how can you not love the name Pieter van den Hoogenband?

on watching the track and field championships


watching them run the two hundred meters
i remember how it felt to fly around that curve
the way the track would rise to meet me and with
each stride i would push off, moving
faster and faster digging in harder and harder
until i took off -- slingshot down the straightaway
my feet never feeling the asphalt

me: check it out. only 16 and at the olympics.

j: makes you feel like a loser, doesn't it.

yesterday i caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror while at work.

normally i manage to get in and out of the bathroom without looking in the mirror, what with my tendency to avoid mirrors in general, but there was no avoiding the spectre i presented: i was the little match girl.

my hair had gone all higgledy-piggledy, one piece left, one piece right, the rest in every other direction possible. my dress was wrinkled and missing a button near the bottom. my sweater had one button hanging on by a thread, and another held on with a giant safety pin that had managed to poke its very bright and very silver head through the weave, and the entire thing had shifted east so that it hung off one shoulder and cozied up to my neck on the other side.

in the i need way more information about this before i get too creeped out category:

d just called and in the course of the conversation said he had been surfing science sites and come upon a place that said examination of the smallest particles of light revealed dna-like structures, individual for each colour of the spectrum.

i'll probably go to hell for this, but i have a hard time taking heartfelt messages seriously when they are so poorly written.

you'r swimmig with the angles now.

a localish girl collapsed and died at a swim meet recently, and this note was left on a memorial site. i saw it on the news the other night and while i had been feeling pretty sad about the whole thing, when i read the note, it killed the sympathy and replaced it with derision.

i'm having a hard time getting anything done.

it is somewhat normal for me to be disorganized and a bit behind, but never to the degree i am these days. in moments of reckless self-diagnosis i wonder if it is really-post post-partum depression. or maybe it is just a flareup of the general depression that lingers around the edges of my world. or maybe it is the ebstein barr rearing its ugly head again, just to let me know it is still lurking, swimming slowly through my blood. the latter would explain the fevers and achiness i've had lately, though it wouldn't cover the nausea.