today has been surreal. first a trip to swarthmore with liz and lana. lunch at the overpriced but cute cheese court to which i’d never previously been; once i listened really hard, i could almost hear its fabled past occupants enjoying excitement through the ceiling. unpacked the flat, liz finally breaking in my beanbag chair by throwing it downstairs, catching visitors offguard: kim, back from china; anna, of the intimidatinglycoolfolk; and mariah, who i never got to say goodbye to at the end of last semester. everyone chorused, “i thought you were gone.”

hopping through parrish, i encountered others, including a serene jackie and our friend Bob the Dean, who had the same reaction. missed the girls upstairs in my favorite room. said my last goodbyes, at least for a while.

capped off the long day by unloading at my house and lingering briefly in my kitchen where my father was translating a page of yiddish for my mother for her co-worker. the page was a xerox from a book the coworker had found in her house but couldn’t understand. as it turned out, it described the coworker’s grandmother’s town in russia. apparently they grew potatoes there.

like i said, surreal.

to amend: rick painted my fingernails. i don’t know what it said on the bottle but to me it looks like glittery asphalt. i keep staring at them. my nails haven’t been painted since i was six and going through my girly tinkerbellproductsanddresses phase. that was back when everyone thought i was a boy (entering 2nd grade, day 1: “why are you wearing girl’s socks?”) my mom made me get my ears pierced at age eight in order to protect my ego but i developed a swift antipathy to earrings, kept losing them, and finally demanded to grow my hair long.

irony of ironies, as soon as i started to grow my hair, i no longer needed to, as other developing physical attributes made my gender painfully clear. an antipathy to being female supplanted my frustration at being mistaken for a boy. that lasted til middle skool and was thrown over in favor of a fixation on boys but at that point, and through most of high skool, i wasn’t girly enough to succeed with them. i sought refuge in females, although those relationships were far from safe, especially when boys were involved.

growing up is a cruel process. funny how a glimpse of shimmery nail polish can take you right back there.

theoretically we’re going museuming today. despite going to bed late after dyeing liz’s hair (not too successfully), deciding not to dye rick’s hair and leaving my hair alone — although i will forever carry with me a bottle of Clairol Auburn — we woke up before 11. still haven’t gotten going exactly yet.

i guess we’re still recooperating from Conversation yesterday. talktalktalk. while watching more SATC (we’re all compulsive, not just me) we discussed possible futures:

[me: so what you’re saying is, if you found one person who you loved and had great sex with, you’d be depressed to be with that person alone for your entire life?

alexandra: yes!]

on to Tryst where we second-hand smoked until we were all dizzy and drank til thoroughly caffeinated. back to rick’s house to drop off his car and say hello to his brother, who had an ill-timed confession for liz that threw her for a loop. dealt with that. back to liz’s. slept three to a bed during which time i dreamt about bags and thought rick was a cat.

lana’s back — went to the Seed with her yesterday. bought a possible bag, though it’s ugly. not as ugly as some, i guess. rick’s painting liz’s nails. this is the shit i will miss in europe.

well, following in the grand tradition of yesterday, we must have pawed through every store in georgetown, lifting and sniffing everything that looked remotely like something i could carry around. but each was either too big or too small, too mature-looking or too ridiculous, too plain or too ugly. a couple that fit other requirements had to be dismissed because they didn’t have covers, which is the problem with my present bag.

finallyfinally we found one: saddle leather, so it’s kinda cool looking, with enough but not too much space inside, a shoulder strap, and a covering flap. bought it, marched it proudly back to the car, only to discover that my notebook doesn’t fit in it. i don’t think we’ve entirely recovered from that, either of us. too much disappointment too suddenly after all that searching.

on the brighter side of things, we found a sweater/jacket from jcrew and two barrettes of a sort i’ve been coveting. my mom took them to the cash register while i was looking at gloves and the woman informed her they were $14 (each.) i exclaimed and she frowned. she flipped through the catalogue until she found a little hair scrunchie for $4 and scanned that in instead.

thank you, we said, amazed. satisfied and beneficent, she nodded back at us.

so tired. last nite stayed up til 4something and woke at 10something, then spent the day shopping fruitlessly for a robe and a bag. came away with a pair of ankle-high grey fuzzy slippers with little black bows and gloves-and-scarf combo my mom grabbed at the last minute to make the endeavor seem more productive. really what i want is a dressing gown, movie-star-style and a kickass, distinctive bag. it’s rooted in my realization that i don’t have style. if you saw me on the street, nothing would induce you to come introduce yourself. if i approached you, you might be willing to engage in conversation, but then again you might not be. you might look me up and down, find no unnatural colors or holes; no metal; no hemp; no patches, and you might decide that frankly i was just a person like all other people and why waste your time.

liz appeared tonite and in exchange for me convincing her not to return to skool tomorrow, she kept me from getting depressive. i had watched house of mirth with my mother and found it far from mirth-ful. in fact, it would have been distinctly sad if i had cared about any of the characters. last nite liz jay and i watched the much more cheerful Sex and the City — four episodes from season two — followed by broken hearts club which was fluffy and cute.

more shopping tomorrow, i can only hope more successfully. for someone with no style, i sure am picky.

busyness, rushing from one thing to another, nothing dire. woke up around 7:30 chuckling about some dreamthing and froze at the sight of my door standing open. the light from the hallway accosted my eyes but for more reason than that i couldn’t return to sleep: i had closed the door. i remembered closing it. only one solution popped into my head. there was someone in my room. he had come in quietly, leaving the door ajar by accident, and was lying down at the foot of my bed waiting for me to walk over to where he was.

someone’s been reading too much fantasy-war shit. *shaking head* although, to be fair, i’ve been this nuts for as long as i can remember. while my brother laughed, i used to have my father put a spell on my closet to keep evil from bursting through. even then i learned to sleep on my back rather than turn either to face it or the window through which evil men could crawl.

combination of too much worry and too much imagination — a terrible thing.

today i ran errands, got a library card (hadn’t had one in about ten years; it’s not a great library), borrowed LOTR III and hobbit for my brother, developed pictures and got passport size ones for copenhagen. rented movies, 5 for $5, including a Sex and the City tape we’ll watch tonite at liz’s in honor of her turning 20. happy birthday, darling, incidentally.

elizabeth, darling, this is for you; i wish i had a page like this for me. ohh hilarity. look how cute you are! wuzzawuzzawuzza

forewent the ER party this evening to chill with my mother and tea and a phone call from the north. and hey, guess what folks? i passed 10,000 visits. granted, 4,000 are from ilana, 3,000 are from ben, 1,000 are from ross, 1,000 are from becca, and 500 are from me compulsively checking for comments. but that still leaves an honesttogod 500 people who have visited my site since its inception in june. … thank you all. i’m choking up; it’s too much. it’s too much. *waves a hankerchief, backs out*

talktalktalk starting early this morning (til 4 a.m.) w/ lana about the evening we’d spent w/ liz and jay at liz’s house, watching gentlemen prefer blondes. then today she and i zoomed off in an effort to relive the summer, hopping from store to store buying cheese and pens with which to assemble the world’s greatest bday present for miss liz (viz., a basket full of cheese and pens.) then we hopped over to her house where we found her away, though her lovely little sister xandra was there to let us in.

not to be dissuaded, we capitalized on liz’s absence by decorating the basket further, placing it on her pillow, and decking the house, particularly the stairway up to her room, with cute signs pointing the way. theme, in lana’s words: “a birthday is fun!”

quite clever. also we chilled in b&n, reading for about an hour. i’ve decided i won’t buy LOTR III, i’ll just go round to various places reading parts of it til i’m done. i still need to drop off film, apply for jobs, work out the summer and such. i made myself a little list this morning. felt industrious and organized. also read the secret journals and chuckled.

my legs started hurting on the train and i couldn’t figure out why. i fidgeted but couldn’t work it down out past my knees; tried to forget it, burying myself in two towers (gandalf’s so much more like merlin in the second book! ohh it will make such a good film); walked through five cars. no use. finally i realized what it came from, and once i did, it receded some. now it’s barely perceptible, back home at last. safe in my room, white as a shoebox, dotted on all walls with smiling faces of people i know and have known, listening to bjork and beth, i have no hint yet of what missing ben will feel like when it hits full force and higher up. meanwhile, dinner mit mi madre, lanaliz time perhaps? — i dreamt my friends were all angry with me, going to some great warm place and leaving me behind. hopefully i will find that untrue.

don’t have much time right now — i’m sitting in ben’s father’s office in Beth Israel hospital in nyc waiting for the good doctor to finish up so we can go for dinner. last nite we finally made it back to chappaqua, barely visible under the snow; i can only imagine the thick, total whiteness that once was buffalo. the greyhound trip was more pleasant than the train. one dippy disney movie and ben tried unsuccesfully to use various parts of me as a pillow and one stop at mcdonald’s and there we were, dropped off in the midst of the world’s most selfimportant city, all the more bustling because the air was swirling madly with fat wet flakes. we trudged thru that, unable to contact either of ben’s parents, making it to a tech store run by haredi jews where ben bought, to his delight, an ultracool ultraexpensive scanner he’d been eyeing and owed for months.

ultimately ben’s stepmother agreed to pick us up at the station and on the way back to the house we snatched snatch. we watched it after a dinner during which the three of them fussed over atmosphere and i still found it clever. today we came into the city to wander around — still cold, but at least dry and indulgently sunny. walked thirty blocks then stopped to read in the old armory, each of us having come equipped with an apple and a fantasy book. then statues in central park which look menacing up close.

home tomorrow. my parents 25th wedding anniversary. and the countdown will begin.