kerouac says

something else that distresses me.

and this wedding, for which i was one of the photographers.

so, today we were talking about sh@nnon jacks0n's book (such a good book! if you're an academic nerdball!) and someone asked how old she was--towards a legitimate question, about where she was in her career--and i went to little a talk she did last year and remember her being pretty young-looking, so before i could catch myself i said,


oh, she's still hot.


and not a single person heard me Except Of Course The Professor, who, though he has barely cracked a smile the entire time we've been meeting in this class, laughed so hard he spilled his coffee. thank god.

then later someone offered me a bite of a peach, and i said no thanks, peaches are really a one-person fruit--you know, they're so messy and drippy, and you don't really eat a ripe peach so much as you go d0wn on it. and the table of twenty-two year olds looked at me in silence,

so i mimed it. eating the peach hoo-ha.




i need to go to the hardware store and buy a filter.

i read this article in the train station over the weekend.

and i find it troubling. and i'm also having trouble articulating exactly why, but i guess it has something to do with the simplicity of the story presented. this guy "admired" a passing woman? he "liked the woman" (and, if you check out the sentence, the self of the woman seems oddly equated with her hairstyle)? "'it's not a crime to say hello to someone'"?

it's not that those statements are false, it's that they bear the weight of some suspicion, which should have been investigated--or at least copped to. it isn't a crime to say hello to someone, but neither is it necessarily an unagressive act for a man to call out to a woman on the street. it isn't that this Mr. Buckle is an evil mysogynist, and certainly not that he deserved an assault--it the absolute lack of interest in examining the acts reported in a way that would at least acknowledge the complexity of issues of gender and power.

and it's that after reading this (via sheila, via daisey) a certain amount of equalibrium was restored by this story in which, for once, it was the person with the vagina who inflicted the damage. and it's that even though it's kind of ugly, i do wish a lot of times that the men who talk to me on the street might think that i have a steak knife in my purse, and that i might have less compunction than they'd assume about using it.

please, no comments about how evil i am for wanting to stab someone. i'll stipulate to it.

i am so sorry!

thirty is great!

the blog is not dying. it's more difficult now, but the future won't be as difficult as it's been for the last two weeks. birthday, wedding, class, gah. too much bizness.

birthday: it was magnificent. in a pretty low-key way that is appropriate for someone who is fighting her way through school and also getting married later and so doubly poor and uninterested in planning another large thing. everyone met at the back room for drinks the day of, and then the next day i finished my application for ADS's performance composition class and was swept away by the monkey to a guest house in the village and a day of bike riding on fire island.



(you cannot actually take your bike on that ferry. we felt like dorks.)

i guess there's no way i could have suspected that this milestone birthday would hit just as i was feeling pretty much the best i ever have in my entire life. i don't mean that school doesn't freak me out (i'm in a difficult class right now and feel like either the Dumb Girl or the Only One Who Admits Dumbness, if there's even a difference) or i don't have generalized anxiety or occasional issues, but:

lots of what i have to say from inside sounds like a bad pop song, and while the pulitzer people may never care to hear it, inside my body it's like the morning good-sound birds suddenly turned it up to eleven.

also, i have to tell you that this exists. they're looking for an administrative assistant, even. all i can think is that there must be people who work there who thought "i'd like to work in the arts" could never mean this and not be a joke.

i'm actually excited about the birthday. we're going to my favorite secret bar, and people will either come or not, and my bridesman is coming in from pennsylvania, and the monkey is taking me somewhere mysterious for an overnight on friday. i haven't packed an overnight bag in forever.

if i've been a little subdued, it's because the third class of the summer is exposing me as someone who's been out of school for ten years and

and, actually, i don't think i can blame it on that.

it's just hard, and school has never been hard, and not only is it hard, it is not a great deal of fun right now. i sit there around a large table listening to people younger than me use words i don't understand. stuff goes by so fast, and i'm not getting it, and at home i'm reading things twice and doing internet research and wishing i had some cliff notes.

and overall, it's just making me kind of sad. suddenly it doesn't seem like a terrible prospect, not getting into a PhD. i don't like feeling slightly bad all the time.

and it's not "all the time," but it's been a rough week. maybe a better week is on its way, and even if it's not i realize it takes some cojones to complain about getting to go to school full time. it's just . . . not what i thought, right now, and i spend a lot of time feeling stupid.

this week is all about my only-child-hood.

so, my final project for the class i was taking until thursday was a collaborative paper and presentation. i don't know how you go about writing a fifteen page paper with someone else; obviously people write entire books with a partner, but i think they probably get to pick them and they probably are interested in the same things.

so i got assigned to this guy who could do nothing but talk in run-on sentences about anecdotes tangentially related to our subject. i was determined to wrassle my inner clench into submission, so i just kept telling him what i was doing, and asking if he was okay. the day before it was due, i asked if he would send me his part of the annotated bibliography by 9:00 pee em so i could integrate it with mine.

he called at 10:17 to tell me he was still writing and had no bibliography. i said, okay. i guess just bring the pages in and we'll put them together just before we turn it in. and then he showed up in the morning

with nothing.

on friday, a co-worker--my friend patrick--was using my computer, trying to install some piece of crap that i didn't need. while he was doing so, an IM popped up from a handle i didn't recognize. who's that, i asked? it's probably X, he said, a friend of his in marketing. he answered the friend's question, and then typed,

"by the way, you have a great ass."

i shoved him aside and typed, "that was patrick! patrick! he was using my computer!" and the person typed,

"who is patrick?"

and this was odd, since the marketing friend was a friend of p's, so i figured it was a joke. there were a few more backs and forths before i realized the person typing was my new boss. who is a Very Serious Female Person.

in both cases, i sort of apologized and sort of explained, but left feeling like i was somehow complicit. not complicit! did nothing wrong! but have been tarred by the brush of LOSERS.

i'm getting over it.

school is a little better when we're writing papers. the kind where we get to pick what they're about? i like that. it's like writing a tiny book, except it's done quicker.

and mine lets me listen to a lot of martha and the vandellas.

some people have been asking, lately, whether school is hard-good or hard-what-was-i-thinking. it's definitely the former. i mean, i know exactly what i was thinking. and this is relatively similar.

and i got an engagement ring. i know you care.