Rant and Ramble

evidently, i'd be worth exactly $1,910,516.00 on the open human market.
who knew?

blood-drawing needles leave crescent-shaped wounds.
crackleplastic covering the not-soft mattress which holds me aloft, sacrificial gazelle beneath buzzing flourescent lights. impartial falsecheerful nurse who disregards my assertions that i've bled this way before.

a little sting, honey, and that's all.

i watch the needle. i always watch the needle; i think it's a stickypainproving akin to the way i walk across subway grates despitebecauseof my residual fear that they will collapse beneath me. i watch the needle nestle beneath my skin, licking into my shy veins, slaking a monotonous vampiric thirst.
then a quiet stomachclench before the only part of the process which truly twinges a psychological dischord:
there is a small tube attached to the needle, which they tape down across your wrist, fleshy side up resting precariously on the edge of the pallet and leading to fist, prepared to squeeze intermittantly on the small plastic cylinder provided for that purpose. a heartbeat after the needle comes to rest inside your vein, the first crimson swishes through that tube. across your wrist, and thence to the bag which will hold, at end, a pint of lifeblood.
across your wrist, where you can feel the warmth of that life leaving you, rushing from the relative containment of skin and flesh where it belongs, where it belongs, and becoming an anonymous number to be entered at the tone.

you saved three lives today.

and hold that tight to my chest, pull it into my undeluged heart and use it in place of the pint of me left sloshing about in that strange plastic bag and four test tubes.

in the morning, i forget who i am.
the night bulges with dreams so vivid and absolute that waking brings a moment of inchoate awareness, a moment in which i am neither my dreaming nor my waking self. a moment that slips by, unnoticed or immediately disregarded and thrown to the winds of necessity. classes, sunlight, worry.

sleep is dynamic rather than static. somewhere between a few and a dozen times a night, i'm pulled out of sleep to move, shift, roll over. by morning, the comforter is shoved against the wall or flung halfway across the room, pillows are found under the bed or at my feet, and it takes that disoriented moment to find myself.

today slid open with the press of solidity against me. early morning light slanting through newly-cleaned windows and casting ivyshadows on our legs. my first awareness of the day is skin.
my first expression of the day is smile.

stretching calves and toes, i find the impossible softness of his feet, and, murmuring wordless apologies for waking so early, curl myself back against him.
in the haze of incoherent morningness, happiness filters through me, soft and pink and golden, until all my words and all my world dissolve into the depth of the mattress, the scent of skin, the sound of breath.

he sighs, sleepdrenched, and pulls me closer.

mixing paint like meditation.

the dignity of each color spinning into the others, learning which are partnerships and which are rivals. red and orange are old, careless friends. red and green are abusive lovers; put side by side the energy sings between them, but truly together they scream and flail and lose themselves, and eventually just stare at each other until each turns to a sad, quiet grey. white tries to mediate and but always fails, thinks too much, pulls the energy from everything it touches.

mix red and violet, find an angrybruised hue. add red, and the blood comes to the surface. add more violet, and the healing begins anew... but the color is different. the moment is passed, and that particular shade will never exist again.

i think the reason i'm a design student is that i don't feel like i'm making this up.

"and it looks like the buildings are burning but it's just the sun" -ani

lease faxed to parents.
phone call to grandmother.
birthday card for roommate, bought way in advance.
going to museum, as per assignment.
took my multivitamin.
giving blood tomorrow.

yes, i am a good person.

"and i asked this God a question and by way of firm reply He said - i'm not the kind you have to wind up on sundays" - Jethro Tull

it is just me, or is the frequency of my blogging a direct ratio to the amount of homework i should be doing?

i don't trust elevators.

especially the ones that grind their way slowly, creaking mournfully the whole way up, then pause dramatically - long enough that you start calculating the how much longer the oxygen will last - before jolting down half a foot and reluctantly stuttering open the doors.

today, one of those was pried halfway open by a sweating repairman who grunted against some mechanism while the elevator floor hovered a few feet up the shaft and the dark abyss of the lower floors gaped around his frame.

today, i think i'll take the stairs.

"you've never been to the moon/but don't you want to go?" -melissa etheridge

i lied.
i have been writing. i've just not been inundated with words... i've been writing, but i haven't had the burning, driving need to write. i think that's the difference, that's what seems so strange to me.

it's all cycles, it's all rhythm.
we wake and sleep, step and sing, even love in rhythms. there are days when i am constantly groping for something to write on, when every margin i can reach is filled with little scrawled phrases. words that hurl themselves against the smooth inside of my skull until i find some way to give them life. thusly made are the handful of stories which i begat but could not bring to bloom, which have a few lines, a few pages written quickly and perfectly and which have no ending. in the mires of my computer are files which consist of maybe six words, maybe a dozen, thrown onto the keyboard for fear of some violent reaction if left inside my mind for a moment more.

she clings to freedom like an angel to her wings
and she screams like a demon when she sings

and then there are days when no words come. when i feel abandoned and desolate and alone.
odd that such little things could have so much sway over my life, but it's a thing i've always known.

and there are those stretches of time when i write occasionally and quietly, neither burning nor broken.
i've always been so strange about moderation.

sunlight. sunlight and little fingers of grass that push against my skin.
roll over, musclemovement.
sweetwhite marble, stretch, shade.
the quickblink of the camera.
hair in eyes.
sunlight, sunlight against every surface of me.
spin until i'm dizzy, laughter, the camera blinks again, again.
dappled sunshade treebranch.
and little grass fingers, closedeyes, sunshine smile.

72 frames in forty minutes.
aahh...

it's strange.

i have all these emotions, these ideas, this overwhelming reality... and i can't write.
i sit down to try, to compose a poem or a song or just a string of thoughts, and i come up empty. usually when i'm drenched in emotion, i spill out in words.

i haven't written a poem in weeks. i've figured out music to go behind songs i wrote ages ago, but i haven't written anything new. i've been churning out scenes for my scriptwriting class, but that isn't expressive in any real way.
i suppose it really only bothers me in principal - i like when i create things, i tend to feel strange when i don't.

i think, really, it's due to the fact that i'm not burying anything. i'm vocalizing the emotions i have, expressing them in ways clear enough that i don't need the intricasies of a poem.
or maybe i'm just happy, and happiness makes for bad poetry.

is procrastination diagnosable?

i wish that zack de la rocha didn't sound so very much like adam sandler.

well, it's taken me about a week to eat most of a two-pound box of chocolates.
that's not so bad.

reminds me of the nutrition study.

which makes me think - i consider myself a relatively balanced, emotionally healthy person. i think i have a good idea of who i am, and, more importantly, a good acceptance of who i am - mentally, spiritually and physically. i know that i'm not in my best shape, but i quite honestly like how i look and, more importantly, i feel healthy.
but, regardless, being made to sit and answer interminable questions about how i feel about food, how i feel about how i look, how i feel about how i feel about food and how i look... made me slightly paraniod. i definitely ate less and more carefully for the few days following each visit.

and that really irks me. i hate the idea that my perception of myself was so easily shaken, that i succumbed so easily to the pressures of the american ideal.

but. i'm now going to go be taught how to sing by my sweet and ever-so patient someone.
and i'm still beautiful.
so there.

there is nothing in the world like having someone to say goodmorning to.

a quote i've always liked, sparked in my memory by peter's entry today:
"i gave my life to become the person i am right now. was it worth it?"

cheerios will be my salvation.

"i can see you staring at the sky, undressing the moonlight with your eyes"

woke up angry today.
i don't know why, there's no reason for it, nobody and nothing that i'm angry at.
just angry. just feeling bottledup and antsy and like lashing out.

i'm ridiculously nervous about auditions. my whole life i've been told i can't sing. for a long time most of my friends wouldn't let me - now i tend to do it anyway and endure the grimaces.
but i've always distinctly avoided any situation in which i would have to sing alone in front of an audience larger than maybe two of my best friends.

i think the problem is that singing is always something i've wanted to be able to do, something that i've vaguely hoped i would one day suddenly be good at... and this, auditioning, has become like a test of that.
and i know i can't sing.

i've always hated the idea that there are things i simply can't do. i'm a definite proponent of mind over matter, and for most aspects of my life, my will alone is strong enough to accomplish what i want.
i remember being shocked the first time i couldn't do another rep when i was weight lifting. shocked, that i was simply incapable of raising that bar and those weights one more time, and no amount of determination was going to make me.

almost as shocked as i am every time i discover that i can't dictate to myself what i feel, every time i fall in love when i didn't mean to.

i'm still playing with the page, obviously, so there'll be new links popping up and maybe disappearing, and format changes as my whim dictates.
so there.

::hyperventilate::

auditions are tomorrow
auditions
are
tomorrow
tomorrow
!

::hyperventilate::

sometimes i feel like the entirety of language is onomatopoetic.
words that just seem to so perfectly fit what they mean...
stumble. seep. forest. echo.

i suppose it's just a lifetime of being immersed in the language. the collection of symbols that create the word "nothing" have always stood for emptyness and lack of substance, and so that collection of symbols comes to mean those things, starts to be those things...

the human brain needs to understand. we are built, neurally, to believe in magic and supernatural things, because the brain needs to make order out of the chaos of the world. we correlate information, group it, name it, even when a real connection isn't there.
name it. we think verbally more often than not, tend to be more comfortable when we can articulate our thoughts to ourselves. language is a vital and integral part of the human thought process, of human existance.

"nothing" comes to mean emptyness and lack of substance; but, even more and more amazingly, emptyness and lack of substance come to mean "nothing." the relationship is reversed... the label is an intrinsic part of the emotion, the experience, the reality of all those things that are are contained within it.

the eskimos, as everyone knows, have their some-dozen number of words for "snow." could they distinguish between those types of snow before they had the words for them? the danes have a word - hygge - which has no translation to english. the best i've heard is "the warm fuzzy feeling you get when spending time with friends." do we experience less of that emotion, since we don't have the word to explain it? comfort isn't the same, joy is closer... ever read stranger in a strange land? i think that's the book, at least... one culture (ours) is waging war on another, alien culture, and they don't understand because they have no word for war or hatred. no translation, no comprehension.
it's a chicken-egg problem, i suppose. can you have hatred before you have the word for it? of course. but can you understand hatred, can you know that you're feeling it?

i think the realization of self is dependent on language, on being able to make the subtle chaos of the world concrete by way of articulation.

but then, there are those moments when you know that words will never be enough to encompass the depth of what you feel, when the most eloquent you can be is smiling.

three day weekend. rock.
and, because we have no more university service learning whatever class, i have nothing on tuesday.
four day weekend.
rock.

unfortunately, i have nothing to say that will turn into words right now, so i have no good way to make up for missing a day (!), and i apologize for all of you who were i'm sure deeply disappointed.
i'll do better next time, i promise.
turn the phone off, even, and devote my whole attention.

my roommate, a photo major, is going to be using me as the model for a project of hers today. i get to run around 30th street station in a trenchcoat.
should be fun - plus, it'll satiate my little narcissistic leanings.
whole rolls of film, all of me!

and for all the capitalist commercialism and the bullshit pink flutterhearts, it's just so neat that we have a holiday dedicated to love.

and for all that i go on about living outside the traditional ideals of femininity, i do so love getting flowers.

happy valentine's day, darling.

"when you going to make up your mind?
when you going to love you as much as i do?" - tori amos

the whole concept of human interaction just stuns me sometimes.
on the bus coming back from my last visit with the first graders, a stop sign paused us beside two people meandering down the street. a man and a woman, around the same age, mid-40's maybe. they matched the neighborhood; worn, stubborn, underestimated. she looked angry, he looked resigned.

she glanced up and met my eyes for a moment.
the bus hissed as we drove away.

the realization that every human being has a history, a pressing worry, a sex life, a tragedy, a true love, a secret they've never told anyone. and these encapsulated myraids flow over and across each other, touching and moving apart, changing in ways so intricate and absolute that they can go years and moments before realizing their depth.
over the freeway and across the Schuylkill, tinted glass windows hide the faces of the people we pass. all i can see is the road, the shining shells of cars, the groping buildings, and the blurred reflection of my own face.

sitting next to me, he says, "it just seems like you're thinking something interesting."

interesting.

there's something about flannel sheets against bare skin.
the delicious billowing of a down comforter, the sigh of air as it falls, sleep already entangled in the pillow, and the decadance of carving two hours of sleep out of the solidity of a winter's afternoon.

sleeping naked is different than sleeping clothed. the way the fabric moves against your skin, and how the arm that is left draping over the covers can feel every air current that sifts through the room.
there is a sense of unity, of the unbroken line of your body cradled by bed, whole unto itself.

and, waking, there is the moment of fullness, acknowledgement that those dancing dreams were contained in this flesh, that all the world is contained within this flesh.

buddhacalmhappy.
yes.

sigh.
so strange to be a woman.

how much of our lives dilate in concentric rings from the dripsplash of lunar blood into clear toilet water, the constant heldbreath of three days late, gritted achepain teeth, strange shame, pure goddammit notnow inconvenience?

and, in that faraway fairytale way, the burgeoning womblife that is washed away each month.

the first panicked lotus moment, afraid that you'll bleed to death there in the public restroom stall.

we are always bleeding, somewhere inside.

"Come on, they're not all that impressed with conversation
True gentlemen avoid it when they can
But they dote and swoon and fawn
On a lady who's withdrawn
It's she who holds her tongue who gets her man"
-the little mermaid

boy, am i screwed.

does it work?

In the beginning, Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him.

2 And Man gave unto God a multitude of names, that he might be Lord over all the earth when it was suited to Man.

3 And on the seven millionth day Man rested and did lean heavily on his God and saw that it was good.

4 And Man formed Aqualung of the dust of the ground, and a host of other likened unto his kind.

5 And these lesser men Man did cast into the void. And some were burned; and some were put apart from their kind.

6 And Man became the God that he had created and with his miracles did rule over all the earth.

7 But as these things did come to pass, the Spirit that did cause Man to create his God lived on within all Men: even within Aqualung.

8 And Man saw it not.

9 But for Christ's sake he'd better start looking.

yeah Jethro Tull.

  # 16:48

asleep around five, alarm at seven thirty.
madonna.
bannerweb, classes don't fit, schedule doesn't work.
fuck fuck fuck.
fix it.
ninteen credits. fuck fuck fuck.
physics class. masochist.
breakfast at nine.
blog blog blog.
mmmm... guitar...

and then the early-morning call from ex-boyfriends who inform you that they've suddenly realized the meaning of regret.

and in the silence of the way i dream, the drenchedlight darkening of eyelids that flutteropen and find eternity there smiling with shirt in hand, the way i can pull my toes against the sheets and know that today i am real, the world is shiningshimmer and brilliantly black, more than i can hold and behind my eyes i see it all, i see the way the world tilts to meet us, the way the angrylight fades to softhappy doublewords like poems that fall away in the wake of water that i'd forgotton was so sweet, forgotton i could fly that i soar that my mouth can make these words come true beneath the blankwall curtain screen that stares at me, the words that pull me from myself and leave me silent spinning alseep and knowing how the light will hit the ocean even if i am here not to see it, and the whisperslide of skin that reaches all the edges of the universe, all the crevices of the mind, the world the world the sky is so full and dripping with all the things we know and hold so dearly...
and in life, we love.
and in love, we live.

"it's not important to be defined/it's only important to use your time wisely" -ani
dear god, i'm addicted.
though we all know i love to talk, and i love to write maybe even more than i love talking, so i suppose it's really not a big surprise that i write so much on here.

we spent a good hour in figure drawing today without a model, using a skeleton instead. my usual gestural drawings looked different with the flesh removed.
the spine became a frenetic zig-zagged line, sweeping curves for the ribcage, dark lines of armbones, hipbones, the space of the skull, dark eyesockets, empty nose. new paper, discovering new bones, new lines, the shoulderblades becoming collarbone, the movement of the charcoal and the spaces between.

and now i'm home, feeling smudged and blurred, strangely aware of the pull of gravity. listening to ani, remembering the first time i heard this album, driving home from berkeley after visiting brig, echoing empty.
strange how long ago that was.

and, as the ever-brilliant being that i am, i've decided to take ninteen credits next term.
this is, in theory, to aid my plan to take lots of credits next year and get an extra summer off.
however, in the meantime, i'll be going absolutely mad.

oh, and anyone have any good ideas about an audition piece?

and i would like to announce, just for the record, that i went over eight hours today without eating, and i didn't bitch about it at all until at least the last hour or so.
so there. miracles do happen.

i had my palm read at the cast party.
evidently, my "headline" and "loveline" are one and the same. this, apparently, is not a usual phenomenon. the headline represents your personality, and its distance from the life line is supposed to reflect whether your personality defines your life, or vice versa.
since mine start from the same place, that means that my life defines my personality.
since my headline and loveline are melded into one, apparently the events of my life also determine who i love.

makes sense to me, more or less.

Last night of the show.
Awww...

"no illusions, circumstance or tradgedies / this is just what i need." -michael kovacs
cast parties are such a fantastically strange breed of event.
the show yesterday went bumpily, a lot of dropped lines and missed cues and whatnot, but i think everyone was really impressive about covering for each other and being there when they were needed.

in general, i've very much enjoyed being a part of the drama program here. in part because drama kids are drama kids, and i can't think of any better way to find a good-sized handful of kindred spirits in one place than to walk into the green room before a performance. and also because these people are just plain talented. from my little black box of curtains and stairways on stage left, i can't see anything but the occasional entrance and exit, and my knowledge of the play is almost entirely auditory.

but still, almost every night, i discover a new favorite part, some new layer to the play, some new complexity that has been revealed by the actors. on the basis of vocal inflection alone, there are times when i am genuinely moved by what's happening on stage.
and to see that talent supported by a real stage, with real curtains and complicated lighting and an audience that numbers in a high plurality of dozens...
sigh
it just warms a little dork's heart.

it's nearly 4am. why the hell am i still awake?
oh, right. i'm in college.
nearly forgot.

so this is me, sleeping through my eleven o'clock class.
oh well.

"i am not a pretty girl" -ani
just because dichotomy is such a cool word.

i've always had this weird sense of duality when it comes to the idea of femininity. i wrote my sociology midterm about this, beginning with, "The development of the social self is beset on all sides by the insuppressible clamoring of the world."
from birth, we are inundated with the expectations of society, by the ideas that other people have of who and what you are, and who and what you can or should be. through the media, parents, teachers, the world at large, we learn what it means to be a person - male versus female, black versus white versus asian versus mexican versus all the subtleties of ethnic culture, gay versus straight versus bi versus all the subtleties of sexuality.

as a child, the label was "tomboy." as i've grown up, it tends more towards "intimidating," "confusing," and "strange."
which is okay.
at a very young age, i began what was to become a long-running tradition of surrounding myself with male friends. i rode bikes with them, climbed trees with them, made mud pies with them. i did all the things that little boys do, to paraphrase dar. i just did them all in pink frilly dresses.
in kindergarten, my two favorite things in the world were pink frilly dresses, and dirt.
that's still a fairly accurate synopsis of my personality - just the pink frilly dresses have evolved into leather pants, dangly earrings and high heels, and the dirt has come to include kickboxing, swearing and charcoal.

i can roll out of bed, into clothes and out the door in five minutes, and i can spend six hours getting ready.
i've questioned my sexuality, been mistaken for a boy, been told i was the "perfect woman." each on several occasions.
i go through stages where i don't cry, ever, at all, followed by stages of intense emotional vulnerability.
for all of my life, i've felt like i'm dancing on the line between what society defines as masculine and feminine, somewhere between what i'm told i should be, what i think i should be, and what i am.
i've never wanted to be the flutter-eyed simpering soap-opera maiden. there was always this feeling that what the media declared "woman" was less than the whole truth - a feeling that i think was rooted deeply in the role my mother played as a strong and independent person. it never seemed to me that she had to sacrifice any of what she was to her marriage or my dad.

it took a long, long time before existing outside the bounds of traditional femininity was recieved as anything approaching good.
though i suppose nobody really enjoys middle school anyway.

"stop me, won't you, if you've heard this one before?" -ani
so there's this dichotomy of my personality, which i suppose is a fairly common thing to have. its not like a clean break or anything, there's certainly only one of me, mumblings to myself aside.
but there are definitiely at least two distinct sides to the way i see myself, the way i interact with myself - the "inside" me, and the "outside" me. i mean that in a few ways - there's the me that exists inside myself and the me that gets presented to the world. similarly, there's the me that i present to the world when the "world" consists of my room and the people i know - inside - and the me that is presented to the world outside. i have a weird internal elevator ritual, and by the time i'm out the door and in the sunlight, i've consciously dropped every insecurity about my appearance or capabilities.

ironically, there's an easy way to label this change. inside, i'm caitlin; outside, i'm kat.
that wasn't a purposeful distinction that i ever cultivated, but it works fairly accurately. i introduce myself as kat, and the people who've known me the longest nearly all call me caitlin.
it's not as though one of those is the "true" me and the other is some contrivance. i'm just as much one as the other, each is an equally valid part of my personality and myself. and it's not as though there's really any change... it's just which part of my personality i choose to reveal, how much of myself i put into any particular situation. and in the elevator on the way out, i'm choosing to be a person who has self-confidence and a short attention span and a large vocabulary. it doesn't mean that i'm not that person, or that i lose any other part of who i am in the process. ::shrug::

i don't think there are very many people who can honestly say that they behave the same in every situation - different situations demand that we assume different social roles, and i know that i act differently at home with my parents than i do at the coffeeshop with my friends, and for that matter, differently depending on which friends i'm with. i think that's a natural and healthy psychological response to the fact that different relationships involve different interactions.
i think this is just an umbrella bracketing, the first distinction in the branching of what becomes an infinite number of interactions with an infinite number of people and situations.
interesting, though.

arugh.

so today i went and played with the first graders... i totally adore those kids. my desire to be a parent has sixteenth-toopled over the past three weeks. they're totally insane but they adore me right back, and a big handful of them came up and gave me hugs today, and one little girl told me she loved me... awwww... makes me feel bad for teaching them ruthless capitalism.

it was interesting. in university last week, the teacher was asking us about our classes. she asked us if our kids were being 'good.' there were a number of responses, then she posed the question of whether 'good' means 'obedient.' personally, i think that's a really good question. we discussed it breifly, in the usual manner of discussions in that class - she says something, the class responds with deafening silence, she repeats herself, one person volunteers a timid answer, deafening silence, and we move on. the irony, of course, is that she's very much a methodical teacher and has a hard time when we don't give her the exact answer she's looking for.

so the question - does 'good' mean 'obedient'? i know that my class is generally quiet and attentive and that i consider those 'good' qualities, and that i am guiding them towards an answer that I want, and when they give that answer, i say 'good.' but i believe very strongly in the idea that a better education comes through questioning and pushing, rather than accepting and obeying. am i a hypocrite?

i like to think that if i were a real teacher with a greater familiarity and affinity for the subject matter, that i would be able to allow a number of varied responses to any particular question, or at the least, a number of thought processes to reach a particular answer. my university professor teaches us very much the way i teach the first graders - there is a set of objectives to be met, a set of concepts that are supposed to be absorbed and understood...and any straying from the most direct path to those goals is dismissed. that is absolutely my least favorite class.
am i a hypocrite?
sigh...

oh yeah, and i've got a link to susie's page now (hey nika, didja know susie has a page?)

that was one hell of a fucking fieldgoal. yeah football.

good lord, what a long day.

"if i was beautiful like you/i would never be at fault/i'd walk in the rain between the raindrops/bringing traffic to a halt" - joydrop
played guitar for the first time in a long, long time last night. remembered a few songs i'd written, threw some music out for a few more that had been floating around in the realm of silent lyrics, and wore my fingers down to a pulp. i haven't written anything new in a while, so far as songs go. i've been very much in poetry mode, coming up with long streams of mixedword rambles and stacatto rhythms, nothing with rhymes or logic, and, more importantly, nothing that has accompaniment in my head when i recite it to myself.
but poetry is good, and random, wordless guitaring is good.

in theory, this page is going to archive itself every week... and the old posts are going to be in the link "go back" since the old page is under the link "archive" - just for the sake of confusion, you understand. however, it's not yet been long enough for that to happen, so wait a while before trying the link. as of now, it goes nowhere. carpe diem. carpe diem.

"can you hear the things i cannot say?"
the light. there was this light tonight, this incredible light. walking down 34th, the buildings were being hit by this impossible light, and the sky behind them just seethed, deep, roiling. it looked like someone had held these glistening, perfect jewels against the dream of a panther, and somehow made it a skyline. to the south the clouds were magenta and gold against a flat grey, and straight overhead the sky was calm blue. we'd been walking, earlier, elise and i, and out of nowhere came a gorgeous downpour. fifteen seconds, and we were soaked. toes were pruned and hair plastered to our heads, and we stumbled along, blind, laughing, until it stopped, suddenly as it had began.
what a beautiful, beautiful world.

My ankles are plotting a coup, i can feel it.