You are my fundamental orienting principle.

The flavor of honey, elusive like smoke.

I've been collecting pieces of life.


the way the breath of a dog fogs in the air
the elegant slump of my oil painting instructor as both of his long arms meet under the seat of his chair
to have a fever of 103.5 degrees
all the moisture in the entire city coalescing on my front windows and in my refridgerator
to be disheveled and singing loudly on my way home in the January like spring
finally getting voice lessons

There are too many pieces for me to hold on to one for very long.

It's a cold cold cold emptiness. Gusts of wind-chill drive cruelly tinkling shards of ice into my stone walls, while the sun looks the other way.

Last night, the windows rattled woodenly like footsteps that would not come as I lay huddled under the blankets. On my half of the cold bed, I thought I would not sleep. I thought I would freeze, tears still warm on my cheeks. But I must have slept because I woke in the morning, still alone.

It seems I do not need you to keep me warm.

Sure, it's a little late to be talking about Tuesday. But Tuesday was worth talking about at the time, and it's still worth talking about.

It was, quite honestly, a glowing emotional achievement. I sat through roughly five minutes of vehement, repetitive verbal abuse from a professor who really seemed to take a somewhat inappropriate amount of pleasure from humiliating me in front of my classmates and program faculty. And not only did I not cry in front of everyone, I didn't cry at all. As a matter of fact, he was barely able to hurt me.

While I listened to his tirade about how I was apparently incapable of seeing what was right in front of me, the blood rushed to my face no doubt coloring it a seemly shade of embarassed. But. In my mind I just kept telling myself that if I could sit peacefully through those five or ten minutes, it would all be over, and I'd never have to put up with him again. Almost done, I thought. This is the last hurdle. This is my last test. If I can make it through this, I deserve to graduate, whatever else I may not have accomplished. So I did. With grace, composure, and good humor.

The last day or two, I've even been discussing him with a deep and serene generosity. After all, the nicer I am to him and the nastier he is in response, the bigger the payback will be when what goes around finally comes around.

I dreamed
of the long walk home
under predawn skies
paved with rain.

A chain-link fence
dripping
across the peach pale
landscape that is Philadelphia
at night.

There's nothing entirely like the rush of performing to an audience. A real audience provides to the performers excitement, nerves, and a sudden, strong desire to prove themselves. It's this last that sometimes lends the performers a reckless sponstaneity paired with the instinctual concentration of a predator.

This is what we felt last night. Our soloists broke out of their timidity to a new level and vocal instrumentals functioned as shining steel parts of a precision machine. A precision machine which, by the way, appeared to be having fun.

So, here's to my girls, the TrebleMakers, who I have taught, cajoled, coddled, scolded, nurtured, and grown to love over the last two months. I couldn't be prouder.

I imagine that I am much like an athlete, bedridden this long year. As winter returns, I am struggling to sit up...to stand...eventually to walk and to run again. Muscles complain with strain and disuse, but force of will can gather them to function, once more.

I will learn to run faster and jump higher than I ever did before, but for now, even lifting my head on my own neck is an accomplishment for me to be proud of.

My shoulders ache with the buzz of trainwheels. Through the window there were trees growing through standing water and train tracks.

A dull muffling sleepiness hung over me the whole way home.

And welcome back.

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. :)