Everybody's got their own angel, and this is about mine

So you came. Hi Mark. This is not a homepage like any of my others. My others are supposed to be funny. Whether or not they are funny depends on loads and loads of external factors, both subjective and objective, including, but not limited to
then you might not recognize the intended humor. which is not, frankly, a bad thing, since some of it is at your expense.
So let me clarify. This homepage is not for you, the Surfer. Am I rude to get it out in the open like that? Probably. But I think I should be honest. Yesterday this guy Mark asked me why I always make new homepages instead of updating the old. I have, to date, three homepages, and this is the fourth. And the answer is because I like having a record. So that's what this is. A record. This was a fucked up year. And it ends up here. The internet, physical incarnation of impermanence. According to Boethius, immortality is impossible because no matter how great the dimensions of the finite, it becomes obsolete when measured against the infinite, meaning time. I love The Consolation of Philosophy, and I made myself love Geoffrey Chaucer because he translated it into English. This is Geoffrey's and my connection. Lewd jokes and The Consolation of Philosophy.

So as I say this was a fucked up year. The title of this page is not accidental. I have the most amazing friends in the entire world. So this is about them. If you want to leave, leave now. Here's a link for your exiting pleasure.

Seen all the good things and bad running down the hill all so battered and brought to the ground. I am hungry again; I am drunk again with all the money I owe to my friends. If you walk out the door will I see you again if so much of me lies in your eyes. —Radiohead

Princeton

Jane

This is Jane. She and Tristan were the light bits in my fall semester depression. Before I found myself and became a Classics major. When I was still trying to pretend that I could love John Milton. And I wanted more than anything else in the entire world to be in London, where I lived last summer. Anyway, Jane possesses the unique ability to make me happy when the entire world has crashed and burned on my doorstep. Which, this year, it did.




Tristan

 This is Tristan. He is the other half of Jane. And I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. They are the only couple I have ever known who are able to always be together and maintain separate and unique identities. Tristan is furthermore the only guy I know who is willing to repeat, in unison with Jane and I, the words "vaginal yeast infection." It's sort of a ritual by now. Sort of?



Nick

And here, The Artist Occasionally Known As Nicholas. Usually he is known as Nick. We have cigarettes and bitch about the void of the universe together. Yeah the void of the universe.



Kendra

I don't have any pictures of Kendra. She's been my best friend (whatever that means) since week two of freshman year, when she grabbed her breasts and introduced herself as "Kendra of the Hills." I had actually met her before then. She was in my roommate, Leah's, academic advising group, and we could never remember each other's name. That's how freshman week shapes up. A lot of vague people with elusive names. But anyway, Kendra and I and Todd formed the core (and only) group of smokers in Holder Hall. My RA, Dave, called us the Unholy Trinity. The unholy trinity died a spectacular death in February, when I got back from intersession and Todd came into my room and informed me that Kendra had attempted suicide for the third time in two years and had been asked to leave for a year. Kendie is one of my rocks. She makes me solidly happy. What can I say about her? She is impossible to express. I wrote an awful poem once in which the only redeeming line was one that compared her to a halogen stand lamp. Nick wanted to put it in Kruller, the lit mag we edit, and this one guy said that the image wasn't in keeping with the rest of the poem. Well, fine. Maybe he was right. But it was the only image that could even come close to expressing the way I see Kendra. When she left, I spent two months in a strange grey lethargy, and tried to write a story to get out of it. I never finished the story. It was about me. I couldn't make it fiction. There was no point. Anyway, in it, there was a line
they had nothing in common except a certain elaborately veiled nihilism
Everything else in the story I could classify. Either it was real, it was about Todd and Kendie and I, or it was fiction, a conscious effort to delinate recitation from creation. That was the only bit I wasn't sure. Not because what we had in common wasn't nihilism. But because I don't think it was the only thing.



Todd

 Desmond T. Barry, Jr. was my first friend at Princeton. He lived upstairs from me, in 133 Holder, freshman year. I met him at our RA group dinner, when everyone was silent and nervous and he leaned across the table and said, "Hi, I'm Todd." And I thought praise the fucking lord someone who talks. It all went from there, frankly. How do I explain freshman year? T and Kendie and I laughed at everything. Everything was a huge rollicking joke, and we were the instigators. Am I romanticizing? Possibly. This was a rough year for T and I. We were the ones who lost the most when Kendie left. To say that we were adrift would be an understatement as well as a cliche. If this is my record than I have to be honest. We are what he calls "residential friends". When Kendie left we were destroyed. Not as friends, as people. We reconstructed ourselves, something that happens every day but usually with less drama, and we did it by turning outwards. I called Jane crying in the middle of the night, after Campus initiations. I remember standing in 1879 arch at the blue phone and saying Kendie tried to kill herself again I need to be with someone can I come over. My nonresidential friends are the creative writing crew. Jane and Tristan and Nick. Todd's are musical theatre people. I'm overanalyzing. I have a habit of that. Anyway, this painting is by Picasso, Blue Nude. Todd's got it up on his wall. I remember one day in February he told me that he finally understood it. That the blue is inside the woman as well as outside. I thought it was possibly the most beautiful analysis of art I had ever heard. Eventually I will plagiarize him and put it in a story.


Mac

...and I are no longer friends. We were friends for eight months before I realized that he has no idea who I am or in fact anything about me. I've drifted apart from people before, but never actually had a mutual decision to sever relations. It feels like a breakup, frankly, which is ironic in so very many ways. Ah, Mac. Funny how you can think someone knows you and then realize they think you're a spoiled private school girl with a 36D, and that the last is your primary attribute. Har de fucking har. You live and you learn, right. He lives next door to me, and I keep trying to return his CDs but he won't answer my knocks. I figure that gives me license to keep them. Hey, the eight months weren't totally wasted... Optimism being the key to life. Yeah.


New York

Shannon

If Pat Akhimie is the Incarnation of Calm, Shannon is the Muse of Well-Balancedness. Shannon and I and Choss are linked by the bond of Limelight, the newspaper we edited together in high school. We spent many a nightmarish hour in the Limelight office, formerly the teacher's smoking lounge, which was how I developed a latent addiction to nicotine. Via the secondhand smoke that was lodged in the carpet. Excuses, excuses, I know... Shannon was my cohort in London. A city to which she was allergic, ironically enough. The irony is in her name, Shannon Carty. If you don't get it...well, you don't get it, do you then? Life sucks and then you develop hemorrhoids. Anyway, Shannon and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment (the Fourth floor flat at 3 Prince's Square, W2 4NP) with Jill, Shana, Jen, Wendy, and Emily, and then halfway through Shana went off traveling and we inherited this girl named Mindy, who was possibly the most midwestern thing ever to cross the Atlantic and had a wardrobe consisting entirely of earth tones. Anyway, the crackup was that the flat developed into two loosely defined camps. The nice all-American sorority girls (Jen, Wendy, and Emily, and then later Mindy) and the sarcastic liberals (Jill, Shana, and I, defined as liberal primarily by a liberal use of the word fuck). And Shannon managed to navigate between this. Everybody liked her. It was amazing. She went to church with Jen and to the pub with me. And she never, ever, told any of us how to do our laundry, which was frankly one of Jen's least attractive habits. Also not bathing, but don't get me started. The sorority crew left two weeks before the rest of us, and I had to air out the apartment for freaking ever to get rid of the smell.



Choss

 Choss' real name is Jessie. I think it's important to get that out in the open right now. She doesn't even like being called Choss. But with Shannon and I she understands that there's no major point in protesting. Or at least, she understands that all of her very voluble protests are primarily rhetorical in nature. Choss talks a lot. That's her defining feature. Her boyfriend's name is Scott. His defining feature is his baseball cap, which as far as I can tell—which frankly isn't very far, since I've met him a grand total of twice, and never actually engaged him in conversation—never comes off. Although I mean, it must. I've got enough confidence in Choss to say with relative certainty that Scott, unlike Jen, bathes.

Newsflash: Choss visited this page and sent me an email confirming that Scott bathes. Regularly. Extensively. Without his hat. Inquiring minds want to know.


Amy

Amy and I are linked by a mutual obsession with The Artists Formerly Known As On A Friday. First we were mutually obsessed with the Beatles. Now we're forming a band. Which I want to call "Nag Hammadi" but I haven't told her that yet. Look out for us, probably not called "Nag Hammadi" (my other bandname suggestions have been "Octopus in Bondage" and "my sweetheart the drunk") at a small, extremely cruddy, and probably very dark venue near you in the not indefinite future. So far we feature Amy Prosen on vocals, guitar, and piano, Victor Mazariegos on guitar, me on drums, and Chris and Christina both do guitar, vox, and piano, and will be duking it out for possession of an upright bass sometime in June. Stay tuned for details. You heard it here first.



Lilly

Lilly goes to Yale and is theatrical. When I went up to New Haven this spring, she was in an absolutely smashing production of Equus, which I enjoyed very much. As far as I know, her family is unrelated to the Tuttle Library of Enlightenment, but you might as well check it out anyway. Lilly and I have been friends since the second grade, when we became Girl Scouts together. It's one of our deeper darker mutual secrets. Selling cookies and everything. And those awful uniforms. Ouch. We quit in the sixth grade, when we didn't get promoted from Junior to Senior girl scouts. In it for the long haul, Lilly and I...



Espy

...is the randomest of my friends, being athletic. Me, with athletic friends? Who knew it could happen. Actually, Espy and I became friends in the fourth grade because we were mutually unathletic. Then she went off and became a nationally ranked fencer, leaving me alone in the domain of flab-ridden thighs. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Espy also goes to Yale. After seeing Lilly in Equus, I went and got rollickingly drunk with the fencing team. I've got to say that I love the fencing team.

see pics of the New York crew (and my parents) at my high school graduation

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