exercise

A Partial List of Things I Got For/Around My Birthday

- a Japanese toy gun
- a yoga mat
- a red felt cape (only a rental, sniff)
- a notebook
- a 1901 edition of Julius Caesar, completely defaced by its previous small-boy-owner
- several pairs of earrings
- a ring
- Double Chocolate Milanos and Parle G Biscuits
- a few novels
- a Rootote
- a GRE Practice Test Book. i'm no longer friends with the person who gave me this.
- a bunch of daisies
- a cactus
- a mini-fridge

***

today i went to a WAGS lunch with a psychologist who'd written about Virginia Woolf, and i all of a sudden remembered that Woolf is my person. i know tons of things about her and get excited to talk about her and have lots of opinions about her---and it's silly for me to force myself to read authors who don't interest me as much because i'm feeling lost about my thesis. this is what will make my thesis right. i just need to work on novels i care about, and i'm not sure why i couldn't understand that until now.

***

listening to Juliana Hatfield "Spin the Bottle," Death Cab's "Sound of Settling," and The Weepies "Gotta Have You"
reading Roland Barthes Mythologies and John Locke's Second Treatise
sleeping on creamy beige sheets
loving my poetry and brit lit classes and trying hard to love my theory one

other things will be okay soon too

reprise

it's been quite a while, hasn't it? i guess you get busy when school starts, but it's more than that--it's that being in Oxford and then New York were experiences and i was constantly, automatically, saving up stories to tell people anyway, so it made sense to write them down. whereas, Amherst is more like life and i forget how to turn that into narrative.
but of course there's plenty to chew on here; life at Amherst is full of the kind of pleasing details you find in novels. for instance, there was that Bread Festival that i went to several weeks ago. it could not have been a purer and more telling example of what Northampton is: a few stands selling rustic bread, butter from Cook's farm, $40 bottles of olive oil; indie kids loitering on the grass, while a band played loud screechy music and a groupie held up their equipment; yuppy couples purchasing the olive oil; the hippie baker and his hippie friends; the Hare Krishna drumming and chanting. the festival ended with a ceremonial burying of the spelt, in which we all participated. after which the windy autumn day turned stormy and i went to Atkins for hot cider.
more than ever before, i think, i'm paying attention to these things. i'm burying spelt in Northampton because i know that it's special, it's the Pioneer Valley and i won't be here much longer, because i know that you really can't live in Amherst if you're not going to attend the Apple Harvest Festival and play with the llamas and kids (goat-kind) at the petting zoo. i actually notice when it's a cold and sunny and the campus looks gorgeous. i'm glad to be here; i'm glad that it's the last year i'm here, too.

it's been, in almost every aspect of my life (every aspect but one, let's be honest), a very happy six weeks thus far. i know it's been six weeks because in a few days i get to take the little hoop out of the new piercing in my ear and replace it with some sparkly stud-type earring, which i will do before my birthday party on Friday. that's another thing i'm conscious about, being happy, trying to be happy, praying and affirming, reminding myself in a very deliberate and cheesy way of what i am grateful for and what i need to work on. i agree that this kind of self-help flower-child attitude is in direct conflict with the cynicism and the judging that i do so well, but i think that's okay. i wouldn't want to not be that person too. i can't stand people who are too sunny to be critical. i just want to be grumpy and critical with a lot of inner peace at the center of it, with no nervous twisty feelings in my tummy or bitter thoughts before i go to sleep. what's astounding is that i can see myself moving in that direction, where i think before i might have assumed that change is pretty hopeless.

i almost don't even mind being in the midst of comps. which brings us to why it even occurred to me to write a new post on this thing...clearly i was desperate for a distraction. i'll get back to that essay in a minute. here, courtesy of comps and my thesis, is a quote that i like from The Mill on the Floss; it comes from a part in the novel when the narrator is explaining the local legends of St. Ogg's. we learn that Ogg the son of Beorl was a boatman who ferried people across the river Floss. one night in a terrible storm, a woman sat crying on the banks of the river, child in arms, begging to be rowed across. everyone else scoffed at her reckless request, but Ogg said the following:
"I will ferry thee across: it is enough that thy heart needs it."

of course, she turned out to be an angel or something and not only was he was blessed for the rest of his life, he also got this town named after him.