it was on. this was a fight. brandon waddled behind me like a giant penguin,. it was on. it was on.

there was a thin line of frozen coating my midriff. but it was on, and suddenly i couldn't pay it any more attention. dareus was stalking me, with a densely packed lump of snow resting on his outstretched hand. i quickened my pace, and brandon did the same. "this is why i don't like him". what? i resumed consciousness of what my life really consisted of. it wasn't pretty. there was a lot of social drama. i didn't want to think about it. "why not? it's just snow. you'll be fine. we've been playing with it all day". lies. it was night. and we weren't playing.

i pondered whether or not i could outrun him, fully geared in my outwear. my boots alone must've weighed ten pounds. but i tried. if i could make it down the hill, then i could run into curtis, and stash myself into

Golden Veins

my learning color is orange. my mind can only synthesize instants, and seems lost in longer themes.

i walked out of olin, a bit perturbed by my continuing inability to see what i was supposed to involving neuroscience. it didn't seem right that i could put in 50 hours of studying for two tests, and end up with a barely above F average. i was angry.

i tried deep breathing while i power walked back to my dorm, but the air was frigid and it burned my throat. the sun was slanted right into my eyes, causing a dreaded uncomfortableness when all i wanted was to melt into the neutralness of unconsciousness. a large building cut out the primary source of solar energy and i looked up. people moved along the sidewalks around the quad. they were deep, dark tracts in heavy contrast with the two feet of snow chilling out on top of the frozen, sleeping grass. something about the colors shouted at me, of individual jackets and backbacks, different paces of pedestrians, people heading in opposite directions, passing each other rather effortlessly. it reminded me of a biology class three years prior when my professor wrangled a goldfish and placed it on a microscope slide to examine the vessels spreading out like the rays of Japan's rising sun on its caudal fin. the classroom's screen broadcast the image, and we could see the individual blood vessels, with little beads of blood cells floating together, concurrent with other vessels pushing their cells in other directions. we noted veins and arteries by their different paces.

my eyes, momentarily covered with an orange film, the residue of the golden caudal fin, noted that this action, of being part of a flow, was very pleasant, and that it was something that occurred naturally and was being conducted on a larger scale by all of us, unknowingly, transversing the quad. not only that, but within all of us, such processes were going on. it was such a thought as to instantly stun me, and leave a lasting effect of wonderment.

i pondered why i couldn't be tested on this. the random acquirement and momentary synthesis of knowledge?

Nerditees

(left) Angiosperms experienced a rapid ascent to global dominance around 90 mya. (below) Flying in front of the rising sun, this young kamikaze cell will find death by the hands of a high Ca2+ influx resulting in the release of Diablo from mitochondria.

Goldfish Die By

Hypoglycemia is like:

Being a fish out of water. I stare, with glazed eyes at my surroundings. Not being compulsed to move, because there's no energy there. Like the dying fish on land, that can no longer generate ATP, I am immobilized. But it dies because it lacks Oxygen to finish off its electron transport chain. I die because I lack the glucose needed at the beginning of respiration (via mitochondria with their cristae crowns, folding and folded).

I can't move. And eventually, I don't want to. Exhaustion would finish me off, the lack of compulsion because of the lack of energy to grab a soda would be the sin I die by.

February 26th, 2008 8:56

Okay, here we go:

The trees look like bleached branch coral. It's wet snow, that's what someone complained about today when the sun was still out, though truly hidden behind the thick precipitation, and I still had one earphone in, so I don't remember much else besides the person's angst.

Now it was dark, and I was lying on my friend's empty bed, watching Drew quietly from a second floor window sculpt into a snowman's frozen face. There was a street lamp right above him, making a halo into the white covered residential quad. For some reason deciduous trees were prominent here, even though it was cold and snowed for the majority of the year, or at least of the school year, which cut out the summer months in their entirety. They had lost their leaves, and now could only offer up their finger like branches to be covered by this wet snow.

I was talking to my sister on the phone. She was twenty-one and at Colby College, even further north. I missed her. I asked her if she was going to marry Ben, her boyfriend. She told me that she didn't know, but had witnessed someone seeking Calculus help flirt aimlessly with him. This had led her to be consumed with rage. But I could tell she still loved him, because he was in the room, and her voice was light and cheery, and she was just joking. I asked to talk to Ben. She asked me why. I told her that I wanted to tell him, "If you break my sister's heart, I'll break your legs". I could hear him over the phone in the background say that he had no intention of breaking my sister's heart, and I told Elyse that I had no intention of breaking his legs.

Someone entered my sister's room, and she said she had to go. I told her I loved her. I didn't do that very often. The conversation ended. I wanted to keep looking out at the trees with their shawls of snow, but Drew had left the snowman, and I felt lonely. I bounded back to my room to do homework.

The Civilian Life

I am sitting in a chair, on the third floor of the library.
I am printing out colorful slides about Love (Corinthians 13:1) using one of the handful of color printers at school.
I feel like my typing is loud, and that the printer is calling attention to me.
I wish I was in a study room.
I have lost my long-acting lantus insulin.
I almost died today. Or was it last night?
I just died in your arms tonight. It must have been something you said.

Llamas llamas llamas.

I think this blog should be better.
I think I should also play the Sims.

French People, Words, and How I Feel About Them

I think that this brings up an interesting anecdote that I don't know if we talked about in class or not (if we have, I'm going to sound really dumb, but I don't care). In France, there is a group of people who can decide what French words are or whatnot (similar, I suppose, to the group of people who write Webster's Dictionary). They absolutely detest English, and are trying to keep their language as pure as possible. However, progress and certain communicative gaps have given rise for the necessity of English-French words.

As much as the language guardians of French detest this, it is happening. People are using what I can only assume is the French equivalent to "spanglish", and this is something that cannot be stopped. Just as we now find it better to communicate in abbreviations and use edgier fonts if given the opportunity (I know I always use Calibri when I can instead of Times New Roman, sorry to you fans out there), the French have begun to use heavily English-influenced words.

So, too, must our culture eventually communicate in ways which it deems most fit. It isn't the selective, well-educated few who decide how people speak, because the experiences of a few cannot equal the experiences of the masses. Language (the way we choose to speak), if anything, is more inherited from your parents and your peers than from your dictionary.

Dying Emo Is No Way To Go

it's nearly one o'clock in the morning now
i'm listening to my valentine's playlist and how......

poetry isn't about the pronouns, so I

fuck it all. i hear each beat
a progression of chords
but they don't resound,
restricted to the reality i just left
when i realized the crazy i am
shouldn't exist on this plane.

"to ascend the pain
is to die"

---------------can't be that crazy girl
got to have hope--human condition--
that tomorrow may bring meaning
to track three

i'm getting sick now,
it's that gut clutch-
that throat emote-
there's nothing sexy about dying
from want.

Heartbreaker

I thoroughly detest the Ventral Tegmented Area and the Nucleus Accumbens. I would fucking do anything at this point to be fucking normal. I don't care if that would make me less cool, I just want to regain control of myself. My brain stopped being functional a good 38 hours ago.

Don't do drugs.

Because withdrawal fucking sucks.

Do you remember when? Fireworks at Lake Michigan

Evanston always seemed like a city to me. I guess, when you think about it, it's rather silly to refer to roughly categorize places into rural, suburban, and urban areas. Even though Evanston is a suburb of Chicago, it's like a city into itself. It was founded a year before Chicago, in 1836, and has a population of 75,000. It has skyscrapers equivalent in size to the ones found in Wichita, Kansas (which isn't saying much if you've ever been to that god-awful, desolate town*).

I don't remember much about my childhood, but I do remember swimming. At least three times a week, my mom would drive me through downtown Wilmette along Lake Avenue and Green Bay Road into Evanston. I belonged to the Northwestern Aquatic Swimming Association by age five, and because of this, I had the privilege of swimming at Northwestern University's gigantic, Olympic sized pool. At the far end were diving platforms, reaching up to the ceiling at 30 feet. The windows were that high, and in the mornings you could watch the sunrise over Lake Michigan, literally within a hundred feet to the east. There really wasn't much of a beach, which annoyed me as a child, because all large bodies of water should have luxurious beaches, or at least they did in Hawaii. Really there were just huge rocks, cut into nearly perfect giant squares. There must've been a quarry there or something, because there's no way nature could have done something so planned.

On the third of July, my family would always drive over to that same parking lot, and walk across onto the coast of Lake Michigan, if you could call it that. We always packed the necessities. A couple of towels to sit on, a folding chair for mom's sensitivity, bug spray, popcorn, and a lot of diet coke in a small, tattered blue cooler. Wilmette, my home town, always did fireworks on the third of July, and was the only of the large towns to do such. We could have gone directly to the Wilmette beach, but with a population of over 30,000, trying to squeeze onto the beach would have proved chaotic at best, especially with a family consisting of three hyperactive and curious daughters. I don't know how my parents found such a remote spot, but there weren't too many other people that came to Northwestern to watch the fireworks over Lake Michigan. It always seemed to take forever to traverse the five miles to the coast, because we had to drive through brightly blinking police barriers, to try and "direct" traffic (if only to make things worse). Large groups of people dragged towards the lake, always, carrying blankets and chairs, over pretentious brick roads (the closer you got to the lake, the richer everything appeared). Every once in a while in the twilight a rogue firework would resound through the suburb houses.

We'd talk about whatever was happening in July. Usually nothing. No school work to be harassed about. No school friends to gossip about. The only thing left were our own internal shallow feelings, and of course, swimming. Every once in a while I'd ask my parents about what they did at work. I knew they were surgeons, but that didn't mean anything to me. There was a time I realized I didn't know what the difference was that separated doctors from surgeons, and this increased my interest. I spent my days at home or at the pool. What did my parents do? Was work anything like school? They'd always respond with answers that didn't help much, or that were helplessly jargon-filled for the comprehension of a child. "Work was good, honey. Performed an appendectomy-"
"Mom, what's that?"
"It's when you remove an appendix-"
"What's that?"
"It's an organ-"
"Like the heart?"
And they were always talking about cases. Cases held things. How could they have cases at work? What were they holding onto?

Regardless when we got to the field that spread out and then crashed into a cliff composed of those square quarry rocks there were always things to capture attention. Fireflies were always fun to look for, and I could spend an unhealthy amount of time just looking for them, sitting quietly. Bug spray was administered in seemingly dangerous amounts. It burned the parts of my skin that had broken, and it smelled wrong. And yet the mosquitoes still persisted. Large clouds of gnats stationed themselves between the crowds of people, as though they also wanted to watch a patriotic display, but were operating on another plane.

If mom and dad had gotten into a fight on the way over, we would escape onto the rocks and try to get close to the lake as possible without falling in. We stretched out our short legs over the gray slabs, and descended to the lake. Our parents would always express concern, but my sisters and I communicated in high, nasaly voices, quite aware of each other and the apparent danger of falling in the lake. I could swim, I knew, and I'd be fine, physically. But mentally, sinking into the indigo lake, would be too much for me to handle rationally. Lake Michigan, at least when I was growing up, was infamous for lines of dead fish washed up on shore during summer beach excursions. I didn't know exactly how they died, but I knew the culprit was something called Bacteria. I thought they were little bugs, and I didn't want them attacking me, especially at night, when I'd have to swim at least 100 yards to shore.

If mom and dad hadn't gotten into a fight, which was always a possibility, we stayed together, spread out on towels and a singular chair for mom. There were lamp posts nearby, and of course, ten miles away was the greatest city in the world, so you couldn't watch stars. But if you were lucky, there would be a lot of planes and boats over the lake, with flashing red pinpoints of light. The popcorn would be gone in a hurry, and I'd stomach diet coke out of boredom or maybe genuine thirst (or to wash the bug spray out of my mouth). I'd always be itchy, messing around in the grass too much. But once the fireworks started, it was hard to pay attention to much else.

They were being launched at least a mile away, and the muffled noise dragged far behind the actual scene. But the explosions would reflect off the lake, and lighten up the coast over in our hometown. It was always pleasantly quiet, not nearly as loud as the next night when Winnetka, our rich neighbors, would let off their fireworks in a field. Every year we would always complain about them, as if we weren't expecting them, yet it wasn't until I was much older when I'd actually go to see them. They were literally shot into the air less than a mile from our house, and my sisters and I would always walk around, pretending to get shout, or yelling in annoyance.

As with any firework performance, the grand finale was always the best part. There really was no other good part to a firework show, unless they managed to put in a star, or a heart, or a smiley face. We'd always point out our favorite kind, but this was not something we'd remember the next day. If we were in Wilmette, maybe we'd hear the music playing on the beach. Something patriotic or some form of popular light rock. Unfortunately, we were miles away, watching silently. Other families were ominously quiet, too, as if they came out of a deep respect for fireworks alone. Indeed, the whole scene was so devoid of humanly noise, that you could hear the waves crash against the quarry rocks if you sat on the edge of the grassy cliff.

Once the finale finished, we'd always clap a little bit, then hustle back into our minivan to get home, but as always, we'd run into the same traffic going as coming. We'd talk about swimming and work, and family gossip, and we'd talk about the fireworks. We'd talk about what we wanted to eat for tomorrow's dinner, and we'd talk about, or perhaps the better verb would be, beg for sparklers so that we could run around our pool the next day with little fireworks of our own.

Worldly Cognitive Dissonance

What if I went around hanging signs that read:
America loves the world.

Do you think the cognitive dissonance would make this so?
If so,
I should get on that.

duh duh duh!

thanks also to kayla, who reads this blog as well.