i have this theory that college oversensitizes us to such a degree that we will not be able to function in the real world. reemerging into a space where, for instance, people don't recognize either the validity of the judgement "heteronormative" or the damned word itself, will be a jolt. but that said, i found this article laughably offensive. tyra banks should shed 15 - 20 pounds? models should be seen and not heard -- "and for supermodels, silence should be mandatory"? and the ending -- where the author quotes the fiancee's admission that she likes to talk and then advises the bachelor, "run"? my god! that's not hypersensitivity, is it? people out there find that ridiculous too, right?

at least we have solidarity in our indignation here. at this point the phoenix exists entirely to make people angry and give them something to bitch about (here's my review, btw). but that's not so bad. it creates a sense of community. yes, sometimes it seems like it's an aggrieved, self-righteous one, but we also learn together too.

hmm. i was starving but located a squirreled-away banana. howzaboutthat. i also happened upon a fortune cookie whose fortune reads, "you will turn the scraps of misfortune into a beautiful quilt." to what that refers, i couldn't tell you: the fact that drama board has decided we must audition for an ideal husband next semester instead of this? my life of late otherwise hasn't been too misfortunate -- indeed i'm virtually "ms. fortunate". after a harsh start, november eased up on me, and i'm grateful. so long as it stays that way.

in about five minutes, tim wise is going to start speaking. as you can tell from my comfortable, trix-are-for-kids t-shirt wearing position here at the computer, i'm not going. it's a shame: he's an anti-racist activist and i, like everyone, need some good anti-racist instruction. but he's not talking about anti-racism, he's talking about anti-zionism. there are two positions on this campus on the israel question, just like there were 100 years ago when people started raising it. there's zionist -- right wing, and then there's anti-zionist -- the left. except "zionist" means "im tirzu," in english, "if you desire it," and the group is vocally in favor of a two-state soltuion. "anti-zionist" means "jato," technically "jews against the occupation," who're also in favor of a two-state solution.

you wouldn't think there could be such an abyss between two groups who would be happy with the same outcome. yet there it is, an abyss large enough to comfortably fit every individual, pundit and college student, who's ever been moved to voice an opinion on the subject.
i keep my distance. in betweens like i are meta-marginalized. with no place on either side, we're shifted upwards to merely observe and be ignored. and, in my case, to bitch about it online.

my excellent excuse for not going to hear mr. wise was my film class showing of star wars. having decided, however, that i'm not in the right mindset for the Force, i returned to my room to write about my underwear. it's new, y'see, and black. it's boxer briefs. i've never felt so securely packaged. wearing them i'm constantly reminded of the first time i came in contact with black boxer briefs. when i was fifteen i went to miami to visit my camp friend, and idol, emile. she was tall and thin and blonde, and the cute little CK underwear looked like it was made for her. on me it looks like what's beneath has been edited out, like the underwear should read "CENSORED" in chalky white letters. ever since i met emile i wanted to be more like her; maybe this is just another step along the way.

oh, i imagine, the many many things i could be doing. working on any of the four major projects/papers i have due in the coming weeks. going to the gym maybe -- i hear people do that. cleaning my room, clearing off my desk (it's five layers deep), hanging up sweaters ... yawn. no, no, it's november 19, which is a different anniversary of sorts, and in honor of today i'm going to focus not on what i'm not (i.e., industrious, atheletic, tidy, organized) and instead dwell on what i am ( ... well, at the very least, the kind of person who remembers bizarre anniversaries).

brigid: [knocks] are you naked?
ester: oh, hang on. [opens door] no, sorry. i was just getting dressed. in fact i'm wearing two sets of clothing.
brigid: hmm, too bad. well, i think i'll go shower.
ester: copycat.
brigid: okay, i'll never shower again. that'll show you i don't want to be like you. ... wait a minute: gloria steinem showers! i'm so torn ...

i heart my living arrangement. i am trying very hard not to dwell on the possible depression that will set in when at least two, and possibly three, of my closest friends leave this immediate vicinity. as the move will quite possibly make two, if not three, of them sublimely happy, it is quite selfish of me to think in these terms -- and worse, to mention it to them.

quick! think of something else. my desk! presently boasts, just in front of me, the following items: a small stuffed one-eyed duck; an empty water bottle; a box of floss; a plastic spoon; an unused coffee cup top; a copy of fires in the mirror; a tape dispenser; catie curtis's truth from lies; two bandana; and an orange and black toy gun-like object that i think you're supposed to use on potatoes. and that's just strata I.

i know i've pledged to be apolitical, but this is too adorably ridiculous to ignore. (WILPF, take notes.) {via east/west}

weekends are such interesting things. they're there simultaneously to allow enjoy yourself and to sleep, except those two things are often at odds and you end up feeling guilty choosing one over the other EVEN IF by SLEEPING you manage to ENJOY YOURSELF.
yes. weekends are strange. this weekend i've spent more time than usual with the ben, appropriately tho accidentally because today is our one-year-and-three-quarters-of-what. we sat next to each other at harry potter 2: actually better than you expect friday and othello: not shakespeare's finest last night w/ ben's english class. i saw a terrific production of othello: inverted a couple years ago at the shakespeare theater in dc. patrick stewart played the tortured moor as the only white man in a black cast. that blew me away. this one just ... well, you know. it was ordinary.

hp2, while ordinary in some respects -- still-too long; still-directed by christopher columbus (motto:"who needs instincts when you can mimic steven spielberg"); and still-scored by john williams (motto: "here, let me hit you over the head. now cry!") -- is better than the first one and largely enjoyable. in parts it's scary, in parts it's clever, and it keeps you absorbed. sadly it leaves out my favorite line from the book: "never trust anything that thinks for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain." but it does make the character of lockhart much more appealing than the book does. thanks, branagh.

so one-year-and-three-quarters ... 21 months ... feels like a rather substantial time to spend with one person. well, i'm impressed. on one hand, we're both stubborn and opinionated, we both like to be right, and in our respective ways, we both want to be known. on the other, we're music v. movies, djing v. dancing, dancing v. watching, all lines v. all curves, serious v. sarcastic, widespread v. tightknit, self-possessed v. self-conscious, masculinity issues v. femininity issues, ego v. ego. somehow, through copenhagen, swarthmore, philly, new york, san francisco, dc, and the never never land of the world wide web, we've managed to make this work.

i am coping with this: "Convenient and tidy but a writer with potential. I may be wrong, but I would wager that the writer is either a teenager or a college student, or both. It reads like it was written by someone who is young and lacks the life experience to add the depth and richness her story and characters deserve for this kind of plot. Millie's redundant cheerful food-making for the girls shows a two-dimensional appreciation for what parents are and do; the other parents - Dale and Nora - are treated two-dimensionally also, as if written by a person who is neither a parent or full-grown adult. Only more life experience can cure these ills. It's a one goal story - essentially, "get to the part where she comes to her parents," but it begs for more creative twists and deeper layers than that. If I am wrong about the writer's age, then her writing is immature and she simply needs to write more. But she has potential! The dialog is quite good - not earth-shattering, but natural and funny in spots. The emotional interaction is fairly relaistic. But the author's understanding and portrayal of Christians and Christian beliefs is cliche and lacks depth or thoughtfulness. Throw-away tags like "fundamentalist" and "Republicans" and "Seventh Heaven" references says more about the author's bias and agenda than about a thoughtful understanding of her characters and conflicting views that conflict with the gay/bi/rainbow views. This movie would have a very limited audience because the story is just two insular and convenient, too "small" and self-promoting - not universal and mature enough for a broad audience." thanks to the folks at trigger street.

my grandparents heard about this other screenwriting thing and passed the tip to my mother who passed it to me. unlike greenlight, you don't need to pay anything -- you commit to reading 2 scripts. once you've done that, you get to submit your own. your reviews are posted as are other contestant's reviews of yours. it's a little stressful, if instructive (and i'm trying hard to focus on the instructive part).

the other review thus far: "A book maybe...? Certainly not a feature film -- indie or studio. The writing is good and there are some really nice lines but that's about it. It's one long conversation. Nothing happens, and that's not good considering the medium. The author has something to say but needs to be a bit more compelling about how it's said. Yes, I'm a guy, but you gotta give me something I can sink my teeth into for for 8 bucks a ticket."

on a scale of "shrugg-off-able" to "crushing," these register around "doubt-inducing." maybe i've jumped the gun on this whole screenwriting thing. or maybe i shouldn't let the opinions of someone whose bio reads "I write screenplays. I eat pizza. I drink beer. And I miss Dean Martin." shake me to the core.

i understand how the choice of this woman to stand for the dems in the house could be controversial, but it just makes me happy. very little exists on the political horizon, just a gloating pink mass of republicans.

but enough about politics -- that's my brother's domain this year. i've sworn off it except for a bare-minimum, subsistence-level to keep me generally informed. have i mentioned i've been happy? maybe i've been scared to. hey, it's been a week or so even at this point. much of the happiness stems, of all things, from confrontation. sometimes you just have to step up and talk to the people who are upsetting you. sometimes that actually works.

not everything's been golden. last night for our film class's showing we saw jaws, which thoroughly freaked me out. i am not meant to see movies like that. i take them much too seriously. (and who really needs to see a great white methodically chewing his way upwards through a screaming man who finally expires with a last gasp of blood? not to mention the film's first victim, the naked woman who dies after five minutes of orgasmic writhing?) now harry potter 2: equally disappointing on friday, now that i can handle. one hopes.

my review of 8 mile. feel free to disagree, but please note that the onion's review, written AFTER mine, supports me 110%. funny always = right.

m: we listened to this kenny g. song at my observation today
b: tell stefanie! he's like her cousin
m: i thought he was black
b: [breaks a rib laughing] he's whiter than white
m: but he plays saxophone
b: so does bill clinton
m: exactly!

[moments later, as b. exhibits a picture]
b: he's got awful hair.
m: brigid, that is culturally insensitive

[later, with b.'s boyfriend]
k: you know who warren g. is, ester?
m: warren g. harding?
k: right. our black president.

i should be writing my movie review IF NOT starting on all that homework i need to get done this week. but having just watched five episodes of season II sex and the city -- the fetish one, the pastry chef one, the jon bon jovi one ... why do i have friends who encourage me in these fixations? -- i'm more in the mood to post. again. besides, it's shira's birthday. when i'm 77, sedate in my vibrating sharper image rocking chair, i will retain a fuzzy recollection that shira was born on 11/11. shira, my most neurotic friend, and one of the people in my past who most shaped my personality.
she introduced me to the girls who became indispensible friends. but she also encouraged me to sing at the top of my voice, think i was pretty, try out for shows, not take rejection to heart, and write. while the other kids we knew in sixth grade were busy being sixth graders, shira thought of herself as perennially thirty. then, in seventh grade, while the other kids started playing around with relationships, she and i contented ourselves being obsessed with each other. we bickered, we compromised, we played basketball and walked an invisible dog, just like a couple. our parents even hated each other.

then, just like that, it ended. she fell in love with a guy who could do everything for her that i could and be someone whose fingers she could suck in public. i was devastated. she broke my heart as much as any stupid middle skool boy could have, and besides, i didn't have a stupid middle skool boy to distract me. that was when i got bitter about love. of course, my bitterness was compounded when the next best friend i had did the exact same thing, only with a boy that we both had a crush on.

it worked out all right. i developed a healthy thin-layer of cynicism, and she ended up changing skools -- cuz by the time she looked up from her consuming relationship shira realized she hadn't just lost me but everyone. in fact, we all learned something from shira: as kahlil gibran advises, we have relationships now with spaces in our togetherness. she goes to columbia now and is dating (i hear) some guy who's attending penn law in the fall.

Full of controversy until I retire my jersey, till the fire inside dies and expires at thirty -- eminem
i saw his movie yesterday in philly, and by "his" i mean nominally curtis "L.A. Confidential; Wonder Boys" hanson's: 8 Mile. for the first time i understood his appeal. it's not just that he's hot, in that pouting, Raphael-cherub, boiling-beneath-the-surface way; or that he's talented (he wrote the raps and they're pretty impressive). he's compelling, like james dean is compelling, because like ol' jd, you half expect him to explode while you're watching. he seems to expect no less of himself.
the film reminded me a lot of saturday night fever -- the working-class kid who's set just a little apart from his friends, who has a special talent that's going to boost him seriously above them and the rest of his violent world any day now. snf made travolta a star; this starts with one pre-assembled. and the fact that 8 mile may be a glorified version of the adolescence of a particularly angsty homophobic misogynist makes this even more of a draw. people like me, who have never listened to hip hop in their lives, are streaming into these theater to see whether their and the media's judgements of eminem are justified, rationalized, or dismissed.

political baggage aside, 8 mile is a good film. it's well-directed, well-scripted, self-aware, gritty and grim. it elicits a serious respect for its central medium, not just as performed by our generation's elvis, and some for our generation's elvis, too. if nothing else, he can rhyme and he can perform.

on an entirely different note, co|motion met our girls yesterday for the last time until january. i went straight from quilt-making with them (each square a representation or homage to an admired woman) to presenting, with sarah, our proposed production of an ideal husband to the drama board. it's possible that she and i will be putting on the main stage production of the spring. our actors will need to insult each other wittily and confidently too. i guess that's a respected skill that never goes out of style.

after one final swandive yesterday, my emotions seem to have leveled out. a week of ups-and-downs isn't too awful, especially when you consider that this is apparently a seasonal pattern of mine. i celebrated my rediscovered chillness by watching an inordinate number of SATC episodes and the always-wonderful empire records, and then drinking wine and playing Taboo with an eclectic group of people in kross's room.
this has been the strangest season for bunnying. who would expect all that bleakness to be conducive to all this love?

i can't stand either of these men and they're both coming to campus. bizarrely and tiresomely, both are jewish and both of the students quoted as bringing them -- one ultra-left the other ultra-right -- are jewish too, so the entire article centers around jewish infighting.
we're not the only minority group clawing each others' eyes out via the phoenix either. last week's "coming out issue," including an interview with a friend of mine, sparked a furious response among people in his community. even people i thought he was friends with hit the high-ground running. i've never even heard the word "integrationist" before: what does it even mean and why is it so bad? so what if some queer folks are also mainstream in other respects? i understand that for some, not making waves would be a denial of identity. but why should that be mandated for everyone?
moreover, i think, someone's vision of "a straight couple and a queer couple sharing a white picket fence" isn't meant to be taken literally. it's a reference to MLK's oft-quoted speech about little black children and little white children; it's also a tongue-in-cheek reference to the "american dream". what it means is that someone visualizes a state of normalcy between people of different orientations. i don't think the person who voices that vision deserves being called "racist, classist, transphobic, and ablist, to name a few." some people in the world are meant to be radicals, "anti-integrationists" and whatever other labels they choose. but to vilify others who don't make that choice, especially in such a public space -- and especially when you know from experience that the person in question is very much none of the above -- , seems short-sighted, sanctimonious, and cruel.

so much drama on campus. tonite's also the showing of bamboozled, advertised widely as the antidote to the dangerously naive action perpertrated by billy craig. he's become the fall guy for the flaws in everyone's racial consciousness. if i knew him personally, at this point i might feel sorry for him too. maybe i'm just growing conservative and soft in my old age.

i know it's arbitrary and abstract, fleeting and meaningless; that its importance is time-specific and by the time i'm 70 i'll have forgotten 70 times over; that it pales seriously in comparison to the republicans taking over the senate; that its ability to determine my intelligence, let alone my destiny, is dubious -- but it still feels so damn good to get an A.

also, to shake us out of our melancholy, sarah c. and i have decided to put on a production of an ideal husband. i'll direct, she'll stage manage, we'll co-produce. together we'll draw wit like blood from the turnip that is a swarthmore winter.

support
from my mother's email, re: my previous entry:
"November can be difficult. Peek around corners until you find a prompt. Alternatively, a good movie, a good haircut, a pretty walk through the fall
leaves (if you're warmly dressed) or just a good cry can be very cleansing. I hope things pick up soon, tho. You're young and beautiful and healthy and
the world is your oyster, even if you don't feel that way at the moment. :) Love. Mom."

and from an old friend's:
"oh honey,
1. stop being ross with the quotes."

i wish i weren't so damn sad. it seems ridiculous: this is still the best semester i've had so far, even if my interest in my classes is waning. i love living where i do, among people. something's always happening -- granted, often behind a closed door and not something you want to walk in on, but it's college: it's wonderful. it's just sadly also november, when it really hits home that it won't be warm again for six months; that you can't frolic so you should probably work though you don't want to, you slacker; that, aside from holidays, there isn't much to look forward to. i would do something spectacular if i could only think of what, and if everyone around me weren't as mopey as i am. (or lovestruck, but if you're mopey, that can be worse.)

happy birthday to my brother who turned 22 in new orleans. where better? i hear the weather's lovely there during the winter. maybe i should pack everything and go. who needs a Watson to see the world?

everybody wants a little sweetness, and nothing wrong, nothing wrong, nothing wrong ...

when did i get so competitive? rockstar matt rubin made a face at me at sharples today: "you didn't go somewhere you would have otherwise gone cuz you were afraid your ass might have been grabbed?" sadly it's true. for the same reason i skipped two classes over the course of the week, spent a ridiculous number of evenings in my dorm and the bulk of two consecutive days in the city. not that i didn't have fun both times. yesterday stef-eliz and i met up w/ ben and ran into brian, my favorite sophomo, and we hung out at millenium queer coffee, shopped buffalo exchange, ate vegan pizza and bantered. a super nice swat van driver took us home, chatting cheerfully the whole time about his nuclear family and how he and his wife got together in high skool and have stayed in swarthmore their entire lives and spend their free time together. "it's almost like we're best friends, not husband and wife."

then, as we deboarded, a figure draped in scarves threw herself at me, grabbed my ass, and then chased down elizabeth and after a much more extended struggle killed her too. that was it. total anticlimax -- i didn't even get those fightin' endorphins to soothe me. instead ben took me to his art building and sketched my feet. i didn't want to get up this morning and have to face a day without the distraction of competition but he made me.

darling liz offers comfort:
Lizplus: i think of it this way, you have to be rejected 42 times before you can win
ishtar42: really?
Lizplus: that is what im going for
ishtar42: huh.
Lizplus: yeah i think so
ishtar42: interesting
Lizplus: i mean if you won right off the bat then you wouldnt appreciate it was much
ishtar42: maybe not
Lizplus: so i dont get upset when i get rejected i just think of it as getting closer to my quota

wisdom. meanwhile i think i'll get some videos from the library i no longer have to be scared to walk to and wallow.
all i want to do is sing the saddest song, and if you would sing along, i will be happy ...

on campus is scary. i escaped yesterday into the city for bowling for columbine and lovely msbecca. we filled our stomachs with indian food, then carried them over to cosi and essentially paid for warmth. once i made it back to my room, i didn't leave again, opting instead for hanging with eliz-and-stef, in matching pastel pjs. the ASSmaster emailed all of us to declare the five finalists, of which eliz and i are two. but now the rules are different. now dorms are no longer safe spaces. lock that door!

darling kross, in apology for setting me up to be killed, made me a construction-paper cd carrying case with burned copies of belle&sebastian, billy bragg, beth orton, eliott smith, and the hedwig soundtrack. it will stand even if nothing else good comes out of this crazy game.

the phoenix this week bordered on ridiculous. two articles on a spread read "beer healthier than milk, PETA says" (featuring an actual scientist verbally hitting his head against a wall) and "sperm is an anti-depressant." the second, which argues that women who have unsafe sex are happier than their more cautious counterparts, was an import from a new york paper. while i couldn't track down the original article, i did find an intelligent, amusing reaction to it. the idea that women, after reading the phoenix, will throw all their condoms in the trash, shout "happiness over health!" and embrace their new protection-free, giddy lifestyle, would infuriate me -- except that i'm so damn well-skooled in the ideas of natural selection.

happy halloween, folks. and if you happen to be someone i care about, please, choose milk.

for your reading pleasure, another of my brother's articles. this one's more liberal: it's about gun control, in which he firmly believes. last time, stef asked me incredulously if we were from the same family (because her family is entirely composed of tree-hugging AIDS-activist queers). this one should establish that we're clearly siblings. see how he references movies constantly too?

in a different, ironically wonderful vein, Black people love us! an old friend directed me to this site during a discussion of how a swattie went in blackface to the halloween party. he "apologized" to the campus as a whole and defended himself at the same time. huge deal, of course. most of the people i heard talking about it condemned the action (and the kid) in the strongest possible terms. others, more privately, have shrugged at me and said the kid was just naive. but how could someone never have heard of blackface? never seen pictures of al jolson, or bamboozled, or shots of amos and andy? if he was just naive, how dangerously naive did he have to be to think black students -- or anyone -- would not mind him stereotyping black people just because he didn't mean to be insulting?

most everyone has a moment here when you realize much of what you thought about racism and systems of oppression is wrong, and that you can't live in a merry oblivious state of colorblindness. this poor idiot's moment happened to come in one of the most public spaces on campus; he infuriated a lot of people who had no qualms about letting him know then and there. but i don't think him concluding that now he has to be conscious of race or careful not to offend is such a tragedy. he should have that responsibility. anyone in a position of privilege does.

too late, kross sent me an email suggesting we not announce the kill. i'd already, as promised, reported to his object as soon as i returned from my sojourn to new york to watch kross's band play CBGB's. he found out before we left that i had him (he won't tell me from whom, but if someone who reads this website is responsible, i will track you down, you vile betrayer) and arranged to have my newest enemy make an attempt on my life. expecting that, i brought my careful roomie brigid along to guard my ass until i boarded that van. once safely in, kross turned to me in exasperation and said, "why can't you just die?"

i can't answer that. i never expected to really get involved in this game, let alone make it through weekend 1. but for whatever reason, here i am -- and last night, there i was, in very close quarters with my object. naturally i got him, and he was a good sport about it, and subsequently he was such a rock star on stage it made petty battles fade away. we walked out of CBGB's quite friendly, and into this:

man on street (whispering): acid, acid ...
ross: what?
me, steering ross away: he said Acid, love.
ross (disgusted): oh, that's what he offered me before.

three cheers, cuz i haven't mentioned it here yet, for another rock star: go LANA! another Loveless Girl title stripped away. i'm almost tearing up w/ pride and joy just thinking about it.

a kill! a kill! not mine, but still an astonishing event: the death of my enemy. alex revealed that he was being pursued by G. but when i called G., G. revealed that actually he was just pretending and S. had alex. this morning then i called S. i enlisted him as a temporary partner: i would serve as bait for him to get to alex if he would act as my bodyguard.

a slow cautious walk through the woods brought eliz, well-protected and paranoid, S. and me ten steps to the classroom door. just then, alex leapt out from behind a car. i threw myself on the ground. eliz threw herself across me. S. and alex circled each other, sumo-wrestling style. finally one lunged and the real tussle began.
alex is quick and scrappy, but S. has long arms. before long the two had moved close enough to where i was lying that i could reach up. alex instinctively grabbed my hand and i grabbed his and pulled him down, exposing his ass to the air and S.'s embrace.

bad guys, 0; ester, alive. now S. has me but under our deal i have amnesty until i leave for nyc. YES. last year's champion is brought down.

i'm very much unused to sustaining injuries. rarely in my lifetime have i ever put myself out in a position to be hurt, whether from climbing trees, riding roller coasters that go upside-down, or skiing down black diamond slopes even after numerous lessons (skill-wise, i'd advance to black diamond, then let fear propell me back to the safety and comfort of the blue squares). or whether from contests, for that matter. i submit to publications on campus but i can virtually count the number of times i've submitted poetry to the real world on one hand.

the result of my timidity, or excessive desire to protect myself, is that i have little experience coping. every few seconds i do something normal with my hand for which i am rewarded with a preachy twinge. i'm fascinated by the bruises around my left knee. when i woke up saturday morning i phased through my typical bitter reaction to rejection. ben calmly let me rant about how i'd learned my lesson: no more movies about queer poeple, cuz "i know values are paramount, but my values are Paramount." i railed at the film industry, despaired of my own chances to ever achieve anything.
and then, after a bit, i was spent. since that morning, when people have asked me about the contest, i've replied honestly with very little ire. consequently people haven't demonstrated an excessive need to pity me, which is what i feared most. i didn't think out this strategy; i couldn't have planned it if i tried. but i think it means that, even if unconsciously, i'm getting better at this getting hurt / losing thing. (i even know, as was established in a convo w/ ms becca this evening, that the not-writing-about-queers thing isn't possible. she pointed out i'm surrounded by them. to ignore their influence would be artificial. so fuck paramount, or miramax even, if they don't like it: i'll find myself a capital-a Ally to make movies with, and if no one else my beloved queer-folk will come to see it.)

[*ring, ring*]
T: hello, worth health center
M: hi. i sprained my thumb, uh, wrestling. is there anything i should do for it?
T: hmm. do you have some bone disease you've never heard of?
M: no.
T: just ice it, take some tylenol, and don't engage in any other athletic activity today. you don't have a rugby game or anything?
M: well, no, but what if i have to, uh, wrestle again? should i tape it or something?
T (frostily): i would just advise not doing that.

stress and frazzlement. i've discovered the hard way whose target i am: alex, the boy who WON last year. ruthless soul, he leapt on me as soon as i walked into the dining hall this morning for brunch. luckily i had a book down my pants (thanks, rilke) and i managed to keep him at bay as we rolled around on the floor. someone handed me a tray which granted me a two second reprieve -- the rules hold that so long as you have both hands on a tray in the dining hall, you're off limits -- until he lunged at me again and wrested the tray from me, spraining my thumb in the process. he's a small guy but MAN is he tough.
we wrestled further. i kept screaming, "someone get me a tray!" until someone not distracted by the other kills happening two feet away (eliz's double kill: first her opponent and then her opponent's opponent, who turned out to be her girlfriend. sorry, stef) got me one and i held onto it for dear life.

i made it, shaking, to a seat. he returned a few minutes later, like the specter of death, and without even blinking pulled me and my chair down onto the floor. as i clutched the tray to my chest, he methodically reached into my pants to get the book. once he realized i had taken it out and put it on the table, he calmly picked it up, placed it in his bookbag, and walked away.

eliz and i lingered for a while, then dashed to the nearest dorm to hide out for a while. cautiously and circuitously, we made it back to our dorms, where we both intend to stay for as long as possible. alex actually lives one floor from me. i should leave a horsehead in his bed or something. oh man oh man. and dealing with conflicting loyalites is hard.

well, so i'm one of the un-special 9,750. while i was dancing last nite at the coming out "end of the word" party, i got a flash of it. that, in conjunction with not being drunk enough to feel unselfconscious or unjudged dancing, zapped me of all energy and i trudged home through the sudden, appropriate downpour to find my suspicions confirmed.
the party rocked, though, for which a hard-working ben is to be thanked. he managed all 4 hours of djing all alone and people really responded. they were assisted adrenaline-ly by the drag king show beforehand and then by the presence of said drag kings on the dance floor. at points the show dragged but it also hit a few incredible high points, particularly with a skit which began with eminem, who was then joined by elton john. together they morphed into 'nsync, i think -- some boy band -- and sang an expressive love duet. they're not the first to posit that the new elvis is secretly gay; jonah linked to a nerve article that spells it out and also implicates sir john. played out on stage by drag kings, though, it's even more entertaining.

i have my ASSassins target. hopefully my paranoia will protect me until i get a chance to carry out my plan. and perhaps a strategically placed Fed Ex envelope.

off to an ASSassins pre-party where the ass master reveals to us contestants whom our object is. i won't last five seconds in this game. i can't even keep sorelle from grabbing my ass on a regular day, and worst of all, i squeal indignantly.
the way it works is, you get assigned one person whose ass you have to grab (with both hands, and so the other person can feel it) within 3 days. if you haven't accomplished that goal, the assmaster comissions the death squad and they get medieval on your ass. yes, i will be henceforth using the word "ass" a lot. ass ass ass.

greenlight reveals the oh-so-special 250 and pats the other 9,750 on the head condescendingly. i am very very scared. but two slices of cinnamon toast in sarah c.'s company at dinner, a trip to the pumpkin patch and an aborted attempt to pick apples co|motionly have bucked up my spirits. we'll see how it goes.
now i need to go drink wine.

in honor of coming out week, poor rusty! and in honor of my family, here's my review of punch drunk love and my brother's latest crazy article ("is he crazy?" "nooo, just ignorant.")

i'm trying to listen to fiercely independent college radio but it won't work. fiddlesticks. i'm glorying in the world of sloth at the moment, in an attempt to balance out the world of pain that was this week, monday - wedesday. in the throes of that pain, i managed to write the 2 papers and get them handed in on time, and make my observation, and not sleep very much, and win one great game of scrabble, and go to all of my classes on wednesday except the very last one cuz by 7 p.m. i was just tired of pain.

sarah k. and i trooped back to my room and quickly established there was nothing either of us could do to make the other feel better. then we promptly had a conversation that made both of us feel better. three cheers for that.

i've done much bonding with people recently. perhaps that's a Return from Break thing. complex interesting conversations with sarah c., analytical ones with sorelle, tenderness with ross, and then of course with ben, who is the best person in the world for me to be dating. last night he sent me an annotated copy of the final draft of my screenplay. his notes, in blue text, consisted 90% of him writing [ha] or [ha haaa] by the jokes. i grinned all the way through and felt better about the script than i had in weeks.
and my ed prof postponed the due date of our second paper to monday. that nicely facilitates my sloth. if only the weather were nicer so i could slothful outside.

for my observation this morning, i pushed myself out of my yummy purple flannel sheets at 7:15 and into the cold blue yonder. brigid hiked with me to about where the trolley was supposed to pick me up and take me to upper darby high skool. since she had a class, she had to turn back before we reached the endpoint and consequently i didn't find the actual trolley pick-up point until after the one i was supposed to catch had passed on. after a cold blue while, another came, and i got off at the right stop and power-walked and managed to arrive only 20 minutes late. except, upon closer inspection, it turned out i was at the wrong skool.
a pleasant secretary volunteered to drive me to beverly hills middle skool, which is where i was supposed to be. there, at last, two hours after i'd gotten up after four hours of sleep, i met the transitional education program class i'll be sitting in on seven more weeks.

the teacher of the 2 of the 3 class periods i sat in on is the head of this refugee program. on one hand, she's cheerful and affectionate with the children and seems quite skilled; on the other, she insisted the students call her "miss" ("because i'm not married") and kept telling the girls to "sit like a lady." she introduced me around as "miss bloom" and requested that the children identify themselves and their backgrounds. one by one, they voiced places i'm dimly sure i could find on a map: liberia; ghana; sierra lione; eritrea; sudan. most speak understandable english. just glancing at them, you wouldn't be able to tell that they aren't native born african-americans. but then little details pop up to remind you: two of the girls, when introducing themselves, added that their favorite thing to do is eat.

on a very different note -- in a very different world, even -- back at swat, flirting is a hot topic of conversation. people insist it's a perfectly valid, positive act, that there's nothing wrong with identifying as a Flirt. yet when they themselves are suggested to be Flirts, they become defensive. although i've participated in the who is v. who isn't discussion, no one has ventured to pin me in either category. just as well. quite likely i'd be offended whether the decision were yea or nay. funny that such a meaningless frivolous thing strikes such a chord in people.

sarah chirps, Time to write! time to write? i'm trying to finish two papers for wednesday; i have a third due friday. my first observation tomorrow morning for which i need to rise at 7:20, heaven help me. general nervousness as the stress of the semester descends which, like the cold, i'm afraid won't retreat again before winter break (or, in the case of the cold, maybe not until spring!)

at the co|motion meeting, as we went around the circle checking in, four people in a row described visiting other colleges over break and deciding that they were quite sure that they made the right decision in coming here. only at the tail end of a break have i seen swatties so sanguine. check back during finals week, when no one has washed their hair for longer than they can remember or can speak except in fragments of theory so that typical conversations run: "meta?" "postmodern." *nod* "yeah, man. patriarchy. yeah." that's the acid test.

i also saw punch drunk love at last and was quite pleased with it. for some reason the theater was filled with senior citizens. when the film ended, i alone rose laughing; most of the people around me remained in their seats, looking perplexedly at the screen. it's been a long time since i left a theater feeling like skipping the way to the train station. it would have been nice to have someone to share it with. well, i guess in a small way that's what my reviews are for.

this kind of thing is so against my principles and at the same so weirdly compelling {lara's link}. like the samsung smut (scroll down if you've forgotten, but remember, the same caution applies) it's not the same without the music in the background. maybe it only works as mesmerizing distraction when you have 250 pgs of No Ordinary Time left and two papers to start.
on the plus side, i'm back where i belong. seeing my friends settled at their respective places i realize i could be happy elsewhere. but not quite as happy. swatties are just so uniquely, adorably quirky -- such a combination of pretention, dorkiness, and a need to be special -- i want to hug them all. where else would i fit in as well?

insanely, apparently, the copenhagen metro is opening. they predicted it would be done in four years last spring. who the hell finishes anything ahead of schedule? the metro served as a running joke when i was in denmark, sort of as a substitute for "when pigs fly." {tinka's link}

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?

lana's so excited about her classes she wants me to come to all of them. i guess that's the magic of harvard. but today i woke up at 11, the time that her Justice lecture was supposed to start. (meet me in front of the red brick building, she said.) apparently the prof is the character on whom those wacky harvard-grad Simpsons creators based mr. burns. a good-natured, ironic homage to one of the U's most respected men.

i did accompany lana to a class yesterday. good practice in ed observation! i even took notes. maybe i can submit those instead of the observation i skipped last week cuz i woke to the sound of rain. in lots of ways it seemed very typical: the two boys talked as much as the five girls combined, tho one girl said seemingly everything that came into her head, using as many polysyllabic words as possible. at one point she said "homosexual studies," which nearly cracked me up. but generally the class kept my interest for two hours despite the fact that i hadn't read any of the texts, and that's impressive.

rain chased me up here. terrible, stupid rain: we were going to go a-frolicking today. perhaps we can salvage those plans, or perhaps we can trade them in and go see punch drunk love. cambridge is much how i remember it, and with the students criss-crossing the quad it's almost unbearably collegiate. lana's uber-cute here, comfortable and settled. it seems like it could be a happy place.

meanwhile, my brother is publishing articles and outraging people at an alarming rate. he's outnumbering me in letters to the editor, 2:1. maybe i should start writing about politics. tho if i did i wouldn't be quite so tough on the folks who voted for ralph. after all, they're friends of mine.

we played Outburst last night, the same edition ilana and i played in n.c. and shrieked over, and of course we [liz, sarahk. and smithie-christine] shrieked excessively at the cards. "______ man (fill in the blank)" produced "fireman" "policeman" and "mailman" and our favorite: "WOMAN." other cards' topics: "things a woman wears on her face" and "things a woman wears" ("high heels" "garter" "slip". duh.) but the most awesome one, which i searched through about ten thousand cards before finding, was "birth control methods": "abstinence" "visectomy" and (drum roll please) "homosexuality." whahoo!!

a cheerful group it was. we'd just partaken of the food christine and sarah had prepped for us at christine's uber-cool house. i can't deal with the living situation here; i am collard-green with jealousy. posh houses, adorable veggie co-ops, signs that say "trans friendly space" on bathroom doors, hard wood floors, comfy kitchen-like dining rooms, as opposed to ski-lodge type dining halls. not to mention noho itself, which even in the rain yesterday made my eyes turn like pinwheels. in the company of our highskool friend rachel, in town for a barmitzvah, we wandered through coffee shops, juice bars, and thrift stores. oh western massachusetts, you slay me. dead in a rainbow puddle, peered down at by cooler-than-thou hyper-pierced gender-indeterminate indie baristas: that's me.

cambridge tomorrow. more or less posh/leftist/colorful/enticing?

oh my god, i'm still laughing. a person in liz's class made this website. unless you are my mother or another close relative who has no interest in salacious material (i mean it, it's for your own good), click the link at the bottom of this beautifully made page that asks "what's your favorite way to waste time?" i mean it: it's for your own good.

so what if i started a webjournal, sez liz, standing next to me eating sesame chicken (she's the worst kind of vegan -- she has no principles.) oh she's wonderful. i'm using her computer now, which translates the cute little cursor/arrow thing into a rather distracting bowl of fruit. she's about to go for a run in the pouring rain. speaking of pouring rain, it hasn't stopped all week. dry for three weeks, then this week it's nonstop. like it's nature's time of the month!

i love how my committed de-politicization lasts only until my father calls and i have fight with him about iraq for an hour. he opened up a can of rant (re: opec) on my ass, managing to get in references to lenin and ralph nader. i can talk a lot but, man, you should get my father going: he can filibuster his way out of anything, leaving opportunity only for his opponent to stammer things like, "maybe, but --" or "hang on a second!" or "dad, i am *not* knee-jerk leftist cannon-fodder! i just don't agree with you!" arguing with my father is eye-opening: it reminds me what the outside world is like, and that intelligent people who didn't vote for bush really are willing to follow the monkey-faced half-literate oilest-of-oil-men cowboy into war. because they really think it's the Right Thing to Do. just like leftists think it's the Right Thing to Do to march in protest.

exhausting. not as bad as travelling yesterday. through mother nature's untamponed onslaught, intrepid adventurers sarah k., our mutual friend and co-Co\Motioner addie and i started our trip at 2 p.m. on a septa train into philly. sarah and i arrived, drenched and half-sentient but senses of humor still functioning, to smith at 1 a.m. the first bus to new york took twice as long as it should have; then our layover in port authority (motto: even if the busses never pick you up, the sketchballs will) followed the same pattern. the last leg of the trip, curiously, once sarah and i parted from addie, was quick and comfortable. but 11 or so hours, under any circumstances, is tough.

even periods come to an end. assuming this one does, elizabeth and i will venture into northampton, shop and eat. if not, we'll keep chugging through the four videos we rented from the library and take a lot of baths. (they have bathtubs here.)

so, war, perhaps (you mean my phone call didn't make a difference?) but never mind that right now. i have a feeling this is how i'll force myself to be all semester/year. i don't want to be part of the galvanized, indignant left. i certainly am not part of the slobbering, war-mongering right. i don't want to wear love beads or hemp or laugh at those who do; i don't want to spray protesters with hoses or be sprayed.
o, apathy.

kross's party went on last night, despite the rain. banana birthday cake done justice to; cheesecake untouched (people thought it was just cheese, nestled as it was all serene like among the grapes.) some folks danced towards the end. mostly people ate drank and chilled. it worked for me and although it perhaps was not the most rousingly successful of all of kross's endeavors, i knew the majority of the goodly crowd and so felt comfortable and enjoyed myself. not a small feat.

today i go off to smith, despite the rain, buoyed by a giddy sarah k. hard to believe that break's starting. i'm skeptical, tho my last class was canceled and i skipped my second to last. but, giving it the benefit of the doubt, i'd better start packing.

FINALLY i am a WORTHWHILE person.

*ring*
t: common cause
m: congressional switchboard?
t: no, common cause. but i'll transfer you. would you like to make a donation?
m: not right now?

[soft jazz]

t: switchboard.
m: i vote in pennsylvania?

[soft jazz]

t: [mumble whisper]
me: i'm sorry, whose office is this?
t: santorum's!
me: vote no on war!
t: duly noted.

*applause*
now you go.

oh, and i've been officially APPROVED. validated! approved!!

ben made the next watson round! excellent. now i'm glad i slept in a field with him (come on, wasn't it obvious i was going to?) even though "sleeping" is really too broad a word for my burrowing deeper into my sleeping bag, stealing his hat, waking every few hours to squint at a gray sky, and shivering from the cold. waking up made it all worth it: ester, he said: don't you have class?
it turned out i didn't, at least not for another hour and a half. we looked around: we'd slept in the middle of a circle of stones on campus and the sun was busy glinting off each of them and the blue sky beamed down at us. our companions had crept away sometime earlier, apparently. by the time ben and i had made our way there, around 1 a.m. -- we had to shuffle slowly down the path through the woods, aided by my small yellow flashback and constrained by ben's old man slippers -- the four of them had already fallen asleep. once again, no chance to talk with kross's chicklet. oh well.
i came back here after tennis and lunch, ostensibly to crash, but an urgent phone message from the history department drives me back into the breach. we few special-honors-major-wannabes, we happy few, we band of brothers ...

i finally finished my review of "secretary," which i titled "taking more than dictation." but they never keep my titles anyway. i got started on it late: rob, ben's roommate from last year, challenged me to a game of scrabble. with a break in the middle to run errands, it lasted from 7:30 to 11:15. even allowing for the gap, i think that's a new record. now i have to make a snap decision whether or not to go sleep in a field. on the plus side, i could wear my bright red yummy fleece pajamas. on the minus side, i would be sleeping in a field. and it's cold outside.

i managed to write my new sophomore paper, hand it to some people, request a grade report, and apply for the honors program today. still more red tape to cut through (one professor whose signature i requested informed me, "this is just bullshit you know." oh boy do i) but i'm moving forward. with any hope i'll be either approved or brutally shot down before break, and i can go to smith certain of my fate.
i get to go to smith!
man, i'm just sitting next to an open window and i'm cold. what the hell kind of impulse drives people from their wonderful comfortable beds and into itchy grass and sleeping bags? forget it. i'll put on my yummy fleece pajamas here, dance around, and sleep where the bugs can't get me.

yesterday morning i rose at 11. now it's 9 and i'm up while my pretty one sleeps. a difference in the rollicking factor, no doubt. friday night took me back to freshman year. sarah c. asked what i would wear to the party we'd agreed to attend. i pointed to a perfectly respectable shirt in my closet and she emitted a shriek. within seconds she was out the door and back with armfuls of her what-would-be clubwear if she went to clubs. with the advisement of marc, one of my oldest friends here, we settled on tops: mine, black lace. it matched surprisingly well with my black lace-fringed zebra-print skirt-slip.

stef and eliz, and stef's friend from home, joined us and we wrangled eliz into a hottop of her own. it went beautifully with her haircut, acquired that morning in bryn mawr, midwifed by a cosy lady who knew her stuff and attended by both stef and me. so we set off for the ball and danced with sorelle, kross + chick, and my new favorite sophomo who looked at me, pulled his student ID from his pocket, and said, "it's a good thing i brought my library card, cuz i'm checking you out."

good times. last night was a different sort of fun: a thought-provoking secretary in the city, excellent but rushed indian food with city-becca, and dumb city comedy. stef and eliz and i, on the way home, attempted to improve on the improv. 185 weblogs walk into a bar ... i saw a movie about sunday mornings that was so bad (how bad was it?) ...

i'm enjoying this lying mofo thing immensely. of course, i'm also in a vicious-ish mood, which is the same reason i'm foregoing seeing dukakis speak tonite and, when i was tabling with eliz for local high skool outreach, i horrified her by using phrases like "be a chickenhawk," "recruit" and "indoctrinate the young." basically i'm glum because i lost in scrabble to kross, 10,000 to 1. silly and spoiled of me. i comforted myself on the walk to dinner with the fact that at least i'm prettier than he is. then of course i got called chubby.
*sigh*
my earlier political memory is my father despairing over dukakis, knowing that the d-meister would never make it to dc. poor guy. well, at least i'm prettier than dukakis. or i'd like to think so.

my favorite advice columnists were right on today. that pleases me. i would like to be an advice columnist, i think. or a film reviewer. or perhaps some super-special and unique hybrid of the two where i draw on cinematic precedent to suggest solutions. that is a terrific idea that requires a creative and clever name. a prize for the best suggestion: go to.

so i've done it. i've submitted true love waits to project greenlight. the final two revisions i did essentially on my own, though i took into account the hundreds of comments i've received from the people who've read it (and, really, thank you all.) but the deadline's tomorrow and i have too much else to think about this week to worry about continuing to nitpick, or worse have other people nitpick for me. so, there it is.

while i was in process of converting to pdf and uploading, i got a call from the woman whose class i've going to be observing for Intro Ed. i'm one of the last people in my class to be assigned an observation: apparently the bureaucracy at upper darby is intense. but she sounds very sweet. she described the class as a special project for which they only got a grant last january. it group sixth grade refugee children together -- some of whom function at a third-grade level -- and teaches them at a pretty individualized pace. she warned me that they become attached quickly, that they will probably like me immediately and cry when i go. sounds certainly unique, almost overwhelming, but if she can teach it surely i can handle sitting in for 8 weeks.

sleep being for the weak, eliz and i decided at midnite to choose the path of strength, the path of pizza and film. we took turns calling our respective Others, laying bets on whose would reply best. they tied, both accepting with minimal/no thought, which is why, of course, we're dating them. the pizza was only eh, but an ideal husband was as lovely as i recalled, and it instilled in me the same desire to live inside a cinematic adaptation of an oscar wilde play.

many pleasant things happened over the weekend. i spent saturday in philly researching thrift shops for this week's phoenix article. birthday-girl addie ventured in with me and we met my friend ben who insisted everything you need to find is on 13th street and consented to try on a lovely red dress for us in the drag clothes corner of a gay hairdressers' next door to spruce street video where my Other ben worked this summer. we moved too swiftly to shop, unfortunately, but addie and i had to get back: i had a date with kross, his mother, and three boyz.
sitting at the table with them all, the last-year-at-this-time male-dominated feeling crept over me, the feeling of being little. honestly it's been about a year since last i found myself in a situation that could catalyze that reaction. it drove me crazy in/out of the barn. that dinner just left me tired and crabby. addie's girlz-only birthday party thereafter revived me. stef made me liquid ecstacy (soy milk, kahlua, just a bit of rum: yum.) to sip while we lounged and laughed and composed swat to-do lists.

sunday afternoon we reunited with the co|motion campers for the first time since the summer. my legs ache from an hour and a half of capture the flag. i never used to be the kind of person who would do any running in that game, but more and more i'm becoming lots of things i never used to be. for instance, with any luck, an american-cinematic-and-social-studies-special-honors-major.

addendum: i've decided to be apolitical this semester. but if i were still in caring mode, i'd find this a good clarification of an issue that's always confused me. the article goes through both sides pretty diplomatically, for the most part.

erotic cookie baking last night, as advertised in stef and eliz's hilariously lewd email invite. eliz spent 40 minutes printing out, um, inspiration, which she used to paper the walls of the trailer where the making and baking was taking place. i forget how ghetto that trailer is til i introduce someone to it, and last night i brought in my dearfriend anne. she's the first chick from DIS i've seen since leaving copenhagen and despite slightly longer hair she was reassuringly the same. a weird view to give someone of swat, to be sure. here's where our endowment goes: the spacious, luxurious danawell trailer. note the three different patterns of wallpaper!

they made way too much frosting so i swiped one of the extra bowls of blue. brigid wrinkled her little ohio nose at it when i showed her this morning: "that is not okay! that looks like melted smurf!" as i dipped one finger in and tried some she cried, "no! that's papa!" brigid = priceless.

after the making and baking and frosting and giggling, the group trooped over to the new media lounge to watch hedwig on the big[ger] screen. as terrific as that film is -- and it's terrific nearly beyond words --, it's even better when you watch it sitting next to kross's mother (thank god at least when i asked her if she'd seen it before she said yes) and across the small room from a flamboyant group of first-timers. in delight, pain, horror, joy, whatever: they howled, howled, and howled.

this morning ben and i darted parrish to check his mailbox for watson notifcation. he made the first cut which whittled 30 hopefuls down to 10. yay benj! we stole breakfast intended for visiting parents in celebration. in the words of agent danger, i rather like him. he's a fantastic fellow. (do yoself a favor and scroll down to read the new jersey exploits. mmm new jersey.)

i'm skipping tennis ostensibly to do work so i should do some: i need to finish v. woolf's magnificent three guineas, i need to brush up on slavery, i need to print out my mini essay about whether or not saturday night fever is a musical (my conclusion: no more than the graduate or strictly ballroom is, which is to say, just plain no. still, it's a better film that i expected.) after an hour's intense discussion with the honors-special-major guru, i think i've more or less convinced myself i should go for it. now i just need to convince (a) marge, my woman in the history dpt; (b) patti, the mysterious feminist/queer theory/eng/film woman i've heard much of and never met -- she's presently hiding out in nyc and how jealous am i; and (c) the history and film dpts in general.

you have to be invested in this, said the guru. i nodded soberly. now i need to figure out if i am. basically, it's a trade-off: i take four preps -- three that i've figured out and one that'll require some creativity (dorsey's slavery seminar? something with rick vallely in american polisci?) -- and in exchange i get the freedom to write a screenplay next year and have professors work on it with me and in the end have two experts descend on me and spend serious time combing through it. if i could survive that without breaking into tears, it would be invaluable.

the guru described the kind of person who usually does this sort of thing: self-motivated, very bright, responsible, independent. he said those people almost always succeed fantastically with this program. those aren't the words i would necessarily pick to describe me, but, hell, i have nothing to lose by trying.

well, while the argument over censorship rages, i'll discreetly move on to other topics. like my victory and accomplishment at scrabble today against kross: 476. that's a new record -- as far as i'm concerned, for anyone ever. kross was relatively diplomatic about it, losing control only for a minute, when he leapt over the board and attempted to tattoo the number on my forehead. luckily i fought him off and he regained his senses. then he accompanied me to my dorm's bbq and told everyone his effort directly contributed to my score so the triumph is partly his. i heart ross.

i don't want to hear from all of you that you regularly score in the 500s and take pictures of the boards which you keep in a stack on a shelf with your westinghouse certificates and Emmys. this isn't about bragging, or who's better than who. this is just me being honest with my readership: frankly, at this moment, i am the best. and that's simply too significant a fact not to acknowledge.

stef posed the question a couple weeks ago, If you could have anyone write a song about you, who would you choose? after much thought i decided belle and sebastian would be a good choice. today i nearly changed my mind and allotted the honor to stephen merritt. you can't choose him, said kross, who likes to be contrary: he's gay. no no, i said, he just hasn't met the right woman yet. even if that's true, though, there's a slim chance that i may not be that Right Woman. in that case, i guess i'm still up in the air.

i was gratified to realize that i'd read a majority of these. some brought back fond memories: i read scary stories all at once, walking back and forth in front of my house, and then couldn't sleep for nights afterwards. in middle skool i played with earth's children, even though my history teacher wanted a note signed by a parents before she released them to me. (like hell: i just found myself a bookstore.)(then of course i couldn't read them in public without the uneasy sense that someone could tell that i was reading prehistoric porn.) bridge to terabithia made me weep; a light in the attic made me laugh, toni morrisson made me think ... what kind of adolescence could kids possibly have if you took catcher in the rye or forever away from them? growing up purely on disney movies is potentially far more destructive than any influence of roald dahl.

anyway, it doesn't affect me. i'm privileged. i'm at swarthmore. we read whatever we want here; we look down on those hick states that run Just Say No to huck finn campaigns. a first-year came to the co|motion info session and said she was going through remembrance of things past for the 2nd time. bully for her. what she'll come to realize, which is even better than being in a place that will cheerfully engage you in conversation about proust, is that if she wants to progress to orson scott card, she could find any of the ender books is under 5 seconds, and no one would think less of her.

sporadic posting because, as i wrote to darling overseas becca, when i'm cheerful i'm usually not in a position to journal, and when i'm glum i don't want to inflict my glumness on my little audience here. yesterday i was quite glum, at least at points. but in the evening, i showered, i chatted with my sarahs, laughing as one attempted to simultaneously look tough and drown her smith-inflicted sorrows by swilling malibu straight from the white, chubby bottle, and then i communed with my ben while pre-partying frisbee players screamed in the hallway, psyching themselves up for Phi Psi.
today everything's gone right. for the first time, i beat ross in scrabble. he took the defeat amicably and afterwards we sat in the amphitheater together composing missives to miss becca abroad. i've had cheerful conversations with anyone i've come across, including just now my precious mother. apparently i inadvertantly outed myself -- as having been Questioning in high school -- to both my parents when i mentioned it in a previous entry. she took it well; my father was more shaken up by it. i can only imagine how awkward things could have been had they gone another way. it makes me conscious of how fortunate i am -- a straight white upper/middle class american female. even the jewish thing has only served as a perk, though in the real world conceivably that could change.

i'm steeled to set up an appointment with the special major guru here. marge murphy, my personal diety, suggested i meld my film minor and special-major in american studies into some specific american-history-and-film-honors-special-major. unlike regular old special majors, who have to write regular old run of the mill theses, *honors* special-majors get to do a Project. in my case perhaps that could be a (my) movie. wouldn't that be spectacular? it's so exciting i can't even truly consider it.

dirt like skidmarks on my feet. how unattractive. usually i think my feet are cute from a distance, although up close they're problematic and i prefer to ignore them. today i've walked and walked and walked, and it shows. it was "college day" or something in philly so swat sponsored buses to transport eager students into the city. i was not so eager as most cuz my movie-dates fell through, meaning i had to walk 60 blocks and see igby goes down alone. as i feared, igby went down as a disappointment (dammit, it looked so cute in the trailers ...) i was tentatively supposed to meet two people outside the theater afterwards but i knew neither would show. indeed neither did.

even though i didn't write a review this week, my presence did not go unnoted. a girl i've never met nor heard of (marc says she dresses well and smokes cigarettes) wrote a letter into the paper criticising last week's review of the pretentious, ponderous lucia y el sexo. she accuses me of "misunderstanding spanish cinema." my film teacher today read that part aloud in class, raising his eyebrows at me. controversy is fun!

scrabble tonight. before then, i have to get some history reading done and a lot of revision on my screenplay which i will throw out of the nest, ready or not, on oct. 2. hooboy, the excitement. i almost threw it out entirely yesterday after an emotional discussion with someone who, in venting about the occasional ineffectiveness of allies, made me feel like i also just thought i was "down" with the queer community. when i cited the globs and globs of queer people i love, she compared that to someone saying, "how could i be racist? some of my best friends are black." considering how strongly i identify as an ally, especially after so much struggling about whether or not i was queer myself, and how afraid i've always been of that word, it sent me reeling. which wasn't her intent. we talked at length later, clearing things up, and venting more, productively. i leant her a dress and let her research porn on my computer and she told me i was a good ally, not necessarily in that order. it was an important night.

fasting worsened my cold. in fact, i didn't really have a cold until i fasted. i had no voice and no cold. now i have some of both. but i wouldn't have felt like it was yom kippur if i'd just gone along my merry way. if this isn't worth it, at least it feels necessary.
i'm unabashedly glad it's over, though, and i can go back to properly hydrating myself. the sense of vertigo that hit this afternoon returns when i think about the nearfuture. like an idiot, or an optimist, i'm applying to project greenlight. i haven't sent any of my work off in ages; i'm usually too timid and frightened of failure. the submissions window extends from 9/19 to 10/2 -- not much time to nudge true love waits from 1st draft status to Fine Piece o' Art. co|motion, my cuntlovin community service group, is starting up again. since i'm clearly incapable of doing anything halfheartedly, i'm up to at least a scrabble game a day. qsa; film reviews; and all the durned skoolwork i haven't as yet begun to take seriously (and thus need to catch up on.)

at least the important holidays are over. now i can concentrate on getting the blasted credit for my study abroad work. i can't believe 5 -- the maximum -- number of classes in denmark might not equal 4 swarthmore credits. i can't believe the number of hoops i have to jump through simply for that. that deadline's early october too. mmmmm. i need to get better quick.

also, an enjoyable stumbled-upon website: mighty girl.

as often happens, my voice has deserted me. maybe it's a reaction to the reacclimation to living in a dorm. all those wacky germs floating about; worse, all those wacky people. having gone a year without being in this situation, maybe my body's defenses are shot.

bad timing. right on the cusp of a weekend and no voice to shout at concerts with, or to use in sarcasm, or to play I Never. tho we didn't end up playing I Never anyway, and it's just as well: the small party i was with last night has played that game more than once before and there comes a point when you wonder what's left to ask or know about your friends. it's difficult to come up w/ interesting drinking games, ones that involve conversation, preferably the revealing kind. there should be a book or something.

the alcohol didn't help my throat. now i have an unsightly pile of cough drops next to the keyboard, and a little plastic cup filled helpfully with packets of salt. i've never done that gargling thing and i'm skeptical. meanwhile yom kippur, the Please God Forgive Me day, starts tomorrow night. i haven't done much apologizing (this is one of the great jewish rituals, incidentally: you have to obtain forgiveness from anyone you've offended or hurt over the past year. it's kinda like a treasure hunt you have ten days to complete. at the end of it, you show what you've collected to god and say, well, this is the best i could do. ... and then god judges you.)
last ditch effort: if i've transgressed against you, please accept my heartfelt apologies. you can even email me and yell at me one last time before you forgive me. or leave it in the comments, hell. i live a public life.

where are those famous endorphins everyone's always talking about? an hour and a half of tennis this morning and then another hour and a half this afternoon, and i'm not high and peppy, i'm exhausted. and kinda depressed, although i enjoyed playing both times. my right forearm hurts and i don't know any exercises that work that muscle. or stretches, or whatever.

in my film class i discovered i had a fan group of one. he was reading my review as i walked in and chuckling to himself. at one point he quoted me to me and said, "this sounds like something from the onion." i nearly fell in love with him. luckily i had the vivid memory of ben to hold me back. but a fan group of one isn't so bad. i mean, everyone has to start somewhere, eh?

i ended up not doing much for september 11th yesterday. i paused by the peace booth and listened to an earnest rendition of "blowing in the wind." i discussed, first with ben and then with ross, that i wished people could take it out of historical and political context, just remember back solemnly to the day america realized - quite harshly and suddenly - that we aren't invulnerable.
but the history and politics of it, which are inextricable, just make me tired. the idea that america deserved it doesn't speak to me, even if i understand the logic and frustration behind that sentiment. governments make horrible foreign policy decisions all the time: when other people die for those decisions, it's tragic. period.
the argument that we should strike back is untenable too and has been since day one. i don't believe there's an insidious global conspiracy that we have to destroy and shooting blindly, or using this as an excuse to take up old grudges, won't help a goddamned thing.

i think we were Got. we didn't expect it; we hadn't been looking for it; we didn't even realize we should have been on guard. and we were hurt. we'll be more careful for now on. but the ones who Got us have vanished again like a mole in one of those Whack-a- games and most likely he won't surface again. we should learn, and mourn, and let this increase our sensitivity and empathy (as once again an attack from abroad reminds us our comfortable isolation isn't either). and move on.

are males or females funnier in general, to you? my instinctive reaction is to say males but when i count the people i know, more females make me laugh. it's definitely not conventional wisdom; women rarely star in comedies, or if they do they're not often also sex objects. hmm.

tomorrow's september 11th. i have classes all day and a screening during the silent vigil. i wonder if i'll think of it as i rush from a to b. i wonder if i'll be able to escape it. i wonder if i should feel more than i do.

what a bad day; and at the same time i hope all my bad days are this mild. the badness, such as it was, started when i went into the city by myself to see sex and lucia. there's nothing out now really, so i chose this hot though strange looking spanish flick for its convenient show-time. the train stalled, however, which meant i had to huff and puff to make it. almost immediately, once i settled in, i felt like pee wee herman. around me individual men sat slouched, discreetly apart from one another. the movie spared me excess time to ponder this and perhaps take a cue and leave: it started.

two hours later it ended and i walked out, shaking my head in disgust, a feeling not allieviated by the sight of the individual men around me, hands in pockets, eyes down, making their way to the bathroom or the door. essentially the first half of the movie, interspersed with artistic shots of the moon, is hardcore sex until it reaches a point where it begins to get boring and at that exact moment a dog eats a child. it's tragedy from that point on until the ultimate redemption, interspersed relentlessly with artistic shots of the moon.

the train stalled again on the way home, and a friend over dinner lectured me cheerfully on why the state of israel shouldn't exist, and at my meeting with my foreign study advisor he assured me the skool appreciates me experiences and encourages all students to go abroad, but despite the fact that i took the maximum number of classes (5) i may not receive 4 swat credits. don't worry, said he, if it comes up short you can do extra work over christmas break.
i walked out, shaking my head in disgust. that was the nadir, at least. after that, qsa and chillin with folks exorcised my demons. today perhaps i have the distance necessary to write a review that's more than the words "incomprehensible pornish eurotrash" over and over again.

the new year. i should say something profound. well, maybe it's not necessary: maybe the only thing profound about these holidays is returning to the same spot, year after year, seeing the same people, making the same small talk, remarking quietly about their outfits, and praying the same prayers. and reacting to the same stimuli differently. this year, the story of hannah, who couldn't conceive, for which her husband's more fruitful second wife teased her mercilessly, left a knot in my throat. not the story in general, though it's lovely, but her husband's comment to her: "am i not worth more to you than ten sons?" the bible is sparse and very often it skips over the fact that one person loves another, implies it or perhaps doesn't state it because it isn't true. but the narrator is explict here in how much hannah's husband cares for her.

for whatever reason, it doesn't say she loves him back. when he poses that question, she doesn't answer. i'd never noticed that before.

my house is about to swell with hungry guests. another tradition: lunch after services at our house. between 60 and 100 people show up every year. for the first time i won't even be able to eat the fish. we'll see how that goes.
happy new year, to my yiddim and beloved Others alike. may it be sweet and healthy and peaceful. and calm.

important step on my journey towards defeating fear of people who are cooler than i am: playing scrabble with suzanne, suzanne's boyfriend, and ross. this mistress of intimidation, and my editor at the paper, is in my tennis class and gets to witness me making a fool of myself twice a week close up. apparently this merely whets her appetite.
last night i finally succumbed to pressure from ross and joined them group for a friendly game of 4-way scrabble. my hands shook through the first few moves. i made ross count my scores for me (that being somewhat less ridiculous, i suppose i supposed, than making basic arithmetic mistakes.) but ultimately ross and i tied for second. that's right: despite nerves and knocking heart, i held my own.

my older brother will arrive in a couple hours to swoop me up and back home for the weekend and the ill-timed new year. life here will proceed without me, which is a shame since i've been enjoying it muchly so far. i like my classes. i like the people i hang around with, even if they do challenge me to be more witty more often. i like being with ben in the amphitheater. i don't dislike battling it out with the history and polisci departments for my special major. even the phoenix's gnarling my review isn't overly upsetting. over the week it's become easier to look around, hands on hips peter-pan-style, and say with pride, "yes, i belong here. and no, i will never grow up."

all day i've had the hiccups. what on earth could that signify? they stopped periodically, like when i was playing tennis badly again this morning with eliz (i got whacked in the jaw with a ball, she ran straight into a fence) and, thank god, when i was in class. then however i had other problems. i walked in to discover that the class -- an english film class, mind you -- has been taken over by huge hulking men. sure, to me, anyone over 5'6" and 160 lbs is a huge hulking man, but even by objective standards, this was ridiculous. in the sweatpants, white sneakers and t-shirt i'd just sweated in for an hour and a half, i looked like i'd come underdressed for a frat party.

in the cafeteria this evening i ran into a girl who i knew freshman year. she went abroad the semester before me so i essentially haven't seen her since then; in fact, it took her a minute to recognize me. i asked her how her reentry had been. oh, good, she said, -- at first. at some point it just became exhausting.
i laughed and made some joke and we parted and i returned to my table. when i looked around, i realized i was already exhausted. i'd had three classes, the last of which was of the 3-hour variety. and i still had one to go. more than that, though, all day i'd been feeling performative. keeping up with witty special people is taxing. especially since this isn't my longstanding crowd, i don't feel secure enough to be boring.

virtually everyone i know here suffers from too much self-esteem and too much insecurity. alternatively that's just me and i just project. a lot.

the day righted itself later. i spreed on half.com and went to my film class showing of bonnie and clyde, came home and had an clobberingly intense conversation w/ stefanie about sexuality and relationships. i've been listening to showtunes. i can't believe it's only wednesday, but weeks always seem three times as long at the beginning. inevitably i will run out of clever things to say, and if my friends decide to retain me then i'll be able to relax. also inevitably, my workload will get so heavy i won't have the luxury of caring. the only question is which'll happen first.

my room is slowly but surely becoming satisfyingly cluttered. a space just isn't a space unless it's filled -- just like, as my mythology teacher taught last semester, a horse isn't a horse unless it's acting horselike. there are probably other problematic Thens that follow but i don't want to think about them now.
a lovely congress just disbanded. sorelle, sarah k. and sarah c. intruded on my solitude. i'd been reading anita hill's speak truth to power in very atmosphere conditions: but they burst in and turned the lights on and settled in for the kind of creative, straightforward discussion that makes me glad to be at college.

i attended my first tennis class with eliz today. she brought a racket and i wore sneakers so between the two of us there existed one person in readiness to play. we took turns. none too steady in my too-small shoes, she tripped around the court, swinging wildly and yelping. by the time she tagged out, she was convinced everyone else on court hated her and i was laughing too hard to breathe. while i was no better, i made far fewer entertaining noises. i did however demonstrate an uncanny ability to move all my limbs at once and none in sync. mm, athletics.

i actually feel moderately proud of my time spent here so far. today i attended two classes, both history, both taught my super-strong, super-intelligent, intimidating women (this i hope will help with my yearlong goal of subduing my fear of [such] people) and didn't do anything remarkably stupid in either. i bought some books and an ethernet cable at the bookstore. i patted myself on the back for my demonstrable creativity with dental floss (if you want evidence, visit my room). i rekindled my love affair with elizabeth, realized i live in matt rubin's old room (oh so THAT'S why the extention sounded so familiar), and punched rob cox until i was giddy. i went to the cafeteria twice and didn't overdose on diet coke.
now i have to write my movie review. then i have a hall meeting. then i'm going to see dr. strangelove. a girl in the basement told me her name, and when i told her mine, said, "ester - [my last name]?" yes, i replied, feeling deja vu-y, as i just had this exact conversation with someone else. "oh," said the girl, "you're fa-- i mean, why do i know you?" "were you going to say, 'famous'?" i asked, incredulous. "yes," she said. "but i thought it would sound weird."
and ben claims no one knows who i am.

a moment of panic descended as i sat at this public computer, stared at the blogger login screen, and realized i'd forgotten my handle. that's at least partly because of my unfamiliar surroundings (so much white cinderblock) -- partly also my nervousness, to which i also attribute my bad skin and random twitching. but actually, as reentries go, this one hasn't been half-bad. my mom and my grandparents dropped me off yesterday on the way to a batmitzvah in new jersey. despite the hurry, they were super-nice to me: they helped me carry my stuff up(4flightsof)stairs, bought me lunch, hugged me a lot. i rewarded them by growling and pointing out the passersby i recognized (in order to establish beyond a doubt they didn't have what a tiny skool it is). finally, as they prepared to go, i despaired, "all these idiots i know! where are the idiots i LIKE?"

as if on cue, my roomie brigid and my dearfriend stef swept me up. after that it was all good. we helped each other move in and then we helped lazeliz, who won't arrive til tonite but whose stuff needed to be shifted from her summer residence -- also 4 flights up -- immediately. we shoulda helped ourselves to her stuff, but, being kind, we just left it in the hallway.
since, i've encountered 91% of the people who matter, and as at least 5% are abroad, that's not bad. brigid's and my room is white and spacey and we've already settled in so that it looks rather inviting (like brigid herself). ross is going to take yoga with me. sarah c. introduced me to her friends who glutted co|motion with japanese candy as we prepared our attack on the frosh at this afternoon's activity fair.
for a drenched sunday morning i'm feeling pretty chipper. almost, even, though i know this'll come back and bite me somehow, glad to be back.