septa, both ways, into and from the city: $7.50

vegetarian buffet dinner at samosa: $9

plus all the wine i could drink at becca’s theater open house

net change in my financial status after this evening: +$11.50

HOW is this possible, you ask? how can a person MAKE MONEY having gone into the city and eaten and drunk sumptuously?

for tonight, i’ll leave you to mull. well, with one hint. i looked CUTE.

second revision: actually, this one many of you have not seen before:

polipersonal

I miss Israel

(there,

I said it)

A beach at the end

of every bus ride, the attendant

anxiety sweeter than salt-

water: getting there alive,

the relief would make me buoyant

and prone to burns.

In Jerusalem, I scribbled every word

the puffing, pacing mayor

said, and,

on a different page, the

angry-tired Palestinian, Youssef:

Your independence,

my catastrophe. I was so innocent,

I was surprised. this was 2000,

things were good then,

hopeful. when I was up North, an Arab

family gestured me onto their porch

for nuts

with everything to say to each other

and no shared tongue, we smiled

awkwardly and ate.

back on kibbutz, no one read newspapers.

I used them to clean mirrors

in hadar ochel bathrooms (my first taste

of a blue collar). people who walked by

nodded �hi,� respectful;

I could be their daughter

everyone took turns doing

this kind of work. still, the political void

rang in my ears until relieved

by a visit to cousins in Tel Aviv

The government dissolved again (they

sighed) Well,

every Tuesday and Thursday.

they fed me, walked me, even dug up

Shabbes candles so I�d feel

at home. See,

I did feel at home, especially on Fridays,

when busses stopped. Religious families

bundled to Shul and Seculars

hit the beach. I�m not observant

but it was spiritual:

dining out on Passover,

hearing Hebrew, sleeping in the desert,

just walking

through the sky-blue city

of S�fad. could you live here?

my friends asked each other.

not until Peace, we said, but felt

on the precipice of it, assumed it could happen

any day. two years later

escaping college, I spent

the spring in Denmark, the country

I knew from Number the Stars

No one carried guns, not even

cops in Copenhagen: even some of

the prisons had no walls

I trekked to classes over cobblestones,

passing pastel buildings,

hot-dog vendors, falafel stands, and

Palestinian protests in halting Danish

to halting Danes: flags and the word

Hitler I recognized: but by then, I�d seen it all

before, shuffled through a gauntlet

of police the only time I tried the city�s

only synagogue, handed my passport

to the guard at the gate and answered

his questions as flashbulbs popped:

over two years, I�d learned

the limit to how Left I could go

if I couldn�t let go of what I�d left behind me,

always planning to go back.

revision. please tell me what you think (better? do you miss something?)

the love song of t. stearns eliot

T.S. Eliot (what did his friends call him?)

loose within the gilded cage

of Harvard, age 19, produced

his best. Without tax forms to file or a split-

level home, Eliot (how did his fellow

snobs know him?) penned Prufrock, a love song, and

my favorite poem.

Decades later, he embraced

the Catholic faith to such a frowny-faced degree

that he chased his chaste and nervous wife

out of the country, across the sea, to an asylum

(she�d decay in pine for him, her coffin

set above the ground)

and buried himself in Ezra Pound.

I prefer Prufrock — old, bemused,

peering at the life he missed. Only, characters

don�t exist, except that the artist

and the art are fused

Genius leans in and

I can�t resist:

a patient on a table, I am kissed

by someone I abhor — the tryst so good that, Doctor,

I want more

and which is worse:

seeming to endorse you by confessing I adore

some of your adolescent brilliance � or

leaving the fanfare and the accolades for critics who,

like mermaids, sing them, each to each, relishing

the high notes I can�t reach? — I wonder

if you�d like me.

I�m the age you were, but far less surly

I giggle more, I�m vaguely girly;

and though I�ll admit that you were wiser,

I�m not a Nazi sympathizer.

still, I�m sure we could agree

we�ve hit the nadir with Fox TV; we could share

a table, raise a glass to a culture gone ersatz; pun

through a series of tea-timed chats; and if we felt

particularly free of the claims of identity

you and I could hit the town:

� me in sunglasses, you in spats �

buy ourselves tickets and laugh through Cats

at least til conscience wakes us, and we drown

the latest set of words of wisdom from my brother as he readies himself to plunge into the real world has nothing to do with politics and is very much worth reading. okay, there’s a tiny smidgen of politics at the end, but for the sake of the funniness that comes before, i imagine you can overlook that.

comments are suggesting i put on shakespeare. what madness is this? anybody want to see / never again be subjected to uncle willy? anybody have a favorite? twelfth night might be mine. then again, no one could do a better job in it than helena bonham carter.

i’m more or less done for the week. a lovely feeling. perhaps i will watch one of my many movies, my collection having bunnied recently. a few serious items remain on the to-do list, to-be sure: finish revising poems for my class’s live! reading in may (i’m thinking terrible twos, the love song of t. stearns eliot, and at 70, a nice chronological progression), finish revising and hand in 10 pages of poems for the possibility of summer money ( => which?), various mailings, applying to the phoenix, blah blah blah. nothing that compares to anything anyone else has to do.

maybe i’ll go into the city and see becca. that’s what i want to do. maybe we can break pesach together. becca, what do you say?

my wonderfully wacky history prof decided that my american social history seminar should be midsectioned by a seder. she printed out copies of a feminist haggadah for everyone and appointed me leader. a couple people in the class had never heard the story or tasted matzoh (can you believe it? in this day and age?)

we went through the whole thing. sort of reminiscent of seder I last year wherein i improvised a seder at a hotel, explaining as i went to bemused onlookers and eager-to-be-supportive friends. this one, however, had a distinct political agenda. i found that charming, if occasionally over the top. i’d never had a seder like that before.

mere hours later, i was in a full car driving to bryn mawr to rent a movie from the Good video store around here. as sarah kelly and i browsed the adult section, for kicks, a man with bloodshot eyes approached us and asked if we’d help him pick something out.

s. kelly and i escaped, rejoining the others. we ended up with adventures in babysitting. (such fond memories of that movie — my summer camp used to show it to us. in fact, it was the first pg-13 movie i ever saw.)

tla was also having a 2 for 1 sale on used movies. figuring whatthehell, i bought 2 movies i haven’t seen but have heard are excellent: mifune, the 3rd danish dogme film, starring the woman from high fidelity, and nine queens, a spanish heist flick. for good measure i got the kingdom too, lars van trier’s ultra-exciting x-files-meets-ER danish tv series. all for $18 total! not that i need your support, or anything. that is not what this webjournaling business is about.

happy easter! as we all know, jesus was way cool …

back at swarthmore, life is calm. everyone lounges about in the sunlight. doing work, of course, but still lounging. it’s fun being a bunny in springtime watching the other bunnies, especially when i have relatively little work to do myself. i may have an ear infection; otherwise, my cold is receding, leaving me hale and hearty. i find everything cute, and i’m eating much too much passover chocolate. possibly those things are related and the candy’s releasing a steady stream of seritonin. what a nice thought.

the other night i got to spend time with kross. we visited with various seniors whose inevitable taking leave of us in a month or so i refuse to think about. we parted only to reconvene at 25th hour. it made me think. like most of the spike lee movies i’ve seen, it needs a good editor: easily 20 minutes could be trimmed off. that was, however, one of the only things that reminded me it was a spike lee joint. the mirror rant and the setting in nyc — right. but where were the overt racial politics? what statement was he making about the white — or, in some subtle way i couldn’t really understand, the black — community?

ed norton and philip seymour hoffman delivered. just a day’s work for them. poor ed: in how many movies does he have to play a violent, self-destructive outlaw? poor cousin phil: in how many more movies does he have to play a sexually frustrated loser? but this is what we love them for. nobody does it better.

also saw possibly the best swarthmore theater-department-theater production yet, roger babb’s take on brecht’s man = man. at points, it felt professional. at points, i thought, what am i doing pretending to direct? i don’t have this kind of vision. sure, he’s been doing it for ages, it’s his job. but it reinforced my decision not to do a show next semester. i’ll leave that to people who share his passion and who are testing out their own abilities and visions.

i’ll concentrate on films. and snood!

here’s a meme: google the people you’ve kissed in your lifetime and see what comes up.

#1 — appears only in the “last will and testament” of my highskool’s class of 1999, the class one year older than we were. xxx is first on the list of things given to a girl who actually, at one point, dated my older brother. if the school hadn’t discontinued the tradition immediately thereafter, xxx probably would have been on the list of things given to me too.

#2 — appears in a review of a play he was in at yale: “For all his talk about death, Harold Ryan (xxxx xxxxx) tries his best to kill the show. Yolen�s direction no doubt encouraged xxxxx to take Ryan over-the-top, and rightly so, but unfortunately xxxxx decided to shout most of his lines. xxxxx does well when he quiets down but does so too infrequently to create a character worth watching. Without any compassion for xxxxx’s shifty-eyed killing machine, the heart of Vonnegut�s play is lost.”

my god, if he’d been a shifty-eyed killing machine when we dated, i woulda let him kiss me with tongue.

ps: now he’s gay.

#3 — last i heard, xxx had gotten fat and religious. fittingly, he appears on the internet only in the form of a boring, bloated d’var torah he got published.

#4 — no mention. an internet void. considering the xxxxx-shaped void in my life, it seems appropriate.

#5 — appears as a kosher cook and on a frank cho webpage, having submitted an excellent entry in a contest. someone on a message board responds, “wow!! xxxxxxxx is awesome!” of course, i recognize the someone — she’s a mutual friend — but that makes the compliment no less true.

#6 — don’t remember his last name, can’t google him. i mean, i only knew the guy several hours.

#7 — the most infamous. in this swattie’s journal entry, he plays an equally infamous historical character: “I had on more than scarves, I was clad as Salom�, dancing to Alan Hovhaness’ The Rubaiyat, while xxxxx xxxx (Herod) watched. After the entire fucking Big Room of Sharples was watching for a minute or so (“take it off!”), he raised his voice, and said, “I am well pleased. You may have anything you like, up to half my kingdom.” I had to ask for the head of John the Baptist.”

when i tried another innocuous-looking link, a series of porn pages popped up and took over my computer. i am now officially freaking out because there are two windows that i cannot manage to close. argrgrhghhghhhhhhh. now i’ll have to clear the history.

#8 — a very common name, it seems. actually two of ross’s pages pop up. the boy’s only distinctive mention.

#9 — he won a debate award. good for him.

#10 — ah ben, the b. loved. for now, at least, the buck stops here.

so it’s passover. i should say something profound.

um.

well, i went shopping today. i bought possibly the most bizarre item of clothing i’ve ever owned. it makes me exceedingly happy (ask me to show it to you. hell, ask to borrow it) at the same old place, of course, where the owner says Wow you’ve got a haircut! with the same resentment that always hangs around her words, like air quotes. actually my haircut has garnered more praise than i could possibly have expected. how wise i was to get it done the day of my last performance: i could coast on it for the next few weeks and compliments could gently phase out of my life rather than simply not be there one morning when i woke.

at the seder, one of my parents’ dazed family friends approached me and said words to that effect. actually, her exact words were, “oh darling. oh you look so nice. you know, when i first saw hilary clinton, i didn’t think much of her, i didn’t think she was going places. but look at her now! she’s really pulled it all together and she just looks fabulous.” then she beamed beatifically at me.

this is the same woman who, at a similar event when i was 13, approached me when i was standing with a good friend. “hold on to your innocence, girls,” she told us firmly. “it’s all you have. and when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

my mother puts on two seders every year. every year they’re planned and orchestrated perfectly. she cooks for 23 or 24, everyone eats off china, we read the same haggadah (published 1975. the only woman anywhere to be found in it is the barren woman who at one point god makes the happy mother of children — hallelujah!). my grandfather leads. we read the four questions in three languages. as each of my brothers and i passed through fourth grade the same wonderful teacher taught us to recite them in yiddish. it got a standing ovation when my older brother first did it, lo these many years ago. when i did it, it brought tears to my grandmother’s eyes. when my little brother did it, everyone found it charming — and he’s been doing it every year, ever since.

seders over with, today we’ve been eating leftover passover candy and we went as a family to see christopher guest’s newest A Mighty Wind. i can’t remember the last thing i went to with a group that big — and it made everyone laugh. also it made up my mind about applying to the phoenix (stupid newspaper) next semester for my old position. i want an excuse to see a movie a week, it’s as simple as that.

there is a whole entry to be written about identity and being actively rather than de facto something or other, but i think for now i’ll wander downstairs, eat more matza, and watch more directtv.

my brother informs me that he’s coming down tonight. packed and ready by 11: all right. whisked to washington where i’ll wake up tomorrow in the stress of a completely different environment. family! and no bread for eight days. last year i was in moscow.

happy pesach, easter, or anything you celebrate. if you celebrate. if you don’t, my god, how do you mark the passage of time?

the long-awaited and much-hyped meeting of the parents went off without a hitch. (pun intended. ha ha.) we began the morning by meeting his mom and harry, her sheesh-what-do-you-call-a-live-in-long-term-boyfriend and dashing through the woods in an attempt to catch the crum regatta. in this charming swarthmore tradition, students make their own boats and have to sail them around the bend of a river. so i’m told anyway; naturally we were too late and missed the action and the awards ceremony.

trekked back to campus. my parents rolled in, reminding me that for three sets of parents we had three s.u.v.s: a lexus, a mercedes, and an acura. after a brief howdyado in the parking lot, we took two suvs a two minute drive to breakfast, at which i was struck by terrible cramps. all the women at the table ordered a spinach omelette; i barely touched mine. it required enough effort to keep up conversation with ben’s mom and my father. everyone else seemed to be doing fine, even lingering post-coffee until i, maddened by my desire to get somewhere where i could lie on my back without eliciting stares from bluehaired women, urged us out.

i got my hour of recooperation time. meanwhile his dad and lisa, his what-do-you-call-a-wife-from-whom-he-may-or-may-not-still-be-separated, and his sister showed up, signaling a changing of the guard. i joined the crowd in the ampitheater, the prettiest least used spot on campus, for a gammalan concert. i can’t believe i’d never been to one before, it was so much fun to watch. then we dined at dahlek, our ethiopean mainstay, where people lingered over spiced tea.

good times. no one fought, no one died. in the car at one point my parents told me that they would help me to live in new york this summer. they’re nicer to me than i deserve. after they left, ben and i were so depleted that we crawled into bed at 9:30. over the course of today, i’ve had to administer two stern doses of ‘quil to keep a bourgeoning sick at bay; luckily it’s worked. i managed to get my last seminar paper written, printed, and sent.

and i got my lottery number. not that it matters: my fourth year, and yet another in which i don’t have to go to the lottery. i’ll leave skool without having ever had the pleasure. but i’m still obscurely proud of my number. out of 1,470 or so, i’m 25.