[ saturday, january 19 ]

oh my god! square one music videos on the web! (and mathnet clips too!) for those of you who like to sing along, here are the lyrics.

you know, when I was five or so and saw the angle dance video for the first time, I thought the warning in the beginning was for real, not quite getting the difference between obtuse angles and obscene activities. I had some vague notion that I was supposed to run and tell my mother about my impending corruption, but I just watched, transfixed, and really it did seem a bit provocative. that tight spandex, the throbbing beat, those flashing lights, his angular jaw...

pbs is the best.
[  20:10  •  +  ]

you might not think that this height of human civilization that we're supposedly living in could be embodied in places like this:

a little indian grocery store that hide on little street next to rowhouses, where the door is propped open with a huge sack of shakarkand and the crowded purple shelves are so close together that you have to turn sideways to squeeze past, and the owner barely speaks enough english to tell you the difference between khattabhaji and suvabhaji but will still sell you a vegetable samosa for a dime, because they're you're favorite and he likes your smile;

the homeless men who sit just inside alleyways with their backs to the brick walls of bookstores and bagel shops, singing a little bit sometimes or drawing on newspaper scraps, wrapped in dirt and sweat-soaked blankets and rustly black plastic bags to ward off the spirits of winter, and who are never anything less than grateful to have the three pennies leftover from the twenty dollars you just spent on music and socks;

a dark, narrow upstairs store that sells only poetry, where nothing is alphabetized and the shelves are so tall that the top row of books is nearly furry under its layer of undisturbed dust, the pet dog rubs its matted sand-colored head against your knees when you bend down to look for something new in the haphazard pile of unshelved hardcovers, and later you have to climb awkwardly and sheepishly over the top of the cashier's warped, cluttered counter to retrieve your backpack, because there's just no way around and the store's owner has disappeared;

you might not think to think so, but we know better, my cities and I. and -- no matter how many words I come up with they are still inadequate -- I love my cities! sometimes I think I love new york for its body and cambridge for its brain, but no matter; the nice thing about places is that you can be faithful to as many at once as you have room for in your heart. even when I am off in the suburbs, I remember.
[  00:06  •  +  ]

[ friday, january 18 ]

it's pretty incredible how much variation there is in the geology and topography of just the continental united states. this is a damn big country; funny how easy it is to forget that.
[  14:24  •  +  ]

[ thursday, january 17 ]

it's not that I can't think of things to say, it's that I can't quite find the time to write them down.

I've been spending a lot of time on trains lately; aside from my regular subway habit, I've also been amtraking and commmuting around the east coast. I've been thinking that I should be bored with this by now, but I'm not.

the first time I took the train between boston and new york by myself, we arrived in penn station almost two hours late (amtrak was never on time back then; on a subsequent trip later that year, it took me nearly nine hours to get from long island to cambridge). I had already walked ten blocks up park ave, with my duffel bag slung over one shoulder and my backpack hanging off the other, before it occurred to me that I was just a little high school kid and someone somewhere might be interested to know that I had, in fact, arrived safely.

I'm apparently some kind of adult now, and I can fly off to some other part of the country without telling anyone about it, or walk up to the ticket window at north station inside the swarm of commuters as if I had a purpose for travelling beyond my own childish whims. it's should feel old-hat, routine, but it doesn't at all. I still feel the buzz of urgency when I look at train schedules, still recite connection times and train and track numbers to myself, still delight (though secretly, now) in the echoing grandeur of big city terminals and their gigantic clocks and the constant rush of feet across hard, flat floors. I still feel strangely, thoroughly satisfied every time I cross the gap between the platform and the train, suddenly overwhelmed by my own confident independence. look at me; I'm a big kid now.

three more trains, tomorrow, and then I will be still for a while. or at least I will move in smaller circles.

by the way, I know I owe like two hundred people email. I'm getting to you. promise.
[  23:18  •  +  ]

[ wednesday, january 16 ]

I think the galactic center is watching us. also, I'm going to new york in three hours but I'm not asleep yet.
[  03:45  •  +  ]

[ tuesday, january 15 ]

there's a house in my neighborhood with a yard full of books. perhaps it doesn't take many books to fill up a front yard that is only a five-by-two strip of grass between the concrete borders of the sidewalk on one side and the porch steps on the other, but still, there are more books than patches of grass. they're sprawled and splayed haphazardly across the ground, facedown with pages bent into one big wrinkle underneath, or lying helplessly on top of broken spines, spread open for the sky. they're mostly novels, I think; I saw a copy of one hundred years of solitude with its pages frozen together, all those words trapped pitifully inside a chunk of moldy ice. but there was also an outdated phone book for another county and a big spiral-bound book of boston area maps, both soggy and worn, yellower than they should be.

I stood and watched them for a little while this afternoon, imagining how they got there (thrown from the second-story balcony? tossed casually over a careless shoulder? --books in flight are like girls on the brink of adolescence, simultaneously awkward and graceful, with all the wrong parts going in all the wrong directions but somehow still fluid and gentle -- or perhaps they are like elephants at a graveyard, gathering instinctually in preparation for death), and how they might end up. paper is so fragile and temporary; eventually there will be no printed words left to mark divisions between the pretentious classics and the trashy romance novels and the utilitarian atlases. they will all be piles of squishy tree-pulp, bleached by sunlight and decorated with tracks of dirt trapped in creases, and with the cover art faded beyond recognition and the letters inside blurred and obscured by rain, sun, snow, wind, and time, how will we know when to sigh and when to smile and when to turn our noses up? I worry about the impermanence of our legacy, sometimes.

you know. harvard has thirteen million books inside ninety different libraries, and some of them probably haven't even been looked at in my lifetime. and every day, probably, some young author goes into the store and is suddenly much less a bibliophile, because there are so, so many books and how will the casual browserby ever find the right one among the crowd of slim vertical titles? how do you choose between permanent obscurity and temporary brilliance? and how, how do you leave a book to wither and wilt outside, defenseless against the harsh, unheeding elements? is it art or merely foolishness?

I think my mind has gone off somewhere and left me behind here with only its echoes to keep me company.
[  16:56  •  +  ]

[ monday, january 14 ]

snow fades to sleet to rain and back again. it's amazing how those few degrees colder can make the difference between a world that looks like it's just been frosted like a birthday cake to one that seems to have been used as a handkerchief by a sloppy, sniffling giant. I stayed under the covers all morning, sleeping intermittently and watching my window from the floor, waiting for the moment when the drips on my screen turned crystalline and I knew it would be safe to get up without being greeted by the dreary sop of almost-snow. it worked; for just the right few minutes, everything outside was white and sparkly, bouncing energy in all directions. it's mostly futile to anthropomorphize the weather, I know, since the clouds are so unforgivingly impartial. but sometimes I can't help it. and how could the slick crunch underfoot be anything but the wretched remnants of an unresolved quarrel, left as an accidental compromise between the solid-hard staunchness of sidewalk bricks and the slippery-wet mess of phaseless water that tries to slither insidiously between the cracks? I like watching the world's secret life, or perhaps inventing it.

also, for someone who is not much of a math person, I've been having a whole lot of fun playing with the encyclopedia of integer sequences. one, one, two, three, five, eureka!

I'm glad vacation exists.
[  18:40  •  +  ]

[ sunday, january 13 ]

I like movies that don't cost ten dollars to see, don't last for three hours, and make me happy to be a part of the universe: look, stars and galaxies!
[  12:11  •  +  ]