Project Read

What am I supposed to be doing right now?  Research for my career development self-report, due Tuesday.  But what am I doing right now?  Ohhhh, you know, just  Wikipedia-ing authors.  Got Welty, James, Hardy, and Trollope all open right now.  No big.

I’ve always been a big reader, from the time my older sister sat me down between her bookcase and trash can and wouldn’t let me move until I had mastered Hop on Pop.  I looooooooved the local library as a little girl; hell, I still kind of do, although I don’t spend very much time in Dayton anymore.  From the Betsy-Tacy series, my one true and unimpeachable love which will last until the day I die, seriously, to the All-Of-A-Kind Family*, from the Mennyms (oooooh, which I haven’t read since I was about 8 or 9, I wonder if they’re still just as magical?) to the Rose Wilder books, I was always, always reading.  This habit continued through grade school and junior high, as I discovered the His Dark Materials trilogy, Agatha Christie mysteries, and, of course, Harry Potter.  Unfortunately, my passion fell off a little when I entered high school, and mandatory novel reading became par for the course in my Honors-track English courses.  I hate, hate, HATE being rushed through a good book, and although I’ve always been an avid reader, I’m also a slow one.  The pace of the courses was just too fast for me to get really involved with the books, so even though I discovered a bunch of great writing which I still love to this day (Jane Eyre, A Tale Of Two Cities, Crime And Punishment, Shakespeare, etc.), a lot of the time I was frustrated or stressed while reading them.  I also didn’t get a lot of leisure reading in, which I sorely missed, even through college.

As you may have picked up from reading pretty much anything I’ve written in the past few years here, I was an English major in college.  My decision to become an English major at the time felt like such a decadence to me.  I was already majoring in Psych, but upon discovering that I could seriously finish that major within, like, two and a half years, I talked it over with my advisor and decided, ahhhh, what the hell, let’s add English, too, shall we?  Best.  Decision.  Of my LIFE.  From the introductory course I took my first semester to the high-level, theory-driven courses I ended up taking junior and senior years (plus one Shakespeare one I conned my way into freshman year, which was pants-shittingly terrifying for someone who was surrounded by seniors, knew less than nothing about literary theory, and had only read about three of his plays, but ended up being simultaneously awesome, as well), I loved it all.  Even the shit-tastic Contemporary Fiction course I took one spring (although that was mainly because there was this way cute, very articulate adn intelligent-seeming Graphic Design major in that class).  I just had this overwhelming urge to learn and to know as much as possible, because capital-L Literature captivated me.  Still does.  I wanted to understand the theories and memorize the time periods and who fit where and what their major works were and basically just read everything.  I was introduced to John Donne, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, a new and begrudging appreciation for Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, TS Eliot, and my new literary boyfriend, Henry James.  Even amidst all this literary love, there were some real shitstorms in there, like the freakin’ Brit Lit pre-1600 class that was all Chaucer and Beowulf and basically a recipe for boredom, or the two WD Howells novels I was supposed to read senior year, but seriously, some dude’s paint business is just not interesting to me, I’ll pass.  Also, I was assigned to read Sister Carrie twice, once as a freshman and once as a senior, and finished it zero times.  I’m still bound and determined with that one though, and one day, I’ll make it through.  All this is a really long-winded way of saying that college ignited the thirst for literary knowledge in me that had always been simmering just under the surface, and it hasn’t really let up.  Since I was focused so much on, you know, being an English major, there wasn’t much time for reading for pleasure.  I was too busy trying to force my way through Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man to have time for, like, Jeffery Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen.  Summers became prime pleasure-reading time for me, although I spent them mainly with light and easy mysteries.

However, at the beginning of the year, a roommate and I both dedicated ourselves to reading more of what we wanted, if only for fifteen minutes at the end of the day, mostly to help keep our sanity intact through second semester.  I was so happy!  I read an Irene Nemirovsky work, Emma, and started The Age of Innocence.  I’m not sure what happened, but around March, the habit fell away, and though I tried to re-ignite it with Anna Karenina in June, uhhhhh, June is maybe not the best time to start a lengthy, dark Russian drama, and I failed.  The only thing I’ve really read since July is Betsy and the Great World for maybe the fifteenth time.  So I’ve decided to re-(re-, re-, re-)dedicate myself to pleasure reading.  I know it might seem like, heyyyyy mayyyyyyybe since you never stick with it, it’s not the best hobby for you!  But it is!  I promise, it makes me so, so happy, I just tend to let myself get caught up in other things and let my novel-reading slide, and then I return to that novel like six weeks later and am like “Wait, wait, wait.  WHO is Ellen Olenska related to again?”  But it’s something that is so incredibly relaxing and allows me to unwind after long grad-school days, and fills the literary void in my life now that all I’m doing is learning about counseling.  So I’ve re-picked up The Age Of Innocence and am just tearing through it and have no idea why I put it down in the first place, and I have a six-week break ahead of me and can’t stop squealing about all the good reading I’m going to do.  I’m on a huge late nineteenth/early twentieth century kick, hence most of my authors I’m looking up currently, and I CANNOT wait to start crossing things off of my book list.  PLUS, the time is ripe to start forming my New Year’s Resolutions, and one of them will undoubtedly revolve around reading more in 2012.  I’m so happy, so excited, and so, so, SO ready to read.

*Hoooooly shit, I just looked this series up on Amazon, and the “Customers who bought this also bought” suggestions offered up both Blue Willow, which fascinated me as a young girl and which I had totally forgotten about, and CADDIE MOTHERFUCKIN’ WOODLAWN, which I loved so so so so SO MUCH when I was little and once read in a single afternoon.  Oh my.  Be still, my beating heart.

I’m just gonna go ahead and admit that whenever I’m feeling a bit lost, lonely, upset, confused, or frightened, I pull out my Shakespeare anthology and read something random, and it always makes me feel a tiny bit better.

Man I Gotta Get Out Of This Town

When I was home for Spring Break at the beginning of the month, I went through my notebooks and folders from last semester, and found a piece of writing I’d done in my Social Psych class back in October.  I remember the exact day I wrote it; it was the day I was going home for Fall Break, and I was in the most boring class I’ve ever had, at 4:30 in the afternoon.  I couldn’t sit still for the life of me because I was so excited to go home; it had been a while since I’d seen people in Dayton.  So instead of listening to lecture, I wrote this, and then just walked out of class.

5 Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

• Sunday morning, 1996, Grandma’s house, sitting down to bacon and eggs with her and Lydia and Whitney
• Home, now, lounging in the green chair, chili cooking, football on TV
• May 2008, Brooklyn Bridge, with the beer and the wind and the lights
• In bed, under covers, in soft afternoon light, Ben Lee singing in my ear
• Whenever, wherever, driving my old, wrecked Honda, windows down, music up

And then, after I found it, I stuck it in the folder I use for my Shakespeare class now and forgot about it.  Until St. Patty’s day, sitting in class listening to a boring presentation, when I took it out, reread it, and added to it:

• About 15 hours less than a year ago today, drunk off my ass with my best friends, in the room of two trashy boys
• January of my senior year, driving home from work with a song in my head and the biggest crush
• August, my sister’s, with beach hair and a book
• Springtime at OLOM, 2002 or so, outside in the early morning cool, on the bike racks waiting for the bell to ring
• 4 hours from now, taking a walk around campus with coffee and my iPod

I think this might become a thing I do.

Catch Up

It doesn’t feel like it’s been a month and a half.  I don’t understand how time is just flying by so quickly this year.  I still feel like it ought to be the middle of February, not the end of March.  I think that’s a good sign.  I’m enjoying myself.  Even though I’ve been gone for a while, and even though I know I’ve been occupied, I cannot for the life of me tell you with what.  Uhhhhh, listening to Beyonce and Ludacris on my iPod?  Yes.  Swooning after several boys?  Oh my God, yes.  Pumping the brakes as hard as I can so that this semester doesn’t ever end because I love this place that I’m in?  Yes, even though it isn’t working.  I’m just busy being happy.  Here are some things I’ve been thinking about lately:

• My Morning Jacket’s “Lay Low” makes me want to long for someone.  It makes me feel like I’m falling for someone I could never have.  I don’t know why, but it just sounds like wanting.
• I found this scribbled in my little notepad I keep in my desk drawer: “Why hasn’t Keira Knightley done Shakespeare?!”  On the one hand, something about how indginant I am over KK’s lack of Shakespearean acting just makes me laugh.  On the other: for real, though.
• Also in the notepad is a note to myself: “Meredith- You will always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.  Take this shot.”  You know, sometimes you just need a pep talk.  And even though that particular shot didn’t pan out the way I planned, I’m still gonna follow that advice.
• Can we talk about Lexi for a moment?  I don’t think I’ve written about her before, but Lord does she ever need to be written about… She’s my TA for my Bio 101 Lab, and honestly, the only positive thing I can say about her is that she hasn’t murdered anyone in her lifetime (to my knowledge).  She is condescending, rude, inconsistent, bitchy, immature, unprofessional, and all around unqualified to be teaching anyone anything, except maybe how to be an unapologetically heinous beast.  I mean, I feel juvenile saying I can’t wait to write a course eval for her, but it’s true.  I just want to give her the worst write-up for being a snot.  I don’t even know if that will affect her in any way, but it’s the only reourse I feel I have besides maybe being an ultra-bitch and talking to my lecture professor about her, which feels waaaaaaay too dramatic a step to take.  So instead, I’ll just bitch about the bitch here! 
• This is the worst thing I have seen in the month and a half I’ve been away from writing; my German professor showed it to us today during our discussion on art.  The second guy, the guy who lays his head on that block of… marble?  clay?  talcum? and then turns and breathes on it like the creepiest serial killer who ever walked the Earth is the artist we’re learning about in our chapter.  Once, he covered his head in goldleaf and honey and carried around a dead rabbit, talking to it and explaining pieces of art to it.  And called it an art installation.  Like, people actually came to a museum and watched it unfold.  What the fuck, Internet?  I was so fucking bershon about this in class today, I was legit rolling my eyes like a sullen teen.  I was pissed off.  Ha, and then my prof asked the class our opinions about it, and the exact people I had expected to like this pretentious, avant garde artsy bullshit were the ones saying “I think it’s wonderful because it holds such deep meaning for the artist” and “It’s very interesting and a unique way to express oneself outside of the normal artistic modes” and when my prof asked me all I could say was “Ich finde das sehr, sehr blod” because I don’t know the German for “drama-queeny”, “insane”, or “intolerable”.  I mean, what feelings could you possibly need to express through conversing with dead animals?  Isn’t that called having a personality disorder?
• It is crazy how into T.I. I am getting.
• My urge to drive, and the amount to which I miss driving around with the wondows down and my music up, has started to manifest itself in completely unnecessary walks around campus with my iPod.  Sometimes after classes, I don’t head directly back to the dorms, but instead loop all around campus, into the old section by the chapel and the administration building, then over by the graveyard and up the alley between Anderson and the BA building, and then home.  It’s exactly like the loops I used to drive after getting off work at night over the summer.  Sometimes I’m just not finished feeling the wind on my face or listening to my very favorite music.  I’m just not done being in motion.