filling in the empty space

Is it really February? January was the month of superlatives. It went from containing the slowest crawling days to so rapidly merging into February, it actually disoriented me a little. A lot. From the most exhausting, the most intensive, the most isolating to the most wonderful, the most liberating, the most laughter-inducing.

This semester's reading period was not much fun. I've never spent so much time in Lamont library before, and I've never studied so long and so hard. The first two weeks of January were devoted to catching up and reviewing organic chemistry. After that was over, I was the happiest kid for about twenty minutes, before I had to review twelve novels in six hours for my English exam the very next day. As much of a relief literature was after all the science, I was so mentally tired that I'm not quite sure how I pulled that off. But it went by fine, and then it was all biology until the end of finals period, since it was on the last day. Except that I went to New York for Andrew's formal the weekend before the exam. Seeing him was a nice blip on my steady library existence, but it wasn't exempt from the category of extreme. Whenever someone asks me how it went, I tell them that superficially, everything went wrong. The one weekend where I was relying on transportation, we were hit by a huge snow storm. Over two feet of snow along the East Coast, which of course includes everything from Boston to New York. I wasn't thinking about that too much, because when I left it was only lightly snowing. It was my first time on a train here, and instead of studying I spent most of my time absorbing the experience. It's amazing how four hours pass when you're just looking out the window. And how much snow accumulates within those hours. So, I got into the city at Penn Station, and I needed to get to Grand Central. I figured I could walk it--ten blocks down and five or so blocks over--and well, I could, but it was not pleasant. I liked walking through Times Square in the snow, but the snow quickly became hostile and the cold made the distance much longer than it initially seemed. So I arrived at Grand Central a soaked snowball, but inwardly triumphant. If only that had been my last confrontation with the snow. Andrew and I took the train to West Point, but the snow kept the shuttles from the train station to campus from running, so we had to wait for his roommate to pick us up. Then his roommate's windshield wipers broke. Then we learned that the actual dance was cancelled because of the storm (the banquet still happened). The next day we decided to push my 12 o'clock train back to Boston to 4. I had to catch the 1:00 train from West Point to NYC, but the trains were only running every two hours, so it didn't come until 2. So I didn't get to the city until 3:55; I didn't think I was going to make the 4 o'clock train so I wanted to change my ticket to 6 o'clock, but because of all the plane delays and such, all trains were booked until 3 AM. So Andrew booked that and I semi-freaked out, but when I got to the station, the 4 o'clock train was still there. Except now I had a ticket for the 3 AM train. And the ticket booth line was an hour long. So I stood there and begged cranky, delayed New Yorkers to cut. It took me five people, but someone let me through and then I asked to get back on the 4 o'clock train, only to find that in the five minutes that I'd relinquished my seat, someone else had taken it. Then I was told I could get on the train with a business class ticket. So I had to pay an extra $30 for a ride that I'd already had just a few minutes before. Then this 4 o'clock train that I thought I'd miss was delayed for about an hour and didn't actually get to the station until 5. It was an express train that was supposed to get to Boston at 7, but we didn't get there until 9:30, and because the subway was also delayed due to snow, I didn't get back to campus until 10:30. And where did I go? Straight to the library. The next day Melkis and I were at the library from 8 AM to 1 AM. I don't think the lost time made much difference; it was just hectic at the time that I was going through it. Physically traveling is stressful because you don't feel like you're accomplishing anything during the waiting time; only the end destination seems to matter and you feel so helpless and insignificant in the process of getting there. Just a victim of the elements. But like Melkis said, on the intrinsic level...it was lovely (extremely so). When we were waiting for the train to NYC, I was looking at the murky Hudson River and the unbelievably vast amounts of slush, and remembered how much I love imperfections. The weekend didn't go as either one of us had envisioned, but I like surprises.

After biology ended, the feeling of lightness was incredible. Absolutely no obligations. I slept--took my first long nap in a long, long while. I listened to music, old comforts and newly bought. I put on decent clothes for once and we went out to eat for once. To Mr. Bartley's...so warm, so good. Then we made white Russians with Melkis's Costa Rican coffee liquor and finally painted our watercolor. We modeled it after Monet's Japanese Bridge, but obviously shaped it according to our own abilities and intepretations as we went along. It was so therapeutic, making the white space disappear. I think its underlying appeal rests in how different it is from the processes of concentrated studying and mindless traveling--these things are hard because it's hard to tangibly see the end result. With the canvas, it feels so nice to actually see yourself create and transform something in such a short amount of time. And of course it was beautiful because my girls are beautiful, and what else would they make. We put it up right away, and then we flipped through the art magazines Melkis got from work and covered the rest of our walls with clippings.

Then we packed for our trip to NorCal, which was one of the best vacations I've ever had, and all I did was go home. I would relay the concrete events in detail, but this entry is long enough, and it really wasn't about the actual things that we did. It was the atmosphere, the feeling of absolute freedom from school, the driving, the food, and most of all, it was these three girls who have been my friends since the beginning of college, who have defined so much of my experience at Harvard, who are so dynamic and funny and smart and fun and silly and talented. I loved showing them the hills, the mountains, the ocean. Highlights include: defending ourselves against angry security officers at Logan Airport, trying on dresses we couldn't afford at BCBG at Santana Row, browsing the scandalous cards at the stationary store, mixing bath salts at Pier 39, indulging ourselves at Ghirardelli Square, watching Million Dollar Baby, baking cookies for the first time, driving through the Santa Cruz mountains, taking in the weirdness of Santa Cruz, riding the oldest rollercoaster on the West Coast, convincing Amy that Northern California does indeed have a beachfront, riding the trolley like tourists, climbing the steep hills to Lombard St., seeing the Golden Gate Bridge on a beautiful day, finishing the entire 3rd season of Sex and the City. And eating. We went from skipping meals to study to eating everything--dim sum in Chinatown, ice cream in SF and Santa Cruz, Krispy Kreme, Jamba Juice, In-N-Out, snacks snacks snacks. We packed so many hilarious moments, pretty sights and sing-out-loud songs in four and a half days, I can't possibly recount them all. Here are some pictures instead.



Some of the bath salts in SF. The colors were amazing, the smells even better. A very happy Amy on the carousel. Yes, we went on the carousel. We're trying to delay the growing-up process as much as possible.



The girls at Ghirardelli Square, which is so pretty and romantic at night. Amy wanted to hold hands, but the rest of us resisted the temptation. Us baking. Amy and I made chocolate chip--we put all the ingredients together without reading the directions. Apparently, order does matter. Only for appearance though; they were delicious, just a little funny looking. Amy and I decided that they were symbolic of their makers--seemingly abnormal but really okay on the inside. Melkis and Steph, on the other hand, made oatmeal cookies that actually looked like the ones in the cookbook.



In front of the Giant Dipper in Santa Cruz, an 80 year old wooden rollercoaster. A little rickety and lots of fun. The girls gleefully riding the cable car. And finally, at the top of Lombard St., with a view of the city in the background.



Our last sight of the city. Started off painting the most beautiful imaginary bridge, ended by seeing the most beautiful real one. It was good to experience the extremes; now I just have to adjust to settling back into the middle for awhile.

an incomplete picture (closer)

Melkis and I saw Closer in the Square the weekend before we left for break. We loved it. Right after it ended I clung to Melkis's arm and all I could say was, "That was so good. That was so intense." I can compare it to no other movie experience. I've seen a lot of intense movies but none that made me hurt in quite the way that this one did. Not that it was more valuable than the other kinds of strong feelings that movies in the past have evoked, but just that this was singular.

It was painful and fascinating to witness how deeply and how effectively--and how efficiently (that word seems to convey the tone of the movie fairly well)--people can and will hurt each other. There were moments when I literally hurt. Why is this unusual? That always happens when I see people being cruel to one another. In some cases, it's a simple repulsion by inexplicable unkindness; in others there's a more complicated empathy involved; the actions may be cruel but the intentions can be understandable. The kind of things Closer depicted were more of the latter sort, but for some reason they scared me in a way I don't think I've experienced before. Because they were so real, so understandable in the context in which they were placed. The things that were said, and that were done, were things I would never have imagined people actually saying and doing, but when they were said and done in the film, they seemed so natural. And that was scary. And even scarier that the original source of these incredibly hurtful things was love. Love is powerful, most movies optimistically tell us, love can surmount all things, they say. Closer doesn’t deny this but it makes distinctions between love and compassion and kindness—love is in fact so powerful that it can destroy any inclination to practice the latter two virtues.

I mentioned some of this to Andrea and she asked me whether I've seen/experienced that kind of hurt in real life, and I said yes, but in real life these incidents and feelings are diluted over long passages of time, place and experience, so witnessing them full-force on-screen, you recognize and feel them much differently. Particularly in this movie, which was so compact. So concise--every word or lack thereof meant something, and lifetimes and a million musings fit easily and comfortably into four characters--four bodies, really--and a plot that could be summarized in a few sentences. Maybe this is where my vague dissatisfaction with real life stems from; I want that level of intensity, all the time. I think I talked to Sarah about that once and she said something along the lines of, why would you want that, you’d be drained and exhausted. This is probably true, and reminds me of what Foucault says about never being able to experience things fully and directly, using the example of the sun—you can never experience the sun as it really is because our interaction with it is too intangible and even if it were tangible it’d be too intense; you can only see its light reflected onto other things and feel its warmth, diluted by distance and particles in the air.

Most of the time I’m more than content with that, even incredibly grateful and happy for that because there are moments when even as it is things are too much, and so beautiful (a la American Beauty). But I wonder sometimes whether that is sufficient, or we only think so because it’s all we can have. I like to think, though, that maybe things are beautiful because even only a fraction of the whole can have such impact, and we’re left to imagine how amazing the complete image would be.

inarticulation

Two people in the past two days have made fun of my inability to articulate exactly what I mean. And I get that all the time. Someone told me that I say “I don’t know” a lot. This is true, and not just in the context of answering questions but more importantly in trying to explain things. I never noticed it much until I encountered a certain person compelled to ask “why?” Not many people have pushed me to explain myself fully, and I rarely voluntarily do it. I think ninety percent of the time I have no idea how to express in words what it is that I feel and mean. It’s harder than people think to translate from individual to individual. English is a lie. People don’t really speak the same language.

Cold sunny days have this weird, almost endearing physically-numbing mentally-stimulating effect on me. I've been thinking about a million things today--no time to write about them. I will when the week is over, if I can still remember. When will the week be over??!

Walking back home from class my iPod malfunctioned. Silence for a few cold seconds, then I was unexpectedly and serendipitously warmed by The Cure.

you were stone white/so delicate/lost in the cold

adams winter formal

In getting ready for the formal, I concluded that I indeed have never learned to be a girl. How does mascara really work? Why are there different powders for blush and eyeshadow when you're just putting color on some part of your face? Why do I not care about lipstick when there's food to be eaten? Why is there no dress that fits me exactly right and does not require some sort of adjusting? Why do 90% of the girls wear black to winter formals? Next year--bright yellow, once I find that perfect yellow dress. Why do I look just as ordinary made-up and dressed-up as in my Friday sweatshirt and jeans? Why wear heels when girls taller than me are also wearing heels? Why not just dance barefoot? It's a confusing system, and these are the important questions, evidently.

Anyway, it's still fun.

Song highlights: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Heaven on Earth, I Touch Myself, Total Eclipse of the Heart, (hint of the 80s anyone?), I Like That ("This song's for Melkis"), CRAZY IN LOVE (that was pretty damn crazy, I must say).

Pictures of crazy people I love. Sorry for the disarray, and the lack of elaboration. I'm sleepy. And for those of you who complain that I never post pictures of myself...too bad.

a journal within a journal

I was three-fourths done with an entry about what and how much writing means to me. Two faulty computer clicks and it was all gone. Five seconds of a daze and a fury later, I start again.

I, like anyone else who reads or writes a public journal, wonder sometimes about public versus private writing. A lot of people argue that you can't judge someone by their blog, that inevitably the writer is more complex and multidimensional than the writing. I definitely see the truth in that--the selectivity that comes with choosing words will always impose limitations on what you can express and in turn what the reader can perceive. But I also think that often you can get more from entries than from direct communication. Not that this should necessarily be the way it is, but the nature of relationships and personal interaction makes it so.

I think this applies to self-perception too. I haven't written in my own journal since the beginning of October. The other night I was organizing my book shelf and came across it. It's amazing how long two months can feel, how distant I feel from the last thing I wrote, how easily I forget things that I felt so strongly at one point. I don't know what's more valid, my memories (or lack thereof) of actual experiences--memories that change with each day--or the writing that records and encapsulates them at the time. Either way, I'm glad I wrote them down. I recognize that writing as a medium is just that--a medium, a catalyst--that can't relay experience directly, but I also think that it can be an agent for more than that.

June 7
I'm finally back home.
...
Everything here is the same, and I'm not. At every point in my life I think I know myself more completely and accurately than the last.
...
Something Barnes said resonated with me. He said when you're young you live for the fullness of the seasons whereas when you grow older you appreciate the in-between moments because you've recognized--resigned to?--the uncertainty of life. It seems reversed for me right now, though. College definitely cemented the presence and reality of uncertainty in my life forever, but I'm not afraid of it anymore and I want those full seasons to come--why should there ever be in-between moments?
...
This is solely for me; no need to explain or show anything because I will know what I meant, and reinterpret, in the future.

June 9
How funny and fitting that so far "May" is my favorite chapter in The Jane Austen Book Club. It's about Prudie hosting the book club meeting on Mansfield Park (but never actually doing so). Prudie never knows what's real; it's blurred by false and imagined memories, fairy tales, images. Loves France but never wants to go there. Maker of lists, but not a prisoner of them.

June 11
When I'm with others, I feel so ordinary. Does recognizing the possibility of the extraordinary make an ordinary person any less so? If not, what a life this person leads, to be able to see possibility and to never attain it. Capote says that with the gift comes the whip for self-flagellation. Maybe I have only one or the other, more likely neither.
...
It's good to be back home. Amidst traffic today I saw the most breathtaking view of Fremont's brown hills against Northern California's wispy clouded skies. Stephen always thinks Fremont hills are only beautiful when green. His eye for beauty is much more selective than mine. The brown touches me in a different but equally powerful way. They're always there, and that's my favorite part about them. What I do miss about the East Coast--the walking. I liked walking places. The trade-offs, I suppose.

June 20
He's the one who's made me so afraid of being selfish, so much so that I made my number one goal to become more selfless.

Deep down I know how hard it's been for him.

July 14
I waver between using my interests to define who I am and hating being defined by my interests.
...
So much easier to write than to speak.
...
He is one of those people who makes me feel so good because for some reason I've made an impact on his life, one of those people whose lives I feel genuinely include me. I don't see or talk to him all the time but somehow he always remembers me, has managed to still want to talk to me after all these years. In that respect he's the most loyal person I know.
...
A six year old girl told me today, "You're a kid too."

August 15
Even though they're both unusually emotional, whenever they talk about love, it's so analytical. It's about the girl's qualities, rarely ever simple, pure feeling--the kind of inexplicable emotion that doesn't need and actually resists analysis, no explanation, no reason. I wonder if that's the kind of love most people feel, and I wonder which I will encounter, if either.
...
I just want to go back to school and move my life forward instead of simply organizing for change here.

September 5
Home from Hawaii. Exhausted. Mixed feelings. Only one week left, wish I had at least two. As anxious as I've been for school to start, something's suddenly brought my heart back here. I don't know what it is. I still can't wait for school, but now I wish I could be in two places at once.

September 10
I want to soak up the last remnants of home with as little introspection as possible--just my parents, the couch, good food, packing, tv music and movies. Is it possible to miss things before you leave them?

September 14
So much has been racing through my mind this past week--I know now why we were made to sleep.
...
I love being a couch potato with my dad, such closeness in that silence.
...
I've been thinking a lot about what it means to know someone. I wish sometimes there was someone who wanted to know the stupid little details of my personality. I wonder if those kinds of things will change over the years. It seems like the most insignificant components of ourselves are the ones that endure the longest.

October 4
"He had all the bones and joints of other men, without any of their proportions."
-Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

harvard-yale

I don’t think I’ve ever danced so hard in my life.

By the end of the week we were all completely exhausted. After churning out two papers, I began the insane memorization for the biology exam, which meant doing the bulk of my chem problem set the afternoon it was due and turning it in fifteen minutes before the deadline. This probably doesn’t sound that bad to most college students, but I’m not a procrastinator. I hate being behind and last minute. But it all got done, and though I have to essentially go backwards and forwards now, catching up on old work and moving ahead with new material, this weekend was enough (maybe too much) of a break to compensate. My point: this weekend was well-deserved.

On Friday night I abandoned the plan to start my junior essay and went to Lansdowne for the pre-game party with the girls instead. We loaded on to the shuttle (which was really a yellow school bus that made us feel like elementary school kids, which was a little strange in that it felt natural). The gimmick is that they open five clubs and you can go from club to club for the price of one—but when we got there the only one open was Avalon, which isn’t that much fun. But we did fulfill Amy’s lifelong desire to dance atop a table (well, it was really a stage meant for dancing, but any elevated surface will suffice). When the others finally opened we went to Embassy, which played really good music but was too hot (temperature-wise…haha). We ran into Maciej, who is such a cute dancer. I will forever think of him as our little freshman buddy (despite the fact that he’s a foot taller than us and now a sophomore). After Embassy we encountered bathrooms, exits, and abandoned bars, trying to find the connecting clubs. We finally made our way to Axis, which was nice and cool (again temperature-wise) and whose DJ said he hated Harvard because he was broke (at which point I thought…so are we). After Axis we took our hip school bus back to the Square. I somehow mustered the energy to read Little Women before heading to bed, so instead of going to sleep with remnants of the sketchiness of the whole Lansdowne experience in my mind, I was left with wholesome images of the sisters knitting and acting out scenes from Pilgrim’s Progress…

The next day was anything but wholesome. Melkis and I got into the tailgate around 12:15 and didn’t leave until 2:30. Those two hours felt like two minutes. The first thing we did was get food—clam chowder, chili, sausages, hamburgers…warm food in cold weather has a wonderful capacity to make me incredibly happy. Then we found Amy and Jen, already intoxicated, at the Adams tailgate. The atmosphere and energy of the tailgate is so amazing. Thousands of people are just swarming over the fields; strolling outdoors among so many people is such a simple pleasure. Clubs, houses, organizations had their individual setups, food, drinks and music. Once we got our fill we danced nonstop for about an hour and a half. In a moment of impulse we climbed a high wooden table, where I got some nice aerial photos of the crowds, and where we got to dance on yet another elevated surface (to Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems too!…Sigh, favorite dance songs) before police officers made us get down. That was a first. Also for the first time in awhile, I didn’t find myself thinking that I could make a better music mix, because they played my favorite Britney Spears song ever (Crazy)...and BILLY JOEL. Who else but us would go crazy for We Didn’t Start the Fire? And a lot of junior high and high school dance music, which everyone knows I have a soft spot for. I must say that we were the craziest dancers there; I don’t think we cared that most of the time we were surrounded by people who weren’t dancing. At one point Amy backed up on me so aggressively that she spilled punch all over my jacket. And proceeded to yell repeatedly, “I’ll wash it with SHOUT!” (with loud emphasis on SHOUT). And so it was that we were able to keep quite warm in the 40-degree weather. I had five upper layers, two lower layers, three pairs of socks, two scarves, and three pairs of gloves (overcompensation for freezing every part of my body freshman year) but I shed most of this after a little while. I would post pictures of the girl-on-girl dancing action but I’m afraid Amy and Melkis would kill me.

It was perfect.

Oh and…yes, we made it to the actual football game…briefly. We watched five minutes and saw our team score a touchdown, then went home to recover (in case you’re curious, we beat Yale 35-3). Later I went to Amy’s to try to do work, though we ended up talking about everything from minesweeper and eggplant pizza to friendships and college experiences. Tailgating in the morning and trying to write about Kafka at night—not easy.

Tonight was the Bob Dylan concert. None of us were too familiar with his music and his voice has been going downhill for a long time now, but it was worth it to see that woman in her thirties, way in the back, totally alone, and dancing like mad to every song, no matter how slow and mellow it was. I don’t care if it was drunk or sober frenzy; that kind of unrestrained passion can be so admirable.

Friday afternoon in stats section, before all the excitement and while I was still bogged in the long stretch before relative freedom, we were comparing the happiness of students during childhood and their happiness after coming to college. The inspiration for this was a hypothetical situation where a girl just celebrated her birthday and starts talking to her friend about how they’re getting older and how things are just not as simple and carefree as they were when they were younger. Melkis and I read about this, looked at each other and said, “This is exactly what we talk about all the time.”

So yes, we had to go back to studying after all the fun and there’s so much work ahead…but I don’t think what comes before and after matters as much as I feel sometimes. Sometimes these moments can be purely carefree, untouched by what you need to accomplish the next moment.

I love this picture because no one looks normal.