remnants

Oop, haven't been jotting down for the past couple days.

The other day, at Jojo's Coffeeshop, I recognized the yellow cup from which I'd drunk chai the day before in the hands of another man. I love chai more than any other coffeeshop drink. I don't know what he was drinking. The path from cup to mouth was obscured by an off-white beard with full, light volume. This drew attention to his strings of hair, separated into distinct threads held together by the oils and moistures of time. He drank from the cup standing, looking out the window, a window I'd moved away from because the warmth was overpowering. Then he went outside with the cup, with its patterns of different suns, printed on it two by three.

Yesterday we went to see Twelth Night, at a funny time of day, which would be four o'clock. I've seen many more plays during med school than in college, due to the proximity and affordability of the Yale Rep. This one was put on the Drama School in a venue right down our street. The most prominent thing I've noticed is that I'm not usually affected by the story/feel the same way I do with books, that what overpowers that is the stage and atmosphere. I'm always surprised by what people can create, concretely; how they use space, color, elements; by how different that all feels depending on the position of space you occupy while observing.

K, onto another day.

afternoon

It was a mildly cold, sunny day and after just two hours of class, lunch and errands, a long Monday afternoon stretched its limbs for me to follow. I packed my bookbag and walked down York Street with Radiohead's newest because I'm addicted; it's so delicious. The up and down I routinely take on York reminds me of how we felt like we'd been in Luang Prabang (Laos) forever because there's one main street and we walked it multiple times a day. The intersection with Elm Street reminds me a little of Cambridge, with Au Bon Pain on the corner and the expanse of brick becoming evident as you stand in the middle, a triangular intersection on your left and half of a cross on your right. I saw several girls wearing brown knee high boots. I have fond memories of Amy and I finding ours for $30 at a Nine West outlet in Atlantic City.

I went to Koffee Too to study. I don't like its structure--two adjacent rectangles separated by a wall--as much as Koffee which has two adjacent squares flowing into one another (more angles but open ones so that it feels like one big place with lots of corners). I usually choose it over Koffee for proximity's sake, but today it was also for the busy street view.

I ordered almond steamed milk but the order was wrong and they gave me peppermint instead. I told the guy it was okay and that I'd try something new. I've only had vanilla and almond before, and peppermint wasn't better than those, but it made me want to try all the flavors (there's maybe thirty). Which I can probably do because I always get steamed milk. I thought about how Toscanini's has closed in Harvard Square and how I can never get Vietnamese coffee (coffee with condensed milk, lovingly sweet so you don't need extra sugar) from there again. Steamed milk, which is also warm and sweet, isn't better or worse, just different.

I opened my biochemistry text and began reading about glycolysis, which we started learning a couple weeks ago (um, I'm just a little behind). I've tried looking at it before but it all seemed like mindless mechanism and I didn't think there was any point in memorizing details I'll just forget. But our biochem conferences have been pretty interesting and I find myself with a funny desire to want to understand conceptually the breakdown of glucose and all the related processes. Today it fell into place more and I decided that glycolysis (and all the pathways we've learned since) is an acquired taste, and I believe in letting things grow on you (probably because I'm the type of person who needs to grow on people). There's certain satisfaction in being able to follow a system. I read in more detail about how glucose synthesis isn't the exact opposite of glucose breakdown because breakdown requires some irreversible reactions. You can't just go back; to make glucose you have get around those irreversibilities, make up some new reactions. And there are all sorts of ways your body tells you to make or break down sugar. It's pretty cool.

I took breaks to read Kafka on the Shore, which came in my mail today. Haruki Murakami is like an old friend, immediately comforting. His language pulls you in so swiftly, you don't even notice except that so suddenly you realize you're content. The main character in the book runs away to Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku: "Shikoku, I decide. That's where I'll go. There's no particular reason it has to be Shikoku, only that studying the map I got the feeling that's where I should head. The more I look at the map--actually every time I study it--I got the feeling that's where I should head. It's far south of Tokyo, separated from the mainland by water, with a warm climate. I've never been there, have no friends or relatives there, so if somebody started looking for me--which I kind of doubt--Shikoku would be the last place they'd think of."

During my solitary trek south to get to Aud's island this past summer, I went to Takamatsu and it was one of my favorite parts of the trip, partly because I felt the most alone there than anywhere else. From my journal that day: "The train getting here was shaky and lacked signs. Getting off at a station, there was one person manning a run-down booth...The train only comes every half hour. It might be the typhoon but everything is empty and desolate, and the air is a bit ominous. I found groves and a small nursery on my hunt for bonsai. There's almost no one around, and the landscape here is so different. Very few buildings. Just sharply shingled rooftops, train tracks, narrow streets, and green and brown, plant and dirt."

While studying, an English teacher began holding office hours with her students at the table next to me. It was so representative of the kind of meetings I'd have back in college. I miss the kind of thoughts that writing essays forces you to consider and develop, but am also glad that I'm free to think without need to commit to a structure and thesis. I eavesdropped on two different students' ideas for their papers (the role of women in proposal scenes in The Importance of Earnest and how language interacts with social context of separate plays) before I decided I needed to move if I wanted to study anything.

I moved to a window-side cushy chair and while I got some work done, I found that my studying requires a hard surface and space to spread my things. It wasn't too long after that that I headed back to campus, darker out now, especially with daylight savings disappearing. Another day over that in retrospect, will be the filler between significant events, but that in the moment is all you have.

sleepy afternoon

so the years spin by and now the girl is twenty
though her dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
there’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
before the last revolving year is through
I'm really emotional today. Not just because of the turning twenty thing, either. It's coupled with the change of weather, the packing, the gifts, the people.

Since I finished writing in the journal that Victoria gave me for Christmas awhile back, I've stopped writing in real journals and instead writing more emails, with even more random thoughts than usual. I regret not recording the gap between then and now in one spot, in a notebook or somewhere, because so much has passed and changed, inevitably, but so much more than is obvious through a retelling of plot or even a recollection of feeling.

It hasn't happened too often recently, but beginning in January or so I began waking up in the mornings really uncertain and anxious--of what, I'm not entirely sure. Of my future, that vagueness that has never much plagued me before. Of myself, something I've alternately given too little thought and too much. Of what it is that I want to give to and receive from life, things I've always seemed sure of, at least in retrospect and at the very least in the abstract. If even the concept has blurred, what kind of concrete does that leave me to walk on?

Remember Big Fish last semester? Sometimes I worry that the world is the big fish and I'm the too small ocean.

Nothing is better than listening to music that has been personalized, through experience, memory or character. I feel incredibly lucky that I have things like that to list under the "certainty" category. Because by nighttime, I've convinced myself that things will be all right. I still wake up uncertain again the next morning, but I never foresee that during the comfort of nighttime. When I write these things, I feel sure--not blindly optimistic (one of the misperceptions I hate the most). My brother Stephen thinks that sadness is more complex than happiness, the whole idea of all happy families being the same and all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. But when I think about those mornings versus those nights, I can't imagine anything being more complicated than simple contentment.