saturday, april 28

•••    today: fourteen hours away from swarthmore, sun and sunburn, two rugby games that very nearly broke me (as it is, I have not a single limb left in normal working order), the last of the season. we won both of them. I cried afterwards but not because it was the end or I was in pain or we still had to drive for hours to get home -- just because. I do that, sometimes.

while we were waiting for people to get ready to leave, I crossed the street to visit the local cemetery. barefoot, in sweats, with one bandage running up my leg and around my waist and another holding my arm motionless against my lower ribs, my hair out and tangled and blowing everywhere; I walked up and down between the rows of headstones, reading names and dates, imagining I knew the stories that belonged to them. two babies, cousins I think, who died in 1952 before their first birthdays, the same year my father was born, marked by little granite slabs engraved with lambs and toy airplanes. a woman named harriet luck who died when she was forty-eight, and whose husband survived two wars before he died thirty-three years later. four brothers who all lived to be over a hundred years old. one fresh grave. one girl who died when she was nineteen, my age. cemeteries make me sad but they also make me feel better, a little, because if a person like me will go and look and care about all the people there even though I never met them, then maybe someone will care about the people I've lost just by seeing their names.

and then, finally, home, shower, bagel and melted peanut butter for dinner. my roommate and her boyfriend are watching the exorcist; the little girl is spitting green goop everywhere. I imagine myself doing the same thing, and then I can't see the computer anymore, so I un-imagine it, and all that's left are peanut butter and orange juice drippings from my attempts to eat one-handed in the dark.
9:38 PM +

friday, april 27

•••    astronomers witness first steps of planet growth and destruction: "it's like trying to build a skyscraper in the middle of a tornado." makes you appreciate our own little planet, doesn't it?
9:11 AM +

thursday, april 26

•••    someone has photocopied dozens of anti-stress kits and taped them up all around the science library. a few people are wearing them taped between their shoulders, in the proud tradition of the grade school "kick me" sign.

outside, the sunset is fading; all that's left of the light that blazed red through the trees is a faint violet stripe along the horizon, like the mark left over from a healing wound. inside, I imagine my heart is doing the same thing. I'm tired and quiet like the night, peaceful like the cooling twilight sky.
8:36 PM +

•••    work, work work! work work? work! work...
rugby!!
(work, work, work.)
3:34 PM +

•••    in an alternate universe, all the flaws in my personality that trip me up from day to day are superpowers, and I know how to save the world.
1:48 AM +

wednesday, april 25

•••    when I walk to school, I go through a parking lot behind a church where a daycare program lives. during the day, the edges of the parking lot are walled off with chain-link fence sections on wheels, and the asphalt is covered in tricycles and tiny green benches and running children. when I walk through I look at their legs and their eyes and their hair, and I wonder how so much personality can fit into such little inconsequential details, and sometimes I wish I were four years old again, hanging by my knees from the monkey bars and watching the inverted world go by. I wonder if I took as little notice of big kids when I was four as they take of me, and then I remember that to them I am just another grownup, evidence of the incomprehensible persistence of time. when I was four I thought humans would go extinct before I would become an adult.

today it is coldish, after three days of stickywet jungle-heat, so the children were all inside when I walked through the lot on my way to physics. the tricycles and green benches were still there though, abandoned and quiet. and there was a little wooden wheelbarrow, painted bright yellow, the color of lemon peel or crayon-colored sunshines with rays sticking out all over like spines on a pufferfish. everything else was grey and dismal, but there was the wheelbarrow, lying crooked against the asphalt as if it had been dropped by someone looking the other direction, ignoring the gloominess emanating from the rest of the world. I watched the yellow wheelbarrow as I walked past, and I thought that william carlos williams was wrong.
1:04 PM +

•••    everything is too real this morning. the edges on my spider plant's leaves are so sharp and precise I think the air should be bleeding, and the cloudy-dull sunlight reflecting off my roommate's glasses is too bright for me to look at.
9:10 AM +

•••    so our quantum mechanics professor handed out the second interim exam at the end of class today. I haven't opened it yet; somewhere between now and next tuesday I need to find a five-hour time block in which to write it, and before then the envelope will stay closed. however, by four pm, we had already gotten an email from him regarding the exam: don't do part 1d; it's too hard. I don't know what to think about that.

I am trying to ground myself with banality, but it isn't really working.
2:52 AM +

tuesday, april 24

•••    and then, quite by accident, I had my first-ever completely lucid dream. so something is definitely up with my brain.

I'm not really sure what happened. it must have been a normal (well, normal in that I had no idea I was asleep) dream most of the time, because from what I remember I was just walking around, trying to talk to people. I think I was on campus, but there were papier-mache zoo animals walking around, looking for people to paint them. there was a hippo who had managed to get halfway purple before the artist had given up, and she was lumbering around with a dejected expression on her face, because she would be completely excluded from the animal social circle if she didn't get her paint job finished. I agreed to do the rest of the purple, and to paint turquoise polka-dots on top. I had the sneaking suspicion that the animals were actually pinatas, and I was worried about whether or not they knew that and what would happen when someone tried to whack them open.

I bent down to dip my paintbrush in the purple paint, and as I saw my reflection in its surface I got the funniest feeling. I'm not sure if I became aware of the outside world for a split-second, maybe because of the noise of a passing truck or something, or if something just happened inside my brain. but when I stood up, I knew I was dreaming. it was very strange -- I've had dreams before where I thought I was dreaming, but that was part of the dream enough that it didn't really mean anything to me. this was such a sudden realization that I almost woke up, but I didn't quite, and then there I was inside my dream and completely in control.

I abandoned the animals, because I wanted to find some people to see if I could interact normally with them. as soon as I did find people, though, I decided it would be more interesting to see if I could walk straight through them. (they were people I didn't know, which made it easier.) I watched them for a while, feeling apprehensive and vaguely squeamish, and then I took a deep breath and walked towards them. I kept my eyes open and kept walking even when I thought I was going to crash into them. and just like that, whoosh, I went through and I was on the other side. it was an extremely strange sensation, sort of like the feeling you get when someone brushes your arm lightly enough so that they touch just the hairs, except that it was all over and inside of me. I looked down at myself and I was still solid, and then I looked back and the other people were still solid. I said hi, to make sure they existed, and they said hi back, so they definitely did. I was pondering this when I woke up.

so. funny things are happening to me. I think almost every dream I've had in the last four years has been either terrifying or completely unemotional, and now in the past week or so suddenly I've been having good dreams, or at least hopeful ones. maybe it's the season. maybe if this happens again I'll have the sense to try flying instead of doing a ghost impression. I've always wanted to fly.
7:31 AM +

•••    oh poetry, you cry, drenched in purpose, tongue for darkness, tune of the unsayable, shrunken little mitten of the world's first snow.

(I am trying to write a poem, but it isn't going very well. and that isn't mine.)
12:26 AM +

monday, april 23

•••    sometimes I have nothing worthwhile to say but I write in spite of myself, and sometimes I have everything to say but I don't know where to start. too often both are true at once. I imagine we all have this problem. how do we fix it?
11:58 PM +

•••    I don't remember the middle of the afternoon very well. I remember being in physics lab and feeling woozysick, and that I was having trouble focusing on the complex variables problems I was doing while we waited for the plutonium to its irradiation thing. I remember at some point after that I said some very stupid things, and I couldn't stand up, and everything looked weird and blurrygreen, as if I were looking up at the sky from underneath a disney movie ocean. I remember my astro professor crouching next to me on the floor, the way you scrunch yourself down to become the same size as a two-year-old, and I think he must have been asking if I was okay because in my memory he looks pretty concerned. and then I remember closing my quantum mechanics and getting up to go to dinner, and everything after that is all fine and normal. but the in between parts... I have no idea. someone could have temporarily transported me to another dimension and I wouldn't have a clue. I don't have a clue. what is happening to me? this isn't the first time I've lost part of a day without really knowing how or why, but it is the first time it's happened in the middle of the afternoon surrounded by people. I think I freaked them out.

you know what though? it was still a good day, because before lab we sat outside in the grass and the sun, talking about physics and nonsense. and after we finished our homework we sat outside again, eating noodles and watermelon and laughing, before we went to the housing lottery. next year I will live on campus, smack in the middle of campus in fact, on a hall that has my friends and my astrophysics buddies and all kinds of other good stuff. so I am happy; it's nice to have things to look forward to next year. somewhere in the middle of my amnesia I finished a physics problem set, although who knows what my math looked like, so that is one more thing finished and one fewer thing on my interminable list of stuff that needs to get done.

also, I have something new to listen to. life is happy.
8:53 PM +

•••    today is going to be a good day, because I'm wearing my shiny red surf shorts, and because I said so. what is it about the color red, anyway? when I was little I had strappy red shoes that I absolutely loved. there was one day when I was going to school, in first grade I think, and I wanted to wear my red shoes but I couldn't find them. I was completely convinced that the whole day would be ruined if I didn't wear the red shoes, and my mother was annoyed with me for crying about something as stupid as shoes, and of course I got the "if you can't keep track of your own stuff you have to deal with the consequences" speech, so I cried more. in the end I wore brown shoes, which unlike the red ones actually didn't clash with my dress, and I think the day turned out okay. but I was upset.

I also remember when my parents brought my sister home from the hospital, the day after she was born, I was wearing red. I remember sitting in the big brown chair with zoey in my lap, looking over the big lump of baby and blankets to my red-socked toes. I wasn't quite sure if the red socks made the rest of the day worthwhile. in retrospect, I think it would have been okay even without my socks.
8:32 AM +

sunday, april 22

•••    for some reason tonight I started thinking about dedications, and to whom I would dedicate a book, if I ever write one. I don't remember why, or if there even was a reason, just that I found myself suddenly and thoroughly preoccupied with the question. would I dedicate it to my best friend, who never reads this page even though I told her she could, or to my family, who would probably feel left out otherwise, or to everyone, or to no one? would it be two words short, for someone, or would it be annotated with one of those clipart epigraphs, who taught me to believe in myself or who saved my life that first time or who read to me every night before bed? I always like to tell a story, however well couched in terse cliches.

so I went on a book-bender, and I took all my books off the shelf one by one to find the dedication inscriptions. of course, most of the books I have here are math and science texts, and if someone dedicated one of those to me I know I would be less than thrilled, so they were mostly empty and not very revealing. most of my poetry books had simply names, alone, without context or explanation. so it is a secret between the poets and the people they love enough to immortalize, however marginally; I wonder if that makes it more meaningful. and I wonder, if I had a book dedicated to me, would I have the courage to read it?

also, I rather like this version of the tao te ching. and I have bandaids on four of my fingers, and I wish it would rain.
11:11 PM +

•••    holy schlamoly,

• I have a lot of work to do
• it's hot in my room
• it's beautiful outside
• my ankles hurt
• there are a lot of specs here
• the air smells good
• time slips away quickly
• blogger is finicky today
• I have a lot of work to do!

(choose your own posting adventure. can be tailored to fit a range of moods, from bitchy to blissful. woo!)
7:14 PM +

•••    happy earth day! why not find out how you can show your planet how much you love it?
8:24 AM +