the fountain of apollo at the garden of versailles

Six songs for the current moment, in a specific order:

Viva La Vida // Coldplay
Forever // Chris Brown
Butterfly // Mason Jennings
Starting Now // Ingrid Michaelson
Crazy Faith // Alison Krauss
Mary Jane's Last Dance // Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Isn't that just about everything?

i can't spell it out for you

I got the email telling me I don't find out about Lyon until Wednesday, which made me pathetically grateful because I have been pushing this decision back so hard already.

What else is there to say? I am still feeling the burnout from midterms (which went over fine, thankfully), and this constant exhaustion is nipping at my shoulders whenever I turn around. I am a class-skipper, a lazy lieabout, a girl who avoids conversations because they make my head pound, swimming with feelings and with apathy.

And how long has it been since I've felt normal, without the blood rushing to my head, without starry wind cutting against me, without the ache settling deep somewhere at the base of my spine? My fingers are going from brown to purple at the tips because the heat still isn't on here, despite the frost from the past two nights, and the familiar pulsating ache is building behind my eyes.

Coffee with Nora tonight, looking forward to that. Perhaps I will lie about, indulge, be decadent, read Emile Zola in translation (I swear that Late Victorian Fiction is ruining any moral judgment I had left, and any barriers to desire), and then head to Alderman.

Speaking of decadence, here are my current indulgences: Au Bonheur des Dames. Art chocolate. Long showers just to stay warm. Eye makeup. The Pussycat Dolls song entitled "I Don't Need a Man". Instructions.

it'll take more than just a breeze to make me fall overboard

It's already October? How did the summer get away from us and fall rush in so quickly?

My Lyon application is due a week from yesterday -- how terrifying and fascinating all at once. I've been truly reticient to discuss this, mostly because I am terrified that if one person manages to talk me out of it, I won't ever be brave enough to go.

At the same time, I can't help but see the lure of stepping out of this life and these life-things and doing something radically different.

For now, I am skimping on my DMP reading and looking forward very much to this afternoon, when I will not have to worry about classes until Tuesday. Yay, fall reading days! Unfortunately, I really will be reading for most of them, since the Late Victorian Fiction midterm is the Wednesday we get back.

I am so glad I took that class. It might be my favorite this semester.

For now, I am a little bit thinking of how to begin to pursue something that I've wanted to speak out on for a long time -- the distressingly negative and repressive attitudes of our culture toward menstruation. This discussion of course brings in issues about parenting, female puberty, sexuality and sexual development, birth control, fertility, pregnancy & childbirth, and menopause, to name a few. All of these are important parts of feminist discourse, but I want to focus on the straightforward physical phenomenon of monthly bleeding and the range of attitudes surrounding it.

Here are the things I want to change: shame, secrecy, and negativity about menstruation. Unfounded fears and stereotypes about menstruating women (including the infamous diagnosis of PMS). The disdain many (most?) women feel about their cycles, and the corresponding lack of interest in alternative menstruation options.

And most importantly, I want to see a radical shift in the way that we teach our daughters (the inheritors of third wave feminism and the succeeding generation to ourselves) about the incredibly creative power of their bodies.

pour tous les matins du monde, il n'y a qu'une aube.

To do this one, I won't lie, I pulled the posts I had written for my nineteenth birthday, and my eighteenth, and my seventeenth. They're sort of an odd mix.

As far as I'm concerned, the past year has been one of the richest and the best -- spending the fall chiefly concerned with my horse, declaring two degrees, spending the winter holidays with the family and Em in a (more or less) laid-back manner.

Spring, vacations, the slow-burning fuse on a best friendship that completely blindsided me. Summer, hot days, smothering nights, a surprising affinity for work. And now we're back to the balancing point of fall, looking into evenings with the Decadent Reader and weekend journeys across the state.

Since my tour-de-force brown belt test has already given me everything I could want, I look forward to a tolerable day and perhaps some joint birthday kata this evening (among other things).

And who wouldn't want to take on this song?
[[there are things that drift away
like our endless numbered days
autumn blew the quilt right off
the perfect bed she made]]

It's my birthday.

got your earrings in my pocket till i see you again

I am finally settling into the give and take of things here, and am realizing that I turn twenty in eight days. How strange a thought is that?

What else is there to say, except that I miss the relative comforts and companionship of the summertime? I've made a promise, foolishly and selfishly, that the weather will break by my birthday and be incredibly, breathtakingly, a Blue Ridge fall day. Perhaps that's more hope than anything.

Things I have gleaned from my classes so far include:
-hope and doubt are two sides of the same peculairly human state
-I am violently appalled and sickened by the not-so-ancient (though more and more discredited) notion that history is a a grand, divinely ordained, *progress* toward liberty, perfection, and telos -- that there is an END to this thing that we are tearing apart.

I need to see my fellow DMP students step away from the blindness of faith, that the world is some non-accidental creation, that the "great men" of history were somehow preordained and "chosen" to grasp the reins of historical change. I am prepared to slap everyone in the face with Britain's crippled postwar economy, the unmitigated disaster of Vietnam, the Armenian genocide, the formation of terror cells in countries whose leaders do not care about the welfare of their citizens.

I just can't reconcile myself with the unbelievably arrogant idea that we are progressing -- socially, morally, economically, politically, and religiously, toward a predetermined telos. I will not be cheated out of the intense intellectual pleasures of ripping down old theories, sustained research, a true quest for understanding, an admission of the senselessness and vastness of the past. By default, I have an incredibly dim view of the future, of the times that we can't think about and the incredible disparities that we face every day.

No one's fought me on it yet. I have to admit that I have more respect and perhaps even affection for my fellow DMP'ers than of any other class thus far. The redheaded boy with the impatient quotations who will challenge me on Voltaire, the gorgeous Russian girl who speaks with conviction, the girl from Georgia whose apologetic drawl does nothing to soften the barbs of her criticism, and all the manifold others.

Oh, and art history can be boring and fascinating by turns.

Sprained ankle - healing well. Skinned knee - healing slightly less well. Test in six days, oh panic.

you should come back home, back on your own now

It's quiet, here, quieter even than it was last year, I think. This new room is finally a little bit starting to feel like a home-place, coupled with a better layout and a nice roommate on the other side of the wall.

I am here, anyway, saying what I should have said last week -- that I miss little Andi, and maybe I didn't realize how much I would miss having her around at the barn until she left to go to school four hours from here. There are not a lot of opportunites to meet someone for the second time, to get another chance at a first impression and a friendship, but I am eternally glad that I had that with her these past two years. I have never had the pleasure of knowing someone so open wide, so free, so small but full of fire. This girl taught me how to make things happen, how to race horses and ride the fine line between suspended galloping and flying out of the saddle, watched me take my first bareback steps and jump my first jumps. The constant oversharer and the only other irreverant liberal, the only other teenage girl, at the barn, she showed up on cold mornings with killer hangovers and never once complained.

Above and beyond all of that, she is a superb horsewoman with a patient voice, a settling touch, and an indomitable determination. She will make a wonderful vet if that's what she goes forward with, and I can't wait for Thanksgiving break when we can reunite, sitting on the porch to clean tack or make horseshoe dreamcatchers and talk about the fall.

This was supposed to be more detached, better formed and quieter, less elaborated upon.

School is going as well as can be expected. I am mildly fond of each of my classes in a different way. In each there is someone fascinating to compell my attention (a stunning French girl, a cheerful boy with red hair, a professor who seems much too young, a girl who keeps reappearing in my courses), so that is something good.

Tomorrow I am spending most of my day at the barn, purely to avoid the overzealousness of football fans and such.

There are so many decisions I am avoiding, it should be criminal.

tried and true, faded, in the twilight

I've come back home once more, and all of a sudden it's August. It's not just August, it's late August, the end of midsummer falling hard with a huge orange moon in the sky every night.

School starts in four days (five, for me, the one who perpetually has Tuesdays off). I am once again migratory, getting ready to reset my flawless internal global positioning system to Brown, resizing all my distances, resetting every frame.

More specifically, I am enjoying the perfection of this weather, so delicately balanced that the slightest breeze would make me shiver or the lightest touch would be too warm. It's absolutely gorgeous as summer turns into fall. Fall!

I don't really know how to write full paragraphs any more; everything is too exciting and yet I also have to go fill in metadata fields.

Oh, and I got invited to test.

[but I was a young James Dean, with a way with the ladies...]