[ saturday, february 16 ]

I haven't been able to escape the lingering scent of food yet, trapped as it is under my ragged slips of fingernails, but somehow it's become comforting instead of annoying. while I was chopping onions and garlic with a swiss army knife I had to blink quickly to keep my eyes from watering into tears, and the blade was so short that my fingers kept running up against the fat ends of the allium bulbs. we had another knife, a nine-cent secondhand one, but that was being used for bread and brie.

if I'd had the presence of mind to bring my own knife, I wouldn't have had to use a pocket knife for dicing. I have a great little knife with a mysterious history; two years ago I found it half-buried in the mud beside the creek, and when no one had claimed it after a week I scrubbed the grime and dirt off it with the hottest water my hands could stand, and then I adopted it. my hallmates were sure that it was some kind of attempted-murder weapon, but I thought it more likely belonged to some careless picnicker who didn't bother to read the weekly news. their version was more exciting, though, and once while its rubber handle was warm inside my grip, I poked myself in the opposite palm to feel the sharpness of the tip. I didn't draw blood, but the tingly prickle stayed on my skin for the rest of the day.

but the email didn't say anything about knives, just mugs and spoons. those I brought, freshly washed. for a while, when the onions weren't quite sautéed enough but I needed the cutting board for the baby carrots, we stored the raw, wet, freshly-cubed red potatoes inside my science fair mug. it's a really weird mug, actually; they were given out at the regional competition, which I guess was sponsored in some fashion by the somerville rotary club, because it says "somerville rotary club" inside the massachusetts-shaped outline that's between a stylized atom diagram and a blurry double helix. the fair was held at somerville high school, so the other side of the mug has a somerville high seal with a picture of something that looks like a beehive and the words "honor and progress" underneath. it's the mug I use for food most often, and I've had way too many people ask me if I went to school in somerville. is it my fault rindge never gave me any mugs?

my coolest science mug, by the way, is from science magazine. it says "I [heart] science" on it, but the heart is a diagram, labeled and everything. it was a present, rescued from a thrift store by a friend who knew I would appreciate it. I love it. anyway, after we put the potatoes in the soup pot, I washed my mug out for the second (but not the last) time. it probably hadn't been washed for at least four months before yesterday; so much for gradualism.

we sat on the carpeted stairs and stuffed ourselves with snacks and gossip while the soup simmered in the next room. for a while I was the only white girl there, an oddity that would have gone completely unnoticed by everyone had I not stupidly asked, "what?" in response to someone being described as multi. for someone with dual citizenship I am remarkably oblivious to things like racial identity, which really I think is not so good, given how important it is to most people. at my first elementary school in upstate new york we were all white, and at my second elementary school on the island there was one (half) black girl in the entire student-and-faculty-body. we were friends; when we were nine she introduced me to right said fred and I was dutifully scandalized by the pussy lyrics. I was also very envious of her canopy bed, with its rainbow-pastel fabric stretched gracefully over curving white steel, but not of the ridiculous new kids on the block sleeping bag that wrecked the color scheme of the entire room. of course, you'd have to live inside toucan sam's stomach for a nkotb sleeping bag to match the decor in any way. hideous.

when I was in fifth grade we got a second black girl, except she was less black than my friend and seemed more orange than anything else. in the summer her hair was sun-bleached and she wore it in bright frizzy pigtails, and whenever I saw her I couldn't help but think that she looked just like an orangutan. I didn't think it out of cruelty or even childish stupidity; all humans have always looked like animals to me, and still do. there's a muskrat in wind ensemble and a bonobo in tap class and a panther on my hall. I haven't figured out my animal, though, at least not yet.

today I seem to be something mindless and chattery... rest assured that it's a google-squared times worse inside my head. the split-pea soup was excellent, by the way, thick and green and spicy. I burned my fingers spooning it into andy warhole mugs and sponged it up with chunks of bread and licked it off the corners of my mouth. the steam from the pot made my hair curl in ringlets around my face and the hot potato pieces I dropped left pale smudges on my navy corduroys, and it was quite the glorious mess.

afterwards, I washed my mug again.
[  13:33  •  +  ]

[ friday, february 15 ]

it was four-twenty when I walked home, and the darkness made all the nighttime sounds seem louder: the recycyling truck idling on a side street like a snoring giant; morning-birds rustling inside bushes, hidden behind a dark curtain of waxy winter foliage; my footsteps crunching lightly across half-dry grass coated in sparkling frozen dew. rumble-flutter-whisper-snap, noises falling into the lilting rhythmic tracks left inside my head from reading all one hundred twenty-four pages of the 13 clocks aloud, nonsense syllables drawing meaning out of context alone.

we all have our faults, and mine is believing so much in words. in the final analysis they will always be too small to fill all the corners of my memories, no matter how much onomatopœic nonsense I slip inside their pockets.
[  04:54  •  +  ]

[ thursday, february 14 ]

a good way to feel better about homework is to do something else entirely.

it's just watery pigment on an index card, but it's so nice and smooth underneath the rounded tip of my brush. everything seems more gentle through the softness of red sable hair, as if I'm feeling parts of the world that my fingertips are too clumsy to touch.

and hey. happy valentine's day.
[  02:57  •  +  ]

[ wednesday, february 13 ]

the seniors on my hall are starting to get grad school acceptance letters. they've tacked the congratulatory papers on their doors, done cartwheels down the hall, run jumping and screaming into each other's arms. I smile, watching them, but in the selfish corners of my heart I wish they would stop, because they're making me nervous.

in high school I made myself crazy in the process of convincing myself that I would never get into swarthmore, but I was quite confident that I would be accepted by a good, competitive college. I had no delusions of infallibility but neither did I have much sense of limitations or barriers, at least not academically. I would make plans and the world would follow them with me. but now, now there are already schools that I know won't want to have anything to do with me, and sometimes this plan of mine seems like one long exercise in self-destruction.

so I don't like thinking about graduate school. and the pre-med juniors are all studying for the gmat, writing med school applications already; I sit with them at lunch and listen to them lamenting their too-low practice scores, and I don't understand how people my age can be doing this already, falling back into the world of standardized tests and national competition and decisions that carry your future piggyback. it will be my turn soon enough, ready or not. which I'm not.

I had to stop in the middle of working on my astro homework today to go sit under a table and cry for a little while, because sometimes I just can't make all the variables go where they're supposed to. but then I came out and things went a little better, so maybe it is just today that is misaligned with me and my brain. the tall serious freshman who lives around the corner from me has an ashy smudge on her forehead and I had my mouth halfway opened to ask her what happened before I remembered it was already wednesday.

besides. I'm wearing a headband made of dental floss, and it's working out better than it should, certainly better than I expected. perhaps everything else will as well.
[  12:24  •  +  ]

[ monday, february 11 ]

this morning while my poetry professor read pieces of the wasteland and told us something that I'm sure was quite erudite about pastiche and parody and prophecy, I blinked fast and hard to stay awake, and I watched as ophelia sat on the clock above the door stroking the buddha's blue shoulders and drunken tiresias wrestled on the floor with two swollen green snakes and a haggard old woman wearing a purple scarf on her head perched on my classmate's shoulder and drew powder-gilded tarot cards out of his ear one by one by one, and I think I may have forgotten how to breathe in between thoughts.

later I fell onto my bed before I remembered to take my shoes off and slept without dreaming, all the way through to per voi il core struggendo si va and into the silence beyond. you know, I think I'm back in love with college.
[  23:24  •  +  ]

[ sunday, february 10 ]

it came out, after all. how about that?
[  12:23  •  +  ]