[ 28.2.03] · [ ]
time, time, time. I feel like a whale in an ocean of schoolwork; when I do manage to poke my head above the surface it's only to snort a bit and grab another breath of air. no time to talk, but I do sing as I swim, sometimes. when I left my room on monday I found the stairwell full of an art class. there were people sitting on the stairs all the way from the fourth floor to the first, with their sketch pads balanced on their knees or spread out on the landings. I picked my way through them on my way down, winding between legs and stray pencils. some people were drawing the railings, with all their careful ornamentation and slow taper; others were leaning back to see the whole curving staircase with its smoothly bending banister and narrow windows. none of them, not a single one, was drawing the other students. the stairs were so full, crowded with people who themselves made small curves or sharp angles, but the pictures were all clean, elegant, empty. it made me dizzy.
[ 25.2.03] · [ ]
this has turned into a strange, beautiful, alien night. everything is so quiet, especially for a friday. when I left the astro lab at 1:30 there were no car noises, no people noises, really no noises at all except that pervasive watery whisper that inhabits the air on mild winter nights. it was fifty degrees this morning, then cool and rainy this afternoon, and now a mist has settled in that seems to fall down from the sky and up from the snow at the same time. I walked home the long way around, through the woods behind the music building. the snow was soft and wet but still deep, and I sank through until my light cotton pants were soaked up to my knees. how odd to be standing in fifteen inches of snow, wearing nothing over my short-sleeved shirt but an unzipped hoodie whose pockets held unworn fleece mittens, my heavy collection of college-issued keys, and my plastic disposable camera with five exposures remaining. I took the camera out and knealt down in the snow to take pictures along its surface, low and stretching out like the moonscape or a great mountain glacier. I'm almost certain they won't come out, dark as it was, but sometimes most of the point is just to see the world through a viewfinder so the edges fall away and all you see is what's right in front of you, waiting. one of the streetlights had toppled over during the blizzard and lay half-slid down a hill with its head resting in a bramble of weeds and bare shrub branches like some sort of fallen giant. somehow it was still on in spite of being mostly buried in the snow, sending fluorescent light streaming through the branches, lighting the snow from within so that it glowed like a nightlight on the floor of the forest. it's been a night for glowing, for almost-silence and softness that makes me feel delicate, lightweight, like spun glass or a soap bubble that could simply float up, up until it's gone into the night sky. even back on my hall, now, everything is quiet and far away. all the doors are closed, and even the girls who are sitting on the couch near the windows are sitting without speaking, barely even moving. it's as if someone hit the pause button on the rest of the world, to let me walk through it without having to grow up any more.
[ 22.2.03] · [ ]
sometimes when I'm anxious I get hot, red-eared and sweaty, as if my pounding heart were generating extra heat with nowhere to go but out through my head and jittering fingers. but today I'm cold. I'm freezing. my fingers, nose, cheeks, and even my toes are all warm to the touch, but inside I feel like I'm made of ice, or maybe liquid nitrogen. or maybe my frenzied heart has finally worn itself out and has stopped beating altogether. in the abstract, I'm still not too worried about having a job
[ 19.2.03] · [ ]
being awake makes me tired.
[ 18.2.03] · [ ]
it is still snowing, so I am still writing about the snow. sorry. I love snow! is any other weather so thoroughly transformative? we are covered, almost submerged in swelling piles of snow. in the bathroom, the entire bottom half of the window is white where a scalloped snowdrift has accumulated on the ledge outside; downstairs, there are trails and mounds of snow around all the doors, as if there hadn't been enough room outside so some of the snow had to sneak underneath and hide inside to keep from being buried. it's light, crystalline snow, too cold to be wet, beautifully soft in the dark and brilliantly sparkling in the round spotlights thrown down by the lamps that line the paths across campus. we don't have holidays or long weekends at swarthmore, but the snow does make it feel like we should. I have all these cover letters to write, plus a few ridiculous essays, for various job applications to which I am finally honestly applying myself. but today I did a spectacular job of doing nothing, telling myself that getting a job was more important than doing my seminar reading and then telling myself that there was no need to finish job applications five days early when the weather is throwing such a glorious party. we walked down to the gym this afternoon to play soccer, bundled up like babies in snowsuits and earflapped hats, and we couldn't help yelling to each other as we slid down the path just how incredible all the snow was. inside, we played under skylights that were covered in quilts and chunks of rooftop snow, and every so often we would get to watch a small avalanche from the underside as the snow slid off, rumbling like a faraway train, to let the light from the sky fall through.
[ 16.2.03] · [ ]
[ 14.2.03] · [ ]
I guess it's supposed to be cold today, but you can't tell from the inside of my room. I don't think I've ever been so compulsive about taking my temperature (okay, part of it is that I like playing with my electronic thermometer), but really, it just feels weird to wake up sweating in boxers and a t-shirt when the world outside is piled with snow. I'm afraid that my plants will die if I leave my window open too much, but it's still warm in here even with an inch of open space at the bottom for the cold air to rush through. it's like I'm living in some sort of virtual environment, and the view outside my window is just a projection, a bunch of holograms to make me think I'm situated somewhere southwest of philadelphia. the seminar room where my monday afternoon psychology class is held is not much bigger than my bedroom, and it has a single window at the far end. from my spot at the end of the table, the window is in the exact opposite direction from the whiteboards where our semi-senile professor scribbles notes. (here's an environment conducive to good learning: a small enclosed space where the air is full of marker fumes and you have to sit still for three hours.) I was expecting this arrangement to get me in trouble before the first class meeting was over, but it took until the middle of class this week, when the snow was really coming down and those thick flakes were catching all over the split-open seed pods on the tulip poplar outside, like sugar filling up teacups -- "rabi, are you listening?" "yes... I can listen and look out the window at the same time." -- and I was listening (frontal cortex activity releases glutamate excites g-aminobutyrate circuit inhibits ventral tegmental area controls dopamine levels in the basal ganglia; cocaine disinhibits gaba circuit and dopamine reuptake is blocked), but that may not have been the best thing to say. silly, silly, windows. my sublingual temperature this morning is 98.9 degrees. perfectly normal.
[ 12.2.03] · [ ]
for some reason the duration of snowfall always surprises me, even after twenty-one years of winters in the northeast and even when I know we're supposed to get five or eight or however many inches of snow. I don't know what I expect, exactly; maybe that the snow expands on the ground or that a half-foot of it just drops out of the sky during some moment when my back is turned. it's been falling since early yesterday evening. I had this idea, last night, that I should go outside and lie down somewhere under the open sky. if I could hold still all night long I would be covered in snow, full of snow through and through, snow where my brain and my heart and my lungs used to be. not to be dead or anything, just to be so full of something clean and white and soft and quiet. instead I slept under a single blue sheet and dreamed about eating small squares of green shag carpet.
[ 7.2.03] · [ ]
oh, the weather! yesterday morning was mild and rainy, rainy where it goes from spitting to drenching to nothing like it's trying on hats or something, not that my moods don't act like that sometimes too. over here in the under-construction corner of campus, the tarpaulins covering the scaffolding were tight shiny drumheads for the falling raindrops, and showers of sparks and molten metal were flying out into the air, so that it was raining fire and water both. then the wind came and blew the clouds away, but walking up the hill felt like swimming through molasses and no matter how snugly I tucked my hair inside both my sweatshirt and raincoat, the wind grabbed it and pulled it out so that it was streaming and snapping behind me like a banner atop a castle tower. today it's cold again, with blue skies and bright sun except where lean, sharp-edged shadows lie criss-crossed on the outside walls. the manhole covers are filled with smooth clean ice where the rain collected. winter, spring, winter.
[ 5.2.03] · [ ]
I'm still lamenting the disappearance of the snow -- all that's left now is so dirty as to be nearly unrecognizable -- but wow, the air has smelled wonderful for the past few days. the earth is thawing and I'm walking everywhere across squelching mud, finally rendering my new sneakers permanently stained, but it's worth it. my window is open, has been since sunday morning; outside it smells like the whole world has just taken a shower and is waiting to give us all a warm, soap-sweet, still-damp hug.
[ 4.2.03] · [ ]
okay, I'm warning you right now that this is going to sound horifically insensitive, but I don't fucking care that one of the astronauts was from israel. I mean, it's terrible that israel's first astronaut is dead, but it's terrible that all those astronauts are dead. I don't care where they were from, I don't care what experiments they were doing, I don't care what the president thinks, and I certainly don't care what commercial funding and research has been lost. not everything has to be about politics! sometimes art is just art, accidents are accidents, and people are people. this is sad: seven families with missing people. that's what I care about. and this, too -- what happens next? the space shuttles are good for two things: putting human beings in space and putting telescopes in space. I had taken the latter so much for granted that it didn't even occur to me that the demise of the columbia would hurt the sirtf mission until a friend pointed it out to me this morning. granted, we have a huge emotional investment in things like telescopes and cameras, but unless this is completely meaningless to you, then dammit, you should too. and as for the humans -- if you could be shot into orbit, if you could look down on earth and see the planet as a sphere, wouldn't you do it? I realize I am veering wildly into the realm of pie-in-the-sky idealism here, but I do believe that exploration and the simple pursuit of wonder are far better reasons for shuttle missions than the bullshit corporate-funded science that most of nasa is tied up in these days. that's what we're doing, you know, with the telescopes and the human beings. it's always been dangerous, and it's almost always been worth it. was it worth seven lives to learn what flowers smell like in microgravity? I kind of don't think so. did those astronauts love their jobs anyway? I really, really hope so. but more than that I hope that the rest of us can do even better. I want us to be explorers before we're politicians, and people before we're american or russian or israeli or whatever. if we decide that's impossible... well, that would be a tragedy too, don't you think?
[ 1.2.03] · [ ]
ugh. please come home, astronauts. and please, world, please no space shuttle terrorism. [edit, 10 am: cnn's tech/space index has been updating continually with more on this story.]
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