The sad look

No, I'm not going out tonight. February has hit campus hard and everywhere the sidewalks lump up into ugly frozen scar tissue. I went to two parties last night and at the second one, around quarter to three, I realized I was crouching on the floor nursing a badly mixed rum and Coke, trading too-loud and undercooked witticisms with James Ngembe, a massive-in-every-sense 32-bit dork who will take you to school on any Nintendo game produced before 1998. I saw this from somewhere higher, which happens sometimes and let's not make a big thing out of it. From about eight or ten feet up I could see myself and James, and the other limp and lapsed people sprawled around the small anteroom into which we'd all separately crawled to get away from the endless, maddening buzz of the main party, and I knew, dropping the awareness onto my own head, that I had circled back around to five years ago and was exactly where I didn't want to be. I took my leave a little after that. I don't mean to sound too good for anyone here, or like I hadn't been having a beery, blurry version of fun up to that point; it's just that I come from a place, and I don't especially want or need to return to that place. People ask sometimes if I was given a lot of shit growing up, and the answer is yes, although you will not find me going into details unless we know each other extremely well or are unlikely to ever meet again. Everyone's got a terrible childhood stashed away somewhere. To take it out and dress up in it again is something in which I see no percentage.

It's been a weird weekend in most regards; the party was probably the most conventional aspect, with the familiar ruined table full of toppled Ciroc bottles and ashtrayed Dixie cups. Lately that spread, reproduced in dorm rooms and studio apartments across the world, puts me in mind of nothing so much as a bombed city. It's the kind of thing I might try to photograph now, since lately I seem to be drawn exclusively to stupid, self-destructive endeavors. I mentioned February's quiet bitchslap of Baltimore? There are about three dozen breath-stealingly beautiful varieties of ice currently in operation, from the captured-water tableau atop the biology lab to the muscular plugs lurking beneath drainpipes and freestanding on concrete to the hundreds of tiny fingers newly arriven on every tree. The main green froze over a couple of days ago and kids were playing hockey on it. The whole campus is locked up, but in the sudden immutable rigidity we have found entirely new ways to move. (For the curious: Yes, I can flip some badass moves on the shoe. Find me Wednesday mornings on my way to the Amplos building.) My point here is that Lohan, and the greater Atwell area, has been wrapped in unexpected and probably undeserved beauty that will almost certainly be given back to the air in a few days, and have I collected any of it with my finger? I have not. Instead I am chasing down muddy streaks on vestibule floors and the caked black snow hiding in the upper molding of the north dining hall. My hands are full of this stuff, the dirt comes out of the water in the hot red light.

It's supremely dumb but it is all of a piece with what I guess is the usual sophomore identity crisis, the point where questions jump on you at nonsensical moments. People you never thought of as particularly interrogative, suddenly their every statement seems pointed at you, a challenge, a thump of the chest. A lot of my friends are either CS or politcal science majors, both of which are eminently useful fields, and it comes up, you know, never in anything more than the most good-natured and frivolous way, but everyone sort of knows that while I will do huge amounts of work for a photography (i.e. visual arts) degree, it won't be the same kind of work that most people do. It's a shaping. Nobody talks about it but nobody is ignorant. It's not even a question of putting in different amounts of effort because I don't think anyone is really dumb enough to believe that Lohan allows even a single person to graduate without subjecting them to a rigorous program of own-ass-kicking. It's just the black box on the flowchart, the thing you can't answer because who would ever ask: why do you care about this stuff so much? What makes you think you should be running your life this way? Who entitled you, out of all the people who want to pin their hours to something that contributes in only the most flickering and ephemeral way? And you can't tell them that it is a way of holding down and holding up. You are ashamed and disgusted that it should be something so crude and obvious as that. To look at the same few inches of color and shadow and turn to the person next to you and say there, are we finally seeing the same thing? Are we level now? You write other reasons around it. You cover it up with text and none of it is false, but that first command is still there. It can't be helped.

None of this is productive, and hopefully I will be made to put it on hold soon. I mentioned there's a girl thing on the horizon? It's closer now and better defined. To shorten history somewhat, I met this chick at a Fourth of July party last summer when I was up in Maine with my grandfather. She's from Oregon and is now going to school in Florida, a freshman, but she's heading up to the DC area for a few days and I told her she could crash. So we'll see. It will be nice to have someone around, anyway, who can take me away from my head for a while.

Radiocination

Well, the trash is still glowing. Raquel Calgieri across the hall had this massive lightstick party over the weekend, with about six hundred little three-inch snappers in seven different colors and various other luminate paraphernalia -- nunchucks, cat's-eye glasses, I don't know what all. There was more alcohol than anyone could even process, and a pretty exemplary lineup of house artists on the shelf speakers, and most of the furniture had been backed up and was hugging the walls like schoolkids in an air raid. I won't claim to remember most of the night; I ended up drinking way too much, trying to match pace at least with Ellen Power, who is four foot eleven and one-sixteenth Cherokee or something. You know, I can't believe it took me this long to figure out, but I really pass through my comfort zone quickly with respect to alcohol. Somewhere over the course of Saturday night I was in the right place, quick with jokes, tossing out bold claims, able even to work a little pop-and-lock routine with my arms (yeah, when I was twelve everything was Kool Herc and Afrika, what were you doing). But then I reach the tipping point without even knowing it, and suddenly it's Sunday and I'm waking up to a carpet full of ground-in peanuts and eight text messages from people asking whether I got lost on the way across the courtyard. It's not all that bad really, it's not like I get belligerent or maudlin when I'm drunk, but I would like to retain a little grace. That's all. I would like to minimize the number of remembered stumbles across the room that pounce on me in Economic History and cause me to ground a fist into one eye.

Anyway, Raquel I guess ordered her party supplies from some aggressive upstart retailer in New York, and they were pretty much nuclear the night of. I know this because at some point the party spilled over into two nearby rooms, including mine, leaving behind clumps of trash to sweep up and tweeze out from divisions in the carpet. That was my afternoon. That evening, though, I dressed down and killed the lights for a quick Wire episode (that show is kind of comical sometimes, but there's usually at least one scene per hour when they get Baltimore absolutely right), and the garbage lit up like aliens at Chernobyl. I tied the bag shut, but the light kept pulsing out; I had to double-hood it and sit with my back completely to the can. What the hell is in those sticks? At least they're easy to find with the lights off. I didn't realize how many I'd missed, and a few were in places that made absolutely no sense. Someone -- I know it wasn't me -- had laid one across the sprinkler head in my ceiling, which would have been fun had it triggered. I had to knock that off with the skylight pole while exhaling about four molecules of carbon dioxide per minute. I am definitely calling it earlier on the drinks next time.

There is some business with a girl I could report here, but it seems too early to say anything. I'm not sure why I'm even bringing it up. Maybe it's the song. "Ellen and Ben," Dismemberment Plan, man. What would it have even been to see them in a club around here. Oh well -- tomorrow looks good. I have to check out a few Richard Avedon volumes for this class but that's totally not work I mind doing. That one Sly and the Family album is all you need, I think, to be reminded that the world is a pretty cool place.