I dropped a class, for the first time ever. I've never felt so morally and academically conflicted. I had fallen way behind in my reading for the class, had not memorized my sonnet for the week, and knew the class was not going to serve me any purpose in my newly (almost, after I turn in the paperwork this week) declared major. Setting aside my closet-workaholic ethics and moral dilemmas, I focused on the above reasonings and pressed "drop" right next to "English Literary Traditions 210-1."
And thus, no Caesar, I am not an English Lit major.Jess and I had a magical evening of romance together last night. We did our date right, on a whim and in search of a hamburger. Our hamburger quest led us to Southport Ave., Cullen's Grille (God love them for their orgasmic onion rings), the Music Box Theatre (for a visually-stimulating French movie event through the film Notre Musique), and Julius Meinl's, a Viennese Kaffeehaus with the most decadent of decadent raspberry-mango-white chocolate tortes my tongue has ever caressed.
We had moving conversations on the El ride home, interesting pick-up lines from 30 year old men at the bars of Southport, and crashed back at our room pre-midnight. Tate came and whisked my lover away from me, and after reconciling my evening to a night of a Porter and Seinfeld alone, I was pleasantly surprised by a visit from JP. After some nice conversation, JP exited and I wandered down the hall to waste a good three hours before finally falling asleep around 4:30 am.
I was awoken this morning by the rude, bitter USPS man who pulled more-or-less the "you're a privileged white girl at Northwestern" bullshit on me and I went back to bed angry to have dreams about singing Backstreet Boys in bed.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
First times
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Momentous Occasions!
Isn't this momentous? This moment, right now? Shouldn't I be documenting it for safe-keeping, or at least as safe as I can online.
(I apologize. Though I update, I cannot take my blogs seriously and everything comes out tongue-in-cheek. Don't expect me to be the sincere narrator that you may have imagined me to be.)
Tomorrow I declare a major. So what?
I'm twenty years old and I am an undeclared major. Is one-fifth of my life over? Like that? I've spent a fifth of my life undeclared! Quelle horreur!
Well, thank God above and the WCAS Advising office, because tomorrow I will take one step forward in life with a so-called direction and therefore justifiable footing! I travail, I succeed, I fail! Who cares? I can stand up, one legged bent up, propped up on the soapbox in front of me and cry out: So what, World? I've got my major and I've got my skin, and you've got nothing on me.
The funny thing about all this is that I've known all along that I'm okay. But in the grand showcase of Northwestern, it helps to say: I'm majoring in biotechnicalpsychopseudomacrotheologichemical studies!
I have three plans. Three futures. I blow on the dice and let the divine hands of various Northwestern administrative officials determine my fate. May they bless the academic land we all walk upon.
It would be sufficed to say that there is another theme to my life lately. A strange, dreamlike clarity to all that happens to me. I sometimes reach these moments of lucidity where I am all ages of myself at once, with heightened sense and sharp thought. I'm not sure it so much helps me academically, but that's not so much what's important.
If I can feel like I'm six years old, gap-toothed with chocolatey fingers from baking, twenty, blossoming and ready to declare a major, and forty-three, relishing in work and maternity (here I go predicting my future), then I am someplace good, because I am someplace good in all those places.
This theme correlates with another, a sense of coming full-circle. The inhalation and exhalation of one void of air, big enough only to fill a pair of lungs. The strange circuity of seering pain, embered anger, and the lifting smoke where there is release. The sudden collapse of breath when first touched, the heated and heightened breath of ecstasy, the quiet breath of common understanding. One touch can circle a wrist infinitely. The wrist requests what it wants.
A man stands on a rocky beach by a small lake. In his hand, he works a stone over and over in anger. With each skin-rawing revolution of the stone in his palm, he justifies his anger by replaying what happened. But like sand through a sieve, the memories fade as he recalls them. They sift in confusion, falling upon one another grain upon grain, indistinguishable from the rest. Soon he has lost the justification, the reasoning. He is left with only the feelings, or more accurately, the chaffing of the lake-rock between his fingers. He turns the stone faster, almost manically, forcing his energy against its bumpy surface and irrationally imagining the fatty grooves of his fingerpads disappearing. With that last thought, he suddenly lets his hand go limp, the rock dropping blankly back to the rocky beach earth. He stares at the lake that stretches complacently before him. Will the loons come again this afternoon? he wonders. Their soft-spoken laments often please him in a quiet way, drawing pleasure from their common expression of sadness. Maybe they miss something. He looks down by his bare feet where the rock had dropped and realizes that he cannot distinguish his rock from the other dull-faced stones staring up at him. Without thinking, he digs his toes into the stones, thoughtlessly scattering them with a jolt of his foot. Breathing deeply, he turns away from the lake and walks toward the car, his mind a steamy fog lifting to reveal remnants of lost thoughts. The fact that one of those tediously gray stones on the beach was still hot from the friction of his fingers doesn’t occur to him. He absent-mindedly rubs his right hand, raw from he-doesn’t-know-what.
I have lost faith in backspacing.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Nyquil is my lover; Dayquil is my muse
This medicated state I'm in is the most wonderful and bizarre thing. I went to bed last night around 12:15 and got up at 9:50. I showered, got ready, and then collapsed in fetal position on my bed.
Needless to say, I decided not to go to my first class of the day.
I have had bizarre dreams too. Two nights ago, the dream I had takes the cake of all bizarre dreams:
I had gone to a circus and/or amusement park-ish place with JP, where we ran into John and Brett, who had been kind enough to save us some seats in the big tent at the circus. Brett suggested we all take a ride on the log chute water-ride and of course, we were all up for it.
However, as we got up to leave the tent, the entire amusement park was besieged by these...critters?... who were attacking us. Kevin "Chops" Brown suddenly appeared, told us he works at the park and he knew the only safe way out was by the log chute. As we ran ahead to catch the log chute and jumped in, Kevin yelled to us: Just so you know, Jenny Tison is at the bottom of the hill dressed up like XZibit!!
And suddenly we were flying down the waterchute and sure enough, there was JT rapping and in the guise of a black man at the bottom. She was there to distract the invaders, apparently. We were all waving to her when suddenly the critter-like things ran out from underneath the waterfall and we were attacked.
I woke up.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
I'm really happy I interviewed Natalia Singer. I really can't describe just how happy I am. Aside from the kindness of Kim to give me a chance to write something in Play, Natalia was just...amazing...and everything I could hope to emanate. Her vibrant personality, impracticality and uncontrollable enthusiasm gives me hope.
Saturday, January 1, 2005
A New Year
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.
--Alan Cohen