"Oh, I just won't sleep" always seems like such a good plan during the afternoon. After I finish revising this paper which is due at noon (and which has started going very slowly), I have to watch a 3-hour-long white supremacist movie and read a critical article for my class at 9:30. I told someone this afternoon that I was planning to watch the movie between 4 and 7 am; I was kind of hoping I was exaggerating, but actually that seems kind of optimistic now.

Child of Jim

Well, I kind of can't believe it, but I've now written seven pages about Matthew Arnold. I decided to go for gold and write about "Dover Beach," since in my opinion it is the famous one for a reason. And the assignment being a close reading, and me being pressed for time, I just played it to my strengths.

I have a feeling the prof probably doesn't know what she was getting into assigning an ex-Irvine-MFA a close reading. And you know, this is cheesy but I really love this stuff. I love prosody. I feel almost privileged to have a vocabulary with which to describe why I love a certain line. In fact, maybe later I'll blog why I love a certain line, but not this close to the paper. In which I pulled out all the J & M stops, mostly on sound but there was also some SVO in there and I used the word hypotactic. This stuff is not breaking any new scholarly ground, but it sure is fun.

Speaking of Jim, he was commissioned to write a poem for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, and here it is. This link won't work forever, so you should read it now. It is worth it.

What's Coming Out of the Sky Report

Hail.

Not, for you Apples to Apples fans, golf-ball sized . . . yet. Since I intend to perch in this cafe window until I have written seven pages on Matthew Arnold, I will certainly have plenty of opportunity to keep you posted on the meteorological happenings in this neighborhood.

Wow, in the two minutes I was just writing this, it has started coming down harder and sticking--like, the whole Ave is white. People are taking pictures of each other in it with their cell phones. It's real winter! I can't believe three days ago I was wearing flip flops.

Pros and Cons

Pro: Very few students are bringing their papers to the tutoring center tonight.
Con: That's because it's snowing.

Pro: Greenie is amazing at snow driving, and I am quite experienced at it myself.
Con: None of that helps with the bone chill.

Pro: I'm having an enjoyable fantasy of teaching scansion to my fellow grad students during my presentation tomorrow.
Con: They probably need it, and I'm not actually going to do it.

Con: I really don't know what I want to say about Matthew Arnold and my paper needs to get done by Tuesday at the latest.
Pro: There is no pro here.

Pro: I had a really nice dinner with the HenHens last night.
Con: HenHen herself is not here.

Con: I have to tutor at 9 am tomorrow.
Pro: We're going to watch a movie!

Home again

Well, I came back to find my leaking ceiling fixed, although pieces of it are scattered around the living room. An outlet also stopped working--unfortunately it was the one powering the fridge, but fortunately, I had very little food in there and only lost some frozen vegetables, a jar of mayonnaise, and a cucumber that would have been a goner anyway. It isn't raining. (The pilot on my flight announced this, and then added that it was going to start up again, but don't worry, it will only last until, oh, June. And everyone laughed.)

It took me two hours to get home on the bus because Critical Mass was fouling up the downtown traffic. On the one hand, it was kind of awesome that Critical Mass actually worked (and watching only the top half of bikers out a bus window is really cool--they look like disembodied gliding creatures, perhaps as animated by Miyazaki). On the other hand--come on! We're a bus, we're public transit... aren't we all on the same side here? Do we really have to sit at this light for 20 minutes?

When I got home I knitted a third of a legwarmer. Seattle is wicked exciting.

California

So far I have spent my time in Irvine visiting the great strip malls of my past. HenHen and I just went shopping for our contributions to Poet Thanksgiving, which I'm very excited about. I am making wild rice stuffing and gravy--family recipes--and Hen is making pumpkin pie and clam dip. Nice Belt is making Lime Congeal, or at least I really hope she is.

Tonight I have VernHog's birthday party and then band practice. Everything is good.

Exam

I'm sitting here waiting for my "exam questions" to be emailed to me; this had better just be a formality, since we got the questions in advance and I've spent all week outlining. It's really not such a bad way to occupy oneself: go to a cute little cafe, drink something nice, and type quotes into the computer. But I've done three cafes worth since last night, and I'm a little tired for actually writing the thing.

Okay, here it comes!

I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing

I was sincerely not planning to finish the novel assigned for tomorrow's class, but I was sitting in the library's cave-like reading room and somehow I kept finding the strength to go on. I have read well over a thousand pages this week. I'm writing this mostly for the purposes of self-congratulation--which I need to keep my spirits up, because I am still not close to done.

On a decidedly silly note, I received an invitation on facebook to join a group comprised entirely of people with my name. I don't really use facebook (too collegiate), but this amuses me.

Raindrops on Roses, Whiskers on Kittens

I am typing this by the light of my new favorite thing, my SAD light. I'm sure it's just a placebo, but I'm really enjoying my treatments--20 minutes of bright blue light, twice a day. More than that and it will create too much seretonin and I will be jittery, according to The Internet. I don't think you read this, Olesens, but if you do--thank you!

My other new favorite thing is Dickens. Josh and I independently decided that his writing has the same good qualities as "Arrested Development"; a somewhat uncanny convergence, but, as such, an undoubtedly true observation.

I am very excited for my California trip, but have a massive pile of work to do before I go--including taking an "exam," which seems to mean I will have four hours to transcribe two papers that I am expected to have already fully thought out but just not yet written down.

My mom is a rock star

For anti-jinxing reasons, I can't explain why until next week. But if you've been following this saga, you know what I mean when I say the ball now is in her court.

Yippee!!!

Karma

It's been raining for a week, and despite my joy in the functionalness of democracy, I feel an attack of SAD coming. This afternoon I'm going to try out my weird blue happy ray machine, while reading Our Mutual Friend.

Interlude for a politics dork-out: the line between the parties seems oddly permeable right now. I'm afraid Liebermann will turn (he gets to chair committees, etc, as a Dem, but I bet the threat will always be there and he'll milk it for all he can get). And I want to know if anyone can tell me, why didn't Lincoln Chaffee run as an independent? It seems like he definitely would have won that way, and if he's going to use his last months to defy the Republicans anyway (on Bolton, at least).... it seems weird.

What a Good Day

This morning I drove around listening to NPR, yelling to no one "YES! YES!" I'm not quite ready to make out with Nancy Pelosi (unlike Churchill, who is), but I am unusually happy about all this.

Moreover, it's like the election is signaling an astrological realignment that's caused many things to go right over the past couple of days for myself and people I care about. It's been nice--but shit, I think I'm too superstitious to post this. But I want to post it, to say thank you.

Thank you, stars. Thank you very much.

Bad Citizen

This is the first major election I've sat out since I turned 18; I'm mad at myself that I missed the registration deadline. I love to vote, even though I've been thoroughly conditioned to expect elections to lead to painful disappointment.

Remember the midterms in 2002? There was a contested election for Massachusetts governor and it looked like the Democratic woman had a chance against Mitt Romney--and then there was Congress. Our usual Tuesday Buffy group got together to watch the returns. Now I expect unremitting bad news, but then each new disappointment was freshly painful. We lost the Senate (remember Jim Jeffords and how we had it for a while?). Massachusetts not only chose to be led a Republican from Utah but also came dangerously close to abolishing the income tax. Massachusetts!

We were miserable. So we dragged our new sense of disenfranchisement to Friendly's and drowned our sorrows in a peanut butter ice cream pie.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, everybody vote!

A 24 Hour Day

Even if, unlike Keifer Sutherland, I can't prevent a terrorist plot, I can stay up for 24 hours at a time. It makes me feel kind of dreamy-like.

*****I'm condensing the rambling post that was here before, not because of the horny studs or any private comments but because I can't deal with the way I switched tenses in the middle (hey, it had been a long day). I wrote it planning to record first and edit later.******

Highlights of the trip to Indiana (working backwards):

--First shift at new walk-in tutoring center job, where I got to work on a paper about Dostoevsky and Fargo.

--Purchase of plane ticket to Irvine.

--Hanging out in Seattle with Edward (long-lost jazz bassist friend), the kind of person who picks you up on a street corner and sweeps you off to Dim Sum before you're even back from the airport.

--Flight traumas: sometimes you just really want to the drink cart to stop for you, and instead it skips you. And what magic exactly resides in a zip-lock baggie that makes it so speacial?

--Night of partying with the Indiana MFAs: cocktail-party with a fabulous reading, Uncle Elizabeth's (gay bar in a doublewide), The Video Saloon (The Vid), where I derailed a flirtation by telling the guy he should drink a Shirley Temple.

--Highlight of child-care morning: [out of nowhere] "Now YOU drive the spaceship, and YOU take the ring"!

--Latte in bed, breakfast at the place they take the famous writers. That means that the same bathtub koi have seen too much of both me and Charles Baxter.

Also, an email went out today asking who wants to join the grad prom committee. Yes!

Also, Dickens is fucking hilarious, but most of my other reading for this week is not going to get done. Oh well.

All the MFAs in Bloomington, Indiana...

are in a coffee shop, and I am with them. They all looked very pretty dressed up last night. Fun times in a small town.

Thanks a bunch, Gary Snyder

You went and had an orgy with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and some girl named Princess, and now I have to have a one-on-one talk about it with a sixteen year old boy.

*****

Coundown to Indiana: 1 day!

*****

I'm really happy they're saving the Hubble telescope.

*****

A light fixture in my apartment broke last night, and I'm considering whether to do some amateur wiring. It's kind of a pain to call the landlords, but I'm a little afraid I'll electrocute myself. The breakers are all labelled wrong and that makes me nervous.

*****

I wish I had a robot clone I could send to class for me today. We're talking about Darwin, and although I love Darwin and in fact have a thing for heroic evolutionists (Alfred Russel Wallace figuring out natural selection in a malarial dream!), I think class will be boring.

*****

I now have three jobs besides school. It keeps me kind of busy, I guess. Perhaps unwisely, I just reactivated my Netflix, and should be receiving three discs of Arrested Development today. Even if it's unwise, I'm excited.