snow! snow snow snow snow! snow! SNOW!

a quietly perfect weekend: rainy and stormy and windy, my very favorite weather. i spent the morning at home, making a book and writing (25000!), then had a wonderful dinner with friends. we made four huge pizzas (artichoke hearts, peppers, mushrooms and onions; pineapple, mushroom, onion and half chicken with barbeque sauce; tomato, onion, garlic and avocado, and i don't remember the fourth, peppers and onions and lots of cheese, maybe) and drank lots of wine, then had a wonderful after-dinner conversation about sexuality, gender, and love. i spent the night there, snuggling with my friend tim (after a very, very long discussion about why i was nervous about just spending the night and snuggling). in the morning we had cold pizza for breakfast and drank green tea and watched the storm. after a while we decided to rent a movie, after which i came home to do my homework. we'd rented supersize me, and so for dinner tonight i made myself a big pot of rice and lentils and potatoes, with spinach and chili and garam masala, and tamari-roasted sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds and peanut butter, and a salad with more spinach and tomatoes and avacado and walnuts and pecans. and that made me feel less like i needed to fast for a week. and now i'm going to work on my paper for natural history, and listen to ani and the rain.

i'm just over 20,000 words now, though they aren't all posted yet. I've not been keeping quite to 3,000 a day, but hopefully I'll get some solid progress made this weekend and then a whole ton in the airport/on the plane before thanksgiving. The end is nigh.


And this is getting harder and harder to keep public. It wasn't ever a novel in any real sense of the word - it's merely self-absorbed rambling. But it came at a time when I needed to work through a whole slough (slew?) of issues, and it has been immensely helpful in that regard. Which means that the content - which was all me to begin with - is getting increasingly personal and, even more than that, intimate. Speaking spiritually, not sexually (though there is some of that in there too).


At any rate, a caveat or four: If you recognize yourself in here, my thanks and/or apologies in advance. If you think you recognize yourself but you're confused, I may well have blended two (or more) stories - this is, at least ostensibly, fiction, after all. If you're bored with the blow-by-blow account of my existential crisis, stop reading. If you're going to leave a comment, be nice. If you have a personal response to make, write me.


thanks.

a few things between the completion of my first thousand words today and my embarking on the next two:


- a lesson on mindfulness while driving.

- if you haven't seen jon stewart on crossfire, do it now. now.

- well, i dont' want to say the election was stolen, but i think maybe the election was stolen.

-the missing link? cool.

- the ever-eloquent Arundhati Roy on peace and justice.


now if only i could write like her.

15,000. forgive me if i'm not writing much of anything else...

today i was startled to realize that there are only a very few weeks of the semester left. i'm going home for thanksgiving, and then we get out of school on december 10, and then that's it! home for december and then back for the spring: permaculture for drylands, small scale agriculture, women's religious lives, and opening the creative mind.


there's lots of minidrama, but on the whole i am still exceedingly happy here. horray.

ten thousand.

what?! i mean, WHAT?! [via sixfoot6]

this is what i love about my school:

in my biology class last wednesday, we took what would be called a midterm at any other school. it's one of two tests we have the entire quarter, and synthesizes pretty much everything we've covered. it had eight questions and took me two hours.


three guys in my class didn't show up for class last wednesday, and didn't take the exam. they all had different and pretty good excuses, but none of them called the professor to tell her they'd be missing class, and they all assumed they'd be able to make it up later. my professor - who is an awesome and incredible teacher and woman - was offended at the lack of respect for her and the class that they had showed. she told them she didn't want to give them the test to make up, but that she would put it before the class because their responsibility to us had been shirked as well. accordingly, we spent most of an hour today, debating whether it would be fair to us if they were able to take the test, whether it would be fair to them if they couldn't, what the point of the test was, and how they could show us, and the professor, that they were commited to us and to the class, taking into account that not all of them are recieving grades. we talked about traditional versus nontraditional values in terms of who judges whether or not you know something, the fact that jason's claim that he shouldn't have to take a timed, written test is negated by the fact that he knew we would have one and could have contracted not to take it at the beginning. every single person in the class explained their position and opinion. in the end, we decided that, since they'd been present when we reviewed the test, it wouldn't be useful for them to take it, but that they needed to do something to prove that they have an understanding of the information we're supposed to have learned, and that they have the respect they should as self-directed students for the teacher who comes in every day to guide them. i'm not sure what the other two plan to do, but jason is planning to write a song for every chapter we've covered so far, and play them for the class next week. and that will be his midterm.


i'm trying to picture a class debating the value of tests, much less someone playing a song about photosynthesis, at drexel, and i just can't do it.

five thousand words! only 45,000 to go. dear god.

here's an interesting map: county-by-county, with a mix of red and blue according to actual percentage of the vote. there's still a whole lot of red, but it's more comforting (and more alarming, if you think about how narrow that margin of victory was) than, say, this one.


also, take a look at this graph, which really creeps me out, and this article which i'm praying (to my own, personal, not-in-any-way-related-to-george-bush's god) is conspiracy-theory hype because it terrifies me.


to keep from disentegrating completely, i also recommend this and this (both from heather corrina's journal, which is also often a heartening read.)


because i don't know how to revolt against this, because i don't know what to burn or who to blame, my pledge is this:

i will do everything in my power to be grateful, to be honest, and to be generous every day, in every moment. i will do everything i can to increase the peace and beauty in my own life, in the lives of those around me and those i love. i will do everything i can to support the wild: that which obeys its own rules and maintains its own grace. creeks and wolves and love and poetry and music and sex and bellydancing and songbirds and redwoods and falling leaves. i will love as hard and fierce and fully as i can, i will try to move past my fears. i will submit to anger when it takes me, will weep when i need it, will sleep naked and make friends and drink tea around the campfire. and that shall be my rebellion.


today i will renew my membership to the aclu, go for a hike and not grumble about the parking fee, and work on my book of poems. i will dance, i will sing, and goddamnit i will not give up.

and, as i'd promised, here it is: my novel. you'll want to start at the beginning by click the little excerpt with a 1 next to it. hopefully i'll be adding at least a thousand words a day - I've already fallen behind, which is a bit worrisome. nonetheless! i don't really have a plot, so it's kinda based on a melodramatic version of actual events on my life. i've definitely done some extrapolation, which will probably only increase as time goes on. feel free to leave comments, but please be nice. this is tough enough as it is. also, i'm not worried about much in the way of mechanics or, to be honest, quality. at this point, it's all about getting as many words cranked out as quickly as possible. in december i'll think about editing.

dancing, dancing, barefoot on hardwood floor, bass and drum and moaning voices pouring through me, guilt and fear and anger dripping from my fingertips like sweat, rushing down my legs and out my pounding feet, hard fierce joy thrumming through me, i am laughing, i am weeping: i am dancing. we expected drums and a didj, but instead there was a boy with his computer and a keyboard, but he was good. he played tibeten chants over hiphop beats, just drumsounds, something halfway techno but with a sitar singing through. sweet rhythm, sweet sound. and we danced and danced and danced, bit by bit losing our selfconscious worry, limbs flailing and feet near to bleeding. not sexy, not stylish, not graceful, just moving. just music.



today my degree plan is due, and i have two signatures left to gather. we did an electrophoresis lab in bio, in natural history we had a former student tell us about herpetology and later attended a symposium on drought and pinyon pine death. turns out we're several years into the worst drought in at least 1400 years, and predictions suggest that there's another 30 to go. they called it "global-scale climate shift"-related drought, said there's no precedence whatsoever in any record we've got. hundred percent death in some stands.


when anything bad happens, since tuesday night, my response has been: not only is the end of the world coming, but... and it was a joke, at first, sort of, but i'm beginning to feel it's true. not only is the end of the world coming, but all the trees are dying, too.


i just take what comfort i can from my csa veggies, the sunlight, music. make dinner with friends, ace my bio exam, hold on to hope.

i just don't have curse words enough.

vote! or i will poke you with a sharp stick! please.