laur monster

Which of these is greatest:

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:41:39 -0400

a) Number of pink pens found in my desk while packing.

b) Number of used once/twice tubes of Dior Show Mascara everywhere in my room.

c) Number of times I will be told tomorrow, “You look so much better without that God-awful dark hair”.

round seven

Sun, 24 May 2009 12:21:00 -0400

So, I keep having this re-occuring dream. In my dream I am at camp in Rhinebeck and some accident occurs where I need to change clothes. I go back to my bunk to change and realize I forgot to pack. I always freak out because I have no clothes, make up, shower stuff, money, ANYTHING for ten weeks. Then I always beg my mom or dad to send money so I can buy new things or ship my stuff. They are always really mean and say no. Then, I steal some sort of car and drive 5 hours (as I opposed to 13) to my mom’s house. On the way, I pick some friend up that my mom “would not appove of” (most of the time someone I don’t even know, but twice a familiar face) and create some kind of scandal at my mom’s house. So weird!

My first re-occurring dream since 4-K, where I dreamed about a man with no face chasing me down the beach.

Today’s agenda: Creating a packing list immediately after yoga class.

little girls in pretty boxes

Sat, 23 May 2009 00:20:00 -0400

Woke up and before I could even roll my head over to see the strap of lastnight’s Jill Stuart dress still on; I was back at that runway. My hand had pulled on the back of my purple velvet leotard, rubbing too close to yesterday’s Sarasota sunburn. My body, in some Beatles song worm-hole already shaking off what it knew was about to happen. One arm up, chin up, smile, shoulders back, big breath. And then the run, the spring board. Upside down but still in control, my life has not really changed. Then I missed the hand and my neck is on the spring board, on the metal pole. “IT HURTS. IT HURTS. IT HURTS” the loudest roar to ever surpass vanilla chapstick.

Pulled the strap up and rolled off of my car keys, all the upside down, none of the control. IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS.

in bed before midnight

Sun, 17 May 2009 23:41:00 -0400

“What’s your name,” we both say with giggly grins that we whip out like campers with water guns, a little too psyched for trouble.

The next day my phone buzzes and I know who it is before I turn my head. “So, you need to do that thing again where you make my mind spin,” I say, and we talk for two hours, and then for two weeks, and then it’s sunrise, and fall, and we’re still talking.

We fight a lot but it feels like gymnastics, when you bring your leg to the back of your head and it’s a complete race between agony and growth. I’m more limber now, and I push further; his fault.

There comes the laughs, the stretch and then heat, and he snarls, “You’ve never met anyone like me, have you?”
“No,” I roll my eyes, “but you’ve never met anyone like meeeeeeeee!”

And then we laugh and tackle each other, and get sick on ginger ale and pizza, and fight some more. In the morning I ache, but I feel like I can one up Nastia when I stretch.

"If you want truly to understand something, try to change it."

Sat, 16 May 2009 01:58:25 -0400

“If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.”

- Kurt Lewin

sign me up, dude.

Fri, 08 May 2009 03:47:21 -0400

sign me up, dude.

If I had to be something governmenty, I'd be NASA.

Mon, 04 May 2009 02:25:00 -0400

If I had to be something governmenty, I'd be NASA.

bad witch

Mon, 04 May 2009 02:08:00 -0400

Hometown in Hermes: So, can you say you survived your first Art’ish party? Did you even have fun?

Laur: I don’t remember much of last night. I’m bad at math when it comes to Belvedere.

Hometown in Hermes: I don’t remember much of last night either…

Laur: because?

Hometown in Hermes: Because I was just staring at you.

Laur: So where was your girlfriend looking?

good witch

Mon, 04 May 2009 02:00:34 -0400

“What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.” - Herman Hesse

So, you can kinda say I am a Brooklyn bound L-train.

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:47:47 -0400

So, you can kinda say I am a Brooklyn bound L-train.

12:38am

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:41:56 -0400

Not sure which skyline will go best with my favorite dress.

Less sure any boy will ever go well with my heart.

Very sure if you take off the Vivinne Westwood heart pendant, slice the skin, tear through the muscle, and crack the ribcage, there is enough glow for a neighborhood of smiles.

Even more satisfaction.

multi-variant equation of the weekend:

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 23:19:00 -0400

300 more miles on the car: -20

Sunglasses at 1am: +60

7 mentions of summer: -300

You finally shrugging and shaking your head at me (verses the usual tugging the cardigan further over my strapless dress, mumbling “youlikereallydrivemecrazy”): +1000

9 hours of sleep: -3 (nights that will now need to be spent on academic house arrest).

More specific:

I think of Ethan Hawke; He says the world only created so many souls, and when its population went crazy, the souls were divided up and shared.

Ethans idea: People are less potent now because they have mere scraps of souls inside of them.

My idea: just a shrug, really.

yay!!! one of my kids was in the times!

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 22:58:39 -0400

how fun!

“The two school-age tenants of a chilly and cramped unit in a Bronx public housing complex are not allowed outside alone. That is their mother’s policy, and not without reason: the mobile police station is no longer positioned nearby. Had it still been there, some in the complex say, perhaps a neighbor might not have been shot recently, in midmorning.

About 95 miles north, in woods just east of the Hudson River Valley village of Rhinebeck, N.Y., a less cramped way of life unfolds on another compound. At Ramapo for Children, a summer and year-round camp, heated log cabins further enhance the sort of sleep that follows days spent canoeing, hiking and apple picking.

The stark contrast in environments is reflected in the disposition of a 14-year-old boy who, one weekend a month, leaves the Bronx for the woods.

“Here, I’m so used to loud noises, and I’m, like, more hyped up,” says Brodick Ighomuaye, who is sitting on a couch in the apartment’s 36-square-foot combined living room, dining room and kitchen, eating cereal for dinner. “Up there, it’s, like, totally silent, and I’m all calm.”

Brodick’s brother, Reggie, 11, who also goes to Ramapo, but only in the summers, puts it more plainly.

“Here, he can be kind of mean,” he says. “Up there, he’s maybe, like, nicer.”

When Brodick is upset, his anger does not go unexpressed. His quick temper has earned him the nickname, and the graffiti tag, Wildboy and two extended hospital stays for counseling.

His moodiness was evident to his mother, Lisa Ighomuaye, 44, by the time he was 3, but it became more marked at age 6, in 2000, when she began a less-than-amicable separation from his father. Over time, her efforts to help him stay calm increasingly meant competing with the area’s prevailing code of defiance.

“Everything around here shows him that he has to be the tough guy,” Ms. Ighomuaye says. “On the block, you have to be aggressive.”

In 2004, she sent Brodick to Ramapo, a camp for children with behavioral problems and other disabilities. Ms. Ighomuaye’s daughter Naomi, now 21, had been going there since she was 11, first as a camper and later as an intern and a counselor.

The benefits were immediate, and Brodick returned three out of the following four summers.

This year, he was selected for the camp’s year-round leadership program for teenagers, which combines outdoor pursuits with community service. But Ms. Ighomuaye, who had multiple strokes last year and lost her job, could not afford the $1,800 fee.

Since the family now survives on a monthly $564 Social Security check for Brodick, $86 in public assistance and $109 in food stamps, $1,500 in tuition was contributed by New Alternatives for Children, a member of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, one of seven beneficiaries of The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

“People say you have choices, but in reality it’s more complicated,” Ms. Ighomuaye says. “I just want Brodick to keep seeing that there’s more than this.”

Naomi, who now attends Borough of Manhattan Community College, credits Ramapo with giving her the imagination to transcend the educational expectations in a place like the Butler Houses.

“It’s like, everyone wants to be a millionaire but nobody has a million dollars,” Naomi explains. “I wanted to go to college, but it didn’t really seem possible because I didn’t personally know people that went to college. At camp, I got to meet people that went to college. So now, it’s like, I know that it’s possible.”

Brodick does not yet think much about college, but at Ramapo, he, too, has found himself making entirely new observations: how the thrill and terror induced by a high-ropes course can make a boy from the Bronx and a boy from the Midwest seem more alike than not, or the effect of a clear, open sky.

“I saw the Big Dipper, I saw the Little Dipper, I saw Orion’s Belt,” he says. “The first time I looked up, I walked into a gate because I was, like, busy looking at the stars. It was the first time I saw stars like that.” “

OK, so….note’able things: The dude can not play outside!

Like, can you imagine that? 14? No outside?

So, really, what I want to say is….Do you have any idea how bad these kids need you? Especially if you are male. Like these dudes need you!! Like reallyreallyreally. I volunteer in this classroom every week and the teacher begs me every week to bring in male friends, “just so they can see a male act appropriately for an hour a week, it could change their lives”.

You have no idea how much your kinda talents and bad jokes could help a kid out. So do it, get involved. KIDS!!! ahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

-bbbsa.org

-mentor1.org

- bug me. i always have some kinda mentoring/volunteer project up my sleeve.

So umm...

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 22:42:39 -0400

about this “awareness” month:

For me, the key significance of the Autistic Spectrum lies in its call for a politics of Neurological Diversity. The “Neurologically Different” represent a new addition to the familiar political demographics (gender, race, class) and will augment the insights of the social model of disability.

The rise of Neurodiversity takes post-modern fragmentation one step further. Just as the post-modern era sees every once too solid belief melt into air, even our most taken-for granted assumptions: that we all more or less see, feel, touch, hear, smell, and sort information, in more or less the same way, (unless visibly disabled) are being dissolved.

It is not due to any academic research credentials or summers spent with whatever title that makes me feel like I can truely stand behind that statement, it is that I truely love and have allowed myself to be loved by children with ASD.

All I can say is, really, anything dripping with academia might have to be thrown out the window. Singular minds, need singular plans, they need you to break your molds.

“my heels are high, my eyes cast low”

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:45:00 -0400

“my heels are high, my eyes cast low”

heaven is heavy, the devil on me two tons too. A much more...

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:15:00 -0400

heaven is heavy, the devil on me two tons too. A much more Pharrell looking Lupe, who totally dropped his part on the everyone nose remix at the show (letting him have my heart forever).

2:02am

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:55:00 -0400

Somewhere between too dry toast and discerning Woodworth’s organisms, I realized that underneath this Anna Sui blouse things are wired, mapped, and beat differently. Then a graying browl flashed back into my head leaning over thick rimmed classes and saying, “Know this and learn it, this is you, the journals, the reviews, the text book talk. Sit two standard deviations above the mean and know, kid, you’re a magnet. Draw in, repel, do as you please, but know it and learn it”.

But in the middle of some mornings, the middle road of Main Street sounds much more appealing. But, I breathe in and chip away at last night’s manicure and know I’m not the only one.

Magnets, you know, magnets, right?

There is the basketball star turned ivy league who curls up on my bed and ticks philosophy; taking the String Theory and making it Cat’s Cradle, bending formulas of cosmos and time until it’s just another excuse to kiss. It’s fun but I lie awake at night and wonder if the Coma Berenices enjoy being used as a mere pawn for a night in my underwear. I suspect the answer is “no” so I keep the curtains shut to keep out the stars, in case they see me and go, “Please, this isn’t right.” We map out theories on each others skin until the poles change. He pouts and growls “why don’t you care” when I roll him away and we both leave with dishevelment to rival nonlinear dynamics.

There is one who knows he looks like an old movie star and drives me 90 different kinds of mad. Zip codes instead of genius theory better explain that one, as these two different types of blue were never supposed to mix. But the universe likes to laugh while peering down at a too hot wrestling match between buying into and avoiding all of those psychological theories. I wish he were boring because I’m afraid of his face or what he might know, but I swallow the fear and it keeps me from ever lying to him, as we pin to the wall film, Freud, urban geography, Salinger, and the stories of the crumbles of people who used to get better drinks than us at parties. He tugs at my hair and my hands and my hem, and we kick each other away but no one gets bruised.

There is one who I met in Prep School detention. He calls me from a Hilton in Tokyo to sing me songs he knows I hate. We meet in New York City where he buys me Chanel sunglasses to wear in restaurants with food I can’t even pronounce. We jump on the bed with Muse too loud and our drinks stain the ceiling of the Peninsula Hotel, and then he traces my arms with his fingers and talks about a house in Miami, in Montreal, in Montego Bay. “You can have your own bed, pas mal, oui, love?” he reviles and I tell him that’s good, since he refuses to leave mine. We have everything and keep each other from yawning at it all. If we ever let our own theories of Stoicism , cognition, and behavior slip from our lips, cities could be ours in afternoons. But fear of it all takes the gold, and that keeps us distances that only 747s could scale 363 days of the year.

But this morning, I was alone. It felt like something had been stolen. Normal thought and calmness had finally had a coup d’etat over all the vociferous theory that usually spins my mind. “Oh fuck” is all I had as the toast dropped out of my hand. We’ll never admit what has to happen.

omg omg omg omg I remembered my password! I reallyreallyreally...

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:42:42 -0500

omg omg omg omg I remembered my password! I reallyreallyreally want like an 808 tour, but like in a really small venue (like 100 people, a clean festivilla would be perfecto). I really hope something like this can happen without changing my lastname to mrs. Pharrell Williams, but…if that’s what it takes, I suppose I can take one for the team.

time for sunshine.

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:21:00 -0400

I am leaving Cape Cod bright and early tomorrow for New York. I probably won’t have phone/internet for a bit, but pleeeeeease leave me lots of voicemails, emails, or even send me some post!

I hope to be back with many tales and even more smiles!

laurachowenstine@gmail.com

"Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this..."

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:19:00 -0400

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke.

I started reading Rilke in my first college class ever at Butler University. My professor was this terrifying doctor of English/Lawyer man, totally not what I signed up for considering I picked the class a little something like this “Rainer Maria is like a band that I listen to in my friend’s car, I like my friend, so maybe I will like all these books”. Gazillions of tears, allnighters, and holding my breath for whole class periods later, I survived the class aaaaaaaand and and (here’s the good part) got an A. Now Rilke always strikes this feeling of terror in my stomatch but then this like ultimate relief feeling. Oh god I was going somewhere on this, but then Pharrell (via N.E.R.D. aka top shelf Pharrell) scrolled across the TV and now my mind is blank. Sorry dudes!