My friends here are AMAZING. We all started hugging each other in a huge pile last night and crying and "Oh god I love you so much!"-ing and laughing until 2.

I'm starting to miss all of the wonderful people back home, though, the crazy Christopher Street nights, the lunches and walks and photo-hunts and shopping trips and conversations and movies and poems and sun. All the people I love.

When I get home I'm going to move my blog to a new URL. It will still be the same blog, archives and all, but it will have a different address, and I'll be more candid in it. I'll give the URL to almost anyone who asks, but I'll know who my audience is, and my readership will be smaller in general. I'll also take my listing off of the blogger server so I'm not searchable on google or on bloggersearch and I'll be able to use real names without worrying about being stumbled upon. I need to be completely honest about everything. I can't explain here.

I'm in Iowa and it's awesome. I'm starting to realize that I can really do this whole "life" thing. I can feed myself and work on my own initiative and make friends--cool friends, friends who I like, friends who are my friends by choice and not because we're all there, or there's nobody else left. The feeding myself thing is the only weak link, actually. I'm so caught up in writing that it's hard to find spare time to eat. I'd been living off of vending machine beef jerky and bottled frappuccinos, which are ridiculously cheap around here, when my friend Sarah said "hey, do you guys want to buy some fruit?" We left with several mangoes apiece, pears, raspberries, cherries and salmon soba salad and feasted that night. Hannah kept avocados in her bag and ate them during break the next day with a spoon.

Iowa city is actually a pretty cool place. It's an artsy little town with some good thrift shops and poetry and prose readings on a daily basis. I've met several incredible writers in the four days that I've been here, of which the first didn't count.

Everybody has good grammar. Beyond that, each person here can manipulate words. The afternoon workshop classes, where we spend an hour each critiquing three pieces, is INTENSE. We all read each others' work several times before workshop because it's good and easy to read. I get mark-ups with hilarious comments and intelligent revision strategies.

My teacher is SO COOL. His name is Nam Le. We're all somewhat obsessed with him. He's Vietnamese and has an Australian accent and he was a practicing lawyer for a few years before he quit to be a writer. He rides a dark red motorcycle, which he parks illegally, "but you don't really have to pay those tickets unless they impound your vehicle," he says. "Then it really bites." He's unbelievably intense and smart and interesting and there's absolutely no bullshit in his class. He has no problem with telling us we're bullshitting. He loves it when we fight each other over a piece, and I've become a regular combatant against a girl named Elisabeth. We don't dislike each other outside of class, but we disagree a lot. "Watching you two is like watching a ping-pong game," says Gillian, "but I'm never sure who's winning."

Here I am at my best. I'm articulate. I'm sharp. I'm confident. I stand up straight. I write constantly. I'm affeccionate and at peace and never judgmental. I love it.

I can't wait to go to college.

check it out

Guess who saw Chuck Berry last night??! All I can say is that I hope I'm that active when I'm fifty, and he's almost eighty. He's still duckwalking across the stage, screwing with his musicians by changing to odd keys in the middle of their solos, bringing people on stage, making mildly lewd jokes, and embarassing his son (who played rhythm guitar) with acclaim.

I'm busy packing for Iowa right now. I love you all. I'm sorry that I haven't posted anything worth reading for a while, but I promise to do better when I get back. I know I say that every time, but this time I'll have two weeks of living amongst writers under my belt.

As for the tattoo, it would be a simple and unobtrusive one, probably in a place that most people wouldn't see (and I don't mean a place covered by underwear). A little black mark.

My poor Harry got some strange sickness that baffled the doctors, and they took six blood samples and sent him home empty-handed. Harry went to the country sick as ever and lightheaded from the loss of blood (he has really low blood pressure anyway) and I felt vaguely helpless.

My sister has pretty much convinced my dad to go to Libya with her at the end of the summer, so it looks like I'll be spending a week in Paris with my mom and abuela. We all like to do the same things--shop, see plays and operas, eat good food, explore the city--so we're a good combination.

The last thing I'm going to do before I leave is shoot pool, eat ice cream, talk with my sister and maybe watch some Seinfeld at night. Just to celebrate being me.

It's a nice thing to wake up in the morning and realize that you like your feet. I think a person's level of respect for themself can be usually be guaged by their attitude towards their feet, unless they just have really, really hideous ones or unbelievably perfect ones, in which case their attitude is probably just rational. It's a good indicator because nobody can see what their feet actually look like after living with them for so long, and because the whole thing is so subjective anyway.

Despite this realization, I'm getting my period again, I might also be getting sick, and my last few days in the city are already so packed that I'm blowing people off, snapping at Harry, trying to get my relatives to do my errands and getting a bit tense in general. I like my feet, but I've been abusing them trying to break in sandals and cover hundreds of blocks at the same time.

I'd rather be busy than bored, though, and it looks like the rest of my summer will continue in the same fashion.

I've seen some really beautiful tattoos lately. I have such an itch to get a small sweet black tattoo in some elegant secret place! But I wouldn't trust any artist with my body who would be willing to do the job, since I'm underage and there's no way my parents would ever sign a permission slip for me. When I'm eighteen I'll go to a convention and find an artist who I trust and flip my ID and show my pattern and grit my teeth and do it.

When I was a freshman I wrote a series of stories about a man driving a blue car across America and all of the strange people he encounters. I found a few of them the other day and was shocked at how well I could see their flaws. They were conceptually strong, but I could have made them so much more subtle and enticing with a few small changes, maybe a shift in perspective, refined metaphors, etc. It's easy to forget that you've been writing seriously for four years, not four weeks, and that you may have changed over that interval. I hadn't realized how much I'd improved.

My roommate at Iowa calls herself a sci-fi screenwriter. I don't know what to expect. The email she sent me was somewhat blunt, but I made sure to send a nice one back to make her know that I'm not going to judge her for her subject matter.

Anyway, I have to go to work.

I'm going to the beach!

I'll stop skimping on my blog so much when I get back from Iowa. I'm unbelievably busy these days--I never get to rest! I love it. It makes me feel alive.

What a great place to live.

Spent the weekend reading The English Patient, Cat and Mouse and A Temple of Texts while Harry got sick and threw up and Zaid and Travis worked in the yard. It was lovely and relaxing (except for the throwing up part) and when I got back the city was waiting for me.

My parents got so frantic over the last week that they contacted about twenty hispanic-oriented organizations, and now they all want me to volunteer. I think I'll blow them all off and stick with Human Rights First, maybe tutor a bit on the side or do weekends for City Year. In any case, I'll be researching Melville and making clothes regularly, so it's all fine by me.

I have this overbearing feeling that with the right education I could really be something, could really be great, could become an intellectual permenantly, could live in my Bohemian paradise and revel in mismatched plates and dusty lampshades. Or I could become what my parents became. This fear more than anything drives me to experience everything I can, seize every opportunity, read everything in my path and write instead of sleeping, listen to music at traffic lights. I want to educate myself in the important things, keep myself inspired at all times, stay alive. Harry's parents did it and mine didn't, and they're still talking about books and writing plays and talking about technology that my parents don't know exists. I have to make it. I have to make something of myself.

So I'm working/interning for Donovan Hohn, Karen Patwa, and Human Rights First this summer. I met famous people last night. My grandma and cousin are here. My sister's friends threw a surprise party for her this morning while I was wearing nothing but a t-shirt and underwear. Summer here is beautiful and busy. Harry's coming home with a huge stack of comics each night from his internship at DC. I'm going to learn to make clothes and read Melville and get muscles in my legs from walking and swimming and biking and tap dancing.

I'm so lucky to know all of these wonderful people and do all of these awesome things!

Deep thoughts are overrunning my notebook but I don't feel like blogging lately.

Batwoman is lesbian WHAT??

I'm SORRY I didn't go to graduation! I mean it!

I'm getting such a kick out of reading and sewing in the mornings and walking through the city all day and having people over for dinner all the time and writing every night. Life is as good as ever. And I even got a swimsuit that fits and a beautiful huge leather-and-canvas slouchy flat elegant California bag. And my relationship feels perfect.

Save the date: July 3rd anyone who wants can partake in infinite ice cream on my birthday. No alcohol or anything, but amazing people and fun and loveliness is promised.

A summary of my day:
I HATE my period.
I have an unutterably wonderful boyfriend.

Just finished my last SAT, provided I don't have to retake the ones I took today. I'm not going to H's country house today, as you might have surmised, but I'll be going next weekend.

My mom and I are in the house by ourselves for the weekend because my sister and my dad went to my cousin Danny's graduation in DC. We've already made plans to watch X-Men, go shopping and make salmon.

I'm going to see Karen on monday to work out a schedule, and she asked me to bring some of the things I've made. I've been fixing things and making things on and off for the past few days in preparation. I'm actually getting to be somewhat adept at making clothing.

Just thought I'd say something.

Last night I found myself walking barefoot in the rain in a white shirt with no back to Katz's Deli in the arms of the lovely Laura Kilberg, similarly barefoot and clad in white, happily discussing Karen Patwa's store opening and the way the rain felt soft on our hair and what we meant to order and trying to remember if we'd had tetanus shots. I had a hot dog and potato latkes in the end and Frankie and LK had egg creams and sandwiches and Shapiro had soup and latkes and it was so simple and lovely, all of us eating overpriced food, writhing in our damp pants (except Frankie, who was wearing a dress) and soaked and starved and happy.

I'm definately working for Karen Patwa this summer. I don't know if I'm supposed to call her Karen or Ms. Patwa now. It seems trivial. Either way it's going to be awesome. How cool that at Friends our physics teachers go on to become punk-rock designers with suitably sexy foreign husbands and downtown hipster-neighborhood storefronts. I can spend my summer learning how to make clothes! The city is so rich.

Somehow I find myself with to-do lists that are even longer now that school is out than they were when it was in session. The main difference is that they're things I'll enjoy doing: "return Revenge of the Nerds, finish buying Iowa books, pack bags for NJ, finish Seinfeld DVD and return, review literary terms, call Darren about yearbook." Not exactly homework.

In other news, I'm officially what Harry calls a "Senior lite."

I still have no idea what to get my sister for her birthday.

Hey, finals are over and I'm alive! I don't know how I did for the year, but I pulled off all of my finals pretty well (except for a 77 in Bio... oops). I don't even have to retake the spanish SAT II. Two more tests and I can go to Harry's country house and relax completely.

Last night I found myself unbelievably tense and irritable. I went out to dinner with my family and Harry and by ten or so I felt a huge ball of unfixed irritation gaining strength inside my head. Even though everything was over and I did pretty well, my veins were still coursing with leftover adrenaline from give-back day, menstrual hormones and caffeine. All of my muscles were tensed and my head and stomach and legs hurt and I felt awful. I was fighting in my head, trying to prevent the irritation from fixating on something physical, and the struggle was making my head pound.

Then Harry realized what was happening and gave me the best massage of my life from head to toe and held my head until the pounding went away. He left when I was half asleep and happy and tender.

When I woke up, my first thought was that after everything that's happened in the last two years, I'm SO LUCKY to be here and strong and happy and have this wonderful person near me who brings so much love out of me.

I feel stupid even writing this down, because I'm all tired and sleepy and I'm sure my description doesn't do justice to the experience at all, but I had to say something. I want everyone to know how good he is to me.

I've tried SO MANY TIMES to make my blog unsearchable, but I just don't remember html well enough! Help!

And why do people keep googling "darkeyedgypsy.blogspot.com"? Are they too lazy to type it into the bar?