periodically yesterday i felt so overcome by exhaustion that i managed to stay awake less by sheer force of will than by punching myself periodically in the kidney.

philly. one date made out of two (i still don’t know what happened to the first): dinner with the lovely miz becca, which began with 4 free cookies, hot from the oven, handed to us by a disgruntled employee of a closing store. the best cookies in the city, supposedly, but i think any cookies handed to me under those circumstances would taste like chocolate chip heaven.

today i need to pack and make lists and remember everything. it’s relatively beautiful out so i don’t know why i’m sad; hopefully it’ll go away. meanwhile i found this hilarious:

“This is going to make millions of women very happy,” Mr. Detroyer said. “As happy as paper plates may make them, this is going to make them happier.”

o postmodernism. the only exposure i had to the sponge until this article was that episode of seinfeld. (also, paper plates?)

happy spring break everyone. or to whomever it applies.

i’ve been offered an intership at the abrams artists agency in new york this summer. casting! casting! that’s what i want to do. well, if writing doesn’t pan out, or while i wait for writing to pan out, or you know. !! isn’t it exciting? unpaid, of course, and the chances of me meeting anyone important are of course slim. but oh good — it’s something. my first relatively concrete something for the summer.

(i have to get one of the two grants for which i’m applying or the Scholars thing; and/or eliz needs to get the jp money & chase internship for me to live in new york at all. so many elements, it’s hard to keep them straight, and in the attempt i’m eating far too much sugar. i need a personal assistant. or an organizational skillz class. or a little robot to follow me everywhere reminding me of due dates and lunch dates and keeping my papers nicely filed in his electronic briefcase, as opposed to just piled precariously on my floor/bed.)

a package arrived from my parents today, containing a whole winter’s supply of ski clothes. since we’re only expecting to spend a day or two on the slopes, i got that warm “oh, mommy” feeling in my heart. also the key to the house in vermont, a very important article that i WILL not forget. i am very excited. veryveryvery. now that i’m done with my pre-break work, i’m focused on rehearsals, people, and this trip. i am also enamored of the post-its danny got me; i don’t know how i ever managed without them.

my brother and his intelligent musings on war:

Bush’s efforts to make his rhetoric jive with Reagan’s created a continuity in American foreign policy between the Cold War and the post-Cold War that should not exist. The “Evil Empire” and “Axis of Evil” have combined to form the “Revolving Door of Evil,” whereby America installs a government and then treats it like a jar of mayonnaise: “Keep contained after opening. Best if deposed in 20 years.”

appropriate for a day like today. what strikes me as particularly great about the whole standing for peace thing is that it is:

(a) a swattie response to an international day of activism that is well-reasoned and intellectual and self-satisfied and so, so swattie (other skools organized walkouts, but as one fella in my poetry class revealed to me, we value education too highly)

(b) a swattie response to an international day of activism that is inspired by the pope — you know, the catholic one? in rome?

(c) a swattie response to an international day of activism that is inspired by the pope in rome and set on today of all days cuz today is Ash Wednesday.

(d) activism that is inherently inactive. but in a good way. i mean, at least they’re not blocking traffic (except for that one guy in my poetry class who left early to go into philly for that purpose)

i found the contrast between observant catholics walking around today with ash-crosses on their foreheads and people wearing the Stand for Peace t-shirts really interesting. i didn’t notice anyone of color in either category. but as i only had one class today and it was small, i didn’t get too much exposure to the range that was out there. in poetry class, the boys wearing the shirts decided that if we all as a class “consensed” that we were against the war and stood together for a minute, they could sit the rest of the time. so we did: stood, then sat again. that was my contribution to this worthy cause.

(note: i do not [entirely] mean to be ironic and caustic. that’s almost as bad as being cynical, which is what people used to call me. i swear i’m not. i really am anti-war and pro-people doing whatever they feel they need to or what will make them feel useful/engaged. this is just my natural edge and if it offends you, you should realize i don’t mean it and i probably love you and by me, anything you do is right.)

i’m beginning to wonder whether being vegetarian is like havine dated someone for 4 months — you’re getting antsy and you realize you either have to move on to the next stage of committment (i love you / veganism) or break up (bacon).

or maybe being vegetarian is like listening to ani difranco — something respectable people only do in high skool.

i’m metaphor hungry. i’m also just-plain-noexcuses hungry. (but for what?) i do fine, vegetarian. the only thing i miss, occasionally, is fish, particularly on holidays. that’s why fish was the last thing to go. go it did. i don’t feel better about myself as a human being. in sushi restaurants in particular, i feel like an idiot. so why not eat fish?

why not eat fish? better with guidelines? it’s headache inducing. the admonishments; the alternatives? (mom, don’t look).

speaking of mom, i know it would make her happy if i went back to eating fish. there’s a reason i can feel unconflicted about.

chocolate + diet coke propelled me through the writing of my seminar paper, but now that i’m done, it’s past midnight and no atom of my body has any intention of going to sleep. so i offer this, dave barry’s take on LOTR. the funniest i’ve seen him be in a while.

timmy: golly, problematic man! you look down. what’s the matter?

problematic man: well, timmy, i’ve just gotten back from a Problematic situation.

timmy: really? what happened?

problematic man: cleverly disguised as a swarthmore student, i was reading some lacan in the kohlberg coffee bar when i got a distress call from a nearby classroom. i swooped over to see what was happening. a young well-dressed asian woman with an acoustic guitar had moved to the front to present her comic dialogue, as, over the past couple weeks, so many of her classmates had done. alarm bells rang immediately as she began, “inspired by the Vagina Monologues as performed recently by several very talented actresses, i thought i’d write my own monologue,” and then proceeded to play the intro the dave matthew’s “crash.”

timmy: why didn’t you stop her, problematic man?

problematic man: well, as the assignment was to write a comic piece, i thought perhaps the ensuing monologue would be an ironic sendup of the monologues. i let her proceed. she put down her guitar and, in a stereotypical representation of a poor-white southern accent, intoned, “i loves my guitar. my guitar is alls i got going in this world. my mama, she don’t like me to play my guitar …”

timmy: holy classism and more-than-likely racism, problematic man!

pm: precisely, little timmy. but she didn’t stop there. she continued to tell the story of how her mama found her one day playing her guitar and threatened her, screaming curses (“you little crackwhore bitch girl”) and expletives before wrenching the guitar from her poor daughter’s grasp and smashing it against the wall. when her father came home later, she explained, he verbally and sexually abused the girl’s mother, and as he had once played in a band that explained the mother’s aversion to the daughter’s guitar.

t: how did the class react to this cliched, melodramatic, manipulative potboiler?

pm: that’s the funny thing, little timmy. people seemed to react as though it was a legitimate piece of drama. when i couldn’t stand it anymore, i assumed my typical role of a sensitive swarthmore student and i raised the issue that the dialect made me uncomfortable. but just then, my arch nemesis, dr. ditz, spoke up.

t: not dr. ditz!

pm: i’m afraid so. “but like the dialect made it like so much more interesting,” she said, “because like i don’t get to hear that kind of talking so often, you know? it’s like really exciting, cause it’s different.” i turned my ExoticizingTheOther laser gun at her but before i could pull the trigger, the professor stepped in and made the point for me.

t: so you didn’t exactly save the day, didja, Problematic Man?

pm: no, timmy. i wish Consciousness Raising Girl had been there with me. but i did the best i could.

t: don’t worry, Problematic Man. there’s still every other class you’ve ever taken or ever will take here in which a travesty like that could never take place.

pm: you’re right, it’s true … all the same, do you think i should destroy the Vagina Monologues before they tempt others to follow this young woman’s lead and create other offensive stories that essentialize females-as-victims?

t: gee, you know, i haven’t actually seen them so i’m not sure. [turning to the camera] what do you think?

tonight i’m afraid is when my monthly reality check gets delivered. fitting as is first of month. welcome [back], my lovely, to the addictive world of blogging.

a chai in the company of sarah c. and my spirits are back up. i have a kickass [idea for a] first paragraph for my history seminar paper that illustrates the thesis i will present through the example of ariel, the little mermaid; and a kickass title (“intercoarse: changing social and sexual habits in recent americans.” harkens back to WISSHH.) in between stretches of dutiful, fruitful labor, we discussed how co|motion has positively influenced our lives, both at this college and in general. it’s like a consciousness raising group circa 1972 (“good old 1972 …”)

exhausted. as we went around the table at the dinner comotion meeting tonight, it seemed clear that everyone feels the same way. it’s relevant, of course, that it’s the last week before break. also that we have too many things we have to do. (swatties.) but without regard for that or other logic, i want to shave my head, take several showers, and sleep for three weeks, possibly not in that order.

screw this weekend (a swattie ritual in which roommates set each other up on blind dates, and each person & their date have to meet through some implausible set of all-in-good-fun publically humiliating events) went fine. ben&i as a couple were screwed to jonah&sarah as a couple, which suited my purposes: we 4 shared an ambivalent attitude toward the dance and forsook it for beer and birthday cake, teenage mutant ninja turtles and simpsons, and pizza. over break, which can’t get here fast enough, we’re camping out in my grandparents’ house in vermont. o that will be wonderful. o undisturbed tv watching, and frolicking, and bliss. o skiing, the only sport i’ve ever vaguely enjoyed, tho it scared me to go too fast or on the advanced slopes.

there is much to get through before then. i’m steeled for it. good luck with your endeavors and your dramas, your sicknesses and stressors. and happy happy birthday to dearlana, even if it feels less than buoyant now.

between rehashings and fallout from tuesday’s seminar drama and other unforeseen events, i didn’t get the clean break from discussing judaism/israel that i expected. which is not to say it was all bad. maybe it makes more sense that it lasted a week, that it was a theme for a week even. now it’s done.

last night eliz and stef invited a group over (including danny who made post-its appear in fairy godmother style) to their apartment for majority-goyish shabbes. cheerfully adorably domestic, they proferred hummus and drinks (“coke or water?”), let us lounge and watch lock, stock. the only difficult point came at the celebration. expectantly, everyone looked my way. at the end of a different week, blessing unkosher candles might not have made me so uncomfortable: but i couldn’t do it. before it could become too awkward, we moved on, one hostess blessing the kosher, lovely challah that the two of them had made by hand. although it was huge, it circled the group again and again until nothing remained.

i could have probably been chiller about the candles thing also if i hadn’t grown up taking shabbes seriously. friday nights are a ritual unto themselves in my family. either we join my grandparents at their apartment or they join us. i set everything up in the dining room, leaving the blinds open. hebrew from start to finish, sung, standing. my mother hovers over tarnished candlesticks. someone prays and we drink manischewitz from old silver cups. my grandfather blesses his homemade challah and distributes it. salt, and it’s over. one by one we kiss each other, murmuring good shabbes.

it’s — it’s, what can i say, tradition. facing squat encased candles from pier one, i had no confidence that i’d remember the words.

on a lighter but also religious note, this is wonderful:

The altered ruling will take effect in the nine western states of the 9th Circuit on March 10 unless opponents win a court order blocking it. It would ban teacher-led recitation of the pledge by 9.6 million schoolchildren in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

“maybe that’s why we’re going out. we have 2 things now. we dig respect and — what was the other thing? the thing we thought of yesterday? dammit. …

are you making fun of me?”

— my b. loved