[ saturday, december 15 ]
after an entire week of barely sleeping (not that you should be surprised by that anymore, I guess, but I still am somehow) I finally crashed last night, fast asleep at half-past-midnight even with my fingertips still coated with the sticky-sweet smell of the inside of an orange peel and my hair still in tangles from enduring the stylistic whims of a determined seven-year-old. I woke up at 3:48 this morning, confused and disoriented, because after three-something hours of sleep the sun was overdue for waking me up, or should have been. my eyes were still tired though, swollen with sleep and fatigue like the rest of my arthritic body, and when I stepped out into the hallway (where the lights burn twenty-four seven) I was knocked backwards against the wall by the force of photons alone. I limped down the hall with my hands over my eyes, fingers parted the slightest bit for squinting through, feeling that I had woken up in the wrong universe.I held my head under the sink faucet and ran cold water over it, feeling the shape of my face in the contours of the stream. my eyes were closed, but it felt like examining myself in a mirror at a too-close range, with my face turned into only a collection of pieces: the upturned corners of my lips; rounded sides of my nose barely big enough to make corners; the faint scar that runs from the corner of my eye down my cheek like a teardrop; soft edges of my jawline; the slight curl of my eyelashes; round, still-pinchable cheeks.
the girls and I had been playing to see who could make the others laugh first (I lost nearly every time, mostly unintentionally) when they discovered that I cannot satisfactorily frown. they tried to teach me, but I was apparently a very bad student, because no matter what I did they just giggled at me. finally they resorted to pulling the corners of my lips down and telling me to hold still as they let go. I tried, really, but it didn't work. "your cheeks are too rubbery!" they told me, chorusing it over and over because it made me laugh so hard. I like games that are fun to lose.
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[ thursday, december 13 ]
one of my astronomy professors has the visual elements periodic table on his wall. it's fun to stare at, but the website is a bit more fun to play with, especially if (like me) you're impatient and can't figure out what the pictures mean just by looking at them. (from halfway across the room I thought the americium illustration was a flag-colored tv dinner tray, but it's actually a smoke detector.)okay, geeks, what's your favorite? I like iridium, though I have to admit to giggling out loud at the picture for barium. that stuff tastes like dirty clay.
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[ wednesday, december 12 ]
from the playtime part of my presentation yesterday: you can fly around the eagle nebula. you know, if you're into that kind of thing.sometimes I think that even I can't believe how cool astronomy is, but then I realize that what's really unbelievable is that I'm allowed to learn it, just because I think it's cool.
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[ tuesday, december 11 ]
as we were leaving the science building after seminar today, one of our professors walked by rubbing his hand. "do you have any idea how much it hurts to drop a semester book on your hand?" he asked.roban half-smiled and said, "well. the semester is dropping on our heads right now."
today was the last official day of classes, although those of us in analytical dynamics still have one more seminar meeting. after tomorrow morning I will be completely done with logic, since our final is inexplicably scheduled for the first day of reading period instead of somewhere inside finals period. after that everything will be physics and astronomy for two weeks and then suddenly I will be back in massachusetts, in a world where I can sleep and the river runs on the other side of the highway and there are doctors instead of classmates looking out for me. even eight hours and hundreds of miles on a train never feels like enough time or distance to account for the chasm between these pieces of my life, and twelve days seems like an impossibly small number in which to fit the rest of this semester, which has already gone in so many directions I wasn't expecting. new friends. new major. new war. new heartache. new love. new...
no time for contemplation, really: so much to do. so much. so.
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[ monday, december 10 ]
it was a few years ago and I was with my friends in new york. we were sitting around a crescent-shaped table outside in the village, eating vegetarian fajitas and looking uptown at the skyscrapers edging the horizon. I was the only person there who had ever lived in manhattan, and I was eager to prove that eleven years away from the city hadn't taken the new yorker out of me."do you even know anyone here anymore?" one of my friends asked me, challenging. I bristled.
"of course I do. in fact, I know that woman right over there." I pointed at a slender elective redhead who was dressed all in black and walking past us with a croissant halfway inside her mouth. my friends looked skeptical, so I stood up and waved and yelled, "hi! it's me!" she glanced at me, startled, and then gave me a witheringly condescending look before she turned away to cross the street.
I could tell my friends didn't believe that I actually knew her. "oh," I said, scrambling, "of course she doesn't recognize me. I was only three the last time I saw her." their eyes were hurting me. what could I say? something too bizarre to be an invention, but too big a secret to be freely repeated. I gasped like a hooked fish just hoisted above the water's surface.
"she had an affair with my dad." their eyes widened, blinked, releasing me. I took a deep breath. going to be okay.
and then I fell off my bed, sitting up breathless even as I tumbled sideways onto the floor, pushing my hands frantically into my mouth as if I could take the dream-spoken words and shove them back inside. lies, lies, lies! I tell lies about myself all the time (yes I'm okay no it doesn't hurt too much) but I try so hard to keep all the things I imagine about other people quiet inside my brain, and there they were spilling like a river over a waterfall, and I couldn't take them back. all morning I worried that the twisting tightness in my stomach would make me sick, and still I'm afraid that the things I want to say aren't the things I'm supposed to say. tangled webs blah blah blah. stupid dream.
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[ sunday, december 9 ]
today while I was playing taboo (with ester benj jesse cathy ross) I got telescope and said "I see through these a lot" and they knew what I was talking about. yay, astronomy. yay, fun people. I'm having a good sunday.[ 20:43 • + ]
I'm honestly not sure how all my work is going to get done on time this week. but I suppose it will, because there are weeks like this every year, and I haven't flunked out of school yet, so I nust have it in me to accomplish things one way or another. I do seem to be toeing closer to that line each semester though, as if this were some kind of extreme sport and it would be pointless without the ever-present potential for self-destruction.
when I was in high school taking multivariable calculus for the first time, and struggling with it, I was semi-convinced I was going to fail. my parents told me that maybe it would be a good thing for me to fail a course, so that I would know I could do something completely wrong and the world wouldn't end because of it. I was unconvinced. I had stopped being a straight a student at the age of eleven, and even before that I had once in fifth grade gotten a twelve on a math quiz, so I had long ago abandoned any delusions of being a perfect young scholar, but I still wasn't prepared to fail an entire course.
maybe it would have been good for me to fail. maybe that way I could have gotten it out of the way before college, discovered that it really isn't fun, and figured out how to truly motivate myself to do well even in the classes I don't really care about instead of just making frantic last-minute attempts to save my grades from the land of no credit. on the other hand, maybe I would have discovered that I could fail things without destroying my life, and then I would be in even more trouble than I am now. no one would accuse me of not doing any work, since I spend more time doing astro/physics than anything else and maybe even everything else put together, but still I am almost always willing to stop and draw a picture, or read my email, or eat a snack, or look at the sky. and while I chide myself half-seriously for having such backwards priorities I know that I don't really believe they're backwards at all. I tell myself the rest of the world will still be there tomorrow and this assignment is due today but then I think, what about this moment and this idea and this feeling? they are all so ephemeral and this assignment will still be here in five minutes. it's like zeno's paradox for productivity: I can always find something more transient, something that needs my attention now if I want to catch it before it disappears forever.
the sky today is beautiful-blue behind a drifting layer of altocumulus clouds, and the sun is dripping through the cracks to spill in stripes along the face of kohlberg. long shadows on the ground fade in and out of existence as the clouds slide by overhead, steadily disappearing and reappearing like a heartbeat. my philodendron's leaves are trembling in front of the open window with the same frequency as the twigs on the tulip tree outside.