I find myself longing for places I've never been. Not because I crave adventure, but because I feel like home is somewhere else...someplace with high ceilings, tall windows, afternoon sunlight and lazy fans. There should be warmth and a bright glow like overexposed film. Hugely empty rooms.

In the mornings, thick grass and cool moss under a sky so full of fog that it sinks down to brush the tops of my bare feet.

What I have instead is my own, ever smaller, home. My mother teases me that I should stack my furniture because there is far more room vertically than there is on the floor. I have no direct sunlight.

Winter always makes me feel this way.

Ah. But if life isn't a quiet blur. I am sorry. I will try.

I know I've said this before, but what it feels like to me is as if I have a void...a vacuum in the middle of my chest. It swells, if nothing can swell, threatening to pull in my sternum, my spine, then out to my collarbone and my shoulder blades, my shoulders themselves, and at the very worst, all the way out to my fingertips. And all of this just wants to collapse.

I wonder that these are the only parts of my body that are effected. I think that it may be because they are the bits that I imagine I could live without. While of course this makes no sense logically, I would still be able to hear, see, vocalize, taste, think, and move even if I were missing my upper torso and arms. It may simply be a question of what I'd be willing to give up to these feelings: I need my head, I need my legs, and I need something to sit down on. But it's all a negotiation. I refuse to surrender these things, but I cannot contain the sweeping collapse within my chest. So it takes my fingers.

What would I give to make it go away.

It's hardly life, really. It's more like survival. I need to choose what to feel and what to ignore, and sometimes I get it wrong. When I do, I find myself a little huddled heap of humanity, sobbing for some stupid reason. But I teach myself not to care. It's all for the better.

Thankfully, classes have started up again to provide a welcome distraction. I once again feel horribly artistic between my three music classes, two photo classes, one dance class, and one film class. But the pack-attend-read cycle is only so absorbing.

And then the day after labor day. Wind-sweet, grey-wet, and chilly. The perfect start to fall. Summer-green leaves all around me threaten to change color and drop to the ground before my very eyes, and I can't help but want a long grey wool skirt, as I've wanted for the past two or three falls. This year I may finally get one. I'm told that we're expecting a cold fall and a colder winter, and I suspect that before it's over I will be wishing for sun, but right now, I am just so tired of summer that I don't want it to come back for quite a while. I love the heavy grey sky and the smell of snow in the air. The way wet fallen leaves on the sidewalk look as if the've been ironed with shaved crayons in between pieces of waxed paper.

It's funny the little traditions that you think are universal but are really so very local to yourself. Kat, from California her whole life, has never ironed fall leaves between pieces of waxed paper, because she never saw a real autumn until she was eighteen. And even then, all she could see were the trees in Philly; I never got to bring her home with me in the fall or the spring to see what seasons changing is supposed to look like, though I suppose Jason showed her.

And this year she escaped just before the fall of fall. Back home where it's always 65 degrees, foggy and overcast and where her lovely winter coat will be of no use at all. I imagine evergreens, there. A lot of tall cedars and short pine trees. Christmas is never supposed to be white, and you can walk barefoot all year round. It sounds lovely, but I wouldn't miss fall for it.

Wind to thy wings, sister.

It feels as if my life is too big to fit into my body.

It's week ten of a ten week term, and next week are final exams...though honestly, week ten is much harder. Finals are simple. You show up and you give them the right answers. Week ten is the week of preparation and intense intense work. Some might call this studying. I prefer to call it 'freaking out.' I have some amount of reading to catch up on for my various tests and quizzes so that my professors have quantifiable proof of what they already know...that I know the material. I have a six to eight page paper to write about the open casting call that I attended last weekend. I also have one final project which I think I'm done shooting. More on that later.

I'm told that I do nothing. Which certainly doesn't feel true, this week. It took me nine whole weeks to fall behind, this term, where I usually have something of a breakdown around week six or seven. Not to mention the fact that I have about thirty hours on my next paycheck, which isn't all that bad for a full-time student who spends tons of time with her boyfriend. But maybe I don't do anything.

My hair, partly pink for the last month or so, has washed out to blonde underneath. I think I'm going to dye it back to pink, but I have certainly decided to have it cut again next Thursday. Fortunately, only the underneath of my hair was bleached out, so the fact that my roots have grown in about an inch doesn't even really show. I just kind of look shaggy.

There is so much life to live and only so much time in which to write about it all.

It's been a slow, sweet haze of contentment and humidity.

I picked up my seemingly-larger-than-usual group on Monday. Alas...cajoled once more into giving the campus tour to this week's mob of engineering-camp kids. And it started out fabulously. They laughed at my jokes, they were willing to talk to me, tell me where they were from, and about the tiny woman that seemed to be in charge of the program but who forgot had forgotten my name each of the last five times I'd told her what it is. According to the kids, she would show up for a couple minutes at a time and vanish for hours in between. Go figure.

So, for once, I'm getting some interaction from the engineering kids. I suspect it was the kamikaze way I flung myself into their tour, the last one of the summer, with the determination that dammit, they were going to like me and we were going to have fun. I'm walking backwards, yelling at the top of my lungs, and hoping out loud that the threatening sky would hold off for us. Unfortunately, no such luck. While fielding a question about my hair being pink, those chubby black little clouds decided to rain on our rather lengthy parade. This, of course, no more than ten or fifteen minutes into the tour. Ok, I figure, it's just a little rain. We'll be fine. A quick look told me that none of the few girls in the group was wearing a white t-shirt, so we proceeded on to reach the shelter in front of the library. During the library schpiel, the rain turns into a downpour. Of course. At this point, mind you, I still had them amused.

No problem, I think, we'll hop right across to the gym....how long could this possibly last? One athletic speech later, I had my answer. Long enough. Yes, folks, we'd been upgraded to a torrential downpour, and partway up to the residence halls, socks starting to get wet, we gave in.

The next five or so minutes was a struggle between keeping track of the kids who wanted to run for cover: "If you know where you're going, you're welcome to go on ahead," and trying to pull the stragglers up from the rear. There was shouting, there was skipping, and there was "We're waiting for the light to change because I'll be damned if I have you soaking wet and hit by a car." And of course, I felt terrible. These kids were here on day camp to see geeky Drexel engineering stuff, and I'd gone and gotten them wet right down to their panties. And not in a pleasantly liberating way, either.

Fortunately, after a half hour of searching for evil tiny-woman and profuse apologizing to the kids for my poor judgement in dragging them from building to building rather than trying to wait it out, Jennifer (I'd known her name since the first week) showed up with a big box of really cute t-shirts. They said Summer Engineering Experience @ Drexel. I, being just as soaking wet as the kids and wearing a more see-through shirt than most of them, was also offered a shirt, which I gladly accepted.

Every time I think about that shirt, I want to write on it "I walked through a thunderstorm for SEX@Drexel and all I got was this t-shirt."

Three days later and my sneakers have only just dried out.

Congrats to all the thonners and all their sponsors for raising over 90 thousand dollars! 432 bloggers made it through the night and 3007 different people sponsored them. The average sponsor donated 30 dollars and 80 cents. (Haha! I am a sponsor of above average generosity!)

Though the Blogathon event is over, you can still donate, so browse the thonners' sites and donate five bucks to whoever you like the best!

Hey, guys, for those of you who've been living under a rock and (absurdly) counting on me to get you your news...Blogathon is going down this weekend. We start about 24 hours from now, and though I'm not blogging for the 24 hrs, Peter is. I'll be appearing on his guest commentary sidebar and my talents will appear on a few of his tunes. If you're not familiar with the way he does blogathon, he posts music every hour. This year, it's all music performed by our friends, a lot of it original, including a couple of pieces by Mike Kovacs. I'll be singing, percussing, and playing clarinet on a few different tracks. If you're up watching the 'thon, take a look at Peter's page while you surf the indubitably fascinating other stuff that will be going on.

Also, Peter will be blogging to benefit World Education, a group that seeks to spread literacy and other life skills to developing nations. If you can spare a few dollars, chip in and help support a good cause or just a good blogger. Or do it for me. Not that I expect that to have worked, but I figured it was worth a shot, right? :) But heck, donate to any blogger or cause you like, but if you've been waiting all year, this is the time to give your money to people who need it more than you do.

Stay up late, make a difference.

Dreams featuring Aku from Samurai Jack who was casting curses at my request. When I attempted to destroy him, he turned into rust on the inside of a tin can. I knew it was him, however, and attempted to wash him out of the can and down the drain, but somehow, I couldn't ever get all of him out. There kept on being more dust or rust or slime in the bottom of the can, despite my constant washing. When at last I felt that it was all out, I ran the disposal.

There was, of course, more to the dream than that, and I have a brief recollection of flying through the stairs and doorways of an airy white building, but much of it was violent and disturbing. I'd rather keep forgetting it.

We had been shopping for not such a long time, but I began to feel tired. Maybe tired wouldn't be the word for it, exactly. I felt droopy. Like wilted spinach. My eyes, dry and sandy, wanted to close themselves down, and my feet resisted all movement. My entire body felt warm and slightly swollen, though it was not. My neck was weak.

I scuffed the floor as I walked, trying to interest myself in personal cd players and window air-conditioners, but I really started to lose power back in the aisle of cables and mice(mouses). It was not gradual, this change. One minute contemplating corner adapters for USB wires and the next dying to sit somewhere near the customer service area where Peter had camped out.

But I did at least end up with new sneakers and a movie that Peter agreed was good but doesn't ever want to watch again. :)

Among other things, there were girls dancing. They were young. Probably eleven or twelve. And they danced.

It was after ten on a summer night, and I was driving. I saw them on Powelton somewhere within the traffic light-stop sign-traffic light-traffic light stretch, and they were on the north side of the street. I had my radio on, and despite my open window, I could not hear their music. As Modern English played in my world, something else was happening in theirs.

They were dancing in a way that I hadn't seen in a long time. It wasn't the self-consciously tense dance of highschoolers as they tried not to make fools of themselves nor was it the self-consciously seductive dancing of college girls, and it wasn't even the intentionally comedic muppet-style dancing that Peter does when he's feeling silly. Rather, they were dancing for themselves. They were doing it because they had the energy to do it on a summer night. Maybe they were excited about the music or maybe there wasn't any music at all. And they smiled. I could see their laughter but not hear it.

I danced with them there in the near-dark for a moment. And drove on.

Useless little pieces. Chunks of time. I succeed in doing nothing. A quiet futility.

I'm very confused and disoriented. It's summer, but I'm in class. I'm working. I've seen someone as distressed or more distressed than I was with a living situation. And I knew she felt trapped, but I felt trapped with her, and so I was not kind to her. I want to do nothing. I'll do anything to make him happy. I saw, for the first time in a long time, where the water meets the sky in a thin line. My best friend's best friend was married last week.

And the heat sure isn't helping.

A quiet blur of time and warm tears, the past week came and went.

On Friday, some parents complimented me on the campus tour that I gave in the 95 degree heat. Later that night, watching my friends brain damaging themselves, I was feeling a strong mixture of disgust and terror. I could have told them that some people die the absolute first time they decide to breathe something other than air, but I'm sure that would have had no impact on them. It might have been more effective to see if they could remember watching ER or any hospital program. When they revive a drowned person or a choking or strangling victim, they always warn the patient's family that the patient's brain may have gone too long without oxygen and so the person may be a total vegetable. But I didn't say anything like that. Every last one of them is older than I am, and it wouldn't be the first time my ideas on a topic like that have been dismissed as the textbook recitations of a naive high school girl.

Instead, I got to watch. I'd never seen anyone do that before. For the most part, it did all look like fun and games. They were silly and pretty flaked out, but the one girl was very serious-looking and very...I don't know...thorough. For minutes at a time, she sat breathing what I knew was not anything her body needed. And she would turn blue.

Not blue like a smurf, of course, but far far bluer than any human's skin should ever be.

The first time I noticed this, I wasn't sure I hadn't been imagining things. Her skin returned to normal pretty quickly after she stopped. But when it happened again, I just stared, knowing that she wouldn't notice, but keeping my expression neutral so that no one else would either. Obviously, just holding your breath for fun could never compare to whatever was happening here. And I do know someone who can make himself turn blue just by holding his breath. Finally, someone made a comment to this girl about how long she was taking, and I couldn't help but blurt, "Yeah, and she's also blue."
"What?"
"I said, 'She's also blue.'"
He studied her briefly. "Oh just around the eyes, you mean."
"No, not really," but his attention was already turned elsewhere.

But now there's at least one destructive behavior that I'll never be tempted to.

Movement is red brick sidewalks mortared with moss, pushing skywards with the rising power of tree roots. It is fuzzy grape leaves, vines around fence and trellis, but smelling like drought. It is the shining runes that appear on concrete when the rain falls faster than it can be drained.

Movement is about ignoring the mosquito bite on my left foot between the big toe and the second one, right where the sandal thong goes. It's about the way the sun falls on my shoulders and sits there as I walk, slowly baking my skin. Often, it's about drying the sweat off the bridge of my sunglasses so that they will stay on my nose for another three minutes before I have to wipe them off again.

Motion is sensate. Summer is tactile.

He has my metronome. And my clarinet. And though I willingly lent him these things, I wonder what, exactly it is that I've given away.

He has my metronome. Now how am I supposed to keep time?

The universe is telling me not to shop at Old Navy. Every time I go into one and pick out some stuff and get in line at the register, I find that I don't have my wallet. Then again, maybe it's just my subconscious good sense.

Oh and by the by, check out this pic of my solo at the TMs concert. Oh yeah. That diva in the middle is me.

Lemme know if you have any trouble opening it.

Soft quiet wet heat on a Saturday night, and the steady clicking of the ceiling fan. Asian-style dining. Nothing to do but shop.

Note to self:"Looking in a broken mirror."

Also: I just took an online version of the Meyers-Briggs test and it says that I'm an Extroverted Sensing Feeling Judging type with "strength of preferences %" 1, 11, 33, and 22 respectively. Meaning that I'm just barely qualified as an extrovert, somewhat of a sensing type, a "moderately expressed feeling personality" etc. And here's what Joe Butt has to say about that. Whoever he is. I especially like this bit:

"Some ESFJs construct rationale which have the appearance of (Jungian) Thinking logic, but under scrutiny are in fact command performances of "Thinking in the service of Feeling," (i.e., Thinking-like conclusions which do not obey the tenets of impersonal logic; they rather construct scenarios from only those "hard, cold facts" which support the conclusion reached by the dominant Extraverted Feeling function. "

I also like that Monica from Friends, Donald Duck, and Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh are fictional characters with the same personality type as me.

My life is amazing...and floating...and wonderful. I have no phone, no tv, and of course, no internet. When is life ever easy? :) But there are no distractions, and I never have to wash anyone's dishes but mine and Peter's. There is only work and clean. Soon there will only be clean, read, play guitar. Actually...that'd be now. Right. Work is done. Clean, read, play guitar, try to get some high speed internet access.

The feeling of bare feet on a finally-swept floor is to die for.

I can afford to be so mild-mannered and chill when I know I'm leaving this house tomorrow. Life: never simple, but often good anyway.

Alright kids, it's that time again. I don't know who all my readers are and I don't know how many of you are in the philadelphia area. But for those of you who are and weren't already coming....

Come see Barely Legal Girls.....

sing.

Today, May 31st at 4pm, see the Drexel TrebleMakers live in concert and for FREE, no less!
Location: Stein Auditorium, Nesbitt Hall on the Northeast corner of 33rd and Market Streets, Drexel University, Philadelphia.

If you can come, but you don't, I'll be so mad. ha. as if I'll know. But I have lead vocals on a song, and you'd also get to see me jump up and down doing girly vocal percussion. Now that's an experience. Ah. Yes, thanks for reminding me. Maybe I shouldn't wear a tube top.

Occasionally, I can just sit with a blank page in front of me and something falls from my fingertips before I know what's happening. That's sort of what my last entry was like.

Today, I can only feel that while things aren't that great....they're really not that bad, either. After tomorrow, almost every stress that isn't purely academic will have vanished from my life, and I'll have the chance not only to focus on my work, but to actually relax for once. When the term is over, I'll honestly have a whole week to put my life in order.

I can't wait.

I live a life like quicksand
Every movement pulls me deeper.

Why don't you just throw me a line?

It isn't sink or swim so much as sink or be devoured
For hours I can watch
Myself spinning out, spinning down and in
A hungry vortex.

Won't you throw me a line?

A crash like thunder shuts the water
Over my head.

The agenda for the rest of the weekend includes: getting really drunk, singing a lot, having pizza, making cookies, avoiding the rooms that smell too much like pot, sunbathing? kissing girls (lol), hot tub, and....ah....taking pictures! That's it. Watch here for any possible updates!

So there's a really bizarre sqeaking noise coming from upstairs of my room. And not the kind of squeaking you compose scenes about, either.

Anyway, I'm really proud of myself. Today, at least, I've risen above petty girl in-fighting and found my zen state. My away message for most of the day was 'Ohmmmmmmmmm...'

I was cited (by someone whose level-headedness I respect greatly) as having made the only positive and constructive comment on our group forums. Not only did I accept a large amount of responsibility for something that is by no means entirely my fault, but I did so graciously and willingly. Not only did I refrain from making any "Some of us are doing things right and the rest of you are doing them wrong" comments, but I also displayed the self-control to keep from pointing out the people who were saying such things and the fact that in the next sentence they would talk about group unity. Finally, I did my best to make myself entirely available to anyone who would be interested in just having a chat and trying to work through our obviously muddled collective thoughts.

I did not, however, find myself a dress to wear for the concert.

With the exception of the big move of the Christmas of 2000, I've always been shocked at how small my belongings pack down. I mean, I only have two pieces of furniture that I can't move by myself, and one of them is just too big and awkward to be moved by one person, as opposed to being too heavy. There will only be a few boxes. Well maybe not a few, per se, but really not that many...

I think my only plan so far is to have everything packed up by the time I get a key to my new apartment. In the first couple of days (or maybe late nights) I'll move everything that I can carry by myself or maybe with the help of Kat and/or Peter. Later in the week, I call in my big strong masculine friends to move the couple of things that I can't do myself, and if there's anything left at the end of the week, my dad can come and help me. Not that I have any idea how my bed will get from one house to the other, but I'm sure I'll have it all figured out in a week and a half.

I undecorated my room today. At first, it was just with the intent of spray-fixing my charcoal and conte drawings that I had hung up on my walls. Then it became the idea of collecting up all my sticky tac. It was only a matter of time before I decided to take all the pushpins out of the walls, and once my design work was down it seemed pointless to leave all those pins in my bulletin board, so that got denuded. A couple of hours later, my walls are nearly bare and it hardly looks like my room any more.

Man, this room could still use a couple coats of paint.

Hemiola is "a rhythmic device in music whereby the meter changes briefly--usually found where 2 measures of 3 beats feel like 3 measures"

I've been told that I sneeze in hemiola. Almost always in sets of three but occasionally in other numbers.

Sometimes I just feel slightly syncopated.


On a side note, I just found a wav file and the lyrics to the Gummi Bears cartoon. Anyone who wants to cover this with me, I'm totally willing to learn the guitar chords and harmony or lead vocals. :)

"Occasionally, a large star reaching the end of its life collapses in on itself, then explodes very violently. So violently in fact that for a few weeks the star can out shine its parent galaxy. This type of explosion is called a Supernova."

I'm hoping this is what's happening to my life. Well...mostly.

There are always these things. Effort, enjoyment, and reward. I'm trying to come up with an exact scale, but I think it would work easiest like this: for any given activity, effort, enjoyment, and reward, each get a number rating. A low number means bad things (a lot of effort, little enjoyment, or little reward) while a high number means good things. Obligation to do said activity can sometimes factor into the equation, but it's not worth figuring out right now.

Say you rate on a scale from 0-5. I think all three numbers should add up to at least five in order for the thing to be worth doing. Like, if something is really hard, and no fun at all, but has a reward level of 5, well then it may still be worthwhile. Or if it's pretty easy and so gets a 3 for effort and there's even a little enjoyment and reward, well then it's also probably a good thing to do.

Anything less than a 5, though, and you really gotta think. Are you a five? yeah, that's what I thought.

Mom...Dad...would you mind if I just started referring to you as my 'benefactors?'

And did i mention that being busy is amazing? I mean, it's tiring, and I always feel like I'm forgetting something, but I get such a sense of satisfaction from accomplishment. But I still don't have anyplace to live. :)

I was driving south on Route 1 in New Jersey, on my way to Philadelphia, at about 11pm last night. A cool damp had descended on the evening like a flock of birds, and every orange streetlight had a halo. Across the concrete divider and two or three lanes of opposing traffic is a long stretch of corporate complexes, though it was impossible to read the unlit signs. But I knew they were there, sitting well back from the highway behind acres of lawn and twisting driveway.

And lights. I passed one huge open expanse that was lit with dozens of high lamps. The light from each electric bulb streamed down through the watery air in a visible cone, and when it reached about two feet from the ground, it refracted through the dense mist that had gathered there, and the entire ground glowed. Peachy orange, it was like a shower of luminous liquid poured from each light source and had begun to flood.

It was then that I realized that I am glad that I have the soul of an artist, not only to notice these things, but also to appreciate them and to be able to share them with others.

It was also then that I realized that I did not have my camera.

I also love being busy, though when I'm not busy I have an over-appreciation for all my spare time. Being busy is great. It lets you forget about all the things that you're not doing.

I love mornings when I am awake. A cool fogginess outside, being easily added to the creative writing class I want to be in, and saying 'bless you' to random people on campus who sneeze. All these things make me smile.

Oh, and I don't think I mentioned the silly term paper I wrote for my Literature of James Joyce class last term...but my professor loved it, submitted it to the english department 'upper level literature class essay contest' and I apparently won. That makes me smile, too.

I think I may have decided on my personal 'meaning of life.' And no, it can't be reduced to a two-digit number. It's just not that simple

While I agree with the basic idea that the purpose of existence in this world is to be the best person you can be, what that includes for me is probably different than it is for anyone else. I definitely feel that happiness is a major goal. I feel that people should do whatever it is that makes them happy, whether or not they happen to excel at it in comparison to others. If, for instance, I wanted to throw pottery on the wheel for the rest of my life because that is what would make me a complete person, well then that's great. Despite the fact that sometimes I really suck at it.

But I think bigger than finding what you love and doing it is the idea that people should have enough consideration for the future to care about leaving the world a better place than they found it. By this I don't mean that we need to stop global warming and poverty, though those are great causes and good examples. What I mean is that every person should figure out what it is that they have to offer and then give it. If you can improve just one life, then you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. And of course a concern for the future is my innate optimism talking and my respect for humanity in general, whatever its shortfalls. Cause I know people who would say, screw the future, I'm more important than that.

But I think that just loving someone makes you a better person. I know that really honestly caring for another person has made me a better person in my own eyes. To consider another life to be as genuinely valuable as my own makes me who I am. No, it won't get me a penthouse apartment and it won't 'show them.' But I don't need praise or status or money to tell me what I'm worth.

The connections between people and an exchange of kindess make this all worthwhile to me. To earn the love and trust and generosity of others by giving my own is what I think of as the point. Not that any person's individual aspirations are not important, because they are. But the kind of community I'm talking about can only help to further the goals of those involved. A community, to me, isn't just a bunch of people who live near each other, they're people who can care for each other, support each other, and offer help to each other in times of crisis, even if all they can do is listen. And of course you love some people more than others, and sometimes people find that they don't have the capacity to give of themselves. But they don't have to fit into my idea of what's right. They will find their own ways, and it is only my responsibility to think of them with generosity and to try to help them in their search.

Ok.

While I didn't cry the first time I got screwed out of the apartment I wanted, I think the second time it's totally allowed. Especially because this time it was actually an organizational/clerical error on the part of the realtor's office and because this time when I found out about it, I was in the comfort of my own room. This time, I could just hang up the phone and lose it.

The universe hates me.

I was walking towards my new apartment after leaving the realtor's office and putting a deposit down on it. I figured as it is a relatively lovely day out and I was in no hurry to do anything else, I might as well time how long it would take to walk from my new place to campus. I walked the blocks taking in the freshly sprinkled flowers on the trees and from the ground. One block smelled like store-bought vanilla cookies but with a slight odor of urine...which would either be the scent of flowers and acid rain or just the elementary school I was passing.

I walked, and when I got to the soon-to-be-mine address, I looked around. It's almost like the suburbs, I thought. But then I corrected myself. No, it's exactly like the city when a city is good. The entire neighborhood is big old stone houses, some of which have been split into apartments. They're close together and close to the street, as you would expect, but very different from where I am now in a few marked ways. The buildings are well cared-for. There are tons of plants and trees. And it is serene.

Around campus, some of the houses are well-maintained, but about half the buildings I see every day are in a sorry state of disrepair. Here, there is very little landscaping at all, because what would the point be when the guests at your next kegger will just trample everything. There are no small trees but what hardy weeds have made their way, because rowdy, careless, and drunk people like to pull up or fall onto such things. And there is no substitute for quiet.

It's not the eerie quiet of abandonment that fills my new neighborhood, but a bright, dewy, morning-like quiet like the tinkling of tiny bells. Which might just be caused by the fact that there are birds living in the trees. Or it might be that there are at least three churches within a two block radius, one of them next door to my house.

Inside, high ceilings and tall windows make it huge and bright, and the little squares of stained glass in blues and greens just take my breath away. And there are so many windows. The kitchen is small, but has more counterspace than the apartment I had wanted before, and all of it is so much bigger.

And all of this, as well as the peace of mind that will come with living alone is costing me only about an extra five minutes walking to campus.

I didn't cry or sniffle or whine or even just get mad and storm off. I really took it quite well. But now I have to be shopping for another apartment...one that I doubt I could possibly love quite as much as the one that I can't have.

Well, that's what I get for....for what? It's not like it was my fault, really. I guess I could blame myself for not forcing a house meeting on my housemates sooner, but that about covers it. I mean, it was only Thursday at about 11pm that I found out that I could actually leave this house. Then I spent all day Friday in New York city, and Monday morning, 9am, I show up at the realtor's office with a deposit check. It's not like I wasted any time. But still, someone beat me to it. How disappointing. According to the realtor, they're not certain that the person who has already put down a deposit on the apartment will definitely get it, but they should know sometime today. So he'll call me to let me know whether it worked out or not. I can't get my hopes up, though.

Maybe I'll go look at some more apartments today.

I am so unhappy in this place. And for the first time, I've had the clarity to see that and be upset about it. Until now, I'd only known that I was unhappy, accepted it, and been frustrated by it. But I'm tired of being unhappy.

It's made me another person, living here. I am always angry and I complain all the time and all I can think about is how awful it all is. And it is awful, but I've only recently noticed that I am so worn down by this emotion that I'm different than I used to be. Underneath every good thing is the knowledge that I have to eventually go home, and that prospect just ruins every day.

Because it is still home. My room has charming little tendencies like the sunlight I get in my window, my drawings all over the walls, and the way my entire window sill is covered in plants. It's the rest of the house that causes stress.

But now that I know that I'm leaving in only a month, I have decided to consciously be optimistic. To know that while it sucks to be here, it's not the only thing in my life, and I have things to look forward to. I really like my classes this term, and it's spring, and I'm starting to make friends out of the other photo kids, and I actually have good ideas. I'm just tired of being unhappy, and I really want to stop.

It appears that they are evolving rapidly. That plastic bag that exerted its predatory impulses as I walked by, one that spiraled on updrafts in a circular courtyard, and now this.

I walked northward this afternoon coming back from some errand or another. Standing at the corner of the main thoroughfare of Central Philadelphia, I spotted something in my peripheral vision. Against a cloudless sky, a patch of white with red. It ballooned, it floated, it wafted, but with some apparent purpose. It soared swiftly southeast, over five stories in the air, never losing altitude. Nearly over the newest building on campus, it changed direction and began to float east.

I watched and watched it, craning my neck, squinting and periodically glancing at where I was putting my feet as I crossed the busiest intersection on my walk. It never wavered, dropped, or faltered. It only rose higher without straying from its apparent course.

It's been too long since I had a flying dream.

Alternating procrastination with uncanny efficiency...you know, there should be a special term for my way of life.

In the morning, first thing, we stood in total darkness, methodically moving our hands. There were four of us, four girls, there in the small lightless room. We laughed together, mostly at the sheer comedy of our actions, and also out of nervousness. This was the first time we'd done this without supervision. We whispered sometimes, because it feels wrong to talk too loudly in the dark. As if someone might be trying to sleep.

After about twenty minutes or so, our film had been developed and we turned the lights back on. We were our normal selves again, only a little different. We weren't sure why we were changed or what had happened.

Later the same day, there were again four of us in that room: myself and one other of the girls from the morning plus one other girl and a boy. More efficient this time, in terms of time, but more panic. When you can't see anything that you're doing, you tend to second guess yourself a lot. So hilarity naturally ensued as an entire tray of chemistry had been misplaced, but the rest of us already had our film out, so it was too late to put the lights back on. The situation was naturally resolved, but the conversation this time got personal.

We talked about sex and who likes boys and who likes girls. Well out of the four of us that were in that room, only one of us has even the slightest affinity for girls, and it wasn't Jim. Surprised the hell out of me, that's for sure. But we all surprised each other in one way or another.

We all said what we really felt, what we were really thinking. Because we had nothing to do in there except talk to each other and develop our film, a process which really only requires repetitive motion and minute-counting. In the dark, we don't have to worry about seeing the reactions of others to our words, and we don't have to be concerned with betraying ourselves through expression, body language, or eye contact. We all have the chance to consider our responses before voicing them and without hurting each other with initial physical reactions. Mild surprise, disgust or approval are easy to hide in the dark, giving us all the opportunity to rethink our own motives.

It's the way all children talk in the dark. Or the way college roommates sometimes do. There's honesty and secrecy and simple curiosity when you talk in the dark.

In my photo class this afternoon, we decided that I am Captain View and I have amazing metering powers, both incident and reflected. But I don't like carrying the large format thing cause it's heavy.

This.......is a long story.

And unfortunately, it probably wouldn't be of any interest at all to someone who isn't a huge photo geek. But if you really think you want to know, I will tell you.

Exhaustion tugs at me like a tiny weight on every eyelash.

So I managed to celebrate for eleven straight hours yesterday, and only three or four of them were drunken hours.

I didn't get in a screaming match with anyone or injure myself in any way. I didn't cry. I didn't get pissed off and leave at any point. Oh wait, I totally injured myself, but that's cause Jack and Ross's front doorway has this metal guard on it to keep the lock from being picked. Yeah, and I smushed my thumb between it and the door. Not fun. But I still didn't cry.

The front of my tank top was both raised from the bottom and lowered a bit from the top, but that was the extent of my nudity for the evening. And when I say that I didn't get pissed off and leave at any point, I mean that while I did get pissed off, and while I did leave, they were separate and unrelated incidents.

But as for the drunken hours, man were they fun. I was sent back inside and up and down the spiral stairs in persuit of grill-food condiments. "Ketchup, mustard and relish, Tam."
Um....'ketchup........relish....and mustard.'
"Tam, look at me. Red, yellow, and green."
'red, yellow, green.'

So I went inside, up the narrow little spiral stairs to the kitchen. "I need.....ketchup...mustard....and relish. Red, yellow, and green." I was presented with the aforementioned items and returned with them to the backyard where I was greeted with great commendation. I rule. And I have SAT vocab words that say that I'm not as drunk as you think I am.

Unlike 19, 20 is a somewhat pointful birthday. I mean, I'm two whole decades old. I was wondering how much of my body is actually twenty entire years old. I know that brain cells don't regenerate, so I image that I've had some of them since before I was born. Probably my bones are old. Heehee. And I think that a lot of really specialized things can't be regrown, like the optic nerve, for example.

But at the same time, I know there are some cells which have a very short lifespan. I don't know how long skin cells live, but at least every week or two I have an entirely new outer layer. Tastebuds have a lifespan of about ten days, I think I heard, so what if I go to taste a flavor that I tasted last month...could it taste totally different now that I have a whole new set of tastebuds?

I am an old person now, but somethings will always be just like the first time.

My life is filled with a strange quiet. As almost all of my classes fall between 3 and 7pm, I have to figure out what to do with the rest of my days. As I haven't had much work to do outside of class, it seems entirely possible that I could get an actual job and start helping my parents pay for my education, but I really do enjoy my free time. Unfortunately, I am also a somewhat responsible person and I feel guilty for being so expensive to maintain. So, as I look for apartments, I should also be looking for jobs. If you know a good one of either, in Philadelphia, I'd be most appreciative of the tip.

So, he left this morning at some very early hour. After making a lot of noise, me putting my head at the foot of the bed to be closer to him, despite his making lots of noise. I remember him saying that it was raining and that he felt as if he would come home and fall right asleep tonight. He kissed me goodbye and left, returned a few minutes later having forgotten something. I think I welcomed him back home.

About ten or eleven am, I woke up for real and got out of bed and started to get ready to walk home in the rain. And then I hear it. Oh yes. The rooster. I hadn't heard his usual 4:30 and then 7:30 wake-up calls this morning, but there was that noise again at...oh...about 10:30. I climb over to the back window and peer intently out of it, hoping for the location of the elusive rooster to be revealed to me. And I did not wait in vain. There, one or two backyards south of his and on the other side of the block he was. Walking around in the rain and crowing. I have found him!

And Peter, if you read this before I talk to you, and there's still enough daylight, look out the back window, and look for the yard to your left with a bright yellow plastic thing in it. There's also some other weird stuff in that yard: maybe the remains of a tree stump or something, and a rooster. Haha!

Some background, since I may never have mentioned it. My parents are divorced and have been for about three or four years, now, I suppose. Both of my parents have long term relationships, apparently: my dad with Marianne who keeps a dog and a couple of cats in addition to her two children and my mom with this guy Dan that she met in Tae Kwon Do.

Today, my dad left a mildly odd voicemail on my phone.

"Hey, calling to say hi, and I need you to call me. Just...uh...yeah, as soon as you get this message."

He didn't seem angry or particularly perturbed, just his usual affable self. I decided to call right away because I have a tendency to forget such things if I let them wait.

Me: Hey, dad, it's me. How are you?
Dad: Good, good, how are you?
Me: I'm fine, what's up?
Dad: Oh, not much, how are you?
Me: I'm...fine. What's going on?
Dad: Oh not much. Are you sitting down?
Me: Uh, yeah...why? (I'm wondering if Grandma died, but he seems awfully chipper.)
Dad: I asked Marianne the question.
Me (darkly): What question?

So my dad is engaged. I tell him that that's nice. I ask him if he was cute when he proposed, he tells me that it's a long story, but that Marianne was surprised but that yes, basically, he was cute. He seems to be waiting for me to say something else.

"So, are we going to have a dog?"

So, I'm very briefly holding a poll. I need to pick two stories to about college life to tell on Sunday for the studio show. Leave a comment and vote for two. The two that get the most votes by the time I need to go to read through win. And if y'all refuse to vote, I'll at least have picked out a few of my favorites. So here are the candidates.

-The Neighbors
-Math for Artists
-Astrophysics Pt 1
-Astrophysics Pt 2: Best of
-I can draw!
-Learning the city

I was thinking the stories I picked should be funny or inspiring or just really...indicative of what it's like for me to be a college student. Upon digging through my archives, I did find that a lot of what I talk about is too personal or inter-personal to be related to by a general audience of college kids. But this is what I came up with. Some of them will probably need a little work to be presented as a monologue, but you'll be able to get the gist. Thanks!

Last night I auditioned for yet another fabulous Drexel Theater Production. This time, with a director who makes an appearance here with us every year or two and about whom I had heard *nothing* but good things. The shows will be on the subject of college life. Parents, the institution, dorms, friends, food, etc. Well for the auditions, we were told we would have to bring prepared a story about campus life. So I came in with this great story about the girl in the dorm room above ours who had a very squeaky bed. Oh yes. And I told it complete with sound effects. And anyway, I got cast in this show, which is designed to be an evolving piece. Some of it is scripted, some of it is intended to be improvised, from what I've heard, and all the actors are intended to learn each others' parts so that the entire cast need not all be present for any given performance. The performances, by the way, are to be largely a surprise to the audience. We will be found, not unplanned on our part, but unannounced. In places like the quadrangle, the cafeteria, and the dorms. There is even a very large probability that these stories we bring in to the director will be added to the show, at some point. Which would explain why, when we meet to read through the established script, we are to have two more stories prepared.

Well, glad as I was to have been cast, now I need to come up with two more stories. Where the hell am I going to think of two more interesting experiences about college life?

In case you haven't followed the rest of my train of thought yet, I have a great big giant collection of college life stories. And you're reading them. I guess. :)

As you may or may not have heard by now, we had a little ambulance-requiring incident at my house yesterday. Despite Kat's claim, our poor punctured housemate was really much calmer than I was, despite having spattered at least three different rooms of our house with his blood. Which Kat and I promptly cleaned up as soon as he was gone with the medics.

When he decided that he'd rather have an ambulance get him and take him to the hospital, than have me drive him, which by the way was fine with me, I dialed 9-1-1 from my cell phone. It was a new experience. I'd only ever called 9-1-1 once before and it was from a house phone so it was easy to trace, but I suppose they must be used to this cell phone business by now. At any rate, I was immediately connected to the Philadelphia police, which is interesting to me only because my cell phone has a New Jersey area code and I have no idea how this whole satellite thing works. I explained to the man who picked up that my housemate had accidentally cut himself and would like an ambulance to take him to the hospital please. He said he'd connect me to an ambulance and he transferred my call.

A woman picked up "Philadelphia fire department." Imagine my confusion. The man said he'd connect me to an ambulance, I told her. She made some response that must have been words but which I can neither recollect nor could I understand them as an explanation, at the time. But she jumped right in, not noticing my bewilderment, I suppose, and proceeded to ask me questions. First she got the address. Then, was he conscious, was he talking, what happened. Yes, Yes, and he was cut by a knife. Did he cut himself, she asked, or was he cut by someone else? I was brought up short by this, "What?" After all, the choices she seemed to have given me were attempted suicide or assault, neither of which was the case. She repeated the question. "Oh no," I laughed, nervously, "it was an accident." She gave instructions on first aid which I relayed to Kat but didn't seem to have any impact at all on what was being done. Got my phone number, said to call right back if he got any worse at all. I said, still confused, "We are going to get an ambulance, right?" She said something reassuring, I suppose, and after a few very quiet, still, tense minutes, we heard sirens approaching.

I went out on the porch and flagged the emergency vehicle which had stopped somewhere up the block to check house numbers. Two rather short female medics hopped out and walked up to our front door, and it took all of my willpower not to smile, say 'Do please come in," and gesture them into the house. Why, I don't know. Maybe it was because they didn't seem to be in much of a hurry.

They asked him a few questions, what had happened, was he cut by the knife or was he stabbed by the knife, had he in fact been squirting blood. To which he calmly replied that no, while he definitely hadn't been squirting, it had definitely been gushing. "So," one of the ladies said, "it was a fast trickle?" He considered this, standing in a bloodied t-shirt with reddened paper towels wrapped around his still-elevated arm in our front hall. "Yes," he said, "I suppose it would have been a fast trickle."

We made sure he had his keys, his cell phone, a clean shirt and a jacket, and he'd easily made it up and down our staircase at least twice before he left in the ambulance with the agreement that he would call my cell phone for me to come get him from the hospital when he was ready to come back.

And that was the excitement that was my early Saturday evening. After an hour and a half of waiting for the housemate to call, I was invited to dinner at Peter's where I sat with my cell phone in my hand for roughly an hour before calling to Kat back at the house. "Is he back yet?" I said to her. "Ah...yes...I thought he might have called you to tell you, and I thought to call, but then I forgot." Ok...fine.

And then we made up a drinking game for Clue the movie.

Isn't it the worst thing in the world when you make a sick joke about something stupid and dangerous happening and then it happens?

Most of the time, I'm so comfortable and confident in my own life, despite the uncertainty, that I feel unassailable. Nothing can go wrong, really, I have almost everything all planned out. Like, forever. I'm all set here, thanks. I have some very basic framework that is absolutely permanent and then there's room for change in the spaces between.

But then there are other times when I'm more in touch with reality. When all of my plans realize that they are useless and they run off screaming. All the pieces of my life are in a big heap on the floor and it's the best I can do just to sort them out, never mind putting them back together. There is no great scheme, then, just me. Just me standing on the edge of some great dark hole stepping forward because I have no choice at all.

So on Saturday night, we opened for PennSix at their spring concert. As evident from their site, they're a comedy group, but their written humor far surpasses their sketch comedy in terms of being....well...funny. And despite the fact that their alumni seem to strike terror into the hearts of innocents wherever they go, the guys themselves rock quite a bit. By the way, we were thoroughly warned months before the show that their audience tends to be quite drunk. So anyway, we were there, at the show warming up running through our set while the guys ran through the hallways in grass skirts and other paraphenalia; we were closed into a tiny dressing room that was about eight thousand degrees warmer than the hallway, but that's ok. So we ran through half of our set, Respect, Sweet Dreams, and Like a Prayer, when there's a knock at the door. We open, there stands one of PennSix. Hey, he says, you guys sound great. Did you know that we also perform Like a Prayer? We all go oh no! do you want us to cut it from our set? No, he says, but we would like it if you would perform it with us for the encore. You can pick something else to sing during your set.

Needless to say, we were thrilled and agreed, we ran through it with their Like a Prayer soloist (amazing) and then refilled the empty spot in our set. So we get out on stage and it's nothing from the crowd but 'Take off your shirts!' and 'I like the girl in the middle.' Well, as I said, we'd been warned and we really warmed up to all the objectifying and sexual harassment. :) As a matter of fact, we totally fed off of it, especially after someone put a twenty on the stage to get us to take off some clothes. Oh, and when someone drunkenly tossed a ball of paper up onto the stage, our President threw it back into the audience. It rocked. They loved us.

Ever since then, I've been saying that we should hire some of the PennSix audience to come to our shows and be rude to us. ;) The encore went famously, and we invited their Like a Prayer soloist to come sing with Meg at our spring show. Man, did y'all ever miss out.

At Kat's prompting:

When I was born, I was five weeks overdue. Yes....five weeks. My poor mother carried me around for more than an extra month. Needless to say, I was a big baby and quite developed. Not only did I have fingernails and an extensive vocabulary, I also had a bit of hair.

My mom's hair was always long. Down well past her waist, she used to tuck it into her pants by accident. I never had my hair cut professionally. I had little bangs in my straight-as-a-pin, almost-black hair and when it started to look really ratty around the ends, my mother would trim it. In the fifth or sixth grade I started to grow out my bangs and they were really and truly gone after a few years. My hair used to get caught in the crack of the seat on the school bus.

When my brother was born, my mom cut her hair up to her shoulders. One summer I wanted to cut all my hair off and my sister argued strongly against it. Her hair was as long as mine and I think she was offended at the very thought of anyone cutting off their hair. She ended up cutting hers short years before I ever did.

Senior year of high school, I decided it was time for a change. I'd been dying my hair subtly redder for three or four years by then, but this time I was fascinated with the idea of blue streaks. I really wanted bright blue streaks in my hair. So I went into the salon that my mother and sister frequented and told them what I wanted. Well, they could give me blue streaks, the hairdresser said, but blue is a very tough color to maintain. It needs to be touched up and made to look blue again every few weeks and couldn't she just give me some nice bright red streaks instead. Well, no, I wasn't into the Scream 2 Courtney Cox racing stripes, but I still wanted something dramatic. So I asked them to dye my hair black but to put white streaks in it. Oh, and I had about eighteen inches cut off of it.

Three months later I went back and had them dye my hair all to black, mostly because the theater show was going up and they didn't do blond streaks in the 40s but also because I was sick of looking like a zebra.

Last year, as anyone who is familiar with this page will know, I took to cutting my own hair. I'd gone back to dying it reddish and I learned how to cut layers into it myself. It became a new hobby, almost. And then last spring I dyed my hair black. Well, turns out that DIY hairdye sticks a lot more insistently than salon color, for better or for worse, and I've been trying to get rid of the black ever since. All this time, my hair was between just below my shoulders to the middle of my back depending on how long it'd been since I took the scissors to it.

So out of the blue and for honestly no reason other than feeling like a change, I decided to go daring and cut my hair short. This was not a move that I was prepared to attempt myself, and so we decided to go down to a local hair cuttery that is reputedly very funky and cheap. I scoured magazines and ended up buying a special hairstyle magazine to get a picture of something I figured would look good on me. There was a lot of conference between Peter and myself and we did eventually decide on one. We got to the salon, I showed her the picture, asked if I could do it without a blow dryer, cause damned if I was buying a blow dryer at this point in my life...and found out...Alright, this stylist doesn't speak very much english. Panic ensues on my part as I don't want to offend the poor woman, but I really felt the need for easy communication. But I seemed to have been able to get my points across to her with only a few different gestures and repititions, so with some calming gazes from Peter, I sat still and didn't sniffle.

So, now my hair comes barely to my chin, I need to wash it a lot more often and I don't love the way it looks without styling, but with a little gel it's fantastic. It hangs in my eyes if I don't pin it back, and the color is fabulous. See, the cut incidentally left nothing but an inch or so of my old DIY black color on the longest layers. Everything underneath is short enough that the black had grown out, so it looks like I just have some fabulous black tips on a pretty solidly dark red color.

One of the best things is that I feel like all kinds of great body parts are a lot more obvious now. My chin, my neck, my shoulders, and I feel very hip, and I feel very bold. It's sexy, it's kind of wild, and I love shaking my head around until my hair is all fluffy. Now *there's* something that never worked with long hair. Turns out that my hair even has a little character to it, besides being straight like a stick.

Maybe next time I'll go even shorter.

On a lighter note (cause what wouldn't be lighter, really?), I just had no dsl for two weeks. And no real easy access to anyone else's internet-capable computer, so you know how it goes. I guess I should make a list of everything I might have blogged about while I had no opportunity and then slowly catch us all up on what's been going on.

I think I've decided that I have premenstrual disphoric disorder but on a seasonal cycle. What this means is that I get really really depressed and irritable about a week before my period, but only during the fall and winter. So that's about 12 days a year, but man, are they wicked. Just ask Peter. :)

We just had a great big TrebleMakers altercation this week which I was largely left out of, as I had little or no internet access. Needless to say, it was a huge todo which resulted in our president and music director both resigning independently and then both recinding their resignations. And might I add that I am shocked and amazed, in a good way, at the diplomatic abilities posessed by the TMs president. I don't know exactly how she managed to diffuse the situation at rehearsal last night, but we all went in really uncomfortable with each other and we all left totally not hating each other, with one possible exception of mutual venom. And we all learned from it.

So, my dishes won't wash themselves, contrary to popular belief, so tune in next time for a discussion about what short hair does to your attitude and about sharing a dwelling with five other life-forms.

What can I have to say about anything. I get disquiet and TroubleMakers and the 48 hours run out. There has to be a better way.

The sound of snow falling. The cry of a gull, always the cry of a gull. The scratch of toast against my gums. Too-sweet tea.
These remind me of the things I've lost.

I've lost poetry.

So it's been one of those weeks, it seems. I did actually go an cut off all of my hair, and I totally love it. We had the big Acappella Fest, and it was really rather a resounding success with the possible exception of relations with the boys. The other groups were absolutely amazing, that's the Ransom Notes from University of Texas, I don't have their web addy handy, and the Haverford Humtones. The RNs were spectacular in terms of complexity of arrangement and vocal quality while the Humtones had shocking stage presence and great comedic sense. Their arrangements were possibly simpler than the ones that we use, but they definitely know how to make the most of them. Our boys, on the other hand...well, all we can do is hope that they had the grace to be taken down a notch, cause damn were they ever shown up. And for that matter, our guest groups really blew us out of the water, but at least we weren't surprised. :) No, we know that we are just little fish in a very big pond, and we're only a couple of years old, as a group. But anyway. There's currently no internet access at all in my house, so my online time is very limited. I've mostly been catching up on the new TMs page. Check us out, sign up to be notified of our upcoming events, and soon we may even have pics and audio clips up there.

Term is almost over, but that means that I have final projects/papers to be doing and have even less time to be dashing off to use other peoples' internet connections. *mwah*

I don't know how many of y'all are in the Philadelphia area, but for those of you who are:

Come to Acappella Fest! See the Drexel Treblemakers, Drexel 8 to the Bar, Texas U Ransom Notes, and the Haverford Humtones on Saturday March 8th at 6:30pm. The performance will be in Stein Auditorium, Nesbitt Hall, Drexel University Main Campus. Show is FREE. Come out and support collegiate acappella! Hosted by the Drexel Treblemakers. We will also be raffling off gift certificates to Philadelphia resturaunts: raffle tickets $1.

It's been busy around here. Kind of. Not necessarily interesting, but busy. Um...there was the show. I sang and played guitar and had 4 whole non-sung lines. Very exciting. Boyfriend still cute and loveable. Kissed two girls on Friday at the cast party. No tongue. :) Finished the show (thank whatever divine powers may be). Talked a lot of acappella with business manager and girl in theater who is starting a new group here at Drexel. Decided to cut all my hair off. Totally perfectly finished transcribing an old TMs song precisely as it is now sung.

And happy belated one-year birthday to Thinking Out Loud.

As always happens around show week, my life seems to be on hold. My classes are almost entirely unimportant, I'm refusing to do housework outside of my room, and all of my activities other than theater are pretty much ignored. Fortunately, my voice is almost all back, so I can practice my TMs music, and talking to the TMs business manager about contacting groups and planning next year's concert gives me my acappella social fix. The choir director is quite put out by all this theater business, and I'm going to be in some serious trouble in my ballet class for not having seen a live ballet performance.

It's a shame that time goes on without me.

An outline of the next two weeks. This morning, singing with the Treblemakers at an Admissions event. Thursday, Friday, mainstage show in which I sing. Saturday morning, another Admissions event with the TMs. Saturday night, another mainstage performance, with the last mainstage show on Sunday afternoon. March 9th, choir concert.

Fabulous time for me to lose my voice, eh?

Not that I've had any time or anything, I'm too busy irking all of my performance directors, but silly Blogger was broken when I wanted to post the other day, and I just hadn't had the heart to try again since. Fortunately, I'm over that, just for this moment, and am making myself late for class and skipping out on breakfast tea in order to write something that really isn't worth it. Cheers!

*considers applying finger puppets to keep fingers warm*

I slept a lot yesterday, and sat by the window in the corner. He has a little tiny window in the corner of his room that is almost against the floor. It's stuck behind the pile of laundry and the guitars, but I can get in there and sit. Outside of it is the top of a bay window, so there's a little platform for all of the snow to pile up on. I watched it all day. Outside the window sill, the tiny flakes of crystalline ice piled up. They were huge, some of them, and I could see all of their six little points when they glimmered in the light from inside. They were very very flat. Two-dimensional and transparent, not like the ones we had last year that were little eight-sided chunks of ice, like stacking a thousand identical snowflakes one on top of the other. Still, they had all their points discernable as well.

The ones that fell too close to the window seemed to fizzle and vanish before my eyes, and every so often a gust would throw a scouring blast of ice against the panes. The sound was like tiny chimes.

I don't know how I'm going to dig my car out of a foot and a half of snow, but right now, it just doesn't matter.

So, I didn't know what to get. I'd never been taken out for 'coffee' before, which was probably because I don't drink coffee. But it had been freezing cold out so I was definitely up for something warm. "Do they have hot chocolate, do you think?" He thought so. I got a hot chocolate and he got a hot spiced cider.

When I had to go to rehearsal, I made some small gesture of affection. I don't remember what it was, but I'm sure he could tell you. I may have kissed him lightly or on the cheek or I might have hugged him or just squeezed his hand. What I do remember is the feeling I had when I watched him turn back to look at me with this huge smile on his face before he turned to the door and left. I had my hot chocolate in the band room, and I couldn't stop smiling and blushing, and I probably would have gone on that way for a couple days if I hadn't been thrown into a wonder of other situations.

I love you!

I've been remarkably future and past-minded these past few somethings. I don't even forget about the present, it all just goes on the back burner. The past is something that definitely bears consideration and that seems to sneak up on me at strange moments, and the future presses itself on my and I grab at it greedily.

I don't like living in this house with all of these people. It's too cluttered for me. There is probably just about no one in the world that I could peacably co-exist with. Definitely Kat. I know i can live with Kat. But anyone else inspires strong doubts in me. I'm looking for somplace to live next year. If Kat goes to Penn, we may get an apartment together somewhere between Drexel and Penn, and if she goes somewhere far away, I'll probably get a place by myself, hopefully very very close to Drexel. The farther from campus I situate myself, the less likely it is that I'll get to class. The relationship is direct.

I've also been thinking about jobs...both for co-op and for after I graduate. Right now, I think I want to be a summer camp arts and crafts counselor for the rest of my life. I could flit back and forth between any art form I can imagine without having to be particularly expert at any of them. And I could turn kids on to new things. I would spend my summers trying to find a passion for every single new camper. Painting, photography, drawing, ceramics, beadwork, cross-stitch, hell whatever. And I could direct the camp plays. I don't need to know anything to do that. But that might only work if I had a job for the rest of the year...and that would have to be some sort of teaching, probably. I'd like to teach, I think, but I don't really want to put in any kind of education training in order to do so.

Man, I really know how to just ramble on and on.

We used to walk. This was back before I brought my car into the city. There were four of us, two boys and two girls. For a while, we all had boyfriends and girlfriends back home. I think she lost hers first, then I did, then one of the boys. The other of the boys is still with his high school girlfriend, I think, but I don't know because we don't talk any more.

At the time, we would walk. We would have some vague target in mind...South street, Old City, Rittenhouse Square, and sometimes we even made it there. We would always leave around dusk, walk east for maybe half an hour in what might or might not be a freezing chill, and lose time. Sonehow, it was possible for us to lose hours in this new city. It was new to all of us, two of us from New Jersey, one from California, and the only Pennsylvania one from an hour away. We wanted to taste the city.

From south street, we learned that Philadelphia is a city that sleeps, and even the weirdos pack it in early. From Old City, we learned that all but the very strangest artistes close up shop after dark, and if they like to party, we have no idea where they like to do it. But from Rittenhouse Square we got really the most representative experiences.

It's a park lined with upper middle class commercialism. High cost bookstores with cafes inside, so you don't even have to find your own, four dollar ice cream cones, hotels and the like. And we'd been there before, but sometime in December they light it up with these glowing balls of colors that seem to just hover thirty feet up in the tree branches turning the whole place into some sort of fairy ball. There are statues and hedges and lawns, and while the whole park only takes up about two city blocks, it was one of the most fantastic things I'd ever seen, and it still is. The four of us sat, not really talking so much as just being there and memorizing all of it. It was unseasonably warm for December, last year, so we weren't uncomfortable, despite it being almost one in the morning. Of course, we did see a giant rat in the park that night and we also talked loudly about the giant rat to be sure that the couple making out in the grass could hear us. And at 1am, a police cruiser did drive through the park to tell us all that it was closed.

But it was still magical.

I had one of those stock experiences that everyone is supposed to have. Maybe 'Stock experiences,' as in 'stock character,' is a little bit harsh. I guess most people consider them 'rites of passage' or some such nonsense. The one I had was the 'getting trashed in the kitchen with your college roommate for no apparent reason' one. So, it was Friday night and I got sucked into this great web site, and started looking up all the drinks we could make with the ingredients we have. We ogled recipes for about an hour while Kat was theoretically supposed to be getting some work done or something. Eventually she says to me, 'alright, i'm making a drink and then getting to work. what should i make?' She talks all in lowercase like that. She decided to try making an Oxymoron, and I decided to try a Red Hurricane. So we went down and mixed our drinks. Kat played with hers for a while, ending up with a pretty unpalatable concoction of Bacardi Limon, lime juice, lemon juice and salt. No water or ice or anything, and she loved it, of course. I tossed my drink back, and then figured, well why bother with measuring...you know, why bother with the rum at all....tequila and cranberry juice sounds like a good plan. So I had two tequila and cranberries. And all of this took place in the span of about a half an hour. That's a lot of tequila in a half an hour, and I had stopped measuring after the first drink, so I can only guess that I had about 4-7 shots of alcohol altogether.

Made for an entertaining evening, to say the least.

In the last 25 hours, I've come in contact with one not-so-common concept three totally separate times. By concept, I mean like a theme. Like the recurring motif of windows in Dubliners or red in The Scarlet Letter.

But my theme is a good bit creepier than windows or red. My theme is skeletons.

I've heard people say 'skeleton' three times. First was last night at Treblemakers rehearsal. Lindsay said, "We'll keep the general skeleton of the rehearsal schedule we worked out before, but with a few changes." Not so creepy at all. This morning in drawing, she said she'd let us decide what to draw today. I missed class on Tuesday, so I was entirely surprised when she offered us the options. "Mannequin or skeleton?" Needless to say, the single vote was for the skeleton, so she dragged two very detailed plastic skeletons out of the drawing storage room. We drew skeletons. Finally, dance class. Not such a peculiar place to be talking about things skeletal, but this particular instance was not a kineseology discussion. Lucinda is a very avid user of metaphor. She's obsessed with the way animals move and often tells us to spread our toes out on the floor like a duck. Well today she said, "Sit like a little skeleton in a closet." What the hell did she mean by that? Well I could show you, but it's hard to describe. She was trying to demonstrate bad form, but the closet part made me raise an eyebrow. The closet definitely has nothing to do with posture. But oh well.

As each of these events unfolded before me, I saw nothing strange, took no note of the apparent theme. It took seven or eight hours for the oddity of it all to occur to me, and why it struck me on the way home from digital photo, I'm really not sure. Maybe it's a bad omen. Maybe the universe is trying to communicate to me the urgency of making Peter say "Ske-le-ton" rather than "Skel-t'n." I have no idea. What do you think?

When life puts sheets-marks on your face, wear them proudly.

What do you suppose the footsteps of a three-inch cockroach sound like?

I saw someone the other day who looked like this guy Mike that I knew in high school. I couldn't remember his last name, at the time, but I remembered that I'd been friends with his older sister who played in the marching band with me and that he and I really didn't get along at all. I remembered that his grandfather was the person who designed the emblem of the Philadelphila Museum of Art or at least the griffin statue that it is based on. I even remembered the rest of his name, eventually. But I didn't stop to talk to him. It might not even have actually been him, after all.

I was thinking today about the pretty girl that we all loved, back home. She was sweet, effervescent, but she had an edge, real or imagined, from living in the ghettos of New Jersey. She wouldn't take any crap from anyone and she would really fight for her friends. Like, with her fists. Needless to say, the boys were crazy for her. I bet they still are.

There's a cute freckled girl with light straight hair and blue or green eyes that I had a class with last year, and I saw her on the street, today. She reminds me of the only friend from home that I've ever seen in Philadelphia, and the reason I've seen her is because she goes to Penn.

In November of 2001, the only boyfriend I ever had who was younger than I broke up with me. That's when I stopped being homesick.

Why do I start up again now?

I could be making this up, but it seems as if about this time every year, I start to appreciate winter. Today was the day this year that winter started to warm up. Sure, it might go back to being cold, maybe for another entire month somewhere, but today was the first hint that winter will eventually end. It wasn't run-about-in-shorts weather, but it was warm enough to take a ten minute walk without a coat and without getting frost-bitten. At least it's a step up from where we've been the rest of the season.

In drawing class, she's been making us draw vases full of dried plants. At the beginning of class, I tend to shy away from their repetitive organic forms in favor of repetitive geometric forms which somehow seem less threatening. By the end, however, I've usually bent to the temptation of little circles and squiggles that no one can say are exactly wrong.

You can call it clinging to the familiar or savoring the present, but right now, I'm into this winter thing.

I don't usually consider myself to have a short attention span, but when it comes to parties, it's another story. I can party with the best of them for at least three or four hours, but really, if you get past that, I just want to go home. One of the problems with having parties at my house is that I have a lot of trouble managing this. So while the more salwart of the boys and girls of Drexel's acappella scene ran screaming up and down the stairs of my house, I tried to quiet them. Why? Because three of our six housemates were totally uninvolved in this particular partying event, all three of them were home last night, and all three of them live on the 3rd floor...the floor closest to our "den" of an attic. True, it was very very early in the evening, but I know that if it had been me, I would have been less than pleased.

But anyway, I got tired of the party, especially since no one had gotten anything at all that I like to drink. So I'm wandering around sober, bored, and irate. Not the best combination, I should think. I repeatedly signaled to Peter that if he'd sneak upstairs with me I would put out, but for a while, he was too busy singing to comply.

Finally the party quieted down enough and he'd been worn down enough that we could just lock ourselves in my room and collapse into sleep.

Even I, with my sharp senses and catlike reflexes, was startled at its movement. It was black, which camouflaged it against the pavement and the shadows under the car from which it crept: the finest predator the city of Philadelphia has to offer. The plastic bag advanced quickly from its hiding place, paused, twitching ever so slightly, and then leaped, falling on the unsuspecting tree with an audible hiss.

Picking the notes to my guitar piece for the show. Walking. The direction I take to mop the floor. Watering the plants. Drawing a checkered tablecloth. Today's hardest dance combination. The sound of the printer in the lab. Tying my shoes. Making the bed. Tooth-brushing. Click...advance, click...advance. Getting the dryer to light. Eating in a hurry.

Do you see the pattern?

Do you see the patterns?

The way I fight doing what I'm supposed to be doing is like ignoring that you have only 24 hours to live. I will do anything rather than go out in the cold.

When I think of something worth saying, I promise to say it.

Twice a week for the last three weeks, I'll wake up at 8 in the morning, take a giant tote bag, and go to class. I sit or stand at my easel and frown at my paper, sharpen my pencil and bend in carefully pressing soft graphite to fiber. For about three hours. It is not unusual for me to skip taking a break with my classmates.

She moves quietly around, between, behind us, and it makes me nervous. It makes me nervous, too, that I really like her and repsect her as a teacher after only about 18 hours of her class, and she seems to really really like my work. She knows that some people in our class are certain that they can draw just fine. Others of us had incredibly low expectations of ourselves. But she knows that we can all use our eyes and that we can all overcome what our brain is telling us we see. All that's left is to see what your eyes really see. She always knows what to say. If I need to relax for a minute she comes and talks to me and tells me what I'm doing right and sometimes, very gently, "Now is that what it really looks like?"

Today we began something new. Instead of drawing only the contours of the still lifes before us, we were to add texture. Not smudgy shading, but dots and lines and shapes to show what a tree branch feels like when you scrape your pencil across it. Just figuring out what you can draw that will show texture is difficult enough. Nevermind actually executing it. After one practice drawing for about a half hour, I was so disappointed in my work that I planned to ask her if I could possibly leave early. I was feeling so unfocussed. But the opportunity never came up.

She next told us to move anywhere we liked and to pick a still life or a landscape to draw for the next two hours. With texture, of course. I didn't circle the room, head for a window, or bolt for the hallway. I stood behind my easel as it had been, took the paper off of it, and moved three steps closer to the massive, central still-life that she had set up at the beginning of class. I sat on the floor and started drawing.

Once, one of the other photo majors in the class came up behind me, shook his head, and told me I was crazy. I wondered really if he was so lazy. Ears of corn and tree branches shouldn't be so much harder than what anyone else was drawing, right? Two hours later, she had us put our work up on our easels and walk around to look at our classmates' drawings. "Is there anything anyone wants to point out?" The I-can-already-draw boy raises his hand almost taking my ear off. He says, "This one. This girl right here." and points at me and my work. I laugh and move away, ostensibly so that everyone can see the piece we're discussing, really because I was blushing so hard.

Apparently, I can draw.

Wearing pink: an age-old remedy for the blues.

It might be suprising to know how much better just writing that made me feel. A wrenching grief washed through and out of me into text and left me with nothing but exhaustion and a persistent desperation. It's all slipping through my fingers and I know it, and I want to stop it, but I know that I can't. And that makes it easier.

I'd almost forgotten what it feels like, this. It's been years, really...more than two. The last time, I sat in candlelight and swirled water in a bowl. I kept a knife under my pillow.

It's the feeling of being eaten alive. Lodged deep into my chest is a void, a nothing. It pulls my flesh into it and makes nothing out of it. It grows. The skin of my shoulders and arms is being sucked in towards the vacuum where my heart used to be. I am shrinking, imploding. My chest will collapse in on itself if I only sob too hard, but how not to. To cut my skin would be to let that blackness seep, pour, splash out to cover everything. Better to keep it in.

My dreams featured:

an unplanned vacation for which I had to pack immdediately. a dining room with hardwood floors and a grand piano in which my sister and I waited for hours. a psychic experience in the dining room, having to do with a passing train. Doing well on a joint photo critique between Stuart and the director of the winter mainstage show. Voleyball. A night journey by car, uphill on dirt roads that fork confusingly. Warmth. My beloved Laurel as a theater department work study and being made to do hair and makeup for the cast after her night classes. Choosing lipstick colors and explaining why they change colors slightly after application. Not trusting Laurel to come near me with a hairbrush.

But what I recall being the absolute most important part of the dreams was that I taste-tested food...candy, specifically, I think. And the absolutely dominant element of my dreams last night:

mushroom-flavored lifesavers(tm).

Consider this:

A sophomore photography major here at Drexel, last summer Tam was suddenly convinced that she could sing. Though this idea has most certainly gone to her head, she brings to the Treblemakers dedication, hard work, and gay jokes about their non-performing members. She was enticed to join the group with intimations of lesbian cheese-and-wine orgies every week, but has since been disillusioned. Only two of the performing members have even offered to take their clothes off for her.


This will be my bio for the Drexel Acappella interactive DVD. What do you think?

I wonder what it's like when one of your job responsibilities is asking, "Would you like condoms with that?"

Days like today make me figure out how to layer three cashmere sweaters so that they still look cute.

I've been dreaming of my teeth, lately.

My one terrible, irrational fear has always been of something traumatic happening to my teeth. The idea of cavities doesn't bother me so much, or even the idea of drilling and filling them. The first of those activities is just a slow deterioration, and while deterioration isn't exactly a good thing, at least it's natural. The filling process, while much closer to my idea of trauma, is at least premeditated and carefully controlled. What really makes me nauseous is the idea of teeth breaking, chipping, or being knocked out. Or even just falling out. I don't know how I acquired this particular fear, but I do know that I haven't always had it, and that I felt this way *before* the only bad thing I can remember happening to my teeth.

So I've been dreaming about my teeth. This isn't new, but I've never been afflicted by a recurring dream of teeth, and I've never dreamed of my teeth with such frequency before recent weeks. It's not precisely a "recurring dream of teeth," either, so much as that many different dreams are accompanied by the same tooth incident. Whatever the dream is about, at some point I realize that my two front teeth are very very loose. Whenever I close my mouth, the left one wiggles forwards and the right one wiggles behind the rest of my teeth towards my tongue. This, needless to say, creeps me out to absolutely no end. I usually wake up pretty soon after this starts to find that my jaw is clenched painfully tight. I can never tell how long it takes me to relax and unclench it enough that it stops hurting and I can go back to sleep, but the other night, even if I opened my mouth, I would close it and continue to clench my teeth together. Eventually I had to put my fingers in my mouth, to keep it from grinding shut again.

They say that dreams about teeth are dreams dealing with your own mortality. I just don't know whether to start my future now or catch up to it later.

Today was a perfect "me" day. Not a "perfect me" day, you know. You get it. Even though I had a little crying session this morning for no special reason, I got to sleep in a bit, and then I went shopping and gave mom's credit card something of a workout. It's so good to be dependent. I walked a lot and tried to remember everything I'd need and the whole time I got to listen to Joni Mitchell. Aaaah. Happy day.

I had expected today to be a mild test run of my day from hell. It exceeded even my winldest dreams. Drawing, sure no problem. Dance...aaaah. An hour and a half of building myself shinsplints. History of Photo..."buy the book. now go home" Sculpture: aaaah. I am not taking 3d design all over again. Ran home after class and immediately web-dropped the class from my schedule. Digital photo, exactly the same goals, professor, and general pace as digital imaging last spring....only for six hours a week instead of three and perfectly scheduled to keep me from getting to theater rehearsals. Dashing about trying to find damned acappella meeting without success. Sit in theater for half hour until rehearsal ends and we find that I was not needed. Find TMs. Have evil percussion part thrust upon me; get ride home. Cry. Have brief venting session with ex-boyfriend and sister. Go join the bitch-sessions of others.

Subjected to some of Peter's interactive and very vociferous "reading" on the subjects of modernity and autopoieticism. And diachrony. I'm going to sleep.

There are very few things I can think of for which communal bathrooms are an advantage; however, an entire wall of mirrors, bright lights, and a broad expanse of countertop do have their good points. For example, the ritual celebration of my kind: the hair-cutting party.

It began in a fit of pique when I lopped about six inches off of my hair...it was as therapeutic as I had expected it to be. Six to eight weeks later, I lost another inch or so and dyed it all black while we cut Kat's down quite a bit and attempted to bleach it. In July, I sat on a plastic bag on the floor of my temporary room. I snipped away by myself until my temporary roommate stuck her head in..."Are you cutting your hair?" I did end up taking off too much.

Another slight trim in September or October, I couldn't say, and fast forward to now. I think to myself that my hair is getting ratty-looking. I eye the scissors. What if I cut it up to my shoulders? My chin? My ears? Shorter than that? I have to think, after all. Don't intend ever to buy a blow-dryer, want to be able to hide it all in a ponytail or something equivalent. What it sounds like is that it'll have to be either ponytail length or a pixie cut. Well, alright.

Unfortunately, there's a picture of a haircut in a magazine that I sort of like a lot. It's about chin length. Definitely looks too high-maintenance for me, I say. I also say, "What if I put my hair in a ponytail, cut the ponytail down to like...three inches, and then fix it from there?" Well yeah, that'd be one way to go about it. But I'd wind up with a little three inch tuft on the back of my head, which would be a bad thing. So it's really a good thing I didn't go ahead with that. I ended up deciding on a more gradual approach: cut a little bit off at a time until you get something you like. I've stopped with the scissors for the time being, but I'm actually thinking more gradual than that. This haircut may take a few days.

So class starts up again, tomorrow...technically. I have no daytime classes and only choir in the evening, as far as I know now. There's always the possibility that I'll have a theater rehearsal thrown at me, but even if I do, it'll be fun. The real test starts Tuesday when I get the first taste of the twelve-and-a-half hour day that I set up for myself. drawing, ballet technique, history of photography, sculpture, digital photography. ECs are stretch and flexibility, mainstage show, choir, Treblemakers. I love being an art student.

The class that I anticipate the most is definitely dance. Before the break, Kat and I bought ourselves ballet slippers, and just yesterday we went back to the dance supply store to check out tights and leotards. Which I decided was a bit silly, since the teacher may or may not be really into bare feet and sweatpants. But that's me. I figure I can go back for anything else that I desparately need. SInce the dance class is in the athletic center, we might be able to get lockers there...if I set up a system of lockers all over campus and hide non-perishable foods in them, I just might make it through my long class days. :) Who knows.

I can only hope that by getting all of this boring trivia out of the way, I can clear my mind and think of something worth saying.

Thought of the day:

You should really consider the window-to-walls ratio of your own house before lobbing a brick at someone else's.