on boredom and what ensues

the rains are here and
soft animal bodies slow down, idle hands pick up books, and
this weekend i found myself bored to be idle bored to be breathing,
losing passion and excitement for small things--
what does a body used to being busy do with all this time,
when plants are going quiet and becca-goat's milk is drying up
and the animals are thinking of fucking and sleeping quiet
and the food is getting stored away for snowed-in days.
i forgot about this!
i forgot that when things get cold bodies get quiet too,
more thinking and planning and appreciating.
i meditated on boredom for an hour. then i looked at the leaves for a while.
this time of year they are beautiful here...green and red and yellow on the white oaks.
dancing in and out of oakmoss sculptured empires.

today i made fresh ravioli with squash & collard green filling and white sauce and navy bean soup and rice pilaf! we burned a big pile of wood, railroad bits and pieces of stuff and brush--a huge bonfire that went all day and we took turns tending. the first frosts have already come and much in the garden died with it though kale and chard are still goin strong. and the rains came! bringing some cold cold misery and some delight--the ground softening and wriggling a little in its descent toward sleep. no longer having to water baby trees and strawberries and the little ginseng plants that are struggling to make it in this strange unfamiliar climate. i had a slumber party with steve and ethan and we read some lewis carroll...other relationships are flourishing too, conversations with walt about patriarchy (always) and i led/mediated a convo about the gender roles/expectations folks were raised with (became mostly a convo about family structures, but definitely breaking ground-setting stage for future conversations).

i have also been thinking of
autonomy and independence, developing and having
chest surgery, talking to my parents about
clothes in urban/rural places, wearing and having feelings about
desiring and loving, differentiating between and embracing
families, creating chosen
fear, finding and routing out
friendships, nurturing sexual and divided-by-space-or-time and intimate
gender, initiating conversations about
hate and enmity, the value or lack of value of
"natural" "law," what is, if anything
quiet, allowing myself to be
shakers, gardening practices of the
sluthood, everything about
traveling, doing-being-becoming-planning

that is something,
i am feeling glad to be in the world today
glad you are too

miserable asshole

wow i really hate being in school!
the actual toll it takes on my life-- incredible!
very taxing stuff.
always biking around
never eating properly.
seeing friends,
always having to go
do some crap for some oaf
with whom i will never make a meal
who will never laugh with me on the floor at 2am
who will never try my kombucha

who is this all for?
who is benefitting?
poopoo


eta:
but in other news, in certain classes i am stating a preference for gender-neutral pronouns. (it's a little nerve-wracking, a little heart-racing). in gender101 because there are 21 female-bodied students and 3 male-bodied ones and i don't want there to be "women" and "men." in my modern dance class because my primary voice is my body. it's not necessary in my agriculture or music class because there's like, 50 of us. i'm eliza with 'they' and zee with 'she'. ha! i'm not confused.

film updates

i cant believe i havent shared any of my film experiences (of which there aren't many).

here's one:

I was in a dance class this quarter where I learned some stuff, first we learned one minute of choreography to a song "Hadippa!" from the movie Dil Bole Hadippa. Preeti (our teacher) told us the movie was bad and we shouldn't see it, but samantha bought it anyway and we all got pretty obsessed. it's a bollywood version of "she's the man" featuring the beloved amanda bynes, which was based loosely off of twelfth night. with rani mukherjee alternately as Veera and Veer. oh and playing opposite shahid kapoor, sigh. anyway the music is awesome, especially "discowale khisko." we told Preeti that we liked the film, and asked why she said it was bad and she said "that's not believable that she could be Veer, how could he not notice she has the same face?"

anyway, if you can get your hands on it, it's lovely mindless entertainment and good music.

ALSO

try to watch "Aladin"... with amitabh bachchan as the genie. hilarious.

ALSO

twilight and new moon just came out here but i didn't see it

ALSO

amitabh's movie coming out this weekend is "Paa"-- he plays a 13 year old boy who has Progeria, so he is dressed up to be an octegenarian, and his son, Abishek Bachchan, plays his father. the tagline for the film is "a unique father-son-son-father story"... only here are off-screen relations actually interwoven into the plot of a film; i don't think you'd ever see this done so explicitly in the states.

ALSO

this weekend a movie Kurbaan came out, where kareena kapoor and saif ali khan apparently have sex (!!!!!!). i read the plot and it looked way to complicated to understand without subtitulos. the tag line is "some love stories have blood on them" because the twist is that he's a terrorist. and her dad warned her not to marry a muslim.

okay। that's all; just doing my share.

boarding a train in 4 hours (at 3am) to head to chennai. goodbye pune, hello leave of absence!

ക്യാ ആപ് വ്ഹോയ ഐ അം വ്രിതിംഗ് ഇന്‍ തമിള്‍

வெயிட் தட் இஸ் மலையாளம்

థిస్ ఇస్ తెలుగు

ದಿಸ್ ಇಸ್ ಕನ್ನಡ -- ವ್ಹಿಚ್ ಇ ಸವ್ ಅ ಲೋಟ್ ಆಫ್ ಇನ್ ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ

चेविंग गम है जा पि जा, हैण्ड पुमप है जा पि जा, लाइफ सा जूस है करती जा, फिकरे करे फिकरे , हरिप्पा!

wow. i didn't know i could do that. first is malayalam, then tamil, then kannada, telugu, then hindi. i wrote mostly in english and it transliterates it... shit that's cool. okay good night. or good morning.

an alpine rendezvous

ingredient list:
50 academics/pedagogists/PhD students
3 teachers
3 nervous undergraduate students
a team of cute submissive students
1600 wires, any color*
a wide diversity of ideas (5 or 6, max)
7 handfuls of laptop
5 cups of meta
a buffet
30 clementines
a bootful of snow, boot included
1 part "i'm not advocating for the destruction of schools, it's just..."
6 more than 2 many cigarettes, handrolled

the recipe:
add 12% german people in authentic bavarian dress. mix with beer and pour into a boot. then spit in it and pour it out of the boot into your throat, toe up (this is the trick for splashing it all over yr face/being a true bavarian man). vom it all back up and add the rest of the ingredients. put it all into a seminar room. mix until thoroughly beaten and sufficiently nebulous. pour in all other ingredients. if the 1 part radicalism is still chunky, extract grant money from the bootcider. climb a mountain. find a torch. drink gluhwein, sprinkle liberally with jokes about blondes, bitches, and whores, untranslatable words in french/spanish/german/portugese....and have a rendezvous. add web 2.0 if desired. enjoy with contradictions!

deLICious.

emily and i arrived here, in garmisch-partenkirchen, on tuesday morning by train and then a long walk down hauptbahnhofstrasse. garmisch is a tinyish town, super touristy/expensive looking, full of ads for permanent anti-aging makeup and hats for ruddy aryan men and their sons. we-ord yo. the hotel perched, full of precarity, on a hill by a ski jump. this guy named gerhardt gave a pretty sweet lecture on "cultures of participation" and how the education/university system produces this discontinuity between passive learning and then the expectation of self-motivated learning/living. lots of graphs and shit here. they're kind of pretty i guess...still amazing to me that people do this stuff full timeish. (that is, transcribing, coding, studying cooperation and collaboration in technology/educational settings...etc.) and i think i forgot about how just absurdly some people can question and jest about women's intelligence and all these smart smart people being so dumb dumb in some ways. don't try to tell me that "that's what she said" is a feminist joke, asshat. that night at the bar almost made me sick/cry, i didn't know what to do and then people were turning to me, "so how do you feel about this? what's the difference between sex and sexuality? why? how do you tell if it's time to clean the kitchen? is this a sexist/racist joke? if i tell a racist joke it means i'm NOT racist, you know? do you hate men? oh don't talk about that now there's a feminist in our midst."
dumb dumb dumb. come on. i forget to expect this from the world sometimes.

i do like the mountains here though. looking at them, that is. and there's a fair amount of snow; when we climbed up to the top, there was a ton of snow and lots of free food. i still stick things in my pockets, collect clementines and rolls for later or maybe tomorrow...mmmmm.

the workshop-y stuff today was kind of cool and kind of exhausting. my presentation is over and i survived. i have a lowlowlow tolerance for sitting still for a long time, so i squirmed a lot, slept a little bit, and had a lot of cigarettes and munched in the lobby with the student organizers from LMU. i've slept like 4 hours in the past 2 days...was up till 5 or so last night finishing up this presentation. blech blech blech.

but now it's done! i'm in a working group on "design principles for a utopic educational setting" tomorrow and then head back to munchen to hang with christian for another day and then to homeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. this presentation was freaking me out--> not sleeping, kind of panicking all the time about how much i have to do. in lieu of weed [zum kiffen] to manage my stress, i've been breathing a lot and collecting moments of ecstatic calm...now i have a lot to write/do but blah blah blah.

wow i loved reading the baohaus housemeeting notes. you guyz. i'm missin you allz (official baohausers and otherwise)...speaking of which, where's corey?

xxxich-will-auf-dein-gesicht-spitzenxxx
that squiddly dutched-up batface homofreak


*must be produced by Mac

a fragment, half-smoked

recently i have been wincing more upon recollection of recently laid-out misspeaks
also, i have been stuck in a cycle something like this: yeah, i do feel like a woman/ali; then not.
flirting with ideas of gender revolution, of harmonica beatboxing and how my voice saves and betrays me.

(then i lifted a lighter to my lips and flicked it, and upon realizing that i did not have anything in my mouth to smoke, slowly lowered the lighter)
(how did i get ash all over my lips?)
(my eye stings as i inhale and my tired throat gets a little flatter, losing a tiny bit of air)
(the butttray is about 1/2 Cigarettes and 1/2 rollies, an interesting mark of something.)

A rememberance from spring

I wrote this down in April apparently, after Civ class one day:

I had a beautiful dream today in class. We were talking about why Kublai Khan would bother to entertain Marco Polo and his suggestion that the emperor convert to Christianity. The text gave us the impression that there were only public and political obstacles standing in the way of Khan submitting himself to the Nazarite, that underneath he knew that Jesus and his tripartite religion was the True Way. All this is obviously total crap. I dreamed that the Great Khan was a magnificent melange of all the regions his grandfathers overran. He was a gorgeous collage of Turkey and India and China and Mongolia and Jordan. He was this polygendered, polysexual celestial benevolent leader, who knew that his position grew out of chance and not God. He forgot no one. And Marco Polo was a pretty boy he kept around and trotted out at parties because he said such hilariously outrageous things. And the Khan would make Marco sit at his feet (when of course he didn't send him out on grand but ultimately meaningless expeditions) and he would stroke the little Venetians hair and smile down on him. Marco would talk about Christianity and the Khan would nod and indulge him, saying, "Of course, it sounds lovely, send me your priests to tell me more." And the priests would come and tell the fantastic stories of the Bible and everyone in the court would be delighted. And Kublai Khan would be pleased at watching his wives and husbands smile and giggle. And they would all talk late into the night about the panopticon and performativity and identity and promise each other walks in the gardens in their old age.

Mmmm, civ class. I suppose when I look back, that was about undermining a certain narrative of power, but also kind of realize it justifies and exoticizes another kind of power.

Lately my dreams have been taking place in a hybrid of all the underground train stations I have passed through in my life. They all have deep, vast lakes in them as well, which I inevitably end up falling into or swimming in or floating on top of. I wonder what that's about. I've also been walking a lot of places in Hyde Park without shoes on. It's a totally dangerous-cool-exciting feeling. I guess it says "I live here, I own this place, and no one can tell me what to do."

if you give a brain some ice cream, and then take it away

yes i will second rolly in describing saturday night's rave as a lake. i swam as a dance-filled genderconfused body through all the high school girls and the shirtless bros. everything was seeping with sex and straight at that but i forgot being uncomfortable and danced and danced. and then oh! the wonders of hyde park that i had not seen before. we do live in a [sometimes] beautiful place.

in other wise,
when so many of my days seem the same, i'm trying to gather little pieces that are maybe something other than chemically influenced moments.

inspired by the garden at 55 & woodlawn, which is full of tomatoes and cucumbers, jalapenos and marigolds (sometimes people on the street stop and wonder at the garden and once i gave some people some tomatoes and they were so confused and surprised, as if the lack of a cash register in proximity to vegetables was a syllogism or a logical gap)...tmo and i cut down a path through the weeds in a lot next to our house and i dug up the earth and it's going to be a garden. so far, only mint, but we're sprouting tiny seeds on the top of the fridge and there will be leafy greens and life. we're also starting a compost pile, hopefully. my interest in gardening is confusing to my mother.

also, i got a job at istra-under-the-train-tracks making coffee and putting gelato in little little plastic bowls. i haven't started yet, not till the 24th or so. at my "interview" he asked me to describe the flavors of the coffee and i said "bark" and he said "vegetal" so i got the job.

and at the character party on friday night, rolly and i went as a sibling-pair of runaways, trevor (8) and daisy (6) with stuffed animal friends (trevor and alfonso) and swedish fish. i remembered that parties are boring for kids even though everything is potentially interesting. we were on a hunt for monsters who eat children, but no one seemed to know where they were, or offered us roundabout ways to fix the problem--a unicorn, joining Jews for Allah, voting for a particular serbian candidate. in the end a woman from the future won the staged election; revolution was a close second.

and maybe that's it, for now.

update:
oh, also, tmo and i decided to get married so i can work in the EU and also to validate our sacred religious commitment to each other and so we can become a social unit of reproductive machinery. the first part is true.