sickness. auditions (for which 2 people showed and we cajoled one of the crew folks to read.) whispering — everyone whispering back, whether mocking or in sympathy, i don’t know. a dietcoke to ward off headaches; a vitamin c droplet; ross saying my illness was ruining his weekend. it sure frightened rob yesterday. he came over to watch a movie but kept looking around nervously at my room as if he could see all the gleefully plotting germs; he bolted. renee, who always seems friendly but a little ill at ease w/ me tho i don’t know why, jess and her boyfriend, ben ross and i watched high fidelity. ben laughed a lot but afterwards asked me what i get from it. lots of housecleaning/upkeep to be done. ross wants a dinner party tonite despite the fact that he’s illin’ too. joel disappeared. waking up to jazz and ben. lentil soup. ross telling me it’s all about positive thinking. trying to convince himself, maybe. ben taking out our garbage, doing our dishes. we need more women of color to try for this piece. apparently they’re intimidated (?) i guess it is scary. so far khadijah and i have been agreeing — vision for each of the characters, etc. meeting tomorrow. she seems to respect my opinion.
it’s cold outside. how did it get to be this cold? i won’t have warm weather again for a long time ….
All posts by ester
i fasted yesterday despite the fact that when i woke up that morning i’d felt the beginnings of a cold creeping in from all sides. good idea from a spiritual perspective; not so good from a health one. by nighttime i’d deteriorated into pressure, drippiness, general yuck. it didn’t help that i came crashing down from my sugar high. i tried to get to sleep at 12; couldn’t, really. around 1:30, the bunny materialized. “wow,” he said, “your voice has dropped an octave.” initially i expected to just curl up and go sleep, but we started talking — partly bunnytalk, partly intelligent talk. i realized that i was feeling progressively better. v. often when i feel shitty, all i need to do is laugh. despite my well-publicized insistence that i can’t think past tomorrow, we got onto the topic of what we’ll be like when we’re old, what our attitudes towards marriage are, general future stuff. it was a very honest conversation, punctuated by quotes (he from winnie the pooh, me from the pied piper). finally around 4 we fell asleep, and tho i woke up numerous times, and had a bizarre dream in which my parents decided i needed to leave this life and start a new parallel one on a cruise-ship, which included a boy who looked like but wasn’t ben, i woke up refreshed. it’s a trick; it won’t last. i need to nap. but how can you not love a boy who stays next to you while you blow your nose and afterwards pulls you closer?
did stat w/ becca — we decided our project is going to involve blindfolded vegan/nonvegan taste tests. then met khadijah for lunch. we talked about the play. i don’t know what she was worried about, she seems to have a lot of ideas. we talked pretty frankly about race and why she wants it to be as close to an all-black cast as possible. “but, you know, this is swarthmore,” she said, “– so we’ll make do.”
i’m rather hyper at the moment, having fasted all day and then glutted myself. after joel becca and i feasted ceremoniously at ruach, we came to kohlberg to top all that good jewish food off w/ chai. mm, chai. …
the fast wasn’t terribly difficult. we went to reconstructionist services until 1, returned home and watched two decent movies (ma vie en rose and suburbia, the first twice as good as the second but neither something i’d seek out to see again.) i slept briefly and woke, panicked, around 5. joel and ross walked in and gave me hugs and asked if i was all right; i calmed down. i had a horrifying sense that there was something very important i had to do Right Away.
i just pointed joe to ross’s website. he’d never seen it before. oop, now joe wants to look at the onion, which is fucking funny this week. (“i can give you 40 seconds,” says he. thanks joe. “did i mention that that’s your cumulative worth to me? 40 seconds?” he’s smiling; what a silly boy.) all right, i’m surrendering the computer. i should go twirl around outside. i have much too much energy.
ross is totally awesome, and not just because he writes about my “proclivities toward hedonism.” he is referring to last year when all of my actions did not quite fall within some people’s definition of honorable. i had been straight-edge throughout high skool; the last thing i wanted was to come to college and have a repeat of the frustration and disappointment that characterized my life there. i mean, going to a small jewish skool for thirteen years had its perks (my wonderful wonderful circle of friends; our senior year 4-month jaunt to israel; the fact that tonite at services becca voiced envy for my knowledge of hebrew). but it also had its weaknesses (a diversity of people rivaled only by certain amish communities; a guidance department run by doddering grandmothers in business suits; jewish mothers as teachers; NO PLAY and no potential for it).
i mean, sheesh, wouldn’t you succumb to the attentions of, at various points, an attractive, determined lesbian, a drunk harvard boy, skirts over pants and queen mary? and, once you got to college, wouldn’t you be swept off your feet by someone who swept you off your feet? or someone who sings Indigo Girls w/ you and compliments your voice? or someone who dances w/ you on a stage and says “swell”? or — oh i have more to say, but becca is leaning demurely over my shoulder and indicating that she wants to go home. we rented movies and are going to be Good Jews by watching them; right, and fasting and praying and breast-beating and all the rest. that goes w/o saying. (‘especially the breast-beating,’ says becca, a glint in her eye.)
forgive me! o, what a year it’s been.
— okay, moments later, i’m back. on the cold walk to the barn, becca had an epiphany that i was a 14th century venetian courtesan in a past life. oop, my eye is twitching — means i’m exhausted — i’ll make this quick.
becca’s so cool. she has this 40s/50s glamour charm and a good heart for the sake of which we forgive her attractions to goyishe boys. we clean-slated earlier, took turns apologizing (me for snapping at her). she and joel and i went to services together; got there late; sat in the back row; and occasionally voided our prayers by whispering comments about those around us, like the tall athletic blond guy w/ the ski-jump nose (we contemplated pulling him aside and saying, ‘all right, chip, the game is up. we’re onto you …) or making fun of reform congregations (‘they’re like, “praise jesus!”,’ said joel). but what’s more jewish than that?
at one point, we three held hands. so adorable. we missed ross of course but there’s actually a prayer you say for those who have forsaken their heritage during which we nodded soberly at each other.
film today was good; still, it felt like it went on forever. at least catharine gaffney sat next to me so i could a) talk to her and b) feel reassured that she is no longer excessively creeped out by me (yay!)
i am at peace. good yontif everyone, especially my jds friends if they’re reading this.
congratulations go out to:
1) my father, who proudly informed me last nite that he’d Sent an Email (“5 years after everyone else,” my mother added) and Revised a Document. more importantly perhaps he entered my name in a search index and visited This Page. this page! such a smart papa i have, i said. not all papas would be so smart — certainly not ones who for the past 61 years have remained stubbornly computer-illiterate and reliant on the secretarial skills of incompetant women in denver and occasionally his daughter to get get by.
2) liz, who called me last nite, flighty and frenzied, to give me a precis of her eventful life. highlights: increased involvement w/ the trans movement (at smith) included special attention to two special souls. the first was brief; this second ongoing. “as terrible as i am w/ names, i’m really good at remembering pronouns,” she says. she seems to be entirely, adorably smitten. the object of her affection reciprocates; & she’s identifying as a female at the moment so it counts as a lesbian relationship.
3) speaking of lesbian relationships, apparently miss annie up at yale has gotten herself seduced by a 21 year old who’s crazy for her.
oh mercy. heartfelt condolences to:
1) becca, who doesn’t deserve such shabby treatment. idiot pennmen.
2) catharine gaffney, at whom i yelled by accident yesterday when she was knocking at the door of the barn. i added insult to injury by hugging her in apology — i forgot that she’s not a touchy-feely person. she more or less fled, and she’s barely glanced in my direction since.
3) the other becca, to whom i was bitchy yesterday. i told ben sorrowfully last nite that sometimes i’m just mean — i don’t know why, really. i get resentful or hold grudges for offenses that people don’t even realize they’ve committed. i ought to talk to her but i haven’t seen her yet today. bah. tis the season to beg forgiveness anyway, i guess.
honestly, what’s more interesting than people?
“n.b.: robert benchley. please come home. nothing is forgiven”
— d. p.
last nite khadijah approached me about codirecting for colored girls who have considered suicide…. she’s never directed before but wants to do this for black history month. i won’t be here then, i said. she still wants me to help: this semester, while i’m around. coaching the actors on lines, helping w/ characters. she’ll handle the movement/dance aspect later after winter break. she seemed frazzled — marc had just lectured her on the necessity of having a VISION before attempting to put on a play and gotten himself all worked up. he directed her in a show last year by the same author; i imagine he feels a little posessive.
i’d never read for colored girls … so i promised that i’d think about it; told her to calm down and not let marc undermine her confidence in herself (standard advice); and went to ponder the question.
i wrote and directed a stupid little play in sixth grade that i was proud of at the time. last semester, becca and i co-directed a scene called “date w/ a stranger.” we made it more complicated than it needed to be by taking the two characters and splicing them into two each — i.e.: two men named clark, two women named paula, all sitting in a row. we played around w/ it a lot, and our actors contributed ideas and opinions, and we made it work. actually it rocked, and it was really funny, which you don’t get too much of around here. (we like our drama dark and inscrutable, and usually either centuries old or so post-modern it was written five years from now.)
i also stage managed another of marc’s plays, neil labute’s “bash,” during which process i was constantly plotting to wrest control away from him. i didn’t want to be in charge of gathering chairs; i had insight. that was kindof frustrating, altho marc did listen to me sometimes and i got some interaction w/ the actors. marc warns that i will have a similarly frustrating experience doing this play b/c khadijah is as stubborn as he is.
i don’t know if any of the above qualifies me. i do want to direct this semester but this certainly isn’t what i had in mind: it’s a seriously intense piece; if done well, i’m sure it’s incredibly moving. the language is gorgeous, it’s poetry, expressive without being pretentious or abstruse. but it is abstract, and expressionist, neither of which i have any experience w/, and it’s about an anger i can’t relate to first-hand. what the hell do i know about growing up under these circumstances? i’m fucking privileged, like almost anyone you’d run into on the internet: white, educated, upper-middle-class. never really denied anything by parents, by life.
on the other hand, this is an opportunity. i’ll never be brave enuf to attempt something this ambitious on my own or even to work on something so foreign. this has the potential to make me very uncomfortable — that can be invaluable.
in other news, after ragging on ben for the zoo that is his dorm (first ants, then a mouse) and declaring i’d never visit there again, we found a mouse ourselves in the barn. karma?
and some jackass keeps calling and asking for me, leaving his name as “jamal” or, shit, what was the other? something else that begins w/ a “j”. joel, who is always the one who answers, is a credulous guy but he has his limits. i just think it’s kindof dumb and counterproductive but done enuf dumb and counterproductive things in the name of humor that i can probably chalk this up to karma too.
ross rebecca ben and i are all in the library, alternately working and making nuisances of ourselves. much recent discussion of a) whether ross should hook up w/ someone while alyssa is faraway and otherwise engaged (spiritually); b) if a) yes, then w/ whom?; c) should becca as well and w/ whom?; d) and what should happen over fall break. we’ ve had these plans to visit ross’s mythical house in “wanakena” which is in the “adirondacks” (please note that thru the use of quotation marks, i am conveying that i’m not sure these “places” exist) for about as long as we’ve known each other. they’ve never worked out, always for lack of a car. i refuse to predict whether this will be Different. i live my life free of expectations — it’s less messy that way.
ester’s rules of happiness: 1) want what you can have; 2) don’t need what you want; 3) enjoy what you’re good at.
much drama recently. an urgent-seeming guestbook message from ari. an intense one from jay. an unexpected (serendipitous?) invitation by an acquaintance to co-direct a play for black history month that i’ve never read and feel rather unqualified to helm. it could easily be an excellent, unique experience for me, or it could be awful and uncomfortable all the way thru. ilana’s dorm struck by a fierce, site-specific tornado. ben frenzied. joel unintentionally creating a shortlived but frightening grease fire in our kitchen: he was more affected than the kitchen was and more ashamed than burnt.
me tired. damn my fellow barnies: when are we going home?
lana insinuated that i write differently, or have been writing differently, this past month. she didn’t give specifics. i wonder whether, now that my audience has slimmed down, i’ll abandon whatever new tactics i’ve put on. there are still strangers, people w/ whom i’ll never have a conversation, reading what i write here. does it matter that it’ll be closer to ten than a hundred per day? i wonder.
anyway, all writing is for an audience, even if you keep it theoretically chaste and tucked away in a real-space notebook. behind every diarist is the anne-frank-sylvia-plath-virginia-woolf-inspired knowledge that if you die before you’re 40, there’s always the possibility that someone out there wants to hear your voice, cut off as it was so cruely and so prematurely before your song was done. essentially writers are performers, performers egotists, and there you go. but what’s the point in feeling bad about it? by that score, most of the world is indicted. certainly most of the worthwhile folks.
i really don’t like to think of myself as an egotist. but it’s more or less inevitable, isn’t it? if you write — or, more accurately, if you make an effort to publish — you’re assuming you have something interesting to say; you assume you’re worth the paper you’re printed on. you’re saying, I think I’m good; probably even Better; possibly Best. what craziness.
last nite becca ross and i stayed up obscenely late corrolating appearances to personalities. could there be some connection b/w metabolisms and characters? ross has a thesis about a certain type of girl who invaribly looks a certain way. becca argues. we pore over the cygnet, debating, finding only one exception to ross’s rule. it’s 2:35 a.m., we shouldn’t be up wasting time like this — which is one of the reasons why, roughly six hours later, ross and i wake w/ a start and rush to class, trudging thru underbrush and heavy moist air. i feel like i’m in jurassic park b/c of the backpack and the general surreal spongy feeling of the day.
history is good, tho (if only i could manage to stop yawning), as is lunch w/ mariah later. she complains about a girl who talks too much in her class and i know exactly immediately who she must mean; the same girl is in my history class, only i’m more sympathetic to her; i concoct stories of a childhood that shaped her in a particular way; mariah remains skeptical. we encounter ben in sharples, equipped w/ headphones (wsrn started broadcasting today) and backpack; we all sit together and after listening to mariah and i chat for a while, he observes that women talk more about People (which he finds petty) and men more about Things (which we do.) both talk about Ideas. we discuss this thought intelligently for a while, then the danger/usefulness of Generalizations as a whole.
later, film class: i arrive half an hour early by mistake but luckily Ayja (sp?) does too and we talk til beloved prof Sunka arrives. once back at barn, scribble some reflections. ben appears. i smile at him. “guess what i’m writing about,” i say. “me?” he asks. “no,” i say. “People.”
in no particular order: free love? hair as a defining characteristic. jamal who asked for me by name. convincing joel, who took the call, that i’ve never known anyone named jamal in my life. awful lyrics. hilarious website. hundreds of pages of history reading; 12 federalist papers. (“do you have to seem sentimental to be sentimental?”) chub. a left-over tray of sushi. a meeting of my sclp group, amusing for 12 girls, 11 of whom are white, 6 of whom are jewish, 4(?) of whom are queer; all of whom are good, sensitive liberals who speak in carefully tactful questions, and invariably wear solid colored shirts of red, blue, purple, or white. vegan chocolate-chip bread. stefanie suddenly faint, revived by my fetching water and general fussing. memories of last nite’s red-eyed garret: “i don’t even know who jesus is!”
passing two bowls around the table at paces, our student-run (this year, jolly-run) cafe — one filled w/ squash soup, the other not. dropping the bowl instinctively in front of elena, ruby’s quasi-bunny, when targeted by the paces staff for smoking (“hey!” she protests.)(she went home this weekend to see her quasi-bunny. i asked ruby if he cared or if anything was declared. “what the fuck do i care?” grinned he.) 20 oz of diet coke, not obtained at paces b/c they’re out of sodas, not to mention spoons, milkshakes, mocha, and champagne, half of which they spilled all over the floor. talk of a jaunt to iceland over fall break. when is fall break, anyway? adirondacks first. sure…
ben’s talking to his mom on the phone behind me. that’s always a funny thing. does she know i’m here? should i leave? (‘don’t leave,’ he whispers, cupping his hand over the receiver.) i chat w/ rob, who was crazy last nite and this morning is occupied w/ his belle&sebastian and the ants crawling all over his bookcase. i wander back in here, sit at the computer. ahh, computer.
last nite was a lot of fun. ben and ross threw another party, this time situtated it in this beautiful walled in courtyard. adjunct to it was another party, one w/ alcohol and which had been well-publicized; but ben and ross had better music and the novelty of an outside, lovely location, not to mention $200 worth of sushi, so they wooed about 200 people over and then kept them. at 2, which was when the thing was slated to end, there were still folks pleading for them to keep playing. it was incredible. all evening long, people approached me and told me how great it was and how much they enjoyed it. becca was wearing the tight three-quarters dress that dips up the front that we bought at mustard seed; she was dancing her heart out and loving it.
shit. the phone conversation has shifted from smalltalk to wartalk (‘i didn’t say do nothing — drop some food on them!’) how about televisions? oh, he just mentioned that: little screens showing international leaders denouncing the taliban. i don’t know if that would work; that might just get people riled up. altho it would be wonderfully ironic if osama was killed by a stray Panasonic set to Fox.
and there are ants everywhere.
focus, focus. yesterday marc and i went into philly. we met jolly, jeff (who goes to skool w/ us and went to high skool w/ joc) and their mutual pennfriend ina, whose first exposure to marc was walking in on him in a compromising position. we went to a mediocre dinner and then split up: marc and i to see bread and tulips, which was charming, and jolly jeff and ina to see some band from iceland in concert.
later, matt rubin and joel, who went to the same concert, proclaimed it the best they’d ever been to — they looked like they’d been shooting up, they were dazed and dazzled. joc seemed less affected but she liked it too. everyone regrouped at the party.
it was quite an active day. to make the post-movie train, marc and i had to run nine blocks. earlier, becca and i lugged all our laundry to the ville, altho we got out of having to lug it all back by smiling pretty at a man who was doing his at the same time and asking for a ride.
forget it, i can’t concentrate. he’s pacing behind me, getting louder and more upset. i should go home: i have to eat, i have work to do. “we’re treading a fine line here b/w war w/ islam and coalition w/ islam.” oh, he’s backed off — he’s apologizing — “i love you too mom” — and, oh man, oh man, “oh, happy birthday. i totally forgot.” jesus. 🙂 (“it was a week ago,” he adds.) anyway.
officially off blogger’s page now, by the way. oh well. my 15 minutes are up.