I have been very efficient today

I had a dentist appointment (no cavities!), and I also bought my sister's birthday present (yes, a month and a half early; that's how I do), and I did my taxes, and I walked around campus which was nice because the azaleas are coming out and they are my favorite flower, and the weather was gorgeous.

And as a treat for myself for being so awfully, awfully virtuous and efficient, I have stopped putting off reading Joan Wyndham's diaries that she kept during World War II. Joan Wyndham is this chick who kept diaries during World War II, and the library has the first volume of them, Love Lessons. It's so funny - she's young and dumb, and her family's clearly insane, and she spends all her time trying to suss out her feelings about everyone she meets. And ordinarily I would feel a bit poor-baby about her, because she's only seventeen, poor thing, and her parents are crap, but oh, God, she's so funny. She says things like this:

The other day [Mummy] ran into Jo [the dude with whom Joan is fooling around all the time] and me walking down the King's Road together, and when we got home she said that she thought he looked 'very interesting' and she wouldn't mind an afternoon in the studio with him herself! Sometimes Mummy comes out with some really quite extraordinary things.

And as well it is so completely fascinating how she's being all with the sexual awakening, and the war's going on - I keep thinking, how clever of the author to juxtapose the two things in this way, before remembering she's not writing a story, it's her diaries.

After tea we had a long talk about masturbation....Just as it was getting interesting and I was going to ask him how it was done, another artist conchie rushed in waving a newspaper. "They've invaded Holland and Belgium!" he panted.

So there it is. We looked at one another. The war had really started.