when i awoke i was struck with awe that there was a new day

I am moving on Thursday. I found a new apartment in a different neighborhood. I have lived in many different neighborhoods in this city. I have moved eight times, perhaps. It is not easy or cheap, and doing it by yourself is miserable. Fortunately, I have had help, and though I've lived in shitty places, I've lived in very unique and diverse places. There is no end to where anyone may end up in this city, let alone the world.

The word "entropy" is derived from the Greek εντροπία "a turning toward" (εν- "in" + τροπή "a turning"), and is symbolized by S in physics.?-wikipedia memorized this term in AP Chemistry my senior year of high school, and I have been fascinated by it ever since. It had a profound impact on my system of belief. Chemical theory was always very fascinating to me. I'm also really fascinated by cosmology. The mere fact that at any given moment, the whole universe is out there happening at the very same time. Add to that the possibility of other dimensions. Endlessness infinitude. O. I'm taking a course next semester on science and religion. It is being taught "in tandem" by two professors. David Morgan, Physics; Michael Pettinger, comparative literature and languages. I go to a pretty small private school in the middle of Greenwich Village. I'm getting a really interesting education but I don't really know if it will get me a "real" job. My education makes me not want a "real" job. I've given some thought to non-profit. That seems to be the default sector of the alumni from my school.

Do you ever challenge cars when you cross the street? Sometimes I do. I am a very aggressive pedestrian. Sometimes I do it very smoothly and skillfully, but some days I'm not 100 percent and I end up bumping into people, cutting them off, bumping into stuff, tripping, dropping stuff... generally klutzing it up. It's on those days I feel like my timing is off, like I'm moving at a different pace than the rest of the world and it makes it difficult for me to harmonize with my environment. However, there are some days when everything is so unified it's like the whole day was orchestrated to work in my favor. One day I was sitting in a cafe on University eating a late breakfast and reading a novel. I use a queen of spades I found somewhere as a bookmark. When the waiter brought me my food, he remarked that it is supposedly an unlucky card. My reply was, "I don't believe in bad luck." I really like the look of the card, and it makes a sturdy bookmark.

I'm pretty sure my family is convinced I am a total whack job. Or, maybe I'm convinced they're convinced because I'm convinced. I have definitely said things before that could be used against me in the event my loved ones tried to have me committed. However, the fact that they haven't yet is a good indication they never will. Unless I get more whacked out... which isn't impossible. (And you have yet another example of something that could be used to discredit my sanity when I'm committed.) I just like pointing out the different ways there are of interpreting one thing. I am particularly fond of turning ambiguous phrasing into inuendo. Especially by tagging on, "That's what she said." I have a very juvenile sense of humor.

I am currently reading "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by theoretical physicist Richard P. Feynman. It is about his adventures in life learning, teaching, working on the Manhattan Project, winning the Nobel Prize, and making lots of mischief. It's a very straightforward story, heartfelt, honest account of Feyman's adventures. I'm about 4/5 done, and I don't know anything about him besides what I've read, so I'm anticipating finishing it. I will let you know how it goes. I haven't decided what to read next but I have a lot of books and plenty of time to read before I go back to school. I don't really have much going on.

I have been having a really good time of life lately, having adventures of body, mind, and spirit. Not many adventures of heart, though; there just isn't time, yet. I'm in no hurry.

I hate apartment hunting

Details to come.

more visitors from abroad

I've received a visitor from Tazmania! I can say with certainty that I do not know anyone in Tazmania. Cool!

That nifty little map thing

It appears that yesterday I was fortunate enough to have a visit from somewhere in the vicinity Bosnia Herzegovina or Serbia and Montenegro. Due to the nature of the map it is nearly impossible to pinpoint the exact location of the visitor, but again I think I know of at least one individual who is currently traveling in both these countries so it is not as random a visit as my initial instinct would have me believe. It is nice to see some diversity popping up on my map, though. Today Europe, tomorrow the world (or maybe just Australia or Asia?).

Dogs a' Barkin'

MY FEET HURT. I bought new shoes and I am paying for it dearly. I have been on my feet more in the past week than any time in the last 4 years. I haven't had a full time job in so long I forgot what it was like. And I'm considering taking on an unpaid internship for 6 hours a week on my days off. It's a spirituality and lifestyle bookstore across the street from my school and around the corner from my job. At the very least it could help me get a job at a different bookstore, if not that one. I'm only going to keep my job until the end of the summer, but I would not mind doing something part-time once school resumes, preferably somewhere where I would not be chastised for reading at work. I've mentioned in at least one previous post that I have difficulty staying in one place for too long. That sentiment applies both the jobs and domiciles.

There is a drooling cat sitting on my belly, purring like a little generator. She reminds me of Roslyn, my friend Sarah's cat. I was with Sarah when she got Roslyn, and I held the 3 week old kitten in my palms in the car as Sarah drove back to her apartment. Roslyn was my god kitten. I miss lil' Rozzie. But I do have Penelope for the time being. She is watching the screen as I write this. There is a tiny droplet of drool hanging off of her lip.

3 more things

#1
I rode the J to Gates Ave tonight. I have a new appreciation for the crowd on the J. Very colorful.

#2
According to the news, there has been a right occurrence of stabbings in the SW'burg area. Watch yourselves. Some of the attackers carry machetes. The Man thinks it might be part of gang initiations.


(#3
I saw a dream walker on the 2 train. He was African, layers and layers of charmed dangling around his neck, playing a drum. Beside him he had a sack full of wood walking sticks, carved with patterns, and one had a skull carved into top of the stick. Just below the skull there was painted a band of red. For one brief moment he looked up from his drums and we exchanged a knowing glance. I can't pinpoint what exactly it was we were both knowing at that moment, but it was perfectly understood.)

ennumeration

Here I am, returning yet again to spit my thoughts into this little box for your consideration. I have been busying myself lately. I work full time at a counter job that bores me to death, buying and selling used books, dining as a party of 1, and otherwise going places and seeing faces.

I have settled on a firm concept for my next tattoo piece, one which I am one week later still excited about. This has not been the case for any tattoo idea I've had since I finished my first piece almost 4 years ago. For years I have been enthralled by the Commedia Divina of Dante Alighieri. Infierno in particular holds a certain fascination for me. As a religious studies concentrator with a specialization in religion and literature, it is no surprise that I would write my senior thesis on this piece of literature. In commemoration of the feat of writing my senior work, which I won't begin for another 6 months, I will be getting select illustrations of scenes from Infierno on my right leg from knee to ankle. I bought an illustrated copy of The Divine Comedy translated by Lawrence G White, illustrated by Gustav Dore. His is by far the best series of illustrations I have seen. Here is a sample of what I'm considering.

Canto V: Paolo & Francesca

Harpies in the Forest of Suicides

Lucifer, King of Hell




Still, there are a few obstacles I must overcome before I can succeed in realizing this desire. For starters, I need to find a tattoo artist who is affordable and still competent enough to execute my idea in exactly the way I want. It is only on this point that I can say I wish I were in Indianapolis. Trevor at Metamorphosis is the only person who has ever tattooed me, so it is hard to imagine anyone else sticking it to me. So the second obstacle is the time it will take to find the right artist for this project. I spoke to one guy at Addicted NYC but his portfolio failed to excite, so I absolutely want to see what else is out there. But it will be so totally worth it. I can almost feel it already.

I'm only human.

I came home drunk at 4am. Picked up my laundry on the way.

Hungry, I dug into my roommate's ice cream without permission.

Fuck it. I love life.

I'm want to quit my job.

Seven Eleven Oh Eight

My head is reeling

I savor pomegranate kisses
From Hades mounted
Rearing and riding forth
From the mouth of a shadow land

These days I hardly recognize myself.

Startling moments of clarity that feel like

waking into someone else's life

And yet
Each day I awake
In my own skin
Brimming with hollow memories
Of a person transforming

Recollections of someone I'll never be again

I nearly missed my stop.


(As I walked home from the train, in one hand I held a cigarette, and with the other I scribbled on my left arm, wallowing in joy

"I thank the universe I'm alive".)

Autechre & Double Adaptor

When I was checking out Semiconductor's other videos, this one stood out for me.

Semiconductor 200 Nanowebbers from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
(You can follow the link to their Vimeo profile for more info on their videos.)

The reason was because of the conceptual similarity it shares with this video (Gantz Graf by Autechre)

Gantz Graf music video for Autechre from lostinspace on Vimeo.

Semiconductor Films

I watched this while listening to Sigur Ros, it was eerily beautiful and fitting. However, the film has its own sound effects, which are likewise eerie. Either way, it's stunning. Check it out.

Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Brilliant

Ad for funeral services
Berlin
(click for full-sized image)

4 snapshots

1
I descend
A thick cloud of balmy dirt rises to engulf me
Sweat rains from my temples
Running off into the niche where my earlobe licks my jaw
Rivulets of several days accumulated filth
Sediment carving canals along the length of my throat

2
A passing train stirs up a ripple of cool air
Particles of pollution gather on my brow
I cannot escape the immediacy of
My physical experience
In such extremes
The pressure of the sun will not relent
Even with the fall of darkness

3
I attempt to knit together half-finished thoughts
To no avail
I unravel
I bind my psyche together with haphazard knots
Never meant to hold in the first place
I am slipping
Through my own fingers

4
Into this fold of fetid summer air
My complexion grows ruddy
Stained by loose dirt and debris

Can't Sleep

Shouldn't have had that Sparks.

[Repost] When I read this in class I cried because I am a big baby.

At least I got an A.

I grew up with a lot of ambivalence towards my religious traditions, especially Judaism. My family participated in holiday rituals for Christmas, Easter, Passover, and Hanukkah, but we never attended services. As a result, I was educated in the cultural dimensions of Judaism and Roman Catholicism with none of the faith. I was never baptized and I was never a bat mitzvah. There were times when I attended Mass or synagogue with my respective grandparents but I was never required to absorb any of it, so I never tried. The stuffy, crowded confines of those houses of worship and vague references to “the Holy Father” and “Adonai” failed to arouse my imagination as a fidgety, anxious little girl.

I learned more about Jewish tradition every Seder than I ever learned about either Judaism or Christianity in all my visits to church or synagogue. The private and personalized ritual of Passover just felt more accessible than formal worship. I was included in a way that I never was in a congregation of initiates. As the youngest member of my father’s extended family, it was required that I read from the Haggadah every year. The reading was always lead by my Uncle Joe, my father’s younger brother and the only member of our secular Jewish family who could still read any Hebrew. The whole ritual was very lighthearted and humorous. Joe, famous for his appetite, would present the so-called abridged version of Exodus, with a refrain of “ya-da ya-da, etcetera, etcetera” until it was finally time to eat. It was the humor and the theatrical (as well as the culinary) experience that made Passover memorable for me. It was the feeling of inclusion that leant the ritual recitation meaning for me, a feeling which I never felt during Christmas with my mother’s family.

I grew up identifying myself as half-Catholic, half-Jewish, as testament to my mixed heritage. But when I entered middle school, for the first time I experienced the phenomenon of rejection by other Jews. Many of my religious Jewish classmates were approaching the magical age of thirteen and the big mitzvah pay off, literal and figurative, of all their hard work in Hebrew school. As “real Jews”, they felt some cliquish need to distinguish themselves from the corrupted likes of me. If I self-identified as “half-Jewish” in their presence, I was almost always met with one of two responses: “You can’t be half-Jewish,” or, “Which half?” Since my mother wasn’t a Jew, then I couldn’t be. Never mind my Hebrew last name or my great-grandparents’ loyal involvement in the Jewish community. I didn’t go to Hebrew school or synagogue and I would never be a bat mitzvah. Lighting Hanukkah candles or eating matzo and latkes didn’t cut it. Time after time they declared their verdict: guilty of goy.

Needless to say, I was turned off. I had had enough traumatic experience with the ruthless world of adolescent socializing to accept my role as misfit with a faint sense of relief. At the same time, like most teenagers, I felt like an alien at home. Holidays became little more than meaningless routines I ambivalently complied with. I didn’t recognize myself in my family, I didn’t recognize myself in God, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I found meaning in music and sought acceptance in subculture.

For most of middle and high school, music was my only religion. It was the only thing I felt I could safely invest my faith in. I passed in and out of my school’s various subculture cliques, which I identified with more through common musical tastes than any ideological impulse to subvert norms. But the pressure to conform to group expectations was not exclusive to the popular cliques, and it always left a sour taste in my mouth. For me it was about music and expression, not fashion or rebellion for its own sake. As I proceeded through high school I alternately rejected and was rejected by scene after scene, from punks and alt-rock kids to metal heads, hardcore thrashers, or straight-edgers. I never found the kind of curious acceptance the Riot Grrl movement gave to Jennifer Bleyer, but I never stopped believing in a supportive community.

It was around this time I developed an interest in Wicca. In part inspired by exaggerated media portrayals, I browsed local bookstores for information. What I found was a religion with just as much history and tradition as any monotheistic one, without any of the formal constraints. It appealed to me for much the same reason it appealed to Ryiah Lilith. I could be a solitary practitioner, communing with the divine elements of nature beyond the scrutiny of a community. I finally had a name for that feeling of calm that swept over me when I sought solitude in nature. I recalled numerous occasions sitting awash in moonlight by my window in the middle of the night, or listening to the rustling of leaves by the breeze in a park. There were also single memories of watching the sun set over the Pacific from a shiny black perch of prehistoric lava flow in Oregon, and the cool smoothness of river rocks beneath my feet and the swirl of water around my ankles in the Smoky Mountains. Wherever I traveled, near or far, that feeling stayed with me. There was a harmony to nature, and Wicca awakened my spirit to its place in it.

Unfortunately, the distractions and pressures of the social and academic spheres won in the competition for my fickle teenage attention, and I abandoned Wicca as a way of life by the age of sixteen. I sometimes regained the feeling of unity I experienced in nature, but I stopped relating it to spirit. Not until my second year of college on Long Island did a profound longing for meaning return. I was struggling through the mire of apathy and self-loathing that my social life seemed to thrive on. Many of my friends sought to numb their feelings with alcohol and other drugs, and for a while I did, too. But the gnawing dissatisfaction in my gut gradually forced me to reevaluate my lifestyle. Experimentation with psychedelic substances in the past had, on more than one occasion, sparked moments of profound self-realization. Psychedelic experiences had inspired me to make positive change for myself in the past and change was what I needed more than anything. I longed for a confrontation with the uncomfortable reality of my unhappiness, its sources, and its solutions, so when the opportunity presented itself, I embraced it. My catalyst was psychedelic mushrooms, and for eight hours I wrestled with the ugliness of an inner darkness that threatened to engulf me and the beauty of outer lightness my unveiled eyes revealed. When I finally sobered it was with the conviction that the heart of divinity resides within. In myself I had discovered the ultimate spiritual authority.

That revelation of spiritual autonomy has been the single most dynamic event of my entire life. Without it I never would have left Long Island, and it is the foundation from which I have gained the strength to assert my social, intellectual, and sexual autonomy, as well. To a large degree I have my cultural Jewish heritage to thank for planting the seeds of that autonomy, without which I am certain my experiments would have been fruitless. And like Billie Michele Mandel, my grandmother was very influential to my development. She has lived a long, challenging, exciting life. She married at a young age, leaving college after her first year to have three kids, and worked as a kindergarten teacher. In the early 70s she divorced and went back to college part time. After her children were grown, she traveled around the world, finished her degree, worked as a biofeedback engineer and yoga instructor, and retired in the 80s. But what I consider the biggest testament to her strength of character and devotion to her family was when she accepted responsibility for me and my older brother, raising us in her home when neither of our parents was emotionally or financially capable. Because of her constant nagging and reinforcement, it was simply a given that I would attend college. She never set a limit on what I could achieve and always pushed me to live up to my potential. Though she never explicitly stated it, I knew very well that the pressure she put on me to choose whatever life for myself I wanted directly reflected her lack of choice as a young woman. And as much as I resisted her pressuring at the time, without it I would not be the fiercely independent individual I am. But my grandmother is not a feminist in the conventional sense. Her cause is not women’s rights, but her family. It was through Jewish traditions such as Passover, and to a lesser degree Hanukkah, that I first came to understand the importance of family and my responsibility to strengthening its bond. I feel fortunate to have grown up without any formal religious training. I may not believe in God, but thanks to the values I inherited from my family, I believe in myself.

Today is a special day

Happy 5[0]th Birthday Mom!

(I will call you at a reasonable hour during the day.)

Why New Jersey is, in fact, inferior to the rest of the country

from Gothamist

Do Not Drink the Tiki Torch Oil!

Five NJ residents have been hospitalized and one has died after drinking oil used to light tiki torches. Apparently the victims from Burlington and Bergen Counties, many believed they were drinking apple juice, but it's actually a kerosene-like substance (one victim was an 8-year-old girl who now has permanent lung damage; another person "person mistook the oil for bottled water and tried to make coffee, but didn't get sick"). The NJ Poison Information and Education System executive director Steve Marcus says, "During my 40 years in medicine, you get an occasional kid who ingests kerosene, but I have never seen this kind of cluster." The product is Tiki Torch Fuel from Lamplight Farms Inc."

waking nightmare

perhaps it was precipitated by reading my old journal before bed. entries about how much i resented the people i once went to college with for their failures to acknowledge my potential and their own. is that why i dreamt of them as heartless, cruel, violent predators? ready to cut my eyes out to spite my face, to cut my arms off to spite my body.

"you need knew eyes" she said in a low, raspy tone, sharp with malice and hatred.

"uh, maybe later, i'm going to bed now."

in the dream i closed my eyes, only for the thought to occur to me i hope she doesn't do anything to me in my sleep. and armless from an earlier attack of the familiar, how would i defend myself from another? i opened them again, and she lingered over me, a vile smile on her sharp face, her yellow eyes thirsty for my pain. that was when i awoke, shaken. the near-attack was as real as any near-attack could have been. the fear of being brutally assaulted in my sleep. the heartlessness and cruelty suddenly painted on a familiar face, for no reason, with no warning, like a person possessed by a demon, disfigured, somehow changed and yet for all appearances still the same.

i rested in bed for a few brief minutes, feeling the darkness closing in on me. i was chilly, so i drew a blanket across my shoulders. it was too heavy. the darkness was too heavy, weighing on me, the nightmare too immanent. i was not yet ready to resubmerge in the pool of subconsciousness. i was rattled, so i rose, leaving my new room and my new bed and the cache of new dreams that have been flooding in from behind the veil these past few days.

i sit down before this computer. there is a message from one of those disappointing friends whom i had recently ceased communicating with, one with whom i had a long, disappointing affair. the time stamp reveals that the message was sent at the very time i was reading about our long, disappointing affair. strange how these synchronicities arise.

"soph, quick question."
but he never asked.

i will return to bed soon, and will perhaps take comfort in a fiction before i let the fog of sleep settle across my eyelids. i have things to do this coming day. a job interview, a friend's farewell, cementing my own travel plans. this was an unfortunate night for these demons to haunt me. is there anything worse than to wish for the immersion of sleep only to fear one's own powerless against the illusions that await one there? the terror of helplessness? all waiting in the comfort of a cool pillow, a soft mattress.