saturday, march 31

•••    this is the sort of headline that just makes you feel sick to your stomach: plane should've aborted landing. ugh.
10:30 PM +

•••    I hate losing games we shouldn't lose. I especially hate it when I don't know how I could have done anything differently.

anyway. I thought I had a lot of things to say, but right now I can't really remember why I thought they were worth saying, so maybe they weren't. if you responded to my little fit of paranoia (which, by the way, was not entirely unjustified) on thursday, have patience, and I promise I will write back to you soon. before wednesday. my whole life right now is relative to wednesday. well, I suppose really my whole life is relative to august fourth, 1981, because that is when I was born. but my current life is relative to wednesday, because that's when I'm disrupting my entire normal existence to go flying away to chile.

how do you distinguish between your whole life and your immediate life, anyway? I suspect you can't. it's all a gradient. there aren't very many things that aren't gradients, one way or another; even the coastline has a margin of error defined by the tides and the weather. unless you are willing to stop time completely, and then everything is absolute, but also meaningless.

did I mention that I saw sunspots last week? I saw sunspots last week, when it was still sunny and clear. they were pale and amorphous, clumped in little groups around the bottom of the sun, which glowed in deceptively benign greyscale inside the telescope. they reminded me of my freckles, which are also pale and amorphous and spattered unevenly down the length of my nose. everything in life is a simile, one way or another.
4:41 PM +

friday, march 30

•••    if I were allowed to get drunk, I would have been drunk last night.
6:08 PM +

thursday, march 29

•••    I know I've been a little bit boring recently, but I've been feeling weird about this. if you're reading and I don't know about it, I think you should tell me, one way or another. not that you have to, but you should. because it would be nice, and it would make me feel better. especially if you're one of the people who leaves funny ip addresses in my referral logs.

also, I think computers hate me. all of them. you know how people who are good at communicating with things are called whisperers, like the horse whisperer or the (completely and utterly ridiculous) baby whisperer? right now I'm the opposite of that with computers. I'm the computer shouter. something like that.

when I got back to my room there was a note on my door in my roommate's loopy girly handwriting: rabi, wake me when you get home. apparently I'm worth worrying about when I stay out later than I said I was going to. I haven't decided how I feel about that.
1:20 AM +

wednesday, march 28

•••    today I ate with one of my friends from last year who I'd almost completely lost touch with after we ceased to be hallmates; I had a plateful of vegan thai food for dinner and tofutti ice cream for dessert; I was thoroughly overwhelmed (in the good way) by a poem one of my classmates wrote for class today; I finished the multi-dimensional quantum mechanics problem set that's due tomorrow; I feel like things will settle themselves into happiness one way or another.

now I'm all alone in the astro research lab, and perhaps all alone in the physics department, because the professors are home with their families and their piles of work waiting to be graded, or whatever it is that professors have to deal with that makes it so hard for us to guilt trip them when they give us impossible amounts of homework. grant proposals, I suppose. I like it here; there are six computers and lots of bookshelves full of astronomy books and semi-technical posters decorating the bulletin boards, like pictures of h-alpha emissions in the southern hemisphere or diagrams of the molecular cloud structures in the milky way. it smells like electricity and printer ink and old coffee, like the unglamorous side of academia. and then there are the things that make me feel like maybe I belong here, too: my notepads full of recorded procedures, my failures and successes at the littlest things like tracing the apertures in stellar spectra; iraf manuals; the pixellated plot of m-92 I accidentally printed; my name on the gnome panel at the bottom of the monitor.

I'm such a dork.

I almost want to sit on the floor, listen to the radio, and read o'reilly books all night, just because I can. but I know there are a whole bunch of spectra waiting to be reduced and extracted, and I know that if I wrote down all the things I needed to do before next wednesday the list would be at least five pages long. so I'll just revel in the possibility of leisure, and then I'll get to work.
7:45 PM +

•••    check out the headline on this one! interplanetary cannibals may cause longer magnetic storms at earth. interplanetary cannibals? are those like interplanet janet's mutant relatives? it doesn't help that the subhead says "colliding solar eruptions pack powerful magnetic crunch," because magnetic crunch sounds like something that should come out of a cosmic vending machines. caramel magnetic crunch, magnetic crunch with raisins and peanuts, munch munch munch.
8:32 AM +

tuesday, march 27

•••    as I was walking from the physics building to the science library, the wind grabbed my hair and threw it in front of my face in a tangle of goldenbrown shine. The forsythias outside the biology labs were glowing inside their clouds of new yellow petals, and the trees on the nearby border of the woods left fluttery, shifting shadows on the path in front of me. do you think our brains and eyes evolved to make us think that sunlight makes everything beautiful, or was that just a happy accident?

I stopped having trouble with poetry, by the way, but I am a little perturbed because it seems like more than half of the poems I've written so far this semester have been about my family in one way or another. what's up with that?
3:31 PM +

•••    my eyes feel as if they are made of something other than flesh and fluid today; sand and air perhaps, like the inside of an hourglass. I'm having trouble with poetry. there is some geometry in that but I'm not sure how to prove it.
11:41 AM +

•••    high energy neutrinos, whee. (but why on earth would you name a telescope amanda?)
8:58 AM +

monday, march 26

•••    if you ever find yourself wandering around the penn campus, check out irvine auditorium. the entire interior is hand-painted with lions and falcons and flowers and various other things, in yellow, blue, orange, and green. up close it looks ridiculous, and as we were unpacking our instruments on stage at the beginning of tonight's wind ensemble rehearsal I was thinking that the patterned border around the stage made me feel like I was back in preschool. then I looked out into the hall, which is three stories high with balconies and vaulted ceilings, and I changed my mind. from a distance all that painting looks as if it belongs on a jewelry box from poland, or maybe somewhere in the kremlin. certainly not native to philadelphia. it was great.

apparently there was some big controversy when the hall was renovated a few years ago, because people were upset about the changes being made to its architectural structure. it was a betrayal of history and all that. blah blah. I think it turned out beautifully, although I never saw it in its original state.

one of the things that happens when you live in the suburbs is the city turns into more of a construct than an actual place. it's the city, the big thing out there, invented by television news anchors and radio deejays and subway maps. and when you're actually there, you're constantly looking around and being surprised that all these things you'd only heard about actually exist, surrounded by asphalt and wire and people as mundane as those belonging to the rest of the world. I don't especially like that feeling, but I still find myself practically swimming in it every time I go to philly. it makes me feel like this isn't my city, and it isn't. boston and new york are mine, but I think philadelphia will forever be the place that lives in the patterns of electromagnetic waves, materializing into reality only when I make the eleven mile journey from swarthmore. philadelphia belongs to the media, not to me.

but swarthmore is mine, and the television doesn't even seem to know it exists, so maybe that's an okay tradeoff. also, philly is a nice city to travel in and out of; new york is just huge and boston's borders are so neatly defined by rivers and harbors that you can't really watch either of them fade into citiness. but philly is outward-sprawly on the sides that don't run into the new jersey border (which is under the delaware river, actually), and the gradient between residential and industrial and metropolitan character is fairly subtle. also -- and as a pretty hardcore environmentalist I feel guilty for even thinking this -- the sun refinery is one of my favorite highwayside scenery pieces in the world. driving past it at night, watching the center city skyline shrink away through the sodium lights and oil-burning flames, I always think of those pictures of the dark side of the earth spotted with nighttime luminescence. I like the way urbanization looks, even if I don't so much like what it does to the world, all angles and hardness and artificial light, stubborn like the plants that grow in the desert or the hospital patients who defy their doctors predictions by refusing to die. looking out at all these things that so clearly do not belong here by any design of nature makes me forget to be lonely.
11:32 PM +

•••    for the first time (and probably the last time) in my life I watched the entire academy awards show all the way through. it was sort of an accident, but it turned out to be not as insipid and annoying as I always imagined it would be, so overall I was pleasantly surprised. the chinese guys who won for crouching tiger, hidden dragon were all a little too cute, especially the peter pau guy who stood up there and rattled off a list of names while julia roberts giggled at him, but they were my favorite winners anyway. russell crowe seemed to have left his sense of humor somewhere else. julie andrews still shocks me every time she doesn't have black mary poppins hair. it's ridiculous that julia roberts won best actress, but most of the other awards were ridiculous too so it was okay because her acceptance speech was pretty entertaining. bjork rocked. or bounced. or both. laugh if you like, but I'd like to see you have the guts to get up in front of however many gazillion people wearing a swan. I like the way light-colored eyes sparkle under stage lights on television; sting and ed harris in particular were good for that.

my favorite part was watching yo-yo ma. when I was a senior in high school he was doing some sort of music education outreach program, and he came to boston so I got to dance around in a circle with him and play improvisational clarinet music (noise, whatever) at his behest. afterwards he gave us a concert, a tiny one, and it was amazing. yo-yo ma in jeans and a disney world sweatshirt, sitting on a folding chair in the basement of a public school, surrounded by fifteen teenagers. he made the exact same face then that he did last night on the stage of the shrine auditorium: joyful but so intense, more real than anything I could touch, but far away at the same time, transcendent and alive.

so I rather like yo-yo ma.
9:00 AM +

sunday, march 25

•••    the way you eat that oatmeal pie, it makes me want to die...

it's all-nineties weekend on the radio. I feel like I'm in high school, or sometimes like I'm in elementary school. I graduated from fifth grade in 92, eighth grade in 95, and high school in 99. funny how parts of my life fit nicely inside particular decades, as if the calendar had sectioned itself according to the patterns of my life. two years ago it was 1999 and we were getting college acceptance letters.

girl, you'll be a woman soon...
2:36 PM +