I love that Ellen talks to the cats as though they understand. I love my hilariously bad study habits. I love that all my friends blog their homework. I love that the light fixture in my room is still two dim fake candles. I love that there is a man tripping, as they say, balls in my living room. I love my stuffed animals. I love the mess in my room. I love that my major responsibilities in life are to two gigantic paintings. I love big oh notation. I love you!

Went to Brenna's house with Annie, Ged, and Angela to decorate cookies and a tree. I three-quarters participated and one-quarter got some work done. Started trying to explain rate-distortion theory (to myself as much as anyone) on mathsquad.

Do you ever find yourself thinking of a romantic partner and getting all these _serious_ feelings in your head? Like, "damn person x is so amazing I want to gaze upon them for the rest of my days and bind my body to theirs and probably have lots of babies" and then you turn on your internal self with a huge stick and some pots and pans and start scaring that shit away because you're 22 and the last thing you need is to start marrying yourself off to people in your head?

Today, watching them decorate the tree and dance and sing, I felt that way about my best college friends. I want these people to be my _family_. I don't want to be apart from them, I want to look at them and squeeze them and marvel at them every single day, forever. I want to be forty with them and decorating our own Christmas tree with the accumulated ornaments of twenty years of being together in a world we built for ourselves and children running around breaking things and all still bravely trying to harmonize our off-key carols and playing the uke and dancing to Brenna's pop music.

And it seems like that's about as unlikely as marrying your high school sweetheart.

What's the technical definition of hypothermia? Several times in the past few years, I've gotten myself cold enough that it takes hours bundled up holding warm things to be warm again. I'm I doing long-term damage to myself?


On with the fiction:

The past few days, I just made up some silly things about grown people in mangers and otherwise playing on the nativity scene setup. I think I might be ready to leave Christmas for a bit.

The thing I kind of want to write about now is how young people make kinship networks by hooking up with each other. So...is there a way to write about ideas about sex and sex-related-stuff without writing porn?

Check it out.

I'm liking this make-one-thing-up-per day gig, so far. I'm going to need to find people to give me feedback, though. Maybe if there were people who could see what I made every day on some kind of live updating log...

In pleasing symmetries, when I got my slightly overdue "let's just be friends" email from that boy I'd been kinda into, I was sitting alone in a room with formerly freshman Eli, the last person to send me such an email for similar reasons. It made me feel weirdly good about my life. I like to think my connections to people are durable, and I guess they often are. Plus I love exercising my social intelligence, so it was fun to write him back and try to plot how to make him want to be friends with me and also introduce me to his new girlfriend. Eternal gratitude to Scott, Merry, Lusann, Jon, and whoever else was at Humza's house that one time forever ago for making me constitutionally immune to most romantic rejection.


Now to take on my math finals with as much zeal as this fiction business.

More lies in this drawing.

I'll call it "A bunch of barefoot white kids who are definitely not me and my brothers discover a mixed up pile of gigantic unwrapped Christmas presents."

My favorite are the two kids who are holding each other and crying, because that's what I would do.

Also the girl who's climbing the Glitterator box, because that's also what I would do.

Seems like the other two arms of that possible Bizarre Love Quandrangle have decided to be their own little bizarre love line segment. Which is sweet for them and all.

Whatever. >:(

The inevitability of Christmas, part 1

Santa Claus is stalking you. He is a like a spy man. He has been kicked out of power in some kind of coup. Turns out Bill O’Reilly was right about that whole War on Christmas deal. Anti-Christmas forces are leading a summer-all-year campaign. They have kidnapped all the elves and taken them to Miami. They have outlawed advent calendars and wreaths. But Santa will not let this go. He is just like Matt Damon. He hides in alleys and follows you around. And slowly, slowly, he approaches. You fend him off, but one day, he will catch up to you.

Christmas ALWAYS comes this time of year.

I've realized that I don't know how to make things up. I love telling stories and making art, but it's always about pulling all the right pieces of reality together and tying them up in just the right way. I don't understand how an idea I've had, which necessarily came to me from some subset of my real experiences, can be conveyed any better than by the clear recounting of those experiences. How does that work?

And yet, clearly, it's the basis of most artmaking and storytelling that I come into contact with. When other people make up worlds and characters and stories, they move me. So I am going to start trying to figure it out. Expect incredibly poor stories and drawings and stuff.

My first assignment to myself is to invent stories etc. about "the inevitability of Christmas." It's something Annie made up and featured in some collages and drawings and paintings freshman year. It seems easiest to start with an idea that isn't mine.

People who know how to make things up: how do you do it?

Welcome, December. It finally got cold today. And it's not even four pm and the light's coming in all golden and sunsetty. This time of year may make me a little sadder, but not much and not in such a bad way. Mostly I think it makes me more weepy--more in-love-crying and cuddly-crying with the people I love, more sad-crying when I feel like I've hurt someone's feelings or when I miss someone. Definitely I feel slower. I want to have an adventure soon, but that means next week sometime, rather than tonight. I'm plodding happily. Plodding through fun, exciting things. Plod plod plod. It feels good, and it also feels like crying most of the time.

San Francisco was neat. All I can say is, "Exploratorium."

I've been in an Advent calendar-making frenzy (thanks to Ben for teaching me how). I'm making one where each door will have a wee little paper nativity scene figure behind it, and I thought the drawings were so cute I made photocopies--maybe to mail to people? Hmm.

I'm in San Francisco with my family. Getting to see my bigshot brother in his natural environs--at Twitter, which is fancy and pleasant-seeming enough to make me think about how it could be nice to have a high-paying job one of these years, and in his apartment, which has separate rooms for the toilet and the tub/sink. Getting to talk to my regular-shot brother about kids and sillier things. We've been walking a lot and my mom is calling it the Camino de San Francisco.

Looking forward to seeing my aunts and a few of my cousins--this branch of the family has always represented the bizarro-world version of my dad in which he went hippie/liberal in the sixties instead of pledging eternal allegiance to the free market, and I want to know them better. Also looking forward to the Exploratorium.

I don't know if I want to live here. How will I tell?

Remember how I had the one semi-boyfriend and then there was the other boy who I was kinda into (update: I think he may no longer be into me. Ah fickle heart)?

I think they are both independently crushing on the same other girl. Who lives in Maine. Life is hysterical.

So I just friended her on Facebbok, natch.

My life is going well! I studied a lot over the weekend but now my academic life is pretty chill til finals. I'm looking forward to going to San Francisco for Thanksgiving.

I'm looking for a place to move to. I might have three friends who will move with me if I make the case for the right place.

Things I/we want:

Visual art scene
Second-tier math graduate program
Refugee or diaspora community or other work for a brilliant woman with an interest in post-conflict law
Easy access to natural beauty
Warm weather would be nice
easy to navigate on foot/bike/public transit would be nice
easy to meet other young adults who like to do crazy performance art pieces/like to play/like to do stuff other than get drunk and eat meals.
exciting nonprofits working with youth and youth empowerment. Democratic school or high school student activist organization would be ideal.
cheap fun things to do like plays, concerts, street festivals. Don't have to be that many, but on the order of like two per week.

Is there such a place? I'm open to being in a city or not. If you know of a place that has a few of these things and is near another place that has a few others, that'd be great, too.

We are always arguing about things, you know. Often about how we should be acting in a world full of racism, sexism, etc.. He always seems to me very defensive about his straight white maleness, and it hurts especially about gender issues. It feels like such a betrayal when my dad or brothers aren't feminist enough for me.

But he is a good guy, you know? He is trying. We were talking about the Yankees and how diplomatically I dealt with all my Red Sox fan friends after the Yankees' recent victory. He wrote

"It’s enough to know that God is a Yankee fan. In her infinite wisdom she lets the Red Sox occasionally be good, so as to heighten their agony the rest of the time while reinforcing the Yankee fan’s beneficence and humility."

It's sweet that my dad would use female pronouns for God. It's sweet that he would want me to live in a world where God could be like me and I could be like God.

Dear Boys of the World,

I know it is hard for you when I write you medium-awkward emails about such topics as When Are We Going To Make Out Already. But ignoring them will not make them go away!

Write back to my g-danged emails.

Love,
Maggie

"Oh, hey, sorry I didn't call you when we left for our walk...turned out we had to go somewhere in particular."
"Oh...?"
"Yeah, we had to go to East Providence to recover this swan carcass, so..."
"Oh, of course, right, a _swan_ carcass."
"Yeah Annie found it a few weeks ago and she wanted to clean off all the flesh and have a swan skeleton."
"Ohhhh was this the same swan I heard about at your party?"
"Yeah we finally went and got it, but some animal had dragged it around and eaten a lot of it. We had to track it through the brush. So now we have this cooler full of dead swan."
"Uhhh..."
"Yeah, now we're supposed to "degrease" it, but, um, do you want to get some dinner? I'm really hungry, and I think they're going to be busy cleaning the dead swan."

We tried to wash it in the tub, the great handfuls of feathers and dirt and bones and flesh remnants. A tubful of grey, greasy, dead-smelling swan bits. We put our bare hands in it, and the drain got clogged and my gag reflex kept getting activated. He stopped by and watched, all four of us hiding in the bathroom so Annie's roommates wouldn't realize there were rotting dead bird parts in their bathtub. "Are you guys dying hair?" "Uhhhhhhh no don't worry about it. I'll take care of it, I promise." Eventually they just told them we found a bunch of feathers.

On the way to dinner, I found an unwrapped sweet tart on top of my car.
"Hey, how grossed out will you be if I eat this right now?"
"You mean on a scale from one to dead swan?"

(edited for typos)

Took the GRE math subject test today! What fun.

No, seriously, it was really fun.

I must've gotten a terrible score, though, because I only answered 30/66 questions.

I always thought my fondness for standardized testing was just because I was good at it, but I guess not. I was just...soothing, to be in there with all those other young mathematicians and a common enemy, with all those little bubbles and those number two pencils and those NO TEST MATERIAL ON THIS PAGE pages, all those often-kinda-neat math problems and a mission of doing them for volume and for probability rather than for perfection. The proctor was an inexperienced-seeming West African-seeming man with a heavy accent and a tendency to do things out of order, and it kind of highlighted the familiarity of the form to hear him reading out instructions with pronunciations that I might not have been able to understand if he were reading from something novel.

I'm doing that thing, I guess, with a boy, where you write each other weirdly poetic emails and have long phone conversations and sort of touch each other sometimes but not in any very deliberate-seeming ways.

I can't decide if it's my favorite thing in the world or if I am Too Old For This Shit. It's exciting, my heart beats all aflutter, but there's also an observer part of me that thinks it's all ridiculous. I don't know this boy well; our connection is kind of tenuous and based on the suspicion that we'd probably like each other if we knew each other, rather than on actually liking or caring for each other. It's fun to court someone by making them scavenger hunts or composing beautiful letters to them or whatever, but I think it's more fun to do those kinds of projects for someone whose mind you know more about. If I were to interact with this guy totally honestly, wouldn't it be more like--hey, I notice you're a boy, one I'm kind of attracted to and whom I think I might like. Let's get our bodies really close together and see what that's like, and maybe talk some about the things we think about during an average day. If we like it, we can keep doing it and also maybe go to a play sometime or cook dinner together or play some kind of spy game. And maybe in a few months or a couple of years when I'm starting to have a few hints of what it's like to be you, and starting to have some sincere appreciation for you as something approximating a whole being, I could experiment with those ideas and feelings by doing romantic shit for you.

Starting a romantic engagement feels like this weird crazy fake thing where you deliberately build up an infatuation with someone you don't know as an excuse to convince yourself to get close enough to them to actually get to know them.

And yet the whole process comes naturally and makes me feel good. I don't know. Either way, boys! There is a new boy. He is interesting. He does not have a couch in his apartment. Kitchen chairs to bed is quite a leap. We'll see.

Also there is an old boy, and I do do those kinds of courtship-y things for him, and it's fun to get to think about what he's like when I have so much more evidence.

Also there is still math and I must resist the temptation to let the boys attention overtake the math attention.

Halloween is a great holiday. I like to meet the neighbors, I like to have to dress up, I like to get outside just as it's starting to get cold and dark and I want to stay in my bed doing nothing.

This year, I was part of a huge parade of costumed 13-25 year olds with drums and other implements of banging, encountering the world cordially but on our own terms for once. The sixteen-year-old girl next to me kept getting me to scream and shriek with her. She also said I reminded her of the counselors at her camp, which is I think the sweetest thing a teenage woman can say to a 20-something woman.

All the other rites were observed, some perfunctorily. I trick-or-treated a few houses, made one candy trade (doritos for milk duds), made a costume, sorted and inventoried and divided a candy collection (though one taken off the ground on november 1 morning on a walk with Annie, not one gotten straight from the hands of the neighbors).

For the first time ever, I also got into the side of Halloween that's about letting your demons out and interacting with the dark and scary and poisonous and deadly things in yourself and in the world. I was a rosebush, which doesn't sound so scary but which felt plenty evil as I turned my cranky, prickly mood of Friday afternoon into something that could strangle or prick. I put my pink hair up with some cloth roses in it and then draped my whole body in cloth-and-cardboard thorny vines, and drew more on my face with eyeliner.

Also I sat around the fire and sang and cuddled with the two other parts of a dear icky tangly love triangle. And had a sweet nostalgic conversation with my beloved own worst enemy. Just the right kind of weekend.

Once there was this mirror and he astonished me and I had him close. And then there was this possibility but I couldn't have him and then the mirror was gone and then he was back and then he was really gone. But there was the possibility and he thrilled me and he wasn't the mirror but i could still see myself in him. And it was so sad, being always with the possibility month after month and never realizing him, but I learned to sit with him and hope for him without waiting for him too much and it isn't enough but it's sort of good. And now there is this boy who seems like he might be just a boy and I think I like him and I think he's real, but...

how can a mere surprise live up to the shapes in my head of the miracles I've known?

I am tired of growing up.