saturday, march 24

•••    saturday's a rugby day. you know that by now, yes? we went to annapolis and played the naval academy in the final-round marfu playoffs. perhaps you don't understand how absurd that pairing is; let me enlighten you. swarthmore is a small liberal arts college with a student population of about 1400, emphasis on the liberal. we call our professors by their first names and sometimes we go to class in our pajamas. we have departments for peace studies and interpretation theory. we can get p.e. credit for sitting around and talking about sexual health, or something. our school was founded by quakers, and we don't even have calculated gpas, let alone class rankings. navy has about 5000 midshipmen, all of whom had to pass a physical fitness test before they would even be considered for appointments; participation in athletics is mandatory for them. they get graded on conduct, and possession of alcohol on their campus is a federal offense. they major in things like systems engineering and naval architecture, and they wear their snappy black uniforms with the gold buttons and the shiny shoes and the funny white hats everywhere.

now do you see? you must admit it's pretty entertaining.

anyway. their pitch is right on the edge of the potomac river; it was cold and windy and intermittently rainy. also pretty. given how hard those midshipmen work, I guess the federal government decided they could fork over some money for a nice campus. I was taped to the nines, fingers and ankles, and wearing my newest pair of socks. they had big skinny greyhounds wearing go navy-emblazoned blankets. we had a bus full of dedicated fans who were willing to spend five hours on the road to watch us play. and we did play, hard, and we lost by a lot but at the same time I think we held our own. I mean, damn, we played navy! and we stopped their overload, won scrums, and we got scored on again and again and we didn't give up. I feel pretty good about that. I also hurt, a lot, but that's what the weekend is for. hopefully tomorrow my spine will be the right shape and everything.

tonight has been rather odd; it is diversity/sager week, which has something to do with studying gender paradigms and multicultural issues, but has mostly to do with genderfuck, the crossdressing/nodressing dance tonight. so I came home and found a bunch of boys in the lounge wearing miniskirts and high heels, waiting for their turn with the resident makeup artist. I gave one of them an orange-colored condom so that he could fill it with water and use it to stuff the empty half of his bra. also there were people waltzing in the breakfast room, but I don't think that has anything to do with anything.

I know all the words to build me up buttercup, but I didn't know that I knew them. funny.
10:28 PM +

friday, march 23

•••    today was beautiful. I went to none of the classes I normally go to so that instead I could go to a class I'm not in, to see yet another astronomy candidate, and then we all went and ate lunch outside on the flagstone path in the fragrance garden. it was very good; we talked about cosmology and malt whiskey and things I no longer remember, but I do remember laughing at them. it's so easy to make me laugh; the universe's gift to me, perhaps. I love my department. now I am tired and perhaps wound-down enough to actually sleep, so I'm going home to bed. tomorrow is tomorrow.
10:06 PM +

•••    so, mir is gone. while I was trying to calculate how much money we'll need to run the rugby team next year, mir was burning through the sky in pieces that have probably been trying to fall apart since 1995. it's such an odd thought -- mir has been up there in orbit for nearly my entire life, and certainly my entire life since I became interested in astronomy. it seemed like a constant, and now it's dead. imagine how you would feel if one day the united states decided to blow up the statue of liberty and let its fragments rain down into the atlantic ocean -- that's sort of how I feel about mir's demise. it was a relic, a monument almost, something that was a part of the sky just as the statue is part of liberty island. except now it's not there anymore, and it didn't leave anything behind but the space that was there to begin with.
8:36 AM +

•••    we're all in a row, on one side of the room:

me at my roommate's computer, which has the stuffed octopus I gave her for christmas perched on top of the moniter, watching me through the curls of its tentacles; my roommate, asleep in her bed despite my clicking on the keyboard less than a meter away; the gerbils in their cage running incessantly on their annoyingly loud wheel, making it sound like a freight train is making its way through the hallway, perhaps unmarked and carrying illegal cargo to secret destinations.

the silly thing is that I'm not up because I'm doing schoolwork. I'm writing the proposal for next year's rugby budget. it's ridiculous how much money it takes to run a sports team, and even more ridiculous how much less money we get than varsity sports. no one would ever tell the lacrosse team they would have to come up with their own money to pay for uniforms and transportation to away games, now would they? blah.
12:39 AM +

thursday, march 22

•••    madness.
8:58 PM +

•••    today I ate lemon sorbet with strawberries and chocolate sauce, and it was good. also, the doctor said my finger will probably stop hurting in two or three months. I can handle that. one more day until the navy ruggers wipe their pitch with me. I can handle that too. there was a train going overhead as I walked under the tracks today, and it was sparking blue and purple. I think some of that energy should have gone into my body through my eyes, but I don't feel like any of it actually did. so sad.
8:39 PM +

•••    I have my finger untaped for the first time since saturday, and it's funny how much easier that makes it to forget that I need to be careful with it. I tried to pull a piece of peel off my orange with it and I ended up dropping the entire orange into my lap. not so good. but someone looking at the slight twist of my finger and the greenish tint of my knuckles and the back of my hand where the blood pooled said it looked like I had been in a fistfight, so that was sort of cool. not that I would ever hit someone with my fist, at least not now. when I was little I used to box with my dad. we had red vinyl boxing gloves that made your hands all hot and moist with sweat, and that made a very satisfying thwackthwack sound when you pulled a quick one-two on someone's stomach. that was fun.
12:26 PM +

•••    this morning in the new york times there was an article about bridge. the card game. bridge is going to be a trial sport at the 2002 winter olympics, it said. do you think the new york times is pulling an early april fool's joke? how can bridge be an olympic sport? they're going to have to change the rules that say all winter sports must somehow involve snow or ice -- something that seems like a fairly fundamental part of the winter olympics definition. how is there anything athletic about a card game? I just can't get over this. my morning is all unraveled now.
8:25 AM +

wednesday, march 21

•••    today feels like it is never going to get dry. in poetry class I sat on the floor of my professor's house, watching the raindrops penetrate the windowscreens outside like little grenades exploding in the jungle.
7:38 PM +

•••    some people belong in art museums and other people belong in cartoons, and the rest of us are just trying to figure out where we fit in the ever-shrinking gap between the two.
9:37 AM +

tuesday, march 20

•••    it's been a pretty good science day.

we took tubs full of sea creatures to fourth grade this afternoon. I was in charge of the starfish and the sea urchins, and they performed beautifully for the kids, sucking onto their hands or waving their spines around while everyone squealed, half horrified and half delighted. I learned something new, too: sea urchins like to decorate themselves with abandoned shells, for protection or camoflage or whatever, and if you put them down naked in a pool full of shell fragments, they'll stick out all these little tentacles and pull the shells on top of them. and you can actually see it happening! it was very cool. all the kids and even their teacher were really into it. I had to wash my hands four times to get rid of the saltyfish smell.

then this afternoon we had a physicist from the atomic physics division of nist who just happens to be the 1997 nobel laureate give a talk on bose-einstein condensates. the food was amazing, and I even understood most of the lecture. so that was also very cool.

now I'm off to test my mettle against three hours of wind ensemble rehearsal with a fractured finger. whee!
6:39 PM +

•••    I'm still waiting for fred durst to crawl back under to the talentless rock he fell out of, said the radio deejay, and I almost swallowed my orange section whole.

happy first day of spring, by the way.
12:06 PM +

•••    ha, I suck! this lab report is due in two hours and I only have a paragraph of introduction!

also, this was a weird thing to find on metafilter this morning. I guess I've been slacking in my keeping up with massachusetts news.

here's a psa: if you're registered to vote here (in the 26th senatorial district in pennsylvania, that is), go do so today. our old senator got convicted of some tax fraud thing, and now there's a swarthmore democrat running for the replacement slot... and also some republican guy who will probably win, but whatever.

back to physics.
7:47 AM +

•••    I have such trouble with focus and elbow grease. it feels having a deadline for one thing only inspires me to do other things, and then they all get the short end of whatever stick I happen to be waving around, divided attention, sloppiness. I want to do a redesign, and I want to do it right now, using nothing but notepad and a color table, to prove to myself that I don't need my computer, and that its death has not impaired my creativity any. I want to finish my poem, even though I spent three hours today getting everywhere but somewhere with it. I want to eat bagels dipped in soup, to suck the flavor from its bread-pores like marrow from a bone. I want to write a sonata. I want to go to sleep.

how can I feel so full of ideas and so out of control all at the same time? I think my blood has turned into acrylic paint and it is making the inside of my heart all blue and green swirled together, the whole entire earth turned inside out and pasted inside me, in strips with rollers the way you paint wallpaper to walls and advertisements to billboards. I would be oh so very zen if only I could stop my pulse from pulsing.
12:38 AM +

monday, march 19

•••    finger verdict: probably hairline fractured at the tip, nothing they can do about it; as long as I keep it protected and I can endure the discomfort they can't stop me from using it. so I'm not complaining. it could have been much worse.
11:03 PM +

•••    I'm really full of nonsense sometimes, yeah? but it's fun.

I love it when people see me and smile, because it gives me an excuse to smile back. if that isn't evidence of how much college has changed me, I don't know what is.
6:51 PM +

•••    college radio is one of those things you don't realize you missed until you have it back. I was listening to tuba and drums a few minutes ago and it made me smile, because it reminded me of childhood when I used to spend hours lying on the floor while the seafoam green rug pushed pressure marks into my elbows, listening to records on our turntable that I abused mercilessly, reading the liner notes over and over and over again. I have no idea how much of this was my own initiative and how much was thanks to my mother, but words and music were always two constants in my life from the very beginning, so no matter how impoverished we were financially, there's no one who can convince me I didn't have an amazingly rich childhood.

there were other reasons, too. but music and words, they gave me an immeasurable part of myself.

if I went back and told my five year old self that I would grow up to be a scientist, that I would spend my monday afternoons in college fussing with micrometers and computers and uncertainty propagation calculations, making myself dizzy counting interference fringes in the michelson-split spectral doublet from a sodium vapor lamp, she would probably laugh at me in disbelief. and then later, alone in her room at night, she would cry quietly under the covers into the pages of a book, because she was going to grow up and be a writer, full of imagination and beauty and things no one had ever thought of before. but if I told her that physics was full of imagination and beauty and things no one has ever thought of before, and that even if no one wanted to pay me to write I would keep doing it for the rest of my life, she might forgive me even if she didn't understand.

the song on the college radio station right now is slow and fuzzy and languid, with percussion that sort of reflects off the melody the way light reflects off the surface of trapped water in a gutter, sending amorphous ripples of energy back into the shadows of the atmosphere.
6:02 PM +

•••    eep, school! dining hall breakfast and mailbox mail and thirty minutes until physics!

my finger is crooked and grey and feels like it's pointing in two directions, but it is starting to hurt a little less. and I'm typing with eight fingers now.

nasa is still taking pictures of smoke and smog. I think my colors would have been much prettier.

outside everything is bright blue (sky) and pale brown (woods) and I feel like there could be sprites and fairies and clay-colored gnomes hiding in the trees that I wouldn't see even if I looked right at them.
9:44 AM +

sunday, march 18

•••    the last day of break, today

I watched a movie in the morning while I ate oatmeal with raisins and dates, spent an hour sitting on the floor trying to braid my hair with only one hand while the shadows from the windowpanes slid across my bare rugbybruised legs,

cooked lentil soup in a friend's kitchen with celery and vegetable boullion, scooped it up in mugs stolen from the dining hall and seasoned it with similarly stolen weak black pepper and ate it outside in the sun, which bounced off the slivers of lentils like the lightrays around the edges of the moon during a solar eclipse, looking at the campus from a whole new perspective, at the arching branches and the austere belltower, talking about the future,

worked in the science library in between sneaking to look at computers, pondering processor speeds and cd-r drives and bank accounts, got as far as the abstract before I gave up on my lab report and went to read poetry, made notes in blue and purple, fell asleep facedown on the coarse upholstery of the orange couch in the corner while I pretended to think about frank sinatra, woke up just in time for the beginning of dinner,

looked at the world through the curtain of my flyaway sleepmussed hair, colder than it seemed in the golden glow of waning afternoon, rubbing the edge of the splint-tape on my injured finger inside my pocket, felt the dining hall whispering to itself it's only five o'clock why are there so many of you here already and the students being drawn radially inward towards the smell of pasta and mashed potatoes subconsciously whispering back it's been a week and we've forgotten how much we complain about you because we're sick of food that costs money and energy,

ate leafy greens for the first time in ten days, rabbity, and swirled my cranberryorangesprite concoction around in its plastic cage while I read alan ginsburg poems that make me feel like I understand parts of california I've never seen and people I've never met, surrounded by people I've never met but who I know anyway, all asking one another how was your break, answers and conversation and awkward pauses flying over my head like the cloud of smoke you crawl under in a fire,

rolled peppermints across my tongue as I walked home past people threading kites like needles through the eveningblue sky, brushed the mud off the edges of my pants and sneakers and shoelaces,

wished I could have just one more day
6:45 PM +

•••    with one cheek on the sun-warmed hardwood of my floor, I can see the blurred edges of bathroom tile, wet mat outside the shower beaten down by wet bare feet, stray hairs that escaped brushes and elastic bands to lie glinting on the edge of invisibility, curves of a magazine splayed spine-up and folded over itself in the aftermath of a fall from the windowsill when all its forty-two pages tried to fly in different directions at once.

I live in a plane that is five feet off the ground, but I like to visit the neighbors from time to time.
11:33 AM +