mmmarilyn; a big-city fairy tale.

wednesday, oct. 18th, 2006.

In a month those flowers would bloom. In a month all dormant life and arrested decay would begin again. In a month she would not mourn, because in that season it had never seemed to her that they were married, she and the silent Methodist Edmund who wore a necktie and suspenders even to hunt wildflowers, and who remembered just where they were from year to year, and who dipped his handkerchief in a puddle to wrap the stems, and who put out his elbow to help her over the steep and stony places, with a wordless and impersonal courtesy she did not resent because she never really wished to feel married to anyone. She sometimes imagined a rather dark man with crude stripes painted on his face and sunken belly, and a hide fastened around his loins, and bones dangling from his ears, and clay and claws and fangs and bones and feathers and sinews and hide ornamenting his arms and waist and throat and ankles, his whole body a boast that he was more alarming than all the death whose trophies he wore. Edmund was like that, a little. The rising of spring stirred a serious, mystical excitement in him, and made him forgetful of her. He would pick up eggshells, a bird's wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp's nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jack-knife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses. At such times he was as forgetful of her as he was of his suspenders and Methodism, but all the same it was then that she loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own.

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

10 til 1

courant 13th floor lounge, lying on the most uncomfortable sofa

At some point last night I was revelling in what a good idea SCHOOL is for me, an arena that encouraged me to stay up all night working scripting puzzles in bed with my laptop. I still hold to the belief that my cycle of Circadian rhythm is far far longer than the average 25 hours or so most humans eventually would resolve to without the infernally quick spinning of the earth.

I was not even terribly tired on Friday night, yet after going to sleep at 2 after preliminary thrashing (oh dear lord what has my life come to that I'm being forced to consider first-order logical implications on natural numbers and sets on a friday night in this tiny room, this tall garret above new york city with excitement crawling everywhere beneath me) and then promptly slept with very little difficulty for 16 hours in the face of my frustrations with the proof before me.

So perhaps I have some investment in the statement that it's easier for me to stay up for many many hours as well. I definitely hit an anti-frustration euphoric peak at around 5a, THIS is what I want for my brain's future: conversations on linear algebra that are engrossing enough to pull me away from a delightful teaser of a clever algorithm, being simultaneously itching to return to it.

Sleep for 10 minutes before matrices attack...

4.03p

courant 5th floor redhat lab, windows overlooking treetops

I'm going to get two wretched wretched take-home midterms AND a regular in-class midterm for my birthday next week.

Also, I had a painfully awful early part of the evening last night: a combination of rain and puddles in my shoes, a broken umbrella that kept closing onto my head, the bearing of a two-week project due today that I had yet to start (which was fine, I only had the most last-minute of doubts that it might not be) and the unexpected hostility of a stranger. I think I take people's spitefulness towards me too seriously, perhaps it is important to consider when it is someone who has the right to be displeased, or someone who I care about, but for some reason, I am held down by it especially when it is a person of no consequence who was being irrational and unjustified.

I think it just frustrates me to see people expect others to know or understand something when that thing is STUPID and I'M obviously the one wronged here.

Moral of the story: Craigslist is a fickle mistress. Oh, and also that I have really good people who make me laugh by phone and IM even when my feet are cold and wet and my mind is filled with irrational and angering vulnerablity.

the older things.

about this.

Marilyn C. Cole (email), 27, New York City, an apartment in the Hamilton Heights end of Harlem, since August 2006. Before that, Atlanta, Georgia for seven years, through a Georgia Tech computer science degree and three years of learning how to be a grown-up and still have fun. Before that, ten years in Savannah, the place that gives her stability, that she considers to be home. Before that, short stints in middle Georgia next to a lake; on Tybee Island next to the beach; in a suburb of Dallas, Texas during the peak of Dallas (the nighttime soap opera); the middle of Oklahoma for the birth of her little brother; and Nashville, Tennessee, where she greeted this mad messed up world.

Attending New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, taking coursework toward her Masters in Computer Science, with debatable ambitions in the direction of a Ph.D. in something or other.

Simply head over heels for a musician whose songs makes her woozy, whose words make her happy, who she wants to marry one day.

Strawberry-blonde hair, blue-green-yellow eyes, pale skin with freckles.

academia, acoustic guitar, acting intelligent, adventures in the car, after-rain smell, alanis morissette, angelina jolie, ani difranco, articulateness, artificial intelligence, audrey hepburn, avocados, bad pick up lines, beauty, being egotistical, being insecure, ben folds, bertrand russell, bisexuality, björk, black eyeliner, blackberries, bloody marys, books, britney spears, bubble baths, candy, cat power, cemeteries, cheap red wine, collar bones, conan o'brien, cooking, cool points, crisp pickle spears, dancing, dar williams, daria, death cab for cutie, dismemberment plan, douglas coupland, drinking, drugs, eating outside, eeevil, elvis costello, english accents, etiquette, falling in love, feminism, firefly, fishnets, flowers, freaks and geeks, frolicking, fun, getting my way, gilmore girls, gin and tonics, girls, google, grammatical correctness, greek mythology, hal9000, handwritten letters, happiness, harold and maude, harry potter, harry/draco, homemade t-shirts, hot hot baths, intelligence, jem, joel, kids in the hall, kissing, kittens, knee-high socks, knitting, late night conversations, laughing, life, luna lovegood, magnetic poetry, making things, margaret atwood, math, max rebo, mazzy star, messy hair, milk, mirah, modest mouse, my computer, my mama and daddy and little bro, night swimming, nintendo, nonsense, not waiting, nudity, new york, originality, pi, pie, pillows, pinky and the brain, radiohead, rainer maria, reading in the bathtub, red popsicles, richard bach, road trips, robots, rocking out, roller coasters, sandals, sarcasm, seduction, sexuality, shoes, sifl & olly, simon & garfunkel, simone de beauvoir, singing very loudly, skirts that twirl, sleep, songs: ohia, soup, stars, staying up too late, subversive literature, sushi, swings, sylvia plath, tetris, thai food, the beach, the color pink, the history channel, the month of october, the simpsons, the smell of bookstores, the windows down, the word indeed, thrift stores, thunderstorms, virginia woolf, weezer, wet trampolines, winks, words.