Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Rachel's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, May 18th, 2006
12:38 pm	At the End of Two Years Grad school's finished (I am now, officially, Masteress Mouse) and my new job is one month away. In celebration of these facts, here are some (funny/bizarre) quotes from my former students' papers: “In America we are allowed to choose what we believe in, whereas in some other nations, choice of religion is not a question. In those other countries, especially in the mid-east, religion means nearly the same thing to everyone.” “So why do you need to understand the meaning of the word depression, you ask? Because if you understood the true meaning of the word, you would not be dead today.” “The woman crashed her family Sudan into a pole.” “In other religions such as the Muslim faith, prestigious leaders flaunt their wealth. Saddam Hussein, although not particularly a religious leader, still claims to be a holy man.” "Both women and bunnies embrace their curves." “In Christianity, the Bible represents the ultimate truth; for Hinduism, Mohammed is truth.” (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 4th, 2004
10:49 am	I'm 25! Insanity... Current Mood: weird (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2004
3:39 pm	A, B, C I have a wild love/hate relationship with this city. Some mornings, walking up the stairs of Penn Station, watching the butt of the business man in front of me jiggle in its pinstripes, I feel a compulsion to run back downstairs, take an Amtrak somewhere wild, and never come back. And so much of Manhattan makes me ill. The Upper West Side: the walls of its high-rises bursting out with thousands of 20-and 30-something-year old yuppie workaholics. Many college would-be revolutionaries meet their end here, slaving their days away so they can afford their closet-sized apartment, Prada, and $15 margaritas. But nothing makes me want to vomit like Times Square - plastered in flashy advertisements and ooohh-lookherelookhere Disney shops. All that is bad about corporate America is set a-glimmering. I'm almost tempted to say that pre-Giuliani 42nd Street with it's 25 cent peep shows, hookers, and sex shops, was more classy. Even the village and Soho, once the savior of my youth, seem too overflowing with rich NYU-type kids who proclaim themselves hipsters by donning $40 Urban Outfitters t-shirts that they could've bought in a thrift shop for a buck. But today! Today, meandering about Union Square, I turned my nose south and reacquainted myself with one of the remaining treasures of New York - alphabet city. Walking through Tompkins Square Park, I was so happy, I almost felt like crying. There, bald and bearded revolutionaries in orange socks ranted crazy speak over tuna sandwiches and chess games. The bizarre, disaffected folk of the city have left the renovated Union and Washington Squares and are lunching on the fading grass of a beautiful, mildly dirty Tompkins Square. And Avenues A, B, C - they still have character... Untouched by the subway system, they remain virtually Starbucks-free. Instead, streets are lined with small coffee shops, non-chain restaurants, bars with murals on their doors, thrift shops, barber shops, gardens lined with pinwheels made from old soda cans! And, shockingly enough for Manhattan, you can still see the sky without lifting your head. I can't wait for summer. Current Mood: happy (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2004
4:31 pm	I'm becoming a psychopath. I check my e-mail, look at my cell phone every ten minutes. I step in the door of my house, dash to the counter - where's the mail? where's the mail? Pictures in my mind of professors in colleges across the east coast reading my papers, transcripts, conjuring up an image of a person through the numbers - and she looks nothing like me. Rating me on my grammatical errors, the solidity of my thesis. And all this makes no sense; I'm already in somewhere - why do I even care? I find myself in the Faskas living room bursting out like a madwoman at someone I don't even know for his opinions; the inside of my body is boiling over and I'm dizzy with an anger I never knew existed within me. I dream of traveling to other dimensions where everyone's been brainwashed and the only person who can save me is James Earl Jones. James Earl Jones?! It's nearly spring but I keep getting that end-of-summer feeling slithering around inside my bones. Current Mood: stressed (Comment on this)
Friday, February 20th, 2004
12:17 pm	this song makes me want to jump up on my chair and scream ecstatically. makes me want to cry, fall on the floor and stare at the ceiling for an hour. Current Music: Velvet Undergound - Heroin (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 17th, 2004
9:27 pm	today is the kind of day that although everything in your life is going great - you just got into grad school, you have an awesome boyfriend, you've been seeing lots of all your friends, you've had interesting experiences and cross country roadtrips and discovered new music and ideas - everything feels like it's falling apart. as though you wake up in the morning and your life just feels uncomfortable, like it doesn't fit you, like the itchy woolen sweater your aunt gave you for chanukah - everyone ooh-ed and ahh-ed and said, god doesn't she look beautiful, but all you could think of was how long you'd have to stand in the center of the room before they let you run upstairs and take the damn thing off. in barnes and noble today i saw a magazine with kurt cobain's picture on it; big headline said it'll be the ten year anniversary of his death. TEN YEARS. and the memories filter of sitting, glazed eyes on dora's couch watching reruns of nirvana unplugged in complete silence. or sitting at my desk, listening to the radio when the announcement breaks and they run into all apologies. frozen at my desk, thinking, did i just hear that right? sometimes i think the early nineties were so much more real than this decade can ever be. but maybe i'm just thinking of what it felt like to be fourteen... (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 14th, 2004
6:40 pm	ABSOLUTE INSANITY "Dear Rachel Adler: I write with excellent news. We'd like to offer you admission to our Graduate Program in English, fully funded with a Teaching Assistantship, a stipend, and a complete tuition waiver. Details will follow in writing, but I thought I'd let you know right away, and also invite you to come to campus for the English Graduate Program's recruiting weekend, March 19-21 2004. It will give you a chance to see the campus, and more importantly it will offer the opportunity to meet and talk with faculty and graduate students, as well as your future colleagues in the incoming class for fall 2004. We can offer you lodging on campus for the weekend, and a stipend to help defray the costs of travel. We're happy to extend you an invitation to join a program where, over the past 8 years, our graduating PhD placement rates have averaged around 90%, despite the deeply depressed academic market. We've recently placed students at large PhD-granting schools (the main-campus Universities of Texas, Minnesota, Indiana, Illinois, Connecticut, New Mexico, Arkansas, Delaware, West Virginia, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Syracuse), as well as private schools and liberal arts colleges (Bucknell, DePaul, Clemson, Auburn, St. Louis University). Consistent with the resolution agreed to by most universities, you are under no obligation to accept or reject our offer until April 15, 2004. However, out of respect for the many other outstanding students in our applicant pool to whom we've yet to be able to offer financial aid, and in keeping with the commitment we've shown you in making this offer, we ask you to make every effort to notify us of your decision as soon as possible. We'll follow up this email with a phone call from Liz Jenkins, Associate Director of the Graduate Program, in a week or so, after the formal letter arrives. Let me know where and when are good times to get a hold of you, and we'll look forward to talking with you soon. In the meanwhile, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me, either by email or at the number listed below. All the Best, JTN" ---I feel totally giddy and like they must have made a mistake. Tuition waiver? Teaching Assistantship? Stipend? All this for me? Insanity.--- Current Mood: ecstatic (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 11th, 2004
12:24 am	Why I better get into grad school... Expenditures: GRE books - $34.71 GRE registration - $245 GRE score reports - $111 TOTAL GRE COSTS - $390.71 Bnot Chayil transcripts - $50 Queens College transcripts - $48 TOTAL TRANSCRIPTS COSTS - $98 UPenn Application fee- $70 NYU Application fee - $75 PSU Application fee- $45 Columbia Application fee - $75 Stonybrook Application fee - $50 UConn Application fee - $55 Binghamton Application fee - $55 TOTAL APPLICATION FEES - $425 TOTAL FED-EX COSTS - $77.42 ---TOTAL COST OF APPLYING TO GRAD SCHOOL: $991.13--- ...but at least I'm done. Finally. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 6th, 2004
12:24 pm	Fly over country I feel incapacitated by the weight that is my routine. New York is icy, rainy; this morning I stood outside for fifteen minutes, slowly letting my world freeze over as I waited for a bus to take me where I did not want to go. All I could think of was that just a week ago, I was feverish, jumping into Frank's car on 20th street and zooming off into a wild America, Satchmo blasting over the stereo. The time encompassed in the five days is immeasurable by the standards I usually use. Office life cannot be compared to really living. But the knowledge that I will quit, that come June, I will take off with Tzvi and roam for two months, sleeping in tents, exploring new cities and towns and reexploring old ones...this keeps me alive. Random road memories: - Crosses scattered across the landscape of Bible Belt America. Big sign says, "Read the bible. It is God's word." - Morgantown, West Virginia. Snowy highways under a setting sun and feeling the power surge, electrifying my being with the understanding that we're crossing into West. - Louisville, Kentucky. Rockin city rife with bluesy fun and indie record stores... Italian food with the half Native American Rachel waitress. - The desolation of a Superbowl Sunday morning in southern Illinois. Definitely the most depressing state I've ever been to. - Missouri: the land of the warehouse; "Fireworks warehouse," "XXX Sex warehouse", "Bible warehouse." What a bizarre country we live in. - LAWRENCE, KANSAS!!!!! Definitely at the top of my list of cities. We're walking snowy, empty streets of a Superbowl Sunday night and across the street, two guys are having a cigarette outside. "Wanna come up? We're recording a band," they say -- and we're up in their recording studio...my brain buzzing.... "This is the night on my brain, leaving Diana unveiled...red man and white woman, under the moon turned pale." Then they say, hey, there's this cool tavern on 8th Avenue, wanna come. And we do. There, the argument begins: Janet Jackson - was it her boob? was it not? The girl with flirty eyes and a bat tattooed across her chest maintains it was not that. Then smiles coyly at me, says, "Girl, you are the cutest think I've ever seen"; I move up from my chair and she says, "Oooh! That was hot! Do that again..." Thinking Frank's my boyfriend, tells him he's lucky (she'd like to take me home -- and all the boys are jealous) - Holyrood, Kansas. A sense of 1950s middle America in the orderly supermarket with the man behind the cabbages twanging do we know Joe from Bayside? No - oh, he must be before your time. And the small diner; woman behind the counter smoking, tells us, "Bless your soul..." for our dwelling in the city of New York. And in pour four happy, hicktown 80 year-olds, laughing their asses off, dissing on lil Georgie Porgie and all his Republican friends and telling us stories of their farming and truckdriving days. I'm thinking DAMN I love this fucking country. And Kansas shines! Must go back. Must twirl in the prarie under an August sun and remember how I frollicked on its February snow under a setting sun... - Then, as a beautiful end, we reach Pueblo, Colorado...where Clemente currently dwells with his beautiful 34-year-old redhead Michelle girlfriend over her health food store. Their children running around together - Tarquin, Sheryl, Kaitsal, Shannon - are a blending of the old and new Americas. Clemente tells me Mayan secrets of the starbeings and looks into my eyes, says, "You must leave New York." 8pm Colorado time, I'm sitting in their lighted, green kitchen, laughing and eating rice & beans, olive bread, salad, and wondering how anyone in this world can ever claim boredom as their reality. Trip soundtrack: Louis Armstrong Bob Marley Bonnie Prince Billy Cat Power Eric's Trip Manu Chao Os Mutantes Modest Mouse Dead Prez Vaselines Current Mood: exhausted Current Music: Moldy Peaches - Steak for Chicken (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 29th, 2004
3:13 pm	the new kick leaving tomorrow for a roadtrip across wintry America... :-) Current Mood: excited (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 26th, 2004
5:06 pm	brain overload Working nonstop since 9am. Actually beginning to become insane so that it begins to seem like the beeping of the towtruck outside is singing to me. 5:08. 22 more minutes. I know I needed to look something up online...? The one thing I've absorbed through all of this is the sadness of the people who make it their life to chase promotions and backstab their coworkers. So many people find the corporate world exciting and I can't figure out why. In college, people like to refer to the experience as "going out into the real world." Real world? Conformist's world, world of responsibility, maybe. But why people believe this world is more "real" than the others that exist is beyond me. Working life is anything but real: it's putting on a fake smile, kissing your bosses asses, exhausting yourself so thoroughly that you forget how to truly think the way you did in college, and draining the sense of individuality you built up your whole life so that you can become a job description. But maybe I'm just being pessimistic. It's been a long day. Tzvi's coming to pick me up which makes things so much better. I'll be happier in an hour. Hopefully. Current Mood: exhausted (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 16th, 2004
1:29 pm	I find it ridiculous. You go to a website. Poets.org, say. Or maybe you take a poetry class. English 140 or whatnot. And they hand you out these books, anthologies, and say, here – this – this is poetry. Take a creative writing class and perhaps poetry will grow out of you. But beware: what you write will never be Poetry unless you are damn good. And then, only after you're dead. And the same goes for art. In 6th grade, they lead you by hand into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wrinkly woman in the bright pink shoes and heels that click-click on the marble stops in front of a Michaelangelo, or if she's a bit more daring, a Picasso, and talks about the colors, the forms, in a way that screams: BOYS AND GIRLS, THIS IS ART. As if we could confine all the art in the world to a few museums scattered across New York, Paris, San Francisco. As if the homeless man drawing pictures on a cardboard box wasn't more of an artist than half the posterized, glass-cased Artistes of the world. But of course, Whitman, Monet, are not at fault. They breathed their art; didn't move into a sterile museum and confine themselves to marble staircases. The problem is the education system which pushes us to believe that real art only exists in the confines of canonized pieces of art. The result is the breeding of generations who are so sterilized that they need to live through television or drugs because they've been trained not to actually SEE the world around them. Real vision, real art is pumping through the sidewalks and the open skies. Dammit. Current Mood: annoyed (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 11th, 2004
1:11 am	High! On life! On the idea that I am alive and breathing and it's Saturday night at 1am and even though I've just exhausted my boyfriend whose put up with my self-induced high for the past 3 hours in his own sleepiness, and even though he's gone home now, I still feel like jumping around the living room and dancing on the couches. So I will. My sister thinks I'm crazy. My dad asked, "Have you been drinking?" I don't care it's fucking 1am and I'm alive and it's negative something degrees outside and my body is fucking bursting. CrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaZZZZZZZZZZZzyyyyyyy.... RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL hee hee. this is fun. feel bad i screwed over snid and crewie. they wanted to go to gambling-land tomorrow but i was so hyper tonight no way i could do that fucking essay. it was just too much fun to put on the mix i made in 5th grade and to hear elvis duran on z100 saying, "win a brand new 1990 fire red mazda miada." just too much fun to dance around my basement like a psychomaniac, to scream and sing and pretend my fingers are little people diving off the end of tzvi's nose into the mouth of the river of life. it's so nice to have a boyfriend who loves me despite the fact that i am perhaps the most luniacal twenty-four year old on this planet. despite the fact that he's three years younger and so much more normal than this bizzaroid chica. coulda gone to see donnie darko tonight at the movie theatre in the village. i should really do that one sat. night. so much cooler on the movie screen, very good movie. verry hyper am i. very hyyyyyyyypppppppppppeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaacccccccccccctttttttttttttttiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiivvvvvvvvvvvvvveeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. this is fun ----------yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy heehee (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 8th, 2004
11:04 pm	Grrr...Republicans http://www.bushin30seconds.org/ 30 second anti-Bush commercials. A few of these are really beautiful. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 7th, 2004
9:22 am	This is for all of you still in college... Fun things are found while procrastinating...though much doesn't apply for Queens, but some still very relevant... 50 THINGS ADMISSIONS NEVER TOLD YOU ABOUT COLLEGE 1. Quarters are like gold. 2. Two meals a day is standard. 3. Road trip whenever possible. 4. Going to the mailbox was never an ego booster/breaker before. 5. You will begin to nap again. 6. Your bookstore bill will almost equal tuition. 7. Squirt guns = Stress relief. 8. E-mail becomes your second language. 9. College students throw paper airplanes too. 10. You never realized so many people were smarter than you. 11. Western Europe could be wiped out by a horrible plague and you wouldn't know, but you can recite last week's re-run of the Simpsons verbatim. 12. You will never rent more movies in your life. 13. No one is too old for video games. 14. The health service nurses are there because they couldn't make it at a real hospital. Never, ever forget that. 15. Care packages are right up there with birthdays. 16. Campus is only clean for family weekend and freshman orientation. 17. It never sucked so much to get sick. 18. Nothing you want to register for will be open. 19. Beware of the freshman 15!!! 20. Be creative in the dining hall... 21. Classes... the later the better. 22. You are no longer thankful that the fire alarms are here to protect you. 23. Disney movies are more than just classics. 24. Asleep by 2:30 am is an early night. 25. Cereal makes a meal any time of the day. 26. New additions to food groups: ramen, and pizza. 27. ATM's are the devils advocate. ATM= Another Twenty Missing. 28. Duct tape heals all wounds. 29. If they say you can't have it in your dorm, they are just kidding--especially,stolen paraphernalia. 30. Keys have never been so important, yet you seem to lose them even more. 31. Showers become less important, sleep becomes more important. 32. You will eat anywhere that is a buffet. 33. You realize college is the ideal lifestyle, except for those damn classes. 34. Procrastination is an art form. 35. Jeans may be worn as many times as the wearer desires. 36. The only time to dress up is when your jeans are dirty. 37. You'll eat anything that's free. 38. College football is the coolest thing on the planet. 39. Cartoons are for all ages, especially Scooby Doo! 40. You are never alone. 41. SNOOD is more addicting than pot. 42. Thanks to Napster, you will never listen to one of your CDs ever again. 43. Those ugly cinder blocks are not sound proof. 44. You will come to hate at least one person in your hall with a passion. 45. Stealing from the dining hall will become second nature. 46. If it's snowing out- the only reason you will leave your room is for food or alcohol. 47. Your RA will be your best friend if he/she has a car. 48. Dishes smell after days of piling up. 49. No matter how nice you are, some people just won't smile back- get used to it. 50. Pictures, posters, emails or anything else to cover the ugly cell we live in will be transformed into wallpaper. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 6th, 2004
4:19 pm	Slacker slacker slacker Rachel... must stop daydreaming myself onto Paris cobblestone, must stop deciding it's important to find out random tidbits of information by surfing the web, must stop playing hundreds of games of Minesweeper and DO MY WORK! Taking long lunches to wander around Union Square is wonderful when there aren't deadlines. But deadlines there are: for work-related projects, and more importantly, for applications. Columbia's essay is short two paragraphs of explanation; Penn State's is barely started. January 15th mocks me from it's calendar space on my wall... And yet here I am, once again, writing in my livejournal. What a bizarre creature am I. Current Mood: lazy Current Music: Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombone (Comment on this)
Monday, January 5th, 2004
10:31 am	Office culture is so problematic. 9am Monday morning, out of the rain, and the first order of business is the cup of strong, sugary coffee. Then it's expected I can sit down at my desk and calmly type and edit away the first half of the day. As if my body isn't a container of wild, racing caffeinated cells that plead with me to bounce, pogo-stick style, round and round in circles and scream ecstatically when I fall down dizzy, the world rotating around me. Current Mood: giddy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 30th, 2003
4:33 pm	out of autopilot, again 4:30...aaaah...energy rush... 1/2 an hour and liz will be waiting downstairs and off we'll go to the magical kingdom of literary new york...kgb bar? bowery poetry? nuyorican? no matter..it's all about the buzz and kick of life... sometimes new york speeds through my veins, pure and unfiltered, creates cities in my brain and leaves me running wild. last night, also, intense. had philosophical conversations about god with david. then lirr back to the LI and get a call from mountain frank - he's in new york - and do i want to hang out? well, it's already 11, but i'm on this rush and i'm thinking, screw work, screw it all, turn on my car and over to queens, turn on metropolitan avenue, then again by the mcdonalds and there's frank's house, alive in christmas decorations. mrs. romano, her hair grown out long, hugs me, feeds me lime meltaways and other pieces of italian cooking and there's frank...drenched in colorado...and his eyes are so different...yes, he says, there's been a soul change. he's been hanging out with clemente, his new lacotan friend, praying native american prayers in sweat lodges and experimenting with guitar and life. in forest park, then astoria in the cafe with my foaming greek ice tea and strawberry shortcake and i'm thinking frank is the adventurer i want to be, need to be, will be. the moment my car leaves new york this summer, i will feel myself transform again to the rachel i was, wild and real, in the summer of 2001. felt it a little last night, realized it's all about the human contact, the natural world. people fool themselves into the delusional fantasy of television, drugs, jobs - all habits that remove them from experiencing the moment. because the moment is really all that matters. air, breath, life, is electric. i will not let myself dull with age like so many people i know. Current Mood: high Current Music: Manu Chao - King of the Bongo (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 29th, 2003
10:41 am	another vacation flushed down the toilet Exciting things about this weekend: 1. It was five days (but I really miss college and its six week long winter break...) 2. My book review was accepted. I'm going to be published. Yay! 3. I got to hang out with Jessica for the first time in five months (why must law school and med school [Mikey :-(] drag our friends so far away?) and Cindy for the first time since I got back from Israel. 4. Despite all my procrastination, I finished my NYU application and will mail it today. (Relearned that revising your own poetry is ridiculously hard) 5. Got to chill with Sara, even if that did mean getting drenched in the rain and dragging furniture and boxes and whatnot around (okay, so Tzvi and the other boys did most of the work - though everything seemed to break around Tzvi). 6. Bought a pair of boots and sandals for $53 (when I thought I would spend $90...yay after-Christmas sales) 7. Ran around Christmasy Manhattan, under the Rockefeller Ctr. Christmas tree, with Tzvi like a dizzy 5-year-old 8. Played some ridiculously fun card game at the Leon's and devoured half a container of black jelly beans (I know I'm a weirdo). ...and now the weekend is over (sigh), and Tzvi's on a plane out to Las Vegas, and I'm in the office drinking another cup of oversugared coffee, waiting for 1:15... Current Mood: pensive Current Music: the buzzing of my computer (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 25th, 2003
1:21 pm	$!#@ applications! I give up trying to define who I am, why I want what I want, what (as the books say it) makes me "tick," in an essay! What makes me tick...nights aimless and wandering hungry-eyed and impassioned inside glimmering cities...open land of the stretch of New Mexico and how the land crumples as it reaches Colorado. I know what does NOT make me tick - dissecting books I know I don't like just so I can say SOMETHING good about it. Editors at Glamour who confuse the flow of storyline with truth. Sitting on trains back to Long Island wondering what the hell I have done with my life and how it is I could have sold myself short. I want to write an essay and be completely truthful. I want to say: I am a traveler, an explorer; I am obsessed with contemplation and memories and photographs and the rush of the spontaneous, purposeless 70 mph on a Wednesday midnight highway. I want to send in my journals, my MP3 collection, my poetry (unrevised) and let them figure it out for themselves! But instead I mull over the meaningless: my lies? my passings? my indiscretions, not-so-bad-after-all decisions? Fuck grad school! Maybe I should just take to the road and spend the next two years doing what really matters... Current Mood: frustrated (2 Comments |Comment on this)