this thing is getting off the ground.

yes, literally. i’m getting off the ground, in several senses of the phrase. firstly, i had my first of what will probably be many falls out of my abnormally high bed this evening. limit of coordination as tiredness tends to infinity equals zero. so i got off the ground and hauled myself back onto the bed as my roommate chuckled. then, i played serious basketball for the first time in over two years this evening. after peter headed back to el segundo, i asked my suitemates if they wanted to head over to the gym and shoot some hoops. unsurprisingly, they looked at me like i’d fallen off of another planet. so i changed into my gym things anyway and called charlie to see if he wanted to shoot hoops. his rationale was that, even though he has to get up at 6 tomorrow morning because of the marching band, it doesn’t actually matter what time he goes to sleep because he’ll be tired anyway. so we met at the lyon center and just threw a ball back and forth for a while, shooting, and, in charlie’s case, dunking. but i am short, and i am out of shape. then eight guys (sophomores? juniors? not freshmen, methinks…) asked us if we wanted to make it five on five. so we agreed, and played a downright manic game. i knew that, as the girl, i wasn’t going to get the ball much, but i think i played some pretty good defense. i could hear coach t yelling in the back of my head: “arms up! arms up on d!” but it was pretty awesome. charlie was worried that i hadn’t had a good time. the thing is, it’s so much easier to just go and play sports with a bunch of guys whose names i don’t even know than to try to make small talk with girls with whom i’m unsure if i have anything in common. and i enjoy sports. i definitely have no athletic capacity, but there’s a winning combination of adrenaline and endorphins that has put me in a pretty chipper mood, for being exhausted in the middle of the night.

now i’m starting to realize how tired i am. calc lecture this morning, followed by a trip out to el segundo, meeting all the people about whom i’ve heard so much from peter. his job is pretty possum. i’m looking forward to doing a little bit of work for them, in my own limited capacity. peter then saw me back to campus (yay!) and we got dinner at the dining hall. this school is really growing on me. or maybe it’s just the endorphins qui me font voir tout en rose. i hope he made it back okay; he didn’t text back. but i texted pretty late so he’d probably had more sense than me and gone to bed already.

i’m burning out. i think i need to sleep (yes, need to sleep. you never thought it would happen, did you?).

like freedom in the spring

yesterday was looking like a pretty abysmal day for a while. i went to my early morning calculus discussion, then came back to my room and attempted to work. it didn’t work out too well (no pun intended). my roommate was still sleeping when i got back, which of course was kind of depressing. my calc ta is chinese, so every time he talks about the range of the function, he says “lange”. i have fun making fun of people and freaking people out. it got better when evelyn called, and then i went for a late, lonely lunch and alex called just as i was about to devour a slice of pecan pie to cheer myself up. so alex cheered me up, and i devoured the pie anyway. then i had a rather encouraging conversation with one of my suitemates, which revealed that maybe i’m not the only person with horribly out-of-fashion views on several things. i went back to trying to work, and managed to get my printer working. i then continued dragging myself through the prewriting exercise that i had to do before writing my essay when evelyn’s dad (professor here) called and asked if i wanted to get coffee. anything to escape this exercise for writing-140, i thought. so i went and got coffee and we got into a good, intellectual argument which gave me the topic for my essay, at last. i ended up writing an essay on “the crippling conflict between science and religion.” if you guys are interested, comment me a note and i’ll post the full text on here.

on another note, maybe you’ve noticed that i changed the name of this blog. there’s an explanation of the peculiar monikers that my blog has borne over the years. the chronicles of genevan suburbia was by far the longest, and now that genevan suburbia is something in my past (though still, oddly, my hometown whenever anyone asks), i’m trying to chronicle the present. my roommate asked me to explain the wacky cutout letters on my wall, so i showed her demetri martin’s “jokes with guitar” on youtube and realized how much i miss robin. robin withdrawal is looking at the physics formulae on my wall and remembering all the jokes we made, and how lost we got. alex withdrawal, on the other hand, is looking at a calculus book and missing “good morning calc class!” every monday morning. i don’t really want to do my practice problems. i don’t really want to go to my discussion section tomorrow morning. i didn’t fully realize how beautiful my friends are until i stopped seeing them every day.

going back to yesterday, i got cheered up after my conversation with nick, not only because it gave me an essay topic, but because i had my first guitar class afterwards. it’s such a fun class. we started off playing iron & wine’s cover of “such great heights”. it’s great. i went outside to practice today because i didn’t want anyone to hear me. so i hid out in some shade on the lawn, drowned out by the noise of the traffic. angelino traffic.

i guess, i’m slowly growing happier to be here.

think different.

it only seemed appropriate to title this post with that great apple slogan. “think different” meaning “buy our computers”. they weren’t actually telling you to think differently from the masses (or, at least, the masses of ardent followers of the macintosh). i guess, even though my computer is an aging dell, i took their slogan a little too literally.

i don’t fit in here. i may have an american passport, and no documents to attest to my swiss citizenship, but the passport does not equate any knowledge of the culture. the automobile-oriented culture of los angeles is giving me a bit of a hard time. i’m so used to a significant degree of mobility, which i don’t have here in a strange city with “bad” districts that are actually dangerous at night. i miss my lake and i miss my mountains. more than anything else, i miss my friends. people who, even if they don’t think like me, understand how i think. and i understand how they think. i guess it’s just been a while since i actually got thrown into an entirely new environment and was forced to socialize. and i got so comfortable in my corner with my half-dozen or so best friends towards the end that i forgot how to be fake to make friends. it’s a dangerous thing to forget.

i went to church this morning, at the united university church. the thing with that church was that it went to such lengths to be “united” and so include everybody that it included nobody. they’re trying to be open, cool, liberal, and they’re completely losing the Gospel in the process. i heard a prosperity gospel preached, that sounded like pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, everybody’s going to heaven and christians just have it better on earth. to take a phrase from my old foul mouth, that’s full of shit. i’m going to lay a few things out right here that are going to make me one of the least cool students on campus.

abortion. you want to know why they call it pro-choice? because if they called it pro-abortion, that would sound like they’re actually okay with killing unborn fetuses. the unborn fetus is entirely dependent on its mother for survival, so i suppose you could argue that it is not its own human being yet. i’ve had the “is a fetus a human being?” argument in my head a lot, and i can’t find substantial evidence in either direction. but i think abortion is wrong, because it’s taking someone’s chance at life away. what if the fetus you aborted would have grown up to develop a cure for the lung cancer that you developed thirty years after aborting your child? and then you died of that cancer? i can’t believe that i’m about to quote ronald reagan (*sigh* quoting a republican, not in jest. for shame.) but, “i’ve noticed all the people in favor of abortion have already been born.”

gay marriage. did you ever do puzzles when you were a little kid, where all the pieces fit together in a specific way? or, if you childhood sucked like mine and you don’t like to remember it, did you ever listen to the song “such great heights” by the postal service? “as if God Himself had made us into corresponding shapes like puzzle pieces from the clay.” there is, evidently, a natural order, and homosexuality violates that. but wait, i’m not done with my opinion. please put down the torches and machetes. thank you. we all have a cross to bear in our lives. i know mine is my parents’ relationship, and my unhealthy reaction to it. i once heard a story of a boy in high school, who knew from a young age that he was different: that he was attracted to other guys. and he felt like God had made a mistake when He made him, so he wanted to kill himself. now, if that anecdote doesn’t evoke at least some form of pity, then you must have a heart of stone. so, i know that my view sounds hideously intolerant and homophobic. but i don’t hate gays. i believe that, if Jesus were alive today, He would be a friend of the homosexuals. but, as with any unmarried person, he would advocate celibacy for them, because marriage is a sacred covenant between a man and a woman. therefore, i am also against gay marriage.

and you want to know what i think when i have to go through my views on these matters? i think that, if the church really fixed its eyes upon Jesus (like in that old hymn), all these things would dim in comparison and we wouldn’t get so tied up about them. but since we live in a fallen world, here you have my opinions. and, while you gather your lynch mob, have some more opinions.

racism/sexism. all human beings are equally valuable. racism is 100% wrong, ’nuff said. not all human beings have the same capacities, though. some people are better at some things; other people are better at others. this is just a statement; many would interpret it along the lines of men and women, but some people can cross those lines. there are some girls out there, for instance, who are really good at video games, or at science and math. and there are some guys out there who just really, really like to cook. and there’s nothing wrong with either of those. if that’s what floats your boat, ignore the sexual stereotypes. and if you stick them to someone else, then i have harsh words for you.

the environment. God told adam and eve to care for the environment. humanity has not been doing much of that lately, therefore we should clean up our act, literally. we’re going against nature in so many places. take, for instance, feed lots for cattle. they’re fed grain, whereas cattle naturally eat grass. the grain has more starch, which produces more acid in their stomachs, which causes ulcers. lesson learned: avoid the corn-fed beef. (for more on this, and other abuses of corn, watch the documentary king corn. it’s brilliant.) furthermore, we are pumping greenhouse gases into our atmosphere with reckless abandon. one way to stop this, and fix the federal deficit in one fell swoop, would be to impose a carbon tax on industry. oh, but the economy… you say. the economy is dead because we depend on obscenely priced foreign oil. we are oilholics. if you got out there in an electric car today, at $4 per gallon of petrol, you would be doing a couple of things. firstly, saving money. secondly, not releasing as many pollutants and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (which, if i may remind you, you have to breathe). finally, you would be reducing noise pollution. you don’t think about it, but my window looks out over a busy los angeles street and i wake up to traffic every morning. so i stand for recycling, nonconsumption, organic food… oh, yes, and i go out and hug trees when i’m feeling lonely. (haha, sorry. i couldn’t resist that one.)

tax breaks for the filthy rich. oh yes, tax breaks for the filthy rich so that they can hire more servants. frankly, i think their taxes should get kicked up. they’re the only ones who can afford it. so, obama tax reform all the way!

so there you have a bunch of views. this is by no means a complete listing of what i think of things, but it’s a scathing one. in the words of strata, “i live just to die for my beliefs.” so, you can hate me or respect me. you can flame me, or civilly comment on civilly phrased opinions.

because, really, if i don’t stand up for my beliefs, who will?

the white brick house

every morning at about 7:30, i come downstairs, lace up my ragged sneakers, and grab my bag for work. when i get to the bottom of the stairs, i see the old portrait photo of jack bouma. maybe it’s 20 years old; it looks like they took it before his stroke. and i wonder, jack bouma. how did you persuade the architect to sell you the corner house that he’d built for himself? how did you win all those medals in the army, the ones that are framed with that sixty-year-old photo and a folded flag of honor? what inspired you to become a psychiatrist, and do these psychological problems really run in the family or is it just my imagination? sometimes, i wonder.

they’ve lived – we’ve lived – in this house since 1960. and a lot of the same old stuff is here too, from when they moved from kansas when my dad was a little boy. it’s a funny mixture of old and new, this house. we have four computers, all less than five years old, here in the den. there used to be a tired old tv along that wall, and one of grandpa’s big, comfy chairs in front of it. my brother and i would sit on each other and watch that 70s show a couple of years ago. grandma has a picture in her room at the assisted living home (which is out in the middle of blessed nowhere) of her and grandpa, with four of their five children, on that same golden sofa onto which i flop down in the living room, quite regularly. it’s a golden room, full of warm colors that should make me feel safe and happy. the same tan carpet that’s to be found all over the house, with warm, polished wood and golden cloth galore. even the piano sounds muted and embracing, no matter how violently i play “enjoy the silence”. and it’s only fitting: at sunset, if the smog isn’t too thick, the sun comes streaming in through one of the two windows and all you can see is gold. all glitters, and all is gold, to anyone’s perception.

i’ve got this memory of that room. in eleventh grade english class, mrs. spurr asked us to recall a happy memory and, since it had only just happened the previous summer, this one came to mind. it was that glorious, indefilable evening hour: the sunbeams were bursting with golden pride all over the golden room. my dad and i were talking about music, as we are quite prone to do, and i mentioned that i’d been listening to led zeppelin. i went to get my little black walkman (oh dear sony… i’m sorry i betrayed you, but apple was so enticing) and plugged it into his speakers. and he sat in one golden armchair, playing his beautiful bass, whose finish reflected the blindingly proud sunbeams into my eyes. i sat on the sofa across from him, singing. i remember there was a day when i wasn’t afraid to sing. the past is a funny thing: it taunts you, and you chase it even though you are fully aware that it is far too elusive, and will never be yours again. every sunbeam is past and gone. that evening, they shone through my dad’s frizzy hair, rendering it a dying halo around the head of a father who someday would die as well.

in english class, the memory came back to me in all its golden sound, and texture, and light. it glowed so brightly, a beacon in the rearview mirror of my mind, that i blinked back some tears. sometimes it’s just not easy.

it’s easy to be lonely in this big house. luckily, the last three of us have a great affinity for our computers, so we sit in the small, cluttered den, busily typing out words that in the end will come to nothing.

p.s. a brief definition from simca’s dictionary: prosetry (noun) prose deliberately written with the verbal intensity of poetry.