The belltower is playing Moonlight Sonata. I walk out the glass doors, away from math, cheeks burning. Scribbling furiously for over two hours? I did well on my test--at least I felt like I understood most of it.

Now: one small thing achieved from a bowl of infinite goals.

I digress...Moonlight Sonata is playing now; somber bells mixing with the sound of a distant train whistle. The two sounds together are potent enough to form a feeling, but covered in relief the way I am right now, I can't say for sure what that feeling is.

I feel like I have no obligations now, just possibilities. A much needed breather that can't last; a small patch of blue sky overhead, surrounded by rolling dark clouds.

Sitting on cement steps that stretch out for half a block, a woman sits down within the boundaries of my. blue-sky reverie and lights a cigarette. She calls someone and talks loudly and unhappilly--she's irritated or irritable or both. I look up again from this little keypad and the blue patch of sky has been smothered by the grey, hanging ceiling that is always moving and never leaves.

Possibilities. Which to grab and which to let go?

It's not possible that he's gone.

The sky, so grey and so low to the ground today, doesn't feel full of possibilities but overcrowded with unreached goals.

Satisfaction, so fleeting.

Every second, single file and marching in this war. Against me? With me? I am too slow, too weighed down. I climb over the wall and see a thosand more ahead.

Today is the thing I wish were dead. Yet it lives on and meets me in my tired state again and again.

Riding the Iron Horse

I'm back on the iron pill wagon again.


Any type of relief for my thought-stealing headaches that doesn't look like Advil liquid gels would be welcome this week. With Shelby being such a non-drug and pharmaceuticals girl, it's hard to take things like Advil without feeling just a little wussy. Ye ole coping strategies have often included giant pieces of coconut laced cake and large dregs of drip coffee. Now I'm shopping for a new cure to my mid afternoon listlessness.

Listlessness
Say that three times as fast as you can.

If only listlessness were equivalent to "having no lists."
On the perpendicular, actually, listlessness seems to accompany the state of having entirely too many lists and too little energy to accomplish anything on them.



I spent my lunch break sitting against a wall near our math complex, along a path that leads to nowhere in particular. I tried to absorb the sunshine, knowing that days like these are limited. After wedging my grey cardie behind my head, I almost fell asleep against the wall, at 1:00 p.m. It's definitely time to take up the iron supplement flag again and wave it to the beat of my unbearably productive schedule, which tick tick ticks on, whether I'm awake or asleep.

Here's hoping Wednesday goes down a little smoother.

Clouds drift by overhead.
It looks like rain is coming.
I am immoveable here against this wall. I feel cement under me and against the middle of my back. I watch the clouds while finishing off the last pieces of fruit from a ziploc bag. The grass barely twitches in the breeze. Like me, the grass watches the clouds.

I sit. Or I stand. Nobody interferes. Nobody intervenes.

It looks like rain is coming, but the sun brightens the cement where the clouds are thin. I sit here.

I leave. Nobody interferes.
The American Dream.
?

Good and Bad, A Day in the Life of

Some good and some bad, in no particular order:

I spent the entire day counting down the hours until school was over. My mind is not in the game, as the pro athletes might say. Maybe because I spent the weekend having fun; maybe because I spent all last week not having any fun. Regardless. That's no way to spend an entire day.

I explained my social ethics book, Solitude and Democracy: Understanding the Politics of Your Soul to my mom over the phone. "If you want to understand something, teach it to someone else." That's what I've always heard and in the case of this class, I think it's working. I've explained it now to Jared, to Jaz, to Shelby in part and now to my mom. I'm crazy about the book. Crazy. Today, I had to turn in a reading paper for the class that details my understanding of the current chapter, including its thesis and key words. The professor turned to me after looking through all the papers and kissed his fingers the way the Italian chefs do to say something tastes magnificent. He said, "You got it!" and something else. Later in class, when I answered one of his questions, he pulled out a watermelon Jolly Rancher and tossed it to me. Those are his favorite. I'm his favorite.


An hour later, while sitting at my desk studying math, I started to nod off in my chair. I went over to the bed to cuddle with my overstuffed pillows for a "short" afternoon nap. Just something to take the edge off, you understand.

Three hours later I woke up, smelling like a mixture of exhaustion and vanilla. Not a good moment. My study time was gone and I still felt like I could use a few more hours of sleep. I pulled myself out of bed, put on my gym clothes and skulked defeatedly to Preston {the gym}. I watched Bill Clinton on Larry King Live while accomplishing the most mediocre workout in months. I didn't do lunges or squats. I walked home slowly.

While I was sleeping, my History professor sent me an email asking if it would be okay if he shares my paper with the class, anonymously. This is the paper that I stayed up all night writing last Sunday. Some of the students came to him after getting their papers back, wanting to know what type of paper is looking for in these assignments, so he is going to give them mine. If I wasn't so exhausted, I would be ecstatic.

Marissa, my roommate, is going to stage an intervention if I don't start getting more sleep at night. That's what she told me tonight. Then she offered me some low-fat popcorn and we talked about why I've never read the Left Behind book series.

Now I must get back to the math I was doing six hours ago and I hope that I don't fall asleep again.

Lots of love.

I Hear Love, Did I Leave the DVD Player On?

I keep hearing myself say "I love you." While walking up six flights of stairs. While listening to professors. While doing math homework. While staring off into the distance.

Like whispers that are echoing endlessly through my ears, bouncing around in the chambers of my heart. It's a strange phenomenon. In math we might say that this type of event is a set whose only member is the empty set. It's happening and not happening at the same time.


I need to face it: I've watched too many romantic comedies lately. They're probably breaking my brain somehow so that I'm hearing myself saying things that I'm not saying.

But I leaned over the railing today and gazed into another world.


To say such a thing to a man--
--is much more lovely than anything that could be heard.



I am fascinated beyond belief with the intersections between men and women. We're so coarse with each other in our modern world. But I can still fall in love.

Belle of the Weight Room Ball

My biggest moment of the day was in the weight room when the guys on the other benches made a scene over my arm workout. I work hard in that nasty room. But I live in a legs culture and two things I certainly have never had are long, skinny legs. Instead I have long, thick legs like that beer horse that has lovely, wavy hair at the bottom of its sturdy legs.

I usually wear T-shirts to the gym, but today, nearing the end of my laundry cycle, I wore a sleeveless little spandex number. I was like a neutral toned version of an 80s workout video. All spandex-y and tough, and in the mood to pump some iron.

I had to wait for a long time to get a free bench and I took to the weights like I owned the place. Miracle of all miracles, as soon as I lifted those awkward metal wonders, my muscles practically popped out of hiding and veins showed up out of nowhere. I felt like the world's proudest body builder at that moment. It was like a novice's dream. There I was, just me and the mirror, and about twenty very bulky men who clearly have strong affinities for tanning beds.

I earned my membership into the weight-room world of glory tonight. Yesterday, I was just another girl on the cross-trainer. Funny enough, the pressure of all the eyes on me distracted me and I flubbed my routine. I spent all my energy on round one and could barely lift my arms over my head, let alone real weight, for the remainder of my sets.

Now, telling you that this was the height of my day, should give you a little insight into how the rest of it went. But in case you want a better picture, I'll admit that I tripped over my own shoe twice in front of the same person. Then I received homework back from my probabilities class in which I got a 27 out of a possible 47 because I used the wrong equation on EVERY PROBLEM!! My first class was cancelled and my second class was confusing.

You can see how being the belle of the weight room ball was actually an honest delight after all of that. Oh, the fallen pride. Oh, the crumpled joy. A 27 out of 47? Ugh.