i finally finished my review of “secretary,” which i titled “taking more than dictation.” but they never keep my titles anyway. i got started on it late: rob, ben’s roommate from last year, challenged me to a game of scrabble. with a break in the middle to run errands, it lasted from 7:30 to 11:15. even allowing for the gap, i think that’s a new record. now i have to make a snap decision whether or not to go sleep in a field. on the plus side, i could wear my bright red yummy fleece pajamas. on the minus side, i would be sleeping in a field. and it’s cold outside.

i managed to write my new sophomore paper, hand it to some people, request a grade report, and apply for the honors program today. still more red tape to cut through (one professor whose signature i requested informed me, “this is just bullshit you know.” oh boy do i) but i’m moving forward. with any hope i’ll be either approved or brutally shot down before break, and i can go to smith certain of my fate.

i get to go to smith!

man, i’m just sitting next to an open window and i’m cold. what the hell kind of impulse drives people from their wonderful comfortable beds and into itchy grass and sleeping bags? forget it. i’ll put on my yummy fleece pajamas here, dance around, and sleep where the bugs can’t get me.

yesterday morning i rose at 11. now it’s 9 and i’m up while my pretty one sleeps. a difference in the rollicking factor, no doubt. friday night took me back to freshman year. sarah c. asked what i would wear to the party we’d agreed to attend. i pointed to a perfectly respectable shirt in my closet and she emitted a shriek. within seconds she was out the door and back with armfuls of her what-would-be clubwear if she went to clubs. with the advisement of marc, one of my oldest friends here, we settled on tops: mine, black lace. it matched surprisingly well with my black lace-fringed zebra-print skirt-slip.

stef and eliz, and stef’s friend from home, joined us and we wrangled eliz into a hottop of her own. it went beautifully with her haircut, acquired that morning in bryn mawr, midwifed by a cosy lady who knew her stuff and attended by both stef and me. so we set off for the ball and danced with sorelle, kross + chick, and my new favorite sophomo who looked at me, pulled his student ID from his pocket, and said, “it’s a good thing i brought my library card, cuz i’m checking you out.”

good times. last night was a different sort of fun: a thought-provoking secretary in the city, excellent but rushed indian food with city-becca, and dumb city comedy. stef and eliz and i, on the way home, attempted to improve on the improv. 185 weblogs walk into a bar … i saw a movie about sunday mornings that was so bad (how bad was it?) …

i’m enjoying this lying mofo thing immensely. of course, i’m also in a vicious-ish mood, which is the same reason i’m foregoing seeing dukakis speak tonite and, when i was tabling with eliz for local high skool outreach, i horrified her by using phrases like “be a chickenhawk,” “recruit” and “indoctrinate the young.” basically i’m glum because i lost in scrabble to kross, 10,000 to 1. silly and spoiled of me. i comforted myself on the walk to dinner with the fact that at least i’m prettier than he is. then of course i got called chubby.

*sigh*

my earlier political memory is my father despairing over dukakis, knowing that the d-meister would never make it to dc. poor guy. well, at least i’m prettier than dukakis. or i’d like to think so.

my favorite advice columnists were right on today. that pleases me. i would like to be an advice columnist, i think. or a film reviewer. or perhaps some super-special and unique hybrid of the two where i draw on cinematic precedent to suggest solutions. that is a terrific idea that requires a creative and clever name. a prize for the best suggestion: go to.

so i’ve done it. i’ve submitted true love waits to project greenlight. the final two revisions i did essentially on my own, though i took into account the hundreds of comments i’ve received from the people who’ve read it (and, really, thank you all.) but the deadline’s tomorrow and i have too much else to think about this week to worry about continuing to nitpick, or worse have other people nitpick for me. so, there it is.

while i was in process of converting to pdf and uploading, i got a call from the woman whose class i’ve going to be observing for Intro Ed. i’m one of the last people in my class to be assigned an observation: apparently the bureaucracy at upper darby is intense. but she sounds very sweet. she described the class as a special project for which they only got a grant last january. it group sixth grade refugee children together — some of whom function at a third-grade level — and teaches them at a pretty individualized pace. she warned me that they become attached quickly, that they will probably like me immediately and cry when i go. sounds certainly unique, almost overwhelming, but if she can teach it surely i can handle sitting in for 8 weeks.

sleep being for the weak, eliz and i decided at midnite to choose the path of strength, the path of pizza and film. we took turns calling our respective Others, laying bets on whose would reply best. they tied, both accepting with minimal/no thought, which is why, of course, we’re dating them. the pizza was only eh, but an ideal husband was as lovely as i recalled, and it instilled in me the same desire to live inside a cinematic adaptation of an oscar wilde play.

many pleasant things happened over the weekend. i spent saturday in philly researching thrift shops for this week’s phoenix article. birthday-girl addie ventured in with me and we met my friend ben who insisted everything you need to find is on 13th street and consented to try on a lovely red dress for us in the drag clothes corner of a gay hairdressers’ next door to spruce street video where my Other ben worked this summer. we moved too swiftly to shop, unfortunately, but addie and i had to get back: i had a date with kross, his mother, and three boyz.

sitting at the table with them all, the last-year-at-this-time male-dominated feeling crept over me, the feeling of being little. honestly it’s been about a year since last i found myself in a situation that could catalyze that reaction. it drove me crazy in/out of the barn. that dinner just left me tired and crabby. addie’s girlz-only birthday party thereafter revived me. stef made me liquid ecstacy (soy milk, kahlua, just a bit of rum: yum.) to sip while we lounged and laughed and composed swat to-do lists.

sunday afternoon we reunited with the co|motion campers for the first time since the summer. my legs ache from an hour and a half of capture the flag. i never used to be the kind of person who would do any running in that game, but more and more i’m becoming lots of things i never used to be. for instance, with any luck, an american-cinematic-and-social-studies-special-honors-major.

addendum: i’ve decided to be apolitical this semester. but if i were still in caring mode, i’d find this a good clarification of an issue that’s always confused me. the article goes through both sides pretty diplomatically, for the most part.

erotic cookie baking last night, as advertised in stef and eliz’s hilariously lewd email invite. eliz spent 40 minutes printing out, um, inspiration, which she used to paper the walls of the trailer where the making and baking was taking place. i forget how ghetto that trailer is til i introduce someone to it, and last night i brought in my dearfriend anne. she’s the first chick from DIS i’ve seen since leaving copenhagen and despite slightly longer hair she was reassuringly the same. a weird view to give someone of swat, to be sure. here’s where our endowment goes: the spacious, luxurious danawell trailer. note the three different patterns of wallpaper!

they made way too much frosting so i swiped one of the extra bowls of blue. brigid wrinkled her little ohio nose at it when i showed her this morning: “that is not okay! that looks like melted smurf!” as i dipped one finger in and tried some she cried, “no! that’s papa!” brigid = priceless.

after the making and baking and frosting and giggling, the group trooped over to the new media lounge to watch hedwig on the big[ger] screen. as terrific as that film is — and it’s terrific nearly beyond words –, it’s even better when you watch it sitting next to kross’s mother (thank god at least when i asked her if she’d seen it before she said yes) and across the small room from a flamboyant group of first-timers. in delight, pain, horror, joy, whatever: they howled, howled, and howled.

this morning ben and i darted parrish to check his mailbox for watson notifcation. he made the first cut which whittled 30 hopefuls down to 10. yay benj! we stole breakfast intended for visiting parents in celebration. in the words of agent danger, i rather like him. he’s a fantastic fellow. (do yoself a favor and scroll down to read the new jersey exploits. mmm new jersey.)

i’m skipping tennis ostensibly to do work so i should do some: i need to finish v. woolf’s magnificent three guineas, i need to brush up on slavery, i need to print out my mini essay about whether or not saturday night fever is a musical (my conclusion: no more than the graduate or strictly ballroom is, which is to say, just plain no. still, it’s a better film that i expected.) after an hour’s intense discussion with the honors-special-major guru, i think i’ve more or less convinced myself i should go for it. now i just need to convince (a) marge, my woman in the history dpt; (b) patti, the mysterious feminist/queer theory/eng/film woman i’ve heard much of and never met — she’s presently hiding out in nyc and how jealous am i; and (c) the history and film dpts in general.

you have to be invested in this, said the guru. i nodded soberly. now i need to figure out if i am. basically, it’s a trade-off: i take four preps — three that i’ve figured out and one that’ll require some creativity (dorsey’s slavery seminar? something with rick vallely in american polisci?) — and in exchange i get the freedom to write a screenplay next year and have professors work on it with me and in the end have two experts descend on me and spend serious time combing through it. if i could survive that without breaking into tears, it would be invaluable.

the guru described the kind of person who usually does this sort of thing: self-motivated, very bright, responsible, independent. he said those people almost always succeed fantastically with this program. those aren’t the words i would necessarily pick to describe me, but, hell, i have nothing to lose by trying.

well, while the argument over censorship rages, i’ll discreetly move on to other topics. like my victory and accomplishment at scrabble today against kross: 476. that’s a new record — as far as i’m concerned, for anyone ever. kross was relatively diplomatic about it, losing control only for a minute, when he leapt over the board and attempted to tattoo the number on my forehead. luckily i fought him off and he regained his senses. then he accompanied me to my dorm’s bbq and told everyone his effort directly contributed to my score so the triumph is partly his. i heart ross.

i don’t want to hear from all of you that you regularly score in the 500s and take pictures of the boards which you keep in a stack on a shelf with your westinghouse certificates and Emmys. this isn’t about bragging, or who’s better than who. this is just me being honest with my readership: frankly, at this moment, i am the best. and that’s simply too significant a fact not to acknowledge.

stef posed the question a couple weeks ago, If you could have anyone write a song about you, who would you choose? after much thought i decided belle and sebastian would be a good choice. today i nearly changed my mind and allotted the honor to stephen merritt. you can’t choose him, said kross, who likes to be contrary: he’s gay. no no, i said, he just hasn’t met the right woman yet. even if that’s true, though, there’s a slim chance that i may not be that Right Woman. in that case, i guess i’m still up in the air.