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Notes | Reading | Unexposed
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Georgia Aquarium | 8 May 2008

Opera in Atlanta | 8 May 2008

Yesterday & today | 1 May 2008

Tomorrow, we fly to Atlanta for the weekend.

Jellyfish Sunday | 20 April 2008

Anaïs Nin in her diary, September 1920: “Sunday has that jellyfish consistency which I dislike both in people and in days.”

In general I quite agree, but today lacked that flimsy quality — it had the firmness that comes from eating a hearty breakfast at the diner down the street, sharing a slice of birthday cake for lunch, and buying furniture in the afternoon.

Inability to reflect light | 17 April 2008

The first page of the question booklet for my exam tonight explained that the computer reads the scantron answer sheet by finding the bubbles that do not reflect light, but in the exam room the graphite always shines back at me.

After I finished my exam, we met at a pub to toast no more school until September.

The weather was too beautiful today not to mention. I carried my jacket leaving work and sat outside studying at school and didn’t even sniff.

Final presentation | 10 April 2008

I can really hardly believe it, but I’ve been taking these certificate courses for work alongside my undergrad over the past few years, and last night I attended the last class of my fifth and final course in the program. Every course was held in one of two identical classrooms in a shiny new building on campus, but last night’s final presentations were held at the medical centre in a dingy basement lecture hall with green carpeting and green desks and a green smell. I was seventh in line to present, and I was much more composed than I was the last time I presented. I went home early and read Beckett and drank White Russians and ate samosas.

Reaching for the salt | 5 April 2008

We went out for breakfast this morning at a diner down the street and then walked around our neighbourhood for a while waiting for the bookstore to open. The weather was beautiful; one of those rare sunny just-cool-enough spring days before it starts getting hot. If I could go around in a light jacket all year I would be perfectly content. We bought a lot of books and beer and a new brand of gin for my G&Ts, and then came home to make wrap-less burritos. And now, perhaps, a movie.

Abruptly opened | 2 April 2008

I hit the last page of Fanny Burney’s Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, a gargantuan Oxford World Classics edition of over 900 pages, late last night. I started it a couple of weeks ago and zoomed through it with zeal. There is something about late 18th/19th century literature written by women* that can hold my interest in spite of all the bad bits.

I hypothesize that Burney kept a list (of about 900 pages) of various ways to torture a heroine and how the heroine would retain her high principles and in-born virtue through her sufferings and survive an even more highly-prized lady than before, and used each method in every novel. The anguish, which I myself rarely feel, is exhausting — pages devoted to arguments and extended fits of conscience, to tearful and agonized dialogue difficult to imagine sustained over scenes of such length. I was going to count how many times Cecilia believed and/or swore never to see Mortimer (Mortimer!) again but shortly thereafter did in fact see him — leading to countless variations upon “the door was abruptly opened by young Delvile!” — but then Cecilia went lunatic for a while and Mortimer just hung around in doorways weeping, so I gave it up.

I do not do Burney justice. She has crazy plots and too many coincidences and melodrama at every orifice, but she gently defies the conduct books and is actually quite hilarious and writes truly the most agonizingly real characters (the kind of people you long to clock upside the head) in spite of the language, and oh do I enjoy the death out of reading her.

Cake and babies | 27 March 2008

I went out for dinner with my three best friends from school, one of whom is visiting from six-hours-north with her new baby boy. Our server was a girl we’ve known since kindergarten, so when N. and B. ordered dessert, she wrote their names on their plates in chocolate sauce.

We went to the new mom’s shower on the weekend, where I held an infant for the first time in years, wobbly head and all, and after some initial noises of displeasure, he settled ambivalently on my lap, face out, gripping one of my fingers in his hand.

My sister is pregnant and due remarkably soon, in June, and one of the above-mentioned friends’ sister is due this spring. And a colleague on her maternity leave visited today and told us about her triplets sleeping twelve straight hours every night. The babies are everywhere.

P.S. And I have a new cousin, Nette, born today in the Netherlands! (1 April 2008)

Brandy and soda | 16 March 2008

Enjoying a brandy and soda tonight, à la Lord Peter, after a week of chasing mice and cleaning up after (and before) them. They are eating the poison — audibly munching on and dragging around the cubes behind the fridge — and I yearn for the day when they will leave us the hell alone.

Ice pellet of anger | 5 March 2008

The storm started up some time during class last night, and I walked the five blocks home from the bus stop through it, peeking out through a tiny gap between my collar, scarf, and hood and trying not to get blown off the sidewalk. The only thing that prevented me from turning into an ice pellet of anger and misery was Bat out of Hell III on the iPod — which I had carefully tucked under my coat while I was on the bus, planning ahead for the cheer required for an unpleasant walk home — even though one earbud kept slipping out due to snow-in-ear. I woke up at six this morning, anxious for the university to be closed due to inclement weather, but it wasn’t.

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