Between Clever Lines

I am on a bus right now. What an interesting transient community. I am sitting next to someone who has lived at the same university as me for two and a half months. We have never met. Isn't that peculiar?  I was thinking of that earlier. Last Friday as I was leaving my Chemistry lab at around 5:00, one of my classmates was heading in the same direction as I was. We walked together, exchanging casual remarks about the weather and music and our lives. I'd never met him before. I'm not sure I would have been able to pick him out as a Brandeis student in a crowd. But we just kept talking and it was nice.  Our paths were about to split when I realized I had no idea what his name was. We yelled introductions as our paths diverged. It was a backwards sort of friendship. I didn't see him again all week, until the next lab. It turns out we've been in the same lab group for two and a half months now. Even then, I didn't talk to him during that lab. We left at differen...

            I want to dye my hair again.  I think maybe turquoise this time.  I’ve had the turquoise dye under my cabinet for forever, but there’re a few reasons I haven’t dyed it yet.  For one, I don’t want to be that girl, the one who dyes her hair just because she’s heading off to school and can reinvent herself.  I also didn’t want to have dyed hair during the high holidays while I was at synagogue.             But I had a conversation with Cece today about what’s probably the real reason: The Manic Pixie Mythos.  When I had purple hair, people looked at me differently.  They thought I was quirky, interesting.  Just because of the color of the tips of my hair.  Isn’t that odd?  And I didn’t want people to think I was a manic pixie.  I didn’t want to feel like I had to live up to my hair.          ...

            Sometimes, I get so involved in the lives of others that I forget how to live on my own.  I share my hurts with my friends, but I forget to let myself actually feel them, to just sit still and breathe and acknowledge that yes, this hurts.  Very much, in fact.  But that’s okay.  That hurt means I’m alive and it means that I had something that I cared about enough to miss.  And I’m lucky because not everyone ever has something that important to lose.             I need to learn to be my own person, even when I’d rather be have someone else around.  I need to realize that it’s okay to be in my own headspace sometimes.  I don’t need another voice around at all times to tell me I’m okay.  I’m making that time for me to be alone.  Well, alone with Taylor Swift and Ben and Jerry.  Hey, a girl has to have her ways of coping, right?  ...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the power of a name.  I spend so much time talking to my friends on skype.  We’re almost constantly connected.  From the time I turn on my computer to the time I turn it off at night, I am talking to someone.  It struck me the other day that I hardly ever hear (or rather read) my name. We are conditioned to love hearing our name.  So much so, in fact, that our brain rewards us for just hearing the syllables that we use to identify ourselves.  And yet I’m surprised and happy every time I read the six letters of my name typed by someone else. Why don’t we use our names more often?  Maybe we feel like it’s weird to continue to say the names of people we’ve known for months or years.  Maybe we feel like they should know that we know who they are by now.  But it doesn’t hurt to remind them occasionally. I guess what I’m really saying is say my name, say my name .

I am in transit again, this time in a car, listening to nerd rock and watching rain splatter against the sun roof. I'm on my way to Long Island for a few days to stay with my grandparents. My aunt and uncle are taking shifts driving, and this car is filled with so much caffeine. Sort of necessary when I didn't finally crash onto my bed until around 3:30 this morning. As much as I love the feeling of airports and being on the train, I also love the anticipation the night before. Unfortunately, that usually adds to my already irritating habit of not sleeping very much. I know I'll be up late the night before every trip, so I usually save all of my packing until the night before. I then proceed to stay up, throwing things into a suitcase and chatting on skype. It's a system that works for me; I don't agonize about packing for weeks, and I don't have trouble sleeping in the car. I love road trips. I like the possibility of everywhere we stop. I like the junk foo...