i haven't written in a while - one has to know when or what can be broadcast for an inconstant and fickle audience to read. i have this poem in mind. my friend john sent it to me before he went to korea last year. i don't know why i'm thinking of it right now, but some aspect of today - of the past week's events, i guess, made me want to read it. it's just a soothing poem. here it is. it's by margaret atwood.

Is/Not

Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise

sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities

you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,

nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveller

Give up this medical concern,
buttoned, attentive,

permit yourself anger
and permit me mine

which needs neither
your approval nor your suprise

which does not need to be made legal
which is not against a disease

but against you,
which does not need to be understood

or washed or cauterized,
which needs instead

to be said and said.
Permit me the present tense.

I am not a saint or a criplle,
I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward.

I dispose of my good manners,
you don't have to kiss my wrists.

This is a journey, not a war,
there is no outcome.
I renounce predictions

and aspirins, I resign the future
as I would resign an expired passport:
picture and signature are gone
along with holidays and safe returns.

We're stuck here
on this side of the border
in this country of thumbed streets and stale buildings

where there is nothing spectacular
to see and the weather is ordinary

where love occurs in its pure form only
on the cheaper of the souvenirs

where we must walk slowly
where we may not get anywhere

or anything, where we keep going,
fighting out ways, our way
not our but through.

i haven't been able to write or think or breathe or do anything the past two weeks. trying to get a handle on amalgam and permite has been trying, and i feel like i've just been rushing from one project or assignment or practice session to another, without time to regroup. Monday was class all day and i don't even remember what i did in the evening, although i suspect it was a biophysics assignment. Last tuesday, after morning lecture, i had some research seminar to give, and then i drilled for more than 6 hours, almost straight, until 10. last friday i drilled crazily ALL day and all night...my sleep has been the type that one gets when the day is spent just tossing energy out into the air - running here, going there, buying this bur, drilling that tooth, bitching about the submargins that occur when amalgam is over-carved or chipped away in a fit of anger and frustration - the type of sleep that is so deep, because your body knows it is tired, but so brief, just because of the logistics of it all. and it's times like this that i become a little more philosophical and a little more grave...and i wonder about things, situations, people, the world (whether i'll pass first year)...

anyway, there are things i must do.