Does anyone still use livejournal?  If so please please with chimichongas on top let me know.  or send me an email at elliot.heilman@gmail.com  do that shit

www.pandora.com

i think i finally got adjusted and am now starting to go to class and write letters and be domestic and have dinner parties in my apartment and have dance parties on the metro and watch the girls from my program get relentlessly hit on.

i will be gone but i have made a lot of foolhearty promises that i hope to keep concerning letters. basically, write me a letter while i am abroad for fall semester and i will write you back. i think that most people who i thought would write i have told but i always skip over people.


my address will apparently be:

Accademia Italiana, Rome
c/o Elliot Heilman
Via di San Pantaleo, 66
Roma, Italy 00186


maybe i will read from you, maybe not. i know that this semester will be good.

the moon tonight was so odd. it was a half moon, set low in the sky. it had the orange haze that has overtaken these past couple of days but as i was driving home i could have sworn that it was an odd combination of deep orange and transparent (if that is even a valid combination). a low, orange, diaphanous half-moon. i am sure that ancient people would have had tons of superstitions about such an appearance and that is why they are better than we (are).

when people ask me how i am doing, i can honestly say "im great, no complaints". everyday that i can say that i am thankful.

i think i have written this before but just to reiterate. a lot of shit happens for no reason at all. i am not saying that everything happens without a reason or if you will, purpose. but not everything happens for a purpose just as not everything happens at random.

so last night liz told me about this thing that she found on her windshield. it was very funny. i found the exact same thing this morning outside my house. it's a ad for a lost dog. the dog is spayed AND neutered. the dog responds to "dixie" and lo and behold there's a picture of ms baker on it. goddammit, that is comedy people.

sorry to be a poser, but like noam, i am going to be out of the country until early july. i dont know my mailing address but i will have a lot of free time with which to write letters.

my email address is 07erh@williams.edu

give me your address and i will write a letter with one of those fancy post-communist stamps on it!

i will write my address in albania when i have it

extending your journey because a good song is on, it's totally worth it.

goddamn you oldies for (con)tritely expressing my thoughts

it is embarassing to work really hard to come up with a thesis only to find that if you had only done the reading assigned to class then coming up with a thesis would have been much easier. i am on the path to shining glory and will either finish will a blaze of awesomeness or just a blaze of falling wreckage. my thoughts go through cycles of lucidity and meandering; my job it seems is to harnass the times when i am actually on task.

i think that if i got myself diagnosed as add, i would be a lot more productive. certainly there must be a way to cheat the system.


and i am going to be back around may 23


ps. grant is a slut

i have a friend who tells me that everything happens for a reason. this is very comforting to think, but i think it relies too much on rationalization to make a reason for everything that happens. what the fuck is the reason then when the fiancee of my cousin gets malignant lung cancer detected right after they get married? i dont really see any, nor do i see any upside.

dont really know what to say. out of the fuckin loooooopppp.

i do know that spring reminds me a lot of when i was really young...those days at arylawn before it was corrupted into ecdc. also, i remember that mary joan (for those of you who know) died and that was kinda weird.

every now and again i feel like i have control over my life...it's a good feeling to have even if you are only lying to yourself.

how can you know more about yourself after having a conversation with someone? even if you dont talk about yourself. thats pretty cool

just a few quick things

it rained here, instead of snowing, for the first time in i dont know how long, aka long time. also, i have a tree right outside my window and now it greets me with birds and now i am glad the snow melted because it looks really weird to see birds chirping and lots of snow on the ground.

but as i mentioned sometime ago, i think that nature is keen to play tricks on us. she will give you a taste of spring and then snatch it away and bring subzero temperatures in its place (i swear thats what the forcast says). i think, however, this trickery is a good thing. i mean life would be pretty boring without it...or maybe it wouldnt, i dont know.

do you think that being omniscient would be good or bad? explain

to my friends here i am not smelliot, i am however other names. there are the common terms of endearment (shitbag, hoface) or others (kid, pepper, dr. e (i made that last one up)). but now my best friends here think i'm napolean dynamite, sans moonboots. i cant decide if thats a term of endearment in the normal sense or my sense, but i think it's funny.

spring break here is in about two weeks and, while i want it badly, it also is bittersweet to realize that i go back to classes on the fourth of april and holy crap thats late. right now i live in a world of limbo, because i am just at school right now, but i have so many cool things coming up HOWEVER i dont know if its better to live in expectation of something than to experience the feeling of finishing said something, did that make sense, i think i am using two too many somethings.

when i havent slept much and i am falling asleep in class i have to start moving around and in one class i look out the window. i have become better at taking notes mechanically while thinking about something else real stupid, possibly amoral. but seriously, if i were somebody watching me in that class, i would definately laugh.

ummm....

the aforementioned best friends also like to insult my frequency in using spoons during meals. they both seem to be of the opinion that spoons are only used for certain things. this would not be so bad, but they display their "right way to eat" on my spoon technique (dont get me wrong i dont ONLY use a spoon, i have a fork too). as you can see, i have spent a lot of time thinking about this.

it is late, i have class tomorrow and i have a lot of fucking shit to do. tish

i really dont think any words should be sacred. i mean how can you give into a word???? its just a word.

and asiago cheese is the fucking shit.

and i received a letter, and i couldnt wipe the smile off my face for the whole day. thats a fucking good feeling

Date:	2005-02-20 01:23
Subject:	the big payback
Security:	Public
Mood:	nauseated

i am not quite why i use livejournal. i check it because it gives me the feeling that i am connected, i guess, but we all know that isn't quite sufficient.

i could tell you how classes are going well, i just got to read the really gorey part in thyestes, in which his brother atreus tells him how he killed the children and fed it to him, the father. i could tell you that i just read the lost steps by alego carpentier and another essay by him that blew my mind in the way that i felt a connection to the ideas themselves. or about feeling like i am in high school biology in my aids vaccine course. or i could just write really long and overdescriptive run-on sentences that blabber blabber blabber.

it really seems unavoidable to not begin your sentences with i for me. but in any case, i shall overcome.

now whenever i think something, instead of forgetting it, almost negating its existence, i write it down. and i seem to be doing lots more work this semester so that my life has been a continuum of lots of work and no work which centers around monday when i have all 5 of my classes. it's also particularly cold here, maybe that's just me complaining, but lots of other people seem to agree. walking for even 3 minutes outside makes my ears freeze, my face feel about to shatter and my head cold. i guess i'm building character or something. also i havent really gotten past that whole awkwardness upon first meeting someone cooler than me, but i think many others suck like i do. i can go down to the coffee shop when my roomate is sleeping to do work and even run into my magic realism professor who might be the coolest guy on the block. expecting to force myself to do work, i love to procrastinate and even get a good conversation. and conversation is the endangered species that i, and many others, have been trying to revive. for some reason, i tend to do much better with people from outside the us, maybe there is more to talk about. but having lunch for 2 hours and not even eating that much is gratifying in a totally different way than a full stomach is. i tend to laugh at a lot of things that other people don't find funny, i don't know if the standard of humor is different here or i have really fucked up my sense of humor. it's funny to be sober and have long winding conversations with drunk people, but tonight the conversation turned towards aids and i was reminded of thomas. there is also this thing called the williams art coalition which is going to be using public spaces all over campus to display shows, i will probably curate some which is exciting. there is also an ab-fab senior band called GO KAT GO! who sounds like velvet underground and plays covers of 90s rock hits and sometimes clash and even velvet underground themselves. And i am toying with the idea of learning how to get out a steady punk beat and play in a band. The library here has a rotation of new books and so many of them are so good, i want to read them and i check them out but end up scanning some books closer than others. There is a strong possibility that i will get to go to albania for a couple of weeks and work on an archeological dig and then maybe travel around to italy and spain for a bit. i am lucky enough to go to prague for spring break too. There is plenty of stuff that sucks, but i cant really say that i am unhappy. but then, can i really say that i am happy? i better actually just choose another word...distressed, there thats better. on another note, i still say sorry a lot and at least one person doesnt believe that i am sorry even when i really am. another girl still thinks that every thing i say is mocking her, that i can say nothing without sarcasm, yet she is my friend, go figure.

my life is busy right now, and busy is good, right? Well maybe my life doesnt really have a structure outside of classes, which are infrequent enough not to matter. I firmly believe that the structured life is not for me, however i realize that for a lot of people it is. I just kinda float around from day to day, busy or at least making myself believe that i am busy. There have been hints of warm weather here, it even got to the mid 40s. and those days are THE WORST. not exactly, but every day of warm weather has brought a cold front, often with snow, plummeting temperatures down. It is the game of winter. Fuck winter.

i just watched don't look back. it was good, of course, but i think i would be way too intimidated to talk to bobby d, i mean he seemed kind of stand-offish whenever he wanted to. but i did admire his admirable detachment from the happenings around him. Hearing the multiple shows started off with "it aint me babe" i was reminded of the narrator's wife in "the lost steps" who was trapped in a historical drama, as if off of the twilight zone, she was doomed to repeat the same play over and over for 5 years.

my roomate has really gotten me into james brown, everyone should really go download or listen to "paid the cost to be the boss" it will explain the fascination. the good thing about going to a small college is that you can feel bigger here than you could in let's say new york. here, even small participation can make it seem like you are making a difference. However, it is a cruel lie. To matter, in this life, in the sense that your life directly impacts many other people, is saved for a select group. to distinguish yourself in this world, seems to be the ultimate goal of success. the "unique individual" that commercials are increasingly pandering to is a collective cry to help from consumers. Its almost too fucking ironic that commercials and consuming will make you an individual.

So life is going a thousand miles an hour. I dont know where the fuck its going, but hopefully it doesnt go the path of least resistence.


i cant believe i wrote so much, maybe it was selfish of me.

my drive back to school was through one giant cloud. it extended through pennsylvania, connecticut AND massachusettes. i think it was pathetic fallacy. i felt as though i was travelling between my two different worlds, and so i descended into the murky darkness of the cloud and then entered a perfectly clear williams.

i dont think that school vouchers are as bad as people make them out to be, at least in an ideal world.

my trip to turkey is coming up and i am very excited. the only thing i am not excited about is rushing to finish everything that i need to do before i leave. now i have left myself with many things to do and only 2 days in which to do said things. however, i did manage to hang out with some cool new people and be sociable (something which i am not often confident i can do).

my thoughts are too jumbled to make any sense of anything, but i have found that i am most comfortable in discussions/arguments. it's not even that i get into conversations in which i am an expert, but for some reason, i completely shed any fear of being wrong or having people know what i think and i can almost most truly be myself (in some weird and FUCKEDUP way). this whole "small talk" thing...and being not socially awkward i think is VERY overrated.

so here's to a new year, full of possibilities and full of dissappointments.

question:

if you at first think something but then realize how stupid/bad/assinine/horrible/egotistical/myopic/etc. the thought is...are you still a good person?

or put it another way:

does counteracting intially bad thoughts and repeating to yourself "thats so stupid" or "how could i even think that" make a bad person with a conscious or a good person?

home is a mixed blessing very much like college is a mixed blessing, but each is mixed differently....got it?

i check my email expectantly and all i get is stupid listserve shit

i had my checkup today and everything went well, i even managed to get 280 dollars out of nih, GO BEATING THE SYSTEM!!!

also, my mom taught me how to make babka (polish sweet bread) and i cooked dinner one night by meself

things are changing, but it's always nice to get back to your roots, back to people who don't need you to talk to know what you are thinking. but now back to that precarious balancing game that is my life, i hope it doesnt topple over.

i almost got through the whole drive home without a ticket.

and i left a lot in williams.

this christmas is going to be different than everyother one that i have had before.

and i am home.