reprints

Throughout all four years of college I made intermittent entries in e-journals I affectionately named in honor of each year. These titles aren't especially ingenious and could actually be a source of embarrassment to me if I publicize them. Perhaps on another day when I am feeling more bold...
Still, not all of the material contained within the journals is rotten. Much of it should be picked up again and developed further. Now, I'm not at all interested in telling you any sordid and intimate tales of love and loneliness. As I so clearly stated when I began this blog, unreserved self-disclosure simply isn't my style. I like to keep some cards up my sleeve when writing, going on first dates, or socializing at work. Therefore, any of my journal entries reprinted on this blog will be carefully selected and edited, if necessary. And I may not always tell you when I've done the latter. All of that being said, here's a little something from a night at the library junior year:

November 28, 2006

Call me crazy, but sometimes I really enjoy working. Adam's curse does not always pan out in life, thank goodness. I had this epiphany as I was working on ideas for my senior paper and taking notes for an upcoming Romantic Literature paper. Any time I try to develop ideas and logic for papers it takes a long time. I must sit quietly, not writing, just thinking. Then I must re-read works, often taking painstaking notes (but not always, mind you). In regard to productivity, it must be likened to watching paint dry. Yet, when I get an idea, when my brain is in fire, and I scrawl down some beautifully profound connection, it's total euphoria. There is this satisfying feeling that usually causes me to sigh with pleasure, and shuffle my papers vigorously, setting them back neatly to signify that similar order has now come to my thoughts.

As of now, I'm unsure that this evening's work is worth that satisfaction. My senior paper idea has not been approved, and I have not officially started writing my paper for Romantic Lit. Perhaps when I do the real work of writing I will kick myself for feeling mildly happy about the work completed tonight: Stupid, stupid...that wasn't even close to insightful. You were just taking up time doing mindless drivel so that you could pretend to work.....Oh gosh, I hope that is not the case. And now it is too late anyway. This journal entry has just interposed doubt into pleasurable feeling and it has subsequently turned it into a sickening feeling. In writing about a hypothetical future I have made it my present. Yuck.

It's funny how little journal entries, so disheveled in their organization and feeble in their offerings, influence when I only intend them for reflection. All I wanted to say initially was: I feel good about the work I did tonight. What I ended up doing was second-guessing myself and souring any sense of accomplishment. In five minutes, in two hundred and fifty words, you can end up falling back into cynical patterns and convince yourself that things are really worthless after all.

sunday afternoons

In general I dislike Sundays. It has probably been that way for the past four or five years. If I actually kept the Sabbath, I'm sure I would enjoy enjoy it more. But Sunday always seems to take the brunt of the consequences for my procrastination during the week and weekend. Cleaning and bills and emails and grocery-shopping and laundry and getting-a-hair-cut and scheduling and cooking and calls home and paperwork are perpetually shuffled off to that block of time called the weekend, which appears during the frenzy of the week as a vast, empty piece of real-estate burgeoning with opportunities for productivity. May your to-do list be writ 20 items long--a Saturday will always do to complete it! Now, either I am simply undisciplined or the weekend is a cheating little son-of-a-gun--promising acres of time and only providing about 10 square feet once you actually arrive on the property. Either way, I rarely accomplish over the weekend what I set out to when I pull into my parking spot on Friday evening after my commute home from work.

Of course I can't do anything on Friday night. Grocery shopping on Friday nights is for single losers and married people. I may very well be a single loser, but I would rather not advertise that fact to my fellow Evanstonians by taking part in those kinds of activities on a Friday night.

And then Saturday...gosh, it's nice to sleep in a bit, make breakfast, listen to talk radio, read Dostoyevsky on the couch. Errands are for the afternoon, tasks that require the most time, the least brain, and offer the most satisfaction when you press pen to paper and cross them off of your list. Evening arrives, and I've got plans and all day Sunday.

So it comes to pass: around 12:30 p.m. on Sunday I walk into my kitchen after church and I gripe about all that I must do. I want the couch and a novel; a nap or a movie; a walk or an afternoon concert; an hour on the piano; a glass of wine and a conversation. I don't want to write a check and send it away; I don't want to fill out tax forms; I don't want to renew my stupid parking sticker. Monday cometh, and such banal tasks only seem to speed its arrival. The only respite, the only mercy, is Sunday afternoon NPR. At least I can listen to Tavis Smiley while I wash dishes, or to BBC News while I compose message #43 in a thread of e-mails about something that really shouldn't have gotten that complicated...

Really I should be more diligent on Saturdays. I used to be when I was in college. It wasn't unusual for me to wake up at 8:30, pack up my laptop and book it to the library to stay until 3 or 4 p.m. Perhaps I just need to commit--really commit--to a schedule on the weekend. Maybe then I wouldn't hate my life on Sundays...

Even though they are decontextualized...

I find the following quotes positively enchanting. Last night around 12 a.m. I was sitting on the floor in my room and began to page through a small leatherbound volume where I occasionally record particularly delicious quotes from books I'm reading. As I sat there, I thought, to hell with sharing recipes on my blog, I'll post these. Ok, ok, the language is a bit strong. And I still may provide you with instructions for making savory meals--that's just not especially high on my priority list at the moment. The mind and spirit before the body: I have Jesus himself to back that up, per his forty days in the desert. But I'm really taking this too far. All I want to do is allow you to enjoy the following:


"I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody that wants to make some kind of splash."
-Franny in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey

"Like so many Americans, she [Billy's mother] was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
-Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five

"We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road."
-Virginia Woolf The Waves

"Thou from the first/ was present, and, with mighty wings outspread/ Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss/ And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark/ Illumine, what is low raise and support;/ that, to the heighth of this great argument/ I may assert Eternal Providence/ and justify the ways of God to men."
-John Milton Paradise Lost

"We've got ninety-nine percent the same genes as any other person. We've got ninety percent the same as a chimpanzee. We've got thirty percent the same as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all? I love about the lettuce. It makes me feel I belong."
-Caryl Churchill A Number

"Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up."
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky Notes from the Underground

"Leonato: Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband.
Beatrice: Not till God make man of some other mettle than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valient dust?"
-William Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing

"Nick went into his room, undressed, and got into bed. He heard his father moving around in the living room. Nick lay in the bed with his face in the pillow. 'My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.'"
-Ernest Hemingway "The Northern Woods" from The Nick Adams Stories

"The hands of the King are hands of healing, dear friends..."
-Gandalf in J.R.R. Tolkien's Return of the King