there simply was the water smell and remoteness... i did what i could, all was good

Hey girl - I wish you read more.
Then maybe you'd know what I meant when I called him Ashley Wilkes.

And hey, Lothario. Stop texting me sweet things.
Because every time you do I'm sad in case it's the last time.
And I want to keep that night, and you, perfect in my memory.
Or maybe I just like the ache in the place you live in.

I pressed my forehead to the train window. Pins and needles through the feet tucked under me anchored my body to the bench seat, kept it from tumbling through the smudgy glass where it would join the litter in the dying grass along the tracks or - more likely - fall straight down through the ground into space. [One hundred million years ago, another train in another city took me over a bridge and when I looked down into the water I couldn’t fathom fearlessness, nor could I imagine being so filled with fear that my cells had no choice but to absorb it all. Afterwards I thought that in the case of the latter my cells would be lucky to be without the burden of choice.] I observed the phantom pricking more than I felt it. Unpleasantness was something I'd begun to note idly. Another errant shadow skimming the top of my consciousness. An addition to namelessness. I considered lurching forward, grasping the slippery things, holding them up and examining them against yellow light… considering these things bled me of any energy to do so. I had used up my reserves.

Sometimes when I'm standing on a really crowded train, ass to ass with some lady and her ten thousand tote bags and resting my chin sweetly on some strange man's shoulder while the kid next to me is attempting to eat a nine-course meal and poking me with his seventeen utensils and some other unidentifiable person's face is smooshed into my arm fat and I'm pretty sure I'm actually standing on top of somebody, it feels really nice. Like everyone is my comrade, we're all in this together, and isn't this some adventure? Aren't we having fun? And then other times I'm surprised I make it to wherever I'm going because the urge to just start handing out slaps is so. very. strong. And then other other times my eyeballs feel like they're shoved so far backwards into my head and the veil between my brain and everything else is just so fucking heavy that day that I barely even notice anybody else. Not because they seem less real, but because I do.

My boat struck something deep. Nothing happened. Sound, silence, waves. Nothing happened,
or perhaps everything has happened, and I'm sitting in the middle of my new life.

JUAN RAMON JIMENIZ

  











Hey, You -
Teach me to step on the bricks you lay.
Lead me through years of winter. 
-Me

this ship will carry our bodies safe to shore

This blog has Christmas stuff in it. Because a girl only has so many things in drafts.

1. So I know that many of you think of me as, let's say, a role model. A woman of impeccable taste and astounding wit, a woman with an uproarious sense of humor and a strict moral code. A real class act. And you are of course 199% sure I am not the father correct. HOWEVER last night I went to finish my Christmas shopping. And spent twenty-two dollars on myself. And zero dollars on gifts for the people I love. But I'm sure St Peter will understand that I really needed a new wristlet. And that nail polish was on clearance. Sparkly nail polish. I'M SORRY.

2. I had a class this semester with a boy who looks exactly like Mohinder from that show Heroes. (I watched the first couple seasons on Netflix a while back but it got super dumb. I hate when totally believable, real shows about superpowers become outlandish, don't you?)

(Google Images)

Like I'm not even exaggerating. If anything I'm underaggerating. He was beautiful. And always in my group. And I loved him, obviously, even though he was twelve. Anyway I started thinking of him as "Mohinder" to the point where I forgot his actual name. And I kept almost calling him Mohinder out loud and catching myself at the veryveryvery last second. Well I made it all the way to the end of the course and then this morning I ran into him getting coffee, like actually physically ran into him, and I was so surprised I said "Oh, Mohinder!" Luckily he thought it was hilarious but OH MYLANTA.


3. Part of me really dreads the holidays. I like lights and songs and trees and I LOVE creepy little elves and dwarfs. And I love picking out and giving Christmas gifts, even though I really never want anything, and even though Christmas is really about love and goodwill toward men and food comas, not things, blahblah. And I haven't had a bad holiday in a lot of years. But even though I'm always surrounded with love, for some reason I get really sad around Christmas. And what I really want to do is be by myself. Which obviously would be the worst and I know that but the urge to just disappear into my office to count my coins and kick at Tiny Tim into the forest for a few days is still there.

4.

source

I know, I know. Doesn't everybody. I have zero regrets, and I'm glad I made the choices I did because if I'd done things differently I wouldn't have half as many wonderful people in my life right now. And I wouldn't have had nearly as many or as meaningful memories filed away in my heart. And I wouldn't be in the place I am right now, which is a really, really wonderful place, even though I feel really, really insecure and unsure about it. All the time. Especially when I go to some group gathering and there are all these people around my age who look like grownups. And have grownup jobs and grownup apartments and grownup relationships. Salaries and real furniture and wedding plans. What. Recently I was at such a party and started talking to this guy, who I soon realized was one of these grownup people. And I was like, You're an attorney already and I am just now getting down to this bachelor's degree business. (Not that a degree = adulthood. Not at all. You know what I mean though.) And it was clear that he was interested and I was interested back but in my head I'm going "Wait. Hold on. Let's just put this whole thing on pause while I get my life together real quick and then we can see about something maybe." And I wouldn't say that happens constantly because SHOCKINGLY I am not constantly being hit on (so weird, right) but often enough to make me wonder if I'm making up excuses on purpose. But look, I wouldn't date me right now. I'd take one look at me and run, because that's what I'm sure I look like. A fucking runner.

No wait. I'd totally make out with me first. Then I'd run. 

We are not the same, I am a Martian

I have eight hundred million black t shirts. Roughly. And I will spend a good handful of minutes picking out which one I want to wear. (Side note, I am frequently mistaken for a Hasidic Jew. It happened more when I lived among them but even now I still get it once in a while. And the only thing I can think of is that a lot of my outfits are just black dress/black tights/long black coat/black shoes combos. Anyway I've had some pretty neat conversations as a result of this and since I happen to be pretty fascinated with Jewish culture ever since Charlotte converted for Harry/my friend showed me Jewish Sesame Street, I get a little weirdly excited whenever it happens. And actually now that I'm thinking about it, I once worked with a girl who thought I was Amish for a while. Turns out she didn't really understand what an Amish person was but that's not the point. The point was lost in ancient times, probably Aslan knows what happened to it but somehow I even doubt that. NOT that I am doubting Aslan.)

So, um. Sometimes for extra specials (because each black t shirt is special in its own way, of course, which is why I refuse to get rid of any) I stick an old pin to a ribbon and make my neck fancy.

1.

2.

3.

You can tell it's a DIY because I put numbers next to the pictures. If you can't figure it out beyond that then you probably shouldn't have access to sharp things like pins in the first place.

in case of emergency, break glass

These next few posts have been scheduled. So you can pause Peter Gabriel and bring your boomboxes home. Or not. I mean it is a good song.

I've always felt about math the same way I felt about Santa as a kid. As in, I believe it's a real thing. I believe what people tell me about it. But the hows and whys just seem mysterious and magical and a little out of reach. And somewhere around age eight is when they both stopped making sense. Honestly the only way I manage to help little ninos along in terms of math without damaging their internal calculators is by taking a "We are learning together! We are having fun!!" approach. Or, you know, forcing teachers or my more mathematically-inclined comrades to give me a crash course in things like fractions. (Wth is with the lattice method, by the way? Who thinks up these weird new ways to torture children with figures?) There was that one time I accidentally taught a kid algebra, though. That was a pretty good time.

So I'm officially finished [have been finished for weeks but am terrible at blogging] with my first math class in, um... since my sophomore year of high school. And I have to let you in on something, friends: I am not "bad" at math. At what point do we start telling ourselves we're "bad" at something and then dismiss it? I mean obviously you can't be good at everything. But George Washington Carver wasn't good at inventing the light bulb at first. And imagine where we would be today if George Washington Carver didn't invent the light bulb. I mean, really you guys, imagine if George Washington Carver just gave up after his first failed attempt at inventing the light bulb.

Sometime around the middle of the semester I picked up this book because of its title, "The Joy of X." Steven Strogatz, you tricked me. But I'm not mad at you anymore, because after I realized it was about math and went EUGH and threw it back down, I felt kind of bad. Not so much for throwing the book, but because making loud strangled noises of primal revulsion very loudly and throwing things is rude to other library patrons and just plain poor manners. And my mother raised me. So I picked it back up and thought "Well, maybe. It is brightly colored. Plus the cute librarian will think I'm smart."

And then I actually read it (take THAT, skeptical look on cute librarian's usually winsome face) and it was so. good. Even though Steven Strogatz explicitly promised me that by the time I finished his book I would be a calculus expert* (I believe calculus experts are referred to as "calculators" in the biz) and I am not, in fact, now a calculus expert (or a calculator, if you will) which means that Steven Strogatz is a liar and a fraud**, I am still recommending this book to you. Because of forgiveness.

"...we might notice a potential downside to numbers. Sure, they are great timesavers, but at a serious cost in abstraction. Six is more ethereal than six fish, precisely because it's more general. It applies to six of anything: six plates, six penguins, six utterances of the word "fish." It's the ineffable thing they all have in common.

Viewed in this light, numbers start to seem a bit mysterious. They apparently exist in some sort of Platonic realm, a level above reality. In that respect they are more like other lofty concepts (e.g., truth and justice), and less like the ordinary objects of daily life. Their philosophical status becomes even murkier upon further reflection. Where exactly do numbers come from? Did humanity invent them? Or discover them?

An additional subtlety is that numbers (and all mathematical ideas, for that matter) have lives of their own. We can't control them. Even though they exist in our minds, once we decide what we mean by them we have no say in how they behave. They obey certain laws and have certain properties, personalities, and ways of combining with one another, and there's nothing we can do about it except watch and try to understand. In that sense they are eerily reminiscent of atoms and stars, the things of this world, which are likewise subject  laws beyond our control... except that those things exist outside our heads.

This dual aspect of numbers - as part heaven, part earth - is perhaps their most paradoxical feature, and the feature that makes them so useful. It is what the physicist Eugene Wigner had in mind when he wrote of 'the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.'"

STEVEN STROGATZ 

*Steven Strogatz does not promise this. At all.
*Untrue. Steven Strogatz is a gentleman and a scholar.
And he fights crime in his spare time, I am pretty sure.

This song, like, all of this... This song is for you.

Someone just told me I can email my blog. Why didn't I ever know this before? And since when do women have the vote? And what is this new-fangled brightness in here? WHERE ARE ALL THE CANDLES? This is fun though. Also convenient because my blog is under a different account than this email and I get unreasonably aggravated signing in and out of accounts. Almost as aggravated as I used to get changing in and out of my ballet leotard. Which is the one and only reason why I am not writing a blog about my career as a prima ballerina right now.

So hi, long absence from the internet. I see I have lots of emails to return and lots of blogs to catch up on and even, happily!, a few new followers to get to know. I didn't intentionally ditch this space, but I have to admit that I haven't been super interested in sharing much of anything with anyone in general. I don't know how I feel about anything, but I know I am feeling it all very intensely these days. Which I guess is what happens when every time you have a feeling you put it away (with gloves on! because the point is to avoid actually feeling whatever it is) to deal with it later, because you are Busy and Important and Have Other Things To Do Right Now. Those suckers are tricky, though... they lie in wait and watch for a vulnerable moment and as soon as they see their opening they EXPLODE and demand to be acknowledged IMMEDIATELY. You know, sort of exactly like the herpes simplex virus.

I don't know if it's hormones or the time of year or the alignment of the planets/my chakras or what but I have been a huge hot mess the last week. Plus some days. I'll be totally fine for a while and then all of a sudden a switch flips and I'm so sad I just want to lie down on the floor, no matter where I am. (I don't do this. But I totally want to.) Or so angry that I want to kick through glass and pull over dressers and scream so loud and long that I end up with slut voice for the rest of the day. (Haven't actually broken anything but I did get mad at my coffee the other day? So I did the reasonable, adult thing and calmly opened the front door to feel some fresh air on my face. And hurl the coffee mug into the yard. But it didn't break because it landed in snow and as far as I know it's still out there, where it can stay for all I care because apparently I am a person who holds grudges against crockery.)

I know the exact second this nonsense started, a little over a week ago. It was the smallest, dumbest thing that happened at exactly the wrong time, when I was having mixed emotions about the following things:

-Longish stay in the city (because of the break and not having to have a job yet - speaking of, oh myLANTA is school easy when you don't have to work or pay rent. I felt extremely privileged this semester. And I guess it feels kind of good to just focus on myself for a while except NO IT DOES NOT because I need to be actively contributing something tangible to other people's lives in order to not feel like a giant asshole loser. Plus it's rude to stare and I wouldn't want to make myself uncomfortable.)

-Date with a grownup man (on aforementioned trip longish trip) (maybe getting its own post because, dating, what on earth)

-Finagling a class/life schedule between two schools on opposite ends of the state

-Car buying (ugh ugh ugh why doesn't ct just install trains ugh)

-My birthday (etc)

Plus one to three kind of more personal things. And these awful awful feelings found a pinhole of distractedness or something and ripped right through it, and ever since I have no idea what to do with myself because I have no idea which things are going to make me feel what way. Maybe this is some kind of PMD thing. Anyway it has something to do with the moon, for sure. I've noticed the looks she's been giving me. And she better knock it off because I WILL THROW A MUG AT HER.

I have some ideas for blog posts this year that I'm kind of excited about, so when school starts again and I get back into more of a groove that'll be a thing that happens. Also I will catch up on all of your blogs which I so adore reading, also I will start sucking less at returning emails/phone calls/morse code/bat signals, also I have two or three blogs in drafts somewhere that I'll publish if I remember in the meantime just to keep too much cyber dust from gathering while I gather my wits about me. I hope you are all happy and healthy and safe and that... um, love and kittens and other good things you get the idea. XO