The Tagline

If this blog were a Gothic novel, this chapter would be titled "Life, love, Cleveland, and anything else worth talking about: Living up to expectations."

Life

What do I know about life these days? I barely have one--but that all will end as of no later than 11:30 am tomorrow morning. The GRE will be over, and I once more will be able to take up permanent residence at Algebra, the rock wall, and wherever else is my home for the moment.

This is the thing about my life right now: it is cyclic. I go down, I go up. I'm just along for the ride right now. I'm figuring out plans for the future that don't hinge on some stupid-ass test and that will keep me writing, happy, and able to afford the occasional pair of pineapple-emblazoned flip-flops. At some point, I should shoot an email to the editor of the Observer and pitch an idea, and also not drop the ball on my summer research, about which I am pumped.

I am sure that I will get bored with the summer research (cardiac tissue, an actual relevant problem, which is also my senior project) just as I have gotten bored with everything else I've ever done. The one single constant in my life (besides falling in love with people who are spectacularly wrong/right/wrong for me) is writing. I've been writing since I could hold a pencil, but I've always had to. There has always been an external force motivating me--a class. The single semester of college I haven't had to read and write I nearly died in all my math and science.

I am well aware of my failings as a writer. I'm not a particularly good poet, and I have no attention span at all for anything else, and I can never, ever, end anything nicely. (which, oddly enough, applies to the falling in love bit too) But I am glib and I am clear and I am good with punctuation most of the time. So what am I going to do with my $120,000 education? I'm going to get my masters. And probably a Ph.D. Work for a while. And pitch a popular science column to any newspaper that will listen to me.

I can't write stories. I will probably never write a novel. I HATE writing research proposals. But science, I can do. I love to do it. And it's what I will do. Probably on the side for a good long time. It's enough to keep food on my table and my soul alive, and it's what I love.

Who could ask for more?

Drop down menus

When I clicked in the box for the title of this entry, I got a list of previous things-typed-in-boxes. Most of them I would have expected (previous title entries, for example) but one totally threw me. Re: homosexual love stories.

I don't remember ever typing that. Perhaps my internet browser has a thing for Brokeback Mountain, a thing I most definitely do not share.

I had planned a short entry tonight since these past few days have been exclusively devoted to junk food, laying around lazily, working out like a fiend, watching bad television, and shopping. It's nice to take a little break from the world once in a while and behave like a completely stereotypical 21 year old.

Also, tonight I purchased a shirt with the Lorax on it. How many people can say that the picture books they loved when they were young are still powerful and meaningful? Bless you, Ted Geisel, wherever you are. Bless you till your grin pops right off your stupidly rhyming face.

Elements of Cleveland Spring

I step out of the gym into a wash of sodium light.
The air carries the heat from the warming earth,
dries the saline on my face.
The smell of sweat blends with the breeze
and carries pheromones away from this
wet warm hard conglomeration of polymers.
They mix, quicksilver, and disperse to attract others,
the common currency of humanity.

Solstice/Equinox

Forget all that earth's-position-in-its-orbit crap. Today is the first day of spring. I am wearing open-toed shoes all day today.

I'm slowly discovering that I have personal definitions for so many things that to quantify them all would be to assemble a new Dictionary of Leigh, which would not be very useful to very many (if any) people but might make an interesting way to write a novel. Here are my seasons: Spring begins when I wear open-toed shoes. Summer is when the trees are three-dimensional instead of ink drawings. Fall is when it's cooled off enough so that the sky can be a truly obscene blue again, and winter is the first snow that sticks, otherwise it's just cold, dammit.

The nice thing about these definitions is that they are not tied to any calendar and thus reflect the actual season it is outside. I have trouble believing that in Florida they ever really have anything resembling winter on a yearly basis.

On a completely unrelated topic: I am going to keep up the trend here of updating daily. I feel that it is good for my writing skills (not to mention my sanity) to write every day, even if all I produce is some self-involved crap that goes up on the internet. Often writing here catalyzes something else for me, so it's a good exercise. Goal for the week: work on ending stories/poems/entries, not just stopping when I get bored.

On another completely unrelated topic: I have a physics test in an hour for which I have only perfunctorily studied. It is the truth that I have at times written poetry on exams which I could not complete in the manner required. Responses have been mixed. (Though the piece I wrote on my P3 final was the easiest piece of poetry I've ever written, and I think the professor still has it up on his personal website)

School is silly, and I will be ever so thankful when the GRE is over this Saturday. Perhaps then I will be able to stop rushing around in a mad dash to do everything I've been putting off because I am too damn apathetic.

Science Fantasy

Aside from being the term my mother uses to mean "science fiction, or fantasy" (being interested in neither of those genres herself) science fantasy is what happens a lot in cosmology.
I really don't understand what the big huff is about evolution. There's evidence for evolution. You want crazed whacked-out theories full of holes and idle speculation and things that are there solely because they're mathematically/aesthetically pleasing? Cosmology's your field.

One of my very valued and respected professors is a theoretical cosmologist. I love him quite a lot, but....his work is literally insane. Let's see if I can explain this so that anyone who reads this can understand. (since I don't understand, and he's patiently explained it to me a number of times, and I doubt any physicists are reading this)

One of the fundamental laws of physics is that there are electric charges--discreet, contained, little bundles of charge that you can't break apart further, and the movement of these charges (electrons) is what gives rise to current, separation of these charges causes voltage, and the combination of all these things runs your refrigerator.

And since electricity and magnetism are really just forms of the same thing, since there are single electric charges, there can't be single magnetic charges. All magnets have two ends (a north pole and a south pole, and opposite poles will attract and like poles repel), no matter how many times you cut them. When they stop having two ends, they also stop being magnets. It's a fact--steal a bandsaw and try it, if you don't believe me. Your fridge will come in handy here too.

So one of the main problems I have with cosmology is that people look at it in completely different ways. Some people look at the temperature of the universe (which is a pretty steady 2.718 Kelvin, or about negative 455.7 degrees Farenheit) and say "well, this is pretty uniform, let's think about how the universe got so smooth from its initial expansion." Others look at the stars, planets, and galaxies as compared to the vast emptiness of space and say "hey, the universe is really unevenly distributed. Let's think about how it got so lumpy."

My professor has a really lovely theory about the formation of the universe that involves things called cosmic strings, which as far as I can tell are just really massive strings of...stuff. This is another problem with cosmological theories--they often rely on particles that haven't been discovered or properties of the universe that only their theories predict. While this makes them great for experiment, you try finding a cosmic string made of stuff, when all you know is it might weigh as much as the earth or as much as the sun or maybe as much as our entire galaxy, and it might be thinner than a hair or maybe as thick as a rubber band.

Anyway, the other problem with this theory of his is that it requires there to be units of magnetic charge randomly roaming the universe at some point billions of years in the past. Apparently this is okay because of some fancy math manipulation of some equations where you basically just switch electricity and magnetism. Which is all well and good, but what the fuck?

It's like attending a lecture on evolution, and everything the person says seems a little far-fetched, but you run with it because hey, s/he's smart, and then at the end they say "and we confidently expect to have found 100,000 year old unicorn fossils in the next five years."

Uniqueness Theorems

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I have an extensive set of very specific connotations that fit overtop my words--a set of connotations that others may not share, as witnessed in the "baby" conversation that happened this weekend past. In the interest of becoming a further recovered physicist (read: not studying for the GRE at all, and writing then going to the gym and coming home and being happy) I will share another word with you: pretty.

Pretty is a word that I use a lot. It is never, ever applied to a person. People are beautiful, lovely, attractive, or hot (all have their own subsets of meaning, but that is another story for another day) but never pretty. Things are pretty, usually abstract things. For example:

V for Vendetta was pretty. The plot was well-conceived and well-acted with the exception of Natalie Portman's sinusoidal accent. The characters behaved exactly as I would have wished them to. Visually, with the exception of the baptism by fire/water of V/Evey (overdone, thank you, I get symbolism very well) it was stunning. The scene near the end with the stylized graphic violence puts Kill Bill to shame--hey look, it serves the plot!

When it comes to movies, and I think other physical tangible viewable things, pretty means stylized, coherent, clever, charming, and involving, as well as visually appealing.

Pretty also has a mathematical meaning, one which is harder to put into words. Pretty rarely, but sometimes, refers to work (a proof, a solution to a problem) that I have done myself. When I say a mathematical manipulation is pretty, I mean that it is clever, clean, and intuitively pleasing.

Baby

So I was out with a fellow Cleveland-lover the other night, and some stories were exchanged. Mine was made up, a pretty standard boilerplate about some girl in the bar, and his was about a man he met over the summer.

During the course of the story, a man restored a car, and the phrase "it was his baby" came out of both our mouths at the same time. While that's intrinsically interesting enough for the internet (the internet has low standards, though a director would make that moment into something huge and meaningful, as opposed to the simple, lovely synchronization of thought) it's the subject of "baby" upon which I wish to pontificate.

Baby is a word which for me has very specific connotations. It's a word you call your most high, most precious, most beloved. That's why it's the word it is--in a perfect world, your children are the most dear to you. That's why it's used so often with sexual connotations--who doesn't crave feeling that desired, especially during sex?

Baby is a name I will only ever call one person, I think. She is so memorable and important to me that I wouldn't demean the term by applying it to anyone else.

Aubrey McFate

Once upon a time, I had a relationship with a person. Said relationship fell apart for a number of reasons (chief among them that we were both dating other people at the time) and, more than a year later, I felt the urge to write about it.

I'm still not sure what drove that urge, if it was because I still loved him, because I loved Nabakov so much (the piece turned out so similar in structure to Lolita that it may have crossed the line from homage to plagiarism) or just because I wanted something big and epic to write about. At any rate, as so often happens, my attention waned.

But here is the best part out of what did get written. Names have been changed.

The Road Untaken

Once upon a winter’s evening, I went out with a friend--a girl with whose green eyes I was already half in love--to watch a movie. Everyone involved in this story is in college, so a dorm was my destination. However, it was a special dorm—an old private residence, with drool-worthy wooden floors and original woodwork. Eric came down to let us in, and lead the way to his room.

Eric's room was painted dark grey, a color that made the grain of the window frames and fireplace jump out. It had originally been intended for two people, but the previous co-occupant had graduated just before winter break, and since it was now after, Eric was the sole occupant.

Eric had just broken up with his girlfriend a month ago.

Did I mention that my first glimpse of him over a year before consisted entirely of his shoulders, which were strong and muscular, and even then I thought "hmmm?"

That his jaw line was square and defined and inviting to fantasized kisses?

That everything about him betokened physical, emotional, and mental strength? (how wrong that impression turned out to be...)

That I kept hearing things about him, how he was involved and intelligent and witty, and the instant we locked eyes I knew it all was true?

He sat in his chair and fiddled with his A/V, trying to get a movie from the computer to play on his TV screen. Successful, he turned around and smiled at us, and right then, at probably 10 o’clock on a weekday night in January, I fell in love for the last time in my life.

Right then in his smile, I could see everything I didn’t know yet.

I saw that yes, he would love me too. That my family and friends would adore him, that he would have a successful career and be supportive of mine, and that we would have a fantastic house in Virginia, probably, and he would teach our four sons to play football in the back yard while I read in the living room, and come in after they went to bed, still smelling of grass and sweat, and lean on the ottoman where I’d put all my papers, and kiss me, and we would go to bed and make love and be so, so happy.

And it is my biggest regret, even today at the end of my days, that I did not then and there ask him to marry me.

Call me Ishmael

People call me a lot of things. My poetry professor calls me "'JenniferK___', just like that, all one word, right?" Sometimes I go by JK, some people just call me K. Though nicknames don't usually stick to me, initials do pretty well.

For the purposes of this hole in the internet, however, I'll be Leigh. This isn't a random choice. When sitting in my apartment, daydreaming about a life that doesn't involve quite so much homework, dropping out of college and going by my middle name as I write for a living seems more appealing than a lot of other things. So Leigh it is.

Writing and poetry will go here from now on, as well as entries more serious in nature.

(yes, Santa, I've grown up a little. Happy now?)

Here's a reprint of the story I wrote last night:

I Cannot: An Algebra Story.

Thursday night, a little physics, a little tea. At Algebra ostensibly to study but really in hopes that Phil will be there, since I haven't seen him in a couple weeks. He is, we share significant looks over Frank the uberpretentious music guy, who in my entire Algebra experience has never once stopped talking about how his music is so fresh and new and people have never heard anything like it. He needs to trim it the fuck down, is what I think. It's too busy--all drum samples and keyboards and synthetic bass. He said it himself tonight, "I just gotta figure out how vocals are gonna get through all that." It's a mess, but he'll improve.

Phil and I catch up on our weeks. His family too has fallen prey to the string of deaths that seem to be going around this time of year, and he's still wearing his funereal blacks. We exchange small talk about our crazy exes or intriguing currents. One of the topics of discussion comes in and broods by the fire. I want to write Phil a note; "10 to 1 he comes up and is social right after I leave" but do not.

An employee leaves. Phil blesses him, Irish in accent and structure, as he walks out the door: "May the grey never find the hairs of your head, and the sun always shine on the...steps...of your...feet...or whatever."

At some point we are both silent, staring off into space. He says "You look like you've got a lot on your mind." I smile and say "no, not really." It is a lie. I have a lot of things on my mind--the phrase 'stop, you're hurting me' among others--but here at this counter, where I feel more comfortable than most places in this world, does not seem the place to share.

I have a hard time believing that people do this, that they casually drop their burdens into conversations like this. I could never spill my thoughts so freely, and if I could, I could not bear to see the look on his face, part anger, part apology, part pity, and part "god I'm so sorry I have a penis."

I want to tell him. I don't think he needs to know, however.

More than anything, I want to collapse sobbing on this counter and tell him the whole story, over which I have never cried.