fallible and even more fragile than everyone else.

do you suppose if tomorrow I show my morning reflection my bloodshot eyes and the paperflecks on my face and the bruiselines on my wrists where they hit the edge of the table, she'll believe that I really did try? that even if I can't look hard enough at the computer screen anymore to tell what I'm writing, I can still produce a coherent analysis of the language in the upanisads? that I'll be able to find the post button...?
11:28 PM +

•••    (I want to bitch about this paper I'm ostensibly writing on this imac that isn't my computer, and to whine and cry about my computer that doesn't work, and to give up on tonight because it's making my eyes hurt. but no, that's not cool. something else instead...)

one of my classmates once told us that voices had colors. I've heard of letters and numbers having colors, but never voices. I don't know why it surprised me so much; I can "see" music as easily as I can see a painting on a wall. still. he said my voice is the exact color of a peeled tangerine in the sun.

I wonder what I would sound like if my voice were the color of the fullmoonlight skipping across the clouds. I wonder if I would still be able to talk.

the music in my headphones now is shades of red and gold, growing outward from the center like a liquid time-elapsed flower, ruffling about the edges. when the song bridges, my flower goes three shades lighter and drops its petals just a touch. and then they're back, held full and soft by the pull of the cello, and the color runs like oversaturated watercolors off the edges.

.... and then someone came and sat at the computer next to me, and she said "are you rabi?" I said yes and she said "you have a really cool webpage." so my face is also red. and now the music has changed.
10:01 PM +

•••    birth from destruction -- redeath and recreation, endless cycle, samsara. yes?
12:24 PM +

•••    last night I got tired of reading about hindu beggar nuns and their enlightened poems, so I went and drew a picture. it's in crayon, and it's a blue angel-mouse hovering in outerspace over a radioactive green planet. I don't know what it means, but the stars are all bright pink. I also drew a bunch of people with holes in them, because for some reason I like doing that, and one of my hallmates said, "rabi! you're weird!" which was very very funny, given the cultivated-weirdness subculture that we live in. and then I went back to my room and my roommate said "hey, want to watch friends?" and even though I tried not to pay attention I still didn't get anything done. I woke up at two in the morning with my notebook rumpled under me and my pen leaking rorshach blots all over the story of subbha, who plucked out her eye to prove to a lecherous man that she was able to transcend her body. or something like that. I think she just wanted to prove that she was better than him, but I am not exactly known for my ability to see the deep meaning in religious myths.

also. I finally admitted to myself that I have no idea when I'm going to be able to use my computer again, so I reconfigured my email and now I'll be able to read it again. but any email I got in the last three days is stuck in the nethernet, so if you have any urgent need to communicate with me you might want to try again.

two more days until spring break. one paper, one midterm, one physics talk. I can do that.
7:46 AM +

wednesday, march 7

•••    the demise of my computer has had an unanticipated side effect in that it's made me painfully conscious, once again, of how public wockerjabby is. somehow there's something very different about posting in the morning with my breakfast on my desk and the sun coming up behind the trees from posting in the middle of the day from a public computer while people swirl about me in a whirlwind of gossip and schoolwork. in some ways I feel like I'm deliberately separating myself from swarthmore -- look at me, sitting in the middle of the library, playing with my own freaking domain name while the people next to me write papers and mathematica files -- but at the same time I feel terribly connected to it, so inseparable that I read my own website while my classmates peer over my shoulder and ask me whether I understood the physics lecture this morning. I don't know how to look at myself and separate the person I am here in these words from the person I am here on this campus, although I know there is a line somewhere. if you put oil and water in a bottle, you can shake it up and make everything mix together, but eventually it all settles out. all liquid, but in layers. I imagine my insides are bubbly-swirled right now, broken into the littlest droplets possible from all this shaking, looking for each other and for familiarity. I am a conglomerate of xenophobes.

it's not that I don't want people to read this, or that I don't want to write it, or even that I don't want my classmates to read it. it's just strange. after all, if you were here, standing behind me, I would be talking to you. and then maybe you could help me figure out what I'm trying to say.

this morning on a whim I grabbed one of my tapes from high school. I have never been particularly interested in making mix tapes, but I like to keep a blank casette around for recording the things with which I am temporarily obsessed, for easier examination. so I have all these random tapes from the days before mp3s full of pop songs and novelties, one hit wonders and music I never imagined I would become so sick of. it's a time machine. so now I am listening to madonna sing they are illusions; they're not the solutions they promised to be, remembering what it was like to be fifteen years old in the back of a little white tin-can car with two parents and two siblings, while I sit here on a fancy chair at my fancy college next to a bookshelf full of titles like "real lexikon for antike und christentum" and "sacramentum mundi."

oil and water. shakeitupbaby.
7:06 PM +

•••    I have a curious george bandaid on the lowest knuckle of my thumb. he's dressed in a spacesuit, looking down and smiling. when I type he sort of wiggles around and grins at the tabletop. and I have the whole afternoon off because my class was canceled, and it's a pretty day with the beginnings of blue sky. maybe I will take a nap.

but I really wish I had my computer back. I miss it.
12:45 PM +

•••    2mass has finished its sky-scanning mission, but it left behind lots of pretty pictures.
9:21 AM +

tuesday, march 6

•••    while I was in the middle of my quantum exam, I got up and walked around a bit to try and clear my head. the science library is on a hill bordering the woods, and the windows face out into a field of trees. I leaned against the glass and looked down through the maze of twigs and leaves that were too stubborn to let go. the branches were covered in sleeping pigeons, identically motionless with their heads tucked and feathers ruffled in defense against the cold, swaying just the gentlest tiniest bit in the wind. watching them, I thought, I could close my eyes and puff my soft armor, my indiscriminate defense against the world, and I could be a pigeon, if only I had a branch to hold me up.

later, as I walked to rugby practice, I saw another tree full of birds, only they were robins. I don't think I have ever seen so many robins all together in my life, and I've been paying pretty close attention to animals since I was old enough to know what they were. the robins were everywhere, on the branches, on the ground, in the sky. from underneath they made the tree look like it was covered in a coat of fuzzy-mud red, and from the path where I walked they made the earth look like it was alive, bobbing and rippling with the motions of hundreds of worm-hunting heads. and then something startled them and they all, all flew away at once, rising up like the flock of seagulls that pulled james's giant peach out of the atlantic ocean. I watched them and I thought, wow, I am so lucky.
10:32 PM +

•••    last night is still lost, though I see from the red pen in my textbook that I at least attempted to accomplish something. too much fried and ketchuped junk food at lunch, too little time left before my quantum mechanics exam is due. I feel there is some sort of synchrony there, but I don't know how to tie it down with words. the snow falling today never reaches the ground because there is too much wind. while I was walking to class this morning, listening to morning radio in between weatherstatic, I was startled by the sudden crash of ice on the path in front of me. it seemed as though the asphalt itself had exploded into a pile of frozen shards, but then I looked up and saw slabs of ice sliding off the treebranches above me. I wonder, if I hadn't looked up, would they have existed at all?
12:04 PM +

•••    I don't remember going to bed last night. I don't even remember falling asleep.
7:13 AM +

monday, march 5

•••    all day I felt like there were metal bits falling around me because off the clatter-smack of frozen precipitation landing on a frozen world. it made me think that someone had taken a giant hammer and pried out all the nails holding the clouds and the sun and the moon and the stars to the sky, and I have been waiting for it all to come streaking down in a foggy blaze of glory. or death. same thing?

I am chicken little's more contemplative alter ego.

after we finished our physics problem set, which was after we finished physics lab, which was after lunch where we did our physics prelab, which was after physics class in the morning, I was trying to talk one of my classmates into staying at the afternoon colloquium with me. we both have a quantum mechanics exam to take sometime before tomorrow afternoon, and a zillion other things to do of course, so I understood why she wanted to go home and get straight to work. we read the abstract -- something about statistical physics and boltzmann problems. something else about modeling systems with self-propelled particles.

"come on," I said. "it will be fun. and besides, you need a break from physics."

she gave me a look and we both fell apart, laughing. what kind of geek do you have to be to think that going to a physics talk counts as taking a break?

(we did go, and it was pretty cool. the particles turned out to be squiggle balls, and they squiggled all over the place. I'm not sure how rigorous the math was, but whatever. I was entertained, and stastical anything is not usually stuff I consider entertaining. yay for fun science.)
7:20 PM +

•••    every time I hear a weather report, the big storm has moved farther northeast. maybe boston will get a couple feet, but we'll be lucky to see five inches. the fact that I'm upset about that makes me think I should have gone to school in minnesota or something. this morning, though, everything was covered in crunchy-wet ice, so it's not a total loss.

my computer still doesn't work. I'm not sure what to do about that.
9:17 AM +

sunday, march 4

•••    apparently my life needed to get more full of things to be taken care of, because my computer will no longer recognize a keyboard.

for some reason I'm listening to kate bush, but I think that needs to stop now.
9:57 PM +

•••    there is big big snow streaking past my window in heavy driven flakes, but everything on the ground is wet and shiny, so I feel like my brain is parsing the whole scene wrong.
10:40 AM +

•••    I love to dance. every once in a while it's worth the throngs of people and the occasionally cheesy music and the boys who don't know how to lead if it means I get to go lose myself spinning under the party lights.

now my ankles hurt and I have eight papers to edit by tomorrow, but I can still feel the music in my toes and in my blood.
2:46 AM +