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.

[at the end of a conversation with mother]

m: so we’ll see you tomorrow then!

e: yes, see you tomorrow.

m: oh, ester?

e: yes?

m: there’s no … reason for this, right? for us and ben’s parents to meet? there’s nothing that’s going to … happen?

it took me a second to understand what she meant, then i laughed and said no. what i should i said is, Damn, mom! you’re ruining the surprise!

his parents are divorced, too. what could be worse than having to clasp hands, look around a table of frozen family members and say, “we have some news” … twice?

if you see me, say congratulations.

i didn’t get the grant — i just heard today, which means i either need to rethink my summer or plow ahead regardless — but i miss hearing that word.

on the brighter side of things, ben is a hero, as is reported in today’s daily gazette. there will be much music in may because of him. and brigid and i got the two rooms we blocked for on the 2nd floor in parrish. the inimitable rajaa is going to be our RA. my fourth year and i’ve never had to go through the lottery.

for the first time in 2 years and 2 months, my parents and ben’s parents are going to rumble. i mean meet. on sunday. we are very nervous about this. i mean excited.

another seminar paper due tuesday, this one about the decline of steel under vile mr. reagan. as i break from depressing deindustrialization reading, i get to read bonfire of the vanities, with which i’d like to start a bonfire on my own. how come nobody told me this book was (a) so badly written, (b) full of stock characters, offensive stereotypes, cliches and ethnic slurs, and (c) predictably paced and uninteresting? tom wolfe comes off as a smug snobby postmodern bastard. maybe it is a successful satirical send-up of the 80s and i’m too oversensitive to appreciate it. but i’d watch american psycho twice over anyday than read a page more of this ellipses-italics-and-exclamation-point driven drivel.

there: i’ve said my piece. now i just need to track down some money for this summer.

narrative:

SCENE ONE

ESTER and S.KELLY walk into the dining hall. ester carries a white plastic bag full of half-full bags of doritos, two library books on the decline of steel manufacturing in america, and her bag, roomymarroon with a long strap. within it are ester’s wallet and her notebook. actual value: c.$250, incl. money in visa account. sentimental value: through the fucking roof.

s.kelly carries a nearly-empty gallon jug of green tea (actual value: nil. sentimental value: nil.) they sit at the end of a long table, putting all their stuff on the seats beside them, except for ester’s roomymarroon bag, which she places by the foot of her chair.

FRIENDS arrive, and with each new addition, the STUFF moves farther and farther down the length of the table, away from s.kelly and ester. an hour passes

SCENE TWO

ester tells the story of how problematic man visited her poetry class today

first, some girl wrote a poem making fun of maya angelou for being fat. i was the only one who didn’t find it clever. alienating enough. within the poem, however, the girl describes a nail clipping as being round “like a nubian hip.” that was when problematic man burst upon the scene. but before he come open his mouth, another girl said to the poet, “i love that you used the word nubian. it’s so … exotic!”

problematic man staggered back, then regrouped, setting his lasers to Stun. before he could shoot, another boy offered, “i guess some people would have a problem with it or call it ‘cultural appropriation’ … but i don’t believe that exists.” the rest of the class murmured agreement, continued to praise the poem, and then moved on. problematic man slunked away, rendered impotent once again by the innocence of freshmen.

FLASH FORWARD:

ester and s.kelly powerwalk back to the dining hall, ester clearly upset, s.kelly singing songs to distract her. one song melds into another and soon s.kelly is singing angrily about the living wage and democracy campaign.

FLASH BACK, MONTAGE; V.O., s.kelly singing:

1) ester and s.kelly gather up their belongings and leave the dining hall.

2) BEN walks into the dining hall and sits in the chair vacated by ester. glancing down, he notices the roomymarroon bag, recognizes it, picks it up, and hands it off to FELICIA, who lives in the building next to ester.

3) ester, near tears, describes the bag. dining hall workers lean on their mops, shake their heads and shrug.

SCENE THREE

ester and s.kelly powerwalk to the library. before they reach the door, someone calls their names. MARC, who knows everything, tells ester where her bag is.

fini.

it was however too much stress for one evening. s.kelly and ester decided to take time off, visit krispy kreme, rent soapdish and recline til 1 a.m. at stef and eliz’s. a wise choice.

i’ve realized i no longer enjoy people with strong personalities the way i used to. recently i sat near and overheard the nonstop conversation of a person i once at least found amusing. this time i had vivid fantasies of the use to which a 2×4 could be put.

this discovery comes on the heels of another, a related epiphany that burst upon me last year: a person who doesn’t dress interestingly can still be interesting. think about it! don’t pretend i’m the only one who has been in the past limited by these prejudices. this is america. we love rugged individuals, loud-mouths, winners, and trendy dressers. it’s who we are. it’s why we watch sex and the city and gangster movies, why we love marlon brando and jack nicholson. it’s why the quakers aren’t cool (in case you were wondering) and why god help religious fundamentalists of all kinds, cuz god knows we won’t.

hopefully this doesn’t indicate a new anti-social tendency on my part. if i get too much more anti-social i’ll end up kaczinskying myself into a corner. i’ve already mentally disengaged myself from the people who invited daniel “yet another simplistic one-sided speaker” pipes here last night and from the people who covered the advertising signs with self-indulgent, snotty posters of their own. i’m not officially the scion of any department. the only dorms i’ve visisted this semester outside of danawell have been parrish and worth. i’m not playing ASSassins. i didn’t even participate in a sager orgy. i mean, come on — someone out there should be staging an intervention. what does it take to get you people alarmed?

at the same time this may go down as my favorite semester. (whenever i get happy i figger it’s the happiest i’ve ever been. it’s bullshit but at least it keeps me cheerful. — in other words, it’s my religion.) well, maybe i speak too soon. seminar today we’ll be reviewing my second seminar paper and i don’t have excessively high hopes for it. i liked the reading for it a lot, as it turned out: mccarthy vs. murrow, evil vs. good, battling it out through television. that’s my kind of social history.

rabi puts it, so succintly:

anyway I have clearly been in college for too long, because dancing around with nearly-naked people while girls in lingerie have sex with boys in drag seemed almost normal. (well, maybe not normal so much as non-extraordinary.)

for the first time last night i was one of the girls in lingerie, and none of it was mine. people counted my layers for me: three on top, three on bottom, nothing on my stomach which is still impressive, even when i think about it. i am not the kind of person who goes around inviting people to stare at her belly-button.

not that there’s anything wrong with my belly-button.

for about 45 minutes, it was fun. i enjoyed dancing with some people and seeing how other people were dressed: rebecca made a terrific cabaret girl, sarah kelly was packing heat, jonah deserved some award for his white muumuu and huge pink hair.

but by the time both buildings were filled like matchboxes, and several people had shoved me and stepped on my toes and ground naked against my back and i’d seen enough nudity for several kubrick movies and i wasn’t drunk, nor planning to be, i was ready to go home.

forsook sleep last night for a league of their own — admittedly a strange decision. it did remind me that i’m right about something i say a lot: tom hanks is way past his golden age. the man is a comedian; he should play unlikeable funny-looking smartasses, like other comedians do. he’s good at it and it’s good for him.

it’s been a strange few days, and with sager, the cross-dressing gender-bending transgressive carnivale, coming up on saturday, it doesn’t seem as though things will cool down for a while. leading up to sager, different groups on campus sponsor presentations and talks on sexuality. these end up being mind-bogglingly specific, to the point where one wonders who actually goes. last night’s was B4T, a transgendered caribbean-american, imani henry’s, performance art piece. and it was really good. afterwards, eliz and i talked gender for hours.

there is of course no limit to how long you can talk gender. it’s a fascinating subject and i think, outside of academia, one that’s largely unexplored. if we take for granted that gender is a construction, doesn’t switching from one to the other reinforce the binary? why not expand, or blur, the definitions of “male” or “female”? or why not work towards the creation of a third category, like genderqueer? we thought one possible answer for that last is that gender is tied up with notions of attractiveness. to pull back from both Male and Female and to declare yourself genderqueer is to potentially limit the number of people who could want to sleep with you.

sex does not = gender. but eventually everything comes back to sex.

i haven’t taken a class on the subject, largely because such classes are theory heavy. are theory, even, and theory makes me gag. there aren’t [m]any trans people at swat so the organized discussions here are abstract and frustratingly unproductive. it’s important to make the campus a trans-friendly space, but only god can make things ex nihilo. maybe not even god.

now to read more about television for my seminar paper. unfortunately, so far, that has been only a quarter as interesting as i expected.

unsatisfactory laundry experience + being called a jap in my poetry class (although the perpetrator apologized afterwards) + going to a film festival of sorts on campus and finding the audience to be indie-trendy-artsy-barnhards and the films to be pretty self-indulgent and unremarkable = craving for a chocolate bar, which i’m now eating sulkily. it’s too much for me, actually; it’s making me kind of sick, but i can’t throw it away.

arrggh!! what if i apply, as previously posited, to film skool, and what if, by some chance, i get in, and the other people who go are like that. i’d never be thin enough, or mismatched in precisely the right way. i’d never have the right glasses or bag or shoes or taste in music. if i wouldn’t be a groupie i’d be an awkward outsider, like i was this evening, and sure, i’m exaggerating, but i was filled with an annoyance so intense i snapped at ross and left ben without saying goodbye.

if i don’t go to film skool, what will i do? once again, google provides the answers:

Ester will provide invaluable input on a number of issues impacting New York City – from health to homelessness to education

Ester will help us understand a young child’s need to bite

Ester will often seemingly heedlessly throw herself into the thick of the fray, enthusiastically giving as good as she gets.

“Ester will have a healthy baby.” (not for another ten years, i hope)

Ester will graduate with a certificate from the Partners in Ministry program

ester will be sold as a mix with conventional diesel

Ester will only generate anger towards people of other faiths

man, this is looking dire.

can democracy and the middle east mix? all the pieces seem to agree that america cannot force the western kind on the eastern world. that’s about as suprising as experts agreeing that water is wetter than sand. still, the arguments are fleshed out and well-reasoned. besides which, each of them is a refreshing combination of ideological opinions: anti-war and critical of the status quo, for example.

don’t take this as a sign that you should try to engage me in person on the topic of the war, though. i will continue to find things to distract me. oh look! a bird! … i will however drink to it, as should you.

choose your favorite from the following, produced by the allmighty google:

Ester is a passionate collector of diamonds, men, red Cartier boxes, and Faberge eggs.

Ester is emotionally unstable and even attacks her parents and hits them.

Ester is a cheerful personality full of life, of positive nature, with good spirits and nice smile.

ester is a colourless mobile liquid with a pleasant fruity odour

ester is often referred to as banana oil.

Ester is neither an anarchist nor a polygamist. she is in good mental and physical health.

Ester is one of those fresh new bandsthat proves that spirit of rock and roll is very much alive

Ester is going to be the Forest Gump of the Bible.

Ester is just getting hotter and hotter (and, no, it’s not menopause)