There once was a girl by the sea
Who worried, "What will I be?"
While I'm here on this island
I'll march forward smiling
...But now for some pizza and tea!

I have the most amazing dad ever.

I am badass, English major style. I kick ass and take names alphabetically and according to MLA guidelines.

I seriously do not understand how I can pull these papers out of thin air like this. It's not that I don't work hard; I do. I kill myself studying. Just not for my English courses. I wait until a day or two before the paper is due to even start, and then I end up with something--forgive the arrogance--brilliant. It's my superpower, I think. I am Lit Girl, hear me roar!

On another note: this head cold is absolute hell. Eight days now I've been dealing with this (and before that it was a chest cold, and before that a stomach bug, and before that a migraine...), and I am ready to be done. For those of you who can take cold medicine without an adverse reaction--I hate you I hate you I hate you please give me your immune systems. I'll return it intact, promise.

freewrite #1, vignette #2

She had dreamt the night before of an old lover, one of the ones who said they loved her and meant it. His wife had left recently, or so the social pages said; but why she dreamt about him over the others was a mystery the whore was not interested in. Still, the dream clung to her lips and breasts all day, and it seemed like her johns noticed it too, because they seemed almost afraid of her. She didn't know why.

She told Hairy Back about the dream while he smoked a second cigarette. He kicked his heels against the table legs for a while before looking over.

"Let me get this straight. Your old lover came to you as a john."

"Yes."

"But didn't want sex."

"No."

"But then decided he did."

"Yes."

"Well, did he get it?"

The question was obscene, and for a moment the whore forget she was a whore. But then she remembered. "Not in the dream. He kissed me though."

"He kissed you. Curious," Hairy Back grunted.

He wanted her to continue, she knew, and because it was Hairy Back she did. "He said he'd lost God and his wife, and he wanted to ease himself into the deep pool of sin."

He snorted. "Was he always so melodramatically metaphoric?"

"Yes."

"Forget him, lady. He may have lost God, but that sort always finds It again in the end."

"In the dream--"

He waited. "Go on."

"Well. He called me a compromise. I had once been his Great Love and now I would be his Eve."

"He certainly does have a flair for the poetic."

"Hairy Back."

"Forgive me, lady."

She shrugged one shoulder at him, and he nodded. "Forget him, lady. That sort always rediscovers God in the end. They're bad news for our sort."

"Our sort?"

He took a long drag. "Those caught somewhere between drowning in the riptide and swimming with the current."

On tonight's episode of Is That Really Necessary?...

Light switches that control nothing; Yahoo messenger; Yahoo anything; the Huffington Post; and Michael Cunningham.

This, however, is utterly necessary:

freewrite #1.

So at the first meeting of our new creative writing club tonight, we did an exercise in which each member was given a line from a book or a poem, and told to freewrite for ten minutes. I swear, I got the strangest (it's the first in the following vignette), but I kind of love the characters that it spawned.

Thus--"Hairy Back and the Whore."

It was a good fuck, but hurried, as Hairy Back would be getting anxious. They never used names (that sordid touch pleased them). He called her what her johns called her, and she just called him Hairy Back because--well--he had a hairy back.

They met almost on time. He smoked; she didn't. She washed her hands. After a while he spoke. "Why, if you insist upon remaining pseudonymous, do you ask them to say your name when they--you know--finish?"

"What?"

"It just seems inconsistent to me."

"I donno. I guess it's the old cliche."

"You are distancing yourself."

"Maybe."

"Or maybe you enjoy the illusion."

"Maybe."

He took a long drag, exhaled, peered through the smoke at her. "Maybe you want to separate yourself from the whore."

She shrugged.

"It makes me wonder."

"Yes?"

"Is it possible to induce multiple personality disorder?"

"Maybe." She stole his cigarette.

The List, Part I [The Canon]:

The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton
Villette, Charlotte Bronte
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
the collected essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Room With A View, E. M. Forster
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Ulysses, James Joyce
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D. H. Lawrence
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
Utopia, Thomas More
An Unsocial Socialist, George Bernard Shaw
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Aeneid, Virgil
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

That, of course, is only the beginning of the list, and I doubt I'll be able to finish it for years, what with all the other reading I have. For example, just this semester I will be reading (and/or have read):

The Hours, Michael Cunningham
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte [a reread]
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Maryse Conde
School Days, Patrick Chamoiseau
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
rabbit run, John Updike
White Noise, Don Delillo
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

A friend of mine reminded me last night (when I was freaking out [see: ~ing out] for some reason or another) that the familiar is not always better.

The familiar is not always better. I don't know why that resonated so much with me. Maybe because I've based the last three years of my life around the familiar. The familiar can't (or at least, is less likely to) give me a panic attack the size of Maryland. The familiar has already had its chance to hurt me, and hasn't, or has but only in ways I can deal with, so there's no chance of any great disaster. Right? Right.

But... no. Not really. Because you and the familiar are on familiar terms, that buffering politeness is gone. There's nothing keeping you on your best behavior but mutual regard, and if, for some reason, that falls through--the familiar knows a lot more about you, including where you're most vulnerable.

Not that the familiar is a bad thing. I like the familiar. I'm one of those homebody-everything-scheduled-and-planned-out people. But I'm starting to realize why my life has been tasting so stale lately.

It's all... familiar.

It's a new year; I'm an upperclassman now; I've come through a lot. I think I deserve to give myself a chance to appreciate the new.

What does it mean? In my dream last night I cuddled with a hot, young pandit in a movie theatre (we were front row, if that makes any difference to your interpretation) and just as we started to kiss, poisonous gas started leaking in through the vents. But nobody panicked. Then my neighbors' loudness woke me up.

So, what does it mean? The priest, the theatre, and the gas? I really can't make that one out.

My psych professor did, however, tell me that I 'dream interestingly.' We were talking about sleep and dreams in class, and he asked if anyone had ever dreamed lucidly, and I tentatively raised my hand. I hate raising my hand, because I hate when the freshmen look at me like I have every answer because omgzerz I'm a junior. Doesn't work like that, kiddos. But, anyway. He called on me and asked if I'd ever been able to repeat the experience, and I answered--again tentatively--"Um... I can't remember ever dreaming any other way."

Then, when he asked about sleep-talking, I raised my hand again, though a few others did, as well. For night terrors, as well. And for hypnagogic and hypnopompic images. He seemed impressed that I knew those names, but, goodness; I may be taking Psych101 this semester, but I too 200-level Psychopathology last semester.

I do have weird dreams though. I've been thinking about it a lot. There's that nightmare where a deer ate my face (don't laugh, it was terrifying!), where I killed the hummingbird, where the Yankees attacked a swimming pool and the elderly Confederates stood no chance (and I on my big black horse fell into the pool and drowned and my soul floated up to the roof and looked down to watch the burning bodies). There was the dream about the Buddha head and the tsunami (a beautiful one), the circling staircase, the one where my cats were actually humans in disguise. Weird freaking dreams, man.

Any weird dreams yourself?

Do you want to be a crazy person?

No, Mom, I don't. I don't want to be crazy. I'm fucking sick of my brain betraying me; I'm sick of these psychosomatic ailments. I'm doing everything I can, but it's not going to be a quick fix--it wasn't last time, either. So I need you to cut me a little slack, please.

I am not either particularly strong or particularly stable, but what I am is fucking determined. I'm not going to let it beat me, but it's hard, and it's going to hurt, and I'm going to cry. That's how it works. I'm going to do my best to do it on my own, but sometimes I need a little encouragement. I don't need to be asked right away, Well, do you want to just quit school and come home? Do you want to be a crazy person?

Because, seriously. No one wants to be crazy. Especially not me.

You know you're a college student when:

1. You spend the last fifteen minutes before class looking at lolcats instead of reading over the course material.

A question I've been asking myself a lot lately: Why are we so afraid of lacking depth?

Now, I'm not saying it's a good thing to be shallow. Far from it. People who focus solely on exteriors (and thus, tend to verify the stereotypes created to excuse them) are one of my biggest annoyances. But it seems to me that my generation is terrified of being seen as anything other than a few thousand leagues deep at every given moment.

Think about it: we must have discerning tastes in music and books, or we look down on ourselves (and/or others). We must follow the news obsessively and be prepared to comment on the economics of any given country at a moment's notice. We must never praise our leaders, only point out their flaws. We must only watch serious movies--preferably those that are foreign and/or existential--and, when we watch funny movies, we must watch them ironically, and always have a reason prepared for liking them. I love how it comments on the hypocrisy of today's generation. Well, it does subvert the asinine morals of the day. I read somewhere the director was trying to take a postmodern approach. We're afraid to enjoy anything for what it is.

Don't get me wrong--depth is hardly a bad thing. I read the New York Times online as many times a week as I can, given my schedule; I overanalyze everything I read or watch (hazard of the English major, I suppose); and I take pride in my collection of music, especially when I have a good band not many people have heard of before. I'm guilty of the same things. I'm just as elitist as everyone else in my generation.

But holy idealistic expectations, Batman, it's exhausting.

Thus, I am waging a war on elitism--at least, in myself. Those CDs I commented on before, the ones from high school that I loved before I'd discovered the glories of postmodern-indie-rock and Icelandic post-rock? I'm going to listen to them, and I'm not going to keep the volume down. I'm going to watch The House Bunny instead of The Wrestler (though I desperately want to see that too) and I'm going to enjoy it.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but then, I rarely do. Suffice to say, I enjoy the Backstreet Boys and Sigur Ros equally, and I'm not concerned about who knows it.