So, I haven't been home since Friday night at about 9:30pm and the roommate was apparently worried about me, with good cause, of course. I did give her a call yesterday at like 3 in the afternoon, and I tried to call her last night, but Peter's steadfast refusal to pick up his house phone had already resulted in my missing her "I'm going out" call. I had actually intended to ask her if she'd like me to pick up a certain supply for a certain top-secret girl activity that we intended to engage in, but since she wasn't at the room, she couldn't give me the go-ahead. And now that it's late on Easter, it seems pretty hopeless. Ah well.

So, sorry, Kat, and you can have some cheezits if you like, just leave a few for me in case I ever wander back. ;)

It's amazing the things that can change your perspective on life.

Thursday was a day full of wondering. Wondering "Just how stable am I?" and "What's his problem anyway?" and "What happens next?" all of which resolved into Kat and me giving ourselves lovely haircuts in the dorm bathroom. Point A--we could have done much worse than to cut our hair. Point B--we both really like our new haircuts.

Friday was an exercise in stubborness, a trait I happen to posess in spades. I was stubbornly refusing to communicate with Peter and stubbornly applying myself to a grueling design project which ended up consisting of seven-plus hours of cutting mat board on the floor. When I was done with the project, I had no choice but to face the problem or just sit around miserable and useless, and while some people might have chosen to be useless, I did not. For once. I decided instead to take the first move and open myself to counter-attack, not that I was really expecting one. So we sat on his couch and talked for a little while until things started to make more sense and we saw what we had to do. He played me a new song he'd written that day about us fighting and how miserable he'd been, and I got to realize yet again how silly and mean I am. But I was won, of course, being a sucker for artists and musicians especially, and what followed was little more than the most perfect night of snuggling/sleep ever known to human kind.

Today was spent almost entirely in bed. Napping, talking, cuddling, what have you. With only a few hours taken out for food and The Mummy, a very surprisingly good movie. A latenight discussion of blood-drawing needles led, in a remarkably roundabout way, to the topic of recreational substances, a conversation that never fails to disturb me...and so I was upset for a little while, but then thought better of it. After all...I have to relax a bit if I don't expect his purity test score to leave mine in the dust.


PS. It's not actually about the purity test scores, I just figure I should relax.

I suppose I've mentioned this, but I've recently been listening to lots of Tom Lehrer, a situation largely due to the fact that I got my dad to lend me his two big Tom Lehrer cds. One of said cds has twenty-eight tracks on it....awesome. I think I've also decided that Lisa Loeb wrote her new album just for me--there's not a song on it that doesn't reach me in one way or another, and some, like "The Way it Really Is," seem to be written about me. Mmm...yes, indeed, I think it's very possible that I'm losing my mind altogether.

Speaking of new, there's really nothing quite like trying something new. Especially when it's something that you never quite dared to do, as opposed to just something the opportunity for which never came up. To take a personal risk is exhilirating in a way that little else is. And I don't necessarily mean risking your physical well being, but maybe risking something so personal that it might just effect who you are.

Maybe you never even realized that there was just this one thing that you wish you had the guts to do. Then one day, you realize, out of nowhere, that it's time to take that chance. And you turn to your roommate and say, "Kat, let's do this thing." And of course she's all for it and so you make her promise not to let you back down. And you don't.

I could get used to this kind of thing.

So after some crying and hyperventilating and nearly bashing my head on some stairs as an effect of the resultant dizziness, I stumbled into math class and sat in the back. I immediately got out some paper and began to write. I wrote and wrote until the quiz, and then in the twenty five extra minutes I had before my next class, and then through a lot of Computer Imaging. I wrote about a page and a half about what happened, why I was upset, and what I thought about everything related, all the while pretty successfully villifying any other involved parties. Finally reached the conclusion that while I was definitely wrong to be picking fights about stupid things, the whole mess was definitely made much worse by other people not thinking before they speak.

I mean, I know I'm messed up, and I know that I've said that I need to be kept in line, but there's a big differencee between setting me straight and aggravating me. I guess the point I'm making is that the appropriate response to me pushing buttons is just to hold firm and not give in. Pushing back is a bad idea. Well, that's how I feel about it anyway. I guess if the point is to push me into a blind panic where I can't even think of what's wrong, then taking the offense is a great way to do that.

Incidentally, I've noticed that one side effect to being put into a hysterical state is that I actually retain some memory of exact words, which is something I am usually incapable of doing during a fight. Well, we learn something new every day, now don't we.

I dreamed, this morning, that I and a team of others were attempting to build some kind of theme park out of snow in a village in Italy or Greece that apparently got a lot of snow. My brother was there, and my roommate's boyfriend's roommate, and one of my high school writing teachers. There were all kinds of strange, sentient little creatures that could have been straight out of a Pixar movie. The snow was colored in bright colors, greens and oranges, and was sometimes not snow but sand. The villagers left, at some point, because the winter was too harsh. I was not ever cold.

After some severe ickiness with my comment service being down and causing errors in my page, I'm all nice and cozy here again. Aaaah.

Went to put on Cake and Pie a little while ago and realized that I really wanted to hear Firecracker instead. It was a strange sensation, but I was just thirsting for the opening chords of "I Do." I suppose they just remind me of when I was taught to play them.
This is, of course, after I listened to both of the Tom Lehrer cds that I have recently borrowed from my dad. All the way through, of course. Most excellent albums.

I'm suddenly contemplating gratuitous links to sexy pictures of Peter. Nah...maybe I'll just keep him to myself just a little bit.

Today marks the one month anniversary of the creation of this blog. Yay! I'm glad that I've managed to stick with it and that I've sort of realized what I have to say. In general, only, of course. The point seems to be for me to get things out of my system and into print where I can figure out what I'm about, though sometimes blogging is also a clear exercise in descriptive or persuasive writing. All good stuff, I think.

Oh, yeah, and the hot boys dig chicks that blog. ;)

Infinite thanks, also, to Peter who grants me such praise as to compare me to Martha and Rabi, a couple of really inspiring Bloggers that I don't read nearly as often as I ought to.
If you like me, read them to see what it's really all about.

I put on makeup today for the first time since my first date with Peter. I guess I just felt like it...I'm wearing one of his favorite sweaters, too. It's always strange when I wear makeup here at college, because I do it so rarely. In high school, I wore makeup pretty much every day, so when I do it now, it kind of feels like I'm being childish.

The fact that I don't wear makeup on a regular basis anymore is a sign, I think, of some kind of personal maturity for me. I rarely feel the need to impress anyone with my appearance; it's more important to impress them in other ways. Now, I use my personality, my abilities, and what sometimes passes for wit in order to make an impression on people, and I really feel that I'm quite pretty enough without the makeup.
At least to anyone that matters.

Back to the grind, again. I've had to actually do school work for definitely the first time in three weeks. But besides that, I've been to some really cool classes.

11:30--Math recitation. Never ever going to one of those again, except for the quizzes they're giving every Thursday.

12:30--Survey of the Universe. Quite possibly the coolest class I will ever take. Astronomy without calculus, but will unfortunately probably entail gravitational motion. Ah well, there are sacrifices to be made for the sake of impressing the professor on the first day of class. "Does anyone know what the brightest star in Orion is?" I thought about it, started to say "Sirius," but by that time he's already written a "B" on the board. "Did someone say something?" he says. "Is it Betelgeuse?" I say from the front row. He looks impressed. "Yes it is." Later, he tells us that Orion is his favorite constellation.

2:00--Computer Imaging. The class itself is going to be quite a bore, I think, but the lab....aaah. The lab makes me salivate. Incidentally, we photo majors have our own digital lab complete with a score of Epson 1200 series printers and some nice flatbed scanners. Yes...one of each for every workstation. Also stylus-tablet consoles for precision graphic editing and Nikon neg-scanners. Aaaaah. Ooops, drooling on the keyboard...

3:30--Design 3. Design in three dimensions. Ick. Professor seems cool, but talks really incredibly fast and, according to my friend who was in his Design 2 class last term, gives a ton of work. Not something I'm terribly looking forward to, and as much as I can understand a photographer's need for understanding spacial relations, I don't see why I have to build little cardboard boxes for this short balding man. At least he let us out two hours early.

Tomorrow, I'll be looking forward to class with my oh-so-competent academic advisor who has yet to give me a grade for her class last term. Mmmm, goodie.
Then my sister is coming to visit, and I'm just all kinds of excited about that, cause no one has ever come for the sole purpose of visiting me, before.
My back hurts from cutting mat board on the floor. Damn design college.

I wonder about myself sometimes. Ok...often. Ok...very very frequently.
Ok...maybe not.

When I do take the time to actually contemplate my motives, I rarely get anywhere. In philosophy, I'm a very laid back person. I just go with the flow, really, and sometimes try to direct the flow just a little. In purely social situations, however, I tend to act on raw intuition. I go along with whatever my gut tells me to do, and usually realize later that maybe that isn't the best idea. Then I do it again next time. I guess I'm used to it.

After spending about six straight hours with me, tonight, including the three-hour-long Fellowship of the Rings, Peter wanted to go home and sleep by himself: something he hasn't done since last Tuesday night. I immediately felt hurt, despite the fact that, on reflection, the situation doesn't really bother me at all. I mean, I get to change my nail polish and blog and do whatever the hell I want. If he were here, it would be different. Every once in a while, a little time to myself is a good thing.
So, I was offended, a little, and as we sat in the car attempting to say good night, I vacillated between trying to make him feel awful for not wanting to be with me and trying to cover up both my emotions and my evil intentions with teasing. I knew, in the sensible section of myself, that I really didn't want him to feel bad about it. That if I tried to upset him, I'd be just like his ex. That I'd really like to spend the night relatively alone. But on some level I suppose I really was a little bit insulted, only because I'm so full of myself and so used to being told just how irresistable I am.
So I've found that I'm entirely capable of slipping back into my evil girl ways. A negotiation between laziness and self loathing make the regression slow. I'll have it beat altogether, soon.

I was in this math class this morning. Yes...a math class. Ugh. I haven't been forced to sit through one of those since the eleventh grade, and then it was more about napping than derivatives. Nonetheless, Drexel, in its infinite wisdom, concluded that my performance on their math placement exam held no relevance for design majors, and that my SAT scores simply weren't good enough to let me out of Mathematics for Design. Right....math for artists.
It's my opinion that anyone who has graduated high school has enough math under their belt to get through life without much arithmetic trouble. While I can see how graphic designers might need calculus to make pretty curved lines on the computer, anyone whose art is not created directly on a computer can probably function just fine with little more than a working knowledge of ratios and a sharp-to-pointy sense of aesthetics.

So now for the scary part. Me and a bunch of other recognizeable College of Media Arts and Design students are in the hall, waiting for the 9am class to let out so that we can get into our 10am section. Along with others, my friend Jason finally squeezes out of the auditorium doors.
"How bad is it?" I ask.
"Let me put it this way, today's lesson was brought to you by the number 3 and the letter n."

Damn.

I can do multiple-variable algebra with exponents and whatnot, and I managed to figure out enough calculus to get me through some nasty high school physics, but here I am in this class. The last transparency from the previous section was still on the projector. There was a word problem printed in neat black type and some figures below it in blue marker. It was done wrong.
Damn.

Topic: Day 1-Sequential Counting Principle.

Damn.....damn, damn, damn.

Ok, so as it was, blogger didn't love me yesterday, so that post that I posted on the 22nd didn't get published til sometime on the 23rd. It was a relatively uneventful day, as usual, though I'd definitely thought up something to blog about. Must see about remembering what that was....

I wonder why it is that people so like to ruin other people's fun. I play an online game, a MUD, actually, and I'm on the staff there. That basically means that it's my job to police (among other things) and make sure that the players adhere to the rules.
Well, one of the basic rules is that there is no "multiplay." Multiplay can include a variety of different activities, but on the most basic level, it means that you are not permitted to use one of your characters to benefit another of your characters. The easiest form of multiplay to catch is when more than one character is logged onto the game from the same ip. There are some exceptions, but usually when this happens, it is a clear violation of the rules. Other ways to multiplay include sharing gold, items, or information between your characters or using the powers of one character for the purposes of another character. For example, a player might log on their cleric character to locate an item for their mage character or they might use a high level character to take revenge on someone that insulted their low level character.
Lately, that last and hardest to trace form of multiplay has been occurring with great frequency on the game on which I am a staff member. Characters will get into disputes with other characters and use their more-powerful "alts" to carry out a vendetta against their rivals.
It's just really sad...I mean....it's a game and it's meant for everyone to have fun. The staff has some amount of difficulty finding these rule-breakers and assuring ourselves of their guilt, so it often goes unpunished for a long time. During that time, many innocent players who mind their own business, or at least do not cheat, can get involved in the conflict and be hurt by those who do not respect the rules or the integrity of the gaming community.
We do our best to ensure that everyone has fun. If you're a gamer, think of the staff, think of the other players, and think about how you would like to be treated by everyone else. Thanks.

I did, however forget to mention the snow last night. Yes...snow. It was pretty but really..on the first full day of spring?
I fell asleep last night just about as soon as my head hit the pillow. Today, it's Friday and almost the end of break. Plans...plans...today might go shopping with Kat, maybe, and tomorrow Peter and I are going to New Hope. I'll be bringing my camera, and maybe he'll bring his guitar and we can do more pictures for his web site or his album. We shall see, I suppose.
Ah well...very little to report at this time.

It was warm again today, even though it has been cold for almost an entire week. It wasn't nearly as warm as it had been when I was certain that spring was here, but it was warm enough to lie in bed with the window open and the fan in. Most of the day, today, was about lounging. Stayed in bed til well after noon, had breakfast, got back into bed. Stayed there til about four thirty or five. Dinner with Peter and his mother. Got home, watched a disgustingly musical acquantance attempt to learn cello before our very eyes.
Then:
Peter picked up his guitar. Jason picked up his cello. The magic was made.
Peter's been waiting to hear one song of his in particular with cello accompaniment. They played that...it was fabulous. Kat and I were in songasms. Peter looked to me when they were done and asked what else would sound good with cello. Three times this happened. Every time, Jason improvised beatiful cello parts with little more than chord names given to him. I scrambled for a tape recorder, came up with nothing.
Peter wants to learn cello, now, and has a guitar tuned in fifths.

To the age of eight, I lived in a little two-story house on a corner in New Jersey. Before my parents expanded it, my sister and I shared a room at the corner of the house on the ground floor. One wall was white, one was pale pink, and the two walls with windows were covered in wallpaper--white background with red strawberries and green leaves. The curtains on the windows were white also, with tiny strawberries. The window closest to my bed looked into the back yard, over the tomatoe plants, over the strawberry plants, and over the grass to the little line of shrubs and trees that separated our yard from our neighbors'. For a while, it looked out over the little play house that my mom had built for us in the far corner of the yard. I remember my mom, my sister and I sleeping in my sister's bed when my sister and I had the chicken pox or when my dad was on a business trip. And I remember sitting in a corner behind the couch when it was very warm or very cold out because the air conditioner was in the window right above the radiator.
Later, my sister and I had separate rooms upstairs, tiny, but with shiny, white, wire closet organizers. The window still overlooked the back yard.
Our next door neighbor was an old lady who was always in her backyard pulling weeds out of the grass. We called her Grandma Byatt. The fence between our yard and hers was just a very open grid of thin green wire, and spiders would sometimes fill a rectangle of it with webs that would collect the morning dew.

When I was eight, we moved about an hour away from that house. The new house was bigger, and the stairs were a dark, satiny wood instead of blue carpet. The room that was mine used to be a boy's; it was painted blue and the only blank wall was covered with a wallpaper mural of the earth as it would be seen from the surface of the moon. I made my parents take it down and paint the whole room pink, though I kept the gray carpet. Years later, I wished that I had kept the mural.
There was a giant hill in the back yard covered with ivy and some viny purple flower with glossy dark leaves and five-pointed blossoms. There was lily of the valley that smelled lovely in the spring and summer when my sister and I would go out at twilight to catch fireflies while my mother held my new baby brother and watched. There was a patio made of unfathomably thick cement that always seemed to stay cool and that caught rain in wide, shallow puddles.
The hill was replaced with a retaining wall and swimming pool, and later, the patio was covered with a deck.

There was a tree. My neighborhood was full of trees, mostly over fifty years old, but this one was mine. My room had two windows, side by side, facing out the front of the house in a roughly eastward direction. The porch roof was just below my window, and despite the obvious temptation, I mustn't have climbed out onto it more than three or four times in the nine years that I lived there. But the tree. It was a dogwood tree of unprecedented size: well over two stories tall. If you know anything about dogwoods, they grow naturally in the understory of a temperate forest, not usually more than 15 feet tall...at least that's what I can remember from sixth grade science. In the spring it flowered pink--giant pink blossoms the size of my palm--and the morning sunlight would stream through the tree, through my window and land, pink-tinted, on my bed and my floor. When it rained, the bark would turn black, and you could see the black, dripping tree and its colorful flowers in stark contrast.
My new house is in a relatively new development. The trees are all tiny and weak, or obviously landscaped. The house is a multi-level, decorated in the early nineties with lots of mauve carpet and kind of art deco wallpaper. There is one curved wall. My room is all in matching bright pink...the pink of dogwood flowers...with one wall sponge-painted in pink, blue, and purple, and there is a wallpaper border of suns, moons, stars, and planets in pink, purple, blue, and gold. There is one window facing kind of westward towards the side of a neighbors house, and beyond that house are more houses. The light is yellow and slanted around six in the afternoon, but the only other good thing I can say about it is that the moonlight is good around two in the morning at the end of the summer.
Home, now, is a different kind of feel. My room at school is dearly beloved, from the morning sunlight to the relentless blue dust that falls slowly and steadily all the time. The dorm bed, chair, and desk all feel like mine, now, a place of sanctuary and occasionally quiet. Home also consists of Peter's apartment, where I have an entire drawer of my own--I keep a toothbrush and toothpaste and a spare chapstick.
But mostly, home is about people, now. About people that understand me: new friends, old friends, my family, once in a while. There are physical places that will always feel like home, but even those will change and fade. While I'll never forget sitting at my open window wrapped in my quilt, trying to hear the snow falling, I can always find someone else to listen with, and they can make it home.

Apologies for the lengthy silence on my part. I went home for a few days and had no working access to blogger. It's breakfast time now...yes...noon...I know...but anyway, I'm going to go have some waffles with vanilla ice cream and maple syrup, and I promise to have a neat entry sometime later today. Topic: "home"

I've been feeling like a housewife, lately. Cooking, baking, doing dishes and the like. And the scary part is that I don't hate it...yet. I mean, it's only been three days, but still.
I've been thinking a lot about the future. Not intensely, but in some quantity. Item A on the list is, of course, finish college; I have at least three years left before I really have to worry about what comes after that. Like, grad school...I have no idea if I even want to go. Will an undergraduate degree be enough? In my field (photography), probably yes. But I'd be willing to definitely get some kind of degree in Art History which I love. The subject hasn't even come up with my parents, who I assume would pay for a large part of it.
It's just that I have some friends who are graduating really soon, and some of them have jobs all lined up, some of them are going to grad school, and some of them just don't know. Other friends, who aren't graduating yet but have a few years on me, are also wondering what they're going to do after graduation, like where they could go to grad school if they decide to go and what they might do if they can't write full-time.
There are plenty of other things to worry about, like...what do I want to do with my life, should I get married and have kids, when should I do all this stuff, and so forth. And trust me, I've thought about it. But for right now, I might go make some more coffee cakes and listen to the rain.

"You don't like corned beef, do you?" I said.
"Ew, no. You don't eat red meat anyway."
"I eat corned beef...mmmm...I love corned beef."
"Ew."

Mmm...I sure hope there are leftovers at my Dad's house.

Sometimes I lose sight of what really matters. I went to bed last night sad and angry and disappointed, mostly with myself and my childish emotions. No matter how logical and posessed of reason I am, I can't help being totally and irrationally afraid of some things. And that really makes me mad--a very mature reaction, of course. So I was sad, and angry, and disappointed, and alone, for that matter. Which is the cause and which is the effect, right? :)
So I woke up this morning, turned over, and saw him sleeping...on the floor...next to the bed. I've done the same thing when I just needed more space than the twin bed could offer the pair of us, but it was different because he knew that I'd been upset. I almost cried. He stirred in his sleep, groggily looked up at me, smiled, and said 'I'm sick.'
My heart slid quietly into my stomach, and I bit back more tears, and I knew that I would do anything for him.

One major difference that I've noticed between the end of term and the end of band camp is that here, we can't just sweep our dust bunnies and grit out the door.

Then it'd just be in the hallway in front of our door.

"The trees were turning as we drove to the hardware store. My new lover made me keys to the house..."

The trees are turning pink and green with the first really warm day, the oh-so-ominous Ides of March. Walking home, my light cotton shirt was too warm, even with two or three buttons undone and the sleeves rolled up. The sun is shining, school is over for the term, and the dorm, with all its open doors, reminds me of the last day of band camp. Aside from a few impending scheduling problems, the world is in a state of perfection.
For the first time ever, I have keys to the house of someone I'm in love with. I...just...could things be any better?

Spring and the nice things I have to say about it.

Rain: Spring rain. For more on how I feel about rain, see this post.
Birds: I walked from Kelly Hall with a little bag of strawberry vitamin C drinks, whistling "Take On Me." I passed a hedge somewhere before reaching my dorm and found that I was being answered. Not that he was mimicking my tune, but he was definitely singing back at me. He turned his little bird head to look me right in the eye; his was a tiny black bead with a kind of yellow eyelid. I was within a few feet of him, and he just looked at me and sang. I whistled at him again, and he whistled back--I smiled at him and kept going.
Between that robin I saw on Tuesday and today's avian incident, I can safely say that the local wildlife is strangely unafraid of me, lately.
Flowers: Wandering down to South street, today, we passed through some tiny little alley-like walkways because we saw pink. Pink trees. Trees in flower. A matching pink exterior wall, and a pink 'It's a Girl!' flag. So we went in and saw one of the loveliest little pockets of Philadelphia that I've yet seen. It was right around Pine street, I think, but since I don't know exactly, I'm afraid that I'll never be able to find it again. The flowering trees (there were three of them all in a row) were no more than maybe 15 or 20 feet high, covered with clusters of tiny, pink, papery flowers. Each blossom had at least six stamen, crimson and antenna-like, springing from its center. There were lots of bees floating through the air in their aerodynamic impossibility, partaking of the first nectar of the season.
Kat and I decided that we love Philadelphia and don't really want to go home.

I slept the sleep of the dead, last night. There was some dreaming involved, but all I can remember is that they were strange. When are they not?
I woke to bright sunlight slanting through the blinds and streaming onto my bed and into my eyes. I was covered in beautiful stripes of light and dark that started out at the window as perfect straight lines, but which were somehow twisted and curved like a pile of ribbons by the time they covered me. I was up two hours before my alarm, pulled the sheets up over my head, and looked at the entrancing sunlight patterns as they projected through my sheets. From under the covers, my blue sheets with little palm trees and waves seemed more to be patterned with wide blue and white stripes, cresting and falling irregularly, on which little figures surfed.
Waking up to sunlight is an absolute necessity.
I fell back asleep and woke up with the alarm, two hours later, playing my favorite song on the new Lisa Loeb cd. She really has a knack for doing good things with track nine.
Today will be a wonderful day.

Ok, it really hurts to type. Ok, typing exclusively right-handed...this is the direct result of more guitar practice in the last couple of hours than in the last three months combined....typing this way is very inefficient. So inefficient, in fact, that I've gone back to typing with my left hand, despite the lacerations on my fingertips. Mmmm....I love Dar Williams. I'm trying to learn "February." I want my old callouses back. *sigh* My right arm and shoulder aren't doing too well either, come to think of it...

Another one from the vaults.

On a Clear Night (1/10/01)

But why do footprints go and not return?
In snow, once pure and sharp in winter night,
The moon drops cold sparks and, upon their height,
The stars reflect the white earth with their burn.
Two pairs of steps defile without concern
For nature’s untouched beauty and delight
But end at once as if they’d taken flight
So suddenly the icy ground to spurn.
The smooth unbroken crust they can’t replace
Nor do they care when thoughts of love are first,
But hands cold and whispers and kisses done—
The finish of a secret hour hard won—
They slip from moonlit fairy realms uncursed
And leaving now their only steps retrace.

When I think about rain, I think about the sound of the drops on flat green leaves and about watching out of my old window as leaf after leaf dipped with the impact of the water. I think of driving to the fairgrounds in the middle of a viscious thunderstorm, just to stand in the middle of an empty field and watch the lightning. I think about the splashing of water over the edges of the gutter, full of last year's leaves, onto the roof of the porch below my window and about heat lightning bouncing from cloud to cloud one night a couple of summers ago. I think, also, of being soaked through every article of clothing I was wearing, shivering, fingers wrinkled, and screaming "Bring it on!" along with eighty of my closest friends--in the middle of an incredibly sodden football field. I remember the rainy day last summer when I went to the gardens alone, expecting to find, if not all of my poetry classmates, at least the teacher, but finding no one. If I dig back far enough, I remember tea parties with my mom and little sister, demitoss spoons and teacups, the cups of a clear, but brown-tinted glass. Through the bottoms of the cups, we could see the sugar crystals. There were picnics on the living room floor during thunderstorms, and my mom would put on tapes of ocean music, and we'd listen to the seagulls.
I love rain as much now as I ever have, but now it's about the sound as much as it's about anything else. From my room here, it's impossible to hear the raindrops themselves. Outside our window is a sheer seven story drop--there's nothing for the rain to hit. Of course rain has an overall sound, one that I can hear from seven stories up, but it's not the same as being able to hear--feel, almost--every drop as it hits the shingles. Who even knows if there are shingles on this building.
Rain, now, is an excuse to stay inside, curled up with tea or hot chocolate, listening to mellow music and looking out at the beautiful gray light. The closer I can get to an open window, the better, especially if I have company.

It was nearly 1am before we decided to sleep at his place last night. When we left the dorm, the clock on the PECO building read "0:58" but there was no shuttle at the corner....strange. In hopes of catching it later on its one o'clock route, we headed for 34th and Market. We waited on the corner in a wind chill that was easily in the upper twenties, neither of us really properly dressed for the erratic weather; I had a t-shirts and jeans on under my winter coat, and he had a thin, vintage, button-down shirt under his light jacket. Neither of us had gloves, scarf, hat or anything else. The wind blew up the sleeves of my coat, and kissing felt strange because my face was numb.
Fifteen minutes later, still no shuttle.
When finally we saw a shuttle leaving the garage and looping around towards the beginning of its route, we ran down the block towards the corner at which it should first stop. Of course, it drove right past, as we weren't close enough to be "waiting" for the shuttle. So we ran back to where we had been waiting and stood for another five or ten minutes in the freezing, windy cold.
When we got to his apartment, finally, we made hot chocolate, and it was another half hour before my face thawed out.
Today, at about 2:30, when leaving my dorm for the subway, I saw a robin. I think the worst is over.

You know what's really fabulous? Surprises. As long as they work, that is.

Question: do I really want to wear peach nail polish, or should I go for an achromatic, as I usually do?
I swear, if everyone had to make the decisions I have to make, nothing would ever get done.

So, today Peter offered to make me keys to the apartment. And that barely rates on the list of beautiful things that happened today.

It was late, and we'd spent two hours driving or walking around Rutgers attempting to find my friends at a certain dorm. Yes, we'd been given two sets of really crappy directions, and at 12:30 we'd given up in favor of the diner. So we were at my ancestral (my family moved into the house January 3rd, 2001) home and the sofa bed was unfolded in the living room for my guest. Complete, of course, with piles of feather pillows and our nice silk comforter. I swear my mom treats guests better than she treats her own children. Anyway, we decided that I should sleep in my room, since it was the first time I'd brought a boyfriend home from college, and while nothing naughty was going on, it'd just be better if the rest of my family didn't have to walk past us in the morning.
So I'd gone upstairs and started to get ready for bed when the wind whipped up outside. Against the siding, I could hear what must have been the biggest rain drops ever if they weren't tiny hailstones. And then the thunder. I have this unearthly love of thunderstorms.
I crept back down the stairs, still in my jeans and tank top, lay down next to him and whispered "Do you hear the rain?" He said very sleepily, "I hear it," and that's the last thing either of us remember before Sunday morning.

"We kissed at eighty miles an hour"
Just in case I forget it before I get home. It has to get into a poem somewhere...I was going to give it to Peter, but I decided to keep it for myself. ;)

It's amazing the way you can give pieces of yourself to other people and wind up with pieces of them. It's a trade, albeit a risky one. Technically, they're not obligated to give you anything in return for the things you offer them, but if you're careful enough about who you give the pieces to, you can be pretty sure that you won't walk away empty-handed.
I think it takes a lot to tell someone that they've hurt you. There are two main elements to to such a confession: first, you are admitting that you are wounded which of course translates as vulnerability and weakness. Then there's also the idea that you're willing to confront the person about the fact that they've hurt you, which implies that you're willing to deal with the problem. And sometimes, the good times, you can successfully communicate the problem despite discomfort and unwillingness to take chances. And more often than not, if two people can articulate their minds to each other, they can find some kind of middle ground and make it all work.
So...what I'm getting at, I think is that being in love is the most wonderful thing in the whole world, especially when everyone involved is pretty grown-up when it comes to fighting fair.

Ooooh, I'm bad. No blog since Friday, and I have precisely five minutes right now. Don't worry, I have something special in mind for when I get the time to sit down. Oooh oooh, and the universe loved me even better on Friday...we were on our way out to get dinner in Chinatown, and I found twenty dollars on the sidewalk! How bout that.

I was just in Wawa and I bought two pints of Ben and Jerry's (different flavors, of course), which I'll admit made me look like a bit of a pig, but I mean, I don't look like the kind of girl who even could ingest two pints of ice cream...
Which is why I cracked up when the checkout guy put two plastic spoons in my bag.

Ok, so first off, I really slept well last night. Maybe not for very long, but I really did sleep well. And it was positively beautiful outside...and I got up early in the morning for the first time in ages and ages, and it was lovely to see the sun so low in the sky.
Then I got to eat a long, quiet, slow breakfast by myself, which is nice, now and again. When I got back to my room, I had a good hot shower that felt really long, but actually wasn't, so that I had time to consider working on one of the two papers that I would otherwise have to complete between 11am and 1pm today. When I opened up the word files that I had headed up in preparation for writing, I found that the shorter of the two papers had been completed at some earlier time. Not that I really remember writing it, but I do sort of remember finishing it, and since it was already printed and in my notebook, who was I to argue?
So I went to Irish class in which we listened to an audio tape of a play that we'd read The Hostage by Brendan Behan. I got back to my room and then realized that I'd forgotten to give my final paper to my professor, so I went to his office and handed it to him. He said to me "You're the first." I looked at him quizically and he asked if I hadn't been there when he'd extended the deadline. Damn. So anyway, I took my paper back for the purposes of actually making it decent before the final exam on Wednesday. But it's done so I don't actually have to do anything before then.
On my way back to the dorm, yet again, I decided to check and see if the study session times for Art History had been posted as promised; they had not. So, I figured that since I was out of the room anyway and since his office was on my way there, I'd stop by to see the professor. While I was there, I might as well drop in on my design professor from fall term and see if he had any of my work left in his office. Now, I knew where the art history professor's office was, but I knew that the design professor's office might have moved, so I'd have to ask in the main office. When I got to the main office, what to my wondering eyes should appear but art history professor and last term's design professor chatting together over a table piled with my current design class's work. Fancy that.
The art history professor still didn't know when the study sessions would be, but the design professor did indeed have a couple of my things in his office. We got into a discussion about why photo majors should/shouldn't have to take 3-D design and ended up with a discussion of how most of the projects I had left with him at the end of last term had been picked by someone else for an exhibit in the school library. He was quite pointed about how Mr. So-and-so had really liked my work.
Got back here, finished my other paper, blogged...and all was well in the world.

The universe loves me today. More on this later.

So sleepy...so foolish...still going to Peter's for the night. :)

Angela's Ashes

Excellent film. I was probably most impressed with its treatment of death, in that three of the main character's siblings die, his grandmother dies, and his girlfriend dies but all are conducted in such a way that the movie is obviously not just trying to make the audience cry. Now, I cry during movies all the time. I cried when Leo died at the end of Titanic, I cried when Julia Stiles's character in Save the Last Dance talks about her mother's death, basically I'll cry at anything. But Angela's Ashes didn't make me cry. I felt the grief and hopelessness that dominated the entire movie, but the screenwriters, director and producer were not attempting to just cash in on the emotional impact of the death of a character. The movie wasn't about death, and it wasn't supposed to be, so the deaths, while important to the plot, were not the driving points of the movie. I think it really was about survival and perseverance and maybe family. Mmm...this is starting to sound like it's going to be a good paper.
More on this later.

Closure. Today has been just one lack of closure after the next, I think. And look at that, it's only a little after noon. Breakfast, while a lovely combination of Entenmann's milk chocolate chip cookies and orange juice, was not really a proper ending to my...well, my "fast." Plenty of other things went unfinished in deference to making it to class. Class, by the way, involved showing up for design, waiting forty minutes for the professor to show up, giving up, and leaving our work with the department secretary. Why? Because today was to be the last class of the term--a critiquing extravaganza. We have no way of knowing what will happen now. My A is pretty secure, but still....we never expected him to reveal to us anything deep or meaningful, but something as simple and final as "It was a pleasure having this class" would have been nice, even if it was a lie.
Hopefully the rest of my day will go better. I have to watch a movie on which to write a paper for Irish class, I have my last (*sniff*) art history class, and somewhere in there I have to write that paper. If I happen to finish my paper before 7:30, which I won't, I'll be going to the winter studio show again and probably helping them strike the set. Well...right. Work.

So, I've been thinking about this for a couple days, now, but I never remember to blog about it. I mean, sure I should be doing design homework right now, but that's beside the point. Ok, so I was thinking about products that we call by their brand names. For example: Kleenex are tissues, Saran wrap is plastic wrap, Xeroxes are photocopies. But it occurred to me that there is another big one that doesn't really have an identifiable non-product name.
Chapstick. Clearly a brand name, actually describes sort of the opposite of what the product does. Does this "stick" "chap?" No, it actually prevents chapping. Now, you might suggest that the actual product is lip balm, and you may be right, but to me, "lip balm" calls to mind something that comes in a tiny clear jar, and you have to smear it on with your fingers. So clearly, the "stick" part of "Chapstick" is important. Ok, so what does it actually do? It prevents the chapping of the lips; the product could therefore be identified as "Lip chapping preventative stick" but that seems awfully awkward. And it also starts to sound like a real stick that you magically wave at someone's mouth to keep it from getting dry and cracked. What I'm thinking is something short, but accurate. I move to rename the item that you find in your coat pocket, be it Chapstick(tm), Lipsmackers(tm), or Blistex(tm), to Anti-Chap Stick. Thank you.

PS. Thanks to those who've left comments so far! I thought I'd just let you know that I really don't mind zeros so much, so don't feel the need to humor me. ;) They're all pretty and round and they let air through...

Mmmm, bloggy people are really nice.

So here's something from the depths of my filing cabinet, since I did, after all, say that I would put up some of my writing.

And Yet, It Moves (February ’01)

I, the girl next door,
Stand with no coat in a wind chill of zero,
Eyes to the sky.
Thirty or forty feet away, my neighbor smokes
And talks and laughs loudly to his cell phone
And smirks at me.

My car window open and the radio turned up,
I watch the universe expand,
And the stars, jubilant in their relative immortality,
Dance slow rings
Around excited twinkling airplane lights,
Vacantly serene.

And that's all the depth you can expect from me today.

Thanks to Still Life and, indirectly Ariel for the new comments function! Make good use of it, people. ;)

So Neighbor B was really upset, after all...

Introducing: The Neighbors

Starting at about 9:30 tonight a now-familiar variety of screeching began in the hallway.
The exposition: You see, I live in a college dorm, and the west wing of the seventh floor of our building is all girls. Incidentally, my next door neighbors are the shrillest pair of people that I have ever had the misfortune to meet. They are also posessed of a very inopportune (for the more...shall we say...sedate? members of the hall) and boisterously middle-school sense of humor. They sing poorly, loudly, and frequently. While they do have some passable taste in music that is exhibited through frequent playings of Jewel and Weezer, they play more of the Green album and This Way than any of the older albums and even weezer doesn't sound good when sung nasally and flat.
Tonight: A calamity right outside our door. Neighbor A decides to raid her roommate, Neighbor B's, underwear drawer and take out all of her bras. Logically, all of them then need to be strung together in a chain and hung from the ceiling of the hallway between their room and the elevator, conveniently passing our room. By the way, we live near the end of the hall, and it's a long way to the elevator. The doors conduct sound perfectly, and thus we hear, from the comfort of our own desks, that Neighbor B keeps 20 (gasp) bras and also that she is at the pizza place with her boyfriend, due to return sometime later this evening. Naturally, hilarity ensues as the majority of the floor is called out to witness the spectacular underwear chain and of course, they all need to stand right outside our door and discuss just how funny it is. Many of the girls previously considered sensible engaged in fits of giggling while a couple of the guys agreed that yes, the joke was very impressive and original. This continues for at least twenty minutes, quite voluminously, as my roommate and I make "snarky" retorts to overheard comments and intermittently attempt to concentrate on our school work. I should also note that we turned up our music at least once in order to drown out the party outside. Then...
a knock at the door. "What the *bleep* could they possibly want..." and I open the door.
Me: Yes? (sweetly)
Random neighbor (with many others observing): Did you see what they've done with Neighbor B's underwear?
Me: No, but I heard. (slams door shut)
Now...I really felt like a bitch for saying that to her but as Kat pointed out, they probably didn't get it anyway. I thought about it for a few more minutes and I said to her, "You know, I don't care if they did. They can do whatever the hell they want with Neighbor B's underwear. They can make all the noise they want, and I'm not going to say anything to them about it, but if they're going to knock on my door, they can damn well expect to hear what I have to say." And I'm sticking to that.
Nevermind the fact that though Neighbor B indeed may find the prank funny, there's also a fine possibility that she'll be very embarassed and more than a little angry. I personally do hope that she is upset by it, if only so that maybe the girls will realize that...no...it really isn't that funny a joke.
There was lengthy discussion of calling Neighbor B's cell phone in order to get her back sooner, and I think they decided to disassemble the bra-chain and distribute them individually over the public areas of the floor (aka: the bathroom, kitchen, peoples' doors, etc.)
Like I've been saying...college is just like band camp.

A few hours ago, I was sitting in Art History, and the professor was talking about Poussinism and the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Classicism was revived in France during the reign of Louis XIV because the painters believed that art should come from the observation of nature but only when tempered with a little abstract idealism. They believed, he said, that "There is no perfection in the world."
I thought with a smile, "I'm not so sure about that."

I've now been blogging for...about 163 hours, and it's already changed the way I think. I'll be walking down the street, on my way to class or wherever, and if I have nothing more pressing to think about, I compose blogs.
Today, for example, I began to think about the wind or something like that and what I could write about it. It ocurred to me that this was not a normal reaction, for me, and then I started thinking about the fact that I actually have some sort of audience that maybe wants to hear what I have to say about the wind or Tube Sand or how the Great Court looked during Crystal Ball. I mean, maybe not, but just the idea that someone might really made me happy. This whole thing is just working out fabulously so far, and I'm really glad I decided to give it a shot. Mmm...I should be painting or writing a paper, shouldn't I? ;)
Oh well, so there are a couple drawbacks...

The buzzer on my alarm rang at 9:28 this morning, cd track 9 to begin at 9:30. This method was developed so that I could be at least somewhat awake for the music and wouldn't miss the beginning of it. It's a system I've used for quite some time, and my body has gotten used to the procedure. Exactly two minutes after it is jolted out of sleep by the buzzer, it expects to hear the whirring and soft buzz of the laser moving and the cd beginning to play. And all passed exactly this way, today, but with one addition. As I heard, somewhere in the waking world, the quiet mechanics of my cd alarm clock, I felt a wave of panic sweep over me...a wave of panic such as can only be felt when one is only partially conscious. I tried with all the effort I could muster to figure out what could be wrong and reached for the volume control an instant too late.
I sure had that music turned up loud, yesterday...(Sorry Kat!)

So this blog caught my eye on the Recently-Updatedl list, cause...well...it's Tom Robbins. He's a new blogger like me, so, if that's what you're into...Oh, and his sidebar's got some familiar names on it. ;) How obvious are my influences?

Today was supposed to have been a bad day. Aside from waking up in a very lovely place, it was pretty much doomed from the start. First off, I could expect Courtney Love and "Celebrity Skin" to rouse me from my slumber at about 6:30am, at which point I'd be left alone in bed. Then, a couple hours later, I'd have to get out of bed myself. Breakfast, then a twenty minute walk to campus, then class. Then lots and lots of work and very little social interaction of any kind for the rest of the week.
Well, what actually happened looked a heck of a lot worse, at first. The alarm may or may not have gone off, but either way, we slept til 9:30, making my 10am class look pretty unlikely. I rather willingly agreed not to go, but that meant that some of the other tasks that had been planned for the morning would also have to be put off. Laundry was to have been done at 7, which was, of course, out of the question, now. Still, we had to rush because by the time we were actually out of bed it was 10, and between toothbrushing, breakfast, and my missing sock, we were hard pressed to get to campus by 11.
33rd and Chestnut was, unfortunately, the last corner that we had in common. With a kiss, we parted, planning to work very very hard this week and that if all went well we might spend some time together on Thursday. Ha. Thursday..the longest time we've gone without seeing each other in the last two and a half weeks was about 30 hours.
So, I got back to my dorm and proceeded to sit, blog, check my multitudinous email accounts and anything else that would allow me to put off going to the photolab: a task towards which I was in no way inclined, at the time. At some point, I couldn't say exactly when, my roomate and her boyfriend returned from...was it art history? After offering to make prints of whatever of my work they would like, I eventually got up the energy to get into the lab where... surprise! ...I was totally in the zone and had a great time. My fellow photo majors must now know that I'm insane where they could only have suspected before. We'll just say that I was dancing to the music in my head.
My day had taken a sudden and dramatic turn for the better. Good work always does that to me. I got back to the room, finished after only two hours of lab work and, after a short delay, was actually allowed back in. At some point, I decided that I was hungry, but I again lacked momentum and actually sat at my keyboard for at least fifteen minutes after I had decided to go to the caf. This turned out to be destiny at work; when I finally walked down towards the cafeteria, I was stopped at a crosswalk waiting for the light when I heard my name called. Laurel, friend to me and closer friend of my boyfriend, was just leaving a nearby building and noted to me that aforementioned boyfriend was inside and just on his way out. This, as fate would have it, ocurred on exactly the same street corner at which he and I had stood not eight hours earlier as we said goodbye for a few days. Go figure.
Yes, Peter had had a very efficient day as well.
We went back to the dorm and ate an early dinner together before his voice lesson and before my band rehearsal. This day that had been so ominously begun eventually resulted in something better and sweeter than we had ever expected.
All I'm saying is that there are forces at work that are greater than free will...that's all.

Self-destruction

Destruction-(n.) ruin.
Self-(comb. form) to, for, or toward oneself.

--Yes, a concept with which I am becoming increasingly familiar, though I do have some shining examples to look to. Instead of getting up at 9am, eating breakfast, and going to Irish Lit, I slept late and stayed in bed singing new Lisa Loeb tunes in my head. It was the fourth time all term I've missed that class, which is impressive only because it's a 10am class that always seems a waste of time to attend. Of course, it is also the last week of the term...
So, right, self-destruction. This week, I have a design board, a final paper in Irish Lit, a short paper due in the Drexel equivalent of Freshman seminar, and at least three hours of work in the photo lab. Fortunately, my boyfriend is even more disgustingly overloaded with work than I am, so there's actually a chance that I'll find that quiet place in my head in which I can focus and work for hours on end. He is absolutely the most wonderful and distracting thing in my entire life, right now. But I have to wonder, if something is incredibly important and overpowering, is it really a distraction...or is everything else distracting me from him?
So, right...self-destruction

So we were driving on I-95 back from our second concert of the day with KFC biscuits and 'mashed potatos' singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" kind of at the top of our lungs. It was 11:30 at night and it was raining, and I was on my way to a party at my boyfriend's house. And we realized, "Yeah....college is really great."

When I was little, my sister and I would go in the back yard and blow the biggest bubbles we could, then with wet hands, attempt to capture them. Round and perfect and iridescent, they'd either float within reach or be caught up on the wind and wafted up above the roof. Sometimes one would hover tantalizingly just above the highest we could jump before bursting or otherwise disappearing.
When the air was still enough, we'd catch most of the bubbles we blew...but only one at a time. I'd be lucky enough to catch one without bursting it, and it would rest, a dome, in the cupped palm of my hand. Pink and green and blue swirled over its surface, eventually giving way to yellow and then silver just before bursting. The problem was that I always wanted to catch another bubble floating pristinely by; I knew that the bubble I had in my hand wouldn't last forever and that a new one wouldn't either. Both would be perfectly beautiful while they lasted, but in order to catch a new bubble, I'd have to sacrifice the one I was currently holding. There was always a chance that the bubble I had my eye on would burst at my touch or even just fly out of range, and I'd never be able to get back that first bubble, no matter how similar another one might be. Ah, decisions.

You have to empty your hands in order to fill them again.

Scratch that...a moment not quite so doomed by fate.

It's really inappropriately funny when you're kissing someone and you've decided to tell them, for the first time, that you love them but they have your lip so tightly between their teeth that you can't. And the moment passes and is left for some other occasion not so doomed by fate.