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.