Buy me a flute and a gun that shootsTail-gates and substitutes...

Saturday I went to Yale for the multicultural open house. It was all stereotypes and huge affinity groups and speeches about how not to be heartbroken if you aren't accepted, and when I ate lunch in one of the dining halls it was like sitting in a crowd of two dozen male and female David Newmans. Except worse, because they were really condescending, too. And I hated the whole obsessively-multicultural thing. My mom understood, and she bought me a tiramisu and we left early. My parents picked up Renata and we all went to Pratt, because they were curious as to how it compared to Yale, and I had a lovely night with Harry that included Mexican-Chinese cuisine and extremely cheap art supplies.

Sunday I said "fuck you" to my dad when he tried to make me write a pamphlet for an organization that teaches kids about God in order to get into college. He didn't take it well. I was grounded for the next week.

I finally managed to convince my dad to let me out at night and I brought Jaya to Lauren's GORGEOUS apartment, where we ate from a communal bowl of lo mein-fried rice-orange chicken salad and talked about love on Lauren's huge, amazingly fluffy bed. Harry and David Tay and Elena showed up. I found the harmonica and Harry found the computer and the whole thing was wonderful and cheerful and sweet and everything else.

I can't explain the sense of affirmation I had that night. It struck me at one point that I was the only person there who wasn't in college; but the whole night I remembered that I loved these people dearly, that they were never derogatory or condescending or judgemental of me or of each other, and that I have a place amongst them. I AM a cool person, I told myself. (Italics don't work on the school computers. I'm not sure why.) I hang out with people that criticize me at the drop of a hat--why? There are people that I love here, people that don't leave me with such wierd, mixed feelings and so much self-doubt.

I worked at Used Book Cafe monday night. My bike got a flat tire when I was halfway there, and I worried about it for hte rest of the ride over. The people at the cafe were nice to me, but my friends there didn't show up, so it was a little awkward. They're all professionals with jobs and families. I probably remind them of their kids. On the bright side, though, they've stopped giving me shitty jobs; I work cash register and bag check most of the time, which means that I have time to read two Ibsen plays a shift, if I'm lucky.

Lauren stopped by to see me and we talked over the bag check counter about writers, men, self-confidence and psychology, occasionally including the people who were checking their bags in the conversation. Since she lives within spitting distance from me now, we walked home together, me in my mismatched clothes, wheeling my bike like a clumsy, short-legged New Yorker, her in her California-casual style, long legs and Grace Slick hair, carrying the teal bike helmet like a fashionable clutch. I wrote my name in wet cement. It's my city now.

So while I'm technically grounded, I don't have any significant plans to cancel this week anyway, except for Elena's play, which my dad is going to drive Jaya and I to next weekend. Elena has to seduce a guy who looks like a middle-schooler. I can't wait.

I'm going to be a dork and talk about school now, because I had a good day. I think.

I totally owned Bartleby the Scrivener in English today. (I already said that I was a dork and therefore I can use the word "owned" without making Harry laugh. I hope.) It was glorious. Ability to affect change. Control. Validity of one's feelings. I say these words confidently because I know my analysis is right; Sarah nods, smiles, writes on the board sometimes. Inside, though, I'm terrified to understand it so well, because I see myself in every other sentence, and it's frightening.

My best point, though, was that it is an essentially utopian novel in terms of the relationship between a master and a hired hand; yet Bartleby manages to control the narrator by taking his disagreement from a physical level--"I won't"--to an emotional one--"I prefer not to"--and establishing dominion in the later realm, where the narrator is weakest, and where he is forced to confront his own hypocrisy. However, Bartleby's discontent and ultimate death makes it instead a rather distopian story for the working class to whom the story was inadvertently dedicated. I think the point of this conundrum is to demonstrate to the reader that power over others does not guarantee happiness so much as power in the third realm--within one's self. Power over the emotions within one's self. This is where I am lacking.

And I managed to shut up for an entire debate in History, which, for me, is a historical event in itself, and to scat a while in Jazz Vocal. Bob noticed that I started on an up-beat and made the whole class try it. I can't decide whether I love or hate that class.

And in the middle of the library in the middle of a conversation in the middle of a sentence I started laughing hysterically because I realized that it has always been consistently true that I associate the predominant male figure in my life with Kermit the Frog. I didn't explain that, though, and everyone looked at me funny and stopped talking for a bit.

I keep thinking that I'm going to see Harry soon, even though I won't see him all week and probably not even next weekend.

One more self-indulgent post. I don't even care. This is my page. I'm allowed to bore you, be pretentious, like myself, brag, name names and tell tangential stories. I'm allowed to reassure myself and pity myself and write sloppily and feel better when I'm done.

"Tie yourself to the tree with roots
But you still ain't going no where."

Because tomorrow's a new day, and everything I write gets washed off the page eventually anyway. I'll hold a mirror up to the moment and take polaroids, like the ones Lauren still has of Jaya, David, Harry and I in a line, and of H. and I kissing, and stick them in a perfectly-manicured journal in my head where someday I'll turn back the pages and show them to someone and remember everything.