Dark-Eyed Gypsy moved to a new URL. All of the archives are there but it's not listed on blogger and not searchable. I'll be happy to give the new URL to anyone who emails me (UrbanAnagnorisis@gmail.com) unless I have a very good reason not to.

Don't be discouraged! I just don't want the school admins to get their hands on it--basically anyone else is welcome to read.

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?

The other day my sister stopped me in mid-speech as I was explaining some science thing to her and said "I can't explain it, but you're so Veronica right now. So you!"

I took it as a compliment (although I'm not sure what it had to do with the science stuff) because I have virtually no idea what my personality is, and it's reassuring to know that it actually exists. I have no idea how people perceive me, for the most part. I credit this to my general lack of self-awareness and my tendency walk around in a daze when I'm thinking hard, which is frequently. This leads to a very strange state of being. As a kid I thought I was pretty much the strangest person there was, so repulsive that no one would want to be friends with me. I slowly dropped that idea, but my self-blindness made it difficult. It was more of a logical deduction than anything else. These people like me, and they've got good taste, so I can't be that bad. These people treat me like everyone else, so I must be somewhat normal. I get hit on at parties, so I must be decent-looking. Etc.

The people I like most tend to have very natural personalities, ones that they are seldom fully aware of, so not knowing exactly how I come across can't be such a bad thing. Over the last few years I've learned to stop relying on other people's opinions of me to judge my own worth, but my self-awareness hasn't significantly increased, so I'm left with almost nothing to go on. After spending a good deal of time trying to figure out how I was supposed to reach an understanding of myself from an outside perspective, it dawned on me that I didn't really need to. I'm usually aware enough to avoid offending people, and I must have some kind of personality, so why not just let it go and express itself? I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.

As for Joyce Carol Oates, I'm not particularly offended by her writing; she's just not so amazing that she should be quoted on the back of every book printed in this decade as though she were the New York Times. I've seen her bullshit quotes on the backs of some of my favorite books ("a story by William Goyen is like nothing in this world but a story by William Goyen") and I don't think she has the authority to judge writers that are clearly better than her--and yet she's always given a prime spot on the sleeve. I keep reading her books, trying to figure out what the great mystery is, and I'm consistantly dissappointed. No matter how hard I try, I can't find any redeeming quality to her work, and I'm a pretty sharp reader. There are tons of mediocre books and mediocre authors out there, but none so celebrated and so publicized as her. A friend who I respect deeply recently suggested to me that I look into a certain college because she was teaching there. The whole thing is very frustrating.

One of the only things I really know is that I don't want to end up like my parents.

It's a long story, but I took some medicine at two yesterday that I'm apparantly allergic or hypersensitive to and have been suffering an aching stomach since. So until a few hours ago, I hadn't left the house since Friday night. I read half of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, one of the books Iowa assigned me, did an SAT practice test, consumed an ungodly amount of jello, ordered things from Amazon, googled X-men characters, fumed about the undeserved popularity of Joyce Carol Oates, filled fifteen or so pages in my notebook, discovered that Isaac Asimov wrote over 470 books (and wrote a considerable amount in reflection of his life), bought five-dollar tanks tops in the basement of Urban Outfitters, listened to Chuck Berry and Cat Stevens, watched some Seinfeld, and generally procrastinated studying math.

Lately I find myself wanting to look elegant and somewhat Austrian--a combination of French sexiness and German simplicity. I guess it's in my blood.

Finals hate me. Here's what's happened so far:

iPod broke.

English final- Sarah told us in class that it was at 8:15. Alex, Max, Nijel, Chris and I showed up at 8. Turns out it's at 12:15. I didn't even have an iPod to pass the time with. We were all coffee-stoked and by the time the test started I was ready to fall asleep.

History paper got deleted after about five hours of work. When I turn it in, the glue has gotten stuck to the cover picture and Ms. Reyes has to rip my folder to get it off. Then she asked me why the pictures weren't in the text. "My computer broke" is never a plausible excuse, so I made something up.

Layout took forever and still hasn't hit the press.

I was exhausted last night after helping Harry pick new shoes and feeding both him and Zack, so I went to bed at 10. At 11 they wake me up to say that on the answering machine Tim left a message five or six hours ago telling me that the Spanish final is at 8, not at 12. So I lost five hours of study time that I had been counting on. I couldn't study at 11, so I tried to go back to sleep, but I stayed up worrying until 12:30.

But this morning my iPod was miraculously fixed and I realized that I was actually pretty well prepared for my Spanish final.

I think it's a good sign.

So I work on my history paper for five hours and in the morning at seven a.m. I discover that all of my work is gone. I'm never using a PC again.

And our punk-rock neighbor with the black hair and the sweet bulldog is gone and Sonya is back. She's been pounding nails into the walls all morning while I was wasting post-its trying to find all of my citations again.

I guess I always felt that I didn't need to say this, but I've thought that many times and have usually been proven wrong.

I don't particularly value intelligence or beauty. I enjoy them and I think that people should strive to achieve them, so in a sense I do value them, but I don't use them to judge the values of people. I try not to, at least. I'm sure that to some extent I do. But I'm also constantly aware of the fact that these things are inherited, not earned, and I dislike people who assert their superiority on the basis of intelligence or attractiveness alone.

What I value in a person is that which is done by choice or learned. I value education. I value skill. I value inspiration and love of life and sense of humor. I value the choice to think. I value passion. I value optimism. I value intellectuality. I value effort. I value the ability to bring out the best in other people. I value the ability to make people laugh. I value the ability to be happy. I value the ability to love.

I know I'm smart and I think I'm acceptably attractive. But I don't think I'm better than other people for those reasons. I judge myself by the standards mentioned above, and by those standards I'm not doing particularly well. I have a very strange sense of humor and consequently have trouble making people laugh, I can be extremely pessimistic, depressed and apathetic, I seldom work hard, and I'm inherently somewhat antisocial.

Lately, however, I've been more inspired to think and write and work. I've been more alive and passionate. I've laughed more. I've been more intellectual and social and playful and loving. I've been working my ass off. So I'm getting to where I want to be. I'm not there yet, though, and I won't be for a long time, and I know it.

As promised, some favorites:

Amphibrach- a three-syllabled foot: stressed, unstressed, stressed. It isn't taught much any more.
Anagnorisis- a moment of recognition or discovery by a protagonist, usually plot-related and most frequently used in reference to Greek tragedy.
Aposiopesis- a breaking-off of speech: "What the--?"
Bathos- an unexpected drop from the lofty to the trivial, sometimes employed on purpose but usually the mark of bad writing.
Chiasmus- two juxtaposed sentences or clauses in which the syntax is the same but the placement of the words is different: "They respected him because he was powerful and he was powerful because they respected him."
In Medias Res- starting a work in the middle of the action
Litotes- affirming a statement by negating its opposite: "Was the loft big?" "It certainly wasn't small."
Meiosis- purposeful drastic understatement
Metathesis- switching a vowel and a consonant or two consonants in colloquial pronounciation: "aks" instead of "ask," or "bird" instead of the Old English "brid"
Pathos- the quality in a work that evokes emotion
Paralipsis (or Praeterito)- highlighting something by claiming not to mention it: "It wouldn't be fair to talk about his small salary."
Pathetic phallacy- atribution of human emotion to nonhuman objects, usually the weather.
Periphrasis- obnoxious use of more words than are necessary
Synaesthesia- using the vocabulary of one sensory experience to describe another
Trope- any member of a category of figures of speech that extend the literal meaning of words by inviting comparison to other words, things or ideas. Metaphor, synonym and synechdoche are all types of trope.
Zeugma- using one word to modify two or more other words in the same sentence, often in a different way: "he took his hat and his leave."

The 5 types of irony in literature:
Verbal- a statement that, by its context, means the opposite of that which it expresses when isolated
Situational- when two characters' understandings of a situation contrast sharply, such as Wilfred Owens' use of wartime slogans to highlight the injustice he sees in war
Romantic- when the writer distances the reader from the plot and characters by reminding the reader of his or her presence.
Dramatic- when the reader knows more about the plot than a character does, giving the characters' words and actions added meaning. Frequently employed in tragedy.
Cosmic- contrast between the purposeful actions of men and the indifference of fate. Thomas Hardy is often erroneously credited with inventing cosmic irony.

Isn't it cool?!

Harry and I had our anniversary. LK came home and made me pasta. Burrito Loco is once again crawling with grads. The newspaper is almost done. My english final is on Tuesday and I need to get an A on it in order to get one for the year. Missed Moll's show on Friday by accident but met Mike. Spent the whole afternoon doing layout and haven't touched my History paper yet. A glass of Bailey's made my uncle and aunt seem abrasive and obnoxious. Arguing about whether I'm going to work for a lawyer, a hispanic organization, or Karen Patwa this summer. Clothes-swapping. Reading. Walking. Harp playing. My iPod is freaking out. Maple candy and buttered bagels and summer sausage sandwiches. Meeting my tutor at Starbucks and talking about literature instead of math. Recurring impulse to call Harry just to hear him on the other end. Going to sleep late becuase my parents are out seeing Tom Verlaine without me. Donating clothes to thrift shops to make way for new ones.

All wonderfully unremarkable. Soft and sweet times. Summer is back.

People who are nice to everyone make everyone around them uncomfortable because they highlight their incecurities. (I hope you can decipher my meaning through all those "they"s.) It's almost as bad as being mean to everyone. You have to wonder what they really think of you. On the other hand, it does make things comfortable in social situations.

SO MUCH WORK and Zack and Harry are on their way over and I'm not sure how I'm going to get it all done.

Dancing is awesome. I think I'm going to try to take a tap class this summer.

Hmmm. Now that it's not late last night that editorial I posted about seems a lot weaker. The ideas are there, though. Donovan gave me some good advice about making it less and more dense in the right spots and easier to read. I've got a lot to work with.

While I was eating dinner Harry called (and mistook my mom for Rosa). After a few minutes of conversation he realized that I was chewing into the phone--very sexy, I know.
"V, are you eating?" he asked, sounding shocked and apalled.
"I'm eating barbeque chicken. Why?"
"What are you doing? It's our anniversary! We're going out tonight! How could you possibly forget?"
"Harry, that's tomorrow."
"Oh."

Apparently, he was calling me from his cell phone just outside the subway, about to pick me up for a romantic two-dollar dinner. And I thought about how silly and bizarre and quirky he is and remembered why I love him.

Two years is a long time.

I got in a real fight with Robin in Photo this morning. She keeps forgetting that I'm a junior because everyone else in the class is a sophomore. She forgave me for skipping the most recent assignment, though, because she liked my somewhat freaky photos of a hairbrush and because she remembered that I have two more SAT IIs, and she stopped freaking out.

My dad said that when he was in high school in Nowhereville, Wisconsin and had the only rock band in town, they didn't call themselves "hippies" at all. "You were a square, a greaser or a freak," he said. I don't know why I find that so interesting. I guess everything gets distorted over time.

I get high off of good grammar. I don't always employ it, but I know how to use it and I love when writing is so gramatically correct that there are no bumps to trip on, no confusing references or unclear run-ons, nothing to hinder the experience that the author is trying to convey.

There's also something thrilling about bad translations of good texts. The words are so foreign and stiff and un-English, and the ideas are so fluid and smooth! I wish Nabakov hadn't translated himself. I'd love to read a really crappy translation of his stuff.

And I have in-house because I was late a lot last week. It's a pain but it's probably good for me, because I have so much work these days that I can't afford to duck out to the East Village Thrift Shop or Thai On Two during the school day any more.

Renata just peeked over my shoulder. "'I get high off of good grammar'? Laaaaaame." And then she kissed me.

And that's the story of my life.

So I took one page from my notebook and sat down and wrote a Letter from the Editor. And it's fucking GOOD. I amaze myself sometimes.

I'd rather be respected than liked.
I'd rather be interesting than pretty.
I'd rather be happy than amusing.
I'd rather be smart than sexy.
I'd rather read than watch TV.
I'd rather eat mole with tortillas than eat all of the candy in the world.
I'd rather have love than sex.
I'd rather make art than money.
I'd rather write essays than write poems.
I'd rather be awake all night and sleep all day than do it the other way around.
I'd rather speak German than French.
I'd rather be homeless than have a boring job.
I'd rather be overworked than underworked.
I'd rather hear a harmonica and an upright bass than any other instruments.
I'd rather learn something cool than get an A.
I'd rather be proud than modest.
I'd rather be modest than condescending.

Rather suddenly seems like a very strange word. I can barely remember how to use it. I have a feeling that nothing I've just written makes any sense.

I promise that when finals are over I'll transcribe some stuff from my notebook and write something interesting for a change. Hell, maybe I'll even tackle politics. It could get wild.

Life is so rich! Music everywhere and beats under the skins of everything I touch and the subway under my feet and the hot summer air combing my hair into thick locks and something new to write down every minute. And I'm stuck taking trig notes on my fire escape in my pijamas because I can't go outside until I've studied for my two tests on monday and test and half-final on tuesday.

I don't even care. I don't even mind my period or the fact that we're not having dinner tonight because mom made black mole at two. I don't mind not going busquing with Matt or seeing Harry or going to the thrift market or sipping Bailey's in someone's apartment over a Dylan debate. Studying isn't so bad. Granola bars are enough. My sister is good for conversation or music when I'm tired and the stuff I'm learning is interesting enough to keep me going.

For example: I can't describe how awesome it is that my history final is a paper on the history of Greenwich Village with photos and primary sources. Reading about the Village's writers is almost as fun as actually reading them. And did you know that the Village is the only US neighborhood to have its own definition in the OED?

I ran into Ron Singer on the street the other day and asked him which books he would recommend and he sent an email to Maria Fahey giving me permission to borrow a copy of Literary New York. "Don't lose it or forget to return it, though, because those are out of print and could cost up to a hundred dollars to replace," Maria warned me.

It turned out to be an incredible book, worth more than all of the rest of my sources put together. So I went on Amazon and found it on sale for $0.73. I ordered two. I'd recommend it to any lit nerds like myself out there who're interested in the Village. If there even are any.

I was skimming my second quarter notebook looking for some math stuff and I realized that it was virtually bereft of any creative thought. There were depressing inky drawings of satyrs and blackbirds and such and a few copied poems of other peoples' but nothing new or original. No jotted thoughts or images or even ideas for later use. The backbone of my play was at the very beginning but after those few pages it was just class notes and sketches and grades and homework. I must have really had it bad.

I'm a million times more alive now than I was then. I've never been so open with myself or so strong before. I've never been happier.

And I keep thinking of all of the incredible people I know and how much I love them. I see friends flocking back to the city where the Mud Mobile is putting ice in the coffee again and drunken parties are blossoming on rooftops. I want to photograph them and call them and poke them over facebook and write about them and tell the world what I think of them. And it's almost summer and now I can!