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.