My days lately, and Tumblr anger

The majority of my life is undocumented now. It would look like: me in front of my laptop or reading, or cooking, or baking, in suspiciously pajama-like clothes. Or me driving to class and then sitting in the back row next to the window in half-lotus, rolling my eyes ferociously and making unrelated notes. (Our rather poor excuse for a teacher tried to force me to let her see them today. Excuse ME. No, I did say, "Excuse me? No, I am not doing work for another class. I do not have any other classes.")

I think for some of us the problem with being alone too much is not being sad, but being bereft of the moderating influence of others. Ideas and impulses and moods are amplified when they are only bouncing off the inside of one's own skull. Agree/disagree?

The parts we do have pictures of:








Odessa, who lent me her disposable to take the picture below.


Burned the backs of my thighs yesterday on a "read and eat cherries in the sun" escape with her to Crissy Field. Cleared a whole bunch of books off my shelf to try to sell (oh I am broke as a joke thanks to backing out of Uganda...).

I got a rather vicious message on Tumblr, which leaves a lingering bad taste in my mouth even though I don't take it personally or even seriously. Yuck. I think I'm always willing to talk, but some people can't hear; there's no point. They hold their agenda too tightly.

I'm tired — so very tired — of witnessing the "FUCK YOU" reaction from people who've read something they don't like. I think such vitriolic reactions are not a sign that we believe deeply in our ideas, but rather that we are identifying too closely with our ideas and opinions, that we have to attack whoever threatens them rather than engaging the problematic ideas. (I have done it too, mind.) Because if the urgency were about the real issues, we would do something that was actually effective. Please, believing things deeply doesn't excuse us from our duty to treat each other well — it is so easy to hurt, and there's too much yelling already.

[Random comments always welcome; below comment space however is especially reserved for reflections/experiences with ugly online stranger-anger in case you would like to unburden some bad flavor.]

Wicker Park

It is home to a seemingly unjustifiable concentration of wig dealers. Somehow the spring darkness makes it the right kind of place for wandering — but then, I feel that way about cities in general...

Happiness and gratitudes

• Confiding in "real-life" friends too.

• A thrifted skirt so long that it can hide my toes, and that it reminds me of a very beautiful spirit whom I roomed with three years ago.

• Being in the rain with two rainy-haired-my girlfriends, and the wild way people at this college get when the big storms come.

• News that three of my peers from anthro and German got the Fulbright—which also means that two of my friends will be in Germany next year while I am!

• Nirvana, earlier Jack Johnson, and the score from Everything is Illuminated.

• I need an expression for something in the soul that is analogous to growing pains in the body. It's what these past twelve months or so have been for me.

• Being out in the muddy and mistiness of the night, almost hearing the earth softening.

• The love-mail I received during my birthday week, and the people who sent it.

• Lying down in a parking lot at dusk and trying to follow the conversation patterns of the songbirds there.

• Just the right Medicine presenting itself as I began to get sickened by Saturday.

• Screaming.

• Swimming in the Lake, and how warm the air felt when you came out of the water.

• That there is enough time. It would be idiomatic for me to claim otherwise at this point in the semester, but enough is defined by what is necessary, so define necessary by what there is enough time for and THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR ANYTHING THAT MATTERS ENOUGH, and so, division property of equality, there is time for anything that matters.

• Having my first roll of slide film in my camera right now.

• Discussing Grimm fairy tales as vehicles for the transmission of cultural ideas about agency.

"I did not allow my daughters to watch Cinderella until they were old enough to deconstruct it from a feminist point of view."
- my culture theory professor

I was underway