Five Papers Flung From Me,

sung in me from the muse of my room, the rooftop, and St. A's in the past eight days. So glad they're gone. This semester saw fourteen forced from me, born in pain to a hard life of revisions and indecisions over each syllable or sprung half-whole from my head, autistic Athenas appearing in flashes of dawn and dawning lucidity. You'd think I was an English major or something, but even Directed Suicide students only rear a brood of twelve. And no more turn aside and brood. Brooding over Ethics of Love, title of final paper, ended this evening. Turned in my last duchess at five and I'm freeeeee. Free falling into four finals. I like exams at the moment.

Wearing the rags of time, wearing out hours and high heels, reading week's been run around, surround sound, dance to drop days with partners in pages, tuxedos, and shorts. Between waltzes with Hume, Eliot, Jesus, we danced from flippant finery into a moshpit. Monday was Spiderball, the JE formal. Jonathan Edward's the richest college, they hoard money like Mr. Burns. Wonderwall, for Spiderball, they flaunt it all. Another swing band played Moon River as I dipped a strawberry on a stick under a cascading fountain of molten white chocolate. Fruit punch spouted from terraces of silver. Stiles seemed far away. Then changing scene, from dress to jeans, Monday slid into Tuesday Spring Fling. My Spring Fling, sling hair against sky, sing along to the Shins. The Shins came, The Shins! Knees above heads, hands hitting air, sitting on Ivan's shoulders, eyes and ears ecstatic. The crowd was erratic. Spring Fling brings out not the best of Yale. It draws the lugs from the frat houses into Old Campus. They wear tee-shirts of ink on their skin and funnel extra idiocy down. Merry with music was excellent but the excrement of a picnic, half eaten hamburgers, plates people don't throw away and the green ground soaked with beer, ugly. In the staggering crowd, I wonder if we are any better than other nineteen year olds and what right we have to all this if we piss it away. But then I am carried away on rhythms of O.A.R. Carving space out of the stumbling mass, I am surrounded by chanting friends alternately jumping and swaying. And I've figured out the delight of dancing, the enjoyment of fully inhabiting my body, fun being inside of it, playing with what it can do, what motions of the music it can mimic. I look up and Harkness rises into the warm splendor of afternoon light. I look up again and it's inky blue. Above blossoms and the familiar roofs of Old Campus, the big dipper pours out evening on us. Wet with music, drenched in delight, we go for Ashley's and eat bittersweet chocolate ice cream and write papers and more papers.

Now and forever, the Yankee game as I study. Through the radio, between and behind voices, come the strains of Teenage Wasteland. They play Paul's theme song when Tino gets up to bat. Its opening chords sound like loyalty. I'm a loyalist to literary theory for the night. Now that papers are all buried in drop boxes and offices, I don't want the reign of the year to be overthrown.

Seder with the Saints

Yesterday I brunched with a Latter Day Saint and sedered with Saint Anthony. Threw together a small impromptu seder at the Hall. There was a certain delight in disarray of making our own meal. The components were all carried away from different kitchens or culled from strange places. Someone slaughtered something for a shank bone. Elijah provided plenty of parsley. The Hillel gave us Haggadahs, a seder plate, and kosher salt. Everything came together except for dessert. Apparently, macaroons do not exist in New Haven (macaroons? are you looking for macaroni?). Stole apples and raisons from the dining hall for charoset. Chopped them standing around in the foyer underneath the goyim's trophies, elk and deer heads. David, more of a Goliath, crushed walnuts with his bare hands. Came upstairs with wine glasses to find him on the floor leaning over a bag and pounding it with his fist. After a ceremonial debate over proportions, combined elements in a pitcher and stirred with a knife. Coco Krumme remembered cinnamon. Daniela Dover, a bitter herb, poured best of a bottle of Manishevetz into the concoction. Oddly, the idea of ritual made her sweeter than Passover wine even before ritual's consumption. We pushed couches around a table to recline, set our feast and began following the stage directions. Being first without family, it felt like our original Pesach. Between the 7 of us, counted 3.5 literal Jews including David Weil who had the most Jewish name but was the least so, actually being baptized. My kind of crowd. But between 3.5 you can have endless agreeable kibbitzing and signifying on the text. Could feel different traditions reclining around the table, rising at their favorite songs, raising which passages had to be kept and which skipped. After some blessings, glasses, stories, those useless sons, four questions, some plagues, and excessive consumption of food, dayenu. Reached for the afikomen slightly sad no one had played youngest child. But unlike any other year when the surprise was part of the charade, when Saul knew it was missing and who took it, we were surprised to discover it wasn't there. No one looking, Shansby had stolen the matzah and secreted it somewhere. We tore around the Hall, ruffling and rattling things, delighted to be playing this game, delighted to keep customary delay in the play. Looked through photo albums and underneath couches and in the pianos. Glanced up to see the swineherd Saint presiding over the search party from his portrait. We found a drawer full of keepas in a desk and laughed at once at the ludicrousness of their location here and at the comedy of our own seder. It turned up behind one of the framed posters. Acquiring afikomen, we reassembled to complete the order. Opened the door of 483 College Street for Elijah. Strange to be somewhere not the hallway of 53 Spring or the yard in Millbrook. In the foreground was the usual Yale evening I experienced without religion, Eliahu ha Navi sang in the background. Gazing out the door into that dark street scene splattered with rain, realized I'd been transported, not back to Germany like the girl in The Devil's Arithmetic but into my own future. Closed the door and we skipped to next year in Jerusalem. We'd all forgotten the tune to the verses of Chad Gad Ya, and Shansby called his Bubbe. Called on collective memory for melody, but we ended by substituting bemused Beatles songs between choruses in an act a little symbolic of the evening.