fallingrain

2003-08-26T14:50:00.000-05:00

Well, it took a tablespoon of Maalox ($1 at the student pharmacy), two capsules of kava-kava, and an hour-long nap, but I did accomplish my 4-mile-round-trip hike to get my course packet, and while I was down there I found the health food store and bought two ears of corn and soy cheese and a couple of fruit leathers.

With this last class today (intro to sustainable development) the last piece of the puzzle fell into place and I realized that I have the dream team of classes. They're all interlocking, approaching the questions I asked on my course application (where did we come from? what are our choices for where to go from here?) from incrementally different angles.

Conflict time. It turns out my parents have been reading this thing. I'm going to check IP addresses & see if they quit, as I asked them to, because I'm writing them nice letters almost daily and besides, this is MY JOURNAL. It is going to be hard enough to seperate myself from my parents here, given that we have what I'd call a very positive relationship and I miss their company. I need to seperate, and part of that is starting to choose which parts of my life my parents are privy to. It is necessary, and I don't appreciate them intruding on the parts I decide to keep seperate. I really don't.

All right, I've decided. If you read this blog, email me at alextree314@writeme.com and ask me for the address of the new blog. If you're my mother, butt out. Thanks.

alex

2003-08-25T18:50:00.000-05:00

I am so happy here.

Intellectually happy. My brain is wiggling its metaphorical toes in glee. My non-metaphorical toes are tired and sore, and my stomach is grumbling, but my brain is happy. It happened today, in a class I was almost too tired to pay attention in, the 5:00 to 6:30 - I heard an idea I'd never thought of before, and there's this wonderfull head-expanding feeling as everything tilts on its axis and realigns. Anyone ever told you that learning is addictive?

I did manage to go to dinner with people, too (Tamz, you happy?) some people that I already knew, but it's right after class, so I may have permanent dinner company. My thought & the environment class is so cool. I was worried at first because the teacher's a real good ole boy in that moderately dirty-old-man sort of way, but once you start talking he listens.

Oh, god, it's so good to go to dinner and talk with people about things you didn't think anyone else ever thought of! I'm glad I did this.

Tomorrow is sustainable development (a program that apparently has a farm attached) and then the two-mile hike to get my History of Literacy course packet in town. Oh, I love you guys, I do. I'm okay. I'm going to be okay.

love,
alex

2003-08-25T11:54:00.000-05:00

First class today. I have another one in an hour and a half. The class was one of the ones in my program, and so the teachers requested to be called Bud and Kay and Bud went on a five-minute tangent about Finding Nemo. It is a huge two-hour class first thing in the mornings, but it is also a good class, and so I shall survive. I left feeling like crying, but not for any reason besides being tired & hungry & overwhelmed. I went to the cafeteria, and as per Tam's suggestion sat down with some people I didn't know - a bunch of dreadlocked senior girls, as it happened, who didn't talk much but were nice. One of them said some really great things about my program, which was nice because I've heard a lot of bad things too. (By the way, what is it with everyone born in 1984? Everywhere I go, the year before me has done something awful and my year pays for it. 1984, you're not on my good side.)

Oh, and it turns out the cafeteria food is edible, even if the staff say vay-gan and try to feed me cheese. I got a bean burger and a huge plate of fruit & lettuce for $5.70. So it's just the food court that's horrific.

My watch is broken, already. That's what I get for buying it from Wal-mart. It's really messing with my head, because I thought it was 1:39 and it turns out it's 12:48 and I'm totally lost and really feeling like I've travelled backwards an hour.

Tomorrow I have to either walk or take the shuttle downtown to a print shop to get the reading that's due Wednesday. Also, I need to call the health center to get my menengitis vaccination. So now I have to go look up the print shop. More later, probably. love to all
alex

2003-08-24T21:14:00.000-05:00

Well, I was sad, and then I went to Club Expo and saw all the cool things that I can do here, and then I made two friends on the way to house meeting, both of them a comforting two to three years older than me. So I am happy. I have so much I need to do before tomorrow, but I'm happy.

love (I mean it!)
alex

2003-08-24T16:55:00.000-05:00

Oh my God. It's a goddamn Haight-Asbury out there.

It's a cool town, but to be honest it's freaking me out a little. Everything is freaking me out a little. I finally got sad, and it's not so much homesick as really really lonely. I think I've done too much in too short a time & am needing to calm & readjust.

God, I hate this tank top. It's super-insulating summer wear. Obnoxious.

This morning I woke up at 7:30, half an hour before my alarm clock, and went for a walk in the woods before heading to church. Turns out church is only 20 minutes away. I got there early & ended up helping a lady set up coffee & pastries (mm pastries. I'm hungry). Turns out they have adult RE here, which is a little odd but much more like what I'm used to then sit-down church is. The service wasn't bad - there was a guest speaker on campus ministries, so it was more like an enthusiastic teach-in with singing. It is a high-energy group, and I'm glad to be there, and I already volunteered to help with forming the campus group. I was really happy with the people I met there, so I don't know why I'm so sad now - maybe because the instant ease of a crowd of UUs contrasts unpleasantly with the nervewracking unfamiliarity of the kids in my dorm. Maybe just because I'm tired and PMS-y.

After service and the campus ministry planning meeting, I decided not to bother to try to attend the rest of orientation, so I wandered downtown & poked in shops, bought glow-in-the-dark stars for my room and a book of color-in mandalas for my old church. I came back to the dorm, watched Monsoon Wedding with my suitemates, started organizing (because the rest of the week I'm going to be running way too hard to get anything done) and got really sad. So I went for a walk - the sun still sucks you outside in the afternoon, saying I'm leaving soon, come talk to me - and realized while walking that I've seriously fked up something in my hip and it hurts to walk. Great. Hurting to walk, stuck 96 steps and half a mile away from many of my classes. We like that.

I have a lot to talk and think about, but I don't really want to deal with any of it right now. I think I will go eat a granola bar and lay in my bed until I feel better.

luv,
alex

2003-08-23T21:39:00.000-05:00

Had a revelation, walking alone and inadvisably through the thin small-town dusk. I do not have to explain my whereabouts, outside of class (analogous to work) to anyone. I do not have to check in, sign out, let anyone know where I've gone. Safety puts its limits on this, of course, but I am essentially at my liberty. I've never tried independance before. It's kinda fun.

I was walking to try to figure out how much time I should alot to get to church tomorrow. I'm thinking a little over an hour walk, so I'll alot an hour and a half, pack nice clothing, and sneak into the bathroom there to change.

Walking through the hallways - girl with christmas-tree ceiling perched on the edge of her bunk bed playing steel guitar to an attentive audience. Constant stream of opposite-gender peoples headed in and out of a door three down from mine. I swear they're waiting in the halls, and I try not to laugh watching them sneak out in the morning. The girl who doesn't like me was cooking pasta in the kitchen while I was making my solitary repast of Nature Burger and canned oranges.

I just learned from the orientation guru across from me in the lab that the kids in my program do indeed have a reputation for destroying things, and that we're essentially in a fishbowl this next year as far as self-policing goes. Good to know.

love,
alex

2003-08-23T18:30:00.000-05:00

incredible day.

First of all, this ain't a college, it's a big building full of people Alex used to know. If there aren't any second chances, I don't know what you'd call this. It was freaking me out, but I just ran into someone from my old Outward Bound group (one of the few good things in a terrible phase of my life) and now I'm excited. I know these people, or did. That's cool.

I woke up at 5:45 and never went back to sleep. At seven thirty, I got up to go walking on the trails (previous entry) and then came back to eat an excessive amount of granola and figure out the logistics of a shared bathroom. I got my mailbox, went to my program's convocation (we did an egg drop! Lee, our director, held one particularly artistic specimen of egg insulator off the ladder and said, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That is all we know in life, and all we need to know" and let the egg go. The prismatic triangle of straws and masking tape bounced once, twice - the egg popped out and rolled away, landing intact on the newspaper. Ours, of course, crunched first try. But it was good fun. being in a room with my program's people felt like being in a really spiffy high school, one where everyone's acting like teenagers but in a funny, cool way. That doesn't sound like a ringing recommendation but consider how much familiarity is worth to me right now.

Oh! Somewhere in here (I really don't remember) I went to the Big Sale, which is the selloff of discarded dorm junk. It really is junk. Cracked ziplock bowls, trash cans with scorch marks on the side, you know. But I needed a trash can and a recycling bin, and a bookshelf, and cereal bowls and water glasses and a cutting board. This sale was at the campus nightclub, which is as far away as possible (i.e. at least eight substantial flights of stairs) from my dormitory. Yes, I did. Luckily, I bought gimpy cheap furniture. I hauled two trashcans and a bookcase across campus on my back. All told, I have probably walked ten miles today. That makes me proud.

Then we had orientation - why do I always end up with the gimp group? We did play "Never have I ever". But I'm supposed to be eating with them right now, and I seemed to have misplaced them.

Whoops.

Yeah, me and this girl - (you know quiet clean-faced horseback riding types? maybe it's the posture that makes the simularity) broke off to go get our textbooks. Turns out they're only giving me one before class starts, though I saw an Oxford Annotated Bible lurking under a sign with my course number. After that we went to the student union and split off, and I bought a lemonade (Minute Maid! bad!) and sat to get the weight off my feet. It was at this point around 3 pm, of course. I went to the food court and was charged $5.30 for a small bowl of grapes and another small bowl of refried beans, salsa that tasted really bad, and chips. The main cafeteria better be better then this. So far it's only open at really awkward times, and not for dinner.

And then we had the general convocation. Some official people talked to us, and the student body president, and this motivational speaker who told us to save ourselves for our future spouses, also that marajuana is sprayed with arsenic. Why can these people never be reasonable?

After that, we were supposed to go to dinner with our orientation group, but since I really geniunely can't find mine and am full of the jelly beans I bought to supplement the terrible food court food, I am here in the computer lab. Where I just met a person I slept next to under a tarp for the rainiest eight nights of my life. I will go upstairs now, and wash my face, and possibly watch a pointless movie (my roommate has an excellent stock of these) but I think not, and go to sleep. At 8 pm. The swingin' life of the college freshman.

love,
alex

2003-08-23T07:45:00.000-05:00

The luxury of walking thin-morning Appalachian trails! I'd forgotten - the air is very cool, and despite the fog almost dry against the skin. The tadpoles in the pond are un-frogged, the size of a baby's fist with the pubescent bumps of legs beneath their tails. But the weight of the bowed rhododendron is oppressive, early in the morning, and my legs have forgotten the trick of going up and down mountainsides without jarring.

hungry. I think I will email my mother, later today. If I call her, then I will be homesick, and that is not good.

love,
alex

2003-08-22T20:15:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm here. Right now I'm really ecstatic (my parents finally left! woo!) but I can feel homesick lurking right around the edges. Tomorrow we start doing stuff.

First, damn, are the boys here determined to get some as s. Second, freshmen males do not look like grownups. Third, everyone here is from my town, I think.

I think one thing that helps me is I sort of take possession of a space and act like I have the right to live there. It's something I learned traveling, especially in situations where the only plumbing you'll see for the next day is a Wendy's restroom. It makes me less tenative, because in my mind, I already live here.

You know? I am panicked about the demands on me. I miss my dog. But still, when I sit quiet and alone in a room, I feel at peace with deciding to come here.

love,
alex

2003-08-22T07:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday: woke early. The family friends came & visited, gave me muesli, hugged me, went. My mom and I went on a sprinting run of all the places I dislike (Costco, Bed Bath& Beyond, Walmart) which lasted for five hours and left me extremely cranky and sad. I went out with Scott & wandered the main drag of our little town. Scott can identify about a fourth of the residents by car, and about half of those by sound. I am not a car person but I think I find this impressive. I left my mother to do the tail end of my packing (I feel bad about this, but the fact is things get done a lot better if I stay out of her way). My friend Erin came by this morning. And then I went out to breakfast with Youth Group Leader Extraordinare. Mom and Dad packed the van. And we're off!!!

2003-08-21T22:40:00.000-05:00

This time yesterday, I was terrified. Now I'm just really excited. I'm ready to go.

love to you all,
alex

2003-08-20T20:17:00.000-05:00

I am avoiding the stage of panic where I start obsessively counting _every calorie_. Which means that I'm in the stage of panic where I get chubby instead. I can feel the little layer of fat under my chin, just sitting there being fatty and uncooperative. I'd better loose weight with all the walking on campus. I typically do when I'm walking a lot and busy.

2003-08-20T12:46:00.000-05:00

Can you imagine sitting in the middle of a bus full of children, looking around at them all, and deciding, now I'll blow them up, now, with that other bus passing that I could maybe hit? Can you imagine? I am sick. There is no explanation, and while I will call it hate I will not dismiss the causes as 'evil' because 'evil' doesn't mean anything besides 'wrong', and I don't believe 'wrong' is an explanation. A valid classification, but not an explanation. More complicated words - fanaticism? some complicated combination of racism and siege mentality?

I think this is the worst yet. Yesterday is the worst yet.

Shallowness break. I can only handle so much:

I've decided I'm taking the wrong tack as far as packing. I want to have my things around me - but what happened to simplicity? Shouldn't I be able to stuff my belongings in a backpack and go? So I am going to take only what I think I need, instead of turning my dorm room into a sort of life raft for possessions I don't want to let go. That means the clothes I have unpacked now (plus some socks), fewer books, limited food (enough to make breakfasts, not three meals a day) my cd-player alarm clock, and my computer. And school supplies.

The thing that's getting me is, if I don't need something in my dorm room, I just plain don't need it ever. My room is getting boxed up so that my sister can move in. If I don't need to take something with me, I am essentially qualifying it as unnecessary and removing it from my life. I will never need it again. So, in essence, I'm getting rid of it.

_Why_ have I stopped meditating? I need disattachment! Badly!

2003-08-19T21:57:00.000-05:00

I didn't mean to write that. Instead, I was going to link to a sad sappy poem that I actually found quite excellent. Some day I will be able to write like that.

love,
alex

2003-08-19T21:55:00.000-05:00

I think sometimes I come across very shallow because I resist hyperbolae. The fact is, for an estadounidense of my age and culture, sometimes understatement best captures the feelings involved. They are never as strong as they could be.

I don't like this. I don't like this bombing, the voices on the radio shattering into explosion and static and stay calm, everybody stay calm. I remember too well the other dust-clouds, a camera held backwards as someone runs away from the blast. My first catastrophe was children trapped in the rubble of a daycare in Oklahoma. I remember this too well.

Sometimes maybe it's better to assume that there's no mercy, that to die means to die in pain. It's too hard to convince myself that the people under the rubble have some respite, that some force of God or nature blots out the pain and fear and thirst. I have spent so long trying to blot out that suffering in my mind. Facing it is almost a relief.

It's no longer try to love the mutilated world. I do love the world, the world that is perfectly willing to blot me and a thousand people like me out of existance by coincidence of day and time, politics or weather. I know that dying means dying in pain and I will not stop taking elevators or try to get my friends to give up their motorcycles. I love the world, and death is bad. Well, there are worse things.

terrified, for all of them

love,
alex

2003-08-19T21:02:00.000-05:00

I don't like this war we're in. It was supposed to be over, and for the gods' sakes cameramen are dying. It won't be over for a long, long time. I'm not sure this war could or should have been prevented, though I am very sure that history will look back on it as a mistake.

Isn't it sad that I'm so much more striken and sickened by the deaths of journalists and UN aid workers then soldiers? I know that 'soldiers knew what they were signing on for' etc. etc. but I don't believe for a second that that makes their lives somehow disposable. (a position, by the way, that several conservatives I've talked to seem to disagree with somehow) Maybe I'm just used to hearing about soldiers dying. That's how we measure whole decades in history, after all, number of US soldiers dead.

2003-08-19T17:20:00.000-05:00

They blow up a government building, and what do they blow up? The UN headquarters. They kill an official and who do they kill? A powerless administrator who had devoted his entire life to human rights.

I am tired of people dying under rubble.

And I don't think it's preventable. At all.

I know that this is a stupid republican question, but where were all these explosives five years ago, when they could have been useful? I know the last head honcho had better security, but blowing him up would have accomplished quite a bit more.

2003-08-18T20:32:00.000-05:00

I wonder if it might be better to marry someone you're not in love with. So many marraiges break up because people fall out of love, but is love - at least starry-eyed walking-on-clouds infatuated love - a prerequisite of making a shared household and family work? Marrying for other goals might be settling for less. It might make infidelity more likely. But if your goal is raising children and creating a stable home life, not living in some romantic (/romanticized) bliss, aren't there more important things then whether someone makes your toes tingle?

Of course I'm wrong. Maybe.

Dear God, I'm not just turning into a conservative, I'm turning into a 15th-century conservative.

2003-08-18T17:03:00.000-05:00

We always debate the difference between religion and spirituality. I thought of a new angle on it today. Maybe spirituality gives you something, and religion expects something in return. Think about it. All religions require a sacrafice - from the God of Abraham in Exodus, expecting pidgeons and honey cake, to the God of Jesus and "love thy enemies" who expects you to give up both anger and vengeance. I think that'd be harder then the pidgeons. Islam _means_ submission, as in giving up a part of yourself to God's will. Buddhism goes straight for the self - okay, the ego - and expects you to wipe it out entirely. I am liberal to the core, but I wonder about this in reference to today's culture. We're 'spiritual, not religious' -

that sounds a lot like we want to be given the benefits without giving anything back.

2003-08-17T19:16:00.000-05:00

This morning I went to church for the Last Time (well, obviously not really the last time, I'll be back for breaks etc, you know what I mean) and then I came home, squabbled with my family, and went and lay down on my bed. Two hours later, I got up, made myself nachos, banged my head on a cupboard and cried for ten minutes (you know that kind of crying where you're just kinda sitting there watching your body carry on? does that happen to anyone else?) washed the kitchen floor, and went and lay down on my bed. I just got up for dinner (the relatives are here) and I'm debating going back to bed. The only respite since I got home has been a bit of swaying around my room to Enigma.

2003-08-16T16:52:00.000-05:00

This bit of admittedly triple-passe' humor made me laugh so hard I fell off of my chair.
from this thread

Thank heavens, Adbuster's is done being angry and is back to being useful again. Also:
Baring Witness - this is a little bizarre, but winds up causing optimism
This kicks my ass

luv,
alex

2003-08-16T16:03:00.000-05:00

The thunder this morning was an abrupt thunder, like someone moving furniture on the roof, except wide and reverberating in a way that I only associated with widescreen movies. I sat on my front steps in my pajamas, hands cupped and head bowed in the torrent pouring off the roof, water beating on my hands running down my wrists down my elbows down my legs away into the yard. It took thirty minutes for the storm to slack, and I was there for all of it. I hold so much more to storm then to blue sky.

I have finally gotten to the point where I can feel how terrified I am about leaving for school Friday. This is good, to know it in myself instead of only seeing it when I lash out at someone. My apocalyptic provisioning spree (six pounds of flour, three of beans, ten cartons tofu, etc.) failed to make me feel better but it did bring to the surface that I feel lost and should expect to keep feeling lost until I get to the mountains.

love,
alex

2003-08-15T16:22:00.000-05:00

My aunt, who tries so hard, bought me a subscription to Organic Style Magazine for christmas. I try to read it every time, but I knew it was doomed the first issue. There was this article - you know those 'being nice to yourself' womens' magazine articles? and it started with one of those older-wiser-woman charecters saying "I remember the first time I spent more than a thousand dollars on an article of clothing."

This issue features a $4,500 lamp made from a mango root.

scuse my nausea. it's just all the back-patting upsets my stomach.

Oh my god. A whole article aboult how shopping for clothes can be uplifting. I HATE YOU, Organic Style! Hello? If you're an Organic Style girl? Thank you for trying. Really. YOU'VE SOLD OUT. YOU'RE A WRINKLY OLD WOMAN WITH TOO MUCH MONEY ACTING JUST AS SHALLOW AS THE OLD WOMEN YOU ONCE REBELLED AGAINST. Give all your possessions to charity and move to a convent in Colorado. Please. It's your only hope.

I apologize for being so vicious lately. I really have been being casually terrible, but

Oh, crud. But there's an article on the schoolyard-garden movement, which makes me really happy. So now I have to acknowledge not totally loathing everything.

I discovered something today. When I usually eat too much (too much being anything eaten when I'm not hungry) it's because I have this stodgy, tired, groggy feeling. My discovery of the day? that feeling is from eating too many carbohydrates. Essentially, I'm eating because I'm full. I must be more cautious in the future.

love,
alex

2003-08-15T08:29:00.000-05:00

My friend's mother died. It took three weeks. I am grateful for her life.

I got up early this morning to work on my garden. I'm sheet-mulching everything in sight. Right now my problem is running out of old newspapers.

love,
alex

2003-08-15T08:27:00.000-05:00

Over 50% of the families I babysit for own their own domain names.

God, I live in a geek town.

I had the most terrifying dream last night. I lived in Germany during World War II, but I wasn't a Nazi or a Nazi victim. I lived in the countryside near a concentration camp, and I dreamed this smoky stink in the air and this sight of tall incineration towers billowing (I feel like crying writing this) and trying so hard to ignore what was going on so that I wouldn't get in trouble. And I could. In my dream, I successfully ignored that charred-meat smell. I ate at Arby's (yes, Germany had an Arby's) and I hid from Allied shelling and I never said a word about those smokestacks.

I woke up in a cold sweat.

2003-08-13T23:17:00.000-05:00

I keep joking that it's time to move when I know _every single person_ at the food co-op. I thought I was joking. Today there were so many people there that I wanted to talk to that it took me an hour to get around to buying groceries.

not much. Working, avoiding, sleep-deprived. You ever get in that space where you're doing too much so that you can ignore how little you're actually getting done?

My friend's mother wasn't expected to live a week after her surgery. It's been three. The family tries to help the mother, we try to help the family, and we all feel that we're failing somehow. And the mother can't let go.

I'm wondering if I should be working harder to get in touch with people, or if I am in fact trying too hard. I am acknowledging, maybe, that youth group must go its own rapidly-splintering way? But the people in it, I want to hold on to. I don't think I can, either.

love,
alex

2003-08-11T20:56:00.000-05:00

no offense meant-
one complains about what one reflects in oneself-

I am getting sick of knowing only wilting-flower kind of girls. You know, super-sensitive alternativas with some - dark secret - and an uncertain air. I miss hanging out with the sort of buzz-cut chicks who, if not vegan, eat steak and are in the habit of crushing beer cans with their fists and bitching, loudly, about how Ani DiFranco caved to the establishment. I know that most of my friends, no matter how wifty, are strong in more ways than I can see. I just miss the feeling of having friends who are tougher than me. It's kind of sad knowing that I'm probably this bunch's best bet in a fistfight.

I know that that is impractical and probably quite mean as well.

luv, (I mean it! no matter how many inches of black eyeliner you've got on!)
alex

2003-08-11T12:38:00.000-05:00

Part of the reason why I write so much, so often is because I type fast, really really fast. I've started doing things like wandering around my kitchen in between instant messages so that I don't scare off half my buddy list. Part of the reason is because I _write_, that's what I do, it's part of my day like breathing and eating breakfast. In my room, right now, there are boxes and boxes of papers and notebooks. I can't throw it away - not even three lines on the back of a spanish quiz - and I don't know what I'm keeping it for. Even if, heaven help me, I am someday famous, no one will want to read the two thousand pages I wrote before I turned twenty, and I don't think that the sum total of human experience should be stored - for what? I'm too much of a Luddite to believe that. If humanity survives much longer, it will be because we are fewer, and I hope those fewer have something better to do (sing to babies? plant gladiolas?) then sit in a musty room somewhere pouring over the stored journals of 21st-century teenagers. I think everyone in our information-addict world assumes that keeping any sort of data must have a near-meglomaniacal purpose. Nope. I keep my notebooks because I like having them. I suppose I should just accept that and not half-wish for a really big bonfire.

(I am superstitious enough that I am going to say, I do not want to loose my papers by having my house burn down, flood, be carried off by tornado, etc. Thanks, dieties.)

luv,
alex

2003-08-09T22:25:00.000-05:00

I. just bought. a computer.

hold me while I hyperventilate.

It's a Sony something-or-other with a dvd player and a flat screen and it cost entirely too much. I'm hoping my dad will forget my offer to pay the difference between this and the eyesight-killing hewlitt-packard he was going to get. It runs XP, which is a little scary - I don't like how the workings of the computer are hidden. I can't run dos, but I liked Windows 95. Since then, it's gotten harder and harder to tell what's actually going on.

To tell the truth, I'm not too buzzed about this purchase. I plan to go home, set it up, and install the Sims packs that the family computer won't run - but I'll uninstall them a week later. Only when this computer is hooked to the internet does it actually become something besides a glorified typewriter and stereo. I am disillusioned with most computerized things - even Sims, which heaven knows is both stupid and addictive - but the Internet, probably by virtue of sheer volume, has yet to disappoint me.

Tam's had her first day at her new school. I hope she's having fun.

luv,
alex

2003-08-09T17:09:00.000-05:00

BET: it's like the 50s, but with s ex!

(my tv at home only gets PBS)

At the aunt's house. I stayed home from a matinee of Seabiscuit claiming headache. My head does hurt (we hit the beach as early as possible and my head is full of seawater) but moreover - my aunt tries to be very accomodating with the whole no-meat thing, but I can only go so far on her definition of veggie food. So yes, I lied and stayed home so that I could go through the cupboards and find something to eat. It's hard to feed a vegetarian when you're not one, and about four times as hard to feed a vegetarian teenager. Especially considering as I ain't exactly a girly eater, especially after I've been swimming for two hours.

Had _enough_ BET. Off to find some good hiphop to clean this stuff out of my brain.

Dear lord! It's a black klansman on Lifetime! What the f ck? Also, a Discovery special on UFOs, some tv movie with Leelee Sobeski, and a lot of MTV2 people that I don't recognize. Turning the damn thing off. Media-wise, it'll be good to get home to rental movies and NPR.

2003-08-08T22:22:00.000-05:00

Road trip! In which my sister and I demonstrate that it is really hard to dance to good techno in a compact car. More later. Hoping I can avoid the tourism and just go to the beach already.

2003-08-08T14:49:00.000-05:00

Om Tara Tu Tara Te Tara Soh beh -

(I need to meditate).

I like meditating with mantras, first, because I can't hear outside my head that way, and second, because the way I learned to hold "Om" in my mouth sets my whole head buzzing. I like to hold each syllable until I run out of air, which probably means that that warm peaceful feeling is oxygen deprivation. that doesn't bother me. I have made peace with the fact that religion has its roots in mind-altering. A presenter on the digeridoo at Culturefest said that one of the spiritual significances of the instrument is the circular breathing required to keep a constant tone, which oxygenates the blood and produces a trance on the part of the player.

Several days ago I was five minutes into my recitations and I started to feel perfectly spherical. Yes, that's spherical. I felt like a round fuzzy blob with hands. I've heard that writers recieving acupuncture often have a sort of disattached feeling in their hands after the session. I wonder if this is the same sort of thing.

Off to find a quiet corner and hope I don't wake the kid. night. I might update from the coast, or not.

luv,
alex

2003-08-08T14:37:00.000-05:00

Huh. Turns out I _am_ going to the beach. At this point I'm just going to nod and smile and hope they don't change their minds again.

I have one of the kids for a full day today. It thundered and lightninged all morning. (I don't know if lightning can be a past-participle verb, but it is when you're dealing with small children.) He's three. He hates thunder and lightning. I spend the whole morning talking to him, carrying him around, reading to him, chasing him, being chased. Now, I love kids. But being stuck in the house with a three-year-old who has no one but you to play with for six hours is exhausting. And because he didn't go to the pool to run around in the shallows for two hours, he wasn't hungry on time, he wasn't ready for his nap on time, and now he's just crashed (after a near-meltdown) because he refused both. In an attempt to get him to eat _something_, I gave him milk and microwave popcorn. They were out of low-fat, so I made full-fat, which I haven't had in years. He ate a small bowlful; I ate half the bag. I feel sick.

Again, glad I'm not a 50s housewife.

2003-08-07T20:10:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about morals and ethics and rules recently, mostly because I seem to find my rules challenged a lot. I set these policies for myself, sometimes for practicality, sometimes for moral reasons - but they keep crossing the line from sensible to sentimental and back again. And then I have to figure out if they apply to me or to everyone, and then there's the fact that I'll compromise my ethics but not my rules.

examples:

No meat: moral that has become rule
Never being involved in someone cheating on someone else: ethic that became a rule
All UU policies of relationship-correctness: rules that I expect everyone to follow, and am generally disappointed in
No dairy: ethic, laxly followed
Never, ever being 'in possession': rule that started as ethic. having trouble convincing myself that everyone doesn't need to follow that, especially when it comes to 'with intent to sell'.

And I just found out that someone I thought to be beautifully oblivious can in fact see through herself. I'm impressed.

2003-08-07T19:16:00.000-05:00

Sad because my family decided to go to the beach without me this weekend (leaving me in an undisclosed secure location! Stalkers, take note: rabid attack dog and swat team. Anyway.) but happy because I salvaged a shower door that will make an excellent cold frame out of someone's garbage. Sad again because I know full well that my dad will probably rip out my garden the moment I'm gone. My sister is moving into my room, and god help any things of mine that aren't in the attic. On one hand, I do find this sort of impermanence very comforting. On the other hand, it can make a person feel a little insecure. I feel worse about the garden then the room. Sometimes I want to follow Thoreau and have a giant possessions-bonfire at least twice a year. This despite the fact that I own 32 t-shirts.

heh.

In other news - there is no other news. Except that I discovered that I can be mature and not pick fights and not sulk and be perfectly reasonable and there is still a lot of conflict in the family. That's good to know, that it doesn't all center on me being difficult.

Oh crap. My pants just developed a run in a hard-to-patch place. Lucky I brought all those pretty scraps home with me. Eh.

I'm unhappy.

Love,
alex

2003-08-06T21:00:00.000-05:00

Last night I found a bunch of photos from the high school anti-war protest stashed in a folder on my computer.

I looked at those photos and thought, that was easily one of the best days of my high school career.

On one hand, what we did was awesome.
On the other hand, to oppose a war you must have war.

I usually refuse to feel guilty over loving protests. Protests are when we put forward our alternate hypothesis. It is us ripping a hole in the world as it is and trying to let the world as it should be in. It is a celebration of hope, no matter how solemn the subject.

But still. I remember that week as being happy. And that bothers me.

2003-08-06T14:53:00.000-05:00

I am sick of the self-destructiveness. I hate it when it's trendy. I hate it when it's secretive. I hate knowing but trying to pretend that I don't is worse. This is about no one in particular; I am looking back at four years of constant trauma and drama. I know that people can be helped. I have seen people win out over everything from schizophrenia to amphetamine habits with some combination of medical help, loving community, the help of friends, and a determination to get better. It can be done.

I need to learn to let go of suffering on another's behalf. I need to accept people on their own terms. I need to learn to put my effort where it will help instead of into constant worrying. I need to remember that spinning bright source of the universe, I need to get outside myself a little.

I wish everyone knew that there was nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to brag about, in being human and being prey to human things.

love,
alex

2003-08-06T13:15:00.000-05:00

So, Monday, out of sheer boredom (and a really gross heavy feeling caused by eating two bowls of Captain Crunch with lunch) I popped a copy of my employer's Tracy Mallet's Boot Camp Cardio tape into the vcr. I have never been a big fan of workout videos, but I gamely hopped and kicked and punched along until about ten minutes in I realized that I was having inordinant amounts of fun. Today I did the whole tape. Call me a gimp, but I'd forgotten what it felt like to be working so hard that sweat was actually dripping. The tape is in three fifteen-minute workouts, so it would be perfect for daily use while I'm at school. I'm trying to figure out how to explain to my roommate and the people in the room under mine that I want to get up at 8:30 every morning and hop around making noise for a quarter-hour. The only problem is 1) the tape has no real cooldown segment, I'd have to remember to stretch on my own and 2) the last workout has a lot of imprecations about how much better you'll look if you do this every day. Now, I know my body needs activity and weight maintenance is a part of taking care of my body. But I exercise - when I exercise - because it feels good, and having exercise involve messages that make me feel negatively about my body makes exercise unfun.

Right now I'm tired and endorphin-happy and have almost forgotten that I'm running on three hours of sleep. Goodgood.

luv,
alex

2003-08-05T23:10:00.000-05:00

Ah! Angst!
::swats angsty people upside the head::
I know that that was unsympathetic but it sure made me feel better.

Really, I love you all.

Tam is heading off Saturday. I'm so happy for her. I hope it turns out well. Since we're both going away to school, it doesn't feel like the huge seperation leaving my friends in my town does. To tell the truth, I'm done with the angst about leaving this church. I will cry a few times more, but I am done with that. The strain I'm feeling now has to do with me, with how I'll adapt, with what I'm taking and leaving behind and I don't just mean what goes in those boxes.

Spent a long time today swimming with Tam, lying looking at the sky from the surface of the water.

love you, each and every one

alex

2003-08-04T22:12:00.000-05:00

I'm making a list of what goes into every box that I pack. I don't know what good it'll do, except that it's presenting a discomfortingly blunt veiw of my possessions. How is one supposed to respond to the news that one owns 32 t-shirts?

All in all, I have 12 boxes so far, plus the crate of kitchen stuff that I'm still adding on to. I packed all the non-textbook books I'm taking with me, and all of my clothing except for a week's worth of t-shirts and two pairs of pants. I expected the books to be the emotional thing to box up; after all, I pack them not because I need them but because I just can't leave them behind. But it was actually the clothing that I found hard to close up; I suppose, no matter how heavy my backpack gets, clothing is still closer to me daily then books are. It's a little strange how much of the clothing going in those boxes was new to me; for the last few years, I've almost never made clothing purchases. And then in the last month I had a really good day at the thrift shop and a lot of my friends gave me their old stuff, and now I have 32 t-shirts. True story.

2003-08-03T21:42:00.000-05:00

Oh. No. Not again.

My mind puts so much weight on people when I'm not paying attention. I don't think about them at all, that I know of, and everything about how I feel changes overnight. I must obsess in my sleep.

Put in a long morning running around trying to fix everything for everybody at sunday school. If this job was full-time, I'd be in such good shape. Or a nervous wreck, or both.

I did announce to the RE director that I'm leaving. That's the last of my church responsibilities, besides the service I didn't know I was part of. Well, I said I had to go to church again before I left, I guess that would get me there.

I have no clue what to say to people.

love,
alex

2003-08-02T23:37:00.000-05:00

All my conflicting Utopias - all the places that I have been happy - are clashing for precedance in my mind, heart, and plans. Nicaragua vies with this church vies with con kids vies with Outward Bound vies with people I don't know yet. I am making my plans based on who I want to be, and I don't know.

2003-08-02T21:06:00.000-05:00

Want to remember -

the moon above the folded-silk layers of coffee-cream clouds, lavender in the dusk. The deer meadow, white tails bounding away into the shadows. I thought nothing could be more beautiful then that and then the v of geese came honking over the horizen, backwinging their way into the pond, two circles landing. Fireflies along the dark path home.

2003-08-01T23:53:00.000-05:00

There is exactly one person in my life right now who I talk to as much as I listen to. Seldom anything deep, but y'know? I should buy them lunch or something.

2003-08-01T22:50:00.000-05:00

"I know I always said that I didn't care how bad the news was, all I wanted was an answer. I was wrong. I don't want this answer."

uff. poor Rob.

2003-08-01T22:48:00.000-05:00

Walking barefoot through the puddles and rain-torn ground, water warm in the cement gullies, sky opening, pouring, ceasing. Mist rising. Parking lot dull and wet as the shell of a pond, sky reflecting.

2003-08-01T15:46:00.000-05:00

Thunder. My brother and sister and I climbed up to the roof to watch the storm blow in.

2003-07-31T19:11:00.000-05:00

Things really are 'just friends' only if the guy is gay and the girl is dead.
::hiding::

Just had a conflict with my parents, because I am worried sick about college. My mother yells at me for trying to continue taking over her life even after I'm gone. My dad has never seen any human problem that can't be solved with a good spreadsheet, and gets condescending real fast if I disagree. I was planning to call some of my friends this evening but none of them are the kind of people I would be comfortable crying while talking to, with the exception of the few I know aren't home right now. I get sick of it - but I listen. They talk. and that's about it.

I think part of my problem with my parents - my father especially - is that I need other people to provoke emotions before I can feel them or deal with them. If I'm upset (and it's not just upset, but upset is what people don't want to provoke) I will hold it in and hold it in until someone yells at me or breaks something of mine or steps on my foot or something. I know this and when I'm not coping with what's going on in my head I will conciously or subconciously pick fights, leave glasses halfway off the edge of the table, stick my feet out in the aisle. I mean, I wish I could pick fights with myself. I wish that my emotional life didn't subject other people to so much fuss and drama. But the fact is, humans are messy.

The one area in which I have low self-esteem is in asking other people to help with my problems. There is a whole litany - people would put up with a lot from me if I were beautiful, because let's face it, beautiful people get away with being totally psycho. People would put up with me if I was nicer, because people endure a lot when they're confident that they're someone's friend. People would put up with me if I were smaller - especially thinner - because small makes people feel protective. I say this realizing, of course, that it has been a long time since I actually asked someone to put up with me.

2003-07-31T01:05:00.000-05:00

Today I actually caught myself sitting in the neighbor's rocking chair, holding a stuffed dog against my shoulder like a crankily-sleeping baby, patting its plush back like it had gas. Biology sucks.

2003-07-30T21:19:00.000-05:00

Do you ever get the feeling that it's all, frankly, pointless? Not depression, just a sort of pleasant and yet totally insurmountable inertia. I think I am trying to avoid thinking about how soon my life is going to change again.

Time magazine was about meditation, and so I decided to take it up seriously again. Usually I just do it as part of another process. New thing: mantra meditation. I know a couple mantras, but I learned them from the UU hymnal and not from an instructor, so I have this vague fear that using them will make my head explode. Still, when I don't have something participatory to focus on while sinking into meditation, I get really oversensitive to distraction. So Om Tara it is.

I really don't want to think about college. I don't want to take any sort of active role in my life because then I'll have to face up to these really scary things that are in front of me to do. I do not do well with change - I mean, you'd think hating routine would be some help here, but no, I hate both routine and impending change. I'm best with aimless randomness. Traveling without deadlines and destinations, that I like, always a new situation.

I'm trying to get ahold of compost and mulch so that I can sheet mulch the idle ground in my garden before I go.

that's all.

night,
alex

2003-07-28T23:56:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I want to make stuff up. You know, create another journal identity and try to submerge myself in some fictional other life. If I wrote it - and I won't or wouldn't, unless it was clearly fiction - I would be my age, where I am right now, with differences in what went before. I'd write that I had a three-year-old daughter (living in another town with her father), that I eat primarily out of cans, that I spent a year living in a commune in WNC, that I have dreadlocks, etc. etc. Sometimes I think that the person I could have been if I had made different decisions walks beside me, a thought away. It would be easy to write her.

2003-07-28T22:49:00.000-05:00

You know what's sad? When people's journals read like novels, the kind that you can predict every plot twist in. When I can call what's going to happen to them - in relationships especially - about three months ahead of time. Sometimes it makes me suspect that people are making things up (could a stranger really be _that_ predictable?) but more, I think it means that people are basically the same as far as their motivations and reactions to things go. That's kind of daunting.

2003-07-27T11:25:00.000-05:00

My friend's mother is dying of cancer. She told me this morning - as we herded kids with paint brushes around the mural they're painting on the wall of the sunday school - that the oncologist had been out of town when they found out that it had spread too far to be treatable. So the family had started to come to terms with it when the specialist found out. My friend told us that they told the oncologist. and then he went out into the hall, and sat down against the wall, and cried.

2003-07-25T13:42:00.000-05:00

Finally got the YRUU songbook! Some interesting stuff in there - for instance, Both Hands by Ani Difranco. I suppose it could work in a high school youth group as the painful-breakup song. Also some Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Crosby Stills & Nash. Yeah, the next time they call us a hippie church? don't bother arguing. I luv my denomination. And behind the front section with all the pop cheery campfire songs (but Mysterious Ways and In My Life still aren't in there!bummer) there are all the old good chants, the making of a UU theology - the protest songs, the spiral dance (we are the weavers / we are the woven ones / we are the dreamers / we are the dream) the hands-in-the-air spirituals. Dancing Circles in the Night. Imagine.

I am determined to leave my church here with as much of the youth culture as I can. I wish I was going to be here to sing these songs.

2003-07-24T20:56:00.000-05:00

The parents had to go to Pilates and the hospital respectively, so I put on a Beatles compilation and made the kids mac n' cheese and told them jokes of the third-grade-gross variety. It was very easy to pretend, for a minute or two, that these were my kids. That this was my life, making mac n' cheese and singing to them and getting the dishes done. I know that after a week or two as a full-time housewife, I'd go absolutely nuts. but still -

good thing I wasn't this age in the 50's -

alex

2003-07-24T14:41:00.000-05:00

They keep changing the blogger user format & freaking me out.

At babysitting house. Being incredibly slack - I let him play Reader Rabbit for an hour while I read his parent's copy of William Burrough's letters to Allen Ginsburg. Fascinating book. I'm learning a lot about beat culture, also heroin and gay s xual tourism in the 50s. Oh, but - entheogen discovery - before the whole world got sidetracked on LSD, Ginsburg and Burrough were really enthusiastic about this stuff called Yage. I had my suspicions from their discriptions, and I finally looked it up &, indeed, it's ayahuasca. (DMT with a MAO inhibitor, with a bunch of other stuff thrown in. One of the few substances out there that apparently leaves your brain in better shape then it found it. I think there should be a charity to ship burnt-out ravers to the Andes for this stuff.)

I don't feel like going into the whole why-I-like-drug-trivia-and-do-not-do-drugs thing again. I should just note it because this is, after all, getting posted from an employer's computer, and I need to restate, Claire no esta un stoner. Gracias. Usted tiene un dia buena, si?

Off to make the kid get some fresh air. I swear, I usually take more trouble to be interactive and stuff. Today I'm just feeling a little fried.

luv,
alex

2003-07-24T10:53:00.000-05:00

I have inadvertantly played a central-tangental role in causing a fair amount of negativity in several people's lives this summer. I know that I am not to blame for what other people do, even if it was related to bad ideas of mine. However, I can't help but feel that there's some culpability in ignorance or innocence of human nature.

Just sad. Had a hard morning - (up too early) - and I am realizing that to live outside the rules means always being judged by the people that follow them. That's never a happy feeling.

2003-07-23T17:27:00.000-05:00

Today I actually noticed another woman's shoes and thought to myself, "Hey, those are cute." Apparently heterosexuality isn't far enough, I'm turning into a femmy straight girl. Please god no.

Jarring transition.

A family friend's mother is dying. My mother and I were at her house most of the night so that she could be at the hospital without worrying about the kids. Everything comes into sharp relief. I sat looking at the print on a t-shirt flung on the sofa. How very beautiful that t-shirt was. How distinct - I sat in zazen, looking up and out the basement window - each leaf in the lightning storm.
Hearing sirens, pray loud.

love,
alex

2003-07-22T09:52:00.000-05:00

Alright. Wake-up call. I have to cut back on my sugar consumption. Yesterday, after dinner, I ate two pieces of cake, four cookies, a brownie, and a square of chocolate. I feel like crap this morning, and that's why. I might have fun eating this way, but it's not enough fun to justify giving myself type II diabetes or something.

I eat such a healthy diet otherwise - occasionally high-fat and low-protien, and definately high-calorie, but made up of fairly wholesome things - and sugar is basically the only thing left that I can abuse. But more than that, I think there are two things underlying the sugar excess:
1) I am on a grocery budget, and often have, in particular, limited high-protein foods as vegetarian protein other than raw beans gets pricey. When I get snacky, I end up supplementing with the family's food, and somehow eating a peice of cake feels less like cheating on my budget then eating a brick of tofu or something.
2) at the end of a long day (see three entries ago) it's really easy to think in terms of "I deserve a treat! or two! or six!" Well, I don't deserve whatever havoc this is wreaking on my body. I am telling you, my mother baked on Sunday and I've been eating the attendant duncan-hines-based crap since then and I feel like I have pms times a hundred. Fun with insulin damage! Woo!

So, I am now writing down everything I eat in a little notebook. The little notebook will stop me from hurting my poor pancreas any more. No, really, scientifically, a food log is supposed to help.

Oh dear. Oh dear. I just had an unwelcome revelation: sweet foods (like Duncan Hines cake) are about the only things that I eat that aren't vegan-screened. Therefore, they are the only way I eat hidden dairy. What if my veganized body, so accustomed to eight glasses of milk a day in its youth, is sensing the butter particles in the cake and screaming for the only form of dairy I allow it? That would be. Bad.

nothing as boring as someone angsting about their food.

luv,
alex

2003-07-21T21:55:00.000-05:00

Every so often, I run into a quote somewhere that is abso-f ck'n-loutely hilarious, and I cannot quote it because that would bring the weight of a thousand pr0n searches crashing down onto my poor blog. Know that this makes me sad. Very very sad.

2003-07-21T21:29:00.000-05:00

Question: am I lying? am I using people? am I being used? for me asking this is necessarily attendant to any prolonged social interaction. I'd rather ask, and know. People come at each other across such gulfs; what is intuitive to one person might be unthinkable to another. I wish people were sensible. Also, I wish that there were only one gender, as straight off that would make everything ten times easier, if less interesting.

2003-07-21T18:35:00.000-05:00

Eleven-hour workday! Woo! Woo!
::konk::

2003-07-20T22:06:00.000-05:00

dammit, turns out it _is_ difficult to pee in the woods if you're a girl
all the bathrooms are full & I sorta took matters into my own hands
no, you didn't need to know that. my journal. See the "my journal" sign? exit is to your upper right

2003-07-20T21:49:00.000-05:00

The haxor handle of alextree is "Smooth Pariah".

I _luv_ it.
warning: popups on this thing are killer

2003-07-20T21:16:00.000-05:00

I have a need to read fanfic and really f ck myself up emotionally. see y'all later
alex

2003-07-20T21:15:00.000-05:00

Home from babysitting for the baby. I've been taking care of this kid since she was six months old; she's two now. She's from an old health-food family and has never had her hair cut. She throws fits interspersed with clear, grammatical and polite dialogue. Before she could walk, she danced; before she could speak, she sang. I used to sing her gaelic psalms for lullabies. The older she gets, the younger she is.

2003-07-19T18:08:00.000-05:00

Bwa ha ha...
I went shopping today - the local thrift shop was having a bag sale, $3 for a shopping bag full of whatever you could fit in, so I bought a bunch of old knit shirts, good winter weight stuff. Also, Erin & I now have matching green striped shirts. I don't know what you call these shirts, but every time I try mine on I get "Video Killed the Radio Star" stuck in my head. Also, I picked up a really old framed backpack for $2, and the world's most awesome memory typewriter for $10. The way a memory typewriter works is, you type in a line of text at a time into an lcd screen, so you can correct typos. At the end of each line it prints onto the paper. It's freakin' awesome and probably just saved me from having to buy a computer.

2003-07-19T12:47:00.000-05:00

Goddammit, my new bag of dried fruit has _bugs_ in it. Little brown hard-winged things.

It's probably worth mentioning that I considered eating it anyway. But goddamn, that was the last of my fruit. I gotta go grocery shopping now.

2003-07-19T09:07:00.000-05:00

Well, I was going to come home after work & have soup and go swim laps yesterday, but Erin came over and we ended up going to see Pirates of the Carribian and having root beer and sourpatch kids for dinner and staying up till three a.m. talking. Junk food and friendship wins out over exercise and sleep every time.

2003-07-17T18:25:00.000-05:00

Our parakeet died this morning. It was old and lonely and miserable, scared of humans and too weak to leave its cage, and frankly I'm glad it's finally free of us. I will never have a pet bird again. We used to have Blueberry, who talked a little and perched on our heads and our fingers and nibbled at our hair, but as we got older our parakeets got less and less attention. And a pet can't be turned off and left in a box someplace like a discarded gameboy.

So this morning, early, the bird finally got free of us. My sister, the only one who loved or took care of him, is heartbroken. My mother wrapped the body in a paper towel and put it in a little wicker basket to bury this evening. She explained this to me this morning, with instructions to keep my sister from opening the basket. "You better put him in the fridge." I said. Look, we're in the middle of summer here. It's not just sensible, it's necessary. But still, something about the pathos of the whole situation -

My dad gets home from work and opens the fridge. He reads the note on the little wicker casket. "My god." he says. "The bird is in the refridgerator." And he refuses to go in the kitchen again. I cannot stop laughing.

2003-07-17T15:51:00.000-05:00

Alright, I was in the sun in my bathing suit without sunscreen for, literally, less than seven minutes, and I have visible tan lines now. This is what it means to be the real definition of white. I'm probably sunburned, but the main source of annoyance is that the color of my shoulders is something I really like about myself, and I don't want them getting all tanned and tough and nasty. I really need to just sunscreen after I shower in the mornings and be done with it.

yah. That's it. need to call my Watauga roommate. not much else.

2003-07-16T21:20:00.000-05:00

laughing over an ill-placed snowflake metaphor. The person who can find it on Scarleteen wins... something. I'll think about it.

2003-07-16T18:33:00.000-05:00

Words are my defense, my barrier, my eternal home base. There is nothing that enough words can't solve. When I'm in a strange place, I carry a notebook, and turn everything around me into words, and it makes a wall of blue ink and lines between me and uncertainty trying to get in.

well, ineptitude and disinclination are making the words unavailible. and now I'm in a sea of IM ::shrugs:: and I'm amused but not sure _what_ the hell is going on.

2003-07-16T18:10:00.000-05:00

That was surprisingly easy, and only passingly awkward, but now becomes aggravating. Ten to one it never actually happens. That would be a pity.

2003-07-16T16:21:00.000-05:00

Full day of work. Nothing in particular to report, except that today was a particularly good hair day and it seemed a shame to waste it on a bunch of six-year-olds. Also, that babysitting leads to eating way too much junk food because when they're being brats I get a sort of twisted pleasure out of eating food they're not allowed to. That's about it.

luv,
alex

2003-07-15T20:06:00.000-05:00

Home. Already a little squabble: my mother wanted to know why I changed my mind about Appalachian (from maybe to yes) and I wasn't giving her the right answers. I wasn't about to tell her the truth: that yesterday afternoon the trees and the sky and every blade of grass seemed to glow from within, and I was so very glad to be a part of it - that I went hiking in shadowy sunset-woods and afterwards sat in the empty parking lot in the fading scraps of sunlight and that it seemed like the right place for me to be. I don't know what's going to happen to me. I don't know who I'm going to become or what I'm going to do or where I'm going to go from here. But I had to choose, and everything in me said, you can be happy here.

So many things to stay true to! boggles the mind.

2003-07-15T11:34:00.000-05:00

The longer I stay still in one place on this campus, the more the hippies surface. It's like watching fish in a pond, you can only see them if you hold very still. I think that's because all the people rushing around like me are orientation students who haven't hippified yet.

The Watauga girls who are entering freshmen are a trip. They're all makeup-wearing, hair-flipping types who intimidate me. I suspect that part of that is, my hs was rigorious enough that the whole collegiate downward-slide as far as cosmetic appearance goes started early. I hope that these kids hippify. The boys have already formed a central group who talk about Bob Dylan and music festivals obsessively, but the boys were already hippies. Yeah. The One With Dreadlocks said he told his roommate he was Watauga and all the roommate said back was 'damn hippies.' Now there is discussion of making that into a t-shirt.

I have time to kill until 2:30, and I'm not really sure I want to go hiking, so here I am.

I'd forgotten how mountain faces look. different.

I got my schedule. The good news is, my earliest class starts at 9:30 and there's a fair chance that I have Fridays off. Also, Watauga counts lunchtime and what apparently is 'nap / frisbee hour' as class time. Still, I have six hours of class on Mondays and Wednesdays. Only an hour Tuesday/Thursday, which is good. I'm glad to have a concrete schedule. I can make comforting little plans about when I'm going to study & do laundry & go hiking and stuff. I mean, my comforting little plans will be shot to hell in the first two days of classes, but still.

I am so happy, and I am so very frightened. I have improved immensely as far as maintaining social networks and being outgoing in the last year, but the fact remains that I am hiding in the library so that I won't have to deal with any more strangers. Eh. One thing that GA really taught me is that I have a certain tolerance for crowds and after that point I have to retreat for the sake of my own health. This was a good lesson to learn.

I tell you what, I forgot to wash this shirt before I packed it? and I reek. Part of the damned-hippie conversation was the patchouli-for-soap conversation. Yeah, one of the long-haired kids said, they shouldn't even have bothered putting in showers. Anyway, after the first month your hair stays greaseless on its own. I do shower, said the One with Dreadlocks. It's just the damned patchouli.

teehee. I am intimidated as hell by the size of the crowd & the fact that I know none of them, but any group of kids so very at home with their dirty-hippie status is a group I can get by in.

Only two hours to kill. Yay.

I'm going to go back to my dorm & brush my teeth & play with my schedule. luv to you all
alex

2003-07-15T08:23:00.000-05:00

And by the way, this is the best "A Softer World" ever. It's amazing how the damn thing sort of grows on you.

2003-07-15T08:12:00.000-05:00

Oh dear god, I'm in love. In love with a beautiful, beautiful college. That flushing sound you hear is the complete destruction of all my plans for the next two, three years, because I got into Wataugua.

I'm so bloody terrified.

Also, my main concern (and has always been) is how I'm going to part myself from all the people I expected to hang around next year. Because I'm here, and not at home, the reality of the situation hasn't sunk in yet. When I get home, I expect to have full-fledged sobbing fits, because I love my friends in town more than, I think, any of the others in the places that I've left.

But I love it so much here! Wataugua Wataugua Wataugua.... I found out last night that I got in and I was completely walking on clouds... it's so beautiful here...

I know four people, three of them from my middle school, which was three school systems ago. They avoid me. I suspect that I was awful to them. The other is the guy from my english class with the funny walk. He's majoring in philosophy. I didn't know that he, y'know, thought about stuff. But it's nice to have someone to wave to in passing.

Oh, I'm so happy. And so very frightened. I hope I know what I'm doing.

2003-07-13T11:28:00.000-05:00

Heading west. I'm prepared for my whole plan for the next year of my life to change radically. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a certain element of discomfort to this.

bleh. I feel awkward. there are conversations going on where I say an infinite nothing because the other sentances will get complicated the second they leave my lips. I am feeling like I have, you know - one day more. Or in this case, a few weeks more. To figure out what's going on, to make my plans, to grasp at what pleasure I can in the people friends place way of living that I'm leaving behind. I am deciding perilous things - impossible things - about the next few weeks. I am very confused about many things. But I want to get what mileage I can out of the tail end of pre-college adolescence.

2003-07-12T20:21:00.000-05:00

I've been weird and cranky all day, but I went for a walk and had a few perilous conversations and am feeling better about life. I'm traveling tomorrow through Tuesday, and I have really mixed emotions about where I'm going, to the point where I don't want to talk about it. But I love y'all very much, hear?

2003-07-12T20:19:00.000-05:00

Okay, weird thing:

almost two years ago, before I started going to yg, I was writing this story about kids living in subterranean tunnels in some totalitarian future (well, the story isn't that important, and was interesting more as allegory than as believable fiction) - but anyway, I created this character named David, who was the leader of this group of kids living in this warren. I know my characters; I knew how he looked, how he walked, how he acted towards the people around him. Three weeks after I started writing about him, I went to yg, and there was this gangly dark-haired kid with glasses and damned if he wasn't - well, older, quieter, and with a slightly different shape to his face, but essentially the spitting image of this character I'd written. Startled the hell out of me.

So, for years - since I moved to this town - I've been writing about these six kids growing up in Asheville around the collapse of the government (wishful thinking, anyone?) and I have this character named Parker (they name themselves, it's not my fault) - but three weeks ago, I was writing him, and he's got this certain malady that I didn't know even exists in real life. And then, I meet this kid with the exact same problem, except his occured at birth, not later in life. Now, this kid is not (I think) Parker, because Parker never had much personality. Still, they look kind of similar, and it's a little freaky.

2003-07-11T20:27:00.000-05:00

I'm beginning to think that I'm being an idiot about things that it's probably to late to change. I'm beginning to wonder which questions are idle questions. I'm beginning to have fleeting attacks of jealousy over other people's lives.

Also, my ex-boyfriend is probably staying here next week, and I'm beginning to wonder if I consistantly overestimate willful innocence.

2003-07-11T19:58:00.000-05:00

there are few things more glorious then the sun setting on the other side of storm clouds. ::hugs self:: orange sky.

love,
alex

2003-07-10T22:20:00.000-05:00

Okay. On one hand: I really, really love my younger-adolescent friends.

On the other hand, when it's ten-thirty at night and EVERY SINGLE ONE has a crisis -

it's especially funny the things they think I know. I have to go look them up like everyone else, people. But the fact is, I do tend to be a walking encyclopedia of trivia, and I will answer things honestly that make everyone else blush, so I guess it's only fair.

Actually, I am really touched that people ask me for advice. And how many times do I have to say it? -I like these kids. It's a shame that there's such a narrow duration.

2003-07-10T20:41:00.000-05:00

Went to a meeting with my Nica friend. I'd forgotten about her. How alive she is. How through she is determined to be. Her enthusiasm is exhausting, and invigorating, and so alive. So very alive. It was so hard to remember, and so beautiful to remember. It's hard to look at my life and realize I want to be on the other side of all the things around me, if that makes sense. So hard to want to shed everything that keeps me from touching/being/seeing everything, when everything that keeps includes my friends, and my family, and so many empty daily habits that I am so tied to. Oh, nica friend, I miss you. I missed you so much. I miss being that, being that firebrand, the roman candle burning fantastic in the night. I have changed so much since Nicaragua, and I don't want to feel like I've betrayed Nicaragua. I need to figure out how to have my passion, and have my life, and have my joy and my love completely without denial. I love so much.

This is me, this makes no sense and cares so much. So this is here, and my daily order has been shaken, shaken to the core. And my life is so much the richer for it.

luv,
alex

2003-07-09T19:25:00.000-05:00

There was a situation with gossip, and I might have made it worse. But then, I went to the person being gossiped about & asked if the gossip was true. It's not. But now this person is pissed off at me, everyone else involved, and the human race. It does not help that this is a person who I am at least moderately sympathetic towards. Because now, I feel really, really bad. And I don't think I should. I just am so unused to getting involved in people's emotional lives.

Well, I was debating my position on gossip (social adjustment mechanism vs. invasive psychological attack?) and I think it just got a lot more conservative. But at the same time.

I am discovering that I am more honest than I am nice.

2003-07-09T19:02:00.000-05:00

"I thank everyone in this book for coming."
-A.W, author and medium

How perfectly satisfactory that was.

2003-07-09T18:19:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's just that dealing with small children all day is sort of boring, but lately I've been reading with a vengeance. I'd forgotten what this was like, to be hungry for books, to not just read them because otherwise you have to pay attention but because something in your brain is crying out for them.
Here's what I remember reading since school ended, many no doubt left out:

The Jaguar Smile by Salmon Rushdie
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Black Like Me by John Howard Griffen
Genesis and Exodus, New International Bible
Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, I don't know who wrote it but it's about Martha's Vineyard
Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card
Buffalo Gals by Ursula K. LeGuin
Nickel & Dimed by Barbara Ehrenrich
The Color Purple by Alice Walker

I'm probably forgetting the duller or less impressive ones. I'm really enjoying The Color Purple, and I'm wondering at all the English teachers who bitched about it being too depressing to read. It's not - well, I mean. It's about all the horrible things people can do to each other, and how they can change and come out the other side whole.

2003-07-08T22:50:00.000-05:00

"Nihilism. What does nihilism rhyme with?"
"Don't look it up. it doesn't matter."
that's not exactly how the conversation went, but it would have been funny.

2003-07-08T10:09:00.000-05:00

Was woken up at six this morning by my mother, from a dream in which Malcolm X was teaching me how to crochet. Dragged around for two hours until she dropped me at the dentist's office, an hour before my appointment, it turns out. I sit & read Nickel & Dimed, which is turning out to be impossible to set down. Then, after an hour sitting reading & drinking aseptic-tasting water out of a dixie cup, I have my merry dentist visit. Apparently, I've been doing something wrong with regards to gum maintenance, something that requires the dental assistant to hack away at my teeth with one of those evil pointy things for a good thirty minutes. So right now (two hours later) my mouth. Hurts. Badly. After that, we hit the DMV, where the lines are mercifully short for once, because I need a state ID card. Now I've got about ninety minutes at home before the next two sets of babysitting jobs. I should be home again around nine tonight.

2003-07-07T19:51:00.000-05:00

re swimming, I did laps for thirty minutes and didn't keep count. Most of them were in my weird frog-kick thing, though, which doesn't use a lot of energy. (someday, I will figure out what that stroke is called). I did two laps backstroke and it almost killed me. Oh well. Everything gets easier with time.

In other news... well, I think I did a serious good deed for one of my friends yesterday, I'll have to wait & see how my advice works out. That's about it. I babysat 8:30 to 5 today and tomorrow I'm working noon to nine. I like kids, and I like saving money, but I am feeling sorta worn.

2003-07-06T22:15:00.000-05:00

Modernity steals time from us. It steals the past (the histories they stole from us) the future (no time with our families / sea levels rising, collapse immanent) and the present. (no time to think / eat / breathe / pray). Modernity steals our time.

2003-07-06T21:15:00.000-05:00

It's nice how writing something down & posting it makes it distant, gives it some perspective. I worry about doing that in a public forum, I worry that I sound really whiny because I'm always seeking literary catharsis via plebian publishing options. Yes, I did deliberately make that sentance pretentious, because I thought it would be funny. Hah.

2003-07-06T21:13:00.000-05:00

So I go to the pool to swim my laps, and it turns out they close an hour early on Sundays. Bummer. I go home & burn a cd of dance music, figuring hopping around my room to techno is close enough to exercise. I like to dance. I'm no good at it, but I kind of think I missed my era, I would have liked raves. So I spend a good thirty minutes throwing myself around my room running out of oxygen and getting very happy on old Orbital mixes and am generally feeling good about my life, my body and the world. My mother comes to the door and tells me that the vegetables I'm roasting in the oven are smelling done. I throw my new wrap dress over my jog top thingie and go to retrieve them. "Oh," my mother says, "is that the dress you bought in Boston?" She studies me for a moment. "That looks nice. I just don't like how it fits across the shoulders."

Now I'm pissed off at my mother, because I was feeling so good and I love this dress. The thing is, she can't give an unleavened compliment, and there is _always_ something wrong with the way I look. Worse, it's usually delivered in a "well, you're ugly, but I'm pointing out a good feature!" sort of way. I tend not to think about how I look, so to have someone come out of the blue and find something wrong with me is sort of painful. And I know that I'm blowing this and the five thousand subtle gibes before it way out of proportion, and I know that one insult tends to outweigh a dozen compliments in a person's memory, but... isn't my self-esteem supposed to be being destroyed by the media, or the diet industry, or something? Instead all of the dents come from family. That's just not right.

In other news, a long, boring day. I like to dance. la la la. um, that's about it.

blessed be,
alex

2003-07-06T08:28:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed that I was a bad babysitter. I just kicked the kids out of the house and told them to wander around the neighborhood until their parents came home.

My head is full of filaments of conversation - too much talk, all of it vaguely confusing. Every sentance my mother says (sitting at the counter behind me, downing her morning ration of Pepsi) reverberates and reincarnates into new combinations of sound and meaning, most nonsensical, most at the edge of comprehension.

2003-07-06T00:22:00.000-05:00

Oh, in other news, I did two laps back crawl today and I was about to die. So I think that's what I need to work on. I did ten laps total again, but my silly british frog-swim doesn't take a lot of energy. Plus, it mainly uses the small muscles in the thigh, which I could certainly use to have but which don't do me much good brawn-wise.

I think I need goggles. I don't like goggles. Sigh.

Oh, I forgot the Asheville news! ::waves to Erin:: I wanted to tell you, I got the news from my old church. Restructuring blah blah blah had to fire pianist blah blah blah all the clubs in asheville instituted an eighteen-and-over rule and the youth group is up in arms. Also, my friend Gracie, who is, I think, fourteen now? padlocked her neck to the city hall gates to protest the war and was in jail for several days. It's really weird to talk to the people I used to know as middle schoolers. They've grown up. It's scary.

2003-07-06T00:12:00.000-05:00

well that was bizarre.

Stephen, I miss you. I actually understood what the hell you were thinking most of the time. The rest of the y-chromosome crowd? natch.

2003-07-05T16:40:00.000-05:00

My mother hit the local overpriced-specialty-food shop (big moving sale) while I was at the grocery store.

I will be a vegan again as soon as I finish off this chunk of appeldore.

(eta): also a couple of cream truffles. All right, that's it. It's been a wonderful sojourn over in lacto-ovo land, and I will remember the indulgences of the last week (the eclair, the ben&jerry's, the cheez-its) with the utmost fondness. But all things must pass.

Ta-ta. I'm heading back to the soymilk-brandishing fanatic's camp.

veggily,
alex

2003-07-04T23:15:00.000-05:00

questions about people that I really would like to know:
(completely off the top of my head, and mostly inane)

Would you forgive a murderer?
Do you think reality is objective or subjective?
Does truth exist?
If you knew you would die tomorrow, what would you do?
If you really knew that you would die exactly sixty years from today, what would you do?
If you could tell God one thing he/she had done wrong & get them to fix it, what would it be?
Do you think that you're capable of absolute goodness?
What did you feel about what you ate for breakfast this morning?
Is it better to be vulnerable or safe?
If you knew that the world was going to end in fifteen years, would you have children anyway?
What's the first thing that you think in the morning?
If you could choose one prayer to say every day for the rest of your life, what would it be?
What qualifies as unforgivable, by your standards?
If you could choose between looking like (random attractive celebrity person) or liking absolutely the way you look now, which would you choose?
Would you be willing to give up a belief that made you happy if it was proved to be at least partially untrue?
What do you absolutely, really love about yourself?
If you could ask someone to marry you, right now, who would it be? First name that comes into your head.
In a perfect world, would everyone be a) fairly attractive, but wearing a hijab or b) homely but n a ked
Do you get sick of being human?
If you could choose one trait to pass to your children, what would it be?
What's your favorite dream?
Have you ever really, really wanted to put LSD in someone's coffee?

Okay, that last one really is just me. (silly bint in my history class). That is not the worst thing I've ever considered doing, but it's pretty close. Oh, and I thought of another one:

what's the worst thing you've ever wanted to say to someone & didn't?

I know that no one, probably, will answer these. But it would be interesting to see something on a survey besides 'what's your favorite kind of cereal'.

leaving no stone unturned,
alex