the other good thing about being here is that my parents have a baby grand piano in the living room. today i wore a sundress and banged out bright eyes songs on the piano and sang at the top of my lungs and sweat dripped down the back of my neck. then i tried to play debussy's first arabesque. it used to be my favorite thing to play on the harp.

(i bet you didn't know that i played concert harp for 6 years. now my harp sits in the living room making me feel guilty, but i'm too lazy to play it because i'd have to tune it, all 80 of the strings, and it's intimidating when i haven't played for so long. my harp teacher used to work so hard to get me to play with emotion and feeling. i thought i was playing with emotion, but it didn't come out that way. i guess that's how i am about everything. my favorite part of playing harp was being in the city youth orchestra and sitting behind my harp listening to mahler symphonies. he wrote a lot of symphonies where the harp only plays two notes the whole time, so i got to just sit and enjoy it.)

i'm feeling better than before, my brain is settling down a bit. i didn't cry today. i'm curious about what's going to happen to me.. i always used to go around saying "nothing bad has ever happened to me." i think bad things did happen, it was just the way i perceived them and never dwelled on them. (because when i said that to c., who is a huge pessimist, he started listing all these bad things that happened to me, but i was like "phff, whatever, that wasn't that bad.") actually, being in love with gabe was the first thing in my life i considered bad, but later i changed my mind because i got so much out of the pain, strange as that sounds.

this heroin experience is as close as i've gotten since then to something i would call bad, although i hesitate to break my good streak, and i'd prefer to not to privilege heroin with that honor. so i'm wondering if getting over it will be worse than other things were. people would probably tell me yes, but i don't care, i don't believe in thinking that way. i believe that i'm magic and i can do whatever i want however i want to do it. so i'll stay here and continue trying to hate heroin and see what happens, and just for now we won't give it any unique status, we'll just call it another experience that was painful but beautiful in some way that maybe was hard to see while it was happening (or maybe we felt the beauty the whole time).

one thing i started to think about in my anthropology classes, listening to other students, is that anthropologists are more likely than other people to look at things as "meta good." like, in my communism class we were always talking about all the awful things the people in soviet countries had to endure, but then someone would say "but it was good because..." or "but afterwards they missed it because..." how people don't realize at the time the true nature of something, they think they hate it but they love it in some larger sense. anthropologists love to claim that you can't understand your own culture from inside it. they go in and say "look how these awful bread lines and shortages build solidarity and community through personal networks and informal trade systems." that's why i love anthropology so much, because there's so much "bad" stuff that i appreciate in a "meta" sort of way. like disasters, power outages, getting lost, etc. i don't know. i'm crazy.

oh no, i'm in the basement and i'm getting cold in my little sundress. i curse having to put on a sweater. by the way, extreme heat is one of the best examples of things i meta-love. i love the discomfort on a higher level. i've written about my love for heat way too much in here, so i won't go on. i have goose bumps. this is so not ok.