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reader, writer, unregenerate comma-splicer |
Listening to the Lad on KALX. As far as I can see, here are the advantages to having a famous boyfriend:
– Luna will let us in for breakfast even if there is a wait.
– Invitation to Grammies.
– Bitches.
– Cameos in Adam Sandler films.
– Canapes.
– Honorary degree means I don’t have to take upcoming midterms.
In big, white letters:
Only poets see poetry in public
The illusion of choices
In small, blue letters nearby:
Merlito likes guys
Just got a call from a detective. Apparently, one of my school friends is an official missing person, which I guess would explain why he hasn’t responded to my emails lately. It was weird to be giving my hesitant opinion about the life and psychology of someone I’ve only known a few months; I kept prefacing everything with “Let me stress that I hardly know anything about him and for all I know everything he ever said to me was a lie, so I am not a good source for this…” I guess in that case I should have just clammed up, but you want to do what you can in a case like this don’t you? I hate to think anything’s happened to him; the detective seems to be hoping he’s just voluntarily gone AWOL for a while.
Now and then some friend of a friend mentions that he reads my site on a regular basis. For these people I’m just a fictional character; running into me at a party must be like seeing Elizabeth Bennet hanging out and drinking a beer–or really, let’s face it, Moll Flanders. The me they see here is a superior me: more streamlined, more articulate, wittier. I’m better on paper than in person. (“You are, actually,” the Lad says thoughtfully.)
I managed to insult my professor today, which I offer as proof of my better-on-paper theory. “Brown is considered to be the least interesting hair color,” I said, analyzing a description in The Awakening, then glanced up at her very brown hair and tardily added “…by some people.”
I’m sitting under eight menacing paper hearts which I hung from our ceiling because I figured it would be a good way to fulfill my Valentine responsibilities. The intended impact was a room fluttering with a kind of lacey, helpless, Victorian love, the whole roof sighing and rustling its skirts. Unfortunately, I could only reach a small patch of ceiling so the effect is more of some swelling disease; a tumorous thatch. We have consumption of the crown and are coughing up paper and ribbons.
In the meantime we continue to have ants, symbolic of all kinds of things depending on what I need symbolized on any given day. Today I’m going with the march of feminist progress, what with my Virginia Woolf readings–or Woolf if you like but I still cannot do it–riling me up. I feel like I should be scolding men on the street for infringing on my personhood. That’s not what Woolf meant–that’s not what the ants mean either–but that’s where I am today. Anyway, how far have we progressed if I’m still hanging swoony Victorian submission from the ceiling?
I’ve got the country cousin of a fierce cold. The cold itself would have knocked me on my ass but the cousin is more hesitant and contents itself with scratching its initials on the back of my throat where it thinks no one will notice and stomping aerobically around my head where it thinks no one can hear.
Getrude Stein thought the comma was a servile punctuation mark and refused to use it.
I spent a lot of the day writing, which is more time-consuming than I ever give it credit for. Pamela Dean, for example, forces herself to write either four hours or four pages each day, which doesn’t seem like much until you try it. Gertrude Stein, on the other hand, probably wrote entire novels in a day once she dismissed unimportant things like punctuation and sense. Today I wrote five pages, mainly about radiators and clocks for some reason, but as I have filled my quota I don’t see any reason to quarrel with the subject matter.
I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which asserts that we shouldn’t give up the distinction between male and female styles. I was thinking of Tunis while I read this, near neighbor of Carthage (city not blog), which most likely has a separation of male and female worlds (and even languages–the men speak Arabic, the women speak French). Virginia Woolf might be right to want to preserve the separation, which allows multiple cultures to form that can enrich the common culture, but you’d have to preserve the limits too.
Why does it feel sort of gauche to say Austen or Woolf but fine to say Miller or Shakespeare?
Where is my orange juice?
I’ll take ye under the sea t’be me BRIDE! (For I am a silkie.)
My friend Muppet, you have tirelessly butt-danced your way through 26 years on behalf of all the children, and I for one am here to say: thank you. Thank you and your butt-dancing foundation. I hope you will continue to dance with me under the sea, if it is not too damp for you.
“Um, hi! I was just wondering if you have accepted Jesus into your heart?” asked a meek Asian girl (and why are they always Asian?).
“No,” I said. “Thor pretty much takes up all the room in my heart these days.”
“Oh, well, um, we like discussing other points of view, so if you want to come to our Bible study and–”
“Yes, you have a generous and forgiving God. Thor, on the other hand, tends to smite the unbeliever.”
“Um…” [Giggles nervously.]
“Getting struck by lightning is not going to help me get through my midterms, is it?”
“Um…” [Not giggling anymore.]
“Excuse me, this is my train.”
“For example,” said my Anthro prof, “if you were doing an ethnography of American culture, you might ask something like: what’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?”
An embarrassed wave of silence swept over us which practically etched the word MASTURBATE in the air.
We have a new neighbor. She’s been living in the apartment underneath ours for a few weeks now, so I’m not in a position to say much about her except what I can glean from leaning casually out the back door to listen in on her loud phone conversations. The only thing I really know for sure is that she loves, loves the movie Garden State. Actually, what she loves is the soundtrack.
She plays it loud and she plays it often. Once every evening, in fact, though the hour varies; her speakers are loud enough to make our floor, her roof, vibrate slightly. I’ve suggested to the Lad that we take her a new CD or two as a housewarming gift, but actually I can’t bring myself to break the cycle. I want to see how it ends–how many more nights before she breaks this odd habit? I like Nick Drake and Coldplay as well as the next guy, but isn’t she starting to yearn for a little Zap Mama or Aretha? All I can figure is that The Shins really did change her life. They certainly have changed mine.