Greetings from Buffalo!

I am having a blast at this conference, though I have skipped a good half of it unintentionally. I am half on PST and half on EST, which means that I go to bed around 2-3am EST (which is 11-12 PST) and wake up around 6:30am EST (3:30am PST). I am not a napper, and yet I am most definitely conking out around 2pm for several hours everyday since Wednesday. I am not used to this!
I have also been missing out simply because I have midterms next week, and I am not attending lecture because I need to study so I physically can't/shouldn't be participating which makes me super anxious about my grades and I have to complete some extra credit so that I do not fail a couple of courses or at least get an unacceptable-to-my-"Asian"-standards (which are really just MY standards anyway, but I use "Asian" to deflect ownership of certain really high expectations and oh! look what I've done to this sentence).

Run-on sentences can be so much fun to read aloud. Though grammatically incorrect, there is just something so fabulous about breaking the rules and simply saying exactly how you mean straight from the brain. No filters, isn't that nice.

I can't ever pass on the opportunity to buy a book, or even several. This is the primary reason for my being poor once I am financially cut off from my parents. There's a book fair at the conference, where many of the participants are selling some of their work. Of course I had to buy a couple - Half Life & The Melancholy of Anatomy. Both works are by Shelley Jackson, who's sensationalized by her textual experiment "Skin". I attended her reading a few nights ago. She makes me want pink hair and bangs. And a tattoo that's assigned by her. I want that experience of complicating my identity by someone's claim of ownership of creating me. Does that make sense? Life is just one big cacophony of experiments.

Of course I should choose Shelley Jackson's texts as my next literary adventure. She writes treatments of the body and the possibilities of the body. I presented a critical analysis of a textual body to postulate the reading of the physical body. My entire panel addressed the theme of the body and bodily experiences. The body is so damned interesting.

After my panel on Thursday, the women in my panel and I went to grab a drink at a bar, and we proceeded to discuss pastimes, pornography, Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia pets, and terrible conference humor. One very interesting observation that one woman made was "I never know what I really look like. It's different in every mirror. It's rather disconcerting to not know what you really look like." This prompted some hilarious musings over whether or not pulling out an eyeball to be a true gazer would work or not, given the lack of depth perception and gruesome vision of an eyeless socket and blood running down the face, and that this would make a fabulous Halloween costume. (What a sentence THAT was.)

Anyhow, this did make me think that it is true that I do not know what my face really looks like. It is disconcerting to not be fully aware of what it is that I own as part of me. That, and that I am subject to any other person's gaze without one of my own. I realized that I cannot do what Astrid does at one point in White Oleander, which was draw her own face so many times that she had memorized every line, curve, and plane. I cannot do that. I can position myself in front of a mirror with a pad and pencil (charcoal, actually, is my preferred medium) and never really know what I look like from one glance to the next.