Lying in the black bed with black bedding next to black bookshelves in the basement bachelor apartment full of metal and glass and the skulls of a few smallish and not-so-small animals and books about the influence of race on intelligence and various other warning signs I was mostly ignoring because I was nonetheless so turned on by the man who possessed them, perhaps because he possessed them, he had been turning me on this way since I was 18 and all the years-long gaps in the seduction had recently been retrospectively filled in, and we had just had sex or were about to have sex or were consciously not having sex.

This is when I decided I wanted to share the fantasy, so I said: do you have any fantasies?

he evaded the question by telling me that us lying together as we were right then was his fantasy, so I asked him if he wanted to hear one of mine, and he said by all means, so I told him:

I am sitting stone still like a statue on a altar in a temple. Outside the temple door is long line of men, waiting quietly. One at a time, they enter the temple, bow before the altar, where I sit cross-legged like a boddhisattva or an oracle. After prostrating, the men come forward, carefully insert their penises into my open mouth, and become instantly enlightened.

I had never told anyone this story ever, and after hearing it, my lover only asked: are they Japanese men? I said, that wasn’t important, the faces of particular men were never seen all that clearly, but I wondered how much he knew

For me, writing and speaking seem to be very different pathways to getting words out. When I write, I don’t necessarily hear the words in my head before I mark them on the paper. When I am writing well, I rarely seem to have any idea what I am going to “say” before I say it. But with speaking, I seem to think knowing what I’m going to say is a requirement to break silence at all, while most other people do not. People talk about extemporaneous speaking, thinking out loud, having no filters on their mouths. I don’t relate to this. If I want to brainstorm, a pen is required. I filter everything before it is spoken, and vast numbers of unverbalized thoughts are lost.

. . .

At the vision conference, my sixth or seventh time going, I had a dream about signal detection theory. It was either that wetting a kitten’s fur increased the signal-to-noise ratio, or that drying it did. I downloaded recordings of white noise on my iphone to try to drown out the snoring of the postdoc, my friend, sharing the hotel room with me. One of the mp3′s had a heartbeat embedded into it, but still I couldn’t sleep. I kept trying to hide from all the scientists, lest they expect me to be one. There were rumors of my advisor smashing a coffee cup on the floor. I continued to have nightmares about my talk for weeks after giving it. Nothing ever seems to change, except that some of the high school kids who used to come to the lab are the ones authoring papers and winning the Best Illusion of the Year.

I went to mass this morning for the first time since Easter. It is hard to go these days, I feel like I am viewing everything taking place at the altar from a great, great distance. There was a time I was so close to every word the priest spoke, so present in every gesture, I could see right into the bread as flesh and wine as blood, would tingle and shake with a sensation of actual participation in the sacrifice, every syllable imbued with this overlay of past in present. Now like so many others at so many times I stand there reciting my Latin from memory without even the grammar I so painstakingly learned holding it up. Everything held far away and at the surface. I think of the scandals. I wonder who I might have given the impression that any of the ritual were truly necessary, that any of the dogma and the structure were a substitute for God.

At home I read about Isabella Blow, I watch YouTube footage of the second plane crashing into the Trade Center, the towers collapsing, the TV anchors trying to stifle their panic. I didn’t watch much of the coverage at the time. It just didn’t occur to me, since it was all happening right outside. Having anxiety dreams again, I listen to recordings of Faulkner from the 50s, thinking the sound of a Southern voice might soothe me like my grandparents’ farm. I often think if I went back to Georgia I might finally be able to write about New York… of this whole decade almost I’ve spent here, so little is recorded that I wonder if I have really lived here at all. With the taxi drivers, I still pretend I am new in town so they won’t expect me to know where I’m going.

Vanessa Gould: “I hope BETWEEN THE FOLDS might do a small part in helping to open up a more interdisciplinary dialogue about creativity in both art and science. It’s curious to me that we’re prone to drawing boundaries around our definitions of ‘science’ and ‘art,’ even though they investigate so many of the same basic things. Whether art, math, philosophy, religion, space science, poetry—the same intellectual questions are often at the root of it. So I hope a broader, interdisciplinary talk will grow. And I think the remarkable examples put forth by the artists and scientists in the film can really help in doing that.”

This documentary about modern origami masters of all stripes is fabulous, and it’s on Netflix Watch Instantly. I never got much farther than the crane stage in origami, though I did make many cranes, but my younger brother picked it up and has been making all sorts of more complex animals for years and even went to an origami convention here in NYC earlier this year. Origami is very cool.

The first season of Battlestar Galactica is also very cool, and available for streaming on Netflix. BSG is probably the best non-HBO television show I’ve ever seen. (edited: Oh wait, The West Wing wasn’t on HBO. But anyway, BSG is really good.)

Other things worth watching: The Social Network. I saw this the day it came out, at a matinee. It’s quite good, although Mitsu is (as usual) pissed at the lack of diversity portrayed at Harvard. A CS class with no East Asians in it! But I was totally thrilled to see someone blogging on LJ in a movie, and also to see a film about events I actually remember. The first time I encountered Facebook (The Facebook), I was visiting my high school friend Jessica at Columbia. She and all her friends were checking this site constantly, but I had never heard of it. That’s because Columbia was one of the first three schools to get access. I later got an account when it expanded to NYU.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Facebook’s supposed mission to make the world a better place by encouraging sharing and openness. I’m quite supportive of this, especially when it involves being open about things that were previously considered to be shameful by the general public or personally brought shame to the sharer. It’s not just Facebook, the Internet in general was been helping to break down these walls between people for ages, oddly at the same time that it sometimes encourages them to sit at home on their computers rather than actually going out with their friends. My friend Meggy has a wonderful blog about living well with bipolar disorder, for instance, which shows what everyone ought to know already, that having the stigma of being “mentally ill” is not at all incongruent with being brilliant, thoughtful and quite self-aware.

Yesterday my friend Cathy got married. It was lovely. I posted the first photos of them as man and wife on FB, and have to admit I checked my page for comments several times before I gave in to my other friend Isabelle’s influence, got extremely drunk at the open bar, and danced for hours. I also had some near wardrobe malfunctions involving my new black Alberta Ferretti dress (which you’ll get to hear more about in my upcoming stint as a guest fashion blogger! stay tuned!) but thankfully all the many photographers and videographers in attendance were able to document was my terrible drunken dancing, and my trampling the adorable flower girl to catch the bouquet. (Actually, she threw it right to me.)

I previously stated that there’s no such thing as being too hungover to go to Mass. That was before I’d ever had 3 cocktails, champagne, wine, and two pints of beer in the same evening. I almost fainted during the Our Father, but I did in fact make it to Mass the next morning, so maybe my point is moot. In the future I will not test the limits of my ability to withstand alcohol poisoning right after getting over 2 weeks of pneumonia.

I love weddings.

You can now read the transcript of the online chat I participated in with Jonathan Franzen last month. Again: the Rumpus Book Club is cool.