Taxes

I've discovered that tax forms read like a really bad choose-your-own adventure novel.

"As you approach the door, you hear a scream on the other side!
If you go through the door anyway, enter a 0 and go to Line 14.
If you turn around and go back, attach Schedule D.
If you listen to hear more, add lines 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enter on Line 2 of your PA-40."

Once we've mailed them in, some poor tax employee gets to process them, which can't be fun. I wrote jokes on the envelopes this year to liven things up a little.

Integration

There are times when nineteenth-century literature feels really distant, and times when it feels really relevent. I'm reading an 1844 tract on the rights of women that refers to "ludicrous pictures of ladies in hysterics at the polls, and senate chambers filled with cradles." I'm thinking the cradles wouldn't be be such a bad thing - when I have children I'm totally going to take them lobbying with me. It's such rubbish that there are these strict categories - you are In Politics or Not In Politics; you are a Professional or you are a Stay-At-Home, you have a public and a private life, your kids are at home or chucked in a daycare.

I'd rather gnaw my own arm off than be In Politics, but I still want to give my senators a piece of my mind. And if I'm going to be in their offices my kids might as well come too and learn about it.

Your soul like a message in a bottle to me

Dear Emma Goldman,

Even though I wish you hadn't spent quite so much time advocating assassination as a method of social change, I think you're super.

Julia

(Why are my best fan letters always to dead people?)

All-female education 4, Julia 0.

Bryn Mawr has all kinds of curses - if you go up certain stairs or between certain trees you won't graduate, if you kiss someone on the Moon bench you'll break up. (If you kiss someone under Rock Arch you'll supposedly be together forever, which could well be a curse depending on who it is.) Tonight I discovered one they don't tell you about - walking down Senior Row alone realizing that you're likely to never have to worry about either of those later curses.

In my greatest act of cowardice in years, today I didn't talk to him again. I may be a fish, but do I ever want that bicycle.

A split knish in Philadelphia

O irony:
Opening night of Vagina Monologues
and mine spends the first act
awkwardly perched on the arm of a sofa
stage right
Complaining bitterly.

Connections

I'm reading Heat Wave, about the deaths in Chicago in the summer of 1995. The argument is that people didn't die just because of the heat, but because they were old and isolated and living alone in stifling one-room flats without any friends or relatives for the morgue to even call after the bodies were found. More and more people are living alone now, and more are dying alone.

Last weekend one of my housemates slipped on the ice and broke her leg. Someone else was walking with her at the time, and her swim coach and I stayed with her all day in the hospital until she was out of surgery. Later her mother flew up from Florida. It scared me to think of what would have happened if she hadn't had those connections - how long might she have lain on the icy parking lot? After the surgery, how would she have gotten home from the hospital? How would she function for the months until she gets her cast off?

It's not just for disasters that it's nice to live with other people. It's a luxury to be able to walk into the kitchen and find Katharine making muffins, to walk into the living room and find Kristy and Kyla watching movies. Sissi's drinking hot chocolate and telling Evie about the time she almost got arrested in Germany, Jenny's riding her bike through the hallway. You can always find someone to drink or talk or eat popcorn with. There are other people in Philadelphia and around the world living this way, and I want to keep being one of them.