for my observation this morning, i pushed myself out of my yummy purple flannel sheets at 7:15 and into the cold blue yonder. brigid hiked with me to about where the trolley was supposed to pick me up and take me to upper darby high skool. since she had a class, she had to turn back before we reached the endpoint and consequently i didn’t find the actual trolley pick-up point until after the one i was supposed to catch had passed on. after a cold blue while, another came, and i got off at the right stop and power-walked and managed to arrive only 20 minutes late. except, upon closer inspection, it turned out i was at the wrong skool.

a pleasant secretary volunteered to drive me to beverly hills middle skool, which is where i was supposed to be. there, at last, two hours after i’d gotten up after four hours of sleep, i met the transitional education program class i’ll be sitting in on seven more weeks.

the teacher of the 2 of the 3 class periods i sat in on is the head of this refugee program. on one hand, she’s cheerful and affectionate with the children and seems quite skilled; on the other, she insisted the students call her “miss” (“because i’m not married”) and kept telling the girls to “sit like a lady.” she introduced me around as “miss bloom” and requested that the children identify themselves and their backgrounds. one by one, they voiced places i’m dimly sure i could find on a map: liberia; ghana; sierra lione; eritrea; sudan. most speak understandable english. just glancing at them, you wouldn’t be able to tell that they aren’t native born african-americans. but then little details pop up to remind you: two of the girls, when introducing themselves, added that their favorite thing to do is eat.

on a very different note — in a very different world, even — back at swat, flirting is a hot topic of conversation. people insist it’s a perfectly valid, positive act, that there’s nothing wrong with identifying as a Flirt. yet when they themselves are suggested to be Flirts, they become defensive. although i’ve participated in the who is v. who isn’t discussion, no one has ventured to pin me in either category. just as well. quite likely i’d be offended whether the decision were yea or nay. funny that such a meaningless frivolous thing strikes such a chord in people.

sarah chirps, Time to write! time to write? i’m trying to finish two papers for wednesday; i have a third due friday. my first observation tomorrow morning for which i need to rise at 7:20, heaven help me. general nervousness as the stress of the semester descends which, like the cold, i’m afraid won’t retreat again before winter break (or, in the case of the cold, maybe not until spring!)

at the co|motion meeting, as we went around the circle checking in, four people in a row described visiting other colleges over break and deciding that they were quite sure that they made the right decision in coming here. only at the tail end of a break have i seen swatties so sanguine. check back during finals week, when no one has washed their hair for longer than they can remember or can speak except in fragments of theory so that typical conversations run: “meta?” “postmodern.” *nod* “yeah, man. patriarchy. yeah.” that’s the acid test.

i also saw punch drunk love at last and was quite pleased with it. for some reason the theater was filled with senior citizens. when the film ended, i alone rose laughing; most of the people around me remained in their seats, looking perplexedly at the screen. it’s been a long time since i left a theater feeling like skipping the way to the train station. it would have been nice to have someone to share it with. well, i guess in a small way that’s what my reviews are for.

this kind of thing is so against my principles and at the same so weirdly compelling {lara’s link}. like the samsung smut (scroll down if you’ve forgotten, but remember, the same caution applies) it’s not the same without the music in the background. maybe it only works as mesmerizing distraction when you have 250 pgs of No Ordinary Time left and two papers to start.

on the plus side, i’m back where i belong. seeing my friends settled at their respective places i realize i could be happy elsewhere. but not quite as happy. swatties are just so uniquely, adorably quirky — such a combination of pretention, dorkiness, and a need to be special — i want to hug them all. where else would i fit in as well?

insanely, apparently, the copenhagen metro is opening. they predicted it would be done in four years last spring. who the hell finishes anything ahead of schedule? the metro served as a running joke when i was in denmark, sort of as a substitute for “when pigs fly.” {tinka’s link}

cambridge, massachusetts. ilana’s apartment-like triple. we’re in the midst of a crisis here — a small scale one, as world crises go; micro, not macro, as i seem to be saying every hour on the hour today — but nonetheless an annoying one. last night around 2 a.m., after the guest lana and i had been entertaining was getting ready to leave, lana discovered that laptop, complete with nearly-complete Justice paper, had gone off the deep end. computer crashes are the worst: there’s no country you can bomb to make those go away.

other intermittent crises (identity! ahhehgrhhh!) have added to the atmosphere of stress, so despite the fact that today is miserable-weather-yesterday’s polar opposite, we’ve been dragging around cambridge trying to keep spirits up. dinner at the co-op plus fun evening plans might help. but if worst comes to worst, we can take the laptop out back and have ourselves a hanging. send the good vibes, people. and a windows xp startup cd if you’ve got one.

other harvard observations: it’s not so posh as i envisioned, actually. but it’s more mannered. here, everyone shakes hands, and there’s this foreign air of gallantry about the men that continues to take me aback. when they hold doors, it’s not because you’re a fellow human being but because you’re a woman. come to think of it, both places i’ve been reminded repeatedly of my feminininininity, whatever the hell that is / amounts to. at smith, the butches kept holding doors for me and carrying my packages and i felt veritably Pink.

here, one wonders, are the boys so mannered cuz the families that send them here expended much energy acculturating their young ones? or do they arrive on harvard’s doorstep in swaddling cloth and absorb, absorb, absorb?

lana’s so excited about her classes she wants me to come to all of them. i guess that’s the magic of harvard. but today i woke up at 11, the time that her Justice lecture was supposed to start. (meet me in front of the red brick building, she said.) apparently the prof is the character on whom those wacky harvard-grad Simpsons creators based mr. burns. a good-natured, ironic homage to one of the U’s most respected men.

i did accompany lana to a class yesterday. good practice in ed observation! i even took notes. maybe i can submit those instead of the observation i skipped last week cuz i woke to the sound of rain. in lots of ways it seemed very typical: the two boys talked as much as the five girls combined, tho one girl said seemingly everything that came into her head, using as many polysyllabic words as possible. at one point she said “homosexual studies,” which nearly cracked me up. but generally the class kept my interest for two hours despite the fact that i hadn’t read any of the texts, and that’s impressive.

rain chased me up here. terrible, stupid rain: we were going to go a-frolicking today. perhaps we can salvage those plans, or perhaps we can trade them in and go see punch drunk love. cambridge is much how i remember it, and with the students criss-crossing the quad it’s almost unbearably collegiate. lana’s uber-cute here, comfortable and settled. it seems like it could be a happy place.

meanwhile, my brother is publishing articles and outraging people at an alarming rate. he’s outnumbering me in letters to the editor, 2:1. maybe i should start writing about politics. tho if i did i wouldn’t be quite so tough on the folks who voted for ralph. after all, they’re friends of mine.

we played Outburst last night, the same edition ilana and i played in n.c. and shrieked over, and of course we [liz, sarahk. and smithie-christine] shrieked excessively at the cards. “______ man (fill in the blank)” produced “fireman” “policeman” and “mailman” and our favorite: “WOMAN.” other cards’ topics: “things a woman wears on her face” and “things a woman wears” (“high heels” “garter” “slip”. duh.) but the most awesome one, which i searched through about ten thousand cards before finding, was “birth control methods”: “abstinence” “visectomy” and (drum roll please) “homosexuality.” whahoo!!

a cheerful group it was. we’d just partaken of the food christine and sarah had prepped for us at christine’s uber-cool house. i can’t deal with the living situation here; i am collard-green with jealousy. posh houses, adorable veggie co-ops, signs that say “trans friendly space” on bathroom doors, hard wood floors, comfy kitchen-like dining rooms, as opposed to ski-lodge type dining halls. not to mention noho itself, which even in the rain yesterday made my eyes turn like pinwheels. in the company of our highskool friend rachel, in town for a barmitzvah, we wandered through coffee shops, juice bars, and thrift stores. oh western massachusetts, you slay me. dead in a rainbow puddle, peered down at by cooler-than-thou hyper-pierced gender-indeterminate indie baristas: that’s me.

cambridge tomorrow. more or less posh/leftist/colorful/enticing?

oh my god, i’m still laughing. a person in liz’s class made this website. unless you are my mother or another close relative who has no interest in salacious material (i mean it, it’s for your own good), click the link at the bottom of this beautifully made page that asks “what’s your favorite way to waste time?” i mean it: it’s for your own good.

so what if i started a webjournal, sez liz, standing next to me eating sesame chicken (she’s the worst kind of vegan — she has no principles.) oh she’s wonderful. i’m using her computer now, which translates the cute little cursor/arrow thing into a rather distracting bowl of fruit. she’s about to go for a run in the pouring rain. speaking of pouring rain, it hasn’t stopped all week. dry for three weeks, then this week it’s nonstop. like it’s nature’s time of the month!

i love how my committed de-politicization lasts only until my father calls and i have fight with him about iraq for an hour. he opened up a can of rant (re: opec) on my ass, managing to get in references to lenin and ralph nader. i can talk a lot but, man, you should get my father going: he can filibuster his way out of anything, leaving opportunity only for his opponent to stammer things like, “maybe, but –” or “hang on a second!” or “dad, i am *not* knee-jerk leftist cannon-fodder! i just don’t agree with you!” arguing with my father is eye-opening: it reminds me what the outside world is like, and that intelligent people who didn’t vote for bush really are willing to follow the monkey-faced half-literate oilest-of-oil-men cowboy into war. because they really think it’s the Right Thing to Do. just like leftists think it’s the Right Thing to Do to march in protest.

exhausting. not as bad as travelling yesterday. through mother nature’s untamponed onslaught, intrepid adventurers sarah k., our mutual friend and co-Co\Motioner addie and i started our trip at 2 p.m. on a septa train into philly. sarah and i arrived, drenched and half-sentient but senses of humor still functioning, to smith at 1 a.m. the first bus to new york took twice as long as it should have; then our layover in port authority (motto: even if the busses never pick you up, the sketchballs will) followed the same pattern. the last leg of the trip, curiously, once sarah and i parted from addie, was quick and comfortable. but 11 or so hours, under any circumstances, is tough.

even periods come to an end. assuming this one does, elizabeth and i will venture into northampton, shop and eat. if not, we’ll keep chugging through the four videos we rented from the library and take a lot of baths. (they have bathtubs here.)

so, war, perhaps (you mean my phone call didn’t make a difference?) but never mind that right now. i have a feeling this is how i’ll force myself to be all semester/year. i don’t want to be part of the galvanized, indignant left. i certainly am not part of the slobbering, war-mongering right. i don’t want to wear love beads or hemp or laugh at those who do; i don’t want to spray protesters with hoses or be sprayed.

o, apathy.

kross’s party went on last night, despite the rain. banana birthday cake done justice to; cheesecake untouched (people thought it was just cheese, nestled as it was all serene like among the grapes.) some folks danced towards the end. mostly people ate drank and chilled. it worked for me and although it perhaps was not the most rousingly successful of all of kross’s endeavors, i knew the majority of the goodly crowd and so felt comfortable and enjoyed myself. not a small feat.

today i go off to smith, despite the rain, buoyed by a giddy sarah k. hard to believe that break’s starting. i’m skeptical, tho my last class was canceled and i skipped my second to last. but, giving it the benefit of the doubt, i’d better start packing.

FINALLY i am a WORTHWHILE person.

*ring*

t: common cause

m: congressional switchboard?

t: no, common cause. but i’ll transfer you. would you like to make a donation?

m: not right now?

[soft jazz]

t: switchboard.

m: i vote in pennsylvania?

[soft jazz]

t: [mumble whisper]

me: i’m sorry, whose office is this?

t: santorum’s!

me: vote no on war!

t: duly noted.

*applause*

now you go.

oh, and i’ve been officially APPROVED. validated! approved!!