[ saturday, december 1 ]

it's world aids day. my red ribbon is still sitting on my desk.

I have this problem every year. having been hospitalized numerous times, kept alive during surgery by machines, and medicated with dozens of drugs, I have absolutely zero right to say that I'm against the use of animals in medical research. without the history of dead animals, I might be a dead animal myself. so yes, I would, and did, trade the lives of several animals for my own; I'd do it again and I hope no one is ever denied the right to make that decision.

still, I call myself a vegan, and vegans are supposed to be against animal exploitation, period. and there's no way to deny that the animals who are kept in tiny cages, injected with all sorts of diseases and drugs, and eventually killed are being exploited. it's unclear to me exactly how effective all those tests are; peta says they're worthless but we all know how I feel about peta and their willingness to eschew useful, rational information in favor of shock tactics. and I patently disagree with ingrid newkirk's infamous statement that "we'd be against animal research even if it resulted in a cure for aids." I find it hard to believe, though, that all the testing is being done in a useful, responsible way; while I'm not one hundred percent opposed to vivisection for ethical reasons, I am against it being done without any regard for the animals' lives and welfare. animal testing that results in a cure for aids, or even a more effective treatment? sure. animal testing that gets nowhere and kills several dozen monkeys in the process? no. of course it's impossible to tell what the outcome of an experiment will be at the outset, but it's not impossible to look at it critically and decide that maybe it won't be so useful, nor is it impossible to treat animals humanely even if they're sick. we try our best with humans, you know.

I suppose my brand of veganism may seem extreme to most people, given that I won't even eat bread with l. cysteine in it, but really I try to base it on rationalism more than anything else: the idea is to be aware of how my life is impacting the planet, including the lives of other creatures, and to conduct myself in a way that minimizes the harm I inflict on the rest of the world. as a socially responsible and (passively) judgmental person, that has to affect my opinions as well as my actions. I try to always think about what I'm doing, what the implications of my words are, what messages I'm sending and how my little life extends out in so many directions through ecosystems and families and communities and industries. I am perfectly willing to be a less-than-dogmatic vegan when I think it's justified. and so...

so I don't know what to do with my ribbon. I want to wear it, but how can I fit all this -- yes I support aids research even though I know it involves animal testing but I think it's important to pay attention to how that testing is conducted and if it's useful enough to justify the cruelty involved -- inside a single shiny loop of skinny red satin? without explaining myself, how can I be anything but a hypocrite? there was a minor movement a few years ago to wear ribbons sideways to indicate some sort of extra awareness or reservation, but then some football player wore his red ribbon sideways to make it look like a darwin fish and that made a lot of people really unhappy. I think upside-down would just be bad. and so now I have mine tipped crookedly towards my mouth, to say why don't you ask me what I mean by this?, but I have a feeling everyone will think I just can't fasten a safety pin straight.

oh well. at least I told you. and at least I thought about it. right?
[  10:18  •  +  ]

[ friday, november 30 ]

sometimes I just want to lie quietly with my headphones on and look at the air between me and the ceiling and not feel guilty for my unproductivity. only sometimes. that's not so wrong, is it?
[  23:39  •  +  ]

[ thursday, november 29 ]

it's the persistence of the fog, I think, that's making it so hard for me to get any work done. fog is supposed to be a morning thing, like the last bit of sleepiness that you rub away from your eyes as you blink and sit up, already dissipating as the world gears into its daily drive. today has been perpetually shrouded with a soft veil of diffuse grey-white mistiness; we're inside the raincloud instead of underneath it. I can see the tree outside my window, dark and wet and naked, but beyond that the world is barelythere, fuzzy-edged and held together only by its faith in gravity.

everything feels smaller, compressed, isolated; with even the far walls of my own dorm disappearing into the fog it is hard for me to believe in the existence of an entire other building at the top of campus, full of classrooms with chalkboards waiting for my stilted equations and professors expecting completed problems sets. I migrate in a circle between my bed and my floor and my computer, as if with those four repeated footsteps I am traversing whole continents, because the entirety of my world suddenly fits inside one hundred fifty square feet. even with my desklamp casting its warm incandescent glow over the most lived-in corner of my room, the light seems ghostly, the air is a sedative, and the future is eclipsed by mystery.
[  15:19  •  +  ]

[ wednesday, november 28 ]

sometimes in the mirror I look so young and vulnerable that I think I must have imagined growing up.

tonight the air is mild and soft and the moon sometimes comes out from behind the clouds, cratered and glowing and just shy of fullness, so I refuse to be in pain. mind over something something.

today has been good. don't you think?
[  22:27  •  +  ]

[ tuesday, november 27 ]

it's been well over four hours since I left the gym, but my palms are still lined with rough red stripes from the grime on the trap bar, my fingers too tender to quite grip a pen, bloody on the insides where they were chafed by the edges of the forty-five pound freeweights. it makes me feel tangible.

in high school I hated weightlifting. I hated the smell of it, sweat and musk and grease and heat; hated the banging clanking noise, cacophanous over the ever-present fuzz of deliberately rythmic top forty hits channeled through buzzy speakers; hated being surrounded by boys who could hoist twice my body weight over their heads and girls who obsessively watched their spandex-clad reflections over their shoulders; hated doing the same thing over and over and over without ever moving anywhere.

I don't exactly know what happened. maybe it's having rugby as a motivator, but I think it's even more basic than that. I like lying on the bench with the bar across my chest, fingers curled, pecs tight, shoulders tensed, everything balanced laterally and waiting for the push. I like having quantized goals and quantized accomplishments: less than a second from start to finish, all that potential collected in such a small space turned suddenly kinetic, antigravity. I like saying, I am this strong, and knowing that I still have time to get stronger. I like the feeling that something so visceral and purely physical can be worthwhile, and that it's okay to try something I'm not sure I can do, because it's okay if I fail. I'll try again next time. and again.
[  22:33  •  +  ]

when the sky is this thick cloud-white color everywhere, I lose my sense of perspective and think it's hanging just overhead, draped across the tops of buildings and trees like a giant monochromatic circus tent. and then there are birds flying too high above me, and I feel like I am living in an mc escher print, where nothing is where you think it is and parallel lines converge.

also, speaking of clouds: there is an extrasolar planet with an atmosphere, and we can measure it. we are so cool.
[  15:40  •  +  ]

[ monday, november 26 ]

I always feel like I'm at a bit of a disadvantage with peter, because while I've been listening to him sing on about a weekly basis for nearly a year, and I have his voice trapped on a little silver disc that I can play to make me remember him singing and smiling in front of me, I am decidedly less-dimensional inside these black-and-white words. and so when we are thrown together under skyscrapers, side by side on park benches or surrounded in all directions by concrete and traffic, his voice with all its curves and inflections is just a familiar piece of the whole, but mine is sudden and struggling to fill in all the gaps that I know are inevitably left by these thin little computer-screen characters. and I can't help but wonder, listening to myself talk inside that tiny bit of time delay between my sparking thoughts and the moment when the sounds hit the air, if this is really me, if this is what I'm supposed to sound like.

on saturday we were walking across the schuylkill, looking at the lights on the underside of the market street bridge, when I realized that I had stopped analyzing the shape of my tongue and the pitch of my voice and I was just talking, really me. it's strange to think that I've known peter for a whole year, but even stranger to think that a year and a day ago I had no idea he even existed. life is such a funny whirlwind of accidents and circumstances; sometimes I wonder how I earned so much happy serendipity.
[  20:54  •  +  ]

it didn't occur to me to think it was weird that half my hair was suddenly gone; maybe I'd had too much hair to begin with. but those strange little white bumps all over my scalp were kind of gross. I poked at one gingerly, holding my thin strands of greasy-dark hair out of the way, and was alarmed when it pushed out farther, more of a spike than a bump now. I pinched it at the base and squeezed it hard, trying to break it off, but it just got longer, shoving through my dangling hair so fast that I couldn't stop it from getting tangled up. and then it started to move. it wriggled around, twisting at the head, maybe searching for a gulp of air; the other white bumps on my head started to grow and writhe as well, and soon I looked like some sort of albino medusa with my head full of sightless, mouthless white worms, all cold and pulsating and dancing without rhythm. I just watched them, helpless, as they squirmed down around my eyes, wrapped around my head, ran their icy little bodies across my eyes, into my ears and nostrils and the corners of my mouth, filling everything that was supposed to be air with a thick crush of squirming worm, until I could neither see nor hear nor breathe, only feel them make their way across my tongue and down my throat.

I woke up and I had my stuffed penguin's foot in my mouth. and I still have all my hair, which is actually not greasy at all and smells rather good.
[  04:49  •  +  ]

[ sunday, november 25 ]

I'm not one of those people who thinks pennies are useless. I keep all my pennies in a little pouch on my shelf, and occasionally I'll dig out a small handful for the inevitable non-nickel-divisible price of seminar break food, or take them to the machine that turns them into dollar bills in exchange for a seven percent fee. I always feel a little guilty doing that, because it puts me one step further on the road to upper-middle-class adulthood where time is more valuable than money, a place that I scorned as soft and indulgent when I was a little girl sitting on the floor in front of a pile of copper-colored change, carefully separating out piles of one hundred pennies each, folding and refolding the ends of the brown paper rolls to make them stay closed, worthy of a trip to the bank.

but last night as I was digging my keys out of my pocket while I hopped off the train, a penny escaped sideways from between my fingers and rolled across the concrete platform. there was enough light from the station that I thought I could see it glinting on the edge of a shadow, and I could have gone and picked it up, reaffirmed its worth to me, brought it home and deposited it in the embroidered chinese drawstring bag that lives on my shelf between my play-doh and medicine bottles. instead I let it go and ran across the grass towards the hill with my sweatshirt flapping around my waist and my hands spread wide like wingtip feathers, empty and open.

maybe it will get kicked aside and fall into the rocks beside the rails, where it will get dirty and cold and turn dull green, and years and years from now someone will find it and marvel at the twentieth-century minting date. maybe someone will find it tomorrow and pick it up for good luck all day long. maybe people will see it but will walk over and over and over it, not willing to lose the time and energy required to bend down and grab it, like bill gates stepping past a c-note scaled down by ten thousand. maybe it will just lie there unnoticed, staring up at the sky, watching the morning clouds skimming overhead and the birds flocking underneath and the leaves still caught in the same wind that tore them from the trees, calm and still underneath all that airborne activity. I wish I could.
[  10:19  •  +  ]