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Hello! Hi! What has happened to me in the three years since I wrote here last? Why, let's begin at the beginning: I took a lot of school. I studied autonomous African communities in the Caribbean in the colonial era. I studied the abolition of African slavery in the British Empire, and the indenturement (err!) of Indian workers. I took classes on German history, Evolution, Medieval People, History of Science, Cleopatra, Renaissance Lyric poetry, New Testament History and Literature, Welsh writers in English, British Heritage Protection law, Celtic Christianity, and oh my god I've learned nothing! I went to London, Wales, Rome and Naples. I started going to Church sometimes. I stopped taking care of my body and gained a lot of weight. Then I started taking care of my body. I exercised and cut my hair and dropped 60 pounds and started adorning myself like an Etruscan Princess. I went to Wales to be courageous, but mostly drank too much. I had torrid love affairs that had nothing to do with love and more to do with sex. I freaked out my friends by misbehaving in a sexual fashion. I became fascinated with human sexuality, evolutionary psychology, and sometimes linguistics. I became terrified of becoming Hitler. I worry that I am a credulous and unsystematic reader and oh my god a mass murderer! My Welsh is mediocre, but my knowledge of the Welsh literary tradition is non pareil! except by those who actually know what they're talking about.
Ta da! Three years. Ha Ha Among The Trumpets!
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My favorite room on Campus is the relaxation reading room. It's called the Quita Woodward Room. It is the clitoris of libraries: it exists solely for pleasure. One, of course, would be quite a fool to mistake "solely for pleasure" and "useless" either in terms of the clitoris or the reading room. We are always forgetting how necessary pleasure is. Many people would be better off if they had either a clitoris or a relaxation reading room. I realized today that it's appeal for me is that it how a college library would have been in the days of yore. It is very traditional, and sometimes I am surprised by how much that appeals to me. Regardless, it appeals to me, and I love it. It's a large room, larger than a normal house room, but it always feels cozy. It has a fireplace with a painting of a nymph-like-girl hanging above it. It has a dull tan carpet spread across the floor, and dark wood panelling for walls. The walls are lined with books, maybe as many as one person could read in a lifetime, almost up to the ceiling. A low slung table, which always makes me think of Medieval banquets, looms in the back of the room. Two throne-like reed-backed chairs stand next to the fireplace. And it boasts the only comfortable couch on campus. I read in the nighttime, when it's dark and gloomy, but I find that the gloom only suits it's purpose. During the night, it becomes a stalwart room, and a lair of learning. It is simultaneously stately, warm, and imposing. The room has everything I could ever want. The books include bird books and the college yearbooks from 1944 on. Like I said, everything I could possibly want.
Sometimes I read during the day, and open the windows to let the Pennsylvanian breezes (unlike any other breezes in the nation, I tell you) in. And I read away, or just sort of sit and enjoy the sun and the Pennsylvanian breeze. It lulls me into a hazy tiredness, and if you are going to be tired anyway, it is best to be hazy as well. It's a very good room.
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It's been a long time since I tried to write anything. Let me tell you some things: 1. I panic while I sleep. I wake up and gasp, and the Roommate asks me if I'm feeling well, or what's wrong. I panic especially in the morning. If I don't have a clock in front of me, I jump off the bed to find one, and then realize that it's three hours before I need to get up. I have punctuality anxiety. 2. I lash out when I think someone's being mean. I say "That's my friend!" or "Don't be so mean!" But usually they say they were just joking, and tell me that I need to relax, and sometimes I really do see that they were just joking. But sometimes I am not so sure that I was wrong to speak up. 3. I'm getting my third cold this semester, fifth or sixth over all. I've never gotten sick like this before I began college. I had hardly recovered from my last one, and now I feel it growing in the back of my throat, raking along my windpipe. 4. One of my friends is severely depressed, and I've been dragging myself around like a zombie because I'm so worried about her. I just want her to be alright. It's so frustrating because I'm in no position to get her to go to counselling or get drugs or something, anything, but I am in a position to be extremely affected whatever she does. All the necessary administrators know she is this bad. There is nothing for me but to be around her, to check in on her, and tell her that I care about her. But it's exhausting. I just want her to be alright.
That's pretty much it.
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