Hey, would you say I'm on the rebound?

Beulah "The Coast is Never Clear"

On repeat for days. So good.

$0.02

Something was caught in my throat--maybe my heart, maybe my pride, maybe just my tongue or my breakfast. Whatever it was, it was making it hard to sit without fidgeting wildly as I watched her tiptoe with her words and make commentary with her eyes.

"So you seem to be someone with a lot on her plate," She said, cocking her head to one side and giving me the playful look of suspicion out of the corner of her bright blue eye. Her hair is platinum flawless and her suit is the perfect combination of polka-dot retro 50s hourglass housewife and high-powered, high-priced administrative academian. My Allston Burr Senior Tutor (something like a Resident Dean), whom I've always considered from afar to be a tragic woman (unbearably cute and unbearably spoiled child, distant and only mildly attractive husband), was now giving me a talk about the precariousness of my academic standing.

"You know, I give this talk to a lot of students every semester. And really, I don't know what your goals are. There was one student several years ago who has since graduated who just, who just wanted to...to pass," A wide sweeping gesture with her hand, attempting to indicate his physical passing out of Quincy house, or perhaps to show her own suspension of disbelief in dealing with the student, or maybe this is how she emphasizes her speech. "Give him all Cs, he was thrilled! And I don't know what your goals are, but remember I'm only sad about this if you are."

"This" being failing my first math midterm and being in danger of failing a class and being put on academic probation.

I have been on an ambitious quest to create a concentration here at Harvard that would allow me to explore materials from an engineering perspective, from social and historical perspectives, and in context of their uses in the art and architecture of daily living. Of course, I dicked around so much with courses during my first year and a half here (choral conducting, French A, neuroscience, linguistics, oil painting), that now I am left with a c.v. which leaves me few options for graduation and a resume that is painfully thin in expressing any coherent interest in future vocations.

My quest, with its strong (and I assure you, very genuine) personal motivations and resulting exquisite theoretical expositions on its legitimacy as a study, has crumbled in practice. I withdrew from my Engineering Sciences class after struggling through weeks without sleep or exercise. I couldn't find time to go to classes in order to complete the work for the classes; I couldn't find time to think between problem sets or lectures or reading. I was taking the perfect schedule to accomplish my goals on a 4-year Harvard timeline, and I couldn't hack it.

There is a tremendous and disheartening disconnect between the theoretical ideals I learn about in this liberal arts setting and the manner in which I am told to learn them. While the Resident Dean can tell me through her ruby lipstick that learning is lifelong and that an undergraduate concentration is no blip on the radar, she only says this because she knows that she has to pad her real message with something consonant with the trendy theoretical underpinnings of all the hundreds of pages of reading that social studies concentrators pretend to do every week. Really, she knows that i-banking interviewers, law schools, and whoever else can provide recognition--the keystone of academic success, for in this society learning is only for yourself in coincidental circumstances--needs something more than genuine personal motivation in order to give a seal of approval. She knows that taking more than four years, or a year between graduation and grad school, or taking the summer easy just doesn't look good, and will get you no further than your bachelors. Maybe she even knows that my mother, with all of her good intentions for my wellbeing, places so much less emphasis on hoping for my cultivation as a moral human being and positive contribution to civil society than my current academic success in the form of fellowships and degrees and future economic success in terms of job security and advancement.

I like reading. I like writing. I even like math when given the time to do it. Above all I love comprehension. But I can't do it all--not with only 24 hours in the day.

It's hard for me to keep a level head about this. It's hard for me to keep this in perspective, to remember, as a good and great friend told me as I sobbed to him on the phone just after the meeting, that failing a class is the least of my worries, and that my parents will always love me. It's so simple and so true, but everything in my life signifies messages to the contrary. I have been greatly discouraged by my environment and I would so like to succeed, but failing that, I would like nothing more than to break and live life somewhere out of the way--where nobody cares that I don't have the money for a nice suit or the resume to fill it. I want to keep a good attitude and take advantage of my situation, but I just don't feel like I know how.

I left her office with no solutions, just an ultimatum. And I cringed as I hit the air outside the building--air that, later in the April day, would bring snow--and I started to cry. I was trying hard to be neither jaded nor in despair, and as a result I just felt alone. And I was; I am, mostly because I choose to be. I don't want to share these feelings and I don't know that external advice can do much besides ease the symptoms--dry the tears and so forth. Whatever is stuck in my throat, I will have to clear myself--and if I believe, I have a lifetime to do it.

Southward!

Off on a 15-hour drive for a week and two days ultimate frisbee, Southern hospitality (?) and general spring break revelry. Oh and hundreds of pages of reading on Confucian Humanism.

Onward, ho!

puzzling

In response the the new-blogger, old-blogger question: I don't know who's the creator. I'm not because i just switched over and it wouldn't let me switch this one. Maybe Juli? We're the two admins.

no more booty calling!

My cell phone died, so please e-mail me if you need to contact me.

Oh my gosh, I just realized that means I don't have anyone's number. Oh. Oh, that blows.

Eye Candy, Food for Thought

One of the best photos that was overlooked.
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"Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I'm talking about the hidden sketches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried. I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if wirting isn't, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it's nothing. That if it's not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement. But usually I have no opinion, I can see that all options are open now, that there seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for somewhere to hide, to be written, to be read. That its basic unseemliness is no longer accepted. But at that point I stop thinking about it."

Marguerite Duras, The Lover

Boys with Guitars

They are a rarity here.

What a shame.

Scraps

Air - Talkie Walkie
Album of the Week

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Choice quotes from recent reading for class:
"Fat sheep make good mutton but poor parchment."
Thompson, The Materials of Medieval Painting.

"...Or take the umbrella. It is an ingenious, thoroughly functional device, neat and practical. But you simply cannot imagine it in company with the racquet or the riding boot. They do not speak the same language. There seems to be something finicky about an umbrella, something rather cold and reserved--an air of diginity which the racquet utterly lacks."
Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture.

"When the possbility of sudden failure exists, a larger factor of safety should be used than when failure is preceded by obvious warning signs."
Beers et. al. Mechanics of Solids.

"The 1370 foot high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text." This one isn't funny. It just makes no sense.

It's Saturday afternoon in San Diego and it's 84 degrees out. I'd love to stay here and tell you more, but I'm going out to my balcony to enjoy this crazy February weather. I have homework due tonight so I'll be doing that... but it's so nice out I don't think I'll mind too much.

My bone

My intention is not to make you jealous (hey--i might be in your neck of the woods next year) but it's probably in the 40s or 50s? And it's not raining yet though it's supposed to.

Have I ever told you that I love your words? I love your words. You say everything I want to say, everything that's trapped in my mind and i'm afraid to admit, everything I can't articulate in words or sounds... i'm so far gone into journalism that I can't write about my day without a lede and a nut. Feelings? They have no place in a news article. And I can't talk to anyone without my list of questions.

The "you" I am talking to is LeeAnn.

Four years into college I can finally admit I do not like weekends. Weekends in college are like bricks thrown into my face every week, bricks that tell me I do not have any friends, nor can I do anything productive with limitless free time. I've almost given up on them, content to stay at home on a Friday and watch a movie by myself, content to not even make an effort to go out. It's always the same boys and beer and shots anyway, walking with heels and taking makeup off, making meaningless conversation. I used to go out with the hope that i'd meet a boy. But now that i'm on the older end of the college crowd, most do not exude the level of maturity i'm looking for. I then went out for the alcohol. The amazing freedom of conversation and action it provided, the endless random excitement. But now I never really get drunk enough to stop thinking about what I really think of the guy i'm talking to. I also went out because I knew people. And now I know people, but if I see them we stay in. So it's the weekend. And I have a paper to write and four books of Victorian blank verse to read and a future to plan and a full Netflix queue and a whole week of work ahead of me. And a few actual plans. Can't I just enjoy that?

I could just enjoy that. I might just enjoy that.

My random evening that consisted of everything I already mentioned also consisted of me and two friends ending up in the apartment of two girls I barely knew in high school. Different social circles, that sort of thing, but four years later we can have a beer together and admit we know each other's names and had classes together four years ago. It's funny the extent to which all that just doesn't matter anymore.

Hey Halfwhat

I'm losing perspective, here. Throw some bones from your respective Californian locations--I'd like to forget that it's 20 degrees (feels like 6) out!

Are you hip?

Ukulele's are so hip right now.

Measurements

I am testing the space between his jaw and his shoulder, measuring with the modified arc built of my forehead nose and lips to see if I fit there.

Along the landscape of a longer neck that fit upon a broader collarbone, one that usually smelled of bread and cigarette smoke and sometimes of sheets and soap, I had once found a hollow that held my cheek and my closed eyelids and my hair-draped forehead against it as a cradle held its charge; that is, dutifully and gently.

The space is smaller, though, on this one. His jaw is in the middle of my forehead, my chin rests on the plain of his chest. I think I can fit here, though; I can imagine getting comfortable with this uncomfortable position. After all, crossing the street, opening the front door, embracing, kissing-- at different, earlier points in my life I didn't like to do those things, either; and all still hold their small and thus insidious elements of danger and risk.

His hands aren't much bigger than mine, and he wants to hold me in them. They get clammy fast, with too much touching, and I let go to spare him the embarassment of realizing this for himself. I know exactly what to do and what to say, which words and expressions to deliver in how many doses to make him sufficiently desirous, to make him feel sufficiently at ease. I am overestimating him in order to feel like less of a predator--he must know my game. (This conclusion, of course, is irrational. He doesn't even know me. He wouldn't know a game from the most genuine sentiment. He is nothing to me; I could be anything to him.)

But at some point, I didn't play and I didn't know, either. I took it slow and did it by intuition, by touch, by moving slowly, uncertain day by uncertain week, feeling my way through and closing my eyes when hoping not to come up short or overshoot. I wrote pages filled and overflowing with those innocent expressions of first infatuation; I wrote and deleted and saved countless emails; I waited for him to emerge and I waited for him to leave. I couldn't control anything. It brought about the best sort of inexact and overwhelming and satisfying love--slowly built by serendipity after serendipity. I can't hope for it again, so I won't. I won't wait for the shoulder that's just right; he's come and gone. I could settle for this. I could settle for a little bit smaller, a little safer, a little more sterile. I can't adapt, I can squeeze in like I belong here. There's no infatuation to swell me up and give me away; there's no uncontrollable desire to make these lips move in ways I don't want. This could be safe; this could be right by decree.

But decree leads to repression; safety leads to curiosity; I will balloon with guilt and longing for nothing in particular.

This is bullshit, dude. Can't do it.

Blank Wave Arcade

The Faint
Blank Wave Arcade

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And to continue in my return to regular program, I'll blog about the weather.

"ARCTIC AIR WILL CONTINUE TO INVADE SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND TODAY. THE
MERCURY IS ONLY EXPECTED TO REMAIN IN THE TEENS DURING THE ENTIRE DAY.
THE WINDS WILL BECOME STRONGER AS THE DAY PROGRESSES...WHICH WILL ONLY
ADD TO THE BITTERLY COLD CONDITIONS WITH WIND CHILL VALUES REMAINING
BELOW ZERO FOR MOST OF THE DAY."

Cookies for you, then, buddy.

Dear Self-Righteous Pole Vaulting Star,

I find it terribly silly for you to say in that terribly haughty voice, "I don't smoke marijuana" just after telling me that your butt is covered in marker from your drunken evening of Track & Field Initiations.

Sincerely,
Me.

SPAWN!

When did Harvard become a breeding ground for bankers?

For God's sake, keep your souls for yourselves and let Goldman Sachs suit up someone else! (This I sigh when I know the girls who work those 15 hour days and go for schmoozing weekends in New York--not weekends in museum galleries that aren't opening, closing, or throwing a gala--are the ones who can afford to try on heels at Christian Louboutin. It is a twisted world.)

Heads Up

The Roots will be in Universal City with Jill Scott & Lupe Fiasco on Feb. 10, and then at the House of Blues in San Diego on Feb. 12 (without Jill Scott).

Or come to Boston and see them with me in March!

Another journey on the road has yet to be documented. New York, New Jersey, three museums, one concert, one surreptitious jam session, some really spicy vindaloo--altogether a good time.

Hell freezes over?

Leeann's post reminded me, last week there was snow in LA. Weird, yeah?

I don't own a camera; this is better.

The View from Here

It's snowing.

It's beautiful.

I'm... almost done with finals.

Revelation

So cool.