how many.

I'm about the biggest idiot around sometimes, but every so often I don't know what to say, so I just let him walk away, see you on Thursday, oh my god I'll think of you until then. So sometimes, between thinking of Greece, Germany, Ireland, I settle on London. And I know I'm stupid, and I know it has everything to do with his voice and his way of expressing the inexpressible while speaking of old stories once serialized. So I say nothing, wait for his gesture, leave, my ears ringing, my heart beat pounding against my chest so fragile I feel I might break.

And things in my life are so varied, so abstract, so hectic right now all I can do to express them is write incoherently. It's my formal manifestation of my inner insanity.

among pages of books, among thoughts, among intellectual garbage.

And in the blankets and
so deep down in the smoke
and
traveled far for ten days
you.
There are quiet spaces
they whisper and
they scream
and you wake up
in darkness.
Lights out and eyes closed
for you
Lost and feeling
and emptying to the physical
Thoughts and floating
clouds and red sunsets
dry heat sticks to your
fingers where I told
you let me go
screams and then
QUIET!
laugh and smile and hold onto
it all
mistakes and it all goes.
Today, well, today
I thought that you
it's not anyone
at all.
That if I made those
choices so far beyond
so deep the red it bleeds into the
clouds and heats the sky
and dries hands
and lips.
That if I made those
decisions
it is far too late for me.
I have already decided my fate
is to be this
to never be defined
by dry hands cracked lips
one day
well, one day
I may repent.

right here.

In limbo:

My thesis has sat untouched for over two weeks. I e-mailed my adviser to tell him I am "working hard," but I suppose that was actually an excuse for my procrastination. Not a lie, though, I swear.

I found out that Wiley has several offices throughout the UK - even in Edinborough. So I plan on contacting my former colleagues from there and begging for some contacts abroad. If that fails (which, knowing me, it will), I will be signing up for this other internship thing I found out about. Costs money though, which sucks.

I saw Brian last week. It was really really nice, and also really really refreshing to remember that no matter what happens between us, we can always go back to the way we were. That kind of consistency is amazing, and also much-needed in my life right now.

I need a job. I've been unemployed too long, and my money somehow seems to be disappearing. I wonder how that's happening?

And, finally, my parents came and visited last weekend for Veteran's Day (my dad is a Vietnam vet), and we went to the Getty and the Getty Villa and we had designated family nap times at 3 pm. I miss my parents so so so much. Makes me want to go to grad school at Berkeley or Stanford and never leave home again (you know, after the year abroad).

small birdie at the getty.

my own margaret bourke-white photograph.

the getty villa in the morning.

oh my god i love this little guy. he looks like he's riding a turkey, which is all right with me.

my mom and dad at the villa.

ch-ch-ch-changes.

My internet was broken, but now it works again, so I'll update later. A little too much going on to do summary, so we'll see what happens.

you'll just have to wait.

Oh, I am so excited to watch the election coverage tonight, and I voted next to Christopher Walken, and as I walked out, I saw John Voight laughing while he was waiting in line to cast his ballot, and it was just so Los Angeles I could have burst out laughing, but I didn't because I'm not totally insane.

Tonight, before watching a show at UCB and reading Great Expectations, I read one of the most inspiring pieces of feminist non-fiction I have come across in a while.

It's called "To a White Male Radical" and it's from 1970. I feel depressed at how so little has changed in 38 years, but also empowered by the same words. Somehow, the word "feminism" has been contorted to carry with it a terrible stigma. The stigma itself only represents how inherently sexist American culture is. But as I read this piece, I realized it runs even deeper than that, and it may be the reason (not surprisingly) why I have always felt I was meant to live alone. And that is because the men I have loved refuse to give up their positions of power to women, they cling to them, they assume hyper-masculine identities to compensate for the threat to their power. And, in effect, women are left confused, broken, weakened, subordinated. We play this game without even realizing its underlying message of Powerful and Powerless.

"You probably do not even know how you oppress me, or other women. Buy you do. Each time we meet you spell out the business of your schedule while I am supposed to marvel at this important male world to which you belong? I sometimes see very little difference between a conventional bourgeois chauvinist who thinks that his work is his whole life and a radical activist who also escapes the risk of being known by another through his intensive avoidance of free time. ...

Why am I writing this? Because you don't understand yet what it means not to oppress a woman. ... I could love you someday if I stayed near you long enough. But then I would hate you as much. I would rather stay away and let others take your shit. You are the embodiment of male chauvinism and what is so sick about it is that you self-importantly deny it."

halloween and stuff.

Halloween was amazing this year. I spent the night with just Leslie, but, oh, did we meet some characters along the way.

The night began with carving pumpkins and handing out candy at Leslie's house and ended with me yelling at some guy while standing in the drive-thru line at McDonald's, telling him that he would never be happy in life because he was a business economics major and a frat guy in college and couldn't define success outside of economic terms. Sad. But I showed him... Right. In order to get to that stage, a concert, several different parties, and a bar stood in the way. So that explains my random yelling. I get very argumentative sometimes. It's all the bitchy, snarky things I want to say that just come out all at once.

I would post photos, but I didn't take any because my costume consisted of a vintage Bill Blass dress and cat ears. So yeah.

Also got to utter the (in)famous phrase: "You didn't even buy me a drink, why would I go home with you?"

Tonight may be clubs or it may be roommate sesh.

Hopefully my next update will be more interesting.

endless and everlasting.

I feel so stupid for ever falling for him. What an idiot I must have been to think he was worth more than a minute of my time and energy.

The way that I am looking at it, life couldn't get much better than this. Every day, I am running around frantically trying to figure my life out, slowly realizing my infinite potential, feeling more myself than I have ever possibly felt. Every day, I am astonished at how much my undergraduate experience has changed me. I am so grateful for it every single day.

And so, as I said before, I feel so dumb -- like such a dumb little girl -- for ever forgetting my own value. I will never let it happen again, and I will certainly never be with someone intellectually, aspirationally beneath me. Just wanted to clear up that point so everyone knows I can laugh about it now. It didn't take too long to stop hurting, and I never plan on hurting on an unworthy person's behalf again. So there!

Also, today I went to a graduate programs fair and I had a wonderful talk with an admissions adviser at NYU's professional school. More doors open as I close this huge, heavy one behind me.

squint your eyes and look closer.

the height of pretentiousness.

I recently purchased a Nikon D40. Well, it's no D90, but I got what my money (credit card) could pay for. I'm mostly just messing around with it, but it has reminded me how important the camera is in our culture. Photography is hardly an art form in most people's hands, but it brings people together. It captures and conveys, it distorts and crops out the unwanted. A lot can be said about the dangers of photography, and certainly a lot will continue to be argued. But as a personal tool, it makes people smile. And it makes people happy to be where they are. Sometimes it's the only reason people get together in a beautiful place. Sometimes proof is all we need. One morning on a tour bus in Ireland, I was so hung over that I got out at every stop just to be in a picture. Then I stumbled back inside and tried to fit in five minutes' sleep. In a way, I'm okay with that.

Thesis is coming along. Page 20.

We watched Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington speech in my communications class today, and right in the middle, my eyes filled up with tears. I want to start something. I want to be so completely passionate as to give my life for a cause. I want that equality he dreamed of, that we are still so far from reaching. What can I do? I am hardly eloquent. I am one woman. I want to bang my head against the wall. Thus the tears. Because forty years later, we're still frustrated. We should be frustrated. We should be making change happen. Instead, I'm in class, talking and not acting, thinking and not doing. I'm part of the problem, yes.

I studied for my midterm with a guy from my English class today. It was nicer than studying alone. Especially because of his British accent. He knew how to pronounce all those British-y words in Victorian novels that I always mess up! Quite an accomplishment.

So now you understand.

there's barely time.

A few days ago in my English class, my professor read a passage from "Walden":

"...Not till we are completely lost, or turned round... do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he wakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

And this, perhaps more than any other reason, is why I am not so scared of my fast-approaching graduation date. When Zora Neale Hurston arrived in New York after having lived all her life in the rural South, she took that big step with the mantra "No job, no friends, and a lot of hope" playing over and over in her head. I plan on not planning anything except maybe a country, a vague understanding of the program I will be going on, and a place to sleep for the first few months. But if I get lost along the way, I will not be lost at all. I will be finding my way back with every move I make.

If there are several accepted modes of femininity, several ways that women are socially allowed to look at their lives in America, I cannot find my place in any of them. I don't feel comfortable taking a job I know I could get in New York and working until I get so stressed out that I have eight ulcers. I don't feel comfortable following in any man's footsteps. I don't feel right going home and being near my family, no matter what that means. I certainly am not ready to settle into eight years of graduate school. I am not a writer. Stop trying to make me a writer. Whatever job I want to assume when I have the experience to assume it has not yet been created. My father is an entrepreneur of sorts. He has his own consulting company, started a record label, created a motorcycle photography website, does whatever he wants.

I realize that those types of things only happen with time, and I am more than prepared to work hard toward an unknown goal for many years. Because I know that all of that work will lead me somewhere - will lead to slow incremental self-discovery.

So I plan on getting hopelessly lost before I find myself again. I am tired of people discouraging me from such ill-planned ideas. I look at the people who critique me, and I feel sorry for them. Because what they have in life makes them live, but it is only a means to an end, they are not truly happy with what they have made of themselves -- especially many of the women who criticize these ideas.

For a woman to stand up and refuse to assume her role as a future mother, future corporate ladder climber is a bit threatening, I think. I refuse to participate in a system that is inherently unequal. When I get back, maybe things will be different, maybe my perspective will have changed. But I am more stubborn than most people realize.