I haven’t had a really graphic nightmare in a while, but maybe it was the Murakami I fell asleep reading. I dreamed I was discussing inane details of my experiments with my advisor in a jailhouse execution room. Does color matter if we’re looking at shape? Should the shapes be monotone or different colors?

While we talked, naked men droped one at a time from above the curtains into the spotlight on a stage in front of us. Some men’s necks snapped instantly, and the crowd would gasp at the sound. Some of them would choke over the course of a minute.

Then I noticed that my brother and sister were in the room. My brother had his hands up over his mouth in horror and I was worried he was going to puke. I wanted to go get them and pull them out of the room, but I couldn’t (because I was in a meeting), and I was wondering if we even had the option of leaving anyway. I had a suspicion that these deaths were things we all had to see, so I stayed in my seat, defended my color choices, watched my brother and sister watch the executions, and cried that I couldn’t do anything to prevent them from seeing what they were seeing.

One of the men fell by his foot instead of his neck. He choked himself to death violently with his own hands. I had wondered as a kid if that could be done, if you had the will for it. Logically, I decided no, you couldn’t, as I got older and came to understand that you pass out before you die from a lack of oxygen. But this man did it nonetheless. It looked excruciating.

I’m trying to shake it off but the details of the deaths and my siblings faces are sticking hard this morning. I’m left more upset than I should be from a dream. I’m drinking coffee, then I’ll go to the gym. If it’s still bothering me, I’ll flip through art books at the library after.

keeps… me… up… all… night. But ah, that’s why I’m here! Blogging… must… wait…

Because I have nice ripe peaches and pears and some Brie and all of them sounded like they’d be really good together on a wheat pita. And they were.

I warmed slices of the peach and pear in a pan and added a little bit of cinnamon and a dash of orange juice to keep the pear looking fresh. Then I toasted the pita with a very small amount of Brie in it in the oven. Then I stuffed the pita with the fruit and admired it. I was going to take a picture but I was too hungry and eager to resist eating it.

So far, I love Rochacha.

Rochester feels smaller, but not sleepier, than Orange County. The fact that I am behind on blogging is a good indication of that. I saw the concert halls at the Eastman School of Music with a student studying jazz there. I went to Bug Jar with department ladies and friends. I went to a BBQ with a pool and trampoline and orchard full of pickable peaches. And I saw a late night movie with Laurel (also from BCS). That’s not even everything, but you get the gist. I feel totally undeserving and spoiled to be here. The charmed life thing again. No wild peacocks here. But peach orchards, big empty unlocked concert halls and impromptu jazz jam sessions are pretty wonderful.

Tonight, this month’s Brighton Democratic Committee meeting.

Still need to change my driver’s license, arrange health insurance, set up direct deposit, get keys to the storage unit, blah blah, but, bit by bit, these things are getting done. Car’s not here yet, which is making things tricky, but I love to run and that’s a good thing when you have no car.

I’m looking for a bike, but I’m exactly the wrong size, it seems, to buy one secondhand. I’m somewhere between kid and lady. Maybe all the bikes that size are sitting, rusting, forgotten in the backs of garages. Maybe they’re all going to have to wait until the kids grow up and go off to college before they’ll be remembered. Maybe the parents, to deal with empty nest heartaches, will clean out their garages only then. Maybe they’ll toss out all the rusted adolescent-sized bikes, because knowing that their kids’ bikes are there would hurt too much and they’re rusted beyond repair anyway. And, honey, wouldn’t the cleared out space make a nice guest house? Your mother wouldn’t have to stay on the sofa bed and maybe she’d come visit more often.

Mmm, pear-peach-Brie pita…

I didn’t get done so many things that I wanted to get done before I left, but it’s time to go nonetheless. Southern California has been ridiculously good to me and I’ll miss it. Mikeh and Mike especially. I know we’ll talk a lot, but that’s also not the same.

I think I sampled a lot while I was down here, and much of it was really beautiful. The pier in Huntington Beach, the crêperie in Belmont Shores, roaming peacocks in Palos Verdes. A lot of it was totally sketchy. Porn valley in Chatsworth, the Greyhound station in downtown Los Angeles, egg donation facilities in Newport Beach, the Brazillian carnival at the Palladium, the gallery on Melrose. (And I probably don’t need to say it, but I appreciate the sketchy at least as much as I appreciate the beautiful.)

People have said L.A. is a bubble world, a city composed of miniature parallel cultures that don’t interact with one another, and that is totally true. And that worked for me. I’ve been able to pop my head into different little universes often. A great place for a fledgling reporter, sure, but also great place for a fledgling adult. I was 19 when I moved to California. I did some of my most important growing up here.

So Cal was a weird place to be when the hurricane hit. Very separate and detached. (I won’t miss that entertainment news dominates airwaves.) But I think it was good for me to see how people are. That people can’t—and I do believe can’t is the right word—relate to things that don’t affect them on some level. They want to, but they just can’t. I don’t think I believe in true empathy anymore.

So I guess the best you can do to understand the world is to collect personal experiences in the hopes that a diverse set of experiences will allow you to relate to more, get closer to understanding, keep you caring. And under that theory, the more personal experiences you have, the better.

So no regrets for the bad and the hurtful and the frustrating. And I can’t be angry at the mechanisms and mechanism designers that caused the unpleasantries. And California has been so good to me in that way, even on the rare occasions when it was bad to me (Kaiser Permanente… HMO oh no… USC Financial Aid Office… holy… and… San Francisco landlord… that still wasn’t all of my deposit… Registrar of Voters… missing paper ballots and… thumb drive in the tabulating machine… just wow).

You can’t beat California for opportunity. It’s true. Whatever it is you’re looking for, it’s here. Really. Thank you, California, for being everything I needed and more. You’ll be missed.

I keep coming across things in the house that I’m not sure what to do with. Like poor Valentine, my childhood ragdoll.

I left Valentine at home for safekeeping when I went off to college. But, alas, my family got a puppy while I was away. The puppy took issue with how Valentine looked at him and did what he had to do. I returned at Christmas to see Valentine sitting eyeless on my bed.

Do you save something like Valentine? The banana stain on her armpit, that was me.

When I was about 14 years old, my good friend and first boyfriend Pierre recommended the Descendents to me. The recommended album introduced me to the concept of ALL.

The Descendents sang a lot about coffee in an almost reverent way. Coffee complements a lot of the values I hold nicely, and the Descendents seemed to understand that and share the same values. Being awake, aware, looking outward. Being active and involved. Bill Stevenson and friend Pat McQuiston developed a philosophy around those values while fishing and drinking coffee late one night. They called their idea ALL.

ALL is the “the total extent.” It’s a quest for self-betterment (“greatness”) that is, by definition, impossible to obtain. It’s endless and all encompassing, whatever that means to you. It’s trying to be a better person every day in whatever way you see that you can. Happiness is the pursuit of ALL, not the achievement of ALL. Sure, it’s not a novel concept (“Life’s the journey, not the destination,” yada yada), but I think it’s elegant nonetheless. I like that it’s an unattached philosophy. I like that it was conceived of late one night over coffee by two friends in a fishing boat.

The Descendents 1987 release is titled ALL after the philosophy. It features two of my favorite Descendents songs, “Clean Sheets” and “Cameidge”. I’m listening to “Clean Sheets” now.

I’ve listened to every version of Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls” that I could find the past couple days. The lyrics are really beautiful.

I am the key to the lock in your house, that keeps your toys in the basement.
And if you get too far inside, you’ll only see my reflection.
It’s always best when the light’s off. I am the pick in the ice.
Do not cry out or hit the alarm, you know we’re friends till we die.

And either way you turn, I’ll be there. Open up your skull,
I’ll be there. Climbing up the walls.

It’s always best when the light’s off; it’s always better on the outside.
Fifteen blows to the back of my head, fifteen blows to your mind.
So tuck the kids in safe tonight, shut the eyes in the cupboard.
So not cry out or hit the alarm, you’ll get the loneliest feeling.

That either way you turn, I’ll be there. Open up your skull,
I’ll be there. Climbing up the walls.

Climbing up the walls. Climb up the walls.

The best things and the worst things in life haunt. I realize that’s the nature of things. But it’s comforting to know all haunting things haunt all people. I’m not unique or alone in that or anything else, no matter how good or bad I hurt. And ultimitely we all die before we understand why that matters. Like Clarence Darrow said, “We know life is futile. And a man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.”

I realize Darrow defended teenage sociopaths. He still had a good point about the ultimite futility of everything.

And so I’ve been letting myself sit down in the sun sometimes at Stanford, even when I’m busy and should keep moving. And I don’t really appreciate the beauty and the warmth of it, but I don’t feel guilty for sitting nonetheless. I’ve come to realize that I take almost everything for granted. Sitting on a giant sphere, flukishly able to move and think and feel, among millions of other flukish accidents of the universe. Free in the world and trapped in the inability to process all of it. Climbing up the walls. But I’m thinking that my inability to appreciate things like the sun and the gift of life is just a part of my humanity. If I walked around with a true appreciation of how everything functioned, I’d never be able to deal. I’d be sitting on the ground, humbled and curled up in a ball, all of the time. And that wouldn’t work.

I’m reading a lot, busy with LSA-related work and ideas, but also back to Ginsberg and Lu Xun and, recently, Thom Yorke.

Speaking of Yorke, here’s what he said about that song:

“This is about the unspeakable. Literally skull-crushing. I used to work in a mental hospital around the time that Care in the Community started, and we all just knew what was going to happen. And it’s one of the scariest things to happen in this country, because a lot of them weren’t just harmless… It was hailing violently when we recorded this. It seemed to add to the mood. Some people can’t sleep with the curtains open in case they see the eyes they imagine in their heads every night burning through the glass. Lots of people have panic buttons fitted in their bedrooms so they can reach over and set the alarm off without disturbing the intruder. This song is about the cupboard monster”.

I wonder if a panic button on the bed is comforting or discomforting. Fear is a funny thing. I feel like I have a lot less of it lately. I feel myself becoming more fearless and wreckless. I’m not sure if I’m moving forwards or backwards in that way, so it must be that I’m moving in circles. Do people ever really change?

Back to the banal: I have pictures from the weekend I meant to post but just didn’t because I’ve been too busy sitting on steps, not appreciating the sun.

I’ll be less emo next post. Promise.

The title of this entry is ambiguous, I know, but ambiguity is funny to me at 2 a.m.

Here’s my ambiguously classified lists of things to know about Rochester:

• First off, I found this Rochester wiki. I like places with their own wiki. Also, Craig’s List.
• Rochester has the largest deaf population per capita in the United States.
• One quarter of the population in Rochester lives below the poverty line, according to the 2000 Census.
• The median age of Rochester is 31 years old.
• Rochester residents have no problem eating something called a “garbage plate” from a restaurant called Nick Tahou Hots.
• Hotdogs can be called “red hots” or “white hots” to distinguish the common (red) hotdog from its local pork-based hotdog variant, which includes powdered milk in its ingredients.
• One of the co-creators of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, Patrick Naughton, is from Rochester. The one who was charged with soliciting inappropriate sexual conduct with a minor online.
• Rochester is home to one of the oldest art theaters in the country, Little Theater. Sometimes they show porny foreign art films with no ratings.
• There’s a Penny Arcade in Rochester, but it’s not actually a penny arcade, much to my disappointment. It’s a club that features bands named things like GoatWhore, Suffocation, Hipocrisy, Mnemic, and Crucifist.
• Rochester has a lot of festivals, including Elsi’s favorite, the Lilac Festival, held each May. There’s also the Rochester Hamfest (radio, not meat) and the Rochester Harbor and Carousel Festival.
• There’s a Wegmans Food Market in Rochester.
• Rochester’s alterative weekly, the Rochester City Newspaper, is independently owned. But their website is often down. Like right now.

Vonnegut died today. He was one of my heros. He was 84, so I can’t say his life was cut short, but I’m still sad. Cat’s Cradle is one of my favorite books. My most favorite behind White Noise.

A Bokonist poem in Mr. Vonnegut’s honor:

I wanted all things
To seem to make sense,
So we all could be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise.

Je n’ai pas déjà pris une décision. Je ne sais pas ce que je veux maintenant. Je sais seulement ce que d’autres veulent pour moi. J’espère savoir où je veux aller bientôt. Je pense que je ne peux pas prendre une décision. La décision me prendra, oui? Oui.

And the funniest most ridiculous part if it all is I feel wholly compelled to take it all so seriously.