saturday, october 13 • • •

→    I will admit that after last week, I was a little worried that rugby had lost just a tiny bit of joy for me. but we played a kickass game againt princeton today, and even though we lost it was the best we've played all season. now the sky is blue like hope behind the autumn-tinged leaves and rugby is still one of the best things that's ever happened to me. rugby and break and airplanes and cities with peter and a beautiful goldenwarm feeling and I so, so earned this.
12:25  ...

→    for ten solid minutes during rugby practice the honker went off, calling volunteer firefighters to action, and we were surrounded by the plaintive howl of sirens approaching from all directions, but it was friday at the beginning of break and not even the weirdness in the air could distract us from our elation. but then we were scrumming and one of our coaches came at a full sprint across the field to tell us we needed to evacuate, now, because of some situation...

there was a suspicious package and soon the athletic fields were empty except for special units and public safetey and people in uniforms. we all wanted to know if it was a bomb or what but no one would tell us, so instead we went to dinner and talked about our vacation plans. later there was a car accident and all the emergency teams migrated there, where a pregnant woman had to be evacuated by helicopter, so I guess the box turned out not to explode.

tomorrow I am going on an airplane far above the earth and the only thing I'm scared of is that I will spend too much time wishing and not enough time watching. I love to fly; it would be sad to miss a single speck of earth-trapped light because of our still nascent history of the twenty-first century.
01:04  ...

friday, october 12 • • •

→    (waiting for the caffeine to kick in)

when we were seniors and it was october 1998 we were all writing college essays, stressed and high strung. I was still oscillating (swarthmore, columbia, swarthmore, columbia, williams? swarthmore? swarthmore?) while my friends focused on their early action brown and harvard applications. I was also being thoroughly irresponsible and refusing to visit any schools, because what if visiting them made me too scared to actually go? so often I sat at lunch and listened to everyone discuss their campus tours and interviews and brochures (propaganda I whispered quietly every time), feeling stupidly alienated and intimidated by their willingness to imagine a future beyond the next weekend. once my friend (who eventually was one of those torianpeople and went to brown) visited swarthmore and came back to tell us all how there were these fascinating classes about jewish women in twentieth century holocaust films (or something at least that I, used to ripping through as much science as possible in a year, found unfathomably specific)...

"but," she said, while I played with the cracks in the concrete, "none of the students seemed to want to talk about it. the professor was really great and had all these fabulous questions but they were all so quiet." but it's their fall break, I said, because I knew more about swarthmore than I cared to admit, and really would you expect them to be interested in class when they're mere hours away from vacation? she grumbled to me that college was supposed to be a place where you cared about learning; I grumbled at myself because I wasn't supposed to care about defending a school that didn't even belong to me.

if only I had known: the real reason classes are so dead when we are mere hours away from vacation is that we're really mere hours away from sleep after days and days of stimulated insomnia and endless work. if I can even stand up to give my talk tomorrow it will be quite the accomplishment. and I know it's not just physics majors whose lighted windows are punctuating the campus darkness tonight.
03:05  ...

thursday, october 11 • • •

→    still doing physics, in case you were wondering. trying not to cry. if I look up I think the world will no longer be there because so much of it has fallen on my head.
21:58  ...

→    panic: woke up at seventhirty on the floor blue pen in one hand blue pen on my face bifurcation diagrams in my face, why sun why? struggled to do arithmetic: one-fifteen on friday minus seven-thirty on thursday leaves twenty-nine hours before physics when ostensibly I will hand in a paper and stand up and talk about logistic mapping as if I understand, numbers as if I can do math, all this physics with no general solutions because it is chaos and we live in a nondeterministic universe. lucky I suppose because if we did and I knew all the quantum numbers I would see myself tomorrow brainless and fish-hooked by questions, gaping at my classmates and professors, wishing for intelligence even more than for oxgen. but chaos reigns and maybe maybe maybe a butterfly will land outside my window and flutter its wings and I will be suddenly transformed into a genius or a simpleton and either extreme would work, I think. now though I dance to jpop to make the rhythm force my head out of cottonfog and my heart out of its sluggish sleep-beat and I sing to remind myself of happy words. reality curls its hotcold fingers around me but I believe too much in luck; somewhere I am always waiting for my butterfly.

(also, hi to all the swatties who read the phoenix. good luck with your midterms.)
08:24  ...

wednesday, october 10 • • •

→    we played with the orion nebula in astro today. so pretty.
20:00  ...

→    I look at my fingers and imagine that I am made of balsawood, edges splinter-squished by inexact xacto blades, held together with patches of invisible glue, light enough to fly but too fragile to withstand the perils of landing. and so grounded. it is something to be soft enough to mold but brittle enough to snap all at the same time.

sometimes I eat pure cocoa just for the incongruity of chocolate-rich smell and bitter taste.
03:33  ...

tuesday, october 9 • • •

→    terrorists, united nations workers... yeah, those are the same.

meanwhile. I am here, stuck between the terrible selfishness and the absolute necessity of reducing my life to a microcosm of exams and readings and papers and problem sets. I hate that it would be irresponsible for me to sit down and try to really understand what is going on, who is being killed, and why this is getting more and more out of control. they say that if we let this disrupt our lives the terrorists have won, but if abstractions like logistical maps of nonlinear systems and hypothetical syllogisms are truly more important than war unfolding, myopia and callousness have won. this is exactly the part of academia that I can't stand, because ideas should never be more important than people and yet I am surrounded only by paper deadlines.
12:40  ...

→    the game for today seems to be, let's see how many different kinds of trouble I can get myself in before I resort to rolling over and playing dead. but the sky is nice and blue.
09:48  ...

→    happy birthday, dad.
03:26  ...

monday, october 8 • • •

→    mirror mirror... (with roban's camera)
17:18  ...

→    I was nine when the whole persian gulf thing happened. I didn't like it. we had air raid drills sometimes in class, and we would all jump up from our chairs and curl up underneath our desks. we were supposed to keep our heads tucked between our knees, but most people spent our five quiet minutes making silly faces across the room or picking at the knobbly yellow carpet. I always kept my head twisted out from under my desk sideways, so I could watch the windows.

I knew well enough that if a bomb landed on top of our school, no silly little molded-metal-and-pressboard desk was going to save me from anything. but there were big big windows all along the west side of the school, windows with clattery panes held inside their sticky, creaky frames, and I imagined a faraway explosion sending a roaring shockwave right into those windows, and all the glass smashing against the classroom air before it rained down in a deluge of piercing hail on top of us.

today they said on the news over and over that there will be more terrorism in the united states, more airstrikes in afghanistan, and I sat with my back against the full-glass wall of the science library and walked outside under the cold moonlit sky in the middle of the witching hour, unafraid.

why?
04:29  ...

sunday, october 7 • • •

→    oh god. here we go.
there's always something to put midterms into perspective.
13:08  ...

→    where is stupendous man when you need him?
13:02  ...

→    check this out! my computer is on the network! yay me! yay my new hero benjy! (the only thing is, I don't know whether this will make me more productive or muchmuch less productive.)
01:08  ...