A few minor roadblocks away from perfect happiness

My room is now (almost) extremely awesome and cosy and nice. I bought a hammer and a step-stool yesterday, which provided me the necessary impetus to hang up my pictures. I hung up the summer girl that my mother cross-stitched for me, and I hung up the little framed cartoon of Viggo Mortensen that Nezabeth drew for me in high school – and I hung up my toile-with-corpse picture which my uncle Jimmy made for me. I also hung up all my picture frames. I went to some trouble to arrange them in a nice pattern so that when I printed out the pictures I have selected and put them in the frames, my desk would be a cheery and heartwarming place to be.

But here are the aforementioned roadblocks:

1. I haven’t got frames for my pictures of Richard III and Anne Boleyn. I wanted to put Richard III on the wall between the window and the bookshelf, and Anne Boleyn in the large empty space between my desk and the bookshelf-type thing on which I have put my stuffed animals and surplus school supplies (which, hey, I’ll never need now. Liberty is liberating! Hooray!). But my frame for Richard III broke, and I never had one for Anne Boleyn. So those are both on hold.

2. I haven’t got a frame for the 10x4 picture of the pilgrim salt and pepper shakers plotting evil against the green alien tied to one of Nate’s cups. I desperately want a frame for that. I am in love with that picture. It represents my mother’s side of the family so perfectly. I would put it underneath my other framed pictures, and it would complete the look, I feel.

3. I have no good pictures of Raksha or tim. I am very very fond of Raksha and tim and would like to have pictures of them above my desk, but I just haven’t got any good ones.

4. The above turns out to be a moot point because my printer has no ink. I bought photo paper to print out the photographs I wanted of all the people I like, but it turns out that my printer is just about out of color ink. So I have a big bunch of empty picture frames above my desk. It’s sort of weird and unsettling actually, and I don’t feel one bit comfortable sitting down at my desk. I was going to work on my story yesterday, but the empty picture frames were too creepy, so I went downstairs and made stuffed potatoes and watched House instead. (Which was kinda depressing. But Penny’s guest-starring next week! (I think – I didn’t get a good look at her.) Penny! Thank you, Hammer Man, I don’t think I can explain how important it was that you stopped the van—)

Hey, Anna, aren't you sorry you said anything?

This is the last thing I will say, and then I am going to bed.

I still hate Wallace Stevens.

I'm not just saying it because I have a category and I don't want to waste it. I'm saying it because sometimes when I look at all my category labels, I see the I Hate Wallace Stevens one, and it reminds me of the deep loathing I continue to have for Wallace Stevens. I'm glad Ernest Hemingway kicked shit out of him and sent him to the hospital. I hate Ernest Hemingway too.

But I love Sean Bean. Sean Bean! How fond of him I am! I wish he were in more things! I started watching Fellowship of the Ring again just because I felt so awfully, awfully fond of Sean Bean. I forgot how sexy Viggo Mortensen is when he's being Aragorn. I like him because the guy who taught him sword-fighting for this movie is the same guy who's been teaching sword-fighting to every movie sword-fighter ever, all the way back to Errol Flynn, and that guy says that Viggo Mortensen is the best student of sword-fighting he's ever had. You know what that means? It means that Viggo Mortensen can kick everybody else's ass who has ever had a sword-fight in any movie you've ever seen, ever. Including Inigo Montoya.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

(Why don't people say that more? I am going to start saying it frequently in an effort to encourage the rest of the world to follow my sterling example.)

A terrible combination

God gifted me with optimism, and then combined it with a terrible sense of direction. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

Today I walked to Wal-Mart to do my shopping, all part of my general plan to walk places when they are within walking distance, and it was a tiresome walk, let me tell you. The recent hurricane has caused a great deal of debris to build up on the sides of the roads, and every time I would reach a massive pile of debris in my path, obscuring the sidewalk or stretch of lawn I was walking on, I would have to stop and wait for the oncoming traffic to let up enough that I could go around (on the street). And it was rush hour. So tricky.

Well, on the way back, laden with heavy groceries, I thought I'd be all crafty and take one of the side streets, and it would go around through a nice neighborhood and eventually lead back to the main road, and then I'd have avoided all the debris areas until I got back to the portion of the road that had sidewalks. I didn't know the neighborhood at all, but I thought, Well, hey, all roads lead to Rome, right?

And I walked, and I walked - it was a nice neighborhood - and I walked and I walked, and a busload of interested young children went past me and pointed at me (I waved at them cheerfully because I was cleverly avoiding debris and getting groceries and saving the environment). After a while, I had still found no road leading back to the main road, and I was beginning to suspect there never would be one. So I turned around and started heading back, all the long way back to where I had originally come into the neighborhood. It was very, very long. The bus full of children passed me up again. They were still all pointing and interested but I was like MOVE ALONG YA LITTLE FUCKERS, THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

Of course when I got back to the main road and looked back in dismay at the neighborhood that had totally failed to help me, that was when I noticed the NO OUTLET sign. Damn neighborhood. No outlet indeed. I was about ready to get a bulldozer and MAKE a damn outlet. Shit.

Silly things that I feel vaguely guilty about, Part V

Okay. So when I was in sixth grade, on the first day of Latin class, I met this girl. And she introduced herself, hi, I'm Mary Ellen, and we exchanged phone numbers for homework reasons, and I wrote down Mary Ellen A. and then her phone number, right? And I have small handwriting, so it looked like I had written MaryEllen as all one word, but of course I hadn't. She said "Oh my God! You spelled my name right! Nobody ever spells my name right!" and because I thought that it was two words I said "Well, yeah. I mean how else would you spell it?"

And seriously. How else would you spell it?

But it turned out she spelled it MaryEllen, with no space, and by the time she had explained this to me, I felt too embarrassed to admit that I had not, in fact, spelled her name right, and I didn't want to say that that was an insane spelling, so I just didn't say anything. Oh my God, how it has haunted me since then. Every time I thought about MaryEllen - which, okay, wasn't all that often - I was just eaten up with dismay and I have always desperately wanted to explain to someone that OF COURSE I didn't spell her insane name right the first time, HOW COULD I WHEN IT IS AN INSANE SPELLING OF A NAME THAT IS TWO NAMES?

I thought of this today because I was covering my books with contact paper, a habit I picked up in sixth grade, and it reminded me of middle school, and then of MaryEllen. Recently (within the last month or two), Bonnie mentioned MaryEllen and said "Remember in Latin class? How you spelled her name right? And then you were all How else would you spell it? GOD you were such a prissy little bitch."

I have never been so grateful for being called a prissy little bitch. I was all NO YOU HAVE MISUNDERSTOOD THAT WHOLE INTERACTION. LET ME EXPLAIN WHAT REALLY HAPPENED.

...Justification was mine on that day. I thought of that today. I am now no longer eaten alive with dismay and guilt, but I have vague guilt feelings left over, and part of me wants to call MaryEllen, wherever she is, and explain that no, I didn't spell her name right in Dr. F.'s class on that day, because nobody could spell her name right after only hearing her say it, and the reason that we didn't stay friends in high school (apart from having nothing in common) was essentially that our relationship was based from the beginning on a rotting foundation of lies and deception.

All loud and screamy

I went to my very first ever LSU football game last night. It was a lot of fun. Trindon Holliday ran extremely quickly, and everyone shouted very loud. And it was only a little game!

Having attended this game, I've begun to feel that Joss Whedon really missed an excellent opportunity to have Anya go to a sporting event. I think it would have been very, very funny to have Anya go to a sporting event. J.K. Rowling didn't miss the point of having weird people at sporting events, which is why it is so very excellent when Luna commentates for Quidditch.

Hey, and speaking of Sarah Palin

Carol Fowler, who is a Democrat from South Carolina, said that Sarah Palin's main qualification for the veep job was that she hadn't had an abortion.

Ouch.

This dream I had about Amber Benson

I was reading Sunshine before bed last night, and I noticed that one of the reviews on the back was a quote from Amber Benson, which I wouldn’t have noticed previously because, of course, I didn’t know who Amber Benson was. (I still think that’s a little strange – does being in a vampire show make you blurb girl for a vampire book?) But then I fell asleep and had a dream about Amber Benson. It was a really strange dream. She was inexplicably in my living room, and I was like, “Amber Benson! Hi! I’m so excited to see you!” (and I really, really was, like we had been best friends in elementary school and I’d just lost track of her). And then she said, “Hey, we need to go witness the Dark Lord’s rise, okay?” and since I remembered what happens in that scene – their wands connect, and Harry escapes heroically! and apart from Cedric Diggory’s death and the post-traumatic stress for Harry, everything works out fine! – I agreed to go with her. They were having it in one of the houses way down at the other end of my street. But halfway down there I remembered that Voldemort had been replaced at the end by a lady Dark Lord, and I didn’t know how that was going to go, so I said, “You know what, Amber Benson? You go on and I’ll just see you back at the house.” And on my way back home a bunch of Tolkien dwarves hopped out of a tree and gave me some sandwich cookies – which leads me to believe I may have gotten them confused with Keebler elves.

I think my subconscious is having some issues about sorting out fictional universes. Also, I think the lady Dark Lord might have been Sarah Palin – I didn’t get close enough to see her well, but she looked like Tina Fey, and I know that Tina Fey represents Sarah Palin to my brain (because my aunt said that Tina Fey would spoof Sarah Palin really well).

Then after that, I dreamed that God was knocking very hard on my door and I was so, so sleepy, but I finally managed to drag myself out of bed to go answer it, and I was running quickly downstairs all grumbly and rehearsing under my breath how I was going to yank open the door and say, “Okay then, GOD. You have woken me UP. WHAT was so damn IMPORTANT it couldn’t WAIT until the MORNING?” But I woke up before I answered the door. (Which is too bad, because the last time I dreamed I met God, we were total BFF.)

Thanks, subconscious. Despite the incredible subtlety of this message, I have managed at last to decipher your meaning. I still don’t know what you were talking about with Amber Benson and the Keebler dwarves.

Whoa

Huh. Who knew? It is an muggy nasty day following a hurricane that knocked down my aunts’ entire house, while another hurricane (bad Ike! Go the hell away!) comes zooming towards us, and I just did something insane and impractical that made no sense and left me in an unpleasant place, monetarily speaking, and I am so happy that I keep bursting into song and squeaking with joy. And not flood and Judgment Day and mine disaster songs, either – funny songs, Gilbert & Sullivan songs, the cheerful fast-paced church songs.

Which is consolations. Which means I did the exactly right thing.

Yeah, so today, I dropped out of school. I dropped out. Of school. I’m a drop-out now. An unemployed, uninsured dropout, that’s me. Part of my brain is screaming WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU LUNATIC GIRL YOU WILL NOW DIE OF SOME UNSPECIFIED DISEASE AND BECOME A BURDEN ON THE TAXPAYERS, because this is so not me. I’m good at school; school is my thing. I get straight As and research things thoroughly and use library resources. I’m the girl who does things because they make practical sense.

That, I think, is the reason I quit school. At least, those were the terms in which I framed my internal debate in order to make dropping out into a less insane decision. I thought this thought: I’ve spent my entire life choosing to do the sensible, practical thing, rather than the thing that I think will make me the most happy (which isn’t to say I don’t do things that make me happy, because I do of course). And that’s worked out fine – I saved money, I went to England, I got good jobs that developed useful skills – so that’s what I’ve always done. But now the system is breaking down, because I have spent the few weeks of this semester consumed with dread and unhappiness, so I decided to do a new thing. I decided to do something that was not practical, just because it’s what I want, and see where that goes.

Though this is all rationalization after the fact. The real truth is that listening to music when you are trying to settle your mind can be a terrible, terrible idea (Mumsy, look. Here is an example of what I mean about taking music as omens). When you are trying to settle your mind about something, you are all too apt to hear a song and think THAT SONG IS SPEAKING TO MY SOUL when actually it’s – you know – it’s just a song. Not signs and portents. Just a regular old song. It’s dangerous because any song could come on! The song that says “You have to be able to get a job with earning potential and it is insane to abandon your health insurance without any prospect of health insurance from elsewhere” could come on, or – and this is what actually happened – the song could come on that says “trust your instincts, close your eyes, and leap”. I was in the car on the way to work, listening to my mp3 player, and Idina Menzel sang most stirringly about the trusting and the closing and the leaping, and I was like YES. THIS IS MY PATH.

Of course, Idina Menzel’s character in Wicked ended up having to fake her own death in order to escape from the oppressive regime of misery. But whatever. SHE IS SPEAKING TO MY SOUL.

One of the dorkiest things about myself I have ever confessed

I really like reading articles about books I have just discovered. Whenever I discover a new book that I like a lot, if I have any reason to believe that people would have written articles about it, I log on to the MLA International Bibliography and run searches for it. I've done this for ages. I read a zillion articles on Angels in America, I remember quite specifically.

It was very trying not to have any power. My sustaining-myself-through-the-hurricane book, which is very long and I haven't finished it yet, is shaping up to be a much more raving success than, actually, I had anticipated, and there are a bunch of articles about it on The Internet. Only six with linked full text on MLA, but whatever, I can find more, I haven't even looked at JSTOR and Project Muse yet! But anyway, while the power was out, I really wanted to read such articles AND I COULD NOT.

...I will never be cool. I read scholarly articles on purpose for fun.

I did discover that Salman Rushdie, alas, doesn't like Paul Scott. He dislikes him so much he used the phrase "big brown cocks" in his critique - I swear to God, he did. But I hope Salman Rushdie is oversimplifying, because I am really enjoying the way Paul Scott writes, all loopy and swirly, and I don't want to have to hate him for being a racist and a paternalist and using a lame and overdone thing to evoke the Indians-are-scary vibe. We'll see.

Edit to add: I finished my book. I still think Salman Rushdie was oversimplifying, and I still like the loopy swirly way that Paul Scott writes, and we will see what happens with the second book, which has "scorpion" in the title (not as nice!). But I can see Salman Rushdie's point - in the end it was more classist than racist though, I'm sorry to report, classism with racism all mixed in. Not flagrantly, and I know I'm always very, very displeased when somebody gets raped in a book, so I may have been cranky, but I think there was a definite undertone of, you know, educated Indians are Good Indians and peasant Indians are Bad Indians. Not very nice. I wish I hadn't liked it so much up until rubbish Daphne's rubbish letter to her rubbish aunt, because I feel rather let-down now. I want to write Paul Scott a letter and ask him why he wasn't free of prejudice so that I could love him with an uncomplicated love like I do Atticus Finch.

I killed a lovebug today, only because it was in my room.

People aren't meant to be without electricity.

It does things to you.