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.