saturday, may 12

•••    sometimes the weirdest things turn up when I get film developed:

I have no idea what it is. any guesses?
12:26 PM +

friday, may 11

•••    our mathy physics final has an eight-hour time limit, to be filled within a single twenty-four hour period sometime before next sunday. in a wildly uncharacteristic moment of decisiveness, I went and picked up my copy this afternoon. normally I put things off until as late as possible, ostensibly because I think I'm going to study more but really because I'm scared of actually sitting down and doing my finals. now I have this envelope in my hand and whether I'm ready for it or not, my final will be done by tomorrow afternoon. I've bitten the bullet; now I just have to swallow it. or something.

a baby was born today, while I sat at lunch looking at diagrams of stellar magnetic fields and debating whether to actually take my physics final. there is more to this but I am hesitant to trim away the edges of my thoughts until all that's left are words, because I feel the vital bits would be reduced to a handful of scraps. there is physics in everything, even in language, but sometimes both are inadequate in my amateur hands.
3:48 PM +

thursday, may 10

•••    today I saw: a white plastic spoon full of sliced strawberry bits; children chasing a poodle puppy; ants swarming around the spilled cranberry juice on my dinner tray; a picture of me tacked to someone else's door; hollow bamboo sticks lying on a linoleum floor; a two-year-old boy with shiny dark hair and eyes shaped like budding azalea petals; a patch of crackly-white dried grass; my half-blind quantum professor wearing khakis and a black silk shirt, riding a bicycle through the hallways of the physics department; stripes of pale yellow light running down the spines of biology journals, across the purple carpet, and back up along the next bookshelf; veins tracing the edges of a bicep; an ice cube clinging to the bottom of an upside-down plastic cup; a spider scuttling up a concrete wall; round drops of paper-white ricemilk on the splintery brown table; two people with white hair and floppy legs running down the sidewalk outside, wearing spandex and blue plastic visors; water gathering at the ends of my roommate's just-showered hair; the sunrise; the sky.
11:17 PM +

•••    edgar allen poe meets the twenty-first century: heart attack in a laboratory dish.

meanwhile, I am here in my pajamas and my diffraction glasses, looking at you and the world through a curtain of rainbows. and I can sing again!
10:37 AM +

wednesday, may 9

•••    I was walking through the center of campus, after conversations in the physics department and lunch with one of my favorite people and five completed errands, and I waved to one of my former classmates. "rabi!" she said, spinning around as she walked past me, "I didn't recognize you with that hat on!" I grinned and tipped my hat, and as she laughed she told me, "you look so happy!"

I laughed too. and wow, I am happy. is that such a surprise?
4:32 PM +

•••    yesterday I sat on my bed with my six-dollar goodwill dress on my lap, and I cut it up and sewed it back together with two different colors of thread, so that it would hug my shoulders nicely and hang in ripples off my hips. it is the color of spilled wine in sunlight, shorter than anything I've owned since I was maybe five years old, and it makes me feel like dancing. I pricked my fingers thirteen times while I pushed the needle through and through and through, but in the end only I could tell that the seams were a little bit crooked.

all night I nursed something vaguely resembling a melonball until it stopped being pretty, in between sips of cheap wine and invented cocktails and assorted shots and the tiniest bit of sangria, which I know is too dangerous for me to drink and is therefore frustratingly good. I find myself liking girly drinks less and less, perhaps because fruit is one of my favorite things in the world and I prefer it pure, but even so it was surprising that I didn't flinch at my first mouthful of soco. I thought I hated whiskey. I didn't get drunk, but I forgot about being sick, and it was delicious.

after dinner and awards and speeches, which for the first time ended before I expected, and maybe even before I was ready for them to end, we danced. I really love to dance and I don't know how I end up doing it so infrequently -- unless you count my capering around the room (and sometimes the sidewalk), which isn't quite the same thing no matter how much I pretend it is. I danced with people, and then alone, when the other people were too tired or drunk or busy smoking to keep dancing. when the floor got slippery in patches I spun around to watch my skirt flare out, and when I got dizzy I stopped and watched the ceiling spin, like twelve hours of night sky all crushed into thirty seconds. at some point the bobby pins dropped off of my head and my hair fell in still-damp curls around my waist, so I spun around again to make it fly.

I hugged a lot of people and tried not to think about being here next year without them, and how different that will feel, and I only cried a little bit. dancing is more fun than crying, anyway. but oh, I will miss them, and I will cry again, when no one can see me.

when it was very very late I walked home, and while I walked I read new poetry from the new book with the lime green cover, tracing out the words by the light of the full moon and the street lamps and the shining reflections on my shoe buckles, imagining the rhythm of the syllables fitting in between the gentle click-click-click of my flat-heeled little-girl mary janes on the sidewalk.

I slept until two o'clock this afternoon. it was the best rugby banquet ever, I think.
12:52 AM +

tuesday, may 8

•••    I am, apparently, yellow and blue, with a red overlay and a bit of a sensitive tan streak -- it seems to me that all those colors would make me appear rather greeny-brown from the outside, but then again I suppose comments like that give away how (non?)seriously I take this. I really like personality tests, and I think there's a certain amount of validity in them despite the inherent inaccuracies in self-analysis. still, I always feel that something important is missing. I have a tendency to break scripted personality tests by scoring equally high on two different traits, so maybe that's why I'm perpetually dissatisfied by their descriptions.

I honestly don't think I have a contradictory personality. is it so strange to be a scientist (and one who likes the concrete, logical aspects of experimentation and data analysis) and still be driven by emotions? am I the only person who needs structure and routine and organized cleanliness but who still puts money and power at the absolute bottom of life's priority list? can we really say that most people are thinkers or feelers but not both? I am both. aren't you?

I don't need a personality test to tell me I'm emotional and childlike. (some people would call me an immature crybaby, and they would be right, but it sounds nicer the first way, doesn't it?) I don't need a personality test to tell me that saving the planet is important to me (some people would say I'm a bleeding-heart idealist), or that I get out of whack when my sense of routine is disrupted or I have to read things that are full of grammatical errors (anal retentive), or that I like my solitude and I have a hard time talking about my feelings (antisocial). so why do I want or even expect a personality test to tell me how all those things fit together? I'm usually bothered by defintionts that attempt to segregate and categorize people or even things; do I have some deep-seated need to understand myself, to have someone explain why I am the way I am because I can't bring myself to share my own explanations with the rest of the world? or do I just have a curious fascination with psychology even though it sometimes veers into fluff and pandering to human insecurities?

blah blah. I think I am taking this too seriously in spite of myself. ;)
8:53 PM +

•••    yeah, hi. time for some administrative notes:

1. I am okay. very tired. I'll be back later. there is much to do, and much to recover from, and much to write about. priorities.
2. at the moment I can't send email, so if I owe you email I apologize. you'll get some as soon as the mail server gets back on its feet.

3:00 PM +

monday, may 7

•••    how can human participants believe in their illusory recollections and at the same time be able to differentiate them from veridical recollections in terms of sensory detail?

this is why I'm a cognitive science minor. it's amazing to me that we can even ask these questions, let alone find the answer. but we can, and we do. or at least we're starting to.

meanwhile, I don't know what is going on with me. for most of yesterday I felt almost fine. now I feel almost dead. was my immune system just teasing me? ugh.
8:46 AM +

sunday, may 6

•••    surreality, number two:

yesterday morning I dreamed that I was a benevolent vampire, and I refused to exsanguinate anything that would feel pain (or die) as a result. I never said "suck blood," only "exsanguinate." I was a nerd vampire, too. all of this was somewhat problematic, as there wasn't a lot of fresh blood to be found that wasn't also attached to a living creature of some sort, so I resigned myself to a premature starvation-induced death. and then suddenly I found myself lying in bed, gagging on a mouthful of blood; for a moment I thought I was still dreaming, but then I sat up and discovered that the blood was my own. I looked in the mirror and saw red decorating the space between my nose and my mouth, alien abductee-style, and I wondered if I had saved the benevolent vampire's life.

last night as I was brushing my teeth to get ready for bed, my nose started bleeding again, from the other side. it made a big modern-art-mess in the sink before I could put my toothbrush down and catch the blood. for a second I felt like I was watching life wash down the drain.
8:46 AM +

•••    surreality, number one:

I haven't eaten in the dining hall since thursday morning. dinner yesterday was sushi and a whole persimmon, at a meeting pretending to be a party. it was my first persimmon, I think. while I ate it I wandered away from the people and watched the sunset, which leaked orange light through the trees while the fruit leaked orange pulp and juice through my fingers. I thought I am eating the sunset to make the world dark and then I walked back to watch the almost-full moon rise over the almost-blooming irises.
1:01 AM +