I've been travelling for the past week and a half--I was in Charlottesville all of last week visiting Stef, and I got to New York City on Tuesday. Right now I'm in Natalia's apartment on Roosevelt Island, and she went to go pick up a friend. Her apartment is beautiful. It's got this black and white motif and there are mirrors everywhere. It's on the thirteenth floor and has a floor to ceiling window on the south wall that looks out at the East River and the Queensboro Bridge. Apparently it's in the building where they filmed that movie Dark Water, with Jennifer Connely, and some of the residents are upset because in the movie they made the building seem all rundown and haunted when it's actually a very nice place.

I've spent most of my time just walking around the city. The weather's been beautiful. Today I was walking around SoHo and saw one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen, picking her nose. A couple days ago on the subway there was this young, tough-looking guy sitting across from me, crying. He was trying to hold it back, but he kept sniffing and tearing up. I found this great hole-in-the-wall place in SoHo where you can get a huge helping of rice and beans and fried platanos for $3 (if you get meat it's $6, and you have to get there before 3:00 or they run out of platanos I found out today). There's also this place in the East Village that sells nothing but all these different flavors of rice pudding (at first I typed "rice pussing" which sounds disgusting). One of the funniest things I've seen is this statue of Vladimir Lenin on top of some random building in I think the Lower East Side. Masha pointed it out. She told me after the fall of the Soviet Union the Russians got rid of all of the statues of Lenin, and they went all over the world and I guess one ended up on the roof of this building, next to a big silver clock.

Speaking of Vladimir, last night I hung out with a friend of Natalia's named Vladimir (Dominican, not Russian), and this kid is great. He's very laid-back looking, with glasses. We had a conversation about whether or not we would live in a nudist colony. I think in the end we agreed we wouldn't because it would take a lot of the arousal out of seeing someone naked. Vlad's real funny--I guess he does stand up at open mics around the city.

I'm writing on Natalia's mom's BEAUTIFUL iMac G5. On her desk there's also this staple remover that looks like an alligator head. It's actually pretty realistic, if you can imagine an eight-inch-long alligator.

Okay, we're going to take a walk and I have to meet Masha at the subway station.

Yesterday and today our mentor teacher has been teaching a lesson on six word stories, which was inspired by an article in BlackBook Magazine. The idea comes from Ernest Hemingway, who apparently once at a meeting bet a bunch of other writers--including Fitzgerald and Faulkner--that he could write a story in six words, and he won. Personally, I doubt if it happened like that--it sounds too dramatic.
BlackBook had a bunch of contemporary authors try to write their own six word stories, but Hemingway's is still the best. It is:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

I have a paper due tomorrow that I really don't want to write. It's an observation paper--I had to observe another class at CRLS and analyze what I saw. In utter seriousness, having to write this paper is making me condsider dropping out of this program. That sounds melodramatic, but I mean that I'm so sick of doing work that I don't care about. I did it throughout school and for a lot of college, and I don't think I can make myself do it anymore. I told Adam that writing this paper is like when he and I tried to carry that mattress and box spring a mile and a half to our house: I basically just write in short spurts, rest for a little bit, and then steel myself to pick it back up and go a little further. While I'm writing, I'm trying not to let myself think how much I fucking hate it. And I'm not just complaining because I don't want to write it--I've already got three pages, so I only have five more to write tonight, and, whatever, I've done that before. It's more the sense of wasting my time and intelligence. I had these fears before I entered this program, and they're coming true. How many poems have I written since I've been here? How many songs? How many open mics have I played?

FUCK, I have to go to class. I wish I were a better writer.

For Zaira

Hey, so check out the first comment on my last post, from some girl named Zaira. I don't know who she is, but from the look of her picture she's probably making a lot of money on the internet.

I wonder how many people that I don't know are reading my blog, or have read it at one point. Actually, I don't really wonder that very often. I don't think Zaira actually exists, either. I guess she's trying to get me to visit some website. Oh, and I added a picture on my last post, just to test out adding pitcures.

So last night was Mark, Adam, and Michelle's joint birthday party. I had helped organize it, sent out emails and everything, so people kept wishing me happy birthday. Eventually I just stopped correcting them. It was kind of nice, actually. The party was on top of this frat house where Michelle lives, over by BU. The frat was actually called Theta Chi. They had some weird rule where you couldn't have hard alcohol in the house, which I flouted with extreme prejudice by bringing in a handle of vodka and a nip of Jim Beam. It was really nice being on the roof. It was a perfect night, and to the north you could see the river and Cambridge across the Harvard Bridge, and to the southeast you could see the Prudential building and downtown Boston. We had bought these little pretzel nubs that were basically one-inch cube pretzels, and I kept looking out at the Charles and wondering whether I could throw one into the river from up there. I had no sense of the distance, though. It didn't look too far, but it might have been half a mile, I don't know. It's like how every time I'm in the T station at Park Street I want to try and jump across the track to the opposite platform, because it doesn't look too far. But who knows, it could be impossible.

Here are a few pictures from last night:



Adam, Michelle, and I at some bar. This was after we left the roof. We went there with these two friends of Michelle's from MIT. One of the kids was from Mountain View (California) and is either kind of awkward or just thought I was an idiot, because it was really hard to talk to him. The other kid reminded me dead-on of Jon Ma. Adam and I told them all the story of when we took the GREs in Madison and then got way too drunk and high at Steve's house. It was me, Zacher, Adam, and Steve, and we all ended up puking in Steve's bathroom. Except for Steve, he was fine.



Grilling my iPod.



Yeah, I don't know what I'm looking at.

It was a lot of fun, until this morning when I woke up with a splitting headache. And it's so fucking bright in my room in the morning. I was supposed to go to church with Mark and Natalia and some other people--there was a special mass at the Old South church in Boston for the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--or I was supposed to go to normal mass with Emily, but I was in no shape to be in a House of God this morning. I was in bed until about 2, and then I went into Adam's room, we talked for a little bit and he made me cut my toenails. It was fun. It was a completely insignificant moment, but our conversation was so silly and relaxed, the kind that reminds me why I love Adam. Oh, and speaking of which, Happy Birthday to Adam. I didn't get him anything, which I feel kind of bad about, but I think I'll get him something cool from D.C. when I'm there.

Adam had to go meet with his content cluster for T210A, so I had the apartment to myself this afternoon. I still didn't feel so great, so I made some Annie's shells and cheddar and read this article in the New Yorker about Theodore Roethke and James Wright. Both poets saw sincerity and honesty as the crucial ingredients in poetry. While working on poems for "The Lost Son," Roethke would walk around his house naked. I don't know about Wright, but Roethke is a damn good poet. I can't believe I never read him more. I remember one of the last conversations I had with John Wheaton, he talked about how he was really getting into Roethke. After reading John's poems so carefully, it now seems like a no-brainer that he'd like Roethke. I went and read "The Lost Son," which I'd never read all the way through. It's pretty fucking amazing. I love the beginning:

At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry:
I was lulled by the slamming of iron,
A slow dripping over stones,
Toads brooding wells.
All the leaves stuck out their tongues;
I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.

Fished in an old wound,
The soft pond of repose;
Nothing nibbled my line,
Not even the minnows came.

Sat in an empty house
Watching shadows crawl,
Scratching.
There was one fly.

"I shook the softening chalk of my bones" is beautiful. I also love:

Fear was my father, Father Fear.
His look drained the stones.

Anyway, I basically wasted time until now, when I'm also wasting time. For my Harvard class tomorrow I have to teach this pretend English lesson on point of view that my group (me, Susie, and Priscilla) have been preparing for the last four weeks. Whatever, I just can't wait until it's over. I can't wait until this week's over, all the papers and everything. Although I really am going to miss my kids. But after this week, I've got a guitar lesson on Sunday and then I'm in Virginia with Stef.

I should get some sleep now. I honestly don't know if I'm teaching anything tomorrow morning at CRLS. Honestly, that's not cool, but by the end of last week everything was coming apart, so I don't think any of us are sure what's going on right now.

The Mouse

I don't normally write in the morning, but I'm freaking out. So last night around 3 a.m. I woke up to go to the bathroom. I was still half asleep--like, more than just groggy, I was pretty much sleep walking. I was in the bathroom and all of a sudden from behind the toilet this little mouse comes running out. I didn't know what to do. It started running around the walls and nosing at the door, so what I did--I was so confused--I just opened the door and it ran out into the hallway. Great idea, right? Then I don't remember anything after that.

I just woke up, and I honestly don't know if that really happened last night. It doesn't seem like a dream, it's much more vivid in my mind right now. But something about it is so weird, like

1) The fact that I don't remember anything after the mouse left is suspicious. It's not like the mouse drugged me. It seems like a jump cut in a dream.

2) The rest of the night I actually had dreams (that I know were dreams) about mice. Is this because I really saw a mouse? Or did I just have mice on the mind from the beginning?

3) This is where it gets real complex: yesterday after my class at CRLS we were debriefing in the breakout room, and a mouse DID run out from behind this filing cabinet, around the wall, and out into the hall. Did that trigger some sort of dream or hallucination?

It's also suspicious that I didn't freak out more and wake Adam up or something. I mean, maybe I was just too tired to know what was going on. Either way, though, it wasn't completely a dream, because I know that I went to the bathroom, just not whether the mouse came. Maybe I fell asleep in the bathroom?

Here is what the mouse might have looked like:



I read this article about memory once by that neurologist guy Oliver Sacks (who wrote "Awakenings"). He talked about how he had this vivid childhood memory of a bomb falling in his neighborhood in England during WWII. Like, he remembered it so clearly. Then one day his family members were like "Oliver, you weren't there." And they--who had been there when the bomb dropped--all agreed that he wasn't there. They had proof, too, like records of him being at his aunt's house or something. Anyway, Sacks figures that because he heard his older brother tell the story so many times, he eventually just wrote a memory of it into his brain. So he has this memory of being there that he would swear to, but he wasn't there. Also, I once heard this psychologist speaking on NPR about planting memories in people, how you can really do it. Her reasearch team was able to convince people that as a kid they had gone to Disney World and met Bugs Bunny--which is impossible, right, because Bugs Bunny is Warner Bros. So anyway, I'm always skeptical of my memories unless there were witnesses.

I guess if I see the mouse today my questions will be answered. Personally I hope it wasn't real, because I don't want to have to kill a mouse.

For the second half of class today I led an activity where the students used magnetic poetry to generate poems. They split into groups of 3 or 4 and worked putting the words up on the board. I gave them the titles for each of the poems they had to write: "Cambridge Summer," "Love Poem," and "Respect." I thought it was going to fall on its face, but they actually really liked it. They came up with some great, funny poems. Some of my favorites:

Cambridge Summer

Sex will soon appear through harmony
with deep music



Love Poem

love blows away my breast size
like romantic garden winter sky
rhythm through luscious beauty
lust smooth sugar can mean sweat strong music

("love blows away my breast size"?)


Cambridge Summer

crashing parties
getting sun
going 2 the club
watch after your eternity
you can over come


Respect

we give respect
ask for respect
and show respect
but never SEE it


Then there was this one group of boys who just got really vulgar:

Cambridge Summer

part my breasts
raw luscious girl
manipulate me through bare romantic love
tongue on me blow


Love Poem

lick my enormous pink pole
hang beneath your black moan
lather my butt


Respect

she's a sex goddess
tenderize his moist respectful pole
kiss on a soaking big breast
respect is good

"Lather my butt." At least their images were strong. In all fairness to them, it was tempting to write stuff like that. Before class, Adam and I were playing around and came up with "blow my big skin candle." Our mentor teacher at one point put up "bleed puppy meat," which was kind of scary...

Oh John. Anyway, went shopping with Mark and Adam this afternoon at Downtown Crossing and Newbury St. Before that I had fallen asleep on a couch in Gutman Library with a toothpick in my mouth and one leg up on a table. Mark's really cool--he told me all about his situation before coming here, which is vastly different from mine. He basically came up here to get his life back together after some bad shit he was going through. He came to Harvard for the name, but we talked about how little our program is actually connected to Harvard. We're not even that connected to the Ed School. Our program feels pretty isolated. Mark has very old eyes. The skin under them is tight and kind of leathery, like a cowboy.

I got caught out in the rain AGAIN. It rains so much here, I'm not used to it. I wanted to go for a run, too, but there was a lot of lightning and stuff, and by the time it died down I was so hungry and it was dark out. I really meant to go for a run. I did walk about five miles, though.

It's going to feel good to sleep in tomorrow. I might spend the day watching movies at the Church Street theater.

Later that night...

Man, this is pathetic, how seldom I post in this blog. I realized today that it's already August, so I've got three months showing over there on the right, and I've got what, like 10 posts? Including that one I did earlier today, half of which was Bob Dylan. I figured out this afternoon that Bob Dylan, the way he writes, reminds me of Bereket. It's like, there's so much going on inside those brains, most of which is both hyper smart and really fucking weird.

Also, I've talked to Priscilla a couple times in the past few days, and I like her because our conversations are complete non-sequiturs. I always like people like that, because I think in non-sequiturs, so it makes me comfortable in a conversation when I don't feel like I have to try and make sense. Like, one minute I'm thinking about a food, like turkey sausage, and the next minute I'm thinking about how I want to start going to church more often.

Man, my paragraphs are always the same length. That's weird. The funniest thing happened in class on Friday. So the students are writing an essay on their favorite poem or song, so we took them up to the computer lab to find poems and lyrics online. They had to fill out a chart with a bunch of possible songs/poems, with the title and author/artist and a few words describing why they like it. So J.J., this kid who's incredibly smart and creative but also kind of introverted and troubled, and who has a really tough time finishing his work in class, he actually filled out the entire sheet. And I was like, "Wow, good work, J.J." He was one of only four students that filled in the whole chart. Then on Monday I was looking over his song choices, and it was stuff like "Hit Me Baby One More Time" and "The Reading Rainbow Song," and, my personal favorite, the theme song from "Bananas in Pajamas." And, mind you, J.J. is this very socially-conscious black kid originally from Memphis who's always mumbling hip hop lyrics under his breath. Anyway, I had a good feeling he was fucking with me, which was awesome. I thought it was hilarious. Today I called him on it, I was like, "So, you're a big fan of Bananas in Pajamas?" and he actually cracked a smile and was like, "Nah, I was just messin' around."

I always have something I really want to write about in my blog, but then I end up just talking about something completely different, letting my mind take me where it wants. I wanted to write about my mom coming to visit this past week and that breakdown she almost had Tuesday night. I was getting pissed off at her for coming all the way out to Boston and then spending her time doing chores around Adam and my apartment. It really hurt her. I have such a hard time getting along with my mom. I just feel like I can never really relate to her as a real person, you know? Every interaction I have with her, it still feels very mother-child, like I'm still 10 years old. The thing is, I used to be super close with my mom, back when I was a kid and my dad was so scary. I used to literally worry myself sick about my mom. Like, whenever she was late coming home from work, I used to go in the bathroom and lock the door and stand in the corner pushing my fists against my eyes and trying to slow my breathing. Sometimes I would get migraine headaches. Then over time things changed and I started to get distant from my mom, and I think she really felt the pendulum swing. I think she's always trying to believe that we still have the relationship we had when I was a kid.

I wanted to write about Masha coming to visit. I felt bad because she was the last in a string of visitors I've had over the past few weeks, and I get really claustrophobic when I have visitors in general. So, excited as I was to see Masha, I was also starting to freak out about all of these people staying with me (Stefanie, my mom). But then I saw Masha Friday night, and it was so awesome to see her. It was like, so great to see a good friend from Stanford, like it affirmed that I actually exist, that last year actually happened. We drunk dialed Albert, which was probably embarassing because I was very drunk in a way that I'm not normally drunk. I was sloppy and tired. Albert said he was drunk, too, but I think he just wanted to make me feel better. I didn't get to see Masha as much as I wanted, which kind of annoyed me--she was spending a lot of time with Carter, the guy who I disagree with about everything. I mean, not that I don't like the guy. In fact, I really like him. But it's like he's my inverse in the universe or something. Like, we could be talking about anything, the most mundane thing, like some song or something, and if he likes it I'll hate it, or vice versa. I saw him on Sunday night and within a few minutes we were talking about the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie, which we entirely disagreed about. I guess it lets me know he's honest. Anyway, the best part of Masha's stay was after I left the bar she was at Sunday night, she walked me to the corner and we had this totally silly conversation about who we would have made out with at Theta Chi. For guys we both agreed on either Rusty or Albert, and for girls Masha said Abby and I said Sevgi. I also realized out loud that if I could make out with any person in the world it would be Johnny Depp.

I wanted to write about Stefanie and how awesome our phone conversations have been recently. It's like she's a different person from the first half of the summer. I think her trip out here and to San Diego helped her relax. The conversations we've had over the past week or so reminded how funny and weird she is, which is why I love her. Like, she went into this speech about how she always gives people handmade soap as a gift, even though she realizes it's a terrible gift for most people. She does it because she personally likes getting soap as a present. I have to say, I'd be intrigued if someone gave me handmade soap. Stef got to Virginia today with her mom and sister. I hope they're not driving her nuts. I tried calling, but I think her phone is disconnected or something. It's funny, Stefanie is the one person I'm always thinking about reading this blog, even though other people do, too. So any time I'm writing about her I have to keep checking myself to make sure I'm writing what I wanted to write about and not something for her to read. Not that I don't say what I mean to her when we talk or write, but I leave out a lot of stuff that I don't think she'd care about. Ha ha, so I guess that makes this blog essentially a collection of stuff Stefanie Kim doesn't care about. But she's one of its most dedicated readers.

I want to write about Yin, every day. That's an entire post to itself, one that I'll need a lot of time to write. I miss her. It's so hard. I want to be close to her, but I've hurt her so badly. When we hug it's different than anything. Her love and friendship is unwavering and I don't know how I deserve it. She exposes all of my faults and inconsistencies and guilty, hidden things and loves me more for them. I betray her over and over again. I was talking with Rick the other night and he said something that I thought was very beautiful and true. He said that affection is a very simple thing, and when someone makes your affection complicated, that's a problem. I do that for Yin. I sometimes think I'm like the first verse of that song "Revelator" by Gillian Welch:

Darling remember
When you come to me
That I'm the pretender
And not what I'm supposed to be
But who could know if I'm a traitor?
Time's the revelator

I miss her so much. I need to get my shit together. Why is this so hard? Like I said, another post.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I was reading over this post before posting, and in the paragraph about Stefanie I like the phrase "terrible gift." It's funny. It can mean two things. Handmade soap is a terrible gift. Spiderman's terrible gift is his super power. It's very melodramatic. I have a terrible gift for writing.

Bed time. Goodnight.

There was this awesome thunderstorm outside last night. Adam and I were talking about it, and he hit it right on the head when he said that he was actually scared. I was, too! I've never seen it rain so hard, and the lightning was striking within blocks of our place. The sky was light as much as dark. It was like being in a war. It's funny, though. The storm woke me up at like 2 a.m. and I was totally out of it, so what I did, I went and turned off one of the fans in my room. Like, you know how you're supposed to unplug things in case there's a power surge? Well I didn't unplug anything, but instead I was like "Oh, I'd better turn off my fan!" The funny thing is that I have two fans, and both were on, but I only turned off one.

Oh yeah, speaking of funny stuff, I'm reading Bob Dylan's memoir "Chronicles, Volume One," which is *really* good. Check out this passage toward the beginning where he's talking about the French writer Balzac:

"Balzac was pretty funny. His philosophy is plain and simple, says basically that pure materialism is a recipe for madness. The only true knowledge for Balzac seems to be in superstition. Everything is subject to analysis. Horde your energy. That's the secret of life. You can learn a lot from Mr. B. It's funny to have him as a companion. He wears a monk's robe and drinks endless cups of coffee. Too much sleep clogs up his mind. One of his teeth falls out, and he says, "What does this mean?" He questions everything. His clothes catch fire on a candle. He wonders if fire is a good sign. Balzac is hilarious."

Bob Dylan is great. Shit, gotta go to class. I'll write more tonight, I SWEAR.