On my wall there is an Indian painting on woven cloth-paper that depicts the Buddha being tempted by the demon Mara as he sits beneath the bodhi tree. Looking at it this morning I realized that I pretty much have my work cut out for me for the rest of the school year. I have to not only resist my demons--my self-doubt, myself-pity, my dependency and my mood swings--but must ultimately defeat them.

Unrelated: this morning I went into the computer lab and saw a hole in the corner where several computers had been.

"Doc, there's a hole!"
"What?"
"Are you getting new computers?"
"Yeah, that too. Mostly it's construction."
"What is it, every six months?"
"Pretty much. We're mostly just getting a cabinet back there to hold all the wires."
"What happens to Gandhi?"
"I don't know. Do you want him?"
"Sure."
"All right, rescue him."

So now I have a huge "Think different." poster of Gandhi, and nowhere to put it.

I can write again!

I wonder what will happen today.

I've stopped thinking about it, but it's true: I'm fiercely independent when it comes to everything but Harry. With him I'm needy and emotional and ocassionally jealous or possessive--I never act this way to anyone else, or feel those things out of that context. I don't want to be feminine anywhere else, either. It's the only time I really give in, I guess. I don't know why.

I think the world would seem a lot more real to me if I looked at people while they were talking.

The phrase "the blues" as used in the music world has its origin in African folklore, where the blue devil caused misfortunes, which in turn caused the depression of the person whom the demon had visited. Some people get the blues when their lovers leave them, when they go broke, when they fall prey to drug habits, or just when anything really screws them over.

My blue devil is my period. I have everything else I could want but I still get that blue devil in a bad way. I get pains that knock me over and headaches and tiredness, but mostly I just get sad and feel disgusting for a little bit. Sometimes it makes me angry; sometimes it makes me hungry; sometimes it makes me sad. Right now I'm just sad and I don't know why. The whole apartment's cold and I'm shivering and trying to convince myself to go out, but I don't want anyone to see me cry and I don't want to get myself more upset. I'm afraid that if I call anyone I know, I'll just wind up getting pissed off at them. I feel like I've been poisoned.

Oh, and here's five photos. The color job was a $5 deal at CVS, so it's pretty crappy, and my scanner stretched everything horizontally, but whatever.

The way I reward myself for spending a whole weekend and a day on the rag (Lauren's phrase) with my dad doing SATs and flipping through college books without arguing once:

by spending two hours browsing lists of beat poets, modernist and postmodernist writers, eastern philosophers, early feminist writers, spoken word poets and people I've heard Harry's dad mention and then choosing a few to order from Amazon with my mom's account.

Now that's satisfaction.

I wrote a really sappy post before, which I promptly drafted, about what I might be like if I weren't dating Harry. Suffice it to say that I'd never, ever sleep with a teddy bear from anyone else. The fact that it came with a large ball of white plaster covered in sharpied aliens, monsters and heroes, and wore a Pratt shirt, makes it OK. Plus, the heat's off in my building tonight, so I'll need something to hold on to when I'm freezing to death.

I know I've been saying this a lot lately, but I really do feel very much in control right now.

I am on the top of my own tiny world right now. I sucessfully had a fantastic weekend (well, two days out of the five that we have off) while PMSing. I'm more in control of my own emotions than I have been for a long time, and the result is that I'm friendlier towards strangers, closer to my friends, more intellectually stimulated, and having as happy a relationship as ever (I got a blow-up of this along with a few other treats on V-Day). And I got into Webster with my Friends ID, even though the show was 18+, and it was just fantastic. The group was BRMC, and Lauren had treated H. and I to the tickets and had a ball. Anyone who hasn't seen them live is missing out on one of the few rock groups that still shows traces of its blues, gospel and soul roots. Go see them!

I don't care what anyone says. Rosa is a hundred times wiser than Arun Ghandi.

I am such a copycat and this is so cool. Please do it! Please get one so I can do yours! Thank you, Sophie!

http://kevan.org/johari?name=veronica v midnight

(view results: http://kevan.org/johari?view=veronica v midnight)

More photos coming soon. I need a better scanner, too.

I'm not going to write anything about it on v-day, because that would be tacky, but let me say in advance that I really truly deeply love him. I don't know how to appreciate him enough. He's the only person in the world who can leave me wordless. He comes in at just the right moment, when I really feel like crap, and leaves me feeling not mediocre but really worthy of love, which I realize afterwords says much more about him than about me.

fear of music/remain in the light

It's funny that Steve burned those two albums onto one disc for me, and titled it as above. They fit somehow.

So we came home early from the Jazz Convention (or "band camp," as Harry calls it) because of the blizzard and had good food and Harry's friends tackled me into the snow and it was fun and lovely. Now the snow's covered about a foot at the bottom of our windows and the streets are buried. Nobody's outside. No cars are going by. The subway system cancelled its weekend construction plans and I bettered mine to include extra Harry, and Jo's play tonight.

It's so strange to look at the city and realize that for all our skyscrapers and sewage systems and lofty life philosophies, we're just insects in the hands of nature. Ultimately, there isn't really anything we can do about the snow. The blizzard will persevere, either across open plains or through cemented streets, equating them with gorges or canyons. We can plan for snow days, but we can't stop them. Watching the wind drift through the streets makes me feel insignificant. Tweety is scared. She's never seen snow like this. She flying around, landing on my head and then flying off again.

On the bus ride home, I ignored everyone and drifted in and out of sleep while I listened (in this order) to Count Bassie, Sinatra, B. B. King, Jerry Jeff Walker and Bob Dylan. It struck me that I'd barely listened to any music all first semester, and had barely read anything. And while listening to Highway 61 Revisited, I realized that the scope of my intellectual interest had been relatively stagant. I hated the tiny circles that everyone was moving in, but my own thoughts rarely went beyond my classmates, my family and my relationship. I was a self-contained tiny circle. My depression and apathy prevented me from even wanting music or emotions or ideas. I felt dead and I didn't want to be alive again. In a way, I was afraid of feeling too much, except for Harry, who bore the blunt of my confusion. I didn't want to have to feel or think. But listening to music really does make me feel alive again, excited and pensive and true. I thought about the route Dylan's music took and felt like I could see him losing and recovering himself the way I do. Music can be an anchor for the soul, a healing force, as can art and literature. And I need that anchor.

As I walked up the stairs with Dan Y. (who's sitting at the computer next to me as I type) after our last jazz vocal rehearsal before the bus ride, I said something about how wide the scope of human emotions is, how many different ways and states of being we experience, and how strange it is to feel happy and see someone who's having an awful day with the knowledge that a week ago you were each in the opposite place.

"It's like being sick and knowing that other people feel well, but not being able to remember how it feels," I said.
"Or like when you have to pee really badly."

I think this trip will be okay.

After-shower and -dinner realization: I'm sixteen. So what if I'm imperfect. My flaws are all inwardly contained and don't hurt anyone else. I have plenty of time to work things out.

I'm an utter hypocrite. I hate when people are condescending to others, but in my head I'm condescending to a lot of people, because I think they're condescending. I hate it when people use their attractiveness to manipulate people or assert their superiority, but I like feeling like people think of me as attractive, even though I neither hint at nor desire romantic or sexual outcomes. I hate it when people get things because they're good-looking, to the extent that I automatically distrust attractive people, but I think it's okay for people to get things for being smart, probably because I'm more confident in my intelligence than in anything else about myself and therefore value it more. I hate it most when people are mean to people who are weak (I don't really do that). I hate people who act like they're great because they have a talent, but I use my self-education as a defense, too, when I feel threatened or inconfident. I use my dress style not just as a means of self-expression but also to boost my own confidence. I read books because I think I ought to have read them and am dissappointed when the classics fail me. I hate people who are obsessive about keeping things, and I give stuff away all the time, but when I think someone's taken something from me without telling me, I get very offended, and when someone returns a book all beat-up and defaced, I get more upset about it than if they didn't return it. I hate my dad's temper but mine's equally short when I'm with my family. I hate my own difficulty in accepting a lot of the decisions I've made. I hate it when guys are sexist, but most of my friends are guys, and when I write fiction, my characters are usually male. I justify this by noting that most of the women I dislike are what Rich called "anti-feminist women," women who compromise their intelligence and personalities to be more feminine by a societal standard, but Rich also said, essentially, that they're pawns in a larger game, and I have to remind myself of that frequently. I hated it when people used their MySpace accounts to brag about the things they thought made them cool, but I've caught myself doing the same thing here.

I think this funk has to do with just having eaten about ten pieces of challah bread with butter and having showered last night instead of this morning. I'm going to take a bath and cheer myself up.

Before I start: my wonderful Harry is back again! READ

And Bob Rosen makes my day. Hooray for jazz!



After a bit of a breakdown last night and a bout of insomnia that lasted until four-thirty, I had a wonderful day today. School is dull, and I don't especially like any of my classes, but as long as I have myself and my own self-respect, what I do in the mornings is secondary.

I had a last-period free, so I packed up my camera, stripped off my pijama pants (my last class was modern dance), tucked my hair into my three-dollar hat, donned my hobo bag, hand warmers, suede boots, bracelets and black suede jacket ($E10 in Austria last summer) and went off into the East Village with the intent of finishing my roll of film before my dentist appointment.

I asked a man for a photograph and ended up talking to him for half an hour, and he turned out to be a die-hard Grateful Dead fan. Then I stopped into one of my favorite thrift shops and got in a conversation with the owner, who recognizes me by now. He turned out to be a literary type with a preference for Africa books, and we talked about V. S. Naipaul and Thomas Pynchon for a while before he let me have a tiny teapot, Indian painted box and silver necklace for six dollars. I took a few more photos and wound up in a fabric store, where the owner immediately took a liking to me because he'd once had a career as a black-and-white photographic journalist in India the '70s. I only talked to him a little bit, because I couldn't understand him very well through his Indian accent, but he was sweet and pulled out extra fabrics for me.

At that point I'd shot half of my roll but had to go to the dentist. I decided to take a bus instead of a subway and ended up talking to a sixty-year-old woman over a baby we were admiring. She turned around and introduced me to her mother, who was almost a hundred. It turned out that her mother had been a flapper in the '20s and '30s. It was incredible. The woman's mother wore an elegant black fur coat with a wide, off-the-shoulder neck--more of a giant wrap than a coat--and a skin-tight red hat with long, elegant earrings and a matching violently-red clutch and lipstick. Under her elegant clothes, every inch of her face was a wrinkle. She gave the impression of being very clean as well. She pointed out features of New York that had changed or were the same as they were in her time, and I leaned in to catch every word until she finally got off, apologizing for having to leave so soon.

Then they shot novocaine into half of my face and I ran to the F-V in the cold, camera buising my chest, and had just begun to feel again by the time I got home.

I feel wonderful and inspired and alive and proud to be part of this city. I just wish there'd been enough light for me to take a picture of that woman.

While my mom watches The Sopranos, I dream about my bohemian paradise, where no plates will ever match, and there will be no venetian blinds, and the door will never be locked.

I wandered the city today in search of a notebook like the one I used to carry and a dress-form mannequin and came home with a messenger bag, a hat, and two yards of soft black cloth. I decided it wasn't worth getting my parents upset about a mannquin, and besides, that would have meant carrying it home and walking my bike back from 38th street to 13th in the freezing cold. I never got around to buying a new notebook because I realized that between bullshitting a sketchbook for my Photo class, papering my walls, sketching and writing in my big five-subject thing, and updating this blog, I really have more than enough creative outlets to fill. Which is partly why none of them are really any good. Anyway, I've been writing a lot more lately even without the notebook.

The more I fill up my sketchbook with receipts, finished to-do lists, and doodles of Patti Smith and winter-men with melting beards and little dwarves, the more I realize how lucky I really am. What's this depression bullshit? I live in the middle of New York. The people around me aren't that bad. I found a really incredible guy who for some inexplicable reason loves me. I'm not hideously fat or ugly, don't have any deadly diseases or even any allergies or asthma or anything, and have two happily-married parents that treat me pretty well. I no longer worry about dying alone every time I eat a cupcake. I'm smart and get decent grades and have prospects for a good college and some kind of career. My writing's not that bad. I'm multitalented and do well on SATs and IQ tests without really trying, and I'm emotionally alive and kicking and highly inspire-able. My photo teacher probably thinks I'm a spoiled brat for all my whining, and I don't blame her. I must be really frustrating sometimes.

My attempt at using my sister's Wacom tablet:

I'm going to buy a new notebook and start writing again.

I'm pretty happy with myself right now. I'm sick of my school but I can push through these last few semesters, and I've still got a few awesome friends left, even though they've all been accepted into colleges by now. My photos all came out white. I don't have birthday presents for Elena or Clark yet. I bought myself a new lens. I'm going to Ikea tonight. Harry survived, and ate chicken. Life goes on.

It's very strange to be around a Harry who's completely un-energetic, is predisposed to be grumpy, and can't talk.

It's soothing in a way to just mother him a bit, make soup and bring ice and blankets and such. It doesn't actually feel all that different. However, I'm discovering that in spite of all my maternal instincts, I'm not actually very good at taking care of sick people.

I watched a total of four movies yesterday.

I'm one of those people who's a little phobic about operations and barely differentiates between brain surgery and facial hair removal. Or wisdom-teeth removal. Now Harry's of on 79th street bleeding from his gums and I'm smacking myself repeatedly for not having woken up earlier or grabbed a cab in my pijamas and gotten there in time to hold him for just a moment, even if he'd just laugh at me. The whole house is empty and I'm getting nervous. My stomach is making weird sounds but all we have to eat is bread, and I'm not really very hungry, anyway. I've tried distracting myself with books or the internet or cleaning up but I can't bring myself to do any of it. I don't really know what to expect after this, or what to do to make things better. In short, my maternal instincts are kicking in at a time when they're somewhat useless, because there isn't anything I can do.

I had the most incredible day. I woke up to an empty house, filled with streaming light and soft comforters and cheerful thermometers (fifty degrees). I spent the morning walking through the city taking photos, getting into literary conversations with sidewalk booksellers, visiting thrift shops and fabric shops and music shops, and making a mess of myself with the orange I bought for a quarter and which comprised my lunch. Then I went over to Lauren's and she shot a whole roll of black and white film of me in various positions for her photography class, to be developed manually. The great thing about Lauren is that she genuinely likes people and has the confidence to tell them so without feeling like she's putting herself down. She's really an amazing person. I hope she knows how much I love and respect her. I left feeling wonderful. Then my SAT tutor came and we had a great time, because he's awesome and funny and likes brownies as much as I do (I finally gave in and cracked open the batch I made for DaSilva). Then I fixed the dress I'd made the night before and Matt came over to have dinner with us. I had to yell at him to convince him that he wasn't imposing, which was amusing. We tried about fifty shady-looking delis in search of a place that he thought would take his ID, and I finally told him to just suck it up and buy the damn beer. It worked. We got back to Matt's place just in time to meet Lucas and Lily and put a dent in the remaining brownies before Clark came upstairs and finished them off. After half an hour of debate, we finally put in The Empire Strikes Back and proceeded to speak over every line. When Matt's dad came home, we moved to the other room and played music, tickled each other, and watched Matt get his ass kicked by Clark on Super Smash Bros for a while over a bunch of coronas and the cookies Clark insisted on making. Clark was as cynical as ever but still softer somehow than before; Lucas and Lily were so much like Harry and I that I had to yell "you'd better be damn good to her!" a few times just to appease my conscience; and Matt was in such a good mood over Chloe and his status as a second-semester Senior that he seemed much older somehow. I felt like I could see everyone now in comparison with their lamer sophomore selves that I had known and seen how much older and stronger and happier they were. Lily was just me as a sophomore, complete with fear of her boyfriend's graduation and history of being kicked out of kindergarted ballet classes (she's the only person I've ever met who shares this experience). I felt like everyone's sister and mother ("except Harry's, I hope" -Lucas) and loved them all like family. I eventually left and talked to Harry for a while while carrying an empty plate stained with brownie crumbs and thought about how much I love my wondeful nerdy talented curious smart sensitive strong Harry, half energetic little boy, half protective, tender man. I felt safe and happy and myself and warm, balanced in every aspect, purely happy.

It was beautiful.

So I got my grades back and they weighted everything against me so even though I improved in all my classes but one, my grades went down overall for the semester. Assholes. Anyway, I was kind of upset about it and I kind of started crying and walked out of Joe Zipolli's class, although I'm told he didn't notice, and I went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and some Sartre. It was almost empty but I couldn't focus and kept feeling dizzier and headacheier and worse, so I finished my coffee and went to talk to Quinones about why an A- and a B averaged to a B-. He said it was a typo but I started crying again and he took me in the stairwell so the whole language department didn't hear me and I started positively bawling, taking huge deep breaths and shaking and leaning on the wall and all that. He was very kind and told me not to worry, there's a million colleges, grad school, transferring, you have your whole life, this isn't really very important. I guess I stress out too much. Anyway, the fire alarm started ringing and he said, "Do you smell gas?" and I said "Yeah, a lot. I thought they were cooking somewhere." (I don't know why that made sense to me.) So we left the building and I was in the park and Jane and Ms. Reyes were being kind but I still felt dizzy and my headache was worse and they sent us all into the church and told everyone who felt sick to go to the back of the building. I ended up in ambulance with Pam Wood and a bunch of middle schoolers. "It's because I was crying for a while and breathing a lot and didn't sleep much and didn't eat anything," I said. "Do you still smell gas?" "Yeah, but I think they're cooking something." "Okay, it's the gas. Get in."

I ended up at Beth Israel with five sixth graders (out of the original fifteen or so) who thought I was very cool. They asked my opinion on everything--ripped jeans, music, boyfriends, high school, college, life. I answered honestly and they liked my answers. I told them stories about my UBC friends who got arrested in DC until they proved that the warrant was no good, and about sneaking into concerts and falling in love and discovering music and wearing my prom dress to Ray's Pizza and pretending I was part of the band to get into the Knitting Factory last year. I told them the history of the beatnicks and Bob Dylan's effect on the music scene and the definitions of surrealism and communism and existentialism. They were impressed. It felt good. I offered to turn my headphones inside out and play some music, and while I was reading random artists off of my playlist for them to choose from I found out that the shaggy-haired-kid's dad was the lead singer of the Cars. Then people started calling me and passing the phone around to say hi. The sixth graders were even more impressed. When I called my parents, my dad got very worried and my mom said, "Okay, just call me when you get home." Now I'm home and my parents aren't mad and my mom is calculating how much I need to improve my grades to get A's now and offering to take me to the Strand and buy some books, which I certainly don't mind. I feel a lot better now that I'm not worried about my parents freaking out, and about failing miserably at life, etc. Children are miracles.

According to QuizGalaxy, after I die I'm going to become unstuck in time, Vonnegut-style, and my arch-enemy will be Oscar Wilde, who will eventually strangle me with a wire but still consider me his friend, and my epitaph is something about hemopheila, I forget what. And I have an 80% chance of surviving a T-Rex attack.

So may ways to waste time on the internet...

Edit: yeah, they don't know me at all. Check it out:

You are not a geek You are not into anything typically considered geeky. In fact, you probably make fun of every geek you see. Come to think of it, you're probably that serial killer who has been killing all of those nerds. Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com