[ saturday, april 27 ]

"cake and pie," said lisa loeb, squinting out at us from behind her glasses and wind-tangled hair. "of course that's the right answer. cake or pie? no no." she was wearing fishnets under her little pink jumper, and she knew just how long to pause to let us giggle. "cake and pie. and donuts!"

and I thought, yes. cake and pie; cambridge and swarthmore. a little while later, when I wrote a letter for amnesty, I listed both my addresses. tomorrow I will leave home to go home. I think I like it this way.
[  19:42  •  +  ]

[ friday, april 26 ]

well, it just wouldn't be the end of the semester without one of my usual irresponsible runaway weekends, would it? most semesters I only go as far as new york, but this time I'm off to boston with the drexel kids. when I emailed my mom to make sure it would be okay for the four of us to invade our family's house, she wrote back and told me of course it was okay, because it will always be one of my many homes. and, well, how lucky am I to be at home in so many different places and with so many different people?

really. I dare you to have a cooler weekend than me.
[  20:11  •  +  ]

[ thursday, april 25 ]

nasa says that hubble has found the oldest stars in the universe. to be honest, I don't understand exactly how they know they're the oldest ones, but still:

The ancient white dwarf stars, as seen by Hubble, turn out to be 12 to 13 billion years old. Because earlier Hubble observations show that the first stars formed less than 1 billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang, finding the oldest stars puts astronomers well within arm’s reach of calculating the absolute age of the universe. [...]

In 1997 Hubble astronomers [announced] a reliable age for the universe, calculated from a very precise measurement of the expansion rate. The picture soon got more complicated when astronomers using Hubble and ground-based observatories discovered the universe was not expanding at a constant rate, but accelerating due to an unknown repulsive force termed “dark energy.” When dark energy is factored into the universe’s expansion history, astronomers arrive at an age for the universe of 13-14 billion years. This age is now independently verified by the ages of the "clockwork" white dwarfs measured by Hubble.

... and that is pretty damn cool. yay, science. (it's good and confusing that edwin hubble has so many things named after him, but I guess it's fitting in a way.) and check out how faint those stars are -- a billion times fainter than the stars we can see with our eyes.

for some reason, it's things like this that restore my faith in humanity.
[  08:22  •  +  ]

[ tuesday, april 23 ]

as black eyes go it's a rather elegant one, I think. it's just a small purple line, the color of the skin on a nearly-ripe plum, and it's got a gentle curve to it, tracing the border between my lower eyelid and the top of my cheek. I barely feel it even when I smile, so I'm a tiny bit surprised every time I see my reflection with its uncharacteristic asymmetry. I imagine the blue fairy carrying a paintbrush instead of a magic wand, bending over me as I'm sleeping, carefully holding my hair out of the way as she draws my wounded stripe in watercolor, with just a single stroke. maybe then she brushes some pink on my lips and blows me a kiss, slipping away before I can open my eyes. four times last night during only three hours of sleep I woke up, blinking and sighing, for no apparent reason.
[  08:36  •  +  ]

[ monday, april 22 ]

happy earth day, fellow earthlings.
[  08:38  •  +  ]

[ sunday, april 21 ]

somehow, in spite of my long and sometimes unfortunately intimate history with hospitals, this is the first daytime emergency room trip that I can remember. in spite of what prime time tv would have you believe, the er at midnight is usually quite deserted, with nothing but ugly wallpaper and sleepy night nurses for distraction. but today I was one of a steady stream of people, and my injury was non-urgent enough that I got to sit for several hours, waiting my turn. I'd almost been allowed to wait until monday for x-rays, but then the trainer made me bite down on a tongue-depressor and I nearly fainted. "I don't feel comfortable letting you eat anything until we know for sure you don't have a fractured maxilla," she told me. and so the emergency room it was, for my second round of x-rays in as many weeks.

the receptionist was wearing so many pendants and pins on her vest that I couldn't see the name on her identification tag. there was an ambulance outside the door with its siren running, so I hoisted myself up on my palms to lean over the counter as I told her, "I was punched in the face during a rugby game and I need to make sure nothing is broken." she handed me a clipboard and sat me down with the triage nurse, who took my temperature and blood pressure before she bothered to take my name. I spelled it twice for her before I decided it didn't really matter whether she got it right; a few minutes later she ran out of room before she had written down all my prescription medications. "don't worry about the rest," I said, and that she listened to. back with the receptionist, I recited my social security and insurance numbers while she assigned me a hospital id number and snapped an orange bracelet around my wrist. "are you an organ donor?" she asked, and even though I knew I wasn't going to be depriving anyone of organs, I blushed a little when I answered no. "I'm not one either," she told me conspiratorially, "even though everyone who works at the hospital is supposed to be." suddenly I felt the little golden guardian angel pinned to her lapel might be staring at me.

my face was hurting me, of course, but it wasn't really that bad. "on a scale of one to ten," the trainer had asked, "how bad is this?" I wrinkled my brow a little, thinking about it; my kidneys have turned me into something of a pain snob. "four," I said, "about as much as it hurt when I broke my nose." while I sat waiting I tried to guess at the painscale numbers of the other patients. the old man with a doubly broken leg who was practically tripping on his painkillers and kept telling the doctor that he liked his scotch neat: six. the young man with an entourage of children in shorts and tennis rackets, who said he'd heard his achilles tendon snap and whimpered as they took his shoe off: eight. the tearful little boy in a bloody green t-ball uniform with a gash under his chin: seven, because everything hurts more when you're a kid. the old woman in a flimsy housecoat who insisted that her middle-aged son stay next to her bed while the doctor examined her: five, although I really have no idea what she came in for. the man who was asleep in the chair across from mine: two.

the television mounted on the wall was inexplicably tuned to the starz! channel, and I sat with my head propped up on my forearm through the course of two completely incomprehensible movies and a few equally incomprehensible parenting magazines before the nudity in gun shy prompted the bloody little boy's father to get up and switch to spongebob squarepants. spongebob was supposed to be writing a paper for school, but instead he was finding dozens of ways to procrastinate: feeding the snail, scrubbing the kitchen, sharpening his pencil. try going to the hospital, I thought, remembering the english paper due on monday. it had been three hours since I arrived in the er, four since I'd gotten hit in the final five minutes of our game, and seven since I'd eaten that last piece of cantaloupe at breakfast. I absently put my finger in my mouth with the edge of my nail between my teeth, but as soon as I started to bite down my eyes filled with tears. stupid face.

"nice shiner," the doctor told me, running his finger over the line of mottled purple that had settled along the top of my cheekbone. "rugby's a rough sport." at least I didn't break myself playing tennis, I thought cruelly, and because my lip was still too swollen for me to smile I just nodded. out of the corner of my eye I saw a group of emts in blue jumpsuits wheeling a stretcher in through the automatic door. a man in dress clothes and a neckbrace was strapped on with bright yellow nylon restraints, overflowing on the sides. one emt was adjusting his oxygen tube while another maneuvered the stretcher around the corner, asking him if he had any other health problems besides the asthma. "hypertension," the man said, straining against the plastic that surrounded his neck and lower jaw. I'm in pretty good shape, I thought, watching him, but still I couldn't choke back my undignified squeak when the doctor pressed against the cartilege at the bottom of my nose.

they tried to write me a prescription. I have enough of those already, I think. "I don't want painkillers," I said. "I don't care if it's broken; I won't take them." all I really wanted was to leave. that and food. in the waiting room outside, spongebob was flipping krabby patties and a toddler was eating lemon creme cookies out of a machine-vended snackwell's package. "ethan's cookie!" he said, bouncing in his sneakers. I pushed my tongue against my teeth, and they wiggled a little in response, tingling into my gums.

on the way to radiology we passed by the man on the stretcher, who was getting set up with an iv. the soles of his loafers looked shiny and slippery. "I'm definitely not pregnant," I told the radiologist preemptively, and she giggled at me, running her hands over the top of her auburn head. she couldn't have been more than twenty-five, and she was a little bit too short to slide the films into place without standing on her tiptoes. I stood with my nose lightly touching the target cross on the board, carefully holding my breath and trying not to wince when the machine shuddered in front of me. fourteen pictures later I was lying on my back while the radiologist slid the camera over my head along its ceiling tracks, and I imagined the locking mechanisms suddenly failing, the telescoping neck falling all the way open with a series of crashing noises like very loud dominoes, my nose being crushed underneath.

I was back in emergency care room three, sitting on wrinkled sheets and listening to a bootlegged radiohead concert, when the doctor came in. "no broken bones," he said, and I was so happy to hear it that I forgot how annoyed I had been at the prospect of coming to the er in the first place. I guess it's good when your emergency room trips turn out to be pointless. "the nurse will be in to talk to you, and we'll get you out of here in a few minutes," he told me, handing me a referral on his way out. dr. your doctor. "o doctor! my doctor!" I said to the walls and the sheets and the clock.

thirty minutes later I was still there, and only the clock had changed its expression. it was after six, officially evening, and I was dangerously close (at least in my imagination) to the iwannagohome whine. I fiddled with my silly orange bracelet and discovered that with a little twisting, I could slide it over my thumb and off my wrist entirely. not like a real metal-clamped hospital bracelet. I remembered how it felt to squeeze the scissor blade between my bracelet and my fifteen-year-old skin, how I had to cut twice to get all the way through the plastic, and how it fell back into its same curl as if it were pretending that my wrist were still trapped inside it. no broken bones, I reminded myself, and while I waited for the nurse and the release form, I pushed against my nose just the slightest bit, to prove that I could stand the pain.

[  01:10  •  +  ]