Wednesday

October 28



Why is it that whenever I try to write and produce something deliberately, I can't come up with anything? Today I bought three tiny moleskin notebooks for writing. As I sat down in the dining hall with the notebook open and my green pen in hand, I was shocked and horrified to realize that the sole poetic thought in my head was a mental image of the ducks from the duck pond, sitting on the sodden earth in an effort to escape their overflowing pond. The only time I come up with someone I'm somewhat proud of is when I'm least expecting it. I'm afraid having my moleskin notebook with me will be a subconcsious reminder that I'm not unexpecting. Oh well. I've learned that you can't force good writing.

Aside from the moleskin notebooks, I bought an umbrella today, and Barack Obama gave me seven hundred and fifty dollars. Don't ask me to explain why. Also, the conjunctivitis has traveled into my other eye. Somebody asked me if I had been crying, and someone else asked if I was high. No to both of those, but thank you for the concern. While I waited in the waiting room of University Health Services (for an hour and a half, but now is not the time for complaints) a nurse walked by and told me she liked my rainboots. She had a pretty face and her eyebrows were meticulously groomed. She wore a cylindrical hat with colorful fake jewels on it. From underneath the hat peered out grey fuzzy hairs. They looked so soft; I imagine they felt like baby hair. They weren't grey because she was old, but because all the color had faded away and the grey was all that was left.

Today I got two poems in the mail from Erin O'Donnell, for my zine. Any day you recieve free poetry in the mail from Erin O'Donnell is a good day. They are wonderful.

I'm sick of hearing myself complain about my writing

Tuesday

October 27


I have conjunctivitis. It's awful and people keep asking me what's wrong with my eye. The worst part about it is I know how it feels when someone around you has something wrong with their eye. You just wonder how it got like that and you want to ask them. One time in seventh grade Mr. Matys came back from a three day absence with one really bloodshot eye. Like, there was really something wrong with it. On the same day he wore an orange spotted tie with a brown plaid shirt. And I remember Amanda Jonaitis whispering to me, "I wonder if his eye is blind so now he can't match his clothes."

I am so much happier at college now than I was a month ago. And I never would have expected it then. I feel like ever since we made "The List," I am feeling so much more fulfilled. I'm not even doing it on purpose, but so much stuff on the list has already been checked off. My Indie Publishing book says that you should publisize your book on your internet blog, so I will publicize my zine here. It's called Auraphice and it's going to be released in December, hopefully. Pretty much everyone who reads this zine was invited to submit via facebook, unless they don't have a facebook. Alex and I both got so electrified with excitement as soon as we started putting this thing into action. Alex designed the cover and I wrote the "manifesto" (title in the works) for the insert. We already got a submisson. It's from Nicole Reynolds, she lives down the hall from me, and it's a beautiful poem. I just want to make zines my whole life. Write and collect other people's writing.

I can understand why one would hate Umass. There is not too much going on here. However, there is as Alex put it "so much potential energy." It is really easy to make something happen, the resources are all here. And I'm starting to think I would so much rather be the driving force behind a movement rather than just participate in one. So much more rewarding. So that's why I love Umass, and why I feel like great things are coming my way. Starting with Auraphice! Submit!

Oh yeah and this week I'm trying to have an adventure every day. Sunday we went to Northampton. Every time I go to Northampton my mood gets enhanced. Yesterday we started working on the zine. Today was bad for the most part because I had conjunctivitis and then I missed the LGBT meeting and it was raining and my room smells weird. But then it got much better because I stayed up till two talking to my friends, and I realize I appreciate them so much and talking to them has made me learn more than all my classes have so far. Well, in different ways I guess. But anyways, that's my adventure for the day, even though it's kind of a cheap excuse for an adventure. Tomorrow is packed with adventures. First of all, I'm going to eat breakfast at the dining hall. And have tea. Speaking of breakfast, today I had a cinnabon that tasted like whiskey. Then I might go to the career center and try to get a job for next summer. And then I might (I keep in the might to guard myself from falling short of expectations) go to Salvation Army. So that's like THREE adventures!

Song of the day is "Jacksonville" by Sufjan Stevens cause I heard someone playing it really loud inside the People's Market after the doors were shut and locked.

All that said, I can't wait to see all of you again. You know who you are.

Thursday

October 22

I thought it was really important that this be photo of the day, for obvious reasons. It felt really nice to have no work today. I wrote a lot of poetry. I think I'm getting the hang of it; I guess it no longer feels unnatural. A boy named Eliot came to my Antro discussion and he had never been there before. He talked more than the rest of the class combined (usually the discussions consist of our TA presenting interrogations to a generally mute group of disinterested upperclassmen), which inspired me to talk more. It's sad when people have no desire to learn, and this kind of people make up my discussion section. From Anthro I went to the dining hall and Eliot asked if he could sit with me. He asked me if the discussion was usually that quiet and I told him it was usually quieter. Then we pretty much continued what we were talking about in the section and it was a very stimulating conversation. Eliot is a senior and he is going to work for the government. Sucks for him, I guess. I better not be in a entry level class like this one when I'm a senior. By that time, I hope everyone I'm surrounded by desperately wants to soak up any knowledge they possibly can.

In my Lit class, my teacher presented the extremely fuzzy prompt of "take five minutes and write whatever's on your mind and then you'll have to read it out loud go." It was awesome. I wrote about bugs. It reminded me of how much I miss having an actual English class, you know, where you write and stuff. But the reason the exercise was so awesome is because most, if not all the people in the class were uncomfortable with reading their private thoughts out loud, and without time to revise or structure their pieces the way they would seem most interesting or charming, they really were private stills of everyone's thoughts. In ten sentences, one can very easily paint an accurate picture of personality and innermost desires. Maybe I'm being dramatic. I'm excited for Art History tomorrow. 

Wednesday

October 21


This picture wasn't intended to be crooked but I kind of like it this way. I'm always amazed when I see the geese and ducks in the pond because isn't the water so cold? Especially because they're naked. But it wasn't so cold today. It was arguably the perfect temperature. Uh oh I'm segwaying into weather talk that's boring. Oh well, anyways, today it was like low sixties, and I was thinking if it was August that temperature would be an outrage, way too cold, fall is coming too early this year, etc. Today it was wonderful. My room smells really good right now cause I left the window open all day and the nature got in. I shouldn't say that, it reminds me of the bug. The bug. Ueehhh. 

Oh my art history midterm is done! I am so relieved. Also, somewhere in the process of heavily studying all week, I decided I completely love this class. I'm going to be so glad I took it and got through it, if I do get through it.

The song of the day is "Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas" by Okkervil River. If I imagine people reading my blog while I'm writing, no words come out. It's weird.

With your hand inside my pocket, you whispered in my ear,
"We have come from ugliness to find some refuge here."

Tuesday

October 20


I'm happy today. We spiced up the monotony of our weekdays by studying for our huge art history midterm in a coffee shop aproximately ten minutes from our dorm. It made studying legitimately fun. I just went outside to watch the meteor shower. I didn't see any meteors.

With my lightning bolts a-glowing
I can see where I am going

Sunday

October 18


This shoe is picture of the day cause it's the best shoe ever and I bought it off my sister. She bought it at the thrift store for two dollars and fifty cents and I'm paying her forty dollars for it. Hm. For some reason I drew circles all over the palm side of my hand with purple pen and I keep looking down at it and thinking I have boils. Today we had started a Butterfield Radical Reading Circle. There's only seven of us, not including our RA, and we decided on three short stories for next week. It's kind of cool because it's an excuse to force your friends to read your favorite books/ stories. Afterwards, Alex Dan Pat and I decided we wanted to start our own club for radical thoughts. There weren't any concrete objectives for the club and every time we tried to verbally explain it it was a different thing. The best I can do now is that we will decide on a mission statement, and have a series of very vague goals. We wanted it to be an exclusive club but that opened up a whole new can of worms. I just want my mind to be constantly probed by other people. Then we wrote a list of things we wanted to do and it was three pages long. Here are some random samples from the compiled list:

Buy a ten dollar marker
Be athletically fit
Make agrobombs (look it up)
Kiss your friends
Be a vegan for a week
Go on a road trip
Write poetry
Rent a videocamera and make a film
Be naked in a nonsexual way
Eliminate insecurity
Make our own rootbeer
No longer take any medication
Aimlessly wander until we find a place that hasn't been found by anyone before

I should stop now before my sample gets too long.  This morning it was snowing like crazy in Holden. The snowflakes were big intimidating chips. Right now I'm in the lounge and a girl named Tori is listening to some rap music that keeps saying "Outta Control!" and has really loud synths. I think I'm gonna go read over the list again and then go to bed.

Saturday

October 17

I don't have my memory card or my connector cable; I have my camera, but it's virtually useless without the other two objects. Point is, I can't take any pictures this weekend so I can't blog, that is until I realized I actually can blog without a picture. It's allowed. This is my first time blogging on my picture-of-the-day blog with no picture. I feel like a criminal. I'm home this weekend and it's really nice/ strange. Nice because it's extremely comfortable in every sense of the word. Strange because being here makes me miss the life associated with this place. I don't really feel its absense too strongly while at school. Today I went to the Worcester Panera to have lunch with Abi Wilson. It was good to talk to someone from home while at home, but also sad because Abi is sad. But being there reminded me of... I guess the whole previous year. I texted Lanny to tell him I was there and his response was "Homesick=]". I really liked that text. I wish I had some kind of text archive or text hall of fame so I could save this one. I guess I liked it because it really should have had a sad emoticon, since being homesick is generally sad, but he and I both knew that this kind of homesick is a sort of touching nostalgia in which yeah, you miss all the good, and you know you won't ever fully have it again, but the fact that it happened is enough that you'll never be sad it's gone. Do you know what I mean?

I also saw two movies this weekend. The first: Where the Wild Things Are, was more deserving than Rotten Tomatoes gave it credit for, I thought. It did a better job of capturing what it actually feels like to be a kid than any kids movie I've maybe ever seen. The second: Capitalism, a Love Story, released my inner anarchist. That's not really the effect Michael Moore wanted to unleash on me but I'm sure he'd be completely understanding. Tonight I felt like none of my friends existed because I knew I couldn't talk to any of them because they were all drunk. Which reminded me of listening to the National in junior year and wondering if I'd ever be "falling out of touch with all my/ friends are somewhere getting wasted." And somehow identifying with this line even though I was very much in touch with my friends and pretty much none of us had ever experienced getting wasted. The National would have understood Lanny's text message.

Sorry I disobeyed all the rules of my own blog. I'm going to try to blog every day this week. Really. I can't wait till the end of this year so I can have a new blog, mostly because I can make up titles.

You know what, I think I will put up a picture.

Falling out of touch with all my
friends are somewhere getting wasted
hope they're staying glued together,
I have arms for them

Wednesday

October 14


If you're wondering what this is, well, it's a bag of cookies. Except the cookies were completely crushed up because they stuck to the pan and Laura had to peel them out piece by piece. Their fragmented structure had no effect on the taste however, they were delicious. I decided tomorrow is going to be the first day of my diet. I don't feel like I need to lose weight necessarily, I just only noticed today how I'm developing the utterly fatal mentality of "food in sight eat it." Today for lunch I ate a giant waffle. Just ate the whole thing. And I realized somewhere halfway into it that a giant waffle, made on the waffle iron, is just thermal energy added to goopy flesh-colored liquid with the consistency of glue. Yeah lunch! I'm hungry.

I'm about halfway done with my monster art history paper, but the second half will be harder, so I guess that makes me less than half done. Oh well, I've conquered most of my self-doubts at this point and embraced the mindset that I'm going to get an A and I am. I am. Tomorrow morning Pat is having a "Pancake Pollooza" in the lounge. Hmm... I guess my diet will start after breakfast.

Today I had an anthropology exam and I think I did okay on it. The song of the day is "The Calculation" by Regina Spektor. I like her new album now. What is poetry. Somebody give me a clue. I'm not creative. Everything I write is either contrived or just a string of random images. So frustrating. Why can't I just write nonfiction.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Monday

October 12

Laura returned from her weekend spent at home with a string of plastic jack-o-lantern lights. They will join our string of non-functional shell lights in the quest to make our room the oddest mix of odds and ends and culture clash in Butterfield. I'm considering buying some green fake spiderwebs and using it to cover the furniture. Happy early Halloween!

This weekend was fantastic. Four great things happened. First the rally on campus on Thursday, then Liz came to visit, then I went to Washington D.C. to march for LGBT equality, and tonight I saw Regina Spektor. A lot of little great things happened too, but mostly during the time span of one of those four. Tonight my friend Dan said something that made me feel really hopeful. I've been in a severe writing slump lately - feeling like writing will never again come easily to me. He asked, "If you couldn't write, would you die?" My first instinct was to say of course I wouldn't die, my life would simply be much dimmer. But then I realized that dim life is not life enough for me, so if I couldn't write, which is the the only thing I want to be good at, I would die. Hope ensued from this realization because since I know I wasn't born to die, I must have been born to write.

This week I have to crank out what is possibly the most daunting paper I've ever written: a 7-12 page paper, independent of three annotated sketches, for Art History. I'm simultaneously terrified and enthralled by it, since it seems like it will be fascinating, and dare I say fun, to write. I also met another Phoebe this weekend and this fact is important because I totally downplayed the novelty and the sheer enjoyment I took in calling someone else by my own name. I've never met a Phoebe before, except for one that was a bulldog. She draws monsters in a little notebook. The person, not the bulldog.

Song of the day (I haven't done this in a while) is "In the Flowers" by Animal Collective. I have a feeling I'm going to be happy to see the end to this week.

October 10

October 9

Friday

October 8


This isn't my picture, it's Alex's. But I really wanted to post a picture of the rally and I didn't take any. My first rallying experience; I truly loved it. It made me feel so much more impassioned on something about which I already though I was passionate. A bunch of kids from Butterfield joined us when we were marching around campus. Joe says "Justice is the only thing I'll yell about." Liz is coming to visit tomorrow(today)! I can't wait to see her. My room is so, so, so clean. 

Wednesday

October 7


A short, nonsensical poem I wrote while walking to "Literary Classics on Film:"

Four o'clock air, pregnant with storm
A mole on the sidewalk,
Recently deceased with its eyelids closed and
its pink velvet star reaching up to the stratus
Tightrope walker
Toes curled, head held high
Holds in one hand a mandolin
In the other:
Tri-colored pasta for mother.

Oh and the picture is of my door, and no, I did not draw any of those cats. I guess I am known for the same types of things here as I was in high school.

October 6


I had every intention to blog today, but when I was getting ready to bed I had to go take care of Alex cause she was sick. Everyone needs someone to take care of them when they're sick. Especially at college because moms are so foreign to the college world. So I filled in. And Alex said I would make a good mom which is weird cause I don't really have nurturing instincts, but when someone you care about is sick, it's weird, it like spurs a gut reaction in which you're a temporary mother/ nurse and you run down to the second floor to ask Kelsey, who you've never met before, to borrow a thermometer to check what you already know is true. If I get sick at college, somebody better take care of me, or else I'm teleporting my mother.

This was a good day!

Monday

October 5




Well, I've been failing lately as a regular blogger, haven't I. Since I've last blogged, all that happened is that I still can't write poetry. That's not true, a lot more happened. My weekend was tumultuous. I think my favorite part of college is late-night conversations. Mostly just with two people. 

I have done more self-reflecting in the four weeks I've been here than in the rest of my life combined.

This weekend is the march on D.C. Tonight I went to the fifth planning meeting and became really touched by personal anecdotes of a lot of the people there. I'm really becoming attached to this cause, even though I didn't have much to go on beforehand other then my basic instinct that a person's sexuality is wholly controlled by them, and cannot take away from their person as a whole. The leaders of the meeting were encouraging everyone there to speak at the rally on campus this Thursday, especially the newcomers. They say a person who speaks in front of a crowd and says "This is my first time doing this, I'm really scared, but that's how important this cause is to me" can have a much more powerful affect than a seasoned protester. We'll see about that. It's not the public speaking that scares me, it's that I don't think I know enough about what I'd be defending. We'll see.

I wrote a short story! And I bought two zines! I like Amherst. Right now I am in the lounge and I feel like there is no one else in the world besides me. It's so late and I need sleep but I do homework approximately at the rate that a sloth crosses a street.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4oNReBV_Mw

Thursday

September 31

I just typed a whole sentence in stream of conciousness and then realized it was just really bad writing masquerading under the facade of that literary device. I am so tired though, I can't write right now. Today I bought food, so nobody freak out that I'm dying. Then I was inspired to clean my dorm room and it looks perfect. Everything is becoming dusty though. I want to buy a duster, but I am wondering, what do you do with your dusty duster after you dust? 

So tired thoughts don't make coherent sense. I ate so much food tonight. Oh and we are still watching Little Doritt in my Literary Classics on Film class. I am actually enjoying it though, which surprises me. Today I interspersed watching the film with reading a portion of a book that was about how anarchy trumps over hierarchy. It really opened my eyes to a lot of things. 

But now I gotta close em'.