Day 92.

Mini-essay for Brown: why are you interested in your interest?

When I was little I would wake up before the sun and read. In those peaceful hours I learned to love books, the quiet flick of their pages, the front and back covers neat before and after markers. Now I have less time; I read on the bus, while teachers take roll and during passing periods. (I've mastered the walking-while-reading technique.) When I was younger I read for characters that felt like friends, the places I knew like home, the plot that even on a third re-reading kept me in suspense. I still read for all of those reasons, but now I appreciate how literature shows us different versions of ourselves, how it lets us become other people and lets us inside their heads.
I started looking for the deeper meanings in my favorite books—to understand the incongruities as metaphors and symbols, to get at the blood and bone, to find what makes these stories move and breathe. Because when something is important to us we tell a story about it, and I want to tell stories of my own.

Day 91.

Letter to my roommate--one of Stanford's mini-essays

Hi Roomie!
So there's really only four things you need to know about me:
1) I talk in my sleep. But hey, free entertainment.
2) I'm scared of the dark and spiders. If you're scared by the light and an absence of spiders then Stanford has done a great job of matching us and we'll make a great team. If not, I'm sure we can muddle through. I have a tried and true strategy for dealing with fear involving a combination of high-kick running (fight AND flight!) and Walt Whitman's barbaric yawp.
3) I am probably three to four times as messy as anyone else you know. It sneaks up on me: one moment my room is clean, floorboards visible and shining, and the next my desk is a mountain and the floor is treacherously hiding under books, papers, and clothes. But messiness is not the life-consuming problem many make it out to be. I still have friends. I function fairly normally. I just can't always find things. However, this has turned out for the better in several ways. When I lost my keys, I became well-versed in the art of breaking into my own house, effectively testing its security (the bathroom window was the weak spot.) My friends stopped expecting me to dress normally the day I couldn't find pants and came to school in a t-shirt, shorts, and magenta kneesocks, so that's one thing I don't worry about. And I've become good at memorizing things, like my 14 digit library card number, so I always have them when I need them.
4) Hopefully I can make up for 1-3 with my baking. Baking is how I communicate. A batch of cookies can say "I was being a jerk," or "What happened sucks, do you want to talk about it?" or "I heard you were hungry," or simply, "I am glad that we are roommates."
I hope you like baked goods. And adventures/exploring.
--Your Roomie
Emily Rose Clarke

Day 90.

Written for Pomona's supplemental essay: What do you do for fun?
..I didn't expect to write about hair, it sort of just happened.

I speak from personal experience: there is no better time to cut your own hair than 2 a.m. and no better tool than kitchen scissors. It is oddly freeing--as if when you cut hair, you cut off all the problematic memories you acquired with it, as if all the stress and worry of the past months could just be severed. And it grows back, even if you mangle the back, sides, or front (or all three.) When I was a freshman I cut fourteen inches of hair off by pulling my ponytail to one side, creating a bob about four inches longer on the left than on the right. That lasted for about three months, until my OCD aunt cornered me at a family reunion and reintroduced me to the kitchen scissors, tossing thick chunks of my hair into the grass like it would just be absorbed.
The postcards from my three donations to Locks of Love hang on my wall, but I would lying if I said cutting my hair was purely altruistic. It's also just fun. For one thing, hair is too often a disguise. Protection. Think of long bangs, or the girl who can cover her whole face if she so much as looks at the floor. Short hair forces you to be unflinching. But hair can also be a statement, a declaration--think of the entirety of the movie/musical Hair. And for many people, hair determines gender, which can be entertaining. I thought it was just me, since I am nearsighted, but it turns out that since my last haircut I am consistently referred to as "that nice man over there" in grocery stores. At the school for creative writing I went to last summer, when I attempted a drag-king social experiment, the only double takes I received were for my penciled-in mustache (which I realize in retrospect was overdoing it.)
At one point my hair fell all the way down my back, but over the course of high school it has shrunk to my shoulders, my chin, now my ears, I guess, in a pixie cut: the product of late nights and looking in the mirror hoping to see something new. All of them but the pixie went well-- it's hard to make the back of your head look normal. Only trained professionals should attempt it with professional tools, like my friend Justin with safety scissors when we had an hour to kill before rehearsal and he couldn't deal with my mullet. I love my hair now though--bedhead is infinitely better with short hair. And with gel, short hair is much more versatile. I went from Edward Scissorhands to an extra in the Alejandro video to Zoolander to Rihanna in under five minutes.
I've tried to convince friends to let me cut their hair, but so far no takers. Maybe it's the sort of joy you have to find on your own.

(Alternate last line: But I'm feeling like a change is in order. I'm thinking mohawk.)

Day 89. The Thieving Geologist

you think i'm listening--
i'm picking your brain for stones that i might add to my pockets.
pretty stones, broken stones i carry them all the same
like a child walking on a beach for the first time.

me, i walk the pages of the giant, ancient atlas
my dad has
(the one that still recognizes the soviet union in both political and geographical form)
trying to lose your stones.
carrying these stones across every river,
from the Yangtze to the Nile,
casting them on every bit of ground i can find like i could
get rid of them just like that,
throwing them into the air
letting them leave my hands long enough for the
sun to swallow them into its skyly body,

i'm letting them fall through the page into
an ocean probably, another continent
but i'll chase them down-- I don't lose stones.

maybe i'm looking for a river where your stones,
yours and mine and everyone we know's stones,
will pull me down and down
pockets of lead leading to the pebbly bottom
where i can bury myself under smaller things and
cozy up to bedrock.

maybe i'm looking for a map in my dad's atlas
marked with different places to hide your stones,
where they can weather over time until
in trillions of years
when the sun burns out
they are
sand at the bottom of a vast dark ocean
right before it freezes
into what will look like
marble, or granite, or quartz.

day 88.

My Recent Google Searches
price of baby iguana

wikipedia julian assange

wikipedia Koschei

wikipedia conductors who died while conducting

why is don't ask don't tell not repealed yet

"a list of terrible things that have happened to ann coulter"

what do you mean zero results

i don't believe in karma anymore

Day 87. WOO LOWERING MY STANDARDS

HOW IS ALREADY DECEMBER 17TH? *panicpanicpanic*
time to break out the terrible school projects....
this is a rewritten holiday song i did for AP Gov.

Babe It's Not Cheap Out There-- Lyrics to a Duet Sung by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama

I really can't pay/ Babe it's not cheap out there
Hair's going gray/ And I've got a country to repair
Campaigning has been/ Please don't kick me in the shin
So very cruel/ Do you take me for a fool
My husband will start to worry/ His favor you shouldn't curry
My banker will be pacing the den/ It's nothing next to American debt!

Things started so well/ You were official
I was a fundraising gazelle / Your press wasn't prejudicial
I was establishment/ I was out selling myself
The primaries / --invisible were a fresh breeze
I met all the categories/ people questioned my birth cert. (Jeez)
I'm over 35, no one denies/ 14 plus years of residency no surprise
I really can't pay/ I'm gonna hold out
(Obama) Babe it's not cheap out there

Then the real thing/ Iowa and New Hampshire
My dreams taking wing/ I felt like a baby hamster
Front page every newsday/ soon there was Super Tuesday
But I won't lie/ The stress compressed me like a bonsai
Then the national convention/ Your pantsuits looked delicious
Democrats wanted no tension/ Division would look suspicious
Now I'm Secretary of State /Gosh the polls looked delicious
How about just a couple shots more?/ Never such a horse race before!

Then I faced debt/Babe it's not cheap out there
Made my banker upset /And I've got a country to repair
I really can't pay/ I'm gonna hold out
(Obama) Babe it's not cheap out there!

This doesn't count as an actual day, it just makes me laugh. I wrote this when I was on codeine for my tonsillectomy and I was like "yeah this is pretty good stuff i'm writing! codeine doesn't affect me at all! I'm going to go back to bed now."
I just found it while going through my files-- this is the entire thing.

Are you hungry, it's lunchtimes
Yeah i could do with some food, what were you thinking
i wasn't. make something for yourself. he walks off
what! uhhhh. pasta.
she takes out a package of ramen.
boil water. she puts a pan on and
she turns on the oven.
this won't take long.
she puts it in unbroken up, in a floating lump.

Sean?? Seaaaannn!
What
I need you
Right now
Right now

Day 86.

thoughts about the lovely How to Be Alone video-- from a while back.

It's only been recently that I've been okay with being alone. I flick on the lamp and settle into the floor with a book. I write and I sing and I am happy. I don't think everyone feels like this though. I think we have forgotten. We go to the bathroom in groups and shout through the stalls, we bring our phones everywhere, and we look down at them if by some mistake we end up in a corner. Loner is the worst insult any of us can think to throw. Untouchable.. but it's a choice and it's one we all need to make once in awhile, because we can't even connect to each other when we're so bothered with trying. And if we just let it be-- we'd learn to be alone again, so we know who we are. So that we don't, as Joan Didion writes, run away to find oursevles and find that no one is home.

Day 85.

My essay for the second UC prompt. Not sure that counts as an ending?

My first kiss was a sycamore tree. I was thirteen years old and hiking near the Potomac River, my family somewhere ahead or behind. I didn't even think about it. Under my lips, the dappled bark was wrinkled and sun-warmed. I heard the rustle of leaves, and a bird, and further off, the river. And that was the beginning of my love affair with trees.
It's common courtesy that if you love something, you should know its name. So in freshman year, I joined a club at my school sort of like an environmental Acadec, called Envirothon. Each school has a team that goes to the state competition, and each team had a person who specialized in one of the five areas: aquatics, wildlife, soils, current issue, and forestry. As the forestry expert, I learned that there are many things you can know from a tree: whether there is a river nearby, what kind of animals depend on it, what kind of soil there will likely be. I learned how to measure a tree's height with a clinometer, a Biltmore stick, and an educated guess. But my favorite things I learned, my proudest accomplishment, were the names of almost every native tree in Southern California, common and scientific. I learned that the tree I kissed was a Planatus occidentalis and that its sibling in California was Planatus racemosa. To remember the names, I looked up the meanings, which mainly consisted of obscure botany terms and the explorer or naturalist that named the plant. But there were many surprises: The genus name for manzanita, Arctostaphylos, is a combination of the Greek for "bear" and "bunch of grapes"--probably because of the berries and red-brown bark; the name for willow, Salix, is a combination of the Latin for "near" and "water." I love being able to know my surroundings like this, to tell which living things preceded humans here. Knowing names lets me talk about them, and it connects me with centuries of people seeing these trees. I read what Thoreau thought of the pitch pine or what John Muir thought of the hundred-foot Douglas fir he climbed in a Sierra windstorm, and think that on the massive cliff of things I don't know, knowing and loving these trees is a foothold allowing me a view.

Day 84.

The Samson twins, whether from habit or from need, were never found apart. In their classes, their desks were an inch closer together than the others students', so that their elbows met over the aisle, and when they walked through the halls of Lincoln High School it was together, one drifting in the same weaving, dreamy way as the other, so that their shoulders were not jarred into separation. They almost seemed to exist as halves of a whole, the opposite of a person with multiple personalities: like the two shared one personhood. Jane never cringed when teachers mistook her for Jasper, and Jasper didn't mind that people tended to call him Jane.

In the first few months of their freshman year, other students didn't seem to notice Jane and Jasper. If they turned their heads when the pair passed; if their eyes lingered on the twins' long, tangled thicket of blond hair that tumbled to their waists in twisted ropes, it was only for a moment. Until someone did notice, and then, at once everyone noticed, in the curiously glossy way of children who have registered that something is out of place but cannot decide what to do about it.
And the twins' hair, combined with their baggy jeans and nondescript backpacks, did make them look like poorly-disguised god-children, mischievous refugees of a fairy-tale world. They quietly enjoyed the muttering, the stares. The twins made it a game: who could get Lincoln High to believe a more ridiculous thing? Jane told anyone who would listen that she and Jasper were allergic to sunlight and grew their hair long as protection. Jasper started a rumor: their sibling, the third triplet, had died of a scissor wound, and their mother, broken with grief, had forbade them from going near scissors of any kind, raised them to fear the twin silver blades. Then, one sunny December day, Jane whispered to a boy in her history class that she and Jasper kept their strength in their hair. That if it was cut, they would not live to see the next day.

Even teachers heard the rumors, which floated up to their desks as students rummaged for pencil or paper. The splash of the drinking fountains seemed to murmur them. If Frank Klimt and his friends had not herded the twins into the quad at lunch, someone else would have. But it was Frank, baring his teeth at Jasper (or was it Jane?), Frank cracking jokes like seeds between his teeth, Frank's head swiveling to find a grin in the surrounding crowd that would be the spark of something happening.
Jasper and Jane kept their heads slightly bowed, Jane's arm around Jasper's shoulder. They shot glances between them like a magician and his assistant, drawing out their secrets.
They did not struggle as Frank pulled the curtains of hair from their faces, turned them up like sunflowers towards the cloudless sky. There was a moment of impatient silence from the throng of people, but the twins did not burn or break into hives or so much as sneeze. Now their small smiles had vanished. They shook loose from Frank's minions and stood back to back, spines straight, each vertebrae of each back finding a notch in the other. The minions were prepared: five pairs of stolen scissors were drawn like pistols from pockets, brandished wildly.
The twins exchanged a second's glance but did not show fright as the crowd, buzzing with disappointment, pressed closer: the second rumor was also false. Frank grabbed hold of their arms and motioned for his friends to bring their scissors. Jasper did not have to look at Jane to see that her face was crumpling; he fought his own brimming tears. They were surrounded on every side, reaching hands trying to pull out strands of that strange yellow hair. Then two pairs of scissors flashed in the golden sunlight, and two locks of hair fell into the melee.

* * *

The twins were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they had slipped away, although no one could understand how it happened so suddenly. But there was a distraction: a unique epidemic had afflicted all the students and teachers, administrators and custodians: everyone was losing hair in massive chunks. One girl's bangs fell off in her morning shower. A teacher's scraggly beard simply slipped off his chin in the middle of a lecture about friction. In a matter of days, everyone was bald. The phones in the office were disconnected due to the constant threatening calls from family lawyers, and attendance at Lincoln High School plummeted. The students who did come to school touched each other's smooth scalps in wonder. Everyone was strangely androgynous; friends didn't recognize each other in the hallways. Some girls hid out in the bathroom and cried, caking on ever more makeup, and the less bulky boys hid too, eating lunch in cramped stalls. Mothers cradled their now baby-headed children and told them what pretty eyes they had, how their forehead acne would improve dramatically. The punk kids replaced their gelled spikes with scalp tattoos.
And slowly, the regrowing of Lincoln High began, watched in mirrors over months of mornings. Some students kept their old hair as it grew back, but most took up shaving their heads. For one thing it had become the norm, but there was another reason: they found that there was a certain pride in facing the world raw.