Y'all, I picked this news story up off Bitch Ph. D. This is one strong girl.

love,
alex

Dear world: fill me up with your light.

love,
alex

Consensus: Kentucky Fried Chicken tastes of death. I've been omnivoring on and off with the occasional chicken wing or peice of fish from the Free Range Health-o-Mart, and those taste fine, if bland and healthy. Kentucky Fried tastes like life in an eight by ten inch cage. I think I'm done with that stuff.

love,
alex

Yes, I do have a self-righteous streak, thanks for asking.

Those of you who've been reading for a while probably know that I go to a little two-year residential college at a little state university. I'm graduating soon, and will finish out my education under the auspices of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, or possibly with the flaky people over in anthropology.

I will post more about this as the graduation date nears - it's been a wierd emotional roller-coaster of a two years - but I just want to comment: there are other residential colleges out there, I've visited a couple of them. There are much better universities out there, of course, I'm at Podunk State, where the major industry is producing accountants and elementary school teachers. But I challenge you to find another group of two or three hundred freshmen and sophomores that don't just read Derrida with enthusiasm, but go around recommending it to all their friends. I have been in a little hive of very bright, inquisitive people for the last two years. If only some of them weren't boys.

Yeah, one of them told me yesterday - a person I didn't think noticed me enough to know I was lonely - that he thinks it's because I have no female peers. For some reason, all the bright, inquisitive, involved people of my year are male, he said, and no matter how bright they are, it's hard to be friends with a bunch of college-age males. This was flattering, but only partially true. There are some really intelligent women here; they just haven't formed a coherant unit that likes to talk about Derrida.

I realize - forgive the introspection, but this is my journal - that a lot of my intellectual isolation is self-inflicted. The core group of males here - those Proust-reading, protest-attending, pot-smoking-hippie intelligensia - are willing to ignore the fact that I have breasts if I'll just discuss the meaning of life for a couple of minutes. This is why I'm glad that I'll know them after graduating my program. Some day, maybe soon, I will no longer be so shy. Then maybe the Derrida and me, we can get down.
love,
alex

I just posted this in response to a question over at So Close. I then realized that I should probably post it on my own blog, instead of hijacking her thread. I have found Tertia's conversations of the past few days extraordinarily thought-provoking, and I'd like to thank her here, too, for getting my brain moving.


"I didn't show up in time to comment on the initial question. I have not even posted on this blog before, though I read it often. And my thoughts are poorly-organized, and I am twenty years old and hot-headed. But I wanted to drop my two cents worth anyway.

I might not consider the problems of the poor to be my problems if I did not benefit from the causes of those problems.

Within this country (the US) I am a college student because several generations of kidnapped, enslaved people made my family rich enough to send its white sons, and eventually its white daughters, to college. College sticks with a family over the generations. We are not very rich - my family has produced mostly agronomists and poor country doctors - except that in this world, sometimes reading, eating, and having a roof over your head is rich.

Do I have to feel guilty for being born with privilege? Only if I hoard it. It is not just my privilege. It is inherited stolen goods. If I share it - if I try to give some of it back, in money, or in work in literacy campaigns, or, heaven help us all, in secondhand clothes, then I am just returning a stolen, inherited wealth.

I do not mean this anecdote to specifically reference your situation as a South African. My family is Southern United States, and my father grew up in a segregated town ten miles from the house of the grand dragon of the KKK. Because the United States is so extraordinarily wealthy, it was not as bad as South Africa, but it was bad, and it was a lot more recent than we like to think.

This means I am obliged to work on a local scale, yes. But what about the international scale? Well, wealth comes from somewhere, and it goes somewhere. The extraordinary wealth of the United States, which, as a middle-class white American, I benefit from daily, had to come from somewhere. It came from colonization, from slavery, from the agressive exploitation of natural resources outside US borders for the benefit of US investors. Starting wars for the sake of US investments is nothing new; in fact, it characterizes our entire military history.

I am not saying that the US is evil, or that Americans are evil. Americans started the Mexican-American war. Americans also fought and died for the eight-hour day, and for worker's benefits. Americans joined the Klu Klux Klan; Americans joined the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King was an American too. Mother Jones was an American too. Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine was an American.

I'm just saying that a lot of our wealth and privilege doesn't belong to us. We have to keep it moving; we have to give it back. There is enough for everyone, if we can be reasonable, and generous, and just, and the United States was founded on an idea that people can be all of those things."

Comments? I want to work through this later on (when I'm not supposed to be writing papers about Guatemala) and try to make it a better, if still idealistic and hot-headed, essay. I hope you all find it interesting, at least.

love,
alex

Incidentally, I did, at some point, between the constant hunger and the walking all over town, loose four pounds over a week and a half on South Beach phase 1. If it weren't for the three pounds that will come rocketing back once all the beer and phyllo dough hit my system, this would be a healthy rate of weight loss.

Next up: eating by the new Gay pride food guide USDA diet pyramid. (I pause to acknowledge that I'm a sucker for colorful clipart). If I keep changing plans for healthy eating - but I'm always on _some_ plan for healthy eating - in the end, I'll be healthy, right?

Right now, reeling from the headache brought on by that chocolate bar for breakfast, I am very much looking forward to the reintroduction of fruit into my diet.

Other things to do today: four pages on whether the Guatamalan guerillas were really communists or just really hungry, and four pages on my definition of interdisciplinarity, incorporating Newell, Carp's rebuttel of Newell (my first introduction to academic infighting), and a variety of other authors most of whom I have not read yet. Ahem.

The thing I forgot to note in yesterday's post is that I delivered my twelve-page proposal draft, full of holes but better than it used to be. My professors, ai, I have such compassion for my professors. Some day I will be a professor, and I will have to read this stuff.

love,
alex

My day:

1) Went for a walk and spent an hour stuck in shelter in torrential thunderstorm. Quite cold, rather fun

2) Local activist raffle night: won a mini-bottle of Jim Bean and a chocolate bar.

3) Crashed our new chancellor's installation gala.
a) stole hors d'vores for activist party
b) danced in public, with enthusiasm

4) Speaking of activist bingo night: the Dirty Girl Scout, granola style: vodka, vanilla soymilk, creme de menthe, and kahlua. Tastes remarkably like mint chocolate chip ice cream; way too tasty, makes this girl scout a little silly.

5) By the way, the diet is dead, long live the diet. It was kicked repeatedly by the box of frosted mini wheats I ate today, and a ballroom full of little tasty things wrapped in phyllo dough was the death blow. I am pleased.

I have had a great night. How about you?

love,
alex

Why do so many people here have to be heartbreaks in motion? Trailing their blond dreadlocks and misty bleary eyes and long broad-shouldered bodies through my life, one end to another. Trailing their cigarette burns and save-the-world ideals and marked beautiful faces. I walked arm-in-arm with the more sensible of the twin brothers, two years older than me and tall and lovely, under the eerie holy eye of the Virgin of Suyapa, in a wooden cathedral in Tegucigalpa. I sat for a second or two under the warm arm of the less sensible of the two brothers, while he stubbed his cigarette out on the pavement with his other hand, while the boys played banjos down the stairs and the clouds moved by. Everyone passes on by.

love,
alex

This is kinda fun, except that it has a real problem working with anything but a straight-on id photo.

The number of times I post here in a day is directly proportional to the number of papers desperately due the next day.

love,
alex

Today, I met a PORN STAR!
And I totally introduced myself.
I did a paper on feminism in the adult industries, I had an excuse.

love,
alex

Last night, I dreamed that we went to some sort of big family shindig a great-uncle was throwing, and when I got there I discovered that all of my cousins once- and twice- removed were young men with dreadlocks. Apparently, my subconcious has a more interesting family than I do.

And then our boat capsized, but in the dream that was quite fun.

Not much else to say. I've been a blogging fiend lately (at least compared to the last few months), but the things going on are all academic. Today, my friends, I master the subjunctive in Spanish.

Well actually yes I do find that kind of exciting.

love,
alex

various crises in alex-land:

1) The Spark has apparently completed its transformation from slightly sketchy purveyor of quizzes & wierd experiments to respectable publishing house. this means: NO MORE SKETCHY TESTS. No slut test. No sex test. NO PURITY TEST. My friends, my American-Pie watching, Dan Savage reading, bizarre american adolescence centered around that test. I will never have an opportunity to get my score below 92%! This causes me grief.

2) On a similarly immature note, the person I catagorically did not want to sleep with no sirree bob has established that he returns the sentiment. THANKS A LOT, guy I didn't want to sleep with. At all.

anyway. Y'all have a nice night.

love,
alex

My parents are, emotionally at least, in the process of cutting me loose. It's an interesting feeling. I certainly don't need them as much as I used to - I probably don't need them very much at all, except insofar as I am totally fiscally dependant and have never had a checking account or paid income taxes. You know what I mean. I probably could get by without any more parenting. I'm just not sure, now that I'm safely several hundred miles away, that I want to. Frankly, no one puts up with your shit like your parents do.

I suppose that that is, in fact, the point.

love,
alex

Exactly one pound lighter.

After being hungry all the time for a week.

Yes, I said that diets are crap, but what I meant was, I will add a bowl of oatmeal for lunch every day and continue with the eating nothing but scrambled eggs and salad. I think I have established that diets are crap in a more conclusive way, right now. Where's my unhealthy plummet? The drastic results that nutritionists tell you are just water weight? I want rid of the water weight! I desire to be defined by a scale number! I call foul!

I do know that it is insensitive for me to carry on like this when so many of my friends have food stuff. I do know that in my own peer-culture way it sets a bad example - you're just perfect, but I want to be scrawny. I realize that it is pretty prototypically antifeminist, because I am healthy and because I am distracting myself from real things that are bothering me - school, politics, life - by the constant planning and cooking of low-calorie meals. Barefoot and in the kitchen.

Simultaneously, eh, screw it. I want a BMI of exactly 20, and I suppose sugar was never really very good for anybody.

love,
alex

So I had my first "babysitting" job last night. Babysitting in quotes, y'all. I came upon one of my friends sitting down by the pond, soberly keeping an eye on three freshmen who were forcibly meddling with thier nuerotransmitters, and decided to hang with them for a bit. Frankly, I'd always expected the LSD experience to look, even from the outside, a bit more dramatic. I'm sure it looked like something to the people that were in it, but to me they pretty much seemed like oversized toddlers with big vocabularies. They kept getting excited about things and wandering away. They were still sociable and self-concious and we got lost in the woods in the dark without anyone thinking the trees were attacking them. It was pleasant company. They were fun, all overenthusiasms and big liquid grins, and I'm glad they had a good trip, even if the biggest revelation they claim to have gotten out of it is that rolling your own cigarettes is a really silly idea.

So another thing gets filed under "just another drug". Whatever works for you, I guess.

love,
alex

The two girls at the other end of the cafeteria table are sweet-faced, heavy-set, with long hair twisted up in buns. They are wearing their gym clothes - making plans to meet for aerobics later - and eating chicken strips from the fast food chain in the other side of the cafeteria. I eavesdrop. They're talking about liberals and feminists. Their bible studies teacher, it seemed, used to be a feminist, back in the 70s, when "feminism was accepted". The one girl tells this to the other, who reacts with great surprise. "She doesn't seem like that at all!" the other says, shocked, a little scandalized. "Yeah," the first replies, "like, when her husband was watching tv and told her to get him a drink, she'd go, get it yourself, you've got legs."

They pause for a moment, shaking their heads. "She hadn't learned to be submissive." the first concludes. "A submissive wife."

Today I got a ride to the grocery store from a complete stranger - a middle-aged woman with a blond page-boy and a jesus fish on her car. When we pass through the main intersection, men wearing sandwich boards are waving placards at passing cars. "Jesus is Lord! Satan is not!" says one board. I want to make a joke. I restrain myself. The woman next to me correctly interprets my silence as floundering for something polite to say. She points out that, yes, she has the Christian radio station on, but somehow she's never felt called to stand on a street corner yelling at commuters. She tells me the story of her fish sticker. She and her aging mother, it seems, once broke down way outside of my little mountain town, in a thunderstorm in the dark. They had no phone and didn't know what to do, when this family with a fish on the back of their car pulls up and offers help. The grandmother decides to trust them, and gets a ride into town, safe and sound, and calls a tow truck. Ever since then, the woman says, she's had that fish on the back of her car, in hope that if she comes across someone in a bad situation, they'll know she's a trustworthy Christian. When we pick up her mother - fresh from the beauty salon - mother brags on daughter, telling me how when she (the mother) was sick in the hospital, her daughter and her son-in-law didn't just bring her treats and presents, they brought things for the whole hall. "Good Christians", the old woman says through her old woman teeth. "Good Christian servants."

love,
alex

Planted seed balls in the unused planter by the foot of the stairs. This is supposed to be the hottest summer on record - temperatures in the 90s in my mountain town, and at home, in the flats, by a swamp, I'm guessing it'll hit three digits pretty often. Today, though, is cold, and misty, and pleasant.

I've been having insane wild dreams since I started going to sleep hungry. When I was in the habit of eating right before I went to bed, I could never remember my dreams, and it upset me. Now I feel like my subconcious is doing a lot of work; I wake up feeling really comforted, given something besides my campus and my room and my desk to hang onto. I've also been waking up with peircing headaches, probably a sign of allergy season. Aleve works.

As far as the hunger, by the way, I've decided that South Beach strict was designed for meat eaters or old people. Today I've only been hungry before meals, but I still ate a big bowl of oatmeal with a bit of barley malt and brown sugar after lunch. I figure any plan that thinks rolled oats with soymilk and barley malt are bad for you is just crazy talk.

I should be doing a lot more than I am, but you know what? It's going to be okay.

love,
alex

Fuck it. I'm at 5'8" and 146 pounds. Do you think I need to loose weight? Me neither. Or at least not as drastically and metabolism-slowingly as all that carblessness. You try being a carbohydrate-less vegetarian with no time to cook.

I had two bowls of oat bran cereal with unsweetened soymilk. I feel much better.

love,
alex

My **** project group won't get their **** **** together and I have another paper to write.

It's pretty outside and I just want to play computer games.

This morning I tried to make moong dosa, which was disastrous. I therefore saluted my first day of South Beach with half a box of Morningstar Chick'n Nuggets (despite breading = the South Beach ultimate evil) and half a cup of unsweetened soymilk.

I am glad I'm doing this though, after yesterday, which featured three peices of cake, two of pie, and chocolate fondue. Me and the sugar, we like each other a bit too much.

That's all! It's very shallow! GOD ALMIGHTY!

love,
alex.


P.S: Yesterday after the pie and fondue, me and some of the Nicaragua people sat up singing old bluegrass hymns with each other, late until midnight. We might only know them from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, but in the cricket-less spring silence and cold leaf-smelling air, on a porch behind the lawn behind the Episcopalian church, it doesn't matter. Or it all matters.

love,
alex

My sunshine friends, this blog is about to take a boring little turn.

Tomorrow: South Beach diet, phase one, begins. No sweet potatoes, winter squash, or brown rice for two weeks. Moreover, no marshmallow peeps.

I will be posting things along the lines of food & exercise notes every so often. I would feel worse about hijacking my blog for this, but I really don't think my body of devoted readers is so large that I'll be disappointing them.

love,
alex

I spent the day inside the concrete box hiding from the sun, and went out in the nighttime to spend my last five dollars on flower seeds.

love,
alex

So often I assume that someone has a problem with me, only to realize that it's just that I've never stopped to talk with them. It's a relief, to no longer hold yourself apart from someone on an assumed dislike.

Doing work! I swear!

love,
alex

I will break my addiction to a certain indy-rock content provider. I will not pay said content provider actual _money_. Really. I swear to god.

The shit has hit the fan here. Again. If you don't hear from me for a while, it's because I'm trying desperately to make it all work.

The thing is, I want to say I'm glad sophomore year can never happen to me again. But there have still been friendships and projects and beautiful ice-cold mornings and the birds outside singing four notes over and over into the sunlight. Academics and angst aren't everything. There is still hope, and being.

love,
alex

The last snowstorm of April melted today, with a great change of clear sky and sun and wind rattling down the mountain like a freight train. The shift in time means that I can run out up the mountain, after everything, charging through the mud and the streams and the spread hands of rhododendron. I sat by the pond for a while - maybe hours even - watching the bright wind erupt across the surface of the water, light flashing up across the broken surface and then subsiding down to the depths. Every time it happened - that bright dolphin-arc across water - I laughed.

I found all the trails on the other side of the mountain, and got lost, and wandered, and fell down and got up and ended up right back where I started. It was good.

love,
alex