october 24, 2000, a night for questions and memories
can one be too assertive? sometimes i wonder and i hope that i am not that way. much of the time i actually feel just the opposite, like i bend too easily for people or am too nice or something. but then there are times like this, when i wonder if i am bending people over and grating on my friends' nerves. hmm..something to ponder.
can one ever write enough? there are so many topics to analyze and so many happenings to remember, but pens don't seem to move fast enough, or maybe it's just that the world moves too quickly for even the fastest writing device to keep up. i wish i could never forget anything, especially the good things, like eating brotchen and nutella with my beautiful friend jen. it was our lunch on a day in july in germany..we had gotten the bread the night before at a real german bakery..we'd even ordered it in german, and we were so very excited about it. we debated on whether the people there knew we were "stupid americans" or not. and the morning found us on our way to austria, first making one last pit stop at a huge mountain lake about fifty miles from the german border. we smeared ungodly amounts of nutella onto the bread and stuffed our faces as our feet dangled lazily off the end of an old wooden dock. the wood had been torn by the weather over the years, as had been a rowboat that was tied to a post near the dock. i could see where the bottom half used to be a bright, shiny red, and the top half a brilliant white, but now it was starting to look like a mixture of orange and tan speckled with rusty patches. i pretended like i was going to push my friend into the water, which started us talking about how nasty the water looked..it was full of algae and funky looking plants, which were probably good for the lake even though they looked gross to us humans. we talked about people we had met and about how we hoped it would not rain until we had finished our lunch. together we wondered what austria would be like, and if the people in france would really beat us up if we didn't at least try to speak french to them. i wished i could take a picture there, but my camera was in the place it always seemed to be when it was a good time to take pictures...safely tucked way down in the bottom of my suitcase. but instead of being captured on paper, the scene engraved itself somewhere else, as you can see. i can hear it, just like chord changes, but it means so much more than those little letters and symbols ever could (as much as i love them even). when i look back at my life i see the things that have happened..all big blotches of pastels and bold reds and blues and oranges. there are patches of gray in between, too, once seen as destructors of the picture, but in reality are there to bring out the contrast between each color, to make them that much more vivid. in the background are pages of scrawled lines that recall, explain, and dissect, magnifying each patch of color so that one can see even the tiniest pixels. and without these lines, to what does the color cling? it's there, but with every day comes a flood of new information to wash it away. i'm afraid of the days' blending into each other, becoming nameless and nondescript, of life's colors fading and dulling until the glow is so faint it can't be seen. it's why i love writing so much, the reason i once scrawled on an airsickness bag when i left my notebook in my suitcase on the underside of the airplane that carried me home. and it's the reason why i hate it when the minutes fly away, taken up by assignment after assignment, and no time is left to let the colors of my mind fly from my hands.
i love to learn but not just from textbooks. -living- is such a good teacher as well, and i can't stand to forget a word she says.

october 19, 2000
it was my birthday a couple of days ago. so that means that as of now, i've been here for twenty years and two days. it feels like a very long time, until i start thinking about rocks and outer space. most people forgot it was my birthday..i think there were three people who remembered besides myself. some part of me wanted to be sad, but another part of me said that i was being very selfish in wanting people to remember me. so i decided to just buy a nice cup of coffee and go totally blank in my mind. so i forgot the bright part of the day, since i was trying to. but when night fell, it was different. it was all "in a sentimental mood" and there was vegetable sushi and that awesome salad with japanese ginger dressing...mmm. someone special gave me chocolate ice cream and a hello kitty box and some music, and we watched a horrible movie but for some reason i didn't realize how horrible it was. the company and the situation are what stuck in my thoughts. just like when people care for a few hours, it can make one forget days and days of gray.
four days ago, the music put me into a trance. it was "in c" by terry riley. as one professor put it, the song is "the cornerstone of minimalism," because it flung open the doors of music, filling the world with even more options than anyone had imagined there being before. the entire piece can fit on one half of a sheet of letter paper. it doesn't call for specific instruments, other than piano, and whoever decides to play it can basically do whatever they want, as long as they play the notes on the page. there are not lines and lines of music, but only small motives. the performers start on the first one and repeat it as much as they want, and then move to the next and do the same, until they're at the end. no two performances are alike. no one performance can be called uninteresting...a better word is enthralling. that music makes my eyes glaze over and puts the most elaborate stories in my head. riley must want me to write a novel, eh?

october 8, 2000
it's dark and gray, chilly and wet, and the clouds are rushing out of the sky and onto our heads..but none of that is enough to stop the kids from playing.

october 3, 2000
she is beautiful from the smile on her face to the words she speaks...from so far away comes a friend. and another has been here before, steadily beating time with me and smiling at the sounds that come out just right. downstairs under fluorescent lights dealt us the tension to pull together, and one floor up and fifty feet over saw us meshing into harmony with the rhythm section behind our ears. these months have been some of the most special, so much so that i can hardly believe all the wonderful things that have happened, and all the lovely people who have come this way. every second we live together and build each upon the other, tiny grain by tiny grain, so that at the end of each day each of us is tall enough to see over the walls of our problems. with blueberry muffins and hot tea and the right set of kids, anything and everything you want to happen can happen, if not today, maybe tomorrow. it means so much to have people nearby and smiling, and speaking words and playing notes and walking steps together.