on the necessity of brain refreshing.

Creative nonfiction is difficult to write, this is something I have come to find. Writing for classes, i.e. hum and soc, always seems so necessarily sterile, like boring the reader is a kind of academic, student-to-teacher obligation. I always bore myself, which is why I so often take such opportunities to develop new interests in things like Slavic languages and bottling water. I have even resorted to looking at lists of ingrediants and wikipediaing bizarre subfoodish listings (see: silicon dioxide, which didn't even sound remotely safe but snuck quite alarmingly into my Land o' Lakes hot cocoa. Oh and, it gives you cancer if inhaled.)

Anyway, my poor uncreative sterile brain has recently uncovered the joys of creative nonfiction via the adorably semi-pretentious yet terribly self-conscious essays of one David Foster Wallace. I haven't read the ambitious, fictional "Infinite Jest", for which is arguably better known... though I'd like to eventually. What I DID read was both "Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All", about visiting the Illinois State Fair, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", chronicling his ultra-pampered voyage upon a commercial cruise ship.

He is hilariously hyperobservant and well-researched. My one critique--I sometimes got the feeling that he narrowly exaggerated appearances and events for the sake of the humor--is more of a skepticism... I can hardly get the guy to prove it. Still, his observations and style make me fall in love a little, and there's a gentleness toward his subjects that really is important.

"...every so often editors at these magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the United States lies between the Coasts and figure they'll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish."

...

Anyway, now for chocolate fondue (no joke).

In lieu of studying Chinese...

though our skin may not touch skin

"Heart-carved tree trunk, yankee bayonet
A sweetheart left behind
Far from the hills of the sea-swelled Carolinas
That's where my true love lies

Look for me when the sun-bright swallow
Sings upon the birch bough high
But you are in the ground with the wolves and the weevils
All a'chew upon your bones so dry

But when the sun breaks
To no more bullets in Battle Creek
Then will you make a grave
For I will be home then
I will be home then
I will be home then
I will be home then
Then

When I was a girl how the hills of Oconee
Made a seam to hem me in
There at the fair when our eyes caught, careless
Got my heart right pierced by a pin

But oh, did you see all the dead of Manassas
All the bellies and the bones and the bile
Though I lingered here with the blankets barren
And my own belly big with child

But when the sun breaks
To no more bullets in Battle Creek
Then will you make a grave
For I will be home then
I will be home then
I will be home then
I will be home then

Stems and bones and stone walls too
Could keep me from you
Skein of skin is all too few
To keep me from you

But oh my love, though our bodies may be parted
Though our skin may not touch skin
Look for me with the sun-bright sparrow
I will come on the breath of the wind"

I'm having some trouble getting over how fantastic this song is. The sound of it fits so perfectly with the lyrics, the lyrics are so pretty, it's Civil War-era love, it features Laura Veirs... The Decemberists have a thing for people having a thing for dead people, and dead people having a thing for living people, and I have a thing for the Decemberists.

Tonight I was reminded that no matter how many northern winters you go through, you just never get used to that skin-reddening bitter wind, and the primitive, mad desire for warmth. Downtown Chicago is as good as Antarctica, with that wind off the lake.. I am a big-city eskimo.

Now, after hours spent laboring over a still-insufficient hum paper (but one which I did edit according to my TA's suggestions), I will sleep. But first, an actual depiction of how messy my room is in the height of exam distraction:

What child is this anyway?

All you need to get you going is a good existential crisis, apparently. And calming green tea from the depths of China. And Yann Tiersen.

My essay is now half-written, draft sent to my TA to be destroyed, bless her heart. I will probably be too lazy to make the changes she suggests, though, sadly... but requirements are requirements. I included in my email of the draft a bizarre, rambling notice on how I referred to the third person reader as "he", because that seemed grammatically correct and less awkward than the cumbersome "he or she". I said I was a feminist and found this distasteful but necessary. Or something. It was really just completely random.

I just re-read my teacher's notes at the end of my last essay (on the Metamorphoses of Ovid, kind of).. he wrote that I have "a good eye for details, but there's some meandering from idea to idea". Which I think is fantastic, because really, that's how I think. I meander. I aimlessly wander, like a lost old woman with a cane. Only just slightly more quickly.

I am recently obsessed with this video and the showcased song. I have forced at least 4 people to watch (and adore) it.

The line "My love for you is not like friendship" is so simple, but effective. Sometimes you only love someone like a lover, or it seems more intense, or you can't focus on the friend part, even though that seems to undermine the relationship. The first time I watched that video I wasn't paying close attention and ended up thinking the boy was a boy she liked, which got me thinking about what would happen if you fell in love with someone when you were small, you died, and you watched them grow up, and fall for and marry someone else. And all the while you're the same little girl, stuck in time and in love, unable to meet anyone new. Love is such a fascinating emotion.

Obsession #2: Kate Bush's high-pitched rendition of Wuthering Heights--something of which I somehow never tire. I first heard the song performed at a Decemberists show, by Petra Haden, and I loved it immediately. I was then pressed to read the book, which I liked very much, and grew to love... one of those books that somehow take time to sink in. Now I want badly to re-read it.

Obsession #3: "Rue des Cascades" by Yann Tiersen. It's like being somewhere that doesn't exist. And when it breaks into strings + accordian I want to melt.

Now, in celebration of classes being done, and finals week being only a week long, and my room being an incredible mess, and rejecting high heels, and drinking white wine, and discovering the Classics Cafe today, and snow, and fuzzy socks, and accurately memorizing a Chinese dialog, and feather bedding, and the god of green tea...

I go to bed.

early december madness

I am losing my mind... over a humanities paper.

This is ridiculous. I literally, literally cannot get anywhere with it. Every sentence I write falls like a brick... writing should be a flowing, organized activity of release and understanding, not some kind of painfully heavy, awkward excavation in which all I find in my mind is... a wasteland.

Which, coincidentally, is what the paper is about. The Wasteland. T.S. Eliot's glorious mindfuck which leaves me nervous and disoriented and awe-struck. This, as well as Une Semaine de Bonte - a Surrealist work (picture-book of sorts) that somehow manages to leave me even more disoriented. Between all the birdmen and naked women, I. Am. Just. Not. Sure. I think I understand better now, about provocation of the subconscious, and etcetera..

I am to write about these works in the context of collection - how they are collections, fragments, and what that means. I have my thesis, I have (some) ideas, but I don't have any kind of eloquence or grace. Every time I start, I veto whatever I've just typed.

I need to inspire inspiration. Or learn how to get out of this rigid, disgusting formal essay mode. I need it to be crisp, and clear, and sensible. But very little is crisp and clear and sensible. My life is not crisp and clear and sensible. This paper is inspiring an existential crisis.

Just, what I'm wondering is this:

Shouldn't I be excited about this paper? Shouldn't I be thrilled to learn about this and synthesize, to record my thoughts? This was supposed to be the kind of thing I get excited about, but instead I'm in some weird academic paralysis. Can all of the creativity be drained out of you? Is that what too much education does? Is schooling good? Am I in a box? Do I lack the intelligence, or am I suddenly flustered because I'm losing something? ...like passion.

Why are we given a life, and we need to find a way to fit in life?