Merge of Blogz

I had to write a blog for my french class last semester. They're just short responses to the readings. Some are good, some are gibberish that I wrote in ten minutes. But I thought, at 2:33 am, "hey, what if I could merge those things into this blog now that the class is over" and 2 minutes of googling later, they were merged! So, if you're into Flaubert to the New Novel: The Collapse of Realism and Undoing of the Subject you should check around September, October and November of 2012.
They're also all still at http://troiscentquarantedeux.blogspot.com/
Maybe I'll post my essay on Proust later. Man, I lost my essays from last year by spilling water on my old computer. Gotta try and retrieve that shit/lrn2googledocs.

In other news, I learned to twerk this evening.

Love,
Julia.

Walt Whitman would have been into the club scene

I am an artistic genius.

Sour Calvados

(Will probably be edited over time as I get feedback. Also, give me feedback if you please, this is my first serious poem attempt pretty much ever.)

Sour Calvados

I left my personality out in the sun
my best qualities
   inoffensive as apple juice
have fermented and spoiled
   I slept in an oak cask
and now I am an after-dinner-drink
  sticky over-sweet
  sipped unsuspected
before dawn

the small o'clocks
when brandy fumes sting bleary eyes
   confuse the coffee
   question the cornflakes
you are convinced
   That breakfast is not a chaser
but the sun is in hot pursuit
and I have no taste for tradition

embrace this flavor
share a fiery morning
we watch the world burn blue
    I dig my day flambe
    (I'm not quite a la mode)
cigar smoke at sunrise
you in a velvet armchair
me in a shallow glass

The picture-word proportionality principle

Testing to see if picture/ word>1000. I have Instagram now (peakabu). But I still thing the blog needs pictures. Thus is born the idea of uploading from my phone. Future posts made in this manner will have fewer words.

This is how I relaxed. With the painting things black. I have chosen really exciting pictures as my test.

Things I Resent in an Article About David Bowie's Influence on Pop Culture

(Sorry for the weird formatting. If I copy and paste ANYTHING into blogger it shows up really weird and whited out. If you find weird whited out shit just highlight it and you can read it. Anyways, my solutions to this are not graceful.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/arts/music/the-singer-who-fell-to-earth.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Usually the NYT is pretty quality, but this article had

two things that made me really sad:

"After the ’90s, a period dominated by the grit and

authenticity of grunge and gangsta rap, the 2000s saw the return of artifice

and glitter."

Fuck you grunge is more authentic than glitter. Also,

gangsta rap isn't authentic. It's not. "I make money off of drugs and

shoot things." No one does that and also lives a really public lifestyle.

"While it’s unlikely that Ms. Minaj is directly influenced by Mr. Bowie, the

parallels between his serial personas and her constant image changes are clear."

Is it just racism that Lady Gaga is clearly "an inheritor" of Bowie but "It is unlikely that Ms. Minaj is directly influenced by Mr. Bowie" when they're doing basically the same things?

How to Tell That You Are Not Insane

Hah. Good joke.
But, I do feel less insane than yesterday. This is such a relief, I want to shout it from rooftops. Then again, people might be concerned about a girl going from roof to roof yelling "I am less insane than yesterday!!!" They will, at the very least, wonder what I was up to yesterday.
Yesterday, I operated on the edges of reality. My back to the wall, I creeped around on window ledges while my toes hung over the abyss. I curled up in hammocks hung from nothing, hung over nothing. I watched carpets shiver and distance stretch. Heartache and sleep-loss are the kids you can't take home to mom and dad.
Heartache didn't have much to do with S. It was mostly about the 9 hours that I spent on my physics lab (6 pm to 4:20 am) on Saturday night. I only did about half of it. It was unreasonably difficult and after failing (I assume) my physics midterm I needed it to be doable. It wasn't. Oh well.
Looking back with a little bit of perspective, it's is absolutely incredible that on my second day of "spring break" I was able to sit in my room for 9 hours working on programming in Mathematica. I have some work ethic, that's for sure.
I emailed my adviser at 2 am that day to make an appointment. I want to make sure that I'm not going to get that letter that says "we're worried about you passing the qual, please pick a new major." I signed the email Julia "Numerical (dis)Integration" because my numerical integrator was failing. No more emailing professors at 2 am.
I finally felt alright on Sunday while watching Legally Blonde with Em at 11 ish. Everything was going to be fine.
Now I'm sitting outside of Chittick painting things black and listening to Ghost Part 2 by Buckethead on repeat. Got a candle burning, it's kinda sunny, and I can see flowers.

This Only Happens To Me the Other Way Around

What a night.

Let's start at 10 am.

Then let's move to 10:50 am when my physics professor says time is up, and I turn in the test. Then I laugh hysterically for 30 minutes. Only ten minutes of that is between classes. The other twenty are during linear.

At 11:30, I stop studying for my next midterm, and take a quiz in linear algebra. Make some fundamental errors and also have some fundamental success so who knows.

At 12:00, I take my Multi midterm. At 12:45 pm I leave turn in my paper, open the door to the room and pass through it into the silly little antichamber that I plan on painting soon, and open my beer. 

I drink the beer as I walk to get food.

I eat little food. I go home and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'll watch Buffy some more after I finish writing this. 

I cut my hair. I go into the bathroom with furious lipstick and giant scissors that I use for sewing and everything else. I look like Mia from Pulp Fiction. It's hot.

I change clothes. Hunter S Thompson's face falls from my collar bone to my early thigh. Cuttoff acid-wash shorts peak out from under him. Red words on them read "blink-of-an-eye" in German and "if a witch spoke would you hear her" in Theban. Highschool, okay. Plus no one can read that shit anyways, it's faded too much to ever elicit a blush from me again.

I clunkity clunk to the front lawn in my cowboy boots and hang out with the deviants that I usually feel awkward around. They were the only people I knew, plus I really like a few of them. I met a new person to be friends with too. We played shoe-frisbee, and became quite adept. 

Sit talk giggle. We summon a deamon, Astaroth, to bring everyone free weed. Minutes later, a friend shows up with a joint in his hand. So, I probably owe my soul to the devil now.

Get hungry, go to Commons, at which point my mother texts me "we're at Higgins" and I realize I've forgotten that I'm going to the Opera today. I change and drive there, arriving minutes before the pork they ordered me arrived.

Higgins. Portland Oregon. Really Expensive. Not too pretentious. Worth your dollar. That meal blew my mind.

Then to the Opera. Rinaldo. Do not recommend. There was one good character, and evil sexy witch. They cast a woman as Rinaldo who is basically Achilles and she did not rise to the challenge.

Drive home.

People are getting drunk in front of my door, so I drink half a bottle of wine and then talk about feelings and sexual hang-ups for an hour or two with Em and Izzy. That felt good.

Then I walk outside and meet Corrine, wander with her for a bit before leaving for the pool hall. Sit down. S sits next to me, kisses me for a few seconds, then ignores me for half an hour. He leaves, presumably to smoke a cigarette and I leave the other way. A few minutes later he texts me.

"Where are you??"

"Home"

"Do you want to hang out" 

"Sure, where are you?"

He meets me by Eliot. I didn't want to be in Chittick with him. He's not someone I want to fuck in my own bed anymore. I tell him he's the first person that I had sex with in my own bed. He doesn't know what to make of it. I insist we "hang out" somewhere else.We agree to fuck somewhere else, but we need to go to Chittick for a condom. We go there, and I grab my Renn Fayre Office Key that was due two weeks ago. He throws me on the bed and starts foreplaying. I don't play along. "Is this okay"

Of fucking course not.

I just said no.

Anyways, we leave. Not much talking. Up to the RF office which is open, so I don't even get to use my key.
As he took off his clothes I said "you're pretty." He didn't say anything.

I have a lot of bruises. Things went a little further than usual. This would be fine, except that I was still a little angry and kinda wanted to have angry sex but instead I had submissive sex. Whatever.

I cry a little, because I'm sad.

Try to explain what's wrong. "I like you too much. I feel so fucking vulnerable." So I kinda succeeded.

He asked me what I wanted from this. I don't know. Actually, I think what he asked was "You don't know what you want from this, do you?" 

We decide to sleep in Chittick. 

Leaving the office, I forget about a set of stairs and fall down them. On the way back we make fun of me. The conversation is a relief.

We try to sleep. I mostly keep crying. Ask him what he wants. He says that he likes being my friend, and he likes sleeping with me, sometimes. A few minutes later I say that it feels like he likes being my friend sometimes and he likes sleeping with me sometimes.

We decide this is bad and maybe when I calm down we can fuck again.

I ask him to leave.

I cry.

I call Graham and cry.

I walk down to the Garden House and by then am mostly done crying. Explain what happened, receive validation.

Stay there till 4:30. Come here, write this til 5:30. Waiting to call my parents and maybe ask them to take me to a hospital. Still kinda in shock from falling down the stairs. Foot kinda swollen in weird ways. 

Happy first day of Spring Break everyone. My last Reed fling started during this week last year. Maybe something good will come along. Because S is pretty great, but he's not good.

Dreaming of Fused Animals

Okay, so art was falling from the sky. It was worth $250,000. It was a bronze cast of an Easter Island inspired head. The donor was an eccentric woman with a passion for Austrian dogs.
I went to her house and one of her dogs ran at me and its snout impacted my face and somehow fused to it. That's when I woke up.
Earlier in the dream, there were a bunch of Siamese-twin animals. Big ones, like mountain lions and Sabre-Tooth Tigers and bears and huge dog-bears and other beariations (that's supposed to be a pun on bears, say it out loud.) But instead of being normally attatched, they were attached at the side so that one was facing one way and the other faced the opposite way. Either that or they had heads on their asses.
Animals. Weird.

I'm uncertain //I'm unhappy //I'm in love

The title doesn't mean anything to me, but it was scrawled on the arm of a chair that hosted me and my studies this evening. Three pens, three handwritings, three-basically-the-sames//totally-differents. I thought about adding "I'm insane" but I refrained. The trinity was left untouched.
Besides, I'm not ready to admit that.
On a related note, I picked up a canvas from the Farm Haus that is in need of repainting. It is a mess of smeared water-soluble paint. I think it's funny that someone wrote "I still love you" in water-soluble paint. I think "I still love you" might be a water-soluble phrase. A few names are writing in magenta markers and black sharpies along the wooden frame in the back. My Holmesian tricks lead me to believe that this unmasterful painting was a group effort. I will paint over it anyways. I need it. I do wonder if I should try to wash the canvas clean first, or just throw my acrylics over the other stuff. I will probably be too lazy to clean it.
On an unrelated note, I have this strange image of a punching bag. ANGER ANGER ANGER. But it's hanging, right, so as much damage as you inflict, it never leaves the system. If you try to give it any real weight, it just falls to the side. I think it's a good metaphor for yelling on the internet.
My room has a hidden ellipse. When I sneeze it echos back steely and harsh. When a boy sleeps over and sits up in my bed he laughs at the discovery.
Not thinking about that right now.
Not thinking much right now at all. What a momentus Hundredth post.
Where am I in time?
On Friday I have a linear algebra quiz on change of basis, a physics midterm on quantum mechanics, and a math midterm covering integrals and change of variables and Fubini's theorem. It's time to take stock of everything I've learned. It's time to make sure that I've learned everything I've been taught.
My responsibilities are catching up to me, while I am falling behind on them. A paradox of idioms.
I've been feeling a connection with Peter Pan, lately. I feel I can tell a lot about me from my shadow. I feel trapped. I feel pressured to grow up. I feel mischievous and empowered to subvert.
Spring Break begins less than 48 hours from now.

99th Secret Public Update On My Life

I imagined coming out of this weekend full of stories. It didn't really turn out that way. This wouldn't be remarkable, except that these last two days felt so pregnant as they approached. This blog is partially to blame for my anticipation, because the next post I write with be the Hundredth, and that is an Impressive Number. I imagined myself crafting a story out of an experience, taking real life and immortalizing it in words for the Hundredth time.
The sun was out with a vengeance. A sweltering 60+ Fahrenheit drove the Reedies screaming onto the front lawn where they collapsed in ecstatic spasms with their cigarettes and six packs. Some fled into the highest branches of trees, fear of the shade driving them to where it couldn't reach.
I sat on a picnic bench, a piece of hash chocolate sneaking its way into my bloodstream. Smiles that were tucked in the recesses of my soul burst out all at once and fought for supremacy drawing my helpless lips into their game. I tumbled and spun; fans swung past my forearms, and my back bent behind my knees.
I drove with a friend to Safeway, where he got some beer and I went tipsily to softball practice Unable to differentiate between bases or keep count of hits and runs, I'm sure that I embarrassed myself terribly. My favorite professor is our coach. I had a great time, and if I giggled too much I had the excuse of being punch drunk off the sun. One junior batted with a lit cigarette in his mouth, and a PBR on the ground. A senior managed to drink and run at the same time, foam flickering along the path to a home run.
Disaster is a social construct.
Overwhelmed and tired, I took a nap. When I woke up, the chocolate had mostly worn off. OCNotes and Shabazz Palaces were playing in the SU as part of Reed Arts Week, so I went with a friend who was on 2CB.
The only important part of that experience was when S came out of the crowd and gave me a hug, and kissed me, and then left.
Classic. The next day I mentioned to someone that he spends a lot of time walking away from me. This is clearly a phenomena of perspective, but it's true. None of this to say that the kiss wasn't the highlight of the evening. Most of this to say that I should probably reassess my relationship with that kid.
I slept again. I was tired.
The next day, I woke up to an invitation for brunch with Liana. We went to Cup and Saucer on Hawthorne, where my eggs were overcooked. The conversation was perfectly toasted, however, and I am feeling closer and closer with Liana these days.
We took some time to wander and smell things. She aspires to smell of linden, cloves, and rose. At first I was skeptical, but as the day wore on the scent proved itself time and time again. I am a convert; it suits her.
When we came back to Reed I put on some comfortable clothes and went off to eat some mushrooms.
Lessons learned: Do not trip with someone you don't know. Do not be seduced by sadness while tripping because however pure it may feel, happiness is bigger. Tripping is personal and when you are tripping you do not owe anyone anything.
It started strangely. I felt two dark places in my chest and gut. They solidified into pods, or seeds. Dark and hard, they sat there inside of me. I couldn't tell if my sadness was grown inside me or placed there. Was it foreign or fundamental? All of the distinct things that brought sadness to my life fell over me like a second skin and burst out of me like tears. Well, some of it was tears. We moved to Chittick so that I could blow my nose. Then Edith came and I felt rescued.
We were going to do ceramics but I saw heaven on the front lawn and ran to it. The person I was tripping with was unconvinced but by this time I had realized that I couldn't make this what he wanted. I ran and tumbled. I held Liana and cried and bit her shoulder and laid on the ground and hit my arms against it. I felt the earth catch them and absorb the impact without flinching. I threw them down again, with equal abandon. After flopping around in the sun, giving my friends raspberries and expressing how much I loved them, I was coming down. The other person had taken a bit more than me, so he was still very much tripping.
We went back to his house to get a coat. I teased my friend who he lives with. I felt expansive and I wanted to take up as much room as possible. We left his house, back to the outdoors and the sun.
As I was in a better place, I helped him through some of his troubles. His heart was still a little broken, and he wanted it unbroken. I gave him some advice, the kind of objective things you can say when you've never felt that way. I also gave him some advice on how to connect better. He tended to assume that he understood people, which is dangerous. I told him if he thinks he understands me, then it makes the job of explaining me twice as hard. On top of telling him what I feel, I also have to change his mind about what I feel. He understood.
The rest of the night my body trundled from here to there. I slept again.
Who knows.

Good News

First kiss since Valentine's day. Slept at his house last night. Cuddled all morning. Sun was shining.
Feel a little bit invincible right now.

Computation Dreams

Sometimes my homework is so awesome that I do it in my dreams and I can't really tell when I've gone to sleep and when I've woken up. Sometimes at 4:30 am I figure I might as well write all this shit down if it's just gonna be in my head on a loop.
They're a lot worse when I'm really desperate to sleep, but it's still kind of a drag. The only cure I've found is watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer before going to bed. TV washes my mind clean.

Fetish Ball//March Fourth//Double Slashes look soo cool.

My chest has two trails of bruises falling down it; one on the left, one on the right. I couldn't wash all of the blood off of my toe, and my wrists are still a little sore from being tied together for about 4 hours. It wasn't a perfect night, but it was a good night. I cared about absolutely nothing, and yet was perfectly satisfied. Both of those things are rare.
That was Saturday. On Sunday I blew off homework and went to March Fourth's 10th anniversary show and it was amazing. During the last song I couldn't even dance anymore, I was just spazming from excitement. I was glad I hadn't invited S because I would have felt silly doing that in front of him. It was very primal.
Now it's just the push till spring break.

Magical Sadness Cure

My sociology professor didn't like my paper. Fair, neither did I. He said it was difficult to understand because it wasn't well written. Yeup, true. Still feels shitty.

But, I'd like to take this sad-feelings opportunity to share with the internet in a not-facebook kind of way the one website that always cheers me up:

http://www.formspring.me/wolfhaley

Yeup, Tyler the Creator's formspring. It's just enough feelings+fuckeverything to make anything seem manageable as a linear combination of those two things. Now, to do physics. And maybe email my prof about redoing the paper.

The fix.

There is only one solution right now and it is to be eating ramen naked in my bed.
I am good typer durnk bluggoing for the win. Aren't you glad I allowed myself editing bribledges for the first sentance. You know don't even. HOwly shit I am really out of it.

Trust

Just saw this TED talk. It made me want to be a living statue. Or, maybe set up a booth like Lucy's from Peanuts with 5 cent psychiatric advice. Talk to strangers.
I love talking to strangers, because I feel like you can tell them anything. Their judgement means nothing, but their perspective can be powerful. I guess that's why I like writing my secrets on the internet. But I'm missing the eye contact.
And I have a caffeine headache.
I'm stuck in the moment.
I want to look harder for Trust. Honesty Couch is as close as I get. Physically intimate situation can become psychically intimate with a little luck. Just push two couches together and lay down. Maybe try fro some eye contact.
Ow my head.

Misleading Title

Having a lazy Friday night. Stayed up late, woke up early, you know the drill. But tomorrow is Fetish Ball and I will be the sexiest librarian and I will carry around a The Delta of Venus and if people want me to spank them with it I totally will and if people want me to read it to them I totally will and if people want to fuck this crush out of me they totally can did I say that?
My heart just starts beating really fast and I get all confused and flustered and I want to kiss him.
Never give anyone power! No power for anyone! Except you. Keep all of the power.
It was more exciting when I wanted to care about him. I don't think that I can handle being jerked around like this anymore.
Anyways, back to the happy shit, Fetish Ball and then party in the French House basement which means darkness and intimacy and goddamn I really need to get laid.
Also, note the clever use of a picture taken of me in Madrid to make you think this post would be reflective or something. Nope. I couldn't bare to outright lie to you though, so I left out the misleading title. Or did I?
This is way too complicated and I have way too many feelings and lots of my friends are in Seattle for a debate tournament so this weekend is gonna be super weird. I should just watch TV and fall asleep.
Also I was looking at facebook and found this picture that I am also really into. You know, just putting them up so that a thousand years from now I will look back and grin at the thought of my youth.

So I guess this ended up being reflective? Or just mostly confused. I am a pile of confused. Who knows. What even. My brain cannot absorb all of the stimulus that gets thrown at it. It rejects some  quantum physics, some linear algebra, and a helluvalotta social cues. WHATEVER AT LEAST NOW I CAN DO TENSOR PRODUCTS. My brain doesn't reject calculus so much.
Wooo my life.

Why Religious Critiques of Science Bum Me Out

They bum me out a lot. Why?
Because they create a false dichotomy of religion vs. science, for starters. I can understand that people who need to push the 5,000 year old earth story will need to undermine science to have any validity at all. But plenty of people with perfectly reasonable beliefs still try to strengthen them by diminishing the value and trustworthiness of science. It seems like this can only come from some kind of questioned faith, which makes me uncomfortable. If you do not believe what you believe regardless of science, then the next step down is to believe it by spiting science. It's not that I begrudge these people their spiritual journey, but this coping mechanism is deeply disturbing to me.
In some ways, that critique could seem a little bit meta. But the reason this insecurity makes me uncomfortable is that I feel by arguing with them I'm simply exacerbating the problem, and not being constructive in any way. Also, I am suspicious people who react to things that make them uncomfortable by arguing that those things are completely invalid. Then again, the KKK has ideas that make me uncomfortable and I definitely believe that they are completely invalid. This road goes two ways, and I'm sure scientific critiques of religion bum people out too. The only defense I have to this is that I don't think scientific critiques are applicable to religion until religion tries to take on a scientific perspective voluntarily.
Anyways.
My most specific problem is in a particular rhetorical strategy. The thing that kills me the most is when people reference the changing views of science. They say because some discoveries have been corrected, any fact could be wrong. If the word "unscientific" comes up then I really lose it. To change your beliefs based on new data is the most scientific way of doing things. Even Einstein had trouble with new models of atomic structure. To be able to think critically and warp your mind around weird phenomena based on either experiments or math is entirely scientific. Adherence to old beliefs because you were brought up with faith in them is where science is held back. I feel like someone famous said that new ideas don't take over, the people who believed the old ones just die.
So, yeah, it bums me out.

Bedrock-a-bye baby

Spinning round
In my bed
Sun goes down
flowers grow
Plant my mind
petal shaped
In the ground
on my own

Happy motherfucking finally weekendflavored days.