So far this week (two entire days of it), my life is functioning effortlessly adequately - and that is why I'm awake at 4:30 PM and not tired, although I got up at 8:00 this morning. I took a shower and immediately got soaked by the snow, blearily attended Poetry class for a while and made some comments, though I felt misunderstood. I jotted margin notes about how learning poetry makes me feel "ebullient" and like the world is "engorged by my faith" - and, as always, I bracketed things according to random inclination, like,
A violent luck and a whole (Gertrude Stein)
and
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing (Marianne Moore).
Anna Karenina is also marked up, though less arbitrarily. A friend and I were recently discussing our generation's proclivity for mental/emotional problems and psychopharmeceuticals; we wondered if it could possibly have always been this way, endemic incompetence at daily life. I'm relieved to find that, at least according to Tolstoy, the Russians were doing this long before we were. A nation was built and maintained by people with our sort of grandiose, isolated moodiness. I read something else, a sequel memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel (who wrote Prozac Nation), over Spring Break, and I'm sure everything I read is influencing everything else.
About Spring Break: It came on the heels of my hell week, which I feel obligated to describe even though it reflects poorly on me (grin). I had a midterm and three papers; I've gotten feedback on two things, and I got A's on them, but everything was handled very at the last minute and very dicily. I used the old binge and collapse formula from last semester. I hardly left the room except to purchase diet Red Bull, which I drank almost continuously and replenished from Wawa in the morning, as soon as the sun came up. On Friday at 1 AM, Jess and Sarah woke me from disoriented subsistence sleeping to give me sympathy cookies (I love them - the friends and the cookies). At 5 PM that day, having finished my final ten-page paper, I took a shower and purchased food cart Chinese food, in order to feel like a human again, and no longer a nightmarish paper-writing creature.
My stomach was so upset or constricted from the Red Bull metabolic vitamins that eating Chinese food was the most pleasurable, sustaining experience of my life. I sat with the Styrofoam container balanced on my knees, fastidiously negotiating my stomach pangs versus not burning my tongue, and concluded the act (like Emma Bovary) in luxurious exhaustion. Anne, Jess, Sarah, and I took a 9 PM train to DC (Anne lives in Potomac, and the others were visiting), and then I slept the sleep of the self-abused. I got up the next day and saw Seth, and we walked around his neighborhood and caught up. I saw Alison on Sunday, for A&J's and en-playground conversation, and otherwise I mostly ate, read, exercised, and slept alone. A notable exception occurred on Thursday, when I lunched in Rockville with Nick B., his girlfriend Deb, and Sarah G. We visited RM, and I kissed Seth behind the school, like back in the day.
This is how the story begins:
