saturday, september 29 • • •

→    I really don't like cars.

one random day in fourth grade, my special class had a visitor named polka-dot hat man. he probably had a real name but I definitely can't remember it, if I ever knew it in the first place, and he wore a white bucket hat that was covered in red polka-dots, just like the ones that clowns have on their gigantic silk boxer shorts. when he signed his name he drew a little caricature face wearing a hat. so he was polka-dot hat man. he was also a storyteller, or a poet, or one of those things that you can be really good at without anyone ever really noticing.

so he told us some stories, I think we were all supposed to be impressed, but I was distracted by the flower pattern on my dress so I don't remember what any of them were about. then he picked a girl out of our little circle and asked what her name was. amy. amy was a fifth grader, and she always looked dirty and tired, with her stringy brown hair and saggy eyes and worn-out sweat suits. I was a little bit scared of her. polka-dot hat man said he was going to paint amy a picture, and we all looked at each other sideways to quietly decide that he was crazy, because there was clearly nothing to paint with, let alone on, in the library.

it turned out that he painted amy a word-picture. or at least he tried. he would start describing a peaceful field, a waterfall, a rainbow overhead -- and then, suddenly, there would be a huge pile of junkheaped cars in the middle of everything, rusty and broken. he would start again with bliss and end up again at destruction. amy was just staring at him with her perennial hollow-eyed half-smile, but I was getting more and more upset, and I couldn't understand why there had to be wrecked cars everywhere. I don't remember not hating cars at least a little bit. I was rarely in them when we lived in manhattan, and I was barely past toddlerhood when I was in my first car accident, so I suppose I never had the chance to develop a friendly relationship with one.

I had nightmares for a few days after the polka-dot hat man was there. in the picture they took of us, my eyes are closed, and I remember saw shattered glass inside the darkness of blinking.

even so I think those piles of ripped-apart cars that tower next to highways behind curls of barbed wire are a little mesmerising, like elephant graveyards. they're far enough removed from the moment of death that you don't have to think about what could have happened, and you can see peace in their engineless stillness, and power in their manmade steel solidity. but it's the kind of beauty that is perverse and cold around the edges, so I try to keep my paintings from being populated by crumpled metal and empty axles...

it's not working so well right now though. the accident wasn't serious, but it was enough. none of us was hurt and my headache is probably just from getting whacked by the other scrumhalf, but the front of the van was all crumpled so the engine was visible underneath, very black and greasy. and I just don't like cars.
16:43  ...

friday, september 28 • • •

→    there's a girl on my hall whose head is always, always covered. even when she's in her pajamas, she has her black-and-yellow scarf perfectly folded and tucked and draped around her head. she looks very regal in it, I think, never disheveled and frayed like me.

this morning I saw it hanging on a hook in the bathroom, empty and huge and just dangling. it was bigger than me and it fluttered outwards in the wake of my passing, and then I couldn't look at it anymore because it was like a discarded snakeskin, missing all its vitality, pointing the way toward something naked and newly vulnerable.
11:59  ...

thursday, september 27 • • •

→    how many days has it been? sixteen? I think we are supposed to be moving on, or at least forward. the flag is back up at full mast. the objectivist society has plastered signs all around campus about a lecture tonight. they say america at war: the moral imperative for self defense and they make me shake a little when I read them. last night while I played beirut I kept seeing every little golden splash blossom into flames and dustclouds. ping pong bombs. we joke about anthrax. I can talk politics again. so there is movement, but the direction I am not so sure about. my classmates say I am supposed to be doing physics. I have a logic test tomorrow morning. the world, though, seems unwilling to tolerate logic, and I am still not convinced that physics is as benign as it pretends to be.
20:43  ...

→    there's a fun toy in american scientist this month. how far will your mind bend?
13:27  ...

wednesday, september 26 • • •

→    well. do you know how long it takes to change a website using nothing but public imacs? (three days longer than it usually takes.) and do you know how many character codes and hex color codes I have in my head? (everything on this page except the green timestamp color and the little linky arrow, for starters.)

anyway. do let me know if things are broken or weird, but actually this time please don't tell me that you liked the old one better because I don't care. this is where I am now. I was aware of the (unintentional) patriotic overtones of the summer design, but that didn't bother me in may because... well, that was may. but now it is september, and while I still care a great deal about this country and the people in it, red white and blue and stars and stripes have taken on a certain symbolism that I fear can't quite be separated from bombs in afghanistan and anti-terrorism acts and operation hyperbole.

so. I have symbolism of my own, now. the earth with the heart is the best approximation I could make of the drawing I left on one of the canvases at washington square park last week; I couldn't come up with words but I wanted to add something. I have been in love with the planet for a long long time, but it feels more important now. and that's really what wockerjabby is about, I think, when you get right down to it.

the ladder is a little geekier. in the symposium, plato (or one of his characters) says that love is like a ladder, and every time you climb a rung you learn to love a little bit more; true love (for everything) is at the top and it might be an infinitely tall ladder, but I'm still climbing.
19:56  ...

→    damn. there's a reason I usually do this at night. working on it.
18:45  ...

tuesday, september 25 • • •

→    (things will change soon
actually, they already are
you'll see)
15:23  ...

monday, september 24 • • •

→    I haven't been cleared to run yet (tomorrow, they said) so instead of working out with the rugby team, I walked to cvs to buy new batteries for my power-sucking walkman. on the way back, I passed a group of school-age girls who were playing in the street. they stopped as soon as they saw me and scuttled off to the curb, where they sat and watched me, all four of them unblinking, as I walked past trying to seem preoccupied with the news (frozen assets, as if that will solve anything) playing in my headphones. I failed. they stared. it was all very hitchcockish. I thought I might implode.

then one of them yelled out to me, in a thick slur of vowels: "what's your name?" the other girls shushed her with a collective hissing whisper, but it was too late, because I had taken my headphones off and turned to answer. my name is rabi, I said, and she jumped up to look me in the eye. I was surprised by her physical presence; she was nearly my height and very round, and I half expected her to crash right into me and knock me over, like a bowling ball picking off the last standing pin. she had a sleek brown ponytail, altogether too neat for her crooked white headband, and squinty brown eyes that sparkled from behind the pudge of her cheeks. not down syndrome, I thought, but something.

"what's your name?" she said again, and I repeated it until she mimicked it perfectly. rabi. my name is rabi. and there were more questions -- how old are you? (twenty) how old? (twen.ty. years old.) where are you going? (home) why? (I like it there) where are you going home? (to my room) -- until the other girls came and dragged her back to the curb with them. they ignored me completely, but I heard their stage-whispered chorus: "elizabeth, be quiet."

it's okay, I told them, I don't mind if elizabeth isn't quiet. and then finally one of them, a lanky girl with shaggy hair peeking out from beneath her bicycle helmet, looked up at me and said, "her mom is trying to get her to stop asking questions. she asks too many questions." and elizabeth, cowed, blinked at me in silence.

I wish I could have explained to her that her questions were exactly perfect. I am at school, at home, and I like it here. I am twenty. I am rabi. sometimes it is just that simple. it's good to remember.
19:52  ...

→    the air is thick like aquarium water and we are all silent like fishes.
10:44  ...

sunday, september 23 • • •

→    today is one of those days when the sky is brighter than the sun because the clouds have pulled the light from horizon to horizonl, so all our shadows are fuzzy and there is a diffuse glow everywhere. if sunlight can be more than the sum of its parts, I imagine we can too.

how is your morning?
11:49  ...

→    somehow between three parties, two shots, a mixed drink that started out mostly cranberry juice and ended up mostly melon liqueur, and the worst tequila I have ever tasted, I managed to dance for nearly five straight hours in spite of my very purple right leg and my swimmy head. I wasn't going to go, but then we finished our physics homework and it was still 8:20 on a saturday! so I gave in and agreed to put on some presentable clothes and go out just to be a semi-normal college student for once. then I let one of my hallmates put eyeliner and green eyeshadow on my face, and I cried when I looked in the mirror because I didn't recognize myself, but when I washed it off there was just enough left to make me look different but not alien.

the best part was spinning in the middle of the fragrance garden to j-pop, with chopsticks in one hand ("you take the fish and I'll take the rice," I said to the boy I had never before met, and he did so I got to eat sushi after all) and my sandals in the other (the ground was cool and slippery and left the bottoms of my feet dark brownygreen), once I had stopped being almost drunk and started being almost sober. I will certainly pay for this tomorrow, but so far my medicated heart seems to be handling this rather well, and it was good to build a fence between the past and the future by doing something different for a change. I haven't finished thinking about terrorism or hurting when I do think about it, but I think today was the top of the hill, and now the path will be a gentle downward slope instead of a rocky climb.

bed now. I am really not supposed to drink this much.
02:53  ...