First homemade soup of the season. Thinking of you.

I love group performance art. Theater, music, dance. Like I’ve said before, I have no artistic impulses ripping themselves from my screaming flesh. It’s fun, but equally importantly, it’s productive. When you rehearse with a group, the goal is almost always to put on a performance, else why spend everyone’s time? If you sing or play an instrument solo, in your own home, it’s entirely likely that you’re just goofing off. Maybe nothing will ever come of it. It’s really kind of like some other individual activities I can think of that please no one but yourself.

And who would want to give up performing? When you’ve been in ballet slippers since the age of five, you can suffer from severe limelight withdrawal.

Mixing the cd has given me some satisfaction, though it involves no actual performance…at least I get my group art project fix.

As of today, it has been six weeks since I last worked with an ensemble.

The occasions on which I have run up against my own limitations are so few, far between, and happen under such extraordinary circumstances, that I’m not entirely sure what those limits are. I am a multitasking superpower.

Am I confident because I think I am capable of anything or just because I don’t know enough to make me timid? Does that make me innocent?

Whatever the value of bravery, I hope that it is high.

I am fearless.

When I was a senior in high school, I was invited to the senior awards ceremony. Along with all my friends, so it was no big deal; it was the ceremony for awarding all sorts of different scholarships that the students had received that year. Some people got money, some just got certificates, but my friends all received the same award; they were presidential scholars or something like that, and I think they got a hundred dollars each. Many of the awards were from private funds or organizations. So we sit through this whole evening (we were sitting in rows on the stage, and I was way in the back), all my friends got their awards, lots of other people got theirs for writing some essay about what it’s like to be the victim of prejudice or whatever, and I’m sitting there in the back wondering why I showed up, since it didn’t look like I was getting anything at all. Well, I’d just about given up on receiving an award for anything academic, and I knew I hadn't submitted any essays, so when I finally received an award, and it was from the entire art department of the high school, I barely knew what to do with myself.

There was really nothing artistic that I didn’t have a hand in (with the exception of string ensembles), and yet, I really never thought anyone had noticed, as I myself had never thought anything of it. It was what I did. For me, it was about building a toolbox. I didn’t have any special message in my art, but what I did have was an arsenal of expressive means.

College was a strikingly similar experience, in a way. I learned how to do a great many things – from delivering a monologue to selectively toning a fiber-based print – but in some cases, my professors were angered because they couldn’t hear me in the work. They thought I wasn’t to be found there, because my voice didn’t ring through. And I don’t argue that fact; my voice was not in evidence – but my hand was. Perhaps I’m just an aesthete or a formalist or even just a craftsperson, but I put my spirit into the effort of making something lovely. To make a beautiful object is one of the greatest achievements to which I aspire. Maybe that’s why I put so much effort into making my home attractive.

This didn’t got at all where I thought it would, but I’ve figured out some of my theory on art. I may not have anything to say, but that’s all right. And if I do ever wind up with some statement that I need to unleash upon the world, I’ll damn well know how to deliver it.

I’ve been remembering some friends that I knew from high school. Mostly people I was in marching band with, and how we didn’t think very much of the ones who wanted to be music teachers. But the reason for this was that we had never really had any good music teachers.

The marching band director also taught the beginners, back in the 5th grade, and honestly, I think he was more suited to the ten-year-olds. He had taught the marching band for years but had only managed to usurp the high school concert band and select band the year that I moved up to the school. The old concert/select director had been a saxophone/clarinetist and was often spoken of as the greatest band director of all time; he was allegedly forced into retirement, for some reason. The marching band director was a tuba player, by trade. As we said then, “’Nuff said.”

At the junior high, the band director was a clarinetist, and a very good one. And he knew his stuff about every other instrument, too, but he really never had the patience for the age group that he dealt with. For the generally well-behaved and attentive students (especially clarinetists), he was marvelous and an excellent instructor during private lessons. But during class, when the drummers and saxophone players reinforced all stereotypes about drummers and saxophone players, he couldn’t quite keep control. All told, not such a great music teacher.

In middle school, the band teacher was another tuba player. You’d think that would be enough said, but I’ll have to add that there was nothing wrong with him, and he picked good music, but he just didn’t make any sort of impression on me.

One of the girls that planned to study music ed. was a singer as well as a trombone player, and I know from my scant experience with her that the choir director was phenomenal. The boy, Colin, was a clarinetist first and a low brass player second, and one of those strange people whose actions always surprise you, even though you should have long since begun to expect the unexpected. So when he declared that he was attending the marching band director’s alma mater to study music, we were all slightly stunned and then said to ourselves, “hmm…I guess maybe that does make sense.” But I do think that he had had a number of private lessons with outside instructors who must have been better musical inspiration than what the rest of us had been subjected to.

So, when I examine any tentative plans I might have to become a music teacher along with my musical instruction history, it becomes clear why it took me such a long time to figure it out. The instruction I received during my college years in university choir, in select ensembles, and in my first piano class showed me, by example, what teaching music can be and how it can positively affect the students. When I came across some slightly sub-par music teachers, I knew them for what they were: examples of what not to do. And when I began to instruct my own musical ensemble, during junior year, I had good examples to work from and bad examples to keep me from being the kind of director I hated.

I am thankful to every one of you.

I would like, if I may, to relate a thought experiment that I observed over the summer. It was given by an ethics professor who bears an uncanny resemblance to Buzz Lightyear, and it went as follows.

You are participating in an experiment. You are seated at a table in a room with another person of the same age, race, gender, social class, whatever, as yourself. For all intents and purposes, they might as well be you. You have no feelings or prejudices towards them whatsoever, and you have never met the person before.
The experiment goes like this. You are given a hundred dollars. It is your job to split that hundred dollars between yourself and the other person in any way you choose. The catch is that if the other person is not satisfied with the way you split the money, they can call the whole deal off and you both walk away empty-handed. How do you split the money?

Second question. If you were the other person in this experiment, how much of the hundred dollars would you settle for?

Now what if it was a thousand dollars instead of a hundred? Same two questions.

Your response to the question of how you would split the money only tells us a little about your generosity and how much you think you can get away with. The question of how much money you would settle for before you were willing to walk away from it all is quite revealing. Some people say they’d settle for a dollar, cause hey, it’s a dollar more than they had before, and if they were the one splitting the money, they’d try to take all of it, too. But some people think, “Why should I have only a dollar when the other person gets 99? That’s not fair at all, and I’m going to let them know just what I think of that be seeing to it that they don’t get any money. Serves them right.”

Say the person tries to split the money sixty-forty with you getting forty. Well, maybe you still don’t think that’s fair, but still, it’s forty dollars. Tough call. If you give up those forty dollars just so that the other person gets screwed out of their sixty, what do you gain by it? Will they change their outlook on life and become kinder people? Not likely. Are you doing it for the pleasure of seeing their unhappiness? Not really. So what you have the opportunity to purchase with those forty dollars or however many dollars is fairness – knowing that what happened was right. Forty dollars was an acceptable price for you to pay for justice.


The point of this is putting a price tag on something intangible. I don’t think at the time I experienced this lecture I had any idea how valuable it would be. Buzz Lightyear to the rescue.

Finding her was like finding a part of myself that, for eighteen years, I had never known was missing. It was a wonderful surprise. People have left my life before…people who were important to me, but in time, the space they left behind filled with other people and pursuits. With her, it’s different. Even now, two years after she left me and this city for Costa Rica and the misty coasts of California, there is still a place for her, the edges healed over like an ear piercing or a belly button – proof of an event that fundamentally altered what once was. This space determinedly refuses to be filled, even at times when there is no room anyplace else in my life, as if since her, everyone I have met is simply passing through.

I think that maybe she is my match in the collective unconscious. It’s not that we always agreed, though we did think alike. The truth is more that we were perfect complements.

She didn’t know it then, but she was headed for more snow. I expect, though I can’t say from experience, that snow in Philadelphia is very different from snow in the mountains of Arizona. Where she came from, she was never long out of sight of the ocean, and the weather was always that perfect sixty-two degrees and dry that allowed her to spend the whole year barefoot and in cable-knit sweaters. She saw the city differently than I did. To her, it was a quarry of concrete boxes holding prisoners who were there by virtue of their own inertia. When I looked, as I sometimes did, I saw shining glass towers or houses, centuries old, many wanting from years of neglect, but all of it with so much potential! She was more realistic than I was, at the time, or maybe the contrast between cedars and asphalt was just too much, but either way, she recoiled.

She drew back until nothing in the city could touch her, including we who wanted to reach out to her, and eventually she had to go. I think he and I had always known that she was seeking something from the world. She would go wherever she had to go to find it, or maybe she just liked the going.

I think she knows that we have this. It’s something I could imagine myself imagining, granting unwarranted importance to one individual in my lifetime – my very own “one that got away” – but, I don’t think it’s just me. We talk hardly ever, though I expect that as she climbs a mountain to get to class today while the shadows are still long in the west, she may think of me…knowing that I think of her.

Life has become deceptively simple. Soon the rhythm of work, rest, and sleep will be natural to me, more entirely than ever before. I work on the 21st floor, and it is grey. The printer is next to the window, and I stand waiting for ink to make numbers to make sense, but the blinds have been shut for the last three days.

Walking (and the acquisition of ever more belongings) has become the highlight of my days. I walk to the bus or the dirty retro subway that is somehow less revolting than the dirty newer subway. I walk to shops, I walk to the bank, I walk to my front door.

I desperately miss cutting my own hair.

I miss trees, and the real smell of morning, and never knowing what new adventure the day will hold.

I want my girls back.

This life is not full enough to make me happy.

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.