no white flag above my door

Coral is sick.

I guess I should have seen this coming. I’ve been crazy busy, and now that Christmas is finally over and I’ve relaxed for a couple of days I am now colossally sick. Yay.

So…what I’ve been reading recently.

A Version of the Truth, by Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack.
This one was okay. Nothing great, just fluffy chick lit. But it was free, an advance reader.
Sabriel, Lireal, Abhorsen, by Garth Nix.
These were all good. A little weird, but I read the first one once a long time ago, so it wasn’t as weird this time around. The middle book is a little whiny and long, but the last book makes up for it.

Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife, by Irene Spencer.
This was one of the best written memoirs I’ve read in a long time. I like reading about other people’s lives, and this one was written by a born again Christian. What I liked about it was how she could still see the beauty in her life, and how she rejoices in her children.

I have also been reading the magazine The Sun recently too. It’s crazy liberal sometimes, but other times the writing is really beautiful.

That’s really all.

I’m going back to sleep. Other than having coffee with Joe and Seth yesterday, that’s really all I’ve done for 3 days.

P.S. I just saw the made for TV movie based on Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes. It was delightful. Really truly delightful.

glamour.

that’s not a song lyric in my title. it is simply what is missing from everyday life. when i was in college, i seem to recall folding my clean laundry….i don’t anymore. i use the same 3 shirts that i wore last week, just on different days so my co workers don’t catch on.  i wash dishes, but that’s because with a dishwasher, i have no excuse.  i often get up and go to work within 10 minutes of each other, which means the bed is the same state of disheveled when i get home that it was when i first hit the alarm clock with a little more vehemence than necessary. my bedside table, littered (for sure) with many good reads, a few decent movies and my journal also houses kleenex, 4 different colors of nail polish, nail polish remover, melatonin, two different lotions a pile of cds on which my computer is backed up, the scissors, two flash drives, assorted writing utensils and several receipts.  not that it’s particularly messy, but it’s no martha stewart.  my living room is very well tended, but my bedroom looks significantly like i don’t bother.

i finished christmas shopping. it wasn’t hard. there aren’t that many of us, and i don’t have the money for the rest of the people i wish i could buy for.  i do need to vacuum, find places for all the books that i have read recently but haven’t filed properly. i think i should win for most eclectic taste in reading. i shall have to inform you all of it soon.

i love you all.

fill this empty space.

In adulthood, momentous occasions are surprisingly anticlimactic.

College graduation is a pretty big hoopla. You rent or buy a cap and gown, you wear your best clothes, there’s a lot of to do. Everyone hears them call your name, everyone sees you shake the college president’s hand. You stand around in the lawn and take a lot of pictures and everybody makes a lot of fuss.

Life is not like that.

I defended my thesis today.

When it was over, I had a long talk with my friend J. about her pending divorce/separation and put on my snow boots and slopped my way to the bus stop, where I took the bus back to the bookstore where my car was parked. On the way home, I picked up some stuff from the Chinese grocery (my favorite place ever!) and called the clan. Now I’m home sitting on my bed in my clean room, looking at the stacks of library books to be returned and pondering dinner options. Granted, there will be celebration. Mom and Dad are planning to come up and get dinner with me (a surprise, I was planning to make egg rolls,) it is not the kind of elation that you might expect.

There is no big deal, there were 3 hearty handshakes and a round of congratulations, and it was over. I am an MA, and there are still dirty dishes and student loans and snow to shovel. Life is startlingly boring.

a song with the dawn.

It has been brought to my attention, by my brain, that I am an adult. I know, I know…for those of you who read my blogging ramblings, I’m sure this is no surprise, since I appear to have this revelation approximately every six months.  But see, I’m not an adult like that whole crowd of my college peers, who are marrying and having children as if the rapture was scheduled for January 1, 2008. I’m an adult. I go to work, I come home, I have lived completely on my own for nearly three years. I buy my own groceries, have mastered the art of eating leftovers for a whole week after cooking, and have a therapist’s dreams’  worth of idiosyncratic habits and tendencies that I will quite likely never be broken of. My apartment begins to look more and more like a home and less and less like a dorm room (see below). I read obsessively, and have been known to pass up an evening of human company in order to finish some heavy softcover novel or tiny book in a dead language. My introvert and extrovert tendencies seem to have melded into a goulash of confusion - all the flavors ending up as one.  I guess one could call this mellowing.

I passed the German exam. I defend in one week. I will have my MA before my brother gets home for Christmas. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. How’s the classics Ph.D. program in Lexington? Anyone have any idea? Don’t get me wrong, I love it here in the frozen north. The 6-7 inches of snow we got last night are pretty much my idea of a great storm. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with a terminal MA in classics (doesn’t that make it sound more like a disease than anything else) and a private liberal arts education’s worth of debt.  Interesting.  We shall see, I guess.

Hmm. Introspective these days, aren’t I? Disturbing. Fear not, my devoted friends and readers. I may be bent, but not broken. Hearts have an amazing amount of resilience because hope is inherent to humanity. We can’t help it. When you come to the end of hope, there is always just one glimmer more. It’s woven into our souls.

ain’t no rain getting in my way

so perhaps this is conceit, (if it is, chalk it down to a feverish mind overtaxed by Greek and Latin*) but i am convinced that if i ever wrote a book, people would read it. not just my friends, who would probably read it out of curiousity and perhaps a little terror that they would recognize themselves in the pages, but people as in the hoi polloi, the everyday common man. i am convinced that there is something about an honest voice approaching the world and situations that we all have to live in that would sell like crazy. for the longest time i thought i had nothing to write about…i mean, it’s not like my life has been crazy exciting. but i have realized that history is not always in the world-shaking events, that sometimes it is found in individual life-shaking events.

and my life seems pretty good at those.

these last two months have been a little crazy. yesterday a coworker told me that i was one of the most upbeat positive people he’d ever met, and i was surprised. upbeat? positive? are you kidding me? i’m so impatient these days. i feel like i’ve been grieving constantly for 3 full years. and a funny thing they don’t tell you about grief - it’s exhausting. they say that these are the times of greatest growth in your life, but i don’t feel grown, i just feel tired. a couple weeks ago i decided for the third time in so many years that i just won’t love people anymore, because it hurts too bad when you lose them. but i know that’s not true, and i know that it won’t work. i’m better at loving people than not loving them.

ha. that’s a funny thought. i had the revelation at work yesterday that i like all of my coworkers. not equally, but i don’t passionately dislike any of them. part of it is simply that now that my MA is winding to a close, the job is once again just a job instead of a place for my body while my brain does calisthenics about dead languages and footnotes and commentaries and committee members and deadlines and exams and failure. (and if you don’t think that all of that is possible in one mind, you’re wrong, i can do all that while juggling periodical locations (name a magazine and i can tell you the current cover and where to find it,) newspaper vendors, unexpected cafe shifts, the deadlines for payments, bestseller lists, and computer passwords…) i am very excited to be finished with school. i can’t wait.

well, i suppose that i’m wrong. if my book reads anything like this post, no one will ever read my potential future book.

* speaking of dead languages - a coworker of mine yesterday was explaining heating coils to me and was hopeful that every scientific fact he put into my head would knock out a dead word or two, it didn’t work…)

p.s. guinever, you can tell mary that the baby’s name is amy. she was very sick in the picture, but she was much better before i left uganda.

beneath the cover of another perfect wonder

where it’s so white as snow

it’s funny, i hate red hot chili peppers, but i love this song.  i have since the first time i heard it. i really love the guitar in the beginning. really really love the guitar in the beginning. wow. i have no life.

so reading lately…

from doon with death, by ruth rendell - i was looking for new stuff to read. this was recommended by the computer at work (you know i’m hard up when i take a computer’s advice on reading.) this wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t stunning. it took me only one night to read. i’m told it’s not her best, so perhaps i will try another sometime.

him, her, him again, the end of him, patricia marx - this one is oddly hilarious. it’s the tale of an obsessive lover. how anyone could love the sort of narcissist portrayed in this book is beyond me, but it is hilarious and well-written. i would never have picked it up myself, but i got the advance reader.

wow, those aren’t very good discussions, are they? i’m tired, it’s snowing like crazy, and i’m going to sleep and read and do sudoku.

time, you’ve got me running…

Ah, the glamours of grad school…

These are the things that I don’t mind about being single. Today I got up earlyish, cleaned my bathroom, spent the day re-typing, re-writing, re-working, and watching re-runs. Then, in the absence of turkey leftovers, I got some Chinese, and am sitting on my bed eating crab rangoon and sesame chicken while I continue the same. Yay.

Anyway. Back to the chinese and re-runs. I wish that this was over, but at the same time, a Saturday night of take-out in my pajamas isn’t that bad.

night will follow day….

Sure as the sun and moon
I am house-sitting for a friend. It’s kind of fun, she has a really nice house and it’s quiet and I can sit on her couch and just stare at my thesis. And, that’s about all I’ve done recently.
Remember I will always be with you
For not a word to say
And I understand you
When you see a darkness coming through
So I’m actually not fond of sitting alone in an unfamiliar house at night. And Uma, the shy cat, likes to run down the stairs and sit in the basement mewling as if her life depends on it. A little freaky. Reminiscent of The Silence of the Lambs, with stone walls and lots of art. I have been here 5 days, and today was actually the first time that I saw Uma for sure. (I’m not good at telling animals apart.) I was a little relieved, because I was worried that I had lost a cat without ever seeing it.
Remember to keep warm
Take shelter from the storm
The night will not last for much more
I wrote in a small note
Put on your winter coat
A cold wind will blow through your door
It’s cold here. I turned the heat up, and I’m a little worried I will forget to turn it back down. I also feel bad eating their food…I mean, I know she said eat anything…but what if she really wanted that avacado.
Night will follow day
Sure as the sun and moon
Remember I will always be with you
Just fold your hands and pray
And I am beside you
Tell mother I’ll help to see you through
Remember to keep warm
K. was an art major, and her house is full of dramatically different pieces of art. Photos, portraits, prints…paintings and statues from different cultures.
Take shelter from the storm
The night will not last for much more
I wrote in a small note
Put on your winter coat
A cold wind will blow through your door
I don’t know how to write my thesis. I still haven’t gotten results from my test last week…I am exhausted.

someone to carry you through.

tomorrow i take a very big exam, which i have failed a few (several) times. i am very nervous. beside myself nervous. i keep looking at the vocab and the authors…and i can’t focus, so i stopped. i don’t know…

i am starting to feel a decent amount of confidence about my thesis anyway….good stuff. solid, boring stuff.

as for the rest…i have a good job next semester, which i’m excited about. yay. loves.

everything under the stars…

*EDIT* I left this half done…haha.

my dad always was the coolest dad on the block. my grandmother probably would have said that was because my parents were babies raising babies…

today as i was walking to my car after work, i remembered one of the many reasons that my dad was the coolest was our trips to the country for woolly bears, you know, those crazy little fuzzy caterpillars. these trips always started with mcdonalds. dad would fill our station wagon with kids from all up and down the street, and we would all get boxes of cookies. mcdonalds cookies came in boxes back then, chocolate chip in a white box with that purple monster on it, the triangular monster.

anyway. you had to eat all your cookies before we got to a certain side road that my dad thought was the best.  we would drive, everyone’s eyes to the windows and then when we saw a woolly bear dad would stop and we would all pile out and save the caterpillar from a much squishier death…when everyone had at least one woolly bear in their cookie box, we all would head back to our house, where we would show off our new pets to mom.  the benefit of the cookie box was that they never really sealed, and by the end of the day, our furry friends had escaped captivity to a much safer environment.

ah the good old days.

and seth and kiersten are coming home for christmas. my heart feels content.