saturday, march 17

•••    i usually capitalize my i's (and only them) because that makes them somewhat paradoxically less conspicuous to me, and therefore more on equal footing with the other letters. but at the moment the only operational finger on my left hand is my thumb, so i'm giving up style in favor of typing efficiency. i played two whole rugby games with a seriously injured middle finger, but i didn't really notice because a) i was hyped up on adrenaline and ventolin, b) my hands were wet and cold and numb, and c) i was getting generally beat up. also, i love rugby, and that makes it easy to ignore pain. it wasn't until the ref blew the final whistle and i collapsed, shaking, against my captain's legs that i realized there was something a little more wrong than usual. anyway, we will find out on monday whether it's fractured or just badly sprained; in the meantime i'm typing with six fingers.

we beat franklin & marshall 40-0, or something like that, so i think it was worth it. as long as i can play next weekend i won't complain. i had to laugh at myself when i realized i was crying over a finger. i have a ridiculously high pain threshold, partly from nature and partly from necessity and practice, but i do cry easily. and when the trainer pulled on my finger to straighten it out, everyone watching said the color just disappeared from my face. i bit my lip and thought, rabi, you've handled arthritis and kidney stones and surgery and staples in your scalp and a broken nose and tubes coming out of your side, and you can handle this finger thing. peanuts and cottonfluff is all this finger thing is. and i did handle it, with the help of my teammates who spread the peanut butter and jelly on my bread for me. so you see, i am still tough. grr.

my roommate and the gerbils came home tonight, and now they are all on the floor playing with flourescent plasticness. it's cute. i have a nice roommate who lets me steal her computer, but i'm a nice roommate too so i try not to take advantage of her generosity; after this post i'll be back to public computer posting. well, right after this post i'll be back in the laundry room getting my rugby clothes out of the dryer, but you know.

also, happy st patrick's day. kiss me i'm irish and all that. (i am irish, in case you were wondering. i have the documents in gaelic to prove it. it makes me feel special.)
7:40 PM +

friday, march 16

•••    today is funny-weird, but good.

I got a danish cd in the mail. it has a little sticker on it that looks like it came out of one of those grocery store pricing guns, but instead of $3.49 or something it says in crooked purple capitals "made in germany." so yes, the music is from denmark but the packaging is from germany, and I have a feeling the envelope is from america, although possibly manufactured in some third-world country. anyway, whatever. it's trip-hop. I like music.

I ate lunch with two astronomers and the registrar. I didn't figure out that he was the registrar until about fifteen minutes after he sat down, though; I had been eating with the people who were working in the astro research lab (namely my professor/adviser and an emeritus prof) and the registrar just came and sat down with us as though he were part of the physics faculty. I was a little perplexed at the prospect that there was a physics person I hadn't even heard of, but I figured it was possible. how weird is it that the registrar is friends with my professor? or that he even knows him? and now he knows me, too. it was a strange strange lunch; we swapped autoimmune disease stories, talked about politics and medicine and not being allowed to eat grapefruit, confided that we all wished break could last another week, that we didn't want to deal with the work we create for each other just yet. I've spent significant parts of all my breaks at school, but this is the first time I've spent most of one hanging around real adults, the people I'm supposedly trying to get away from. it's been fun.

I remembered that my dad is really cool. you're not supposed to think your parents are cool, really, when you're a kid. and I was too busy not really getting along with my father for a long time to bother paying attention to anything besides how much we annoyed each other. but he is really cool. did you know my dad wrote stories and drove a taxicab and built furniture for me when I was little? he did. and he still talks like a storyteller and drives like a cabbie, and even though he didn't build my last bookshelf he did help me put it together. parents are annoying, but people are cool. something like that.

I stayed in the lab way too late and didn't get nearly enough done, mostly because I was exhausted and at a certain point when I was trying to reduce an image I was completely convinced that "aperture" was not a word. seriously, who makes up words like that? and who writes them five times in one sentence? so all I really did was flatfield a bunch of stuff and discover eighty trillion problems that stood in the way in the completion of my next task. all my images had to be rotated ninety degrees; one of the flats was just somehow wrong; iraf was finding apertures where there weren't apertures; I didn't really know what I was doing and I was too tired to properly figure it out. so I kept my professor from accomplishing anything by constantly asking him questions, and I didn't accomplish much myself. but at the end of the day, when I logged out and turned off the lights and locked the room up, I looked back and realized -- hey. I just spent today doing astronomy! -- and it felt pretty good.

I went to the co-op to get food, because I decided white rice and english breakfast tea weren't going to cut it for an entire weekend's sustenance, and I ended up with way more groceries than I would have needed even without tomorrow's rugby-funded bagel breakfast and pb&j lunch. so I had a feast, and I ate as much as I wanted, including four dollars' worth of fresh raspberries. now I'm eating garlic couscous, nice and fluffy, and I have papaya waiting in a cup for me. at the co-op there were lots of ville kids with their skateboards and gel-slicked hair, buying skor bars and illegal cigarettes. I bet they thought I was a total dork, with my vegan food and my swarthmore sweatshirt. I bet if they knew I came home to spend the night alone, they'd think I was an even bigger dork.

so that was today. I love break.
11:02 PM +

•••    all month the crocuses have been struggling. they tried to come up and then they got snowed on. the temperature went up and down and they didn't know what to do. the rain tried to beat them back into the ground. every day on my way to campus I walked past sad little patches of closed-up purple and white flowers, frostbitten about the edges or dripping with condensed fog.

this morning it's cloudybright and breezywarm, the earth smells fresh from springtime rain, and the crocuses are blooming, open towards the sky like baby birds waiting for their first meal.
11:24 AM +

•••    last night in chinatown I ate something called tofu blossoms for dinner, because I think at least half the point of going out to eat is trying something you've never seen (or maybe even heard of) before. still, I wasn't adventurous enough to order the phoenix roll -- it had no description, just "order for a surprise!" which made it sound to me like it had a little paper toy hidden inside. I get enough of those from christmas crackers.

there was a little girl there with her father, maybe about six years old, and she kept singing songs from her school play with no regard for the chinese muzak playing in the background. we watched her and we couldn't help but smile. I love the way children approach the world.

and now for something completely different: did you know smoke and smog move differently through the atmosphere? I think we should dye them different colors, say purple and turquoise, so we can watch them. it would be like having the entire sky turn into a lava lamp.
7:34 AM +

thursday, march 15

•••    apparently the real reason conservatives aren't too worried about global warming (and why you shouldn't be, either) is that all the bleeding heart liberals will get washed out to sea when the polar ice melts. hopefully we won't scare all the tropical fish away.
3:14 PM +

•••    two heads are better than one.
9:37 AM +

•••    vacationtime is different from normaltime because you don't notice it passing until it's halfway gone, and then suddenly you wake up and it's thursday morning already. I could see my heartbeat in the tiny tremble of the world every few seconds. at first I thought there was a giant, or maybe a dinosaur, walking down the street and making everything shake with each footstep, but then I remembered I live in pennsylvania, not hollywood.
9:35 AM +

wednesday, march 14

•••    so beautiful! blue sky, fifty degrees, big fluffy clouds and big black birds wheeling up and down in front, all my twelve plants scattered about the room and fluttering in the breeze. across the street there's a gigantic conifer or some sort or other, and it's twisting in the wind like it's trying to dance the hula. the radio has managed to play three songs that I like in a row, I didn't miss a single word singing along, and in three weeks I'll be in the airport getting ready to leave for chile, so dead computer or not you can't even try to tell me that the universe hasn't been smiling at me.

I like being happy. it seems obvious, but it's more rewarding than you might think to step back and actually realize.
4:40 PM +

•••    instead of heading straight into the research lab like I should have this morning, I went for an hour-long run. it's perfect running weather today, breezy and warm so that you glow with the effort but you don't end up dripping in sweat. as I neared the end of my route, just at the point where my feet wanted to start dragging and my lungs were fighting the rhythm of my legs, I saw someone running towards me. it was my old math professor, the one who made me hate linear algebra and who I generally regard as at least a tiny bit sadistic. but she smiled at me, and I was too surprised to do anything but smile back. it felt nice, and it gave me the energy to finish with an uphill sprint.
10:46 AM +

•••    it would appear that I've killed my computer. it doesn't start anymore. I guess that's the trouble with trying to fix things; you give them the opportunity to get worse. I no longer have the energy for this. seriously, if you were going to buy a new computer and you had a tight budget but rather demanding speed and power standards, what would you get?
12:43 AM +

tuesday, march 13

•••    wow! check this out! now I have my name in two comics! (dude, doodles count in my book.) and both so disturbing! I feel special.

I am also apparently quirkyalone, having scored 110 on the quiz. usually I think quizzes are silly, since they are so generic that, like horoscopes, they always contain some grain of truth to grasp on to. but this one is so little and so silly that it managed to hit the nail right on the head with one sentence: though you may not be romancing a single person, you are romancing the world.

yes! that is exactly what I am doing! you know; oh world, I cannot hold thee close enough! and all that. but without the ropes or gym outfits. alison talks about classic literature; I talk about children's literature. it all evens out you see.
9:24 PM +

•••    today, I have been wrestling.

first with the rabbit, who escaped while I cleaned her cage and ran into the heating duct to hide. then with iraf, which kept giving me error messages I didn't understand. and finally with my computer, which has yet to admit defeat. I'm gonna get it though. I got the rabbit out without burning either of us, and I successfully trimmed all the overload pixels off our ccd images. so I'm up on the universe so far, and I'm looking for a hat trick. there must be some way to make it work.

that's what I keep telling myself anyway.
7:34 PM +

•••    network card dead again. I'm a little upset.
8:18 AM +

monday, march 12

•••    last night started with chinese food and lots of television, and ended with if questions and impromptu sleepovers. I got home this morning smelling like soy sauce and broccoli and forty-degree air, and it was good.

in between we staged a fight... or something. we dressed a boy up as a princess and then we dressed up as evil bandits and kidnapped him with nerf guns. we stole his crown and danced around, and then we fell asleep before the hero climbed in the window to rescue him. but we woke up and there was a big fight, wherein all three bandits got knocked out, but not before I gave the hero a black eye. she untied the princess and they lived happily ever after in their balcony. we took lots of pictures.

did I mention that at nineteen I was the youngest person present? I don't know how much imaginary play goes on at most colleges, but big kids here know how to have fun.
10:11 AM +

sunday, march 11

•••    think of something happy. now smile, but only use half your face -- whichever half feels more instinctively natural to use.
now think of something unpleasant. sneer at it, again with only half your face. which side did you use?

according to discover magazine, most people will smile with their right side and sneer with their left. even when you use your whole face for expressions, happiness looks more natural on the right side, and unhappiness looks more natural on the left. (they determined this by splitting pictures of faces in half, and using them to create symmetrical expressions. aside from the fact that symmetrical faces always look weery to me, the right-symmetrical smiles looked much more normal than left-symmetrical smiles. and v.v.)

when I tried it, I smiled with the left side of my face. I didn't even have to think about, so there was absolutely no hesitation or contemplation or anything else that might have screwed me up. I thought, ack! I'm backwards! but then I tried the other one and I frowned with my left side too. so I'm not backwards, I'm just defective. or something like that. what do you suppose it means? (I know there's nothing wrong with the left side of my brain, since it seems to be largely dominant in other areas -- hand-eye coordination, language capacity, so on and so forth.)

is your face normal?
1:33 PM +