cambridge, massachusetts. ilana's apartment-like triple. we're in the midst of a crisis here -- a small scale one, as world crises go; micro, not macro, as i seem to be saying every hour on the hour today -- but nonetheless an annoying one. last night around 2 a.m., after the guest lana and i had been entertaining was getting ready to leave, lana discovered that laptop, complete with nearly-complete Justice paper, had gone off the deep end. computer crashes are the worst: there's no country you can bomb to make those go away.
other intermittent crises (identity! ahhehgrhhh!) have added to the atmosphere of stress, so despite the fact that today is miserable-weather-yesterday's polar opposite, we've been dragging around cambridge trying to keep spirits up. dinner at the co-op plus fun evening plans might help. but if worst comes to worst, we can take the laptop out back and have ourselves a hanging. send the good vibes, people. and a windows xp startup cd if you've got one.

other harvard observations: it's not so posh as i envisioned, actually. but it's more mannered. here, everyone shakes hands, and there's this foreign air of gallantry about the men that continues to take me aback. when they hold doors, it's not because you're a fellow human being but because you're a woman. come to think of it, both places i've been reminded repeatedly of my feminininininity, whatever the hell that is / amounts to. at smith, the butches kept holding doors for me and carrying my packages and i felt veritably Pink.
here, one wonders, are the boys so mannered cuz the families that send them here expended much energy acculturating their young ones? or do they arrive on harvard's doorstep in swaddling cloth and absorb, absorb, absorb?