saturday, may 5

•••    all my writing impulses have been more diary-ish than usual, which is why I've been resisting them. but life has been very surreal lately, so maybe I will get over myself and write about it anyway, later.

one of the bad things about being sick is that it makes it so hard to sing. I miss my singing voice, and breath.
1:36 PM +

friday, may 4

•••    no more classes, just a four-day weekend full of too many parties and then finals spaced between goodbyes that come too soon and last too long, and packing because we are college students and we have no homes, only temporariness. and after that I will be in cambridge and the world will have changed, again.
6:02 PM +

•••    I still can't get over my voice in a microphone, me barefoot behind the podium, eightysomething people for me to avoid making eye contact with, grappling with cosmic questions about life and death and sibling rivalry at 9:15 on a thursday night, knowing exactly where the moon was through the wall behind my head. these are all true stories, or at least parts of stories, I told the eightysomething, and I wonder if they thought like I did that we were in the middle of another true story waiting to be wrapped up in words.

I could have told so many stories, but instead I said this is the only poem I've decided never to revise, and I hoped my week-old poem, still fragile and tentative in its frozen nascence, my elegy without music, could speak for itself. maybe it did. maybe the only thing that matters is that I remember feeling every word, and the empty space around them, in my mouth, on my lips, in the air, more than I remember the letters on the page under my fingers. I still don't know if I'm a poet but I think those words really were a poem, imperfect as they were and are and will always be.

in the end, yesterday was a good day.
6:28 AM +

thursday, may 3

•••    beware the spinning black hole menace!

also, apparently because life can always stand to be a little more interesting, not only do I still have a low-grade fever, but my eyes have gone all light-sensitive and inflamed on me. and while I am a terrible patient in that I will put up with way more than my doctors think I should before I do something about it, I know from experience that my eyes are not something to screw around with. so today will involve what I'm sure will be lots of fun interaction with health center nurses who have exactly zero experience with autoimmune diseases and hydroxychloroquine toxicity and just want to pump me full of useless antibiotics.

I am not really a fan of the health center.

aside from that, though, I think I might be getting better. maybe it's just that I'm dressed in ninety-degree-weather clothing and that really doesn't go with being sick, but I'll take whatever I can get.

the weekend is so close I can almost touch it.
8:58 AM +

•••    in between my inept attempts at physics and intelligence, I've been trying to work out the introductions for the poems I have to read tomorrow. in public. poems, in public. mine. it seems unfathomable. I still haven't decided which ones are the least terrible.

terrible or not, they all have stories. the stories are too long to really fit into five minutes, and still not substantial enough to fill in all the cracks between my piled-together words and too-deliberate enjambment. I realized that while I really like to tell stories about the things that have happened to me (or just the way life happens, me or otherwise), I'm never quite able to convince myself that I want anyone to hear my stories. perhaps that's why I have so many imaginary conversations, and so few real -- not actual, real -- ones. just now I had an imaginary conversation with one of my friends, about the pictures taped to the side of my bookshelf, in which I told him some secrets that I believe in but might be invented anyway. am I worried about telling too many secrets, or too few? I like to tell stories, but it makes me worry that I am not content to be less than a story myself.

I think that explains pretty much all of the ambivalence I feel about this web thing, too.
3:57 AM +

wednesday, may 2

•••    rabi provides help and support for those in need within the
farming community in england, wales & northern ireland.
11:59 PM +

•••    today is weird. my fever has gone from borderline dangerous to simply annoying, but I still feel like I'm living on another planet with a virtual reality helmet on. I feel like a lot of things today. alien marionettes. in physics this morning I talked about parabolic partial differential equations without understanding the words tangling around my tongue, but I know my idl plots were pretty and I suppose that's what really mattered. skipped religion to sleep, head in elbow, sweating. in poetry my words felt thick and tired, stuck in the hot space between my tonsils and my teeth, and I think I made everyone else hate them as much as I did. my professor looked at me as I sat on her cool wood floor, and told me this is what extensions and notes from the deans are for, so I should sleep and heal instead of wilting like my mother's daffodils in ninety-degree air. but it is the last week of classes, and I think I have spent my yearly melodrama quota, so I will suck it up and push my wilted petals hard against the sky. maybe sometime in the next day I will remember that it's okay for my poems to be imperfect and incomplete, because I am only nineteen and I haven't learned all the words yet. and it is hot, hot, hot. and I am good at pretending.
9:08 PM +

•••    I am going to either melt or spontaneously combust, but I'm not sure which. I imagine either would be exciting for the people watching. sort of. today I am a marionette and my strings are made of silk, strong enough to make me move but fine enough that they are easily broken. I'm inside a cardboard box puppet theater, looking out; it's you who can't see everything. and off to class we go.
9:50 AM +

tuesday, may 1

•••    

while
I
was
lying
onthefloor
trying
tobreathe,

it
occurredtome
that
everything
looks
like

badpoetry

without
a
spacebar.
8:34 PM +

•••    I hate this feeling because it reminds me how much my life isn't mine; I don't create my life, I just inhabit it. I guess a lot of things have been reminding me of that lately, some more self-inflicted than others, and I guess if I were enlightened or something I wouldn't be bothered by my own mortality.

I think one of our best defense mechanisms is our ability to forget about the transience of existence. in fight club, which is one of the few movies that annoys me more in retrospect than it did while I watched it, tyler durden says something about how your life is ending one minute at a time. (and remember that hemingway and nietzche were around a century ago, and even cake cheerfully told us as soon as you're born you start dying, lest we begin to think that anything original ever squirmed its way out of tyler durden's mouth.) what do you do with your minutes if you think of them as endings? this afternoon as I did physics the variables started playing truth or dare with each other, and eventually they dared each other off the page and into oblivion. I kept thinking, I am alive and this is what I'm getting out of it? talking differential equations? but if I didn't have to worry about how alive I feel (or don't) it wouldn't matter. would it?

I hate this feeling because it reminds me of waking up and being surprised that I didn't die in my sleep, of breathing through a plastic tube and not being able to move. once I held so still in my hospital bed that the nurses came in and picked me up to turn me over, so that I wouldn't get pneumonia or something from lying in the same shallow-breathing position all night long. but it only made me feel more like a corpse, taken by the shoulders and thighs and feet for the one-two-three-flip.

what I really hate is that my memory is selective enough that something as simple as a hundred-and-three-degree fever can make me think I'm fragile even when I'm surrounded by reminders of my strength.

time to go talk to the physics equations.
5:06 PM +

•••    pioneer 10, phone home!
10:28 AM +

monday, april 30

•••    I want to take myself apart, like reverse-engineering a puzzle, and lay out my constituent parts all in a line on the library floor. heart, brain, tonsils, fingernails, lips, ears, shoulderblades, kidneys, toes. and everything else. once they were all there, clean and separate and alone, I could give them all names and introduce them to each other. I imagine they wouldn't want to be re-engineered into a person again, but I think I would make them obey me anyway, and once we were all back together we could have carnival parties every night, with strawberries and champagne, and french pop songs playing in our head, and costumes dyed colors that don't have names. and run on sentences, lots of those, covered in chocolate for sweetness. maybe it would kill me, but wouldn't it be something?
3:59 PM +

sunday, april 29

•••    and just like that the weekend is over, and there is only one week of classes left. three weeks left of swarthmore, at least this year; soon I will no longer be a sophomore and the seniors will no longer be seniors and I don't know what I'll do.

when I was in fifth grade, we lived on an island that was part of the city of cohoes, a place that is full of more history and mythology than ten-year-olds or blue-collar millworkers can appreciate. there was a country club at one end of our island, where people wore bermuda shorts and smelled like golf carts. at least I imagined they smelled like that; although my father, a newspaper reporter, was sufficiently cultured and white-collared enough to be a part of the local smirking elite, he subscribed to the mark twain school of golf and devoted most of his athletic life to wearing holes in the soles of his tennis sneakers. he also apparently thought it was more important for my sister and me to be dancers and gymnasts and musicians and softball players than it was for him to do anything as respectable as golf. I didn't learn until I was in high school that my parents lived paycheck-to-paycheck before my dad got a job at harvard; I'm not sure what they were thinking when they decided to have a third child before they had a savings account. crazy. anyway, in the three years we lived on the island, I never once set foot on the golf course, but I spent many hours standing behind the fence that separated it from our softball field, looking through the black wire fence and imagining what the golfers smelled like. cheap cologne, wine coolers, golf carts, sweat, grass. I guess in some ways I was a mean ten-year-old, because I really had no idea what all those men in their white shoes were like on the inside, and I hated them for their appearances and their choice of pasttime. but that was the same year my elementary school started serving sandwiches made from peanut butter and blueberry pie filling, recycling the meat from sloppy joes to put it on top of the next day's pizza, and holding counseling and speech therapy sessions inside a single shared broom closet; before that they had relocated the art supplies from a shelf in the boiler room to a cart with a broken wheel, and they cut the special education budget so drastically that our gifted (I hate that word but you know what it means, don't you?) students program was eliminated entirely. I went to a council meeting once, still dressed in my green and white softball uniform, to watch the debates over taxes and our education budget, and the people who had no children and thought they should therefore not be responsible for our education looked like the same people who thought it was worthwhile to whack little white balls around until the birds started squawking at them. at the meeting I raised my hand halfway, going over in my head what I would say into the microphone about how important it was to me to escape my regular class of thirty for my special class of six, even if it was just twice a week for an hour at a time. but they didn't call on me, which was a momumental relief, and our special class disintegrated, which sucked. so I hated the golfers, even though it wasn't very fair of me. besides, I admitted to myself that I was a hypocrite; I liked girly alcohol, too, and if my parents had let me I probably would have sucked down an entire strawberry-kiwi wine cooler with dinner every night.

today while I was at haverford, watching an ultimate frisbee tournament and pretending to contemplate physics, I was reminded of being ten years old, standing outside the softball field next to the golf course fence. when I was nearing the end of fifth grade my parents were getting ready to move, this time to a whole new state, and I could feel the temporariness of my life the way I imagined doctors could feel the weakness in the pulse of a dying man, or maybe in a fetus waiting to be born. I remember it was just the beginning of twilight. the lemon-lime slush puppie I was holding made my hand tingle with cold, my one-size-fits-all softball cap was falling too far over my eyes, and my socks weren't pulled up to the same height. I stood there, watching the men on the golf course with one eye and the people playing on the diamond in the aftermath of our game with the other eye: pink ralph lauren polo shirts on one side, white hanes three-pack t-shirts on the other, and me in between. I wondered if time would stop if I were still enough. but I couldn't stop myself from breathing or blinking, and I could feel my heartbeat in my ears, so I just waited for the moment when everything would change.

I still blink too much. I think that's when time moves fastest. three weeks is a long time compared to the blink of an eye, but it is still terribly, terribly short.
11:51 PM +

•••    on friday my entire religion class went outside and sat underneath a crabapple tree. its branches spread out flat on top before they lean over to touch the ground, so we were just as much in the tree as we were under it, and all we could see were the trunk and the grassless ground and the leaves and the sky poking through, and each other. we were reading zen poetry and haiku, and when the wind blew, the tree dropped clouds of pink petals down on us like gentle rain.

settled in trap-pots,
octopuses may be exulting
in their ecstasy of a single night
under the moon of summer.

just now I opened my book and thirteen little flowers fell out onto my lap.
11:03 AM +