swing down, swing up, but at least presently we’re on a swing up. don’t talk to me about politics. this isn’t about politics. this is about hats. a lovely one that has been on many heads has landed on mine, where i must say it looks best. perhaps i will even get to keep it.

the set is near complete and it’s gorgeous. there is something extraordinary about seeing ideas you discussed six months ago materialize in ultra-lifesize form. rehearsal this evening lived up to its surroundings and despite today’s shakiness and queasiness i’m buoyant now. running into cheerful sarah kelly in the library helped. we have a date tomorrow, to keep us cheerful, to watch an episode of My So-Called Life.

everybody’s talking about the goddamned war. if you’re not, well, as my father’s friend trotsky once said, “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” where i am the anger is palpable. — & speaking of anger, i happened across this mesmerizing list of the 50 worst people of 2002. some of its bombast is funny, some of it just takes your breath away. but some of his points are particularly well-made.

not that i’m the kind of person who’ll hate someone else just cause i’m told to. and i won’t agree to go to war or stand for peace just cause i’m told to either. unless of course, it’s funny, like the tractor standoff:

Watson said he is acting alone. Asked why he decided to protest this week, Watson said: “I just played it by ear. The Lord told me to do it. He said, ‘Time is running out, Jack.'”

i mean, i don’t want to like this guy. he’s a tobacco farmer and clearly a nut-job. but he is against the war and hey, maybe this is the kind of effective political action the peace movement needs.

i’m not sure why the anger hasn’t hit me. because i accidentally slept thru cowboy bush’ s 13 minute call to action? because i’m too stressed with more immediate personal issues? (ha — that makes it sound so serious. i don’t really have issues. i have perfectly reasonable things to deal with, things i brought on myself.) because i’m suspicious of melodrama? because people are worrying about the future and i think, what’s the point? the future hasn’t even happened yet!

my bad mood lifted last night thanks to a moonlit rendez-vous with ross in the ampitheater. before that, tho, i was sincerely anxious: if i was breaking down and it was only MONDAY, what kind of quivering pastel mess would i be by friday? thank god i’ve stepped back from the brink. now perhaps the world will too.

to wit:

I will be a stout

and blissful seventy,

with a stomach like a cushion

for my breasts

sturdy legs to walk me

round and round the zoo,

with one hand on some man

for support

which man, with luck, will

make me laugh across tables

accompany me to cinemas

or mountains

and with me watch retreating snow

reveal mirrors, and birds dislodge

shards of songs

from their throats

maybe, by the time I�m old,

science will have found a way

for women to give birth

to grandkids

so I can have some

They�ll bake cookies to feed me

and frame the poems I

write for them

some of which may be famous

if I am, in certain circles

I�ll remember when people

envied me

told me I changed their conception

of beauty, or slept with me

to spurt urgent, sour words

on my sheets

I�ll tell stories, when I�m 70,

of my affair with the president,

who had me write on him with

fountain pens

and had to explain

to the president of Cameroon

why �fleetingly fascinating�

circled his wrist

and I�ll grow faint and wistful

telling stories: at 70, stories

are what�s left, and more than

half fiction.

stressed and frazzled. which is to say, i’m caught up with everyone else at last. at dawn, ben and i fought over the words to the tiny toons theme song. he finds out about the watson (the fellowship where they pay you to stay out of the u.s. for a full year. they should give w. an honorary one …). such things are always nerve-wracking. no excuse, however, to get up at dawn.

it’s st pat’s day. who has time to drink beer and reinforce stereotypes? although the closest i come to irish is present assocations with a couple cute catholics, and past strong attachment to scarlett o’hara. presently i’m listening to billy bragg, worker’s playtime. accidental but appropriate.

i’m stressed, so oversensitive. frazzled, so frizzy. i have to write a poem in quatrains. shit. — er, shamrocks.

sometimes waking up to the internet can be oddly discouraging. it’s a representative chunk of the huger, general abyss, and staring into your computer screen makes you realize what a molecule-like part you play.

enough about abysses! it’s a beautiful spring morning. at least i think it is. roomie brigid has cracked the window to let the soft blue air float in. i’m back at swarthmore, got back at noon yesterday having being deposited by a loving father on his way to new jersey. we talked iraq nearly the whole time, as we did the night before at the dinner table when we weren’t talking about whether or not polanski should be able to return to the u.s. without [fear of] punishment.

his argument: it’s been 20 years; he probably was on drugs back then; he’s harmless now; what good will it do, either him or society, to lock him up?

mine: [expletive deleted]

no, really, i was much more eloquent. as always i could see where my father was coming from; but come on. our justice system isn’t based on principles of “what good will it do?” roman polanski, in case you’re too lazy to read gailey’s account above, stands accused of posing as a photographer to get access to a 13 year old girl, taking pictures of her with her shirt off, driving her to jack nicholson’s house on mulholland drive, giving her drugs and alcohol and then raping her. instead of facing any of these charges, polanski fled to france. that country of truth and virtue refused to extradite him. now he’s made a marvelous movie that’s up for an academy award. in the plainest of plain cliched english, that doesn’t put him above the law. we shouldn’t pardon him b/c, unlike millions of other arrested americans, he had the means to flee this country and live happily in the hypocricy of another.

back on campus, i talked less and did more. my stage manager and costume designer have been working since tuesday and they greeted my late entry into the windowless basement room of Getting The Play Ready rather coolly. we open on the 27th: come! i can say that safely since i haven’t had to think [panic] about AIH since before break, and i had break to relax and buy soothing things. despite workworkwork yesterday i’m still in soothed mode. it’ll be fine! come see the show: it’s free!

brigid walks in from taking a shower and says, “my auntie em was married to this guy rick and then they got divorced. she said, ‘you know, i thought he was into jazz. but no, he was into cocaine.'” o, the tribulationish future we women face.

ideal day in bethesda, yuppie overeducated capital of the midatlantic:

begin at mustard seed. you remember this 2nd-and paradise from back when it was dinky and window-less, supported by a cult following willing to seek it out in that ugly shopping mall next to Honeybaked Ham and Iran Books. it stands proudly on its own on wisconsin avenue, with mannequins for eyes, now, and it bustles. say hi to the owner, a strange midly-bitter woman who knows you by name and who has made casual reference to a past pockmarked with an eating disorder and a present that features a cat. she once expressed jealousy at your closeness to your friends. they also shop there compulsively.

they’re not there today, however. you try things on and decide to take a shiny skirt that could be considered pink and a terrific vintage ketchup-colored dress. at the register, the girl ringing you up grins and hollers to the owner, “see?” turning back to you:

she: [the owner] didn’t want to take this. but i think it’s great. it’s, like, scandinavian.

you: hey, maybe that’s why i like it. i thought it looked like a tripped out alice in wonderland.

she: no it doesn’t. no. … it looks scandinavian.

owner smiles thinly at you as you leave, folding up your coat because the sun makes it unneccessary and tucking it in the bag next to the acid alice piece. walk to bethesda row, choke slightly at paying the $9, and buy a ticket for habla con ella. buy a diet coke at the new giant and hide it in your bag before the show starts. mmmm, the show. cry. ignore the old people whispering plot details loudly to each other. feel slightly creeped out by the ending and want to talk about it with someone.

last, hop over to secondstory books and zero immediately in on a vhs copy of wonder boys. pick up a cheap white noise while you’re at it, reading the back impatiently, perfunctorily, before walking it to the register. return to the sunlight and stand, head high, waiting for your chariot to appear.

the last few days have been more relaxing than exciting, and then there was my little driving error coming home from visiting my friend nomi in college park. 20 minute trip ballooned, swelled, boiled over, volcanoed into a 2 hour long wheel-gripping rain-and-rush-hour highway navigational excursion involving new carrolton metro station, a gas station swarming with cops, my father, route 50, no cell phone, and one near-death experience that luckily resulted in no injury to the car, myself, or anyone involved outside of my imagination.

in an unrelated but pulse-quickening incident, a spider appeared on my ceiling later that night, after i’d taken out my contacts, so i had to squint to get more than a vague impression of many-legged-brownness scurrying around above me. finally i called lil bro in to kill it. i haven’t been keeping track of femme points recently but these two episodes combined must add about +30 to my total.

apart from that, though, it’s just been mild weather, lots of work on my grant proposal, crossword puzzles, chatting w/ friends, and several movies, including my lil bro’s pirated version of jay and silent bob strike back at last. whatever you can say about j.a.s.b.s.b.* you have to acknowledge it’s funny as shit. i watched it by myself and i still laughed. something about mary did not pass that test.

* k. smith should write, not direct. k. smith needs a good editor. the movie itself needed to be shorter by about a quarter. ass jokes are overdone. miramax jokes, however, never lose their flavor.

at dinner tonight, my mother made salmon and i took a piece. and ate it. no forked lightning, no applause, no symphonic sentiment swelling in the background — phillip glass, i assume, being otherwise engaged. the 9 months since i’d last eaten fish withered to nothing inthegrandschemeofthings. i didn’t gag. i’m still a vegetarian, just one who eats fish. or who has recently eaten salmon. which — and this upset my mother disproportionally — was a little dry.

serendipity! the book i picked up in northshire, near randomly — on sale, looked appealing — deborah eisenberg’s short stories so far contains one of my all-time favorite stories that i read once years ago in a class; then lost; then couldn’t remember either (a) the name of or (b) the name of its author. “days”! it’s thrilling and somehow very satisfying. and, i should note, it is precisely as good as i remembered.

back from the relatively unfrozen north. jonah , who may chronicle the journey on his grandfather’s webtv, drove sarah, with whom, before this series of coincidences interlaced our paths, i had never seriously spoken and who, moreover, does not believe in blogs, ben and me up to my grandparents’ house in the green mountains. we celebrated skool finally letting out by stopping in nyc for dinner, dessert, and actually-funny improv in chelsea before dropping in on a much startled crowd in ben’s dad’s house. half the assembly stared at us fuzzily in matching bathrobes, then threw up their hands and let us have our way. marauding college kids, high on adrenaline and comedy! they knew they didn’t stand a chance.

we calmed down once we made it to the serenity of manchester, vt. the calm, i think, had a calming effect. we slept and made popcorn, rented 5 movies for $5 and watched three (not bad) (reefer madness — camp: hilariously unbelievable; sleeper — funny for fifteen minutes and then same-old woody allen claptrap; and women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, vintage almodovar). we ate a lot of sugar. all day saturday we skiied: in the morning we [read: ben] taught sarah to ski on the bunny slope and then ben and i hit the squares. we’re so hardcore. sarah acrued an impressive collection of bruises to go with her knee socks and we totally earned the shitty overpriced hot ski lodge lunch food, not to mention the yummy mexican dinner and ben&jerry’s.

sarah distributed fake tattoos that made us all look like we’d been mauled. they pleased us much. eventually, sadly, we had to pack up clean up and go, after a stop at my favorite bookstore in the world. jonah drove us safely back to ny and this morning ben squired me into the city to meet my mother and grandmother for lunch. they’d popped up for a Good Cause Auction and i got to take the train back to dc with them. phew. travelling done, at least for the moment, i’m going to sleep deeply — when i’m done with this conversation w/ sarah kelly about the INCREDIBLE PARTY WE’RE GOING TO THROW:

WHAT’S YOUR LUV WORTH-STOCK: coming to you this spring!! probably april. a couples only olympics: prove your luv in games like “heart hickey giving” and “co-dependent [aka, 3-legged] racing”, the exhibitionism treasure hunt and name that luv-tune! you know you want to, so if you’re not in luv, give that good friend a second glace or get going on that elusive crush. more details to follow soon.