You gave me hyacinths first a year ago. They called me the hyacinth girl.

currently listening to: "gloomy sunday" by billie holiday

as thoroughly bewildered as i am about the events described in my last entry, as long as the correspondence is religated to banal twittering, i don't think it's worth it to me to worry about. she wrote to me again. oh well. i don't know. i don't beat around the bush with people and i don't trust it when they do it to me. i am naked, searing disdain or a warm i'm-sorry, hug and make my feelings known at all costs kind of person. i don't know what says naked disdain more than moving out and not responding to messages, but that could just be my problem.

i started reading the sound and the fury yesterday and now i am on the last part. i NEED to own it. i LOVE IT. i must have thought it was about war, because i remember consciously deciding not to buy it when i had the chance. i have made various stabs at first-person narratives and faulkner's work wickedly exacerbates my wish to be comfortable in first-person. i am working on it.

tomorrow i have the creative essay and modern & contemporary fiction, the first classes of which i had yesterday. the creative essay has four people in it, myself included, and seems like it's going to be a blast. we wrote for ten minutes on the subject of "place" and the professor was the most embarrassed of anyone to read what they'd written.

there are six people in modern & contemporary fiction, but only five came yesterday, myself included. we sat around a little table, and i had all my books for the class and was all ready sitting somewhere else. so i lumbered over and the other girls (it's all girls) filled the one side of the table. i thought the professor was going to sit at the head, but he swung his chair next to me, which made my strident, persistant, WAY OUT OF CHARACTER show-offishness even more spooky. we went over the books we're reading and he had me explain the ones i'd read all ready. we had to then write down everything we knew about the modernist period, and after five minutes everyone else had a sentence about the world wars and i had a page. he then asked me to explain the modernist period.

i am a) flattered, b) excited that this professor appreciates my familiarity with and interest in the material, c) terrified of being held to a standard other than my own, which isn't so great when it comes to impressing and grades and the opinions of others, d) a shade embarrassed because i was the only one who spoke. i think i am the only person taking that class because i need it, but thus the rest of them are taking it for fun and i totally dominated their fun. in my defense, no one else was going to talk, and they know it.

i hope i get an A.

the first thing we're reading is heart of darkness, which i absolutely cannot read or even look at without thinking of a scene in "kicking & screaming" when max is reclining at a desk and, bored, is reading the spines of their bookshelf and crooning "in this heeeaaaaart of darkneeeessssss". every time. i have to sing.

after that: to the lighthouse (i have never read virginia woolf before, and what i have read about this book makes me excited to experience it), the sun also rises (i never read hemingway because people kept insisting i wouldn't enjoy it - i enjoyed "the killers" immensely, but that was a short story, so i am interested in how a novel will go over), light in august (STOKED I FUCKING LOVE FAULKNER), a good man is hard to find (i don't think flannery o'connor is for me, but we'll see), slaughterhouse-five (read myself last semester, i am excited to read this with a group and hear the professor's thoughts on the aliens), chronicle of a death foretold (clare gave me a copy of one thousand years of solitude, which of course now i want to read so badly before i read this...), THE UNBEARABLE MOTHERFUCKING LIGHTNESS OF BEING (BITCHES!), and beloved (toni morrison is responsible for one of my very favorite quotes ["all water has a perfect memory, and is forever trying to get back to where it was"].).

i am deeply disappointed there is no nabokov. deeply. i would've much rather have pale fire in favor of a good man is hard to find any day, but then that is a joy for me to read and for someone else it is the difference between another extremely involved novel and a collection of short stories.

anyway, i hope i can top that act tomorrow. today i was totally in typical-of-me mode and gawked my way through romantic lit and at the end of the class the professor asks you how much you participated and you must say ("i spoke twice", "i never shut up", "oh, good morning") before leaving. it frazzled me so badly i didn't go to see my advisor like i BADLY needed to. fuck. so i have to see him tomorrow. have to.

if anybody should ask i'm going to a seminar
pieces of the moon
JOBJOBJOB
interviewinterviewinterview
sensitive heart, you're doomed from the start
(& etc)