10/13/05

It has been raining for seven days. Actual non-stop water falling from the sky for one hundred and sixty eight hours. I refused to leave the house today, which was probably a bad idea (solitary confinement is sadder than rain), but after yesterday, when my feet were wet for ten hours and I feared gangrene, I just wasn’t going to have any more of it. I am from Seattle and this is ridiculous.

One of my favorite nights in Prague was the night our Russian teacher took us to see the symphony. It was not only my favorite because I got to sit next to a cute English boy for a while, but also because the concert itself was actually amazing. The conductor was a little man with wild hair who used his entire body to direct the music. It was like he was an instrument, maybe, and so was the audience — when the applause started before the final note had faded out, you could see his body tense at the dissonance and he shot up his hand to quiet us. When there had been enough silence, he gestured his permission and we clapped.

And the soloist — oh, the soloist, this giant hulk of a man in a white dress shirt and gray pants to match his hair, who slouched over the piano like, I swear, Frankenstein’s monster and played with big fingers such complicated passages it made me tired even to see them. I watched the sweat paste his shirt to his back in concentric circles, each one closer to the color of his skin. He was from Florida, it turned out, and I’m sure did not speak Czech at all, and when he came out for an encore he announced merely, “Mozart,”1 as if it was the only word he needed, and really it was.

It was all fantastic enough that I didn’t even care that I had to leave the seat next to the pretty British boy for the seat next to the guy in the puffy jacket with the unibrow who I once caught looking at boobs in the computer lab. It was okay. I just stared at the stage in awe.

Sometimes I feel like writing down my memories erases them from my head.2 Please let me keep this memory, just this one.

There was also a ballet, at the very beginning of the semester, that the center bought us tickets to as a welcome gesture. Please do not mistake this for culture; I know less about dance than I do about classical music. It was modern ballet, they wore spandex, there were giant rolls of corrugated cardboard on stage that sometimes doubled as dance partners. I don’t know. All I know is: dancers have such skin. It’s stretched much tighter than mine over muscles and bones, and you can see every single piece of them slide around under it as they move. Sometimes there would be lots of them on stage, and they would touch, or they wouldn’t, and I would realize that the thing I wanted most was for all of them to pull themselves into a giant knot of flesh and just be there, touching, all in the same place. I may or may not have been a little bit frustrated in certain ways. Dancers are pure sex, I swear.

I think one of the reasons school gets me down is that I don’t end up seeing nearly enough things like this. I just read and write and eat and sleep.

I remember once watching my friend Melanie playing the violin and being much more fascinated by the way the muscles were straining in her neck than by the music itself.

I guess I like performance better than art? Or maybe I just like anatomy. Oh, god, I love anatomy.

Sometimes I want to eat the world.3

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1. I actually have no idea what he played. Let’s say it was Mozart, though.

2. This is just about the only reason why losing the entire contents of my hard drive upset me so much. I’d been writing into a text file on my computer since eighth grade, and the last time I made a copy of any sort was three years ago. My memory is pitifully weak, and that’s where it all was, and it’s gone, and that hurts. I’ve been scared to write since. Maybe it’ll force me to just remember.

3. I have been accused of being crazy for saying things like this, especially about things like Leaves of Grass, which I really just wanted to devour with a fork. However, I am obsessed with both anatomy and etymology, and incorporation literally means to take into one’s body, so it follows that the best way to understand and utilize something is to put some frosting on it and then go ahead and chomp it down. Freud, not that you care, totally backs me up on this.4

4. I just mentioned Freud in my online diary. Oh, god.