Ok I'ma get sick of livejournaling about my eating disorder real soon, but in the mean time, Anorexia:

1. Gets you real drunk real quick
2. Allows you to look homeless at all times of day/night in your ill-fitted jeans
3. Makes it OK to forgo pants on any given day
4. Attracts scum

Win!

Activity: Pretending I go to Harvard.

Goal: Not to capitulate.

Mood: Rainy Intoxication.

What is Useless in This Life: Romantic love.

So, in the wee hours of Tuesday, I drink water and listen to the weather.

September: everything hurts.

Floundering. I'm just floundering.

Sometimes I really don't like: poetry readings, poetry talks, poetry workshops, poets. Then I wonder why I've been barreling along this career path for three years. Then I think of Anne Carson and Russell Edson hiding from the world and I feel encouraged.

Four workshops down, two to go. Four poems down, two to go, but I think I'll just write one very long one. Oh and then a year of graduate school. Sheesh.

Also yawn.

Also also

I can't believe I've been sleeping in a dorm room for 9 nights. I feel like a piece of origami, folding myself into myself.

I'm at writing camp. By that I mean the esteemed and lovely New York State Summer Writer's Institute at Skidmore. I broke my laptop before coming, though, which means I am living in a dorm room, sleeping in a twin bed, and have to go to the library to watch TV, so it's basically like wilderness survival training.

I kid.

Excited, mostly, to move to Boston. 75% excited, I'd say.

Happy July.

Indiana: fantastic. Chris: great. Everything else in life, including poetry, family, finances: in shambles.

This is how it always goes.

4AM and I'm awake because, well, this is my sleep schedule now: wake up after 3-4 hours of sleep, internet, get another 3-4.

Early tonight: Ithaca fireworks, then Felicia's. I'm here, but I've officially "run out of money." Not that I've actually run out, but I've spent more than I planned to on this trip: I have so many things ahead of me to spend money on! Boo. It's been good so far, though. Staying, for once, in my very own bed in Danya's guest room, which means it's okay for me to be an insomniac.

I'm going to Indiana on Monday to visit Chris. Things have been - well, they've been. Suddenly I haven't seen him in a month and I'm looking forward to seeing his familiar car and his familiar face because I'm still stupid in love. Then we're driving back to NY, and then to Boston for a move-in weekend, but them I'm off to writing camp for 2 weeks. Then I have 5 weeks until classes start - so much time unoccupied, so much time to be penniless! And such is life in graduate school.

It's amazing how easy it's been to migrate all of my journaling to twitter.

Yawn.

Haven't been this miserable, self-destructive, and hopeless in a long time! Hi misery! Goodbye cell phone. I can't use you, I am too upset.

I'm not sure if it took me longer to identify panic attacks, or orgasms.

I don't even know what to say, what to do, where I'll be tomorrow or the next day or next week. But soon July will come and I will start over.

The man in bed was one of several men
to whom I gave my heart. The gift of the self,
that is without limit.
Without limit, though it recurs.

( So boring. )

So happy I'm even contemplating doing my laundry.

Major, major change in plans.

I was trying to be as optimistic as possible about NYU, but there were a couple of things I was very nervous about. I only received a half-tuition scholarship, there were going to be 48 poets attending in the fall, I could only take two classes per semester, I would have to work. Besides that, I've never wanted to live in New York. Really. But I was really going to make the most of it.

Yesterday I got, very unexpectedly, an offer from BU with a full tuition waver and a teensy bit of extra money. The faculty there is just as wonderful, and over the last 24 hours, I've already had more contact with them than with any of the faculty at NYU, where most of the communication is done by administrators. The program will have 9 poets next year, and I'll be working with Robert Pinsky and Louise Gluck. And I am thrilled. Genuinely exuberant, ecsatic, a way I didn't feel before.

So I'm moving to Boston in the fall! (And, within the next 12 months, teaching two introductory creative writing courses. Oh, what will my students think of me?!)

I think I'm going to NYU next year. Still waiting to hear from a couple of places, but the faculty there is so good it makes me want to cry just thinking about it. Sharon Olds!!! Here, I'll put a poem right here so that you, reader, can read it.

( Sharon Olds )

Oh my God. So excited. I have a new attitude towards poetry after an outstanding astonishing 9 hour conversation, and now I write something every day, read something every day, edit something every day. I also run every day.

I've been "dating" a lot I guess, but I'm still...in love. At least I'm starting to form a life that I like, a day-to-day existence I want to keep living out.

Sleep problems, etc.

April will be good.

Oh I AM ALWAYS IN LOVE.


Chris broke up with me, and on my birthday, but I have nothing more to say about that because it's not my life anymore.

I'm not sure what my life is, what I am trying to build in these weeks where I try to pick up healthy habits and then sabotage them with unprecedented amounts of red wine, where I swear to be honest but can only be honest in certain amounts with certain people. Where I want to be beautiful and give up my dream of writing poetry because it is too ugly. I lose and regain all my faith in myself ever day. But that is not it, suffering is not it.

In this moment (and I suppose forever), I have an e-mail from a boy I kissed that says, of our meeting, "It was a beautiful gift and I often daydream about it, except we're under pecan trees in Georgia or in the field behind the house where I lived upstate."

Yes. A big love, probably one of the most consequential relationships I've had, one that taught me so much about myself, ended, and it hurt, and I would be filled with anger if it weren't for my miraculous ability to be always in love.

Also I graduated summa? 

FEBRUARY, the month in which everything resolves itself.

Dear stranger 
extant in memory by the blue Juniata, 
these letters 
across space I guess 
will be all we will know of one another.

So little of what one is threads itself through the eye 
of empty space.

Never mind. 
The self is the least of it. 
Let our scars fall in love.

My undergraduate career ended on a familiar, comforting note: I ate duck, drank myself silly, and walked home at four in the morning.

Also: at the end of the walk, an "I love you" text message.

Also: have to leave, move, vacate and prepare myself never to return by 2:00pm.

And then, it's all waiting for my honors status & my grades & grad school and learning how to breathe new air.

I don't want to be here at all in the Spring. I want to be breathing in new air.