Mavis will save us

the flirtations perform "nothin' but a heartache" ... in the ruins of tintern abbey. full color, full bellbottoms. nice.

... is a pair of little white gogo boots. check out the backup dancers when they get to "shout" and ronnie spector really gets into it...

there's something deliciously unnerving about all that synchronized dancing. it holds everything taut so that when ronnie breaks out of her choreographed moves - with a hair toss, or a little prance around the stage - it's like the snap of a rubber band.
so good!

i'm reading a memoir by an autistic animal scientist, temple grandin (she has designed one third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the united states), called Thinking In Pictures. her reliance on visual (as opposed to verbal) thinking is so pronounced that when she was younger, grandin was only able to understand abstract concepts when she could find visual symbols or equivalents for them in the outside world. for instance, she prepared for both her high school and her college graduations by finding a special door (one was in her dormitory, the other on the roof of the library) and "rehearsing" for the transition by moving through it. she says she never had a concept for what it meant to "get along with people" until she got trapped in the gap between two sliding glass doors while washing them and realized that the delicate movements it took for her to unjam a glass door without shattering it were equivalent to the tact and care that it took to maintain human relationships.

"Throughout my life, door and window symbols have enabled me to make progress and connections that are unheard of for some people with autism" (37).

now i don't know how much someone *needs* an abstract concept of human relationships to form and maintain them, and she doesn't really explain what results her discovery had in terms of specific friendships. but i'm struck by this idea she seems to have that a transition in her life could not occur until she'd found a preexisting material object or scene that could carry its meaning to term like a womb carries a child...

i also imagine the young temple grandin as a medieval knight on a series of heroic quests for these magical objects that can unfreeze her life, which each time has been stilled again by a wicked sorcerer.

now i want to ask all my friends if they have a symbol that causes progress in their lives...

there's a hole in my only pair of wearable pants

ahhhhhhhhhhhghghghghghhhh!

last night you gave yourself a pat on the back, whitey. remember? tears of joy and pride were dripping into your free starbucks latte, and somewhere in the background, faintly, 'we are the champions' was playing on the loudspeakers of a true american patriot. you ran out into the streets and chest-bumped your bros and shouted the sacred foreign-sounding name at each other like it was a new esperanto that would unite us all. this is what your mom must have felt like when she protested the war in vietnam. high five!!!

nightmarish human leech creature@2:50

a professor showed us this video today in class and i am obsessed with it. wouldn't it be awesome if you could select little sections of space and just - zzzp! - fold them away for later?



i didn't start really listening to beck until... maybe this summer, even, when modern guilt came out. lame, considering he's been around since i was what, seven? i take much too long to decide i like things, and to get to know people. must be less tentative.

"I dried my tears & armed my fears
With ten thousand shields and spears,
Soon my Angel came again;
I was arm'd, he came in vain:
For the time of youth was fled
And grey hairs were on my head."

must drastically narrow thesis topic this week - off to firestone!

it is NASTY hot in princeton.

i received some new inspiration today for how to make this blog less like my angsty livejournal in high school. which it was becoming, in parts. no more attempts at generalization+universal truth. just the facts, ma'am.

i'm helping my roommate type responses to the backlog of emails she's accumulated in the past few weeks. she has a problem with her hands - kind of like carpal tunnel, but inoperable - that kicks in off and on and makes it impossible for her to type. so she's writing out responses by hand, which i will type up. the little slips of paper are spread out over our makeshift coffee table (bedspread, two boxes, a flimsy board torn off an old piano).

also i am wearing a bikini top. as i said, nasty hot.

this article expressed resentments against generation X that i didn't even know were festering deep in my soul.

"You guys got all the cool traits! Disaffection! Nihilism! Cynicism! Ironic distance! People just keep calling us idealistic. There is nothing sexy about idealism. And you guys have been laying this trip on us forever. In 1997, the Times looked at Mentos and Hanson and called us "edgeless." They dragged out Generation X rep Douglas Coupland to call us all uncool for liking the Spice Girls. We were little kids! Sorry I wasn't an edgy 12-year-old, Doug! I wasn't into Built to Spill yet!"

i have been reading too much.

i didn't realize when i started my thesis what a handicap it is to take a piece of criticism, rather than an original idea you had about a piece of literature, as your starting point... have to resist the temptation to vacuum up information indiscriminately, deluding myself that it's research when i'm really just putting off thinking about or creating anything of my own.

northern virginia is more tolerable now that i venture outside fairfax county. i'm sitting in this cool coffee place in clarendon that's like a grungier small world... full of college students in punkish army green, drinking shmancy coffees from kenya and paupa new guinea. got a clean bill of health from the doctor today; that tight feeling in my throat isn't strep, or mono. sweet! had been feeling vaguely guilty about being out and about as a possible virus bomb.

someone gave me this song two years ago, and i just refound it today. (it was mislabeled in itunes! horror.) it makes me wish i'd been unemployed this summer for more than a week. (i'm not 100% behind the video's weird variable-gravity animals etc., but imeem's sucking so youtube will have to do.)

I don’t like it when my face tenses up with that little smile that hugs your jawbone too tight in the corners to be an expression of pleasure. When it happens you’re always trying to find something to do with your hands, clasping them behind your neck then around my knee then folding them in your lap. You know how every part of you sits, weight of ankle on ankle, slight tilt of the hip; your body is a fuzz of pressures. Every word is whispered a thousand times before it can be spoken, and the possibilities multiply into a fog. You’re amorphous and immobile, human static.

“There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart?”

Most of my actions are controlled by habit or convention, programmed responses to external pressure. How many times a day do I actually will an action as opposed to submitting to it? How many of my actions (not just writing) have any roots in my heart at all?

A tree is a solid trunk that branches off at either end; all its possibilities come from itself, not from outside. Know what you need to do, and the rest is just white noise.

first things first: Kappa has a house now? shoddy journalism, NYT. shame.

Moreover, months of work uncovered no evidence that Dr. Ivins had traveled to Princeton, N.J., where investigators believe the letters were mailed. The closest connection was that a chapter house of Kappa Kappa Gamma, a sorority with which Dr. Ivins had a long and strange obsession, is located near the contaminated Princeton mailbox.

i lived through an earthquake yesterday. i didn't know, actually, until all the girls on hall poked their heads out of their doors to say "did you feel that?" ("feel what?") and i started getting concerned texts from the east coast. (i'm fine guys!)

another life milestone.

who talks about girls like that? have you ever talked to a girl before? you even have a sister. do you at least talk to your sister? then you'd know no one is impressed when you call the girls who bother to flirt with you fat or old, or insinuate that they're sluts.

ew

came back after the staff meeting today to take a nap and immediately remembered why i never take morning naps here: they're widening a roadway right outside my window. from here i watched a steam shovel work ever so delicately on a beech at the edge of the deepening ditch: the shovel nuzzling the tree's neck, peeling away strips of grey bark, bending (the tree seemed caught unawares) the hard resistant body toward the ground, coaxing, pushing, until the the roots gave out and the tree tumbled onto the ground.

i jumped out of a plane last saturday. i'm going to crib a description from an email to cx: "skydiving was beautiful and not even that scary - just supremely disorienting. i gasped like a fish, because you feel like you shouldn't be able to breathe, even though you can. by the time i learned to inhale again he had opened the parachute and we were gliding. definitely a weird experience, but no where near as intense as i imagined."

also they gave me a free tee shirt (a steal at $189!)

when a boy flirts with me i just flip out. i should admit it. i flip out and freeze out and drop off the face of the earth. i used to say to myself (the other fourteen times), well it's because he did this annoying thing, i just don't want to lead him on, i'll just lay low a couple days, etc. etc. but wow do i need to chill. wow.

i'm not sure how i feel about re-entering the blogging world. deleting my livejournal two (?) years ago was cathartic. and already i'm updating way more than is cool.

so let's pretend my blog has intellectual content. i like the new beck album. all the soft voices going "ahh" in the background of gamma ray. beck's voice going "ow." that's the final vowel sound in every line of the verses, and it sounds nice with whatever effect they've run the vocal through. he emphasizes it each time but then really goes to town on the second "arounnnnnnnd," and the last syllable stretches out and swings back like a boomerang. i guess it's conventional to like the single but i think gamma ray is my fave. maybe because of the video, which you should look up because i'm too lazy to post the link.

two more days left in the session - only one of my girls will be back for the next one, and she won't be mine anymore. i'll miss them a lot. i haven't written about them much, because of all these pesky confidentiality agreements they made me sign before i came here, but i pretty much wish i could adopt the whole hall.

sniff.

i'm sitting at my makeshift desk by the window - two bookshelves shoved together for a table; for a seat, the minifridge on loan from Tom, our dorm's resident priest. (comfy except every two minutes or so the thing revs up again and vibrates my butt.) kids are gone for the day - or until my mandatory class visit at 1 pm to watch them dissect rats. (ooh.)

i'm wondering: why does no one write pop secular ethics books? i mean, there are a lot of self-help books about how to make you feel better, but not that many about how to be a better person. why is it in our culture that only christians [and maybe peter singer] write comprehensible books on how to live an ethical life? i guess most novels carry implicit ideas of how to live a good life, but i mistrust my tendency to read them that way. they're art not an instruction manual... where do we atheists look for guidance? (TV?)

unrelated: in the dining hall today, a crowd of 5-year-old boys from soccer camp were lining up to go outside. i think the littluns must have chosen their own team name because as they fumbled their way into single file their instructors were shouting "i'm not going to tell you again! snakes of darkness, line up! line up!"

the moral is,
5-year-old boys = heaps of awesome.

mm, testing out the new blog.
Los Angeles is not at all what i was expecting - everything tan and everywhere low, a sprawling PCP suburb, dry and timewarped, where somehow every car trip is twenty minutes, regardless of distance. where grass is always green when it never rains. all those associations of los angeles with artifice, sunset boulevard, mulholland drive, sense of dislocation, human beings in a desert.
this would be a really creepy place to live.