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.