Sunday afternoon

It isn't quite a lazy Sunday afternoon, as I am busily working on a handout for the presentation I must give to my Shakespeare class Wednesday night, but Sunday is Sunday regardless of how busy I am, and so there's a slight aura of laziness around the apartment. The cats are certainly promoting a relaxation strategy; Aime has once again taken over the green kittybed (which C. originally made for Jinian, the big tabby cat) and is sleeping soundly in it, and Jinian is off in the living room, probably sideways and asleep on the old yellow chair.

Last weekend passed in a blur of meals with in-laws, a good night of amateur theatre (a production of Sondheim's Assassins, very enjoyable although mildly flawed in execution), and then some frantic gerbil-like wheel-spinning as I tried to catch up on all the reading I'd been letting slide because of the terrifying midterm. As the week progressed I calmed down, and managed to finish both Pride and Prejudice and Their Eyes Were Watching God in good order.

I had meant to write about the lovely trip to the farmer's market this morning, but afternoon has become evening as I focused on my presentation materials instead of on this post, and now friends have arrived for dinner and gaming. Perhaps I will return tomorrow afternoon, to season the short essay I need to finish with more personal meanderings.

a sleepy Friday night...

Yesterday I finished my paper (in the nick of time) and turned it in! I am giddy with relief.

I am not usually up this late, but I went out to a very nice dinner with my in-laws (husband's parents, sister, and her boyfriend), and then when I got home I still had some writing to do. Which writing I have just sent off to my editor (by which I mean my generous friend who makes me commit to sending her writing every week, without which committment I simply don't write), so now I am taking stock. Should I go lie in bed and read something I won't have to write a paper on afterwards? Or should I play a bit of a computer game? A difficult decision, made more difficult by not knowing what I would read: I finished the last Sarah Caudwell novel (The Sybil in Her Grave) this morning, and am thus poised delightedly above my piles of books, musing over which one to swoop down upon and devour next.

Today I slept quite late, and then went out to coffee with a friend, trading stories from our recent travels (his to Tokyo, mine to London) and discussing manga and theoretical politics and phatic novels. After I got home I saw my husband doing dishes, and leapt in to take over while he took the trash down. The dishwasher ran while we were at dinner, so after breakfast tomorrow I'll be in a fine place to begin my morning dish-doing routine.

And oof, I'm sleepy; I think I should just declare tiredness the better part of it being after midnight, or something else incoherent, and toddle off to bed. Good night, gentle reader; I hope your dreams are pleasant and your waking even more so.

the home stretch

I am in the home stretch of my paper; one and a half paragraphs of near-final draft left to go, and then as much editing as I can manage before I need to go to sleep. Tomorrow on campus, between my entertaining 11-12.15 class and the 15.30 due date, I will sit in a lab and do a final editing pass, spurred on by the knowledge of almost, almost being done -- which thought reminds me that unless I want to take seven books with me to campus tomorrow, it would behoove me to do my Works Cited page tonight, and to double-check all my citations before I go to sleep.

This paper being done, I will spend the weekend whipping up the tidy little one page paper on Nella Larsen's Quicksand, which ought to be a pleasure; I seem to like doing limited, in-depth writing much more than sprawling surveys of material. I also need to start researching for my two Shakespeare projects; I am doing a presentation on the treatment of Shakespeare in China & Japan, and a paper that is going to have something to do with Shylock and Malvolio. Both of these will need a great deal of research, but I have fine web access to all sorts of exciting sources, so I ought to be able to curl up with tea and enjoy the process of assembling my materials.

Academic work aside, I am thinking once again about how very, very messy my house is, and how difficult it seems to make any headway on this point, despite an extremely helpful and hard-working husband. At the beginning of the year I had been planning to do the dishes every evening after dinner, but that has quickly fallen by the wayside; when I'm in school I often need that time to study, and when not in school I don't want to spend the first half-hour of my time with my husband cleaning. Also, several evenings a week we have to zoom off to someone's house as soon as we're done with dinner, or otherwise we're having people over and I ought to be interacting with them instead of in the kitchen cleaning. So, what to do? The obvious solution seems to be to make post-breakfast the dishes time, with byes on the two mornings I have to leave immediately for class. There will certainly be the occasional morning (such as, she says with mild bitterness, every morning in the last week) in which I must start typing on a paper the second breakfast is over, but if I am sensible with my time otherwise those mornings will be rare. And now that I have shared this plan with you, gentle reader, perhaps my determination to see it through will be increased sufficiently that not even laziness will stand in my way.

This afternoon I drank far too many cups of vanilla jasmine tea (a gift from C. I am finally taking proper advantage of), for which I am now becoming profoundly grateful, as the hours creep on and still I am not yet too tired to think clearly. Caffeine can be the bane of my sleep schedule, and thus I rarely indulge in it after the morning, but tonight I think it was a wise (albeit unplanned) choice.

It rained this morning, and the streets are still just damp enough that the cars swish as they drive by. I love that sound -- especially when I'm lying in bed, warm and cozy, and don't have to get up for a while. I'm looking forward to falling asleep tonight with that sound in my ears.

the Lamentable Midterm, round 2

Once upon a time, when I was in group therapy, my therapist said to me that I had a very interesting therapeutic style; I would work intensely on a topic for 5 or 10 minutes and during that time get an immense amount done, more than some people got done in several sessions. And then -- I would stop, exhausted, and float along lightly on the surface until the next period of intense work came around.

I bring this to light, gentle reader, because I feel that is exactly my pattern in working on academic tasks (such as the Lamentable Midterm that I have once again skipped classes to deal with), and I am not so sure that it is a good pattern. To have worked very hard this morning for 3 and 1/2 hours straight through is commendable, certainly, but the afternoon seems to be frittering away in approaches that don't quite pan out, leavened with a sense of general bitterness that I have spent so much time on this paper and am not yet finished. Which bitterness does no good, I might add, for it just makes me less inclined to do the work and more inclined to throw up my hands in dismay and go read the last Sarah Caudwell novel. (Perceptive readers may be able to detect traces of Caudwell's distinctive style in my own prose at the moment; I stayed up a little too late finishing The Sirens Sang of Murder last night.)

I tangent briefly to note that perhaps writing here does do me some good, after all, for when I was stuck trying to find the descriptive term for Caudwell's prose I automatically flipped over to the other writing space to work on something 'easier' -- and that space was my midterm. Clearly my midterm writing strategy at this point should be to try to describe something extremely difficult here in my blog, so that my brain flees back to the midterm as a simpler task. Oh, I wish I knew if I was being ironic!

But where was I? Ah, yes -- fretting about how I am a very slow writer, and how I have been working on this midterm for six days now and am not yet finished. This is, I speculate, not only because I naturally work in the method described above, but also because I accrete text much as an oyster creates a pearl. Each paragraph must be close to correct before the next paragraph can proceed -- and so right now, for instance, I am five paragraphs from the end, but that doesn't mean I have a rough draft I could just shrug my shoulders & turn in, because the second of those five paragraphs can't come into existence until the first is right. Not perfect, but right. As one might imagine, this is a real problem in classes in which one has to turn in a rough draft for peer review; I don't have rough drafts of my academic writing. I have my process, and then close-to-final drafts. (Oddly, fiction writing seems to work a bit differently -- perhaps because there's no logical argument, I can put in entirely wrong paragraphs as placeholders until I've got more clarity.)

However, I say to myself, it is the last year of my BA, and my process does produce papers which receive excellent grades, so I should perhaps just resign myself to doing things this way for the next seven months -- but when I put it like that it sounds like such a long time. Regardless, I am not about to change my process until I finish with this paper, so I must go pay attention to it again. Only 4 paragraphs to go!

a brief (personal) history of knitting

I learned to knit on New Year's Eve of last year, at the wonderful warm house of my friends C & E. C being a knitter, I had been watching her work for months, marvelling at the lovely things which sprang from her hands while being certain that I could never do such a thing myself. I have always had stubborn fingers, fingers which will only learn such tasks as suit them; I type 120 words per minute, but when I tried (a decade back) to learn to crochet they rebelled and I gave up in disgust. Repeatedly.

So when C greeted me not only with hot tea and yummy snacks, but also with circular bamboo needles, some bright yellow yarn, and a selection of knitting books, I was dubious at best. Yet there I was, curled up on the couch in her living room, and my husband was chatting with other people, and there seemed absolutely no reason not to give it a try -- and by the end of the evening I was clumsily knitting away, absolutely amazed that my fingers believed this complicated maneuver with yarn and needles was something they ought to be doing.

The next day, of course, was New Year's Day, and although I was rather exhausted and heavy-eyed from the previous evening (there had been some wine to go with that knitting, and great quantities of excellent cheese and chocolate fondue, and champagne, of course), I had promised to attend a brunch at the home of the Z's. So attend I did, and enthused to passers-by about my new knitting talent, and in the course of conversation decided that since things had been going so well, I might as well learn to purl.

And thus, gentle reader, I can accurately say that I learned to knit on New Year's Eve, and to purl on New Year's Day -- a formulation which still makes me giggle.

Since then I have bought much yarn (mostly from Knitpicks) and many needles (ditto), and I am right now a single row away from being done with my first project, a baby blanket made with old acrylic yarn that I'd bought back in my crochet days in the hopes of making something for my then unborn nephew. The blanket's pattern is so simple that it was a perfect first project for me, and I had the chance to make a thousand beginner mistakes, learn to identify them (with much assistance from kind knitting friends), and eventually to repair them myself instead of handing them off for someone else to fix. I also learned that it really is okay to start over -- and over again -- and over again when things just aren't working out. The final blanket is much smaller than the pattern intends, since both my yarn and my needles were thinner than recommended, but I've been told that it's the perfect size for a carseat blanket, so I'm satisfied. Once I have finished this horrifying midterm (the one I ought to be working on right now) I think I'll carve out the time to finish the blanket and photograph it and then see about gifting it to the small child who has expressed interest by putting it into his mouth repeatedly.

perhaps perhaps perhaps

I am not certain where my desire to share the little details of my life has gone off to, but it seems to have taken a permanent vacation. What a change from ten years ago, when I wrote a webjournal almost daily using bare-bones HTML out of an intense need to share myself with the world.

Is it just that I've become such a more private person now that I am so satisfied with the big picture of my life and so aware that the small details will work themselves out? Or is it that I have such excellent friends now that my desire to share myself is satisfied over afternoons at my favourite coffee shop, and the occasional evening in someone's living room with a cup of tea? Some of both, I think; I am certainly more private and less impelled to tell the world everything now that I realise that there are people in arm's reach who will be delighted to hear.

All of which is a complicated way of saying that I have more real connection with other people than I used to, and that I appreciate the interaction and engagement more than simple broadcasting. Oh, yes, I do realise that if I wrote here regularly I might have regular readers, and then there would be interaction and engagement -- but in a way that's part of why I'm reluctant to do so. I would worry about whether I was being read, and wonder who my readers were, and feel bad if I failed to update, and that -- all of that -- sounds so unpleasant, so much like added stress rather than spreading my wings in the world of the web.

So, you may ask -- at the very least I may ask myself six months from now -- why am I even writing this post? Well, I was playing around on Ravelry and through one link and another rediscovered Yarnstorm which is a lovely blog written by someone I might enjoy growing up to be. And there, gentle reader, is the gist of all this; I read someone else's description of their life, and I am inspired in tiny ways to change my own life, to make it more beautiful, more graceful, and above all, I suppose, to make myself more aware of the great beauty and grace that I already have. And in these moments of inspiration I think that it would be lovely to write my own blog, where I would describe all the joys (and no doubt some of the frustrations) of my life in such a way that I can see in my experience some of the qualities I find reading about the experiences of others. I frame my life through my own stories, and if I tell my life through my blog as a story of grace and kindness, understanding and real emotional connection, and turn my haphazard attempts to create warmth & beauty through knitting and cooking into a story other people can read, surely then I'll believe it all more myself?

That may seem disingenuous, but I do really mean it. I know that my own satisfaction with my life is to some extent based on how I understand it, and I think that my understanding is shaped by how I share it with other people. Couldn't I tell the story of my life here in a way that helps me be the person I really want to be, and to value the things I really want to value? Wouldn't it help me avoid being bogged down in the things which don't particularly matter?

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But while I think all of this over, I must also go write a midterm about Freud as a writer and the influence of his psychological theories on literature. I anticipate one or two more posts here as the day (and the midterm) progresses, however, since my urge to write does also seem intimately connected to approaching academic deadlines.