March 21 whew. toasty inside wth shivery-damp edges since i'm fresh from a long, initially hot bath.. taking another dive into text after yesterday when the laptop crash sank a long lovely entry. grrr. restart with a bit of history. no first: *** I thought I would--will be doing a LIVE web-broadcast set tomorrow afternoon with two new friends*** which you can check out. if it all works out it will be 2pm English time (unfortunately that's 9am Eastern Standard.. but if it goes well it will be archived at the website. the info I have for now is: http://www.gaialive.co.uk possibly with the following attached: /chill and the two other djs (whose name the session might be under) are LANI and something beginning with F. I'll fix this in the morning but i wanted to get something up tonight.. anyway it should be fun. we may tag team, or I've worked out some fun mixes with brandnew tunes picked up in Brixton this afternoon.

most of the time with my folks was fabulous. Saturday was the highlight. Mom and Dad came out to my house for breakfast- scrambled eggs with bell pepper, garlic and chees, plus my own rice pudding con coconut y cardamom y saffron. yummm. Then we hopped the scenic cross-northerly-London bus, which starts in my turk-dominated neighborhood, heads through a more hassidic area, through to Camden, tourist-crammed. There we caught the tube up to my beloved Highgate cemetary.

This is one of the best places to be in London. We headed straight for Marx's grave, and were not disappointed. One new thing was that the plaque for Claudia Jones (the only one right next to Marx's) now has an epitaph saying something about her: born in Trinidad, a socialist, journalist, activist. So good to see a black west indian woman right next to Marx, the whole area is a reminder of what he and his work has meant to so many people. While we were there, a group of 15 or so Kurds (from turkey) came with a red flag, one read a speech, they sang and even danced, chanteda few things with fists in the air. An eldery Chinese man with maybe his son came and took pictures of each other. A mid-30s Vietnamese man who worked in the government (so he told my mother) was there for some time as well. And the area across from Marx's grave was not only beautiful, overgrown and filled with flowers, but inspiring. My favorite of many sights were the graves of Dr. Sabiha Mehdi Al-Khatib "wife, mother, grandmother, tireless campaigner for peace, women's rights, and social justice in Iran."; next to Rosamund Patricia Walmsely-McCarthy "Roz" "Student, playwright, broadcaster; champion of the Afro-Caribbean cause, whose sun went down while there was still day, March 1996, Aged 25 years." And farther around, on the long darkgrey marble headstone of Dr. Jamil Munir Abdul-Hamid: "Iraqi communist dedicated to democracy" -- not a sentence you'll come across in the US. All around this area was a communist/socialist subtext, fallen comrades, tireless campaigners, humorists (I saw two!), an Iraqi poet "pioneer of free verse." The bright sun cradled the mounds upon mounds of flower-encrusted dead, cats wound past or curled on slat-benches in pools of light. I grew more romantic as the minutes went by, set off by fecundity of vines and blooms and births implied by the loving names, and all the graves of wife-and-husband, where the headstone was an open book, the name of one carved on one page, and the other name on the facing page, part of the same story. Confession: when I die, if I've been married or linked with someone for many years, that's exactly what I'd like. Plus some good words for younguns to read as they climb over me to pick a flower.

Also saw a dance performance with the folks. Hit me that I haven't seen dance in eight months maybe? odd considering I used to perform and practice regularly.The last piece, to two Steven Reich tunes, was especially good, with heavy rhythm and layers of sound flooding the stage and dancers taking up threads and skeins of ideas, tugging and twisting them into sentences and shouts. The passion and complexity of the choreogrpahy, the mesmerising skill of some of the dancers, and their straight-up muscle definition all inspired me to (when I get back) take up the practice again: modern, contact-improv, or capoeira. hope i can sustain.

March 16 (entry written late last night)
okay, definitely getting overexcited. trying to study for my stats exam but i can't focus can't focus. my parents are in town, just got in just got in. Mom called me from the hotel and we immediately wound each other up in knots because were are too similar when tired. so she handed the phone to dad who calmed it all down and made plans to meet. typical mom-me interaction:

mom: "I'm so glad you called! I realised we had left you number at home!"
me: "yeah I thought that might happen."
mom:"..and i thought maybe we'd have to email you"
me: "But if you could email you could just read my number which I emailed to you." mom: "what?"
me: "If you had access to email you could get my number which i sent you"
mom: "i did email you. Before I left."
me:"but what I mean was if you had email there at the hotel you could have gotten my number."
mom: (sounding irritated) "we just got in this minute, we haven't had time to do anything."
and so on.

Anyway made a date for dinner tomorrow. Then reclined around my stats articles again. bleh. read them too many times. mind wanders.. thinking about the generally positive vibe in my journal. It's true I don't write all the negative little things, but partly that's because I don't like reading journals (for the most part) that are just long lists of complaints. I also don't much like reading journals centered on romance problems. But especially I dislike "life sucks" catalogues. Right now, my life doesn't suck. I'm well aware that most of the reasons are beyond my control, factors of systems, institutions, timing and luck. But I'm enjoying it all the same. or even more so. because guilt is mostly a waste of time, and i'm too aware of the value of all of this to want to waste it moaning about little stuff. whew. anyway I was thinking back to the only time in my life when I qualified as depressed. After one year at college, where I had taken on way too much responsibility and gotten totally burned, burnedout and eaten up by selfish people, and my coping mechanism involved lots of sex (safer. it was safer sex i mean). Anyway I had had an agreement with my serious boyfriend from highschool and the summer, that when i was back we'd get together again. But somehow, compounding my sex-filled year I fooled around with a mutual friend of highschool boyfriend and mine, thinking it would be part of college life, not Boston life. word of my behaviour filtered back to Boston from the midwest and ended up Sounding Really Bad. got back to boston on the proverbial emotional knife-edge, and was pre-emptively dumped.
all that is really just the backdrop to my story, which is about how fucking cool my dad is. After a month of not eating much, not getting out of bed much, my dad and I were talking and I was talking about punk rock and how I had wanted to play guitar etc., and he said we had an old one in the basement. I said yeah but it needs strings. he said let's get some. what, now? so dad drove me to a music store with this dusty old acoustic and we got strings and tuned it and that night i was puzzling out tablature to Tom Waits, and by the end of the week it was acoustic Minor Threat all the way, baby. I have my dad to thank for all the silly bands I've been in since and the silly fun I've had.

March 15 late addition Just have to proclaim this because I can't thank'em directly yet. The place I went to for the conference I've only been to twice. Knew nobody. In all the breaks chatted with folk, talked about by thesis. Got a list of names of people at the university out there.. and sent off a slew of email today. I got four responses from professors that were perfectly friendly and even welcoming. these were all names from one guy who i met at the conference who definitely is getting a card or something in the mail when i get back. I know none of it may work out when I finally get there, but I totally have this rush of good feeling because i had this little pile of notes in my inbox that all said "here's my home phone, call me when you get in, or tell me where you're staying and I'll call you (!).. these days are good for me, these days busy.." right on!
March 15 2000 got my tickets for jamaica. boston-jamaica-boston-london. home first, for sweetness with longdistancelove-brought-near. already had dreams about that boy which make my blankets weigh hot but not heavy enough.

not much to write about my plans for research in Kingston. Never been to Jamaica, never been to the Caribbean, never been to the tropics, never been to a third-world country. I've been so blase about travel and culture shock so far, and I get lots more warnings now, mostly from brits and europeans. My biggest fear: how to get people to talk to me? I need interviews. And I need a data set. Got the big brush-off from a woman in the legal department of a large record label that i had hoped i could see data from.. thought it was public record stuff, but maybe not.. so what now? I need my work to speak the language of the institution, which is numbers. Just one damn regression equation that's all I need. A decent one, that is.

I am looking forward to the heat. although I can't imagine it right now.

Won free tix to a sneak preview in late london: Being John Malkovich last night. Funny. I loved the plot. even the heavy-handedness worked for me. Agreed with FAC that the editing wasn't so hot, the pace dragged a bit. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of slow movies, but only because there's something which draws me in... atmosphere, character, emotion, quality of light... none of those could carry the slow bits. Still, for a first big film it's pretty great.