saturday, october 20 • • •

→    so, today I updated my geek code. silly, since the code itself hasn't been updated in five years, but I couldn't have people thinking I'm nineteen, now could I? (the other significant change is that I let my psych-heavy minor make an appearance. and I've apparently gotten more liberal -- who knew?)

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GS/MU/SS d-(?) s-: a-- C++$ UL+ P++ L+ E W++$ N+
!o !K w++ O- M+(--) V- PS++(+++) PE- Y++ PGP-- t+(t*)
5+++ X++ R* tv b+(++)>++++ !DI D- G++ e h-(*) r x?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

and, of course, the obligatory ungeek link.
12:02  ...

→    when I woke up at six this morning, all I could see outside my window was the faint outline of a nearby fir tree and a row of little glowing spots where I knew the pathlights stood on the ground. I went outside and walked through the fog, imagining swirling ripples and eddies left in the clouds behind me, breathing in as deeply as I could to let the cool moisture blanket my lungs. everything looked dim and far away, like the borders of alternate universes, always just beyond my reach. when I came back inside my head was sparkling from its coat of fog droplets, as if someone had sewn tiny diamonds through my hair to make me a perfectly lightweight halo.

when I woke up again at nine, there was sun outside and the ground was covered with the fir tree's spiky shadow. the pathlights were all turned off, just a line of straight shiny black posts, and I could see all the way to the angular buildings and tall yellow trees at the north end of campus. my pillow was a little bit damp, though, and there was a band of wispy white cloudiness clinging to the horizon, carrying my fairytale morning across the world.
09:48  ...

friday, october 19 • • •

→    sometimes the internet is just painful. it aches all the way up my wrist through my elbow to my heart, and I don't know how the burning from inflammation in my carpal joints turns into a twisted knot in my chest, but I guess technology can make anything possible.
23:16  ...

→    (test)
18:04  ...

→    hi, I'm going to mess around with some scripting now, so if anything looks broken, that's why and hopefully it will get fixed soon. in the interim, you know where the links are...
15:57  ...

→    I would just like to say that without the international postage calculator, none of my friends abroad would be getting letters from me.
10:50  ...

thursday, october 18 • • •

→    comfort in unexpected places:

this afternoon I found myself in the backseat of a car stopped at a red light, wearing my fuzzy warm jacket, with sunlight falling through the back window onto my shoulders, music falling from the radio through the air onto my ears. utterly mundane and thoroughly perfect.

just now I went downstairs to pick up my mail and there was a group of musicians playing an irish jig at the bottom of the stairwell, letting the melody echo up along the banister curves, so I danced all the way down and curtseyed for them at the bottom. completely ridiculous and absolutely wonderful. I love this crazy life.

what happened to you today?
21:03  ...

→    a full day on the ground and still when I walk through campus I imagine what everything would look like from the window of an airplane. for someone with a perpetul sky-fascination I should be transfixed by the way clouds are still rightsideup from above, or the way the ocean is like the sky only flatter and sparkly, but instead it's the manmade bits of metal and concrete stretched across the earth that I like to watch. I love the way cities rise up like fingers grabbing at the clouds, so much more sudden and sharp and gleaming than nature could ever manage with mountains or glaciers; the way land is divided up into rectangles lying flush against one another like sardines in a box; the way everything is connected by thin bands of grey, carrying cars almost too tiny to be perceptible, mostly curvy with the occasional right angle to push in a new and unexpected direction. we've turned the planet into a circuitboard, electric and heavy with our technology, just like the collective turns people into borg. it is beautiful in the abstract and breathtaking in concept but still somehow terrifying in reality.
03:15  ...

wednesday, october 17 • • •

→    even before hubble, astronomy pictures were beautiful.
20:02  ...

→    last year during october break I was struggling with the feeling that I had no home whatsoever. thirteen months away from cambridge meant that the city and my family had all moved along and grown up without me; my off-campus dorm was deeply entrenched in the sleepy upper-class suburbs, an environment that I never have and never will be comfortable in; all my friends on my freshman hall, which I still missed terribly even though I pretended not to, had gone home for break; I missed the camaraderie of classes and rugby because they had begun to feel more like home than any physical place; new york city was three hours and forty dollars away; philadelphia was closer but clearly, defiantly, not my city. I felt displaced, disconnected, and homeless.

I think I still feel homeless, but now I like it. being disconnected makes me disentangled from the permanence of any one place, and now I can hop on a plane to boston or a train to new york with nothing but my backpack and find myself inside a city where I know how the streets twist, which subway stop to get off at, how the little pieces of everything (skylines, sidewalks, park benches, intersections) have changed over the last three or five or ten years. and then I can come back to philly, back to swarthmore, which is my point of stable equilibrium, my resting place between journeys. philly is still a little bit mysterious, with the sidestreets I've never walked down and the culture I haven't fully absorbed; swarthmore is still teaching me to appreciate the gentle beauty of an open sky and buildings that are shorter than trees.

I'll be nomadic for a while, I know, but I'm not just leaving my old cities behind. I'm turning the whole world into my home.
11:19  ...

tuesday, october 16 • • •

→    tori amos was one of the first artists who was guaranteed to sell me an album just by making one; the only other person who had me sucked that far in back in 1996 when boys for pele came out was paul simon, and he's been part of my life since forever, so...

tori. the thing about living in cities is that I never ever had a particularly good reason to spend money to see live music because it was everywhere for free, and besides I was never really captivated by artists as much as I was by art, so why would I pay to see people play old songs when I could buy a hundred or so new songs for the same amount of money? but then I met peter, who buys almost as many cds as I do and manages to go to concerts to, and so...

tori. in boston. at the wang center, which is a beautiful old theater with a slightly confused box office. we went in on the train around noon, after checking to see that the webpage still said the show was sold out (it did). within five minutes we had a pair of tickets in the first row behind the sound and lighting equipment, which were empty and inexpensive because they thought the slightly obstructed view was somehow not worth the incredible acoustics at the smack-center of the entire theater. and so, suddenly and happily, we had tickets, and the day was beautiful.

tori. was beautiful. the lighting design was fantastic, all swirly and undulating so we felt underwater (and she was the starlight sparkling across the surface), and the sound was perfectly clear and sweet, but even without any of that she would have been beautiful. she was so far inside the music that there was no telling where sound became material; never ever have I seen a human being and a keyboard turn into a single singing, breathing organism before. I'll spare you the gushing litany about how much I loved every song, but even though I knew she had been doing me and a gun every night it was unbelievably intense and harrowing. I was too stunned by the absolute breathless silence in the audience and her trembling-strong voice to even cry... and so I just sat, frozen, gaping. and so...

tori.
16:21  ...

→    (tori...)
00:03  ...

sunday, october 14 • • •

→    it didn't occur to me until the middle of the plane ride yesterday that I haven't seen a new england autumn in three years. now I'm here and it is surprisingly cool, with misty-damp air you can feel inside your lungs, and dark grey riverwater next to crackling brown leaves.

things change so quickly here. every time I come back there's a new store in harvard square. my family just grows up and up and old. it's election season, and I recognize less than half of the names plastered all over the houses on my neighborhood; my own front fence is holding up a political endorsement for someone I've never even heard of. the observation deck atop the hancock tower, where I spent many bittersweet nights falling again in love even as I said goodbye to all of this massachusetts life, has been indefinitely closed. it makes me sad.

but the weather, the new england autumn weather, will always be like this: nippy and wet and scented with the brambly-pungence of turning leaves, drying grass, freshly born winds. and so no matter how much the physical world changes, this will always be familiar as soon as I close my eyes and breathe.
21:06  ...

→    I do always think about what it would be like to die in a plane crash even though I am not actually worried that it would happen to me. I'm under no illusions about my mortality, and I fully expect that no matter how long I live I will be not so thrilled about dying, but there's something about the suddenness and magnitude of death by airplane that worries me. the funny thing is, it's not so much my nonexistence that I'm afraid of as everyone else's continued existence without me. what would I become in my own inexcused absence?

as we were taxiing out to the philadelphia runway, we passed a huge double-decker plane bound for england. it is so amazing when you sit next to those giant lumpy things to imagine them in flight, and yet right now I am sure that plane is miles and miles in the sky over the atlantic ocean, carrying hundreds of sleepy people inside its cocoon of steel and fuel. humanity is amazing. I hope I get to stick around and be amazed for a long long time.
01:02  ...