"step, step right over the line and onto borrowed time"

Jeff, this entry is for you, since, as you pointed out last night (and with all due sincerity) it has been two weeks since my last blog post, and isn't it about time I write something?

Lets see. There was major emotional turmoil two weeks ago, arising from two different situations, which ultimately gave rise to some interesting conversations, including one which will be the discussion topic at WomCam next week--female solidarity.

I continue to enjoy my fiction tutorial, though I've discovered now, in order to generate ideas I need to get out of the flat, walk, be around people. Otherwise the day just slips by stagnantly and I start to go a little nuts.

I read Virginia Woolf's The Waves last week, and I adored it. It might be the first thing I've read all year that really, truly resonated with me on a deeper level than just surface admiration for the complexity of the prose or the loveliness of a particular sentence (i.e. Tender is the Night or Farewell to Arms). It was also one of those books that you struggle to hold onto after you've finished. It starts to feel like a dream you had months ago, where you thought, for a moment, it all made sense, you had it all figured out, and then the phone rings, the alarm goes off, you wake up and forget what it was exactly you dreamed in the first place. Still. Much of what she ruminated on--at least what I focused on--was art & nature; how you survive; the responsibility one has to one's friends, to one's self; what you lose by distancing yourself from the world--or if that distance is vital. All things I've been thinking about, at one point or another. Bernard, one of the six characters in the novel, and, in some ways, an amalgamation of Woolf herself, is forever the observer, left to record his friend's stories in lieu of his own, because somewhere along the way, he didn't get around to making his own. He was passive, always searching for the "true story," unable to see the beauty in the natural world anymore than he could in a touch between lovers.

I've been considering applying to Oxford directly after I graduate to do a Master's in Literature (1900-Present), though who knows if I would even get in. If I didn't, I would just work for a year, in some aspect of the publishing industry, and even if I did, I'd still apply afterwards to get my MFA. Stay in school, delay the inevitable, I can't give up writing or literature. So why not continue them both, at least for a while. If I can, if it's possible. Anyway. There's a wonderful quote in The Waves which made me feel, for a moment, that the last thing I should do is spend more time in a classroom--that I should be out living, experiencing, crafting my own story (which, I think, I already am):

"that would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly"

This one too:

“Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person”

Valentine's Day was Saturday, and instead of bemoaning the fact that this year I happen to be unattached, I realized, in a fleeting moment in the midst of a delicious spending spree, that this was the first time since I was sixteen years old that I haven't been in a destructive sexual relationship / pseudo-relationship with anyone. Which, I think, is something to be celebrated. I baked brownies, and ate them for dinner, drank strawberry wine coolers while wearing a polka dotted silk slip and massive Lolilta sunglasses, and spent the night with some of my favorite girls, getting drunk off champagne and raspberries and vodka shirley temples, singing along to Celine Dion. All is well.

Europe planning is more complicated than I had foreseen, but in a month from yesterday, Amy and I will be on our way to Paris, then the Riviera, then Geneva, Lausanne, Lake Como, Venice, Rome, Vienna, Prague, Amsterdam, then back to Paris one month later just as our Eurail passes run out at midnight. How very Cinderella.

I also got in touch with the author of a fantastic manuscript I read this summer, which was then picked up, and is going to be published sometime next year. It's one of those things, where, as the intern, all the difference you make happens behind the scenes--the authors have no idea who's the first to read their manuscript, even though the interns are who make the majority of the intial slush acceptance/rejection decisions, I'd say. It was nice to actually speak up, congratulate her, see how excited she was to hear about me. It felt rather rewarding.

It's hard to believe half the year has gone by. It feels like I'll be here forever (in the best way).