white is not surrender, despite what you've been told.

No amount of coffee, no amount of crying, no amount of whiskey, no amount of wine, no nothing else will do, i've gotta have you.

Last.fm makes me happy.

Carved pumpkins with the flatmates tonight--third year running Amy and I have done this. A Sarah Lawrence tradition, now. "Even in thirty years," she said. "We'll still do this." It was cute. More flatmate bonding. My mother sent me Halloween decorations last year--a taste of home, from the years Justin, my mother and I would go all out decorating. Cars and passerby would stop on the street to take pictures. We turned our front lawn into a graveyard, hung ghosts from the trees, littered the lawn with skeleton bones, laced spiderweb over our railings, painted pumpkins on the steps. When I got a bit older, Roo and the girls would come and help. I remember freezing outside in hoodies and jeans, that leaf-burning smell in the air. It always seemed like it was cloudy. Perfect New Englandness.


Freshman year at Sarah Lawrence, my wonderful neighbor had sent me a care package of Halloween candy and garlands and the like. Marty, Amy, Eunice & I descended on the Gilbert kitchen--a term I use rather loosely--with the pumpkins we had procured, and dived into them with steak knives, pop music blaring in the background. We stuck them on the windowsills facing the North Lawn, with flashlights inside, until they finally rotted a few weeks later and the cleaning ladies got rid of them. I dressed up as Snow White that year, because that was my nickname anyway. The pale, pale skin, and my long black hair almost down to my waist. Wednesday Addams was Marty's other favorite nickname for me, but Snow White made the better costume. Sara, Victoria & I went trick or treating through Bronxville. Last year, Amy came over to AC 12, cooked a fantastic dinner, and we carved a pumpkin into a squirrel. It was amazing. AC 12 in general was pretty fabulous, but that night was especially good. We went trick or treating again last year--me, Amy, Joanna, Eunice at the end. The memories are so clear, but right now they feel like a different world.


Friday Amy & I will go on a ghost tour of Oxford, then hit up a pub crawl. The Iffley flats are having their own Halloween house party Saturday night which we'll all go to. I think I'll end up going as some Moulin Rouge type thing. Ransack my closet for my best corset, my petticoat skirt I always get compliments on. Something simple like that.


Went to the Bodleian to work today with Alex. Sometimes I really can't believe this is where I go to school, these are the places I get to study in. It just doesn't get old. And there's so much to see & do. None of us have even scratched the surface.

"i'm telling you from where i sit you're one of a kind"

I've been listening to Griffin House a lot. Thanks Amy for that new musical obsession. That, and Sugarland's "Very Last Country Song." What can I say? It's been running through my head. If life stayed the way that it was & lovers never fell out of love, if memories didn't last so long, if nobody did nobody wrong, if we knew what we had before it was gone, if every road led back home...

This evening it started snowing briefly, for the very first time this year. It's rather a mess out now, but we all ran outside for a minute, stood there shivering in sweatshirts and boots and blankets. It was bright and sunny this morning. Spent five hours in the Oxford IT getting my laptop de-virused, and emerge into the rain. English weather. Still, walking through the parks this morning was beautiful. And after my fiction tutorial, I actually felt excited to sit down and write. I haven't yet, but at least now I have a better sense of what I need to do.

Also discovered the marvelous fact that Oxford does indeed have a Masters program in creative writing. Absurdly competitive--only 14 slots and about 150 applicants--but in a lovely twist of fate, my literature tutor is the Director of it. I actually might be able to come back here, work, write, live. I really might be able to.

Like any place, the initial euphoria has worn off a bit--New York was always the same way for me after a while--but I'm more in love with this city than I've been with anywhere else. It's cosmopolitan& suburban, academic & arty, comfortable & surprising. At the very least, that sense of calm I felt on arriving almost a month ago has yet to evaporate. That's never happened to me before.

"Just be," Amy keeps telling me. "That's all you can do." It's hard not to look at her and want what she has--if only because she's integrating more easily, and I keep trying to do just that. Perhaps I shouldn't have arrived with any sort of expectations, but after last year/this past summer, I needed to have some & I needed to get away. Coming here was probably the best thing I could have done for myself.

Marty, written to me: "you are beautiful. you are smart. you have an amazing career ahead of you. please, please do not settle for someone who is not worthy of your affections. you are at a whole different level than all the men you've ever been with...i am half inclined to start a committee to approve michelle's male interests! (in that case, you should meet some of my fairfield friends--they would love to assist you)...things tend to jump up and bite you in the ass a lot of the time. so chin up! i love you, and i don't love everybody. go live your life!"

This is why we have best friends. To remind us of these things.

Tonight, I am going to watch Harry Potter, I think. It is that kind of night.

freewrite.

"Figure out your views on writing, your views on life," I was told by my writing tutor last week. "They may not be what you expect."

***

I believe in all the cliches---love, beauty, truth--or rather, I want to believe in them. I want to believe in karma, but I've never seen it work to my advantage. I like to play myself off as a cynic, but I'm still ever the optimist at heart. I want everything, and worry I will get none of it. I don't believe in God, except when it's convenient. I don't buy religious rationales for all the horrible things that happen in the world. I try to live my life like its artful, immersing myself in academics and other intellectual pursuits, but I wonder if I wouldn't give it all up for the chance to be truly happy. But I'm basing my idea of happiness on a fantasy because I've never had the kind of relationship I'm looking for. I play out my own neuroses in my writing even as I play them out in my own life--or can't play them out, as it were. I don't know if I have what it takes, if my discipline is up to snuff. Maybe I've coasted for too long.

Because I can't be in person all the things I want to be. Because I can't say what I want to say, so I have other people say them. Because I don't know that I'll be able to live the lives I want. So does that make writing a selfish pursuit? Perhaps. I want to change the world, but to my own liking. I fight for the issues that affect me personally--or have affected--because I never give myself time to mourn anything. I am always looking forward, can never stay in the moment. Plans, plans, plans. "You are not happy." Maybe. Would I really trade it all for convention? My mother did the opposite. But I at least want the chance to fuck it all up. I take up fights that concern me because I want someone to say yes I understand. Why did I write that memoir? Because I needed people to know. Because I couldn't keep it all inside. Because I needed to know who else had had that experience. But no. More than that, I needed lots of people to say "it was not your fault." I needed lots of people to tell me I was strong, to be horrified, to be enraged--to have all the reactions I couldn't/didn't have--from myself or from the people I needed to have had them. Selfish vs. altruistic. Afraid I don't have any original ideas, so I just pop out what sounds good. What will it take for me to get excited?

Obsessions--male relationships. I keep returning to/writing the same ones. Trauma. Female relationships. Why do you do what you do? Beauty/aesthetic. I never slow down, and so do I really experience anything? When I melt, I don't write about it. Do I write the things that matter or the ones that don't? I am afraid to be told "you are not that good." Idealization vs. reality. Sex. Fantasy.

I don't write about happy families.

What rules do you follow? Don't you follow? What do I believe. Convictions. I need to have some more. Be angry. Be raw. Speak your mind.

I cried when I read that memoir in class. Visceral reactions. But I wrote it impassively. My best work has always been in one fell swoop.

"You like to turn things into a story, do you?"

I am more honest with total strangers than I am with you.

This is what I believe. There is no rhyme or reason but what we make ourselves. You create your own justifications.

I like my options. I am afraid of being tied down. Ergo, so are my characters.

I am too transparent.

I worry about dying young. About dying. About my mother, brother, father.

I treat sex like a game I know how to play but have to yet master the rules.

My mother always asked me "what's going on in that pretty little head of yours?" Things which I think but never say. If I say them outloud, that is worse, because the possibility of being rejected outloud would be worse than me not saying it at all.

I still think you and I could have/ should have ended up on an entirely different path. I wanted to kiss you before I left--before you left, that afternoon--but I didn't. I didn't want to risk it all getting screwed up all over again.

I use my characters to try on different persona's, different lives, but it's never that simple.

"So in love with your writing"--is it or is it not the same as me?


What I should tell Linda tomorrow: "I have to start something new. But where/how do I begin? I have trouble thinking of ideas. I used to use photographs. I need some way to feel inspired. I don't want to keep writing the same old thing. Because I think I'm better than what I've been doing. It just takes time to get there again."

"I don't want to come to you tonight"

"It doesn't get easier to tell the truth. It always gets harder. The deeper you go the harder it gets."

Maybe I'm just kidding myself here.


"It's still early," Jessie reminded me. "Don't fret."
I try.

"I used to think of it as a plate glass window just begging for a brick"

Joined the Oxford Poetry Society this evening. Was very much like Dead Poets Society, albeit not in a cave and with British accents. But, like Dead Poets Society, completely male dominated. And I realize, coming after my last entry, this makes me sound like one-track feminist. But I wasn't the only one to comment on that fact. I mean the entire reading was made up of male Oxford students--specifically, attractive, swaggering, slightly pretentious male Oxford students, with varying degrees of talent. But nonetheless. Where are all the girl poets? And perhaps not surprisingly, sticking to strict verse seems quite popular, along with overtly religious themes & odes to lost love. It made me miss Tina's class. Give me some Sirens & Outlaws, please. Well, now that I have joined, it would be ridiculous for me to just sit back, mouth off, and not do anything. I want to inject some Sharon Olds-style life into this thing. Be rebellious, make people take notice. Though given my oftentimes lack of assertiveness, that could be easier said than done. But I at least want to try.


***

So, at the suggestion of my darling flatmate Jeff, who reads this blog, and was mildly dismayed no one would know who he was, here's a brief introduction to my flat. You have me, obviously, then Amy, who I'm so happy I'm living with. Apparently some of the girls back home have bets going on how long it will be until we kill each other, but quite honestly, it's working out perfectly. Last night over drinks (seriously, do we do anything else?) we both commented on how grateful we were to be sharing this experience with our best friend; how wonderful it is to go out and have adventures but to still know you have a built in security net. Anyway. Then there is Alex, from Wesleyan, who I totally adore. She's incredibly smart, cute, and does wicked imitations of her crazy tutors. The three of us spend a lot of time together, which I love. Jeff is from Swarthmore, and also quite smart and very charming, not to mention an excellent cook and an avid golf player, on the Oxford team no less. He lives next door to me. We all love him. Finally, we have Mark, from Reid. Mark is an anomaly. I have yet to really figure him out. But anomalies can be a good thing.

Kind of like the monkey head we found at the bus stop this morning. Anomalies. It keeps things interesting.

Now to go finish Dracula. Enough with this procrastinating. Indeed.

"That quiet voice, it's rising up again"

It has been one of those days. Even at Oxford I guess you're bound to have them.

It was just so fucking frustrating to hear that even at Oxford--especially at Oxford--this place that is supposed to be (or at least, I have fashioned it to be) this liberal, intellectual, spirited haven--even here, they have all the same problems Sarah Lawrence did/does, and maybe more. Listening to the girls at WomCam talk today (Women's Campaign--Oxford's feminist society) it was all I could do not to burst into tears. I spent two years fighting that battle. Yes, I learned how to do it--how you do (and don't) navigate administration, how you get information out, what information there is to get out. I know how to fight that battle. But do I even want to? Again? I was honestly aghast to hear they have absolutely no services for survivors of sexual assault; that the only place you can go is a rape crisis center, which is run by barely trained volunteers with no counseling experience and limited hours, and is itself always on the verge of collapse. Sarah Lawrence's excuse was monetary. They just never had the money, for a variety of reasons. And after two years, we finally reached some sort of compromise. It wasn't entirely adequate, but it was better than before. Take Back the Night last year was, for me, the culmination of that particular struggle. Standing there with Erin, watching the writings of all those girls burn, both of us silent, somber, invested in it for entirely different, equally important reasons--I will never forget that moment. I knew even then it would be a memory that even years later, would define Sarah Lawrence for me. But what's Oxford's excuse? The University is endowed with billions; the town itself is more than well off. It's not like they don't have the money. They just funnel it elsewhere. "Into more leather couches"--wryly declared by the American graduate student who's been living in the UK for years and was the instigator of this particular conversation in the first place.

It was just beyond frustrating to hear these girls talk of how they're unable to speak up in front of their male peers; how "feminist is a dirty word;" how the latest bop theme is "Spartans and Sluts" and how that's widely considered respectable. How they run assertiveness training workshops and study skills workshops for women because Oxbridge is notorious for having a finals gap between women and men. How this is still considered in many ways an "old boys school," and as an American, who's spent the entirety of her undergraduate career thus far at an especially liberal, predominately female campus, I am just having a hard time understanding--or rather, accepting--all of this.

Yes, I could--and maybe should--fight that battle again. But walking back in the rain, it was all I could do not to cry.

"Reducing the world is an adult skill"

I will...never ever drink that much whiskey again in my life. Having generally stuck to such things as vodka & orange juice, or girly cocktails, or, here, ciders, I was so very dumb and didn't realize drinking jack & coke is not like those other things. Hence, four drinks later, I amazingly am still upright, wondering why I'm not feeling anything when generally by that point I would be on my ass, and now, nine hours later, I kind of want to die. And I have never had a hangover in my life before. Oh god. Now it's all one big blur. We went the Oxford Union bar, which was absolutely amazing in its sheer classy pretension. Outside there literally were guys in tuxes smoking pipes. Brilliant. And the library looked like something out of Clue, complete with dusty old volumes and velvet draperies. Then we went to the Eagle & Child, where Tolkein and C.S. Lewis used to sit and write, and then we went to the bar underneath the Oxford Union, where the contrast between that and the Union bar itself could not have been greater. Think pounding music, grungy basement setting, and unwashed gothy children throwing them back. Then, after somehow carrying on an entirely lucid conversation with Rachele about our double tutorial, I arrived home around 1:00, only to have some sort of conversation with Fayez about his philosophy of neuroscience course. At some point on the walk home I had "fucking gorgeous" screamed at me by a carful of drunk? British boys. And yet it is never quite that flattering.

So. Somehow today I have to: outline my literature tutorial; start said literature tutorial; plan lowkey dinner gathering for tomorrow evening with the assistance of Amy & Alex (after we couldn't help but comment on the overwhelming attractiveness of Jeff's grad school student golf team captain, he took it upon himself to invite him over, saying I specifically would cook for him) Yeah. I can't cook. So we are having a gathering instead. Also. Must stop feeling nauseous. Right away please. I am already so off schedule.