List of things to love:

#63

2008-12-21T03:15:46Z

Eight months seems like a lifetime.
I'm not used to letting other people make me feel like this.
I was never this kind of girl.
(I can't adjust to sleeping alone again.)

#62

2008-12-03T03:21:18Z

I could get used to being told that I'm beautiful everyday. /shallow

#61

2008-12-02T18:03:04Z

What does one wear if one is attending a Black Tie Christmas Party with a Jewish guy?
(The Jewish part doesn't actually affect fashion decisions, it's just an amusing juxtaposition.)

#60

2008-11-28T04:46:22Z

Well, fuck, I might be getting attached.

#59

2008-11-22T03:26:36Z

Wednesday night I went to two parties, drank $50 wine and cheap gin & tonics, flirted with older men and went home with a younger one. That was a first, but he was the best I've had in a good while. (I didn't give him my number but he tracked it down - we have mutual acquaintances - and called me the next day. I found it strangely charming.) Still, I always work best with the temporary and he's leaving soon -- I'm terrified of being dependent on anyone.

#58

2008-11-15T21:27:44Z

Some ways in which my life resembles science fiction: The street outside my house is lined with Ginkgo trees that drop their yellow leaves and yellow (foul-smelling, make a popping sound if you trod on them) fruit. It's been raining the past few days and the rain mixes with the sticky fruit insides and coats the sidewalk with a thick, muccus-y mixture. My feet stick to the bricks as I walk down the street.

Some films I have (re)watched recently: The Ice Storm, Five Easy Pieces, American Zombie, Stand by Me

Some things I have been thinking about: tattoos, Eggs Benedict, Fools (in a Shakespearean sense), aging, crises

Songs I am listening to a lot: Hole's cover of "It's All Over Now Baby Blue"

#57

2008-10-15T04:12:50Z

Cups of coffee drunk (since Thursday): approx. thirteen
Miles run (today): seven
Hours of sleep (that I will get tonight): approx. four
Lies of I've told -- big and little (since yesterday): three
Pounds lost (since the semester started): eight
Meaningless sexual encounters semi-excused by broken-hearted-ness (since October 6): two
Resulting orgasms (from above encounters): zero
Football games attended while falling-down drunk (homecoming, we lost): one
Skills mastered (appearing calm and collected while I'm being dismantled inside): one
Tears shed: zero

#56

2008-10-12T08:07:28Z

I'm reading a new translation of the Iliad, and I'm in great pain because I'm finishing. I'm right near the end, and I can't bear it. I chose the Iliad because, working on Brundibar, I'm so tired I can't see straight. I know the story of the Iliad; I'm reading it now for the depth of the poetry. I read two or three pages a night, like reading the Bible. It's exactly what we're talking about, which is the sense of the sheer inanity of life, the stupidity of it — and the gods are worse than the people. Just when Agamemnon thinks they're on his side, it turns out they're on Hector's side. The gratuitousness — I want Troy to win today, says Hera; well, no, says Zeus — and then the rest of it is the killing that goes on and on. I don't know why it touches me this way. There's the point where Hector is coming up behind this young man — say his name is Ajax — and Hector's flashing sword is aimed at his neck, young Ajax who spent his own money to come all the way to Troy, he needn't have, he lived on the rolling plains of Corinth and he had a farm and his wife stood holding her big pregnant belly as she saw him off, this young man so promising, so beautiful, so brave — the sword strikes him just under the lobe of his ear, cuts his major artery and the head topples off and he falls into his smoking foggy death and he goes clattering on the floor and everybody grabs for his armor.

-- Maurice Sendak

#55

2008-10-07T05:13:21Z

Ways in which my life continues to resemble a David Lynch film: Yesterday while going for a walk with their three-year-old daughter my neighbors (in North Carolina) noticed a large number of buzzards gathered on the side of the road. Expecting to see roadkill, they looked closer and found a man's body.

It's not an ear, but.

#54

2008-09-22T22:16:45Z

Ran into my favorite professor today. She greeted me "Hi favorite student" and the day was instantly brighter. Woke up sick, can't get out of the fog, but my exam went well. I'm just barely keeping my head above the water work-wise and it's my own fault -- I can't have senioritis already, can I?
For lunch, I made a concoction of basmati rice, Greek yogurt, and chick peas cooked with fennel, cumin, red pepper, mint and shallots. It was delicious.
I need to sleep tonight. Wish me luck.

• • •

"Sometime later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the upper east side that went 'but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,' and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before."
-- Joan Didion

#53

2008-09-22T02:38:34Z

I woke up at noon and tried to make myself cry, but I can't do that. I don't feel much lately; even orgasms are boring. Last night I wore pink heels and drank Johnny Walker Red out of a beaker in S. & A.'s living room and kissed a boy in a leather jacket on the corner of his mouth. (I don't want to know his name.) We were at a party; the theme was "preppy;" so much pastel and popped collars -- sometimes I hate this school. I'm trying to gather the willpower to make myself study French, instead I just daydream.

#52

2008-09-15T06:41:32Z

Dreams my seventeen-year-old self recorded:

10 October 2004: "I had a dream last night in which I instructed my mother on how to purchase drugs.
'So you just give them money and they give you marijuana? Really?'"

13 November 2004: "Last night I had a dream about being in love. It was like falling. We held hands and walked through a prairie with big tree roots but no trees. We hoped no one would capture us on film."

20 November 2004: "I had dreams of swimming through the river in Ecuador. There were a lot of wasps, and I thought that they were on my shoulders but maybe they were between my toes instead."

08 January 2005: "Last night I dreamt that there was a toy house in Sarah's basement, it looked like her own, but not the real one. Before, it was just two rooms, but now it had a roof and everything. We tried to move it, so that the sidewalks would line up, and underneath was a rut of wet dirt. There were money and charms buried there, under where the house had been -- some of them had been through a paper shredder, not all the way, but almost. The house left pink smudges on our hands. When we moved the house the roof came off, I had to hide it so that Sarah's mother wouldn't know. I put it in her closet, which had once been a kitchen, and had antique appliances and turquoise painted tiles among hanging articles of clothing. In the kitchen, Sarah's father told us stories in German and our hair changed colors while we drank hot chocolate."

22 January 2005: "I dreamt that we were painting the house black, and an awful bright blue, unlike bruising despite the names. We were angry -- the neighbors had painted their house black, and we were asking my father why we had to copy them. 'They had to paint it black,' we said (the reason why they had to was not specified) 'but this is just stupid.' There were trees that looked like toothbrushes popping up everywhere, all black and the sky was black too. Later, we were shaving our legs over the side of a bathtub with clawed feet and there was blood in the water with the shaving creme, but we hadn't any cuts on our legs. We couldn't decide where it was coming from -- not scared, just curious. The bathtub had brown water-mark tide lines ringing it, and the shaving creme looked like birds or ships."

23 January 2005: "I was swimming in the river -- they kept making us swim. We watched them dunking people under before us, watched them cry out, tortured just five feet away. There was no way to climb out, all the plants were full of thorns and our feet were already bleeding. 'Watch out for the birds,' they said. 'They stay under the water and if they taste your blood they'll kill you.' We swam forever and launched ourselves on the docks, broke through panes of glass and ran through gravel until my feet hurt even more.
I have so many dreams of swimming great distances in brown water from something terrible."

31 January 2008: "Last night in my dreams, people were arguing the 'validity' of bisexuality. There were people in a backyard swimming pool who where not meant to be there. I was trying to develop film in the bathroom sink with a scarf over my eyes. (But the lights were on. All was exposed.)"

02 February 2005: "Last night I dreamt that Shira and I were listening to music through broken headphones, that were plugged into nothing, but they still worked."

06 February 2005: "I had a dream that you came to visit. You gave me a box with beautiful fish in it (sometimes the dream was narrated like a book) and there were self portraits all over my walls. There was a woman in a yellow raincoat who was everywhere we were. We lay on the floor together, but you weren't as kind as I had expected. In the end, I cried."

13 February 2005: "Last night I dreamt that my fish were dying. The smaller one left blood behind it when it moved. I was trying to separate them, I put them in pots. I could hear a voice saying that she killed her fish because she had just had a tattoo.
(I think that these may have been the same fish as the last dream.)"

#51

2008-09-15T05:46:10Z

• Since Friday, I have seen three one-armed men on three separate occasions. I'm beginning to fell like my life is being directed by Lynch.

• Rather than writing a French paper, I spent a good portion of the evening reading journal entries from my first year of college. I feel simultaneously very disconnected from and very connected to my eighteen-year-old self. I felt things so strongly then, and while I may have been simply teenage melodrama, I miss feeling that way. I'm so flat. And I miss my eighteen-year-old hair. I don't believe in dwelling on the past, but I turned twenty-one just two weeks ago, and I'm scared half to death.

• I drove to Virginia this weekend to attend a Planned Parenthood conference. It was an excellent experience all around, but mostly I left with a strong sense of pride. Pride for H*yas for Choice and what we do, despite the odds. Proud to be a woman and proud to be making a difference. It's wonderful to believe so fully in an organization and what they do and to believe that we can actually affect change, that it's not simply a buzzword that politicians toss around.

• The interstates of Virginia are beautiful, with heavily wooded roadsides, no kudzu but layers of pine needles. They pass around the towns and cities rather than through them and you lose all sense of place.

• I don't like the word goals. Resolutions, then, even though it isn't a new year: be braver (I say this often); be more honest; take chances, make mistakes, get messy; stop once and a while.

. . .

A Monday poem:

Sung Dynasty

My lover tells me that when autumn comes
He will fashion me a boat of cherry blossoms;
There's no way I'm getting in that.

-- Sean O'Brien

#50

2008-07-26T02:57:47Z

Every culture has its southerners--people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could they be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives--envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibited, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun that we do. Every country, including southern countries, has its south: below the equator, it lies north. Hanoi has Saigon, Sao Paolo has Rio, Delhi has Calcutta, Rome has Naples, and Naples, which to those at the top of this peninsula hanging down from the belly of Europe was already Africa, Naples has Palermo, the crescent-shaped second capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where it is even hotter, more heathenish, more dishonest, more picturesque.

-- Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

#49

2008-07-20T17:44:18Z

Instruction Lecture for a Liquor Store Clerk

The customers want something from you that you do not own but in fact lord over. Let the older men call you baby or hon, it relaxes them. See how they tremble, hands like a wet fawn one hour old pushing up to stand. It will be a hard winter and the fawn won't make it. Mostly it is bleak. Once in a while a customer won't have enough money and you will have to make a call. Will they return later and pay gratefully. Will they never return, like the buck in November cruising the knotweed. The bright orange cap in the bush looks like a loud, upside-down tureen to you, but to the buck it has a grayscale wash that is easy to ignore. Someday you will die, this always surprises you. Usually customers do have the money but sometimes they will cough into their hands as they present it. Chronic Wasting Disease has affected herds in the Midwest, but so far it is pretty safe around here. Dropping heads or ears, tremors stumbling, increased salivation, and excessive thirst and urination. There is a gun under the cash register but you won't have to use it. In fact earlier, when I said lord over, I was speaking of benevolence. If you hit a doe with your car, and she crumpled into a ditch but her eyes were still open, her eyes open like a small child drawing a picture of dark roses, would you shoot her? Lastly, when making change remember to smile. Your smile is resplendent.

-- Paige Ackerson-Kiely, No One's Land

#48

2008-07-19T03:57:29Z

The woods, behind the Days Inn, were different from the forest around his farmhouse in Piecliff, New York. They were unmistakably southern woods, smelled of sweet rot and wet moss and red clay, of sulfur and sewage, orchids and motor oil. The atmosphere itself was different, the air deeper, warmer, sticky with dampness. Like an armpit. Like Moore's Corner, where Jude had grown up. Angus snapped at the fireflies, blowing here and there in the ferns, beads of ethereal green light.

-- Joe Hill, Heart Shaped Box

#47

2008-07-18T19:57:44Z

A list of odd things my boss has said to me lately:

• "I like a girl who drives a truck." (He then made me park said truck in three different locations before he was satisfied.)
• "What up, my negro?" (This is wrong in many ways.)
• "I need you to go give the < insert noun here > some love." (This essentially means to "fix" the object in question, whether that be to season the chips better or to mop the floors.)
• "You need to tell people that guanciale is pig jowls. Tell them it's the King of Bacon. You know what the King of Cheese is? Parmigiano reggiano. You know what the King of Beers is? Come on, you're American. Budweiser!"
• "How do you spell 'rapture?'"
• "What year were you born? Oh, I have to be nicer to you, you are a little girl!"
• "How many pages do you think are in one of those Harry Potter books? About a million?"

#46

2008-07-17T05:14:05Z

Words I've said lately: "all day", "no mas", "si", "no", "no problem", "I can stay late", "I miss you", "I don't miss him", "one month left", "you're too old for me"

Place I've gone lately: the gym, the library, the restaurant (work), the farmers' market, the beach

Places I've slept: my bed, on the couch, the bed of someone yet unnamed

Lies I've told: at least twice a day

#45

2008-07-07T03:01:05Z

In his heart, there is a girl; she is me. No contract keeps her, she goes with him, she goes alone, precipice to precipice, upon every ledge agreeing again to leap. She is with him, she has been with him, every minute, alongside. No one can know what we know. Just us. Us. If you listen, you can hear it. In the wide sound of the rain -- us.

-- H. T. Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl

#44

2008-07-06T19:25:59Z

What Jeremy likes about showers is the way you can stand there, surrounded by water and yet in absolutely no danger of drowning, and not think about things like whether you fucked up on the Spanish assignment or why your mother is looking so worried. Instead you can think about things like if there's water on Mars, and whether or not Karl is shaving, and if so, who is he trying to fool, and what the statue of George Washington meant when it said to Fox, during their desperate, bloody fight, "You have a long journey ahead of you," and "Everything depends on this." And is Fox really dead?

-- Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

#43

2008-07-06T05:58:10Z

I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm, maybe it was the only way she could break away from her mother, maybe Demeter was a bad parent the way that Lear was a bad parent, denying nature, including the nature of children to leave their parents. Maybe Persephone thought Hades was the infinitely cool older man who held the knowledge she sought, maybe she loved the darkness, the six months of winter, the sharp taste of pomegranates, the freedom from her mother, maybe she knew that to be truly alive death had to be part of the picture just as winter must. It was as the queen of hell that she became an adult and came into power. Hades's realm is called the underworld, and so are the urban realms of everything outside the law. And as in Hopi creation myths, where humans and other beings emerge from underground, so it's from the underground that culture emerges in this civilization.

-- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

#42

2008-07-05T17:26:07Z

"Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves," said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word "track" in Tibetan: shul, "a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by--a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression of something that used to be there. A path is a shul because it is an impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet, which has kept it clear of obstructions and maintained it for the use of others. As a shul, emptiness can be compared to the impression of something that used to be there. In this case, such an impression is formed by the indentations, hollows, marks, and scars left by the turbulence of selfish craving."

-- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

#41

2008-07-05T07:02:55Z

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of--to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.... Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless.

-- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

#40

2008-07-05T06:55:39Z

"The dead air shapes the dead earth in the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth. It lies dead and warm upon me, touching me naked through my clothes. I said You don't know what worry is. I don't know what it is. I don't know whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or not. I don't know whether I can cry or not. I don't know whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth."

-- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

#39

2008-07-05T06:16:33Z

Nothing Left to Write About

And the sun, Scientific American predicts,
will white out, become cold like the small town
bums playing billiards with Jimmy Dead Eyes,
and I wonder if I still want to wait for
that special moment--if I can--and I think
I will. People haven't evolved into this icy
state just to die without the bliss of a final chill.

-- Kristine Ong Muslim