pin and mount me like a butterfly.

i'm out of space and out of time again. there is, quite simply, far too much to do. if i should panic sometime between now and next friday, i am terribly sorry, but not very surprised.

pieces of eight.

a recreation, then:

i missed my bus to make a button monday morning, and as a result missed my train and geology lab as well. but it was the tough thirties (i think.) broad, smoking a cigarette with one breast exposed, which is what tough broads do. all my ladies love her.

i met samuel delany in class. today i found out that he teaches queer theory and a class on graphic novels at temple. i'd like to eat his life. he's this brilliant, funny man who wrote a book about sex he's had in times square porn theatres, and, not many hours after that, i was there, passing, i think, one of the last theatres in what has been bought by disney and mtv, singing venus in furs to myself. i wanted very badly to go in, mostly to prove that i'd probably be killed for doing so, as the book didn't deal with safety for girl-like-things as well as it could have. but i had people to see.

whitney was a fop; her cuffs were laced. we, whitney and her mum and her sister lindsey and i, went for pizza, then to see forbidden broadway, which was terribly silly, although we sometimes didn't quite get it. we went out for desert. there was far, far too much chocolate, which is always a magnificent situation in which to find oneself. we went back to the hotel, where there was talking and measuring and sleeping.

dear whitney,
you are neat. i have a great big crush on you.
love,
p. dreadful

we walked a cathedral of geometry over water. a blue alien was there. i wanted to sing heroes on the way up, but i sang hedwig instead. whitney and i were man-bicycle hybrids. when we were no longer over water, we passed toys in babeland, and i was terribly excited about it, although in we could not have gone. we looked for one restaurant, but found another instead, and then abandoned that one in favour of the pink pony, which was a lovely place with lots of books, and a man fighting with sheet music, and french waitress/owners, and big blue doors with actors behind it. we could have ordered peanut butter and banana sandwiches, but did not. we ordered earl grey and mango sorbet, among other things, instead. it quickly became whitney's favourite restaurant.

we wandered the lower east side, not finding what we were looking for, but finding other nice things instead, like cookies.

we went to the library. in my life i've been to more amazing places and seen more beautiful things than i have any right to have experienced. this place very quickly managed to make it clear that it would be quite near the top of the list of said places. it was a maze in marble, arches and stairs, hidden books in rooms i could not enter, all guarded by two lions, built, mostly, by andrew carnegie, who has benefited me personally more than is probably proper. i have long wanted to dream of libraries, and this one, i think, is the one of which i have wanted to dream. there is a room there, of books pertaining to shelley and his circle. there is a window in the door, and the inside is all wood and red leather and books and busts. were i door's father, it would be my study. it is, quite possibly, the best room in the world. in the big room with all the desks i thought of the reading room in the british museum, of virginia woolf. whitney and i did stichomancy in plays by and books about shakespeare and smelled the books and looked at the ceilings. we stood and looked at a shelf, at some of the only books we were actually able to find. it was there, among those pages and those names, the dead poets, the little gods i've been chasing since this literature was still a part of my own tiny oral tradition, that i felt more at home than i have felt in a very long time. whitney suggested that we should get locked inside, and find the books and the goblins who kept them and slide on the marble floors in our socks and drink tea, and we all agreed. there was a gift shop there that sold great author finger puppets, and oscar wilde fruity breath mints, and witty things meant to trap the wallets of the right sort of nerd. i was tempted, but resisted. capitalism trembles at my willpower. (or forgets that i exist because of my poverty. whichever.) we climbed atop a lion, the one on the right, according to the lions. this was really quite a lot of fun.

whitney was mistaken for british, which was really only right, as i'd been pretending that new york was london for much of the day anyway.

we went to a diner where the waitstaff sang songs. it replaced the pink pony as whitney's favourite restaurant. we both fell in love with a delightful gayboy who sang an elton john song.

i yet again avoided seeing mama mia. granted, this has never really been a threat, but this is the second time i have escaped a city in which it was playing, and not seeing it has felt like something of an accomplishment both times.

whitney and lindsey and mum went to see thoroughly modern millie. i went home.

i can say with certainty that the whole thing was velvet underground, and iggy pop and the stooges, and bjork's debut. it was a bit of hedwig and bowie, and the dresden dolls, although i haven't yet decided what song, and a bit of the clash, although that was mostly my imagination.