"'You have a consistent character yourself and you wish all the facts of life to be consistent, but they never are.... All the variety, charm and beauty of life are made up of light and shade.'"

In celebration of the graduate student proto-union strike, I'm up at an ungodly hour being useless and not feeling guilty. My recitations (which, let's face it, I may or may not have attended, since they are at 10 and 11 AM respectively) are canceled, and the decision of whether to attend Adultery Class at 2 PM was left up to us as moral/political individuals by our beneficent professor. Earlier, I did read dutifully about psychoanalysis & Eliot, as well as sexual linguistics & Eliot, as well as other steamy things & Eliot (the writers of readily available lit criticism are letches), and I got a good start on Anna Karenina, which I'm enjoying very much so far. I wish I could read Ada, or Ardor alongside it for maximum pleasure/comprehension, but I probably don't have time for that (blogging, of course, is my one goofing-off indulgence).


In other news, Tara visited me on Tuesday and Wednesday. This engendered the cleaning of my room, for the first time in weeks (usually it's a dark pit where things are furtively procured and consumed, and dishes pile up, and sleep happens at odd hours, and I'm never presentable if I can help it - so for God's sake don't visit me unannounced). She said repeatedly that my room was a cell or a trap, which hardly justified my cleaning efforts. I tried in vain to show off my mastery of Campus Life, which meant eating at a food cart and parading around Locust Walk and relaxing in the overcrowded student union. Tara called Penn "obscenely beautiful" (or something like that?) but also "very preppy." I was likewise "very preppy"; my lifestyle doesn't come off well at all in her summation.


Fortunately, because I am incompetent, I had Anne and Jess at my disposal to take us around Philly on Tuesday night. We took a cab to Chinatown and ate opulently (by my half-starved college girl standards) at Penang, including two supposed drinks that were actually piles of shaved ice, coconut milk, syrup, gelatin, beans, and corn. Afterwards, we walked off the meal towards South Street, with a momentous stop at Condom Kingdom to check out garish cheap dildos, expensive porno DVDs, and various sexually-charged gag items. I bought an adorable pink condom in a lollipop wrapper (and the stick has an orange bow!) just in case my Valentine's Day condom is disappointingly colorless. We also saw the historical district and bordered on the waterfront; meanwhile, the Mardi Gras nightlife (such as there was) picked up around us, though the ominous policeperson/mounted policeperson presence dwarfed the available amiable drunks, due to fear of riots.


On Wednesday afternoon, Tara visited Haverford, so I napped abjectly. It was strange not to be writing for the DP during her visit; there were so many additional hours for me to squander. We met up again in the evening for the student radio benefit concert: Koufax, prefaced by a good local band, a marginal Penn band, and a musical atrocity. The concert was housed in the Rotunda (nee The First Church of Christ Scientist), and the performance site itself was spacious and bare, not heavily attended and connoting residual devotion/asceticism. An apparently sober frat boy tried to crowd surf anyway, causing Tara to say indignantly, "They're moshing in the church!" After a while, the musical situation became so dire that Anne, Jess, Tara, and I escaped briefly to Ben & Jerry's. Back at the Rotunda, I repaid Jess (a WQHS DJ and scapegoat) with Stares of Malice for the godawful emo warm-up act that was musing plaintively into its guitar about the perfection of sadness and sidebangs. Koufax didn't justify our suffering, so we left.

I only wanted her to see
The beauty of the world surrounding her

On Valentine's Day, I woke up inexcusably late and found a goody bag from my RA outside my door, containing holiday Snickers, Hershey's kisses, and a pink condom. I placed my condom forlornly on the side of the desk by my digital camera, evoking a risque tableau that is not to be (well, perhaps someday - it is absolutely necessary that I find out whether the condom itself is pink). I crawled back into bed because Saturday is my customary day for sleeping as if dead, and then I called Seth, and he suffered my sentimental impulses for an hour or so as we discussed books, our lives, and each other's sweeping fundamental flaws (our staples). I worked until early in the morning, with a gap for more talking to Seth, and then I persuaded Jess to go grocery shopping with me at 2:30 AM. We stocked up on Red Bull and sugar-free Red Bull, launching a binge on my part that has had distressing implications for my sleep habits.


Back at Jess & Sarah's place, I imposed on her further by consuming the leftovers from her romantic dinner. I felt like a parasitic hanger-on on the institution of Valentine's Day, but I was neither man-hating nor shamefully lovey-dovey - which is a triumph, I guess, over the crass commercialization of intimacy (grin). I stumbled home, satiated with Pad Thai and energy drink, at 4:30 AM, and there were still interlocked couples on Locust Walk. It was fairly warm and gray out, and there were lights on in the townhouses over the bridge; it seemed like a pleasant time and place to be young and alive, albeit by myself. On Sunday, I woke up at a reasonable hour to write for DP - the only continuous source of stability and good sense in my life - and then I went to Anne's for dessert + gossip.


Perhaps it's the unfortunate number of Sex and the City episodes I've seen lately through illegal downloading, but I perceive iconic or archetypical elements in my relationships with Jess, Sarah, and Anne. We meet for girl talk, and the boys mentioned seem peripheral and changeable - but, of course, we talk about more than sex, including housing, academics, and our latent capacity for super powers. Also, there's often bulk candy, which is now my number one food group. I went home again to start homework at 1:30 AM or so, and my week has progressed since then in terms of unremitting sleeplessness and bewilderingly frequent deadlines.


Oh, but I wrote commentaries on "Prufrock" and "Preludes," and I wish I could write about Eliot forever, but none of the things I actually want to do are lucrative or even generally worthwhile. I was so pleased with my Norton Anthology of Poetry afterwards that I kissed it goodnight, which Tara said sounded perfectly normal, which means it's probably weird. I contributed to the class adultery novel-in-letters, reviewed Madame Bovary just enough to make a couple comments about the fragmentation of religion in modernity, and then I diagrammed sentences for ling, which was a little tedious but much improved by playing with the fonts on MS Word for color-coding. Poetry class completely justified my attendance today when someone suggested that "This is Just to Say" succinctly addresses 15 years of pent-up hostility towards Eliot: "Prufrock doesn't dare to eat a peach, but Williams eats all the plums." Maybe it's just me, or my exhaustion, but I thought it was the funniest thing ever.

Seth (on the phone): You need a potted plant to rant to.
Me: Won't you be my potted plant?
Seth: Happy Valentine's Day to you too.

And this for my sister, who rules -

Marriage is love.

Catch-up summary: I felt at my worst over Winter Break; in general, I suppose when I'm upset that I feel humanly morbidly obese, a billowing excess of uncontrolled feelings and doings. Clearly, I should just exercise more (or at all). All I remember about it in retrospect was posing (in a manner that I believed was) stoically in various photos, and walking with Seth at night on Christmas Eve, trading apocalyptic sulkiness in the near-empty Bethesda cross-streets. I also had some spikes of good cheer, including sushi and making out in a parking lot by a field on New Year's, and making mischief with Tara, et. al, the following Sunday, as captioned below.


Oh, I nearly forgot the TMBG concert - On December 30, I acquired badass mutant rat hand stamps (due to underage) and gleefully ignored my burgeoning cold. During "Older" ("You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older"), I wished Seth a hoarse happy birthday. During "Cyclops Rock," on the line, "There's a whole new generation waiting to be wrecked by you," we gestured emphatically at each other. I made it until the second or third encore before my cold + shouting along to TMBG songs caught up with me, and, presumably hyperventilating, I became very hot and saw black sparks. I started to indistinctly push through the crowd and, disoriented, made it to the bar and was trapped.


Seth rescued me, leading me to the outskirts of concertgoers and up a flight of stairs, to a little corner where I could sit unmolested by security for being a fire hazard. He got me a glass of water from the bar, and I crouched unobtrusively, nursing it, while he stood next to me and tried to make out "Fingertips" from below the balcony. He touched my hair absently and inquired about how I felt. I said that I was fine, and grateful to him, and I practiced measured little breaths into my water cup. The black sparks receded by the time I had my peacoat out of coat-check and we'd recovered Seth's car from a spot adjoining a barbed-wire fenced lot.


I returned to campus early on Saturday, January 10 to move into my new room. The experience of obtaining entrance to the Quad (Spruce itself was blocked off between 36th and 38th), accessing my room, feeding the meter, rearranging furniture to accommodate an (erroneous) notion of the limited number of outlets, haggling to recover my things from Chris's room in Kings Court, transporting them to the car in shifts, locating and making use of storage carts, feeding the meter, unloading everything and carrying it up a flight of stairs, and unpacking and setting up the room - largely outside, during a gloomy and frigid day - caused me to be colder than I may ever have been before, and also sick and weary.


I concluded that first day eating canned soup balanced on a bedside table, and nursing my dejectedness over the Fight Club DVD. In fact, throughout that first week, I did little else besides watch Fight Club during homework, a practice which I should probably resurrect - because it made my little room feel homey to hear the strains of "Where Is My Mind?" at all hours. I found productivity & happiness through attending classes in the mornings, working for the DP in the afternoons, and talking to Seth whenever he was available and especially on snow days. We seem to be back together, but I could be wrong (grin).


Socially, I've been spending a lot of time with Anne, Jess, and Sarah (the people I plan to live with next year) and their assorted friends and love interests. I took the weekend of my birthday off, to go home and see Seth and accrue birthday dinners in restaurants (one with him and one with my parents), but otherwise my new girl friends and I have: clubbed, room-partied, talked for hours about childhood nerdiness and the pleasures of highlighting textbooks, eaten pho and bulk candy together, and, most recently, watched the future father of Jess's and my children perform with Mask & Wig. His name is Gary Lundy; he's a junior here and he appeared as one of Donnie's friends in Donnie Darko, and he is hopelessly adorable and talented and charming, and he must marry at least one of us.


The highlight of my evening (besides the show itself - which is a historical fixture at Penn and involves male undergraduates, some in drag, musically lampooning various things) was the raucous Penn drinking song component afterwards. I took a few sips of Jess's Long Island iced tea, and it went straight to my head, giving me the nonchalance to turn away slyly from the object of my matrimonial aspirations as he walked right past me. Since then, I've been alternately busy and lazy, and sometimes miserable, but RAP-Line and DP are going well (13 published articles to date) and my classes are providing some amount of external validation. I hope to finish with this present busyness and enjoy plenty of goofing off in the next two weeks, before midterm hell circa March 1.

Mood instability has always worked in my favor in terms of cultivating a bewildered worship of the ordinary elements of existence. I wake up from whatever petty problem with myself that I was dwelling on, and discover that breathing itself is still miraculous, that the sharp angles and color contrasts of visual perception are a marvel that belong to my own organs and a network of sensory coils inside me - and, yes, I feel infinitely capable, not because of anything particular to me but due to the fact of my humanity. I am a center of known life and energy in a potentially indifferent universe; I am a conduit for everything I perceive and pass on. And it seems to matter much less whether I deserve what I have (which is, beyond the great number of external boons I enjoy, like an aesthetic and stimulating environment and financial security and kind people, a simple opportunity for near-continuous observation). I feel, instead, a selfish commitment to hold onto being for as long as I'm allowed.

I'm aware of the symptoms of manic-depression and that I act them out on a much smaller scale, including these bursts of prolific egoism. I just thought, having been more open about my sadness last semester, that I might as well not hide the bizarre mania either.

Some photos of things I've done sort of lately, which I have to go back and caption more descriptively:



Late night cavorting at Tara's during Winter Break, with such antics as a.) drawing on the torsos of all the males and one female, b.) making sexual innuendo about the lightsaber until Natalie G. bit the tip off (!?), and c.) playing the third consecutive nightly game of Never Have I Ever (this time with sobriety!).



My First (and potentially last) Clubbing Experience, which entailed: insecurity, elemental frigidity, moral and feminist outrage, and sleepiness, approximately in that order. Pre-gaming beforehand (as the kids call it these days) was a bust and accurately foreshadowed the evening - as I was teased by a boy for my baby-steps in the direction of drunkenness, moments before he downed a double-shot of tequilla and promptly threw up on the carpet. He's a nice guy, and I'm sorry to make fun of him in this format, but I have to get my revenge somehow for all the rolled eyes I've earned through my cautiousness with alcohol.


Anyway, clubbing itself was spooky and monumentally inappropriate, and it transformed me into a man-hater for roughly three hours after we left. Besides the entire male population (and the steep entry free), clubs are fantastic though - the pulsing, shocks of color, strobe lights, the thrill of dancing shamelessly. My only other issue with the event was the preponderance of police cars (and lack of taxis) afterwards - as if after-hours is signaled by a drug bust every night? A murder? I really didn't understand what was going on (grin).



I donned an old homecoming dress for the DP banquet the following night, dawdling in my room during cocktail hour and finally stomping over to the Inn at Penn in high heels, in the snow, at the appointed time for dinner. I was instantaneously out of my depth, as I entered a vast hall of hundreds of people networking; my editor rescued me briefly, escorting me to the bar and introducing me to the new love of my life (for the evening), the amaretto sour.

I made a friend named Farouk after the formalities (dinner & speeches), and he rescued me further, a.) getting me another drink and b.) helping me escape to a party full of Penn drama kids, where I was marginally less socially paralyzed.