The Years Are Short, But The Days Are Long

I hate the University of Michigan's web application. I hate all applications right now, actually, as I tend to get about two pages in before the voice in my head starts saying "you're not actually going there, why are you wasting your time and money? Go for a walk! Go to the art museum! You know you're going to OSU or UVA anyway, so why bother with this shit?"

Although I have typed "university" somewhere around 75 times in the past few days, it still has a 50% chance of coming out "univeristy." I still randomly type "you" when I mean "out" or vice versa. Although I have a pretty high typing rate, the frequency at which garbage comes out of my fingers is pretty high too. I cannot get used to the fact that I must enter dates month-day-year, rather than the more logical day-month-year. (the date is such a shaky concept for me anyway) I cannot remember that each time I enter a state where I have lived/worked/been educated/asked for a recommendation I cannot type it in, I must click a link from a pop-up.

My keyboard is filthy, due to my inability to keep my promise not to eat while I work at my computer. It disgusts me, and yet I don't have time to clean it, nor do I have space to pop all the keys off and q-tip them, as my desk is covered in GRE score reports, printed recommendation forms, and post-its to remind me not to forget to send my transcripts to places I am applying.

My eye fatigue is now at the point where I cannot even type my own name properly. I used to have quite a bit more stamina when it came to staring into computer screens. Something about taking a poetry class where I wrote everything in unlined notebooks with waterproof pens has broken me of doing anything lengthy at the computer other than simulations and the occasional email.

I can't remember the names of any of the programs to which I am applying. They all have the word "molecule" in them. They are basically a means to my right to be called "Doctor" and make money at a place which is not a college. I intend to get out of academia as soon as possible.

Statement of Purpose. Fuck. I'm out of ticky boxes. I love ticky boxes. I hate admissions essays. They're always either frustratingly open-ended or demonically specific, or both. I remember one application that simply had a 9"x10" box and instructions that said "fill this with anything you think we might like." I ended up writing a piece of music. I didn't get in. I'm glad Caltech admissions never makes mistakes. Getting my dream turned down surprisingly left me uncrushed. I came to Case. It was the right decision.

There is still a woman out there who believes that Severus Snape is real, watches over her, and someday will reincarnate her in a form in which they can truly love one another.

This Is Not a Love Letter

Because you hate it when I write to you--you think I have piles of expectations. You think I'll write some crazy free-association and then rant at you for not understanding the way my mind works. You worry that you'll seem stupid if you ask me for clarifications.

Because we're not like that.

Because this is not an epic love, and we function just fine when we're separated, and we share everything when we get back together. There are no feelings spilling out of my ears to put down on paper. Hell, most of the time we don't even say it.

Because I wouldn't know what to say in a love letter to you anyway. Hi, it's grey out. You live 150 feet away. I could walk up and shout to your window. You know it's grey out. You know how I spend my days. I could tell you that I wish I was with you, but that would only be marginally true. (I need to do these grad school applications, and with you around I wouldn't be able to)

Because you know it all already. You know I love you. You know things are just better when we're together, but they're fine when we're not. You know my favorite place to kiss you. (between your shoulder blades) You know that I don't strain for metaphors or comparisons with us. We're the blandest of bland, and stronger for it.

(You know what I know that you don't? That you won't be nervous when you propose.)

A Poem I Love and Two Poems I Wrote

One Art ~ Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Paper Cuts
Your heartbeats raised bruises on me.
Broken, I'd retreat to fiction,
salivate to pages turning,
read to believe our love was epic.

But paper cuts, and when I lick my wounds,
my blood tastes sweet like aspartame.

Freshman Year
Kissing Chris Renner:
emotional Hiroshima.

Oh, We Don't Give a Damn for the Whole State of...

It is this week that I regret not going to OSU. I have regretted this exactly five times since coming here; once for every OSU-Michigan football game and once more for the national championship. It's not so much that I love football--I don't really like or understand the sport. It's that I was raised OSU like it was a religion. My dad and I had several talks when I was younger about why it wasn't okay for kids born and raised in Ohio to root for Michigan. It's not about making the "right" choice. It's about pride in where you're from. If you are from Ohio, you back Ohio State. Period. If you are from Ohio, you cheer for the Indians, you don't jump on whatever World Series-bound bandwagon is swinging around the block. (In the case of baseball, I suppose it's okay to support both the Indians and a team that might be successful.)

My memories of high school are entirely blue and silver. I attended every football game, every boys' basketball game and most of the girls'. I cheered our girls' basketball team in the state playoffs--we went to Columbus that year. "We Are the Champions" makes me cry, because I associate it with the Slate Sling, a miracle half-court shot made from an inbound pass with 0.6 seconds on the clock to beat our rivals (colors? blue and gold) in the state tournaments. We have it on video. It's times like these I miss showing up an hour early for games to stand outside in the cold in a customized t-shirt, shorts, and thigh-high tie-dyed socks. I miss screaming until I lost my voice, even though I couldn't hear a thing. I miss the mob mentality and the cheers and the feeling of losing yourself in the group.

So go bucks. I'll be getting text messages about the game while I'm at R's brother's wedding. Some people just don't have their priorities straight.

Happy Couples Don't Get Ratings

Sunday night, dinner was cheese and triscuits in front of Desperate Housewives. I'm just home from a family wedding and my slovenliness is somehow a response to the weekend I spent steeped in my family whom I alternately adore and hate.

I write my last check for the electric bill, cursing the fact that I forgot to order more checks. I put a Gee's Bend quilt stamp on it and remember the exhibit at the museum, except I always get it mixed up with the Phillips collection exhibit and some American landscapes. I resent the fact that I have become the type of person who uses quilt stamps. I cling to the idea that they are artsy and thus okay for a twenty-two year old to put on envelopes.

The weekend in review disappears under two incidents: my aunt, the awful one, asking me at the wedding reception if I was going straight for my doctorate. When I replied in the affirmative and attempted to explain why, she cut me off to ask how old I'd be when I got out. I'll be twenty-eight, bitch.

The second incident was my mother showing her displeasure once more about Virginia. I love my mother. She's one of my best friends. But her attitude towards graduate school pisses me off. First she didn't want me to get my doctorate; apparently there'sa rumor going around my family that getting a doctorate makes you forget to get married. And now, when I've found a program I am truly in love with, she's got nothing but negativity for the eight hour drive. I made her listen to me, this time. I think she finally understands that I'm not going 500 miles away to spite her, or to deprive her of my company. I'd be doing it because the degree program, the research, is really too good to pass up. I love the town, I like the campus, but that's all frosting. Five years and I'm out, and I'd rather have that degree and that experience than settle for anything else.

I will miss Cleveland. I think about that tonight while I write my return address on the electric bill--about how the idea of missing Mark and Phil and the Algebra and graffiti and related things sinks slowly under the fact that someday, my return address won't be Cleveland anymore. I fear losing my Cleveland pride. I wonder if I will forget to love the Indians, no matter how much they lose. And I think about how much of this is just fear of moving, fear of transplanting myself away from my family and loved ones.

I put the Turtles' "So Happy Together" on iTunes and think about wedding music. Kate hasn't chosen hers yet, although I was fitted for my bridesmaid dress yesterday morning. If I were to make a Postsecret card, it might have something to do with a short playlist on my iTunes that I have, just in case. Which is stupid, and exactly the kind of behavior that men attribute to women all the time, but mostly I just don't want to forget a great idea. I care about very few things when it comes to weddings, but I want nice music.

I think about telling my dad that with the absence of influential music forces in my life, I listen to the same six albums over and over, and not a single one was recorded outside of the early nineties. I love this about R, that he's got worse taste in music than I do (and that's really something) and he doesn't care. I remember thinking as the processional music started that if someday it was R standing up there waiting for me, he would never think to be nervous, he would never wonder if I just wasn't coming.

My Only One

I'm a pretty cynical person. I like to dress it up as "practical" or "logical," but the fact of the matter is I hate chick flicks, (except for My Best Friend's Wedding) weddings, mushiness after about 30 minutes, happy couples, puppies, rainbows, and cupcakes. I don't believe in happily ever after, I don't think love is what gets you through life, and I generally don't cry in movies, or about much of anything unless I'm pissed.

I don't know how I got to be this way. I wasn't like this before. I used to be able to fall in love and just be in love without so many stupid thoughts. I used to be able to not worry about the future, trust the people I loved, and take things as they came. Actions like these, of course, got my heart broken to bits multiple times, and I got hard. Slept around. And eventually woke up, because I wasn't doing myself any good.

So I got into a relationship that made sense--took my hardness and molded it into a different form. I prided myself on how calm and rational this relationship was. Loved the fact that there was no drama. Loved that my family loved him.

And now he's giving me Hollywood kisses in the produce section. Making me dance in Starbucks. Twirling me, kissing me, kidnapping me to take a walk with his friend. And I know this would all be a lot more interesting if I were 35, in a Sex-and-the-City or Nick Hornby sort of way, but the very realness of leading a functional life scares me shitless. It's a lot easier to be single and screwed up. It's all there on the surface. But with stability comes so much subtle terror.

I could lose him. I could lose him at any point--in the standard breaking up sort of way, or when we're thirty-eight and the whole kids thing is just starting to get comfortable, a little. We could lose a child. A brother, a sister, one or four of our parents.

It's so much easier to have nothing to lose. I think that's why I'm so cynical. I don't want to have anything to lose. But I already do--I have a brother I adore, and two parents who are my best friends, and R's getting under my skin, no matter how logical he was in the beginning, and I'm starting to think we've got a really good thing going here.

Facebook is Not My Friend

All my close friends from high school are engaged or married.

A girl who graduated a year after me has just had a child.

Last night R and I had a serious conversation that wasn't precipitated by a fight or ultimatum, about us, about our future together, about the possibility of a more formal committment soon. About how he'd face off with my mom for me, to get me some peace of mind right now, as two weddings in two weekends plus grad school applications plus other stuff is driving me nuts.

I am old and I don't want to be. I'm part of a couple, what feels like a real couple, and I don't know how I feel about that. I'm looking at moving a few states away, and I think R is looking into moving with me. Over this past weekend, due to his drunkeness and a couple of his friends' loose lips, (plus the conversation last night) I'm starting to get a hugely better picture of how he views our relationship.

And that scares me, because I've always been able to count on him to be the sweet yet thoughtless type. I can always count on him not to care when I don't show up to his softball games and relish the time I want to spend alone because it's more time to put a pot on his head and run up and down the halls of his fraternity house. (Yes, this actually happened. I was there for that one.)

But this weekend a mutual friend told me that R has frequently encouraged him to hang out with me, because R knows that this friend makes me happy, and seeing this friend ensures that I have a good day. Last night, R and I talked about lavaliers--his fraternity has no policy on lavaliering, and there was a stink when one of the brothers gave his girlfriend one. R was against it. R once told me that he didn't think he'd ever lavalier anyone. Today, R came to the physics talk I was in charge of. He's never done that before.

When I put this all together and add in the rest of his behavior lately, this relationship doesn't seem like the logical functional relationship I counted on it to be. I didn't realize until this point how much I'd relied on his perceived indifference. This is for real, and he's for real, I think.

It seems that I continually have these little ephiphanies that life is, in fact, proceeding, and my boyfriend doesn't hate me.

Wanted, Wanted: Dolores Haze

Isn't it funny--I can't remember the first time I read my favorite book. I remember purchasing it in the bookstore, telling my mother it was a classic and I thought I ought to read it. (and her scandalized face, because the book is Lolita, of course) But I can't remember reading it. I can't remember where, if it was at home in my blood-red room, or in Cleveland, in a dorm or in my apartment or under a tree or surreptitiously in class. I can't remember reading it at all for the first time. Or the second, for that matter, or the third. I can't remember a time, literarily speaking, before this book.

My copy is battered and torn, as all my favorite books are. It's been underlined and bent and written in by many hands. An identical copy, down to my underlinings and notes, went off with J when she went to France, to remind her of me.

J is small, like me, and thin. She has a sweet, childlike face and a head full of brown ringlets. She has blue/grey eyes. Every time, since the beginning, when I read Lolita, she is what I picture. J at fifteen, perhaps, before we were really friends--all legs and arms and faux-bright cheerleading smile. Did the book set me up to love her? Perhaps. Did she set me up to love the book? Perhaps. Is all of this weird and slightly incestuous-feeling? Yep.

I almost always have very clear mental representations of characters. (If I do not, it's usually a sign that I think the story sucks) They are very rarely people I know, and even more rarely people I'm close to.

I'm still not off my Stephenson kick, either, and lately I've been seeing the world in Waterhouses and Shaftoes. I'm pretty sure I'm a Waterhouse--smart, but not the smartest; involved, but not the most involved; a pivotal cog in the wheel that's not used 80% of the time. Waterhouses are history's narrators. They were there. They had a part. But in general, they let the people better suited to doing things do things.

Shaftoes, on the other hand, they fucking do things. They're not always the right things, and they're not always for the right reasons, but they do shit. Shaftoes are Marines, treasure hunters, faithful lovers, hopeless romantics, practical starry-eyed idealists, and generally speaking the person you want on your side in a fight. Shaftoes are the people who change the flow of the world. (When I read Cryptonomicon, all I can think about is how proud Jack would be) Sean's a Shaftoe, I think.

Sick Day

I've never really liked chicken noodle soup. I don't really like chicken all that much to begin with (I'm a red meat/fish/alternative protein kind of person) and noodles in soup just don't do it for me. I used to like chicken soup with rice when I was younger, but that might have been because of the book.

But since I found out that miso soup is almost/equally/more good for you than chicken soup, I've happily made the switch. Now, when I get sick, I start chopping carrots, onions, tofu, and spinach, if I've got any, and whisk in the miso paste. I make ridiculously unauthentic miso soup, but it tastes so good. A bowl of this every hour, when I'm sick, with my favorite chopsticks and a good book or movie, and pretty soon I feel a lot better.

Someday, I will do this for my children. When the first snow starts to fall and one comes down with a cold, I will call off work and spend the morning slicing carrots and onions. I'll saute them until they're nicely carmelized, and drop them into hot water, and watch the oil glitter on top. I'll dilute the miso with hot water until it's mixable, and finally add soy sauce until everything feels right.

And hopefully they'll grow up thinking miso soup is as much a comfort food as I do.

Things That Pissed Me Off Today

Successfully completing a problem for my E&M class only to discover, after neatly writing it up, that I'd forgotten to do any calculations for the M part.

The fucking abortion trucks driving aimlessly around campus. If you didn't have the honor, these are big, delivery-style trucks emblazoned with pictures of bloody, aborted homunculii (with coins for scale!) with CHOICE?? printed in bold, hysterical letters and a URL for a pro-life site at the bottom.

This pisses me off for two reasons. One, it's just fucking gross--there's no reason to resort to tactics like that. People who abort fetuses generally know what fetuses look like, and if they don't, they probably don't care. It's just scare tactics. And two, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what they look like, because at that point, they're still parasites. Leeches. Tapeworms.

It's the same choice I made when I paid for my birth control--the choice not to have a child. I'm not much of a feminist, but the idea that some male lawmaker can tell me how many children I should have boils my blood. If I get knocked up despite my best efforts, are they, or the pro-lifers, going to make sure the baby daddy's life stops for three or four months? Are they going to pay my medical bills? No? Then fuck the hell off.

I saw a girl today wearing tights. As pants. Without a long shirt or dress over them. Just a regular T-shirt, jacket, and tights. Tights are not pants. You look stupid; too stupid to even properly put on clothing.

Fuck It, I'm Missing My First Class Anyway

8:30 classes once a week are not meant to be attended. Especially when they're just a bunch of physicists jibbering about gravity waves and other things that are not, really, that important in the grand scheme of things. This is why I'm getting out of physics. I'm expected to care about gravity waves and dark matter--things that probably don't exist. Or if they do exist, are just a mathematically convenient way to think about real things. It gets to the point where you can't tell convenience from reality, and that bugs me.

Also, I couldn't find any underwear I wanted to wear today. I'm not in the mood for underwear that will jump up the end of my digestive tract, nor am I in the mood for underwear seemingly designed without thought for female anatomy, so that it cuts off circulation in one or both of my legs, or is lined in such a manner that I wonder if I am abnormal and most women have vaginas coming out of their belly buttons or anuses.

To top it all off, I dreamed (kind of) about Mark last night. Specifically, I dreamed that I was in Charlottesville with a bunch of people from Case and my high school, and I ran away from them to find him. When I did, he asked me to move in with him, and I told him he was the only person in the world I'd do that for. And then I ran away from him and found a burrito shop that made massive burritos with tons of salsa--you couldn't even get them closed, the workers just kind of lumped them together and threw all the edges on top of the pile inside. Someone ordered a corn burrito, and then I woke up.

I'm by no means a prude--I've done a lot of things with what some might consider a lot of people. But I'll never live with anyone until I'm married. Not for any moral reason, although it probably wouldn't be worth the constant hounding to "just get married" I'd get from my family. It's just that I'd like one thing to be unique to my marriage. Because of the rape issue, it's sure not going to be sex. If things had gone differently, maybe, although I can't see myself really having that kind of willpower. Living together just seems like a nice, kind of old-fashioned thing to save. It's not so terrribly important that it'll wreck a relationship--after all, R and I see each other every day, he's held my hair for me while I puked, I've seen him as angry as he's ever been; there's not a whole lot more to learn if we shared living space.