saturday, september 1

where is it written in the laws of the universe that rabi + internet + swarthmore = bad karma? I still haven't gotten my connection working, I can't for the life of me figure out why, and I have been equally successful (which is to say not at all) at finding someone to help me, and grrr. but I spent the afternoon playing with four little girls and I just got fed a lovely dinner of edamame and sushi and sake, so I'm feeling pretty good anyway in spite of the unspeakably large amount of money I spent on textbooks today and the impending homework contained therein. still, an internetless rabi is a slightly hollow rabi and it makes me sad in the corners of myself.
23:30 ++10

friday, august 31

hello. I think time moves faster at swarthmore than it does in the rest of the world, because I've only been here for a few hours and already there is more to do than I can keep track of... for now, though, I am unpacking. also the library has new purple imacs and the hockey puck mice are gone! and I have homework, but before I can start it I have to go textbook shopping, but before I can do that I have to unpack. so I am unpacking, as I said. hey swatties, come visit me!
16:40 ++9

we moved to cambridge exactly nine years ago, and that is an impossibly long time for someone who still doesn't really know where home is. nine. years. this neighborhood has changed a lot since then. a few years ago, rent control was abolished in our district (even though most of the voters in cambridge voted to keep it) and now there's no going back. we have a trendy grocery store where the salvation army used to be, a brand-new drugstore sharing what used to be an abandoned parking lot with an even brand-newer whole foods store, new apartment complexes popping up to take the place of weedy dirty public parks, fresh construction on the sidewalks, all screaming prosperity! happiness! urbane wholesomeness! as if we had all just emerged from rehab scrubbed and shiny and ready for some good p.r.

there's one building in particular that stuns me a little bit every time I walk past it (on my way to central square, which is still clinging to some of its grunge in spite of the starbucks invasion fleet). it used to be dark blue-grey shingle, with cloudy, cracked windows covered in duct-taped cardboard, almost always full of people with spiky black hair and bristly mustaches even in the middle of the night. there was a red hand-painted sign over the door with the name of some business or other that I'm sure was nowhere near as lucrative as the drug trafficking that (though I never witnessed it firsthand) was supposedly going on in a big way. I walked by so many times and every time I marveled at how something could look so abandoned and still be so busy all the time.

now in that very same corner-spot there is a lemon-yellow building with white trim and shiny golden knockers and doorknobs and mailboxes, repeated down each street-facing wall, so that if you stand just on the corner and look straight at it you think someone shoved a building up to a mirror, but then you look more closely and see that there are different numbers on all the just-spaced-so doors and maybe if you look even more closely there are different things hiding behind the windows, plants and little figurines and suncatchers and sometimes a cat. by all rights it should be happier, cleaner, better than it was before -- but I can't help but feel that something is missing, that a bit of dodgy character has been replaced with a bit of vapid uniformity.

I think what I really worry about is that I see too much of myself reflected in the gentrification of my neighborhood. sometimes I feel guilty for being happy. sometimes I wonder if it is some sort of emotional deficiency on my part, if I am too shallow to recognize the profundity in the world enough to be hurt by it. so many times I found myself apologizing for crying too much or for being so unsteady on the tightrope of equilibrium, but I was never really sorry for being sad -- why do I feel now that my love for the world is some sort of betrayal of my humanity? just because it's positive and good doesn't make it silly, or trite. I remind myself, but I still wish for seediness to prove that existence is a form of survival. the world is so beautifully complicated -- is the beauty in the complications or only in my head?
02:19 ++8

thursday, august 30

my mother tells me that I'm nowhere near as far on top of things as I was last year. I think that's a bad thing. and why is the weather always so perfect just when it's time for me to leave?
16:30 ++14

wednesday, august 29

the jump.
20:01 ++6

so newsweek's big cover story this week is called arthritis: what it is, why you get it, and how to stop the pain, and it mostly talks about the relationship the presciption drug industry has with arthritic senior citizens. since I have rheumatoid (not osteo) arthritis, my disease is really nothing like what the article is about (although heaven forbid anyone should bother to acknowledge that arthritis comes in many forms and is not just an old-person's-affliction), but that's too bad -- I'm going to take this one on anyway.

actually, the thing I want to address isn't so much the article itself, but the little "bylines" blurb from donna foote, one of the reporters who worked on the article. (it's on page four of the print magazine; I can't find it on the web.) she says, "I had no idea [of] the suffering that's imposed by arthritis. if you have the diseae, your life is about pain -- avoiding it, easing it, and managing it." she goes on to say that sufferers' ability to "grimace and bear it" is "quite heroic," but it's still too little, too late.

my life is not about pain. there are days when I have to crawl from my bed to my medicine, days when I can't take notes because I can't hold a pen, days when I have to wrap all my joints in braces and bandages, days when I can't see straight, and sometimes days when I can't talk and I can eat only soup and applesauce. but there are also days, more days, when I can dance in the streets, days when I can ride my bicycle up steep hills, days when I can play the piano for hours at a time, days when I score rugby points, and days when I sing at the top of my lungs because it just feels good. I am always in pain, always, but that is not my life and it's certainly not me. my grandmother is not her bad hip. the friend I saw on saturday is not his wheelchair. leukemia patients are not their broken blood cells. and I am not my arthritis. I'm not even a hero. I'm just a person.

my treatment is, in part, about pain, about avoiding it and easing it and managing it. I am fully aware that my life would be very different (and possibly ended) without my doctors. but my life is about love, light, stars, music, people, beauty, strength, struggle, thought, words, shadows, wonder, survival, and just existence -- it's not about pain. pain is part of my life, just as it is part of every human's life, but I will not let it define my life, and I think it does a huge disservice to all of us to assume that everyone with arthritis (rheumatoid, osteo, juvenile or otherwise) is first and foremost a sufferer.
12:27 ++21

I stood on the edge of the platform over two hundred feet above the quarry water, and all I wanted to do was jump, but for once I didn't have to fight it. (that I am not dead as a result of some unsuccessful attempt at flight is a shaky reason to believe in my own willpower, but sometimes it's all I have.) I was draped in harnesses and carabiners and redundant safety systems, but as I jumped, headfirst in a swandive as graceful as I could manage with sneakered feet and rolled-up sleeves, all I felt was the air and the gravity pulling me through, and it was so perfectly real that I completely forgot about being scared. weightlessness at the top of the rebound was a shock, but as soon as I could look to see which way was up I was heavy again, falling, and if not for the tightness of the fabric around my ankles I'm not sure I could have figured out what happened... even afterwards, as I hung upside-down at the end of my stretched-out blue bungee cord, with my hair falling up(down) across my eyes and my blood running too quickly into my brain, the air everywhere around me felt more natural than the ground ever has against the soles of my feet.

why was I born without wings?
01:01 ++11