saturday, october 27 • • •

→    it smells like college in here: sweat and gin and hairspray in the pile of clothes I wore to last night's party, lingering reminders of my dance partners still clinging to my sparkly tights; pulverized grass and ground-in dirt in my rugby kit; cheap beer and smoke and weed in the sweats I wore to the social, where I sang so loudly I almost lost my voice; ink and graphite and paper layered on top of everything, the omnipresent reminder of why I am here and what I still have left to do. I work hard, I play hard. say what you will about academia -- I am so alive.
18:21  ...

friday, october 26 • • •

→    I used to not sleep because I couldn't, because I would lie in bed for hours and hours waiting for my mind to be quiet, because even if calm won the battle, nightmares were winning the war. I spent so many many nights sitting under the window, just watching the trees and stars, waiting for sunrise; I knew the smell of dark air better than I knew my own morning scent. I slept in the afternoons, safe in daylight and solitude, and in classrooms, guilty only when I woke up.

I have no trouble now with allowing myself be vulnerable enough to willingly watch the world dissolve, or with separating nightmares from reality. and still I never sleep, because there's always something due the next day with enough weight to convince me this miserable omnipresent exhaustion is worthwhile, or at least necessary. somehow this world feels much further beyond my control than that old one in which my insomnia was almost purely involuntary... I chose this path; somehow I must be able to deal with it, right?

right.
21:51  ...

→    snap, crackle, dark.

that's what happens when you drop cold water on a hot lightbulb, in case you were wondering. oh look, I'm awake in the middle of the night again.
04:24  ...

thursday, october 25 • • •

→    hello, it's still coming out week. I don't know what to do. I've gone through all my stickers. shit like this still happens, and they say it's not that they're homophobes they just wish the gay people wouldn't act gay, stupid high school stupid world all over again. and I don't know what to do. in the phoenix jackie says the point is [partly] for allies to show their support, but how? they have a rally and I'm doing physics. I tell the girl at the table that the uberdyke pin is awesome and she gives me this lopsided half-smile and I feel like I am patronizing someone. why I am so thoroughly and suddenly stymied by this is a mystery. maybe I just wasn't paying attention before.
20:37  ...

→    gravity lives inside my eyelids.
01:26  ...

wednesday, october 24 • • •

→    the pieces of conversation that I'm constantly anticipating never happen the same way in reality that they do in my imagination. I suppose that's inevitable, because I don't have room in my head for entire other people, but it still leaves me sometimes empty and confused.

pathologically shy, really. which wouldn't bother me at all except that having people who want to listen doesn't make it any easier for me to talk. or to stop imagining.
20:42  ...

→    the trouble with working all night long is that I completely lose track of deadlines. the darkness is deceptive: I can't see more than fifty meters outside before the world gets lost in indefinite blackness, so why should I be able to see any further into the future? urgency is for daytime, when the edges of things fall back into existence, and even though I have class in less than three hours I still think I have all night to finish this assignment. night is amorphous, given shape only by its grey half-lit borders, and we are still inside.

also. check out the wicked cool black hole.
06:46  ...

→    see, this is exactly when I don't want to be awake.
03:40  ...

tuesday, october 23 • • •

→    so, in between working for money and working for knowledge I've been thinking more about coming out week, trying to think about what it means from other perspectives. I've had people assume I'm bisexual and tell me I'm a lesbian; I think my father thought I was gay for a little while after I went to college. but really, honestly, I have no idea what it's like. and it's nice for me to sit here and wear my stickers and sign petitions and yell at people who use "gay" as an insult, but it's also awfully easy.

I went to a public high school that was, by most measures, very progressive and liberal. we had an active and very visible gay straight alliance, cross dressers, openly gay students and teachers, a popular transsexual student, all-inculsive coming out day festivities... but it was still high school. one day after school in the beginning of freshman year, I walked two of my friends to their bus stop in harvard square, even though it wasn't quite in the direction of my house. we were standing in the pit outside the stairs, just about to say goodbye, when one of them grabbed my arm and said, "wait. there's something I need to tell you." and so we stood there on the slushy sidewalk for two hours, and my feet froze inside my falling-apart soccer shoes, while she told us the story of how she fell in love with a girl, she was afraid to tell her parents, afraid that some people at school would think she was sick. it was the first time anyone had come out to me like that, confessional and vulnerable. thank you for trusting me, I said, and she told me, "I was pretty sure about you. thank you for proving me right." it was surprising, because I thought I was one of the least threatening people in our entire school, and if I were even a tiny bit scary, what must it be like to face everyone else?

so I have no idea, really, what it's like to have a secret like that. as much as I think, and imagine, and try to understand, I have only my own limited perspective. a few weeks after that afternoon in harvard square, the deep space nine episode with the infamous same-gender kiss aired. some bible belt stations edited the kiss out; others refused to air the episode at all; the episode was heralded as trek's next great political statement (this was 1995, remember). I watched it and was frustrated: this is it? two cute, feminine women, hiding behind the metaphor of alien culture, share a few passionate kisses and say goodbye forever? what kind of political statement is this? there's still no gay characters on star trek, and they didn't even stay together! as far as I was concerned, following the metaphor meant that the episode was saying, "look, sometimes people decide to stay in the closet, and it sucks but that's just how it is." so I was frustrated. but I gave my friend a videotape of the episode anyway. when she gave it back to me, several months later, she said, "you know, when they kissed... it made me so happy that I cried."

so I don't understand. but I try to be understanding. or something.
11:04  ...

monday, october 22 • • •

→    jerry falwell is straight. think about it.

so it says in thick sidewalk chalk on the path down to the dining hall. it's coming out week at swat. I love coming out week; I love the stickers and buttons and my happy queer friends. the chalkings, though, are making me feel a little squirmy. I've stepped across that reminder that jerry falwell is straight four times tody and I still don't understand what I'm supposed to think about it. should I be ashamed to share any sort of trait with him? should I wish I were gay so I could be that much less similar to him? jerry falwell is a lot of things: a bigot, a racist, a homophobe... male, white, straight. whether or not his straight white maleness is related to his prejudices is a legitimate matter for debate, but it shouldn't say anything about the characteristics of other straight white males.

last year some people got upset at the chalkings that said, "ten percent is not enough: recruit, recruit, recruit." I thought they were funny; irony is a useful device, and I'm sure I don't know how much pressure there is to go along with society's expectations. this year there's a similar one that says something to the effect of, "straight people are fine as long as they act gay in public." don't ask don't tell sucks, and that's exactly why. but... jerry falwell is straight? carl sagan is straight. jane goodall is straight. so what?

I want to understand this; I want to be able to wear the I support the gay agenda sticker I still have in my pocket without wondering if the gay agenda includes holding straightness responsible for the likes of jerry falwell. jackie said the chalkings were queer-positive. I'd hate to think that queer-positive has to be anything but homophobe-negative, because if it does I don't really know what my shiny new queer-friendly button means anymore. can't I be queer friendly without being embarrassed that I like boys? a few chalkings out of the dozens decorating campus won't make me unfriendly, but they do make me confused.
19:08  ...

sunday, october 21 • • •

→    you know. sometimes I just lie on my bed and close my eyes and try to remember the names. numbers are meaningless to me, and if fifty or five billion people had died on september eleventh I wouldn't know the difference. but names are substantial, unique, and when the string of syllables gets long enough that it is minutes and minutes before I can open my eyes again, I know that it means something heavy, and indelible, and real. even though only four of those syllables are familiar to me, I still feel the absence of all the words I don't know of the thousand it takes to describe a picture, or the million it takes to describe a person, the endless uninvented words it takes to describe a life. every name has a face. I try to remember.

I used to read the obituaries sometimes just to learn, because there are so many people I'll never ever know. and that's comforting, the same way it's comforting to read the dates on gravestones of people who lived ninety years, to know that there were whole entire lives in between those numbers. but today in the inquirer there was a special section about all the people from philadelphia who died in the attacks, and I read all the words that belonged to the faces of so many strangers whose lives were not whole, yet, and it is no comfort at all. more names to remember. more syllables that seem to weigh more than the earth itself.

I don't know the names of any people in afghanistan. it scares me.
19:47  ...

→    finally. :p
12:53  ...