Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year"

Dear friends,

I thought you'd like to know that being twenty years old was not at all as scary as I thought it would be. I am having a fabulous 2010 so far, give or take a few moments of grumpiness, and I keep thinking back to last February when I was learning to cope, and how different things are this year. For the first time in forever, I am in a beautiful living situation with my friend J. and two friends live next door, and another right upstairs. We have pot lucks and sit around gossiping and drinking wine and studying every day of the week. I am having a dinner party this Friday and we are going to make all sorts of Southern comfort and soul food -- fried chicken, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, fried green tomatoes, banana pudding, biscuits and gravy, maybe some cole slaw too. If any of you are ever in the city, you are always more than welcome to come sit in my little studio apartment and play Super Scrabble with me. Yes, Super Scrabble, with quadruple letter scores!

My classes are wonderful, albeit exhausting. I am taking a poetry class, and I have shared one of my poems with you under the cut, but really I am writing the same poem again and again so it should be nothing new or exciting. I am taking an Oceanic Art History class, and am sharing some of my favorite kinds of art so far with you too. I am learning about symbols and mirrors and transformations in this class. I am writing a poem about Asmat war shields soon, about how organic shapes can be transformed into such repetitive geometric forms, or something like that.

Sorry that this post is all over the place, but I guess I have a lot I want to tell you and to remind myself. I was supposed to go to London for spring break, but I don't think it's going to happen due to money situations, but that means I will be able to go see Joanna Newsom and hear Edward Hirsch. Which reminds me, Jeanette Winterson is reading tomorrow night! I am canceling pizza and beer night to go hear her read, and I am so excited, beyond excited.

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"Sometimes, we need to return to certain ancient gestures of tenderness. Gestures are more than just gestures, they are like drawings made by one body on another body."

I have somehow managed to alienate myself from everyone I used to love, and it is a halting kind of loneliness; my heart is a ghost haunting my body. Do you know what it's like, to have your body betray you?

I swim by myself, float on my back and watch the cars drive past the spillway. I eat ice cream by myself, walk around the deserted shopping complexes of run-down Tuscaloosa. Most days, I stay in bed for 18 hours, reading and sleeping.

Jorie Graham writes, "there is a way to not yet be wanted," and I'm hanging onto it by a thread. There is a way to not yet be wanted.

Songs I have been listening to lately:
♥ When I was a Young Girl, Barbara Dane
♥ You Don't Know How it Feels, Tom Petty
♥ Hospital Bed, Seabear

1. Jorie Graham is the most intelligent person that I have ever heard.
2. I am going home next week.
3. These days, I find myself reading more and more desperately.
4. Two more papers, one more homework, two more exams.
5. A picnic, finger sandwiches, afternoon matinee, and perhaps the cloisters before I leave.
6. Trying to learn the entirety of Statistics before noon.

I am keeping a paper journal these days, and it feels nice to have something solid and permanent in front of me. I can say, these are my thoughts, they come in blue, purple, and sea-green. My plans for the summer include:

1. Sleeping on the dock
2. Reading all those books I bought and never got around to reading, including: sonnets to orpheus, anna karenina, ulysses, a biography on marie antoinette still, and the complete letters of oscar wilde.
3. I think it will be nice reading someone else's letters and journals for a change.
4. Adrienne Rich writes, "I ache, brilliantly."

I. Today, I took my final midterm, went to a lecture on Mao Zedong and the Peasant Movement in China during the 1920s, worked for a little bit before throwing up and going home. Then, I sat in bed and read about the foundations of rural Chinese society, Frida and Diego, and the Mexican Revolution.
II. The words I have recently been hearing more than any other are: REVOLUTION, STALINISM, MAO ZE DONG, PEASANT MOVEMENTS, RUSSIA, 1911, 1917, THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES, INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, IMPERIALISM, OPIUM
III. I am turning into quite the history aficionado. I am currently reading about Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution. I am also still reading about rural peasant society.
IV. I am going to the library sometime this weekend. I am going to check out the following books:

1. The Elegance of the Hedgehog
2. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
3.On Revolution

V. Tomorrow, I am going to skip work again, apply for scholarships, order two dollhouses, buy watercolors and learn to paint.
VI. No matter how much I read, there is a part of life that I cannot learn through books alone.
VII. It is so strange to me how so much can be going on at the same time. Take for examples: 1920s involved flappers, the overthrow of the Mexican dictatorship, and a mass peasant uprising in China; 1950s, Frida died and my father was born.

VIII. All of this affects me in the most serious ways.
IX. -isms that affect me: communism, stalinism, totalitarianism, schism, heroism, altruism, leninism, homesickism, sickofsnowism, missinghimism.
X. I NEED TO LEARN ABOUT GRACE.

Sometimes I think the world is too small for a sadness like mine. There is no eloquent way to say it.

homo homini lupis

man is wolf to man

1. Today is the first day of the shortest month of the year, which means it is the perfect month to get my life back together. I start hopeful, playing Scrabble until two in the morning and going to the Museum of Natural History, examining delicate spoons of my ancestors' pasts.

2. He told me I ruined him, I am the reason why his life keeps falling apart, again after again. I do not know where to place all this hurt, when to open my palm and let these ills fly away, like swallows. I do not know what to do with all this misplaced love, this sense of betrayal. I am going through that phase where I hate art and poetry and am forcing myself to read small dosages of something, something like medicine, something to keep my mind off a heart like thimble, dented, broken.

3. Today is the first day of the shortest month of the year, and then it is Spring again.