Stay · Me · With · Wine

Some of you are thinking, "why?" Why defile a perfectly good piece of classic English literature by adding gratuitous gore, ninjas, and childish sexual innuendos?
Well I say, “because it’s there…and because antiquated copyright laws let me.”

Some things are not meant to be, and some of them happen anyway. 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594743347/artandlies-20

This month is strange. Here is Autumn, damp and cool and perfect, and I can't find anything within myself to answer it. My life has always been so autumnal, but now I feel as if summer is clinging to my coat tails, sticking to the bottoms of my sun-bleached sneakers. I find myself basking in Parisian summers with Colette rather than read king Lear. I want no dark and misty nights like tonight. I smile and am sunny to everyone I meet these days, trying to pull them from the dark reveries that so many fall into in such weather. It is as if there is a wall between me and myself, and I feel her there, longing for midnights and horror and chill, moaning gales, waiting to find some chink through which to escape into my conscious mind. Poor thing, but I can't allow her out. I have too much to do and haven't the time to be her.
My last class was filled with stress and sudden mental breakdowns. This class is filled with sex. My prof. is convinced that everything Shakespeare says is horribly dirty, even when it's very obviously not, and would be completely out of place if it were. But we all must smile and nod, because she'd so cheerful and proud of herself, and it would be a shame to rob her of her good mood. I'm also working costume crew for a play, which may or may not turn out well, but luckily I'm far too lost in non-class reading to worry too much about it. I had the most glorious night tonight, laying on my bed, listening to Debussy and eating lemon drops, while reading Claudine in Paris. Lovely, that was.
I'm currently feeling very pleased with my halloween costume ideas.

I would love to be sleeping right now, but I am sitting up, a bit drunk, drinking water, listening to Nick Cave, and forcing my brain to work. I'm attempting to become sober before bed, since I have a practice GRE in the morning and a penchant for bad hangovers.
I've been living in a rather delightful ramshackle dorm which is really quite lovely from the outside. My room is a bit like a St. John's dorm room, all cinder block and tile, and a lovely view. I found a freshman the other day who I rather wanted to box up and ship to New Mexico, but I think that the handling costs would be rather excessive, and besides, I haven't anywhere near a large enough box. The freshman this year are adorable and disturbingly numerous, they're a bit like puppies really, in that they are trainable, but follow one about.
I've been thinking of the future and being terribly afraid, and taking senior sem. which led to ever larger mental breakdowns, culminating in my sobbing in the bathroom for most of a morning. I don't think I've felt such stress since I left St. John's. I'm glad it's over and I can move on to what looks to be a delightfully simple Shakespeare class and dressing up people in either period costumes or the castoffs of cowboys and barmaids. It should be lovely, though I have to buy new books for it.
Well, that was a bit of a drunken ramble. I suppose I'll sleep now.

Summer is ending. I've written nothing here since the end of the school year. Little has happened, and much has. I've been home alone much of the time, enjoying what will probably be the last complete summer spent in this house, and doing almost nothing I had planned to get done, seeing almost no one I had meant to see. (If I should have seen you, if you desperately wish to drink coffee and hear about the various exploits of my cats, do give me a ring. I leave a week from Sunday and keep getting the nagging feeling that I've forgotten things/people.) I played with the cats and worked part time in our tiny and unlikely little art store. I cut off most of my hair, the long hair I've had since I was a small girl, and now am looking like a character truant from the pages of Cold Comfort Farm. The course of my life also changed a bit when I concluded that it would be better for me to get my PhD in English and become a professor, rather than become a librarian and live with the nagging feeling that I could have done better. It means that the search for a grad school is now on and the thinking about finances, and how I will now be in school for another five of six years when the end seemed so very close just a moment ago. Life seems rather shiny and new, with whole new areas of possibility yawning open beneath me without warning.
I've been worrying a great deal over classes and grad school. Worrying about money (which I somehow continue to spend with reckless abandon despite its scarcity) and my horrid new dorm. The last couple of days I've been counteracting the worry by indulging completely, eating out, shopping. I bought a leather jacket and a beautiful silk dress and drank good wine more often than I probably should. I've seen people I haven't seen in forever, like my once-coworker Andy, and spent time trying on wonderful, newly acquired vintage clothes, listened to french poems set to Debussy, wandered sun and rain drenched streets with a bizarre French book and endless cups of cinnamon topped coffee. It hasn't annihilated the fear quite as I would have liked, but it has taken the edge off.

I've been utterly amazed by this spring. It's the first time in 3 years that I've seen a midwest spring, a thing which can be compared to spring nowhere else. part of this may be because the winters here are so impossible. This year trees were destroyed, buildings encrusted with ice, park benches and small children buried beneath drifts of snow. Iron grey skies were punctuated by painfully bright and frigid days. In the clutch of such a thing, it is impossible to believe in spring. You just know that this year it will not come and when the snow finally melts, the world beneath will be left a stark wasteland. When the spring comes it is a miracle. The trees you knew would never leaf again suddenly burst into bloom and the entire world is filled with the scent of apple blossoms and the sounds of laughter and birdsong. I had forgotten.
Now it is nearly summer. today was hot and muggy, grey and misty. I was supposed to be terribly productive, but I have yet to start my homework. The year is nearly over and most of my room is already packed up. Plans are made for a Wednesday exodus down to Hanover. I'll be awfully sorry to leave my little room, but can't wait to go and rearrange my room at home. I'm looking forward to a summer of house sitting, watching movies and cleaning out all of the closets. I may even have a yard sale.
I feel very removed here. I know that it's the place because all of it disappeared when I was away during spring break, it disappears in Mexico as well. On a happy note, it means that I won't miss anyone over the summer, nor any of the graduating seniors who I will likely never see again. As much as I may like some of them, I don't really care about them.
And I'm off to finally do some French homework, followed by translations which started off as an amusing diversion and have morphed into extra credit. Yay!

I've just started my final block of the year. An impossibly difficult French class which will leave me broken, and possibly mad (if you can be both at the same time.)
My religion class last block went stunningly well. Today I got back my final paper (inexplicably, as my teacher is currently wandering Mongolia with a tiny bilingual monk and a gaggle of students) covered in cheerful and excited comments and a lovely shiny A. I’m quite sad that I’m not going to have more classes with that professor, he was wonderfully entertaining and had glorious stories about snakes and superstitions and witch doctors and dying cultures...sometimes all together. He had been everywhere.
This weekend I met all of the geekiest people at my school. They were utterly adorable. I had a glorious time and cleaned things and watched ridiculous girly movies and ate midnight pancakes and came to terms with a boy who frightened me once while drunk.
I'm currently planning to spend a month lost to madness and to return to Galena at the end of the month in shambles and utterly unemployed (unfortunate, as I can't afford tuition next year if I have no job,) but ready to cook vast quantities of yummy food and possibly clean out the garage of all my stuff (not to mention clean every surface in the house...must be...cobweb...free.)
Ah well, the world is lovely and everything is bursting into bloom and I have a D.H. Lawrence novel to keep my mind off of my french homework. Off to study late night verb conjugations.

There is thunder and lightening outside my windows, and I am wrapped up in a blanket, drinking Irish breakfast tea and trying to come up with a way to argue against my textbooks assumptions about general animism in early chinese religion. Earlier tonight I spent some time in my dorms creepy basement telling ghost stories to a terrified gay boy from Texas to help him take his mind off the tornado warning.

I suppose little has happened since last month. My crushing of C.S. Lewis went well...so well in fact that my teacher stopped me yesterday and urged me to look into doing some independent study next year, as she thinks I'm ready to work on significantly more advanced things than my undergraduate classes will offer.
I spent much of spring break in New Mexico visiting Santa Fe and my younger brother. It was lovely. I had missed the mountains a great deal. They are so beautiful and the stars are so close. It was lovely to see Ryan’s little house and sit about watching movies and drinking good beer. There is very little in the world like family.
I am lucky that I live in such a gorgeous place or I would never be able to stand leaving Santa Fe. It was lovely to see everyone from St. John's, though it was brief. It's nice to know that those I knew are doing well. It is a glorious thing to feel utterly unneeded. I was glad that I was able to visit this year and not at some later time. It felt as if everything there had simply been suspended while I was away; time seemed wonderfully static. Next year many of the people I wanted to see will have gone away.

I’ve found a strange person named Amit Erez. Seemingly he’s part of the underground music scene in Israel, but he plays lovely songs on guitar and sings in English with the most fascinating accent. It’s a middle-eastern/ english/ possibly german/ almost a little bit irish kind of thing, but really very pretty in a unique way.

The tea is nearly gone and I must be off to write my first religion paper. I have a wonderfully energetic and bizarre little Jewish man for a professor and I am less than sure of what his grading will be like. He's a bit too whimsical for comfort.

This has been a very nice Easter. Being somewhat grown up I have long given up on easter baskets and trinkets, yet this year I was sent hyacinths and beautiful soap and tonight my mother and stepfather arrived with huge bags of food which they somehow expect me to consume within the next three days. I spent much of the day curled up in bed with a bizarre 18th century novel which, though an obvious precursor to Jane Austen, sadly had not her knack for raising itself above its own time. I spent the rest of the day in conversation and arguing vehemently with C.S. Lewis in my notebook. As much as I love him, his views on Paradise Lost are far too coloured by his religion. He managed to miss the whole point of the epic. One simply cannot compare Satan to a character from Emma and I'm afraid I'm going to have to crush him (with as much kindness to him as I can manage) into tiny pieces in my paper tomorrow. Now I must stop eating tiny chocolate eggs and proceed to doing something useful...I have yet to read Mr. Lewis' comments on the other residents of Hell. I'm sure it will be equally witty and show just as much a lack of understanding.

I've been reading Milton for the past couple of days, in preparation for reading a great number of articles on Paradise Lost, and have concluded that Satan is just fantastic. I was a little conflicted about this until, while flipping through an academic essay, I found him compared to the Steppenwolf. It's rather true. Yes, he's wrong, but he's so confused and noble and pitiful and idealistic that it's really impossible not to love him.
I'm being awfully English today. At the moment I'm having tea with bread and butter (cake is rarely seen in the best houses) and a perfect apple. It's so aesthetically pleasing that I have to set it down and stare at it between bites. I've concluded that it's simply poor sportsmanship to tempt anyone with an apple when they're so obviously irresistible. In a little while I will go to have a dinner/late tea of cucumber sandwiches and petits fours while watching 6 hours of pride and prejudice. It is my one non-school related activity this weekend and the rest must be spent deep in study, creating a bibliography, reading books and essays, and deciding in what direction I want my research to go. It's really rather exciting.

Someone has turned my favorite poem by Keats into lolcat...and binary

http://www.students.ccsu.edu/~jarvisalm/lolpoem.htm

Though I think the best is the version in 1337:

"Ch4rm'd m461c c453m3n75, 0p3n1n6 0n 7h3 f04m 0f p3r1|0u5 5345, in f43ry |4nd5 f0r|0rn"

I love getting time to go home every month. It's bloody glorious. This break I've done almost nothing but cook and eat. I've made scones and apple muffins and tea cakes as well as dinner on wednesday night and I've eaten out and had Guinness and wonderful provincial French food. I also went shopping and got shoes that aren't made of cloth or full of holes, it's fantastic. I also (during a fit of generosity on the part of my mother) got a plane ticket to go see my little brother over spring break which will fill me with joy (and, simultaneously, with French food). Tomorrow I will go to eat at my dad's house, visit with the kitties, and possibly go to see a wonderful warehouse filled with bits of old houses.
I've started watching an old BBC show called "House of Eliott" and it's lovely and charming and gives me an excuse to drink tea and pretend to be British. It makes one feel as if the whole world is just going swimmingly.
Now if I could just get rid of the continuing, and progressively creepy, nightmares I'd be perfectly happy.

Lately I've had this bizarre uprising of my animal spirits (to use Jane Austen's terminology). I feel downright sprightly much of the time, bouncy even. I can't concentrate on anything to save my life which is not helping my French grades in any way. I'm ready for summer and house cleaning and long walks alone at night. Perhaps because cleaning and tidying of life has been so much on my mind, I found myself cleaning out an old e-mail inbox, finding bits of a strange and forgotten self. I found poems that I wrote for a high school english class, deeply cynical and rather pretty. There were notes from people I don't remember any more. I hate when I find those. I wonder how many people I've known rather well who I now have no memory of at all. I was so bizarrely cynical then. I really wonder where it all went. Now the best I can do is sad (which is slightly more disruptive to my school work than bouncy good cheer), unfortunately, sadness makes me thoughtful and I rather need to be the kind of person who can memorize verb endings. So, mindless happiness it is, thank god for Morrissey.

I'm amused that the most adorable pop songs are now called "indie" regardless of record label. "Oxford Comma" sounds like pop to me, no matter now much nerds or indie rockers may like it.
There is something storm-like going on outside and I haven't bothered to do my homework yet. I've been sitting for an hour doing nothing, not even writing the letter I've been trying to start since two in the afternoon. I feel like I may be asleep or, possibly, very very alert. If tomorrow is warm the roof is going to start leaking again. Perhaps I'll venture out in search of caffein.
And can somebody explain why the internet is trying to sell me a “Pretty Mexican Bride”? That's just really not what I’m looking for right now.

The air is so thick tonight that every breath feels like a drink. It is no longer cold, but rather, momentarily, cool; a lying breath of spring. It feels like a thunder storm though the sky is clear. I can hardly stand my euphoria. I want to run, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.

and feels like now

For the first time in a couple of years, I have become so pale that the sunlight reflects off of my skin.
I don't know why, but this year actually feels like a new year. it may have been the trip to Mexico,or possibly the reappearance of a ridiculous number of people I hadn't seen since high school. I've been listening to Simon & Garfunkel's "Cloudy" over and over again, sometimes interspersed with the Super Furry Animals "Cosmic Trigger Happy," Which oddly reminds me of Gary Oldman as Sid Vicious singing "My Way." I don't know what this implies for the coming year, but the moment I start hitchhiking or trying to recapture lost youth I hope that someone will have the decency to shoot me. I'm getting that itchy, winter feeling which makes me want to move, possibly across the country. It's very difficult to do my homework when I feel this way. Luckily I was feeling much more solid on Friday and had the presence of mind to write my paper then. It made me wonder if Mark Twain read much by Benjamin Franklin, their manner of writing holds some fascinating and distinct parallels. If I ever get the chance I think I want to write a comparative paper on "Remarks on the Savages of North America" and "The Lowest Animal."
I'm surprised and disturbed by the seemingly prevalent belief in our culture that the world is coming to an end (first the president, now the pop music), simply because our economy is failing and we've twisted our political system into something resembling a labyrinth. Empires fall all the time, it's not the end of the world, just time to move to Canada.
I fail at coherency today.

Tonight my windows are covered in a delicate tracery of ice. I can stand outside for no more than five minutes before my fingers become frost bitten. Mexico was beautiful and strange and so very very warm. Hundreds of flowers were in bright bloom and we ate chocolate mousse on a balcony beside the lake. It all seems very much as a dream now, torn away by the intensity of the winter weather. On Sunday I return to school where I will trudge daily to class and weekly to the grocery store through high drifts of snow. I was not made for such extremes, and long for a cottage by the sea.

I'm nearly off to Mexico and freedom from computers and telephones and the cold of a midwest winter. I hope anyone reading this has a lovely midwinter festival of whichever name they choose. Today (as of 1 am) is the winter solstice and my family wants to do a presents and baked goods type of thing before we head out.