it feels better to be home than i had anticipated. really good in fact. i'll try to hang on to that and not slip into the typical summer boredom, at least for a while. for starters, it was absolutely gorgeous today. that was plain for the whole of the astoundingly scenic cross-state train route of the Empire service, but i felt it best getting off the train, mom and martha there to pick me up. luggage inside, i showed martha some pictures barefoot, helped mom give a dress consultation to julia walsh, sat on the swing. went out to the plum house (a ridiculous quantity of food - age tofu, nasushigi, wasabi shumai, ohitashi, bonito, tuna tataki, tamago, lots of rolls and sushi - left me once again over-full but happy), came back and watched a funny thing happened on the way to the forum - funny how the "period" emphasis of the film has shifted so now you're more conscious of it being a sixties' artifact than set in ancient rome. i went to bed at about 12:30 and only got up over twelve hours later, so i must have been tired.

i got about five hours the night before, but it was more than i had planned for: my alarm didn't go off (poetic irony or just bad luck?), but i luckily woke up at 8:30. too late to make the 8:40 train i had been shooting for (i wanted an extra two hours to finish packing stuff up, clean a bit, wash dishes, eat breakfast, etc.), but i managed to catch the 9:06, with a bit of scrambling. hurried down to the station as fast as my luggage would let me - my pack weighed 72 pounds (i measured it when i got home), and i was dragging a suitcase that was nearly as heavy, along with my computer pack, likewise overstuffed - gave up partway there and dropped the suitcase, dropped the pack at the station and went back for it just as the train was rolling in. i wouldn't have made it if not for a kindly conductor who waited for me as i lugged the suitcase back over as well. whew. sweating pretty hard there, and on no breakfast either. luckily i had filled my water bottle. i got my reserved ticket at the quicktrack machine quite efficiently, but somehow still managed to miss the 9:42 by about a minute. so i lugged the stuff back up the staircase, and fortunately ran into a red-cap who offered to cart it over across the station for me so i could catch a 9:55 to new york. good for that. i slept for most of the time on that train, which was luxuriously empty. and it turned out i had plenty of time (20 minutes) in penn station, which i just spent people-watching in the entrance to the seating area. managed to snag a seat to myself on the six-and-a-half-hour empire state train to rochester. so i was happy.

it really is a beautiful ride. the train follows the hudson the whole way up and over, and i just sat there and looked at the water in the sunshine for long stretches of the ride. i read 150 or so pages of Cloudsplitter (gripping, especially the bleeding Kansas stuff, which is where I am; and easy to get back into thanks to many passages where Owen reflects back on his life and enumerates the important events), slept for intermittent half-hours or so, constructed hopeful summer scenarios of convenient encounters and travel plans, devoured a much needed and not-too-awful lunch from the cafe car (green salad and raspberry-turkey-swiss sandwich). i read the spike piece about boredom (and the rest of the magazine as well - it's good reading, if largely not funny per se - i liked especially the conversation about the mütter museum and the p. hortense vroom story - also, i wonder what that vowel-grubbing laeona niaess would think if she saw that bit about her) but i didn't really feel bored, which i thought was impressive.

funny, i had felt a bit the prior day (this would be what, tuesday), as i was packing all day. not boredom maybe so much as panicky frustrated sadness, loneliness and yearning for something. packing, maybe, will do that to you. joel left in the mid-afternoon, taking rae and his receiver, and we were down to one-pair-of-speaker capacity. so we listened to the end of the alphabet (remain in light, twilight singers, vanderlice, lucinda williams - too sad sez nori so traded in for stevie wonder) trapped in my room, as i put things in boxes - so many boxes, so many things, and it just becomes arbitrary which goes where. the dust kicked up in the process made me teary too, which doesn't help. rebecca mentioned the low level of e-mail activity, and it was definitely evident. most of my my communications were disheartening - brigid stuck in an inhospitable home without use of computer or phone, and unreasonable punishing parents; edith headed for vermont too soon for us to consummate our theoretical friendship, amidst a rough patch that i don't even have the references to connect, and she'd already seen the movie - it broke her she says; pained business and infuriating inbox filler. somehow things all took a turn for the better after petar (my latest savior) came over to help drive the sealed and labeled boxes over to the banana house. it was a quick and painless process (amusingly one of the boxes started buzzing partway through), and joanne was there at the receiving end to help out too. then we turned to other things - white-tape initials on our foreheads, ice cream and undone macaroons, my house at montmartre and a visit from gabe. petar, becca, and i went to his gargantuan triple in roberts, shared for the summer with nick jarrèt and mawrter aaliyah (spelled?). the room is huge and white and biblical - the soundtrack changing too fast for me to realize it had switched from dancy idm to george michael to pachabel's cannon to califone to gregorian chant - for some reason i was enjoying the smell of cigarette smoke - coke from wine glasses and discussion of soda and ester and boucai and summer and fall and people i didn't know. i didn't talk much. becca and i climbed up to the loft and i stood posing for christlike photos, with leftover lacrosse stick. then back home, where nori was ripping my collection as fast as she could, i helped myself to some water-ice and malibu (mmm), conversation turned to metric units (as in poetry) and the microphones. and i turned in. (3:30?)

yes. well, as this entry loses its fluidity and the reverse-chronological artifice becomes apparent as that, i might as well recount a bit of monday too, and make it complete. readers (this is me addressing you, o-how-meta) may have noticed inactivity here lately, days left undescribed, a drop-off perhaps linkable to the discovery of the sproul parody site (have you seen it lately? his apparently random-entry-generator has gotten amazingly sophisticated. or maybe it's just standard, i don't know. it's funny though) - to his implied (and lately rather explicit) criticism of this site (or blogging in general?) as egotistical, self-centered, etc. it is that, arguably, but not necessarily in the ways he seems to be targeting. i mean, well, i'm not going to explain myself again right now. but. thanks to Eva Holman (senior, or whatever) for the e-mailed in vote of confidence and assurance that she likes this "because it is personal." i certainly don't intend to change my s.o.p. on this site in response to the parody. however, i have been thinking for a while of allowing more flexibility with the degree of detail in my self-coverage. just so as not to feel compelled to go back and write about events long-past, for continuity's sake. we'll see if i can really live up to that. i feel that summer may have more periods of less-noteworthy time anyway, as well as diminished computer access. and we'll see how much danny makes fun of me for writing long hours all the time. i still feel a desire to go back and write about some now-rather-distant events, specifically Worthstock and maybe the DisPlan show, because I think they're things I'll want to remember (and i do remember them, in fair detail, at this point, so good to record that.) that's what it's about. physical memory, a la alex timin, who carried around an elph to keep a photographic record to serve as a memory. of course i know the paradoxes and impossibility involved there. but this helps, truly, and i can recapture feelings with these details that more of a gloss might leave out. anyway. about monday.

what happened monday? i was returned, refreshed, rubin was around, recording (with mastaproduca joel) a funky "dress up" that veers wildly from our live version, makes perhaps too much use of protools and electribe gimmickry, but that's the fun of it, right? some very nice bits to it. they churned it out as a two-song cd, cover-art from my photo of rae + elena (aw, the girlfriends) at worthstock, b-sided with a retitled rupture-dynamics track (the evolved "cheat on your boyfriend for me"). meanwhile, I visited campus, not to get lost, but found Stef and Zabby (new name, coined completely spontaneously in a comment on her blog: bizzy, as in lizzy with an affected lazymouth, and ironic because it sounds like busy), and then Ali, but didn't really meet up with any of them again as we discussed. i prepared some corn and spinach/asparagus w/ stuff for dinner, augmented by rice and peanutsauce by becca, and later supplemented with some blue-corn nachos and a nice stiff gin-and-pineapple juice. there was an abortive diplomacy game (it sort of started out abortive), with Dan Shargel, a friend of his from Cornell (who knew Julian and reminded me of Anthony), me, Becca, bombastic-ridiculous Joel (as Germany with rapid-expansion 'blitzkrieg!') and latecomer Nori, but not exhausted Petar or scruffy Rubin (look - capital letters!). I had an easy time of it as England, since Andrew (the friend) made a tentative, unclear-on-the-rules France, and Russia and Germany (nori-o and joel-o) soon departed to pick up Rae from greyhound station. yeah. but it ended. oh well, some other time - it is a fun game, and good to play again.

these long-few-and-far-between entries mean not so many lyric quotes, so they're starting to stockpile now. i may write about events of last week soon, just to see if i can remember what happened. it's good memory exercise, fun for me too, you know? now i'll eat and play in the sunshine.

they say that i'll recover
my love of her
once in a while
but i don't know
i don't think so