Here comes a feeling you thought you'd forgotten.

In Twelfth Night, the social order comes undone--women fall in love with women, gender becomes malleable, nobles marry servants, servants imagine that they could become nobility. To parallel the end-of-Christmas festival after which it was named and at which it was performed, Shakespeare's play effects a mood of licensed disorder--and things get more than a little crazy.

Life mimics art. Not that our last day of classes (affectionately called LDOC by all those who care) is the same as Twelfth Night, but in a way it performed the same function: loosened everyone up, broke social customs, made everyone rethink friend circles and habits. People I knew in completely different ways found their way to my room and met each other and mingled, we played a stream of trashed up music, tried our best to stay in a comfortable stupor (difficult to maintain for more than five hours straight), etc. Rarely are so many people so willing to get completely messed up, and rarely do we all find ourselves so devoted to having a good time. In the end, I came out with new and unforeseen conceptions of everyone, of social relationships, of how life could be if only academic stress didn't interfere with the living of it.

And the effects have not worn off. Reading period has been a time drain: last night in the library until sun-up with hardly any work done (talking, instead, to good and new friends--rehashing the year in perspective), today four hours at dinner off-campus and bantering forever.

Now to study? But how could I? LDOC is still in the air and with it a sense of non-urgency. At the end of this journey, I feel very much the way I did at Oxford last summer--looking back on a period of my life with a vague sense of having grown in as-of-yet still inexplicable ways. But that time I was only able to construct the narrative months afterward (at the expense of having by that point already made a few missteps), and I hope I'll be a quicker study this time around.

Even if you knew.

Show the soul you never had:
a fad that will not save you.

♫ "Honeymoon" (Bombadil, Tarpits in Canyonlands)

Obsession continues. Time passing in increments of five-minute songs.

Falling slowly.

I don't know,
but I want you
all the more for that.
Words fall through me,
always fool me,
and I can't react.
Games that never amount
to more than they're meant
will play themselves out.

Take this sinking boat,
and point it home.
We've still got time.

[ . . . ]
You've suffered enough
And warred with yourself.
It's time you won.

♫ "Falling Slowly" (The Swell Season, The Swell Season)

For me, when everything is beautiful, life is music -- especially sad, sad music, especially soulful lyrics. This is why I think that I might be destined for poetry, not prose. Lately I've been looping the same few songs on my iPod, and it's put me into a strangely calm, reflective mood (despite finals in less than a week):

1. "Falling Slowly" (The Swell Season, The Swell Season)
2. "Broken Horse" (Freelance Whales, Weathervanes)
3. "Cosmic Love" (Florence + The Machine, Lungs)
4. "Honeymoon" (Bombadil, Tarpits in Canyonlands)
5. "Generator ^1" (Freelance Whales, Weathervanes)
6. "Melectric" (Ramona Falls, Intuit)

The Lollapalooza line-up seems really promising this year, and I'm tempted to fly out -- have at least one really good friend going, and another good friend is staying in Chicago for the summer.

Life & Times & LDOC.

"Do not throw these away. Though they are different, they are lovers."

Sums up one incredible, attention-deficient, too-substantive, and surprising end of the year.

Celebrate celebrate celebrate! (Much, much more later. Late-night Glee with roommate now.)

Sleep: Loss.

(Bill Hayes, for The Times)

It was the opposite of a shadow. Which is as clear a definition as I can come up with for the soul.

50.

Today is my father's birthday.

When I was little he used to lift me onto his shoulders and then "forget" where I was, and he'd wander around our two-bedroom apartment for almost an hour trying to find me while I sat way up high giggling with my legs hanging down onto his chest.

I called him this morning, and I miss him.

Twelfth Night.

And with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

(Still so cruel?
Still so constant, lord.)

She is drowned already, sir, with salt water, though I seem to drown her remembrance again with more.

ENTP.

I'm always wary of the MBTI because I wonder why it takes a test for me to understand the answers I already gave.

Nevertheless, I spent more an hour today trying to figure out why the type I presumed I was (ENFP) didn't really make any sense. And then I realized it was wrong.

So here it goes for who I suppose I "actually" am, now:

ENTPs are usually verbally as well as cerebrally quick, and generally love to argue--both for its own sake, and to show off their often-impressive skills. They tend to have a perverse sense of humor as well, and enjoy playing devil's advocate. They sometimes confuse, even inadvertently hurt, those who don't understand or accept the concept of argument as a sport.

ENTPs are basically optimists, but in spite of this (perhaps because of it?), they tend to become extremely petulant about small setbacks and inconveniences. (Major setbacks they tend to regard as challenges, and tackle with determination.) ENTPs have little patience with those they consider wrongheaded or unintelligent, and show little restraint in demonstrating this. However, they do tend to be extremely genial, if not charming, when not being harassed by life in general.

In terms of their relationships with others, ENTPs are capable of bonding very closely and, initially, suddenly, with their loved ones. . . . ENTPs are also good at acquiring friends who are as clever and entertaining as they are. Aside from those two areas, ENTPs tend to be oblivious of the rest of humanity, except as an audience -- good, bad, or potential.

Source: Typelogic

The ENTP personality type is sometimes referred to the "Lawyer" type. The ENTP "lawyer" quickly and accurately understands a situation, and objectively and logically acts upon the situation. Their Thinking side makes their actions and decisions based on an objective list of rules or laws.

Under stress, the ENTP may lose their ability to generate possibilities, and become obsessed with minor details. These details may seem to be extremely important to the ENTP, but in reality are usually not important to the big picture.

With their thinking tied to the myriad possibilities they see in the world, they act swiftly and decisively upon those angles, choices and combinations scarcely noticed by other types, but through which they can build whole new frameworks or completely redefine an existing external situation in such a way that it appears new, revitalized and once again full of promise. Sameness, stasis, conservatism - even daily routine - can be loathsome to fervent ENTPs, whose drive is always to be into something new, different and full of fresh possibilities.

ENTP people measure their success by their “aha” moments, by the sense of satisfaction which comes as they spread their newly written maps before them and contemplate the new adventure, design, investigation or conquest which has now become their road ahead. What has gone before, previous achievements, ways of living - even people met along the way - are often now forgotten or considered passé, mere steps along a path which has now brought a new frontier to be exploited for its gifts.

Without a solid thinking function, the ENTP can easily discount or fail to notice the essential ethics of social and interpersonal relationship, often considering themselves “above” or untouched by such limiting values and often discounting the possibility that their actions might be or hurtful or seen as unethical by others. It is not that the one sided ENTP is deliberately hurtful, but simply ignorant of the effects which can flow from their often compulsive need for change or need to show how clever or individual they are.

Source: Personality Page

For ENTPs, falling out of love, which may not always occur, results when their vision of the relationship does not square with reality. Sometimes they will select someone who offers stability and comfort and ENTPs later will become bored with the stability. When scorned, ENTPs use their powerful and broadreaching analysis to explain the reasons why the relationship was not good in the first place; additionally, they may become competitive with their former partner and work hard to win. ENTPs do not like to lose at anything they undertake.

Source: Some random site

All right, enough of this nonsense.

But oh god, that look in your eye:

Trouble that does not search words.
It sprung from the biblical vine and
Awaiting to return to the dirt.

(But oh god, that curve in your spine:
A question mark, a doctor's sigh
Was framed by the windowsill.)

And you saw something I did not in the night.
You saw something I did not in the night.

♫ "Broken Horse" (Freelance Whales, Weathervanes)

Insults in academia.

A friend shared with me some gems from the research he's doing for some paper or other. Apparently two academics locked in heated debate can't help but lobby some rather immature insults at each other via their medical publications.

Academic 1

1. Regrettably, Fumento seems unclear on the concept of a "controlled randomized clinical trial," an unfortunate failing for a wannabe medical journalist.
2. Regrettably, Fumento doesn't seem to understand the critical point, and perhaps even the less critical points, and so makes us both look like idiots.

Academic 2

1. His use of insults such as calling me a "wannabe medical journalist" (I have published three medical books with major publishers; he's published two) speaks for itself.

<3 Love it.

Lab.

What I will miss most about lab: my postdoc and the lab techs.

I tried to describe my postdoc to a close friend today and all he said was that I had "tried [my] best to make her sound as boring as humanly possible." But I find her interesting precisely because of her lack of surprising quirks: she's steady, driven, singularly interested, diligent, trust-worthy, deferential. This, I think, is what a scientist should be. It's how my PI is too.

It's also exactly what I'm not. (Not a coincidence.)

One of the lab techs is anomalous. She's vibrant and affable and is reading Lolita right now and entertained us with stories about her previous romantic snafus today. Her eyes flash when she says she will never let a guy get in the way of her career. She has a way of smiling that I've never been able to master. I think she wants to be a pediatrician, but she doesn't find herself capable enough to go to med school. She really could be a great doctor--she seems to genuinely genuinely care about others instantly, upon meeting them.

I'm glad I met these people. I like adding character types to my repertoire of the human race. I just realized how creepy that sounds.

Typos.

From today's Schott's Vocab on The New York Times:

Rachel Olding reported on a very costly typo for Penguin Group Australia: “The publishing company was forced to pulp and reprint 7000 copies of ‘Pasta Bible’ last week after a recipe called for ‘salt and freshly ground black people’ – instead of pepper – to be added to the spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto.”

Definitely the funniest moment of my night.

Family ties.

When I called my mother today, to tell her about accepting the internship in D.C., did I detect a sigh of resignation on the other end of the line?

Has she just now relinquished me from my childhood?

Or am I being dramatic?

I'm most likely making too big a deal out of this -- but that's how life occurs, right? It hinges on pivotal moments, either recognized at the time or not.

The realization that I will be away from home for so long concerns me, especially given the very real possibility that my parents will be moving within the next six months.

Psychopaths, Poetry.

Went to two completely different speaker events today.

1) Exploring the Brains of Psychopaths -- Dr. Kent Kiehl
(Sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, DIBS, the Philosophy Department)

Crazy economic analysis + fMRI data + diagnostic behaviors + anecdotes about serial killers. Apparently some treatments designed to instill empathy in prison inmates actually increase the likelihood of recidivism for psychopaths, because they learn how to fake empathy and therefore how to better commit crimes. Apparently psychopathy costs the U.S. $250-$400 billion/year due to prison costs, etc. (Crime costs $2.3 trillion/year?!) Apparently there is such a thing as a "vanilla in-mate," i.e. a non-psychopath, i.e. someone without the criminal versatility and sadism of a psychopath. Apparently psychopaths barely use their paralimbic systems, which Kiehl discovered after collecting data on 1000+ in-mates using his mobile fMRI trailer contraption (He plans to go to Alabama soon to collect more data. Difficult not to laugh at that).

2) Reading & Talk -- Dorianne Laux
(Sponsored by the 2010 Archive Literary Festival)

Poetry -- the rhythm of it. Laux has memorized tons of poetry and she recites it on command, to elucidates her points. Never have I thought of poetry so seriously. It was always an instinct, but I guess now I see how it could be a craft, how it could almost be a trickery of sorts -- a mastery of rhythmic effect and imagery.

A poem she recited for us, to illustrate the importance of syllables:

One Heart
Li-Young Lee

Look at the birds. Even flying
is born

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open

at either end of day.
The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.

Padgett Powell.

I wrote this in my journal during PP's talk last Thursday:

"My life has been, I guess, a slow discovery that I am an ass. Very slow."

"Learn to play your instruments. Then get sexy."

Quoting Barthelme: "We have wacky mode here. Does anyone know what wacky modes must do? Break their hearts."

And out of a strange anecdote about his relationship with his publisher: "The firing didn't take."

You think it's a secret, but it never was one.

I've been ineffectually trying to do something for hours without getting anything substantial done. The choice: to sleep now, or to stay up until I eventually finish one item of work? I guess I've opted for the second without realizing it.

I was not made properly to survive in this existence. I don't know what else to say except that nothing convinces me anymore of the things for which I never previously needed convincing. What I need is my family: My mother, scolding me for not focusing on schoolwork. My father, reminding me that I was once upon a time even less wise than I am now. My brother, pestering me to play cards with him. I need a house on a cul-de-sac in Ohio within a five-minute jog of my best friend's house, and I need her to squint at me when I show up breathless at her backdoor at two in the morning, and I need to giggle over horrible stories about middle-school crushes with her until the first hints of sunrise.

Acute nostalgia is my poison of choice, it seems.

I borrowed the title of this post from a poem by Ralph Angel, which has haunted me since last summer:

You think it's a secret, but it never was.
Sell the house, move to the beach, this isn't his closet,
there are no phantoms here.

You think that if you know the truth you'll forgive her. "I lied,"
she said. "I was afraid, afraid I'd be left alone."

Do we not each day leave this world
together, half asleep, a goodbye kiss steadying ourselves
against the seats of the train?

Do we not meet again and, always
dreaming, not find a word for it, the dream that would exclude us?

Someone remembers something that happened a long time
ago. She forgot it, it changed everything.

What can I tell you that you don't already know?
That life is sad? That this moment
brims with too-sweet wisteria?

And you, too, are sad. And hopeful. Adjustments
were made, the way they can be now.

You pick up your knife and almost
look at it, and put it down again. That she destroys
her life by keeping alive.

Botched politics.

What makes me laugh the most about the recent political scandal that just hit my college campus is the sheer ineptitude of it from all sides. It's completely hilarious: a politician known for his lack of diplomatic abilities ousted by the only student group on campus who would even conceivably make anti-gay slurs. And the insensitivity of two college newspapers. There is so much finger-pointing -- and so little productive discussion -- to be had.

So much being botched all the time. And right after we'd gotten so much good press from the NCAA Championship too. I've never cared much about politics, but boy is it a spectacle to behold!

The wind-up before the wind-down.

Skyped with a friend last night who I haven't talked to for weeks--he's been busy traveling Europe, and in that interim I find that I have grown to miss him.

I don't ever miss people, not really--not in a way that means anything more than "where are you so you can once again reassure me of myself?" So that in most people what I miss is a reflection of myself or who I think I want to be, but in missing him, I missed more than just companionship (I rarely see him anyway, and maybe will see him once this summer if at all). Our friendship has always been a process of my understanding too late everything he's already known for a while -- I think he realized we could be good friends long before the thought even entered my head.

Because I know my own deficiencies, I'm easily impressed by pragmatists, logicians, those level-headed enough to understand exactly how the world is not falling apart. With this friend, I find that I am instantly put at ease by his cool attention to solutions.

For it is important that awake people be awake.

I've never actually read this to anyone, but I think it might be a good idea to start.

A Ritual To Read To Each Other
William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Mess.

Everyone.

Embodiment.

Realizing more and more that I have intensely physical reactions to my emotions, becoming more aware of the whole mind-body phenomenon. After emotional trauma, I can't fully fall asleep for days -- a bizarre insomnia that somehow keeps me more awake and alert instead of tiring me out. Nowadays whenever I think of a memory that still bothers me or the imminence of the future, I feel queasy. When something exciting happens I find it more and more difficult to restrain myself -- the enthusiasm just kind of tumbles out of me.

Today I was at lab running my fifteenth PCR of the day and in a sudden bout of existential stress, I ran to the bathroom and stood gagging over one of the sterile white toilet bowls. I could control neither my thoughts nor my nausea, and in some way they were the same. I'm always perplexed, even in the moment, by how the world warps around me -- how stark, how unfriendly it seems all at once.

As a perversity, I tell myself to believe that my physical and emotional identities are collapsing in on each other, until I become nothing more than a passing ambience in the air. This is gimmickry, I know, but I'm good at entertaining such bombast. I like to think that I'm falling apart, peeling and crumbling like an aging Venetian building. It reminds me of Professor Moten's scholarly aestheticism, to which he is monkishly devoted. Or maybe of Professor Ruderman engrossed in D.H. Lawrence scholarship in her carrel somewhere in the corner of Perkins Library.

Various & sundry.

Back-burner thoughts:

1. My new claim to fame/shame is a random column (titled "Why I am not a neuroscience major") that I wrote for my college paper, which I thought would elicit just as much of a response as my other pseudophilosophical columns. Except I guess I actually managed to offend some people this time -- amazing what you can do when you decide to take a stance on a tangible issue. (Plus do I agree with myself? Plus what is this mutual animosity between the humanities and the sciences, and can anyone have any productive thoughts about the rift?)

2. Padgett Powell had so much more authenticity and grit to him than JSF. Still must understand this. Also: having drinks with a writer = most collegiate experience of my life.

3. Perspectives on dysfunctional friendships and barely functional people.

Writerly experiences.

Just got back from visiting a memoir-writing class -- I was invited by a professor on the assumption that I'd know something about creative nonfiction. A strange situation: because he teaches a continuing education course, I was the youngest person in the room by about two decades, and I talked to these people about memory and truth. I felt incredibly naive and potentially fraudulent, but they all seemed to take my personal essay well.

I am constantly being reminded of the humility of writers. The students in this class were middle-aged, with real stories and experiences to tell. Some of them had previously been journalists. They talked about families and townhouses and hospital visits. In a sense, they were much more real to me than Jonathan Safran Foer, who seemed to be playing at a life instead of living one. (Must think more about why this is my impression.)

One thing Foer and every writer I meet keep telling me: Writing is not glamorous. It's a keyboard and you and hours and hours (days and days and months and years) of painstaking effort. It's work. You can't be a coward for this, nor can you expect to be validated by anyone else. I should probably inspect my own level of commitment and fortitude before I so casually tell myself that I will write.

Everything, Illuminated.

Rereading one of my favorite books.

Three passages I never forgot, even though it'd been four years since I lay crying and crumpled in my bed at home (so much distance and time traversed since then, but I am essentially the same soppy mess, no?):

1. 4.517--The dream of falling in love, marriage, death, love. This dream seems as if it lasts for hours, although it always takes place in the five minutes between my returning from the field and being woken up for dinner. I dream of when I met my wife, fifty years ago, and it's exactly as it happened. I dream of our marriage, and I can even see my father's tears of pride. It's all there, just as it was. But then I dream of my own death, which I have heard is impossible to do, but you must believe me. I dream of my wife telling me on my deathbed that she loves me, and even though she thinks I can't hear her, I can, and she says she wouldn't have changed anything. It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, and they have and will a thousand times, I awake (53-54).

2. He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. . . . He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all (64).

3. And when she said, Father, I love you, she was neither naive nor dishonest, but the opposite: she was wise and truthful enough to lie. They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things--willingly playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life (114).

etc etc etc. I would quote the entire book if I could.

Emotional amnesia.

I'm coming back to myself after a long time of being absent.

This, I think, is a common thought that I stumble upon repeatedly -- once or twice a month, whenever the seasons change, whenever circumstances jar me out of complacency.

I feel destined to repeat this growth process for the rest of my life, just as Clive Wearing's journal reveals the full force of his retrograde amnesia:

But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake. . . . 2:14 P.M: this time finally awake. . . . 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.

(Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_sacks?currentPage=all#ixzz0kpvMQUvk)

It's difficult for me to continually feel like myself. I think I get too caught up in ambitions and associations and goals, which everyone says you're supposed to set and maintain and use as a measure of something important.

But I always find myself losing myself during the academic year, only to emerge during the summer into a better sort of existence, and I wonder during my transitions why I let it get that way.

My conclusion is that I need to travel again. I think back to last summer and the trip to Oxford as one of the most self-affirming times of my life. I need the distance and the space to recreate that feeling, in order to discover again what it means to be fearless. So: Tibet -- may you cure me.

Everything has everything to do with myself and nothing to do with any of the expectations I pile on myself, or any of the people in my life, or any of the lies I tell myself about why things happen.

This is the hardest lesson I will always forget.