November 2011
5 posts
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Seasons, seasons, seasons
After turning back the clocks for the winter, it always takes me by surprise how much I like having it get dark earlier. Perhaps it’s because I tend to find comfort in the darkness and that turning down the shades and flicking on the light switch allows me to focus more, to be more productive. But I think it’s much simpler, much subtler.
For the past few days I’ve returned to my...
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Gaining an hour while you're already far behind
I’ve always loved the idea of daylight savings time, of watching the clocks fall backwards and gaining what we so often long for—more time. Lately, this is something I’ve been wishing I could have a lot more of, because pages can not be read or pages written or sleeping accomplished within the too few hours of a single day.
I’ve been behind, lately, and it’s a...
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The purple gown from Halloween's past
I used to dress up for Halloween as a little girl. It was something I looked forward to. A lot of costume catalogs came to my house, and I remember my sister and I used to flip through them in order to pick our favorites as well as laugh at the sillier ones. I always came back to the catalogs when I was on my own, flipping again through the pages and thinking of all of the things I could pretend...
October 2011
35 posts
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I used to do things, and maybe I still do
I’ve always been shy, but when I was younger, it appears that this never really held me back. For example, some of my earliest memories are from pre-school, in which I often chose to hide in the dress-up bin if I decided the story one of the teachers was reading to the class was too “boring.” In my early years of elementary school, I always tried to set up play-dates with the...
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"She always had the feeling that it was very,...
Lately, I’ve been staying in bed until the last possible moment, fitfully tossing and turning under my covers while the alarm blares defiantly. My subsequent showers have been either too hot or too cold, my skin scalding or shivering, and more often than not I’ve arrived wherever it was I was going a few minutes late—with damp hair. I have novels and articles and plays I need to...
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"To sleep; perchance to dream"
One of these days I’ll learn not to set alarms for myself on Saturday mornings with nowhere to go. This morning, the familiar ringing awoke me only long enough to turn off the alarm before falling back into a partial sleep. Part of me, however, is convinced that the reason I continue to set these alarms, Saturday morning after Saturday morning, is for this exact purpose—being able to...
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The week is almost over
It’s Friday afternoon and I’m finishing writing a paper that’s due at midnight, and It’s strange to realize that what has been an incredibly stressful week is coming to a close. In between paper writing, two midterm exams, a stomach virus, and general stress, I’ve had an interesting past few days.
So, while I’m procrastinating on writing my paper, here’s...
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On the difficulty of saying hello
Last night I sat in the dining hall alone, eating dinner and taking sips of soda while I alternated between staring out of the window and at my plate. I always feel so self conscious when I am eating alone—I am aware of the plastic fabric of the booth against my legs and back, of every person walking by, of how long it takes me to chew and swallow each and every bite.
While I am so aware,...
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But when I read, I can become the character--I can...
Last weekend I finished reading Mrs. Dalloway for the second time and was having trouble collecting all of my thoughts. Mrs. Dalloway is one of my favorite novels, and Woolf one of my favorite writers, and it seemed to me then that I could never adequately express how much that novel makes me feel.
Rereading a novel (especially a favorite novel) is always an interesting experience. You are given...
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Things that I should write more about
It is just so, so nice to come home after you’ve been away for a few weeks. I came home for the weekend yesterday afternoon and it’s been wonderful so far. I have so much reading to get done in the next few days, but being home has made the stress feel a little more bearable—at least for now.
I really need to start writing more. Lately I’ve been either thinking about or...
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It's funny how you feel sometimes
A few nights ago, I was feeling incredibly stressed out—eventually in tears and hovering over a word document with a paper that simply did not want to be written. It had been a stressful week. In between losing my student ID somewhere along the way to class, preparing for and giving two presentations, nightly readings, and general worry, I had been glad when the weekend finally came. But I...
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“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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Editing, editing, editing
It is late, nearly two in the morning, and I am still writing a paper which should have been finished hours ago. It’s a short paper, but I’ve realized that I will soon be over the page limit, and will therefore soon be editing it.
Editing, editing, editing.
Somehow, the idea of editing seems rather strange to me right now. The idea that some of the words I’ve written are...
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September 2011
10 posts
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“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive....”
– Attributed to Howard Thurman (via fivehours)
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Marshland, stray cats, and names carved in beach...
When I was twelve, I signed up for a summer program that gave tours of a local beach’s marshland. Wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and too-white sneakers, I climbed over a wooden fence in order to wade through ankle-deep mud that smelled harshly of methane. We had been warned about this, the smell, but an unpleasant odor did little to dispel the sense of adventure that overtook us as we splashed each...
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But where does the afternoon go?
If today has taught me one small thing, it is that there are many things we can do to avoid what it is we should be doing, what we need to be doing. You can wash your dishes in water so hot it scalds your hands; shower in water that you can not coax to any temperature above a lukewarm drizzle. You can fill a water bottle, full to the brim, and drink slowly, sip by sip by sip.
You can make lists....
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“Photography is not an art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature or...”
– Alfred Stieglitz
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Because it is nice to share, because it is good...
I remember having a conversation with my friend in which we talked about our reading habits. Somewhere in the course of the discussion I told her that I always need to have a pencil near me when I’m reading so that I can underline my favorite passages and fill the margins with my thoughts.
My friend seemed rather taken aback at this. She went on to say that she couldn’t imagine writing in a...
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“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet 