I went to the library on Saturday afternoon, the Main Library in the Tenderloin (the bad part of town) (also the closest library to me).  It's strange to me, a suburban girl, that the Main Library has a very small selection of fiction - most of the popular fiction is in branch libraries, scattered around the city.  I was in the mood for young adult historical fiction (preferably set in the nineteenth century), involving magic of some kind.  This may sound like a very specific sort of mood to be in, but it's actually surprisingly easy to find if you know where to look.  More on this in a moment.

I was standing in the stacks with my arms full of books fitting this description (plus the Kite Runner, to give myself some respectability), when a young man approached me.  He was thin, I thought probably younger than me, of indeterminate racial origin.  He said softly, "Excuse me.  I... I think you're cute, and I was wondering if I could talk to you."

I felt a surge of terror.  Not because of him - it could have been anyone - but because I was at the library, with my arms full of young adult fantasy novels, and all I wanted was to be left alone to immerse myself in them.  I couldn't imagine holding a conversation with a stranger at that moment.  I tried, haltingly, to explain: "I'm sorry, it's just that I... when I come to the library, I like to be alone with my books..."  He looked dejected (rejected); I felt bad.  But I was in Solitary Library Mode, a state of being developed over many years, and I couldn't just snap out of it.

Back to the young adult fantasy novels.  That evening I told my friend Brian, a quite erudite and well read fellow, what I had spent the afternoon doing (reading an entire one of those books).  He seemed surprised, and I tried to explain the appeal:

First, there is familiarity (many of these books I have read before, or have read other books by the same authors/set in the same period etc.).  Familiarity allows me to overlook certain things I could not overlook in an adult book; I read like I read as a child, without the criticality I now bring to everything (I cannot read most adult "escape" fiction - chick list, fantasy, mysteries, etc. - anymore, I get too annoyed with the writing, and the stereotyped characters, and the social and political implications).

Second, some (though admittedly not all) of these books (and in general, young adult and children's books) are well-written, entertaining, thoughtful, and contain a lot fewer stereotypes and negative social and political implications than adult books.  Maybe they're, on the whole, not deep wells of philosophical thought (though certain books of the children's fantasy genre, like the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman, have much deeper moral and philosophical depth than the majority of adult books) but they often make an effort not to succumb to conventional gender roles or neat black/white world views - while retaining the romance and adventure that make a book easy to gobble up on a sunny Saturday afternoon.



There was an article in the SF Chronicle today about Avenue Q - which I really want to go see! - and why things like muppets and cartoons are being used by adults/in adult forms of entertainment.  The author suggested that these childish mediums allow radical ideas much more freedom than mainstream forms of entertainment for adults.  I would suggest that it goes beyond using these mediums to offer radical ideas to adults - authors (who can fly under the radar much more than Disney or Pixar) are also using children's books to create characters and stories they couldn't tell to adults.  (I didn't give it much time here, but I'd say, again, the His Dark Materials books are the strongest example of this I've seen, but there are others.)

Wow, that was much longer than I meant it to be.

Well, my stories are saved, at least a healthy dose of them, and pictures.  About 10 GB of my data has been recovered; pictures, they said, stories, and schoolwork.  These are the things I needed and wanted.  The man on the phone opened my Panama story for me, and read lines, skimming through.  It is all there, just as it was.

I should be overjoyed, and I am, but I think I steeled myself for loss, and had worked my mind around it.  I had encompassed and accepted, to some extent, and what I said, about starting over, I do believe that, that there can be value in blank pages.  The thrill of buying a new notebook and opening it to white, clean, waiting lines.  So I am having strange feelings now.  Overall, joy.  I think what I should take from this is a sense that I can begin again, if I need to.  It is good, it is important, to have the old things available, but I shouldn't rely on them.  In a way, it is easier to leave things behind when they are there to be left - because you can look at them and realize that they aren't right, rather than having this idea in your mind of something great that was, even if it wasn't.  So I will take and leave, as necessary.

The other thing I will take from it: back up important things.  Constantly.

I called Apple to have them send me a box, so that when I get my computer back, with the bad hard drive reinstalled, I could send it immediately to them for a new hard drive.  The man on the phone told me there is some possibility it is NOT a hard drive malfunction, and that there is one last thing to try.  This makes me very angry.  I paid $400 to save my data ($300, plus $100 to buy an external hard drive for them to put the data on to send it back to me) because I was told, absolutely, that my hard drive was physically corrupted.  And now he's saying... maybe not?  I have a feeling that if it wasn't dead, it is now, since they have presumably done something to it to get the data off.  But I have to wait anyway, because they won't send me a box until I can try whatever they want me to try.  I will never have my computer back, restored, functioning normally.  If I paid $400 for a mistake, and all my data was there, safe and sound, I am going to be very angry.  (Even though, really, I should be happy.  There are things that they could not restore, things that were corrupted.  I am reacting emotionally rather than logically.)

I have been doing a lot of thinking, as I have no computer to distract me in my evening hours.  Maybe it is an excess of caffeine recently, but I have been feeling strange, disconnected from myself.  There were things I wanted to write about here, and cannot detail anymore: synesthesia (a friend told me he sees the letters F and R, and words beginning with those letters, as purple; which makes me very happy; and I envy synesthetics, who experience a whole new dimension to language, but also pity them, because it adds or disperses value, at least the way he explained it, so some words fit better and some worse; everything that adds also takes away, perhaps), dreams (I dreamt that Hedwig of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame was singing at a wedding I was at, a very proper wedding, and no one else realized who she was, and they loved her and asked her to give a toast at the reception, which she did; the word "crotch" came up somewhere, and people were politely amused), obligations (I told my roommate I am moving out, though I haven't found a place yet, but I want to start showing my room; she can't cover the February rent, and she said if we don't find someone to take my room, I "have" to pay it; there is no contract, so responsibility is very ambiguous; she is the only one legally responsible, but she has my deposit, and could I suppose keep it if I refuse to pay; moving is stressful), and other similarly random topics.

I re-read The God of Small Things.  I love that book.  It creates its own language, which in a way every great book does, but this language is more unique than most.  It doesn't try to be easy or familiar.  But it doesn't try to be difficult either.  It simply is, complete, its own, and in that, inescapable.  A viable die-able age.

My cousin got into Vassar, her first choice college - early decision, so she is committed, she is going, her whole future is before her now.  Congratulations!  I am excited for her, and nostalgic about that feeling of triumph, and possibility.  (Possibility!  As if now I am at The End of Things, and I do not still have my whole life before me.)  I am writing because when I tried to remember the summer of being 17, that summer between high school and college, all I can recall is a part time job doing telephone surveys, which can't have taken too much of my time, really, and... perhaps a visit to my grandmother in Seattle, for a week.  I remember some relationship drama, between friends, and I think a night at the hot springs, during a meteor shower, where we drank wine and watched shooting stars all night.  That must have been that summer.  But these are only moments, and I am grasping for a whole.  I went to look in my old blog, hoping to find some hint, but it turns out I didn't write anything between May and September of that year.  Seeing that, I was inspired to write here, because it is so easy to forget months and years, if you don't write them down.  Or maybe that's just me.  I re-experience through the act of composing, and events are never quite real for me if I haven't put them into words (if only in my mind).

It's Monday.  This morning I went online to look at how much money I have in my retirement account (about $250) and calculated how much I need to save to make 85% of what I make now (before taxes), every month, between the ages of 67 and 94.  Something around $3,000,000.  Even though now, doing a little calculator arithmetic, that seems excessive.  Maybe they were counting in inflation.  Anyway, I would need to be putting in $900 more a month to get there.  This is not going to happen, since I don't have $900 a month, and anyway, the money I do have, I am putting aside for travel and adventure, for next year or the year after and not for year 68.  But then it hit me: I have such a long time.  I am so young, we are all so young, and everything will change a hundred times before I am 67.  I will meet a thousand new people, and love them and hate them and eat with them and talk to them, and I will go so many places, there are so many places to go, and read so many books.  45 years is time for so much, if it is well used.  This month, next month, the days between now and when I walk out of this office building not to return, these are only grains of sand.  Unless I write them down, I probably won't even remember them.  But there are things I will remember, between now and 67.  Things I will remember even if I don't write them down.  There are so many days and nights ahead.  And that is only 45 years!  I have a 25% chance of living to 94, according to Fidelity.  That is 72 years from now!  Maybe America will be in little pieces by then, maybe we will have teleporters and genetically engineered babies.  Maybe we will have made the world into a desert, and we will live in little outposts of struggle, and curse our fathers and forefathers for destroying what was once lush and beautiful.  Maybe we will live on the Moon.  Who knows.  Maybe I will be married, maybe I will be divorced, maybe I will be a widow, and a great-grandmother.  Maybe I will have been married 3 times.  Every one of those people will take up whole years in my life, years still ahead of me now.  It's exhilarating!  I am my own limit.

Funny, how I can be caught up completely by these two feelings at once: sadness, that I will never be 17 and starting college again, and awe and excitement that I am 22 and can do unimaginable things.  And all the time, I am sitting at my desk, eating clementines and trying to hold my eyes open.

I've been reading Wallace Stegner, I think that is why I am thinking about being old, and being young.  A quote (not about age or youth, just a quote that I love, even though it is quite the opposite of how I really interact with the world): "Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless.  Skinless?  Dance around in your bones."

I did research at the Library of Congress today.  I sat in the enormous domed reading room and felt that I was back in England: the heavy wooden furnishings, the golden reading lamps hovering lit and unused over every desk, the feeling that there are rules one is supposed to know, and follow.  I had a sudden yearning to be wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

I paged six books about Panama and the Canal Zone published between 1909 and 1913.  I have decided to write a novel, nominally about the building of the Panama Canal.  Don't ask me why, it just came to me.  There are three main characters: Eliza and Grey Walcott, American siblings (Grey is a doctor at the American hospital), and Alexandre Michlet, a French-Panamanian engineer.  But it's really about birds, and enormous flowers, and strange embroideries, and benevolent despotism, and modernization as destruction, and tropical diseases, and American neo-imperalism, and hotels, and racism framed as the difference between gold and silver, and, of course, a love triangle, because apparently I like love triangles that involve siblings and homosexuality (but not that way and not at the same time... er... whatever).

Two more days in Washington.

Last night we had Ethiopian food, my three roommates and I.  I was supposed to go to the zoo (it was on my schedule) but I didn't.  Saturday I went to the National Gallery.  Rothkos, and a painting by Jim Dine made all of names, and mobiles, twirling shadows on the walls.

Today was a better day.

I saw Barack Obama and Tim Russert speak and engage in a conversation about changing the nation's view of public service, getting involved, bipartisanship, changing the way government works, and other good things.

My boss' birthday is coming up, so we had Indian food and cake.

My roommate Sarah got a library card from the public library, and I am going there after work.  Despite my vow to read all the books I brought with me before getting new ones, I have found that I just can't stand to not go to the library.  Anyway, "Underworld" isn't really summer reading material.

I read a Dave Eggers short story called "Your Mother and I," which made me very happy.  ("One week we made all the cars electric and put waterslides in every elementary school.  We increased average life expectancy to 164, made it illegal to manufacture or wear Cosby sweaters, and made penises better looking - more streamlined, better coloring, less hair.  People, you know, were real appreciative about that.")

I went to Teaism, and sat.

A long week.  I sat at my desk rubbing my eyes and trying not to yawn, and copied and pasted citations and summaries, and looked at the Fulbright website and thought about where I would go, if I could go anywhere, and what I would write about there.

Yesterday after work I went to happy hour at a Japanese restaurant with a couple co-workers, their friends and my roommate David.  We ate sushi and had cheap Japanese beer, which someone else ended up paying for.  My co-worker Ryan told me the writing sample that I sent in was really great, and that it was worth not making any money to do something you really loved.  The thirtysomething women adored David, they said he looked like Buddy Holly (he was dressed up for Western Day at the Canadian embassy, in a plaid shirt and skinny jeans).  The restaurant was chrome and flourescent lights, and in the unisex bathroom the water spouts opened like beer taps, and a man gave me a funny look as if I was in the wrong place.

After happy hour ended Laura joined us and we walked to a club to see Pedro the Lion, who turned out to be extremely Christian, and we spent more time sitting around talking about how long it had been since any of us had made out with anyone, and eating nachos, than we did listening to music.  Laura and I discussed religion, and on the way home we all traded mp3 players, gifting one another with songs.

Today we read, mostly.  I slept in and we went to try and get brunch, but it was too expensive, so instead we ate at a chain lunch place and then bought books (I resisted, with much difficulty, since I have a number of books sitting in my room waiting to be read already).  We found a cafe with brightly colored chaise lounges, and read for two hours (I am in the middle of "The English Patient") and then walked home across the city.  The old row houses, bricks painted magenta and sky blue.  People on porches.  Crowds on Georgia Avenue where the Carribean Carnival parade passed earlier today.  It was humid, cloudy.  A few nights ago it thundered so loud I lay awake for an hour, and the power went out.  The air is ominous and heavy everywhere.  I'm sleepy, but I promised I would go out dancing.  In a week, Liberty will be married.  At the club last night David handed me an empty cup, and I tried to balance it on my head.  It fell off, and immediately afterward two different boys tried to hit on me.  "Your head isn't flat," one told me.  I assured him that I knew that.

I am sitting on the balcony.  It is almost midnight on a Saturday night and the sky is a deep purple gradient between the tree tops and the overhang from the balcony upstairs.  This is the only time I have been outside today.

There are excuses for this.  It was hot out.  I was tired, and didn't even get dressed until late afternoon.  I was involved in my book (Henry and June by Anais Nin.  An easy book to become involved in).  Last night was enough of a party for two weeks, much less two days.

I think it is the lack of sleep, and the restlessness from being stationary all day, but I feel quiet and a little sad.  I want to lose myself in something.  Eight hours of reading should have accomplished that, but Anais Nin drew me in without relieving me of the world.  The headiness of her words, her life (or whatever remnant of it she chose to record), left me empty and grasping for an equivalent sensation.  Or maybe just for words of my own, for a story to tell.

David is here, also tired, also staying in for the night.  We talked and then sat in silence.  We played a game of Crazy Eights, and David said, "We are so like old people," and I said, "I get that a lot," but it wasn't the same as when Cutter told me he was an eighty year-old woman.  We drifted into our separate pursuits.  We are at a slightly awkward stage of friendship I think; we know each other but do not, at all.  But then, who knows anyone?  (Ugh, I hate being like this, these juvenile overdramatic questions, I should just fling myself off the balcony and be done with it.  So middle school.)

I don't know what I want, except to be in Rawaan's living room sipping port and making a list of historical figures I would like to sleep with, or making chocolate pudding in Cutter's kitchen, or on the Green slurping bubble tea, or nestled into Annie's body pillow.  I need to be here now, I need to be here.

I wish I could capture the color of the sky, to prove that it is really purple.  Artichoke heart purple.

"When Eliza studies, it is like discovering her own anatomy.  The words resonate within her as if rooted deep inside her body.  She pictures words lining her stomach, expanding with each stretch of her lungs, nestling in the chambers of her heart.  She is thankful to have been spared from fracture, tonsillitis, or appendectomy.  Such incidents might have resulted in words being truncated or removed altogether, reducing her internal vocabulary.  Elly contemplates growing her hair long; it could give her an extra edge."

Just finished Bee Season.  I love books.

My last night at home.  (Home is a strange word.)  As I tucked Vivien into bed, she said, "Brr," and then, "Will you get under the covers with me?"  I curled up with her, one hand tucked against her cheek, the other resting lightly around her small shoulders.  Her eyes drifted shut and I could count her eyelashes, and I thought I love her so much, despite her tantrums, or because of them, I could not love her more, I am aching with it, and I don't know when I'm going to see her again and then I thought about The Little Princess and how Sara looks at her father for a long time and he asks if she is learning him by heart and she says she already knows him by heart, he's in her heart, which is how Viv is, but I kept looking at her anyway, for a long time, her little open mouth and her round cheeks.  Life feels like a series of goodbyes; I feel defined by what is missing, or rather, who is missing.

But tomorrow there are new friends, and old friends who I have missed, back again, and a new city, and a new job, and a new place to call home, for a little while anyway.  All of these are good and exciting things, which make up a life.  I'm trying to focus on the moment, on the present instead of the absent.  Trying to get enough sleep.

I've settled happily into Oregon middle aged life.  Yesterday I helped Vivien pick out a dress for school, I went to lunch with them, shopped, and attended a cocktail party given by the family who used to live in my parents new house.  Today I made quiche, facilitated children running in and out, watched a video of my sixth birthday party, and had dinner with the neighbors (we split conversation by gender - Eric and the husband talked about philosophy and snakes, and Mom, the wife and I talked about children and our families and personal histories).  It's very hard to judge yourself as a six year old.  I couldn't tell if I was cute or just a little weird.  Vivien was highly amused however.

All my exciting stories are once again related to children.  This is a periodic happening in my life, which I am sure will reoccur at intervals from now until I die.  At the moment, my best one is about getting on the airplane with the girls and having them take out the safety cards and pore over them for about twenty minutes, asking intensely detailed questions about what might happen in different varieties of emergency.  "What if you're holding on to the emergency flotation device, and you go on your back, and your head gets under water?  What would happen then?"

I've been reading Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.  I'm not sure if the main character is involved in a gay love affair or if I've just read too much Oscar Wilde.  Anyway, lots of descriptions of English countryside and non-English food and people being alternately passionate and incredibly snitty to one another.  Yay for English country manor novels.

I am attempting to take things one day at a time.  And not obsess over the people who are not here.

I got a new phone number, if you want it comment with your email address.

I just finished "The Time-Traveler's Wife" - it's 500+ pages long, and I read it in about 40 hours (in which I also slept and did a couple other things). I feel like I've been bogged down recently, in my reading, and it felt so good to tear through something, to swallow it in one gulp.

After turning the last page I dabbed at my red, wet eyes, and got out of bed and looked out the window. It's snowing. The street is white, it must have been snowing for quite a while. I was supposed to go grocery shopping today; I have no food in the house at all. But even if Kate would let me borrow her car, I've never driven in the snow before and wouldn't really want to. I was also supposed to go to the bookstore and buy a book that I'm supposed to read for Monday. Maybe I will do that, at least. Walking in the snow can be nice. I can at least eat out and won't die of starvation that way.

I feel detached from the world, stranded in my own head. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.

The Hungarian baths are my new favorite thing. Besides the numerous indoor pools of varying heat and size, there were three huge outdoor pools - one very warm, one cool and long and one with the best invention ever - a series of concentric rings. Inside the middle was a bubble pool, and around that a very strong current which sweeps you around and around, bobbing and laughing - picture thirty strangers of all ages, shapes, nationalities, grinning like idiots and laughing and bumping into one another and flowing through the water. It was incredible. Also, there was sunbathing involve. And a sauna that literally was an oven. It was 77 degrees Celsius, which is like 175 degrees farenheit at least. Standing inside it felt like my lungs were taking in fire.

The rest of the day was lovely too. I've attached myself to a guy from my hostel, also travelling alone, who incidentally visited London for a week and bought a book at the Tate Modern that I saw once and didn't buy and then spent three months looking for and wishing I had bought (I know this makes no sense, but it was really exciting for me), David, and we've been indulging each other's need for companionship. We went to the Basilica of St. Stephen's, and a photography exhibit, and ate falafels and now we're going back to the hostel to have tea. Hurrah.

I just read Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: a lovely book, quietly tragic and poignantly funny and engrossing. I began it when I woke up this (I’ll be honest) afternoon, and couldn’t stop reading. Who knew a book about an elderly butler could be so captivating? I’d like to see the movie, though I’m afraid it would be disappointing — but with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, maybe not.

I feel a little guilty for sitting inside all day reading, but its gray and rainy out, and I feel absolutely not temptation to venture out. Yesterday I did make it to the British Museum for a few hours. Lily and I wandered around the Chinese rooms, looking at 3000 year old jade and 250 year old enamels of bright yellow and turquoise, colors I always imagined could only be made synthetically. We went to the Egyptian rooms and saw the mummies, perfectly preserved. One body has survived, unmummified, dried out by the desert sand — laying there inside a glass case, shriveled skin and hands and a wisp of hair still on his forehead. We saw the Rosetta Stone, and discussed what of our current culture would be preserved. There’s so much stuff now, so many gratuitous objects, are they going to be saved for two thousand years to be displayed in a museum? We are so obsessed with ourselves now, with recording and documenting, that it’s hard for me to imagine everything disappearing the way some ancient cultures have disappeared — only fragments left, pieced together to create a fragile picture of life. But maybe there’ll be some cataclysm, natural or unnatural — or maybe technology will progress to a point where we can’t access our own records, everything stored on computers will be lost, obsolete.

I started thinking about diaries, and then about blogs — in a way, they’re so much more permanent, because there’s no question of paper breaking down or being damaged — but then if the livejournal server crashes, is all of this lost? (I personally have a back-up, but not of every entry). Does that matter? Do we write for posterity, to preserve? Or for this moment, to help understand a particular experience, a time or place?

The Remains of the Day — while clearly a fictional account — is a glimpse into a world that’s gone, but also a world that continues to affect us, both in terms of the actual history involved and in terms of the human experiences. The narrator’s tragedy and his triumph is his dignity, his immersion in professionalism at the cost of humanity — maybe. Maybe not. What does this novel tell us about the time it describes that a diary couldn’t? Or does it only tell us about the time in which it was written? And will this novel be preserved? We still study literature from two thousand years ago — what will be read two thousand years from now, assuming humans still read or at least communicate stories in some way?

I’m just going around in circles now. Not a terrible thing for a rainy afternoon.

I just finished The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I am still floating in that world, the moth opening and closing its wings on my heart. A viable, die-able age. I want to re-read it, or just sit, thinking, feeling it. The words seeping in to my skin. I love feeling this about a book, this rare and precious wonder. My whole life, my being, is built around the search for this — finding it, struggling to create it — and then it appears, unexpectedly, overwhelming, and tiptoes away again when the real world reappears.

A couple of Lily’s friends from Macalaster are in town, and took us to Edgware Road to eat falafels and smoke shisha. We did the first in a hole-in-the-wall with a small counter and four chairs, which we twisted around so we wouldn’t all be staring at each other’s backs. The shisha, in contrast, was in a huge restaurant, the ceiling covered with jeweled mirrors, the walls in red and green and yellow, and glowing fixtures on the corners of the booths. The waiters negotiated between shishas set at the edges of the tables, buckets of hot coal in hand. We had yogurt drinks and inhaled banana shisha, letting the soft taste of the smoke drift in and out. This is a part of London I have only known from the novels in my London Lit class — in White Teeth, one of the characters goes to sit with the old men and smoke shisha on Edgware Road, watching the women walk past in burkas. There were women at the restaurant with headscarves, and others in tight black shirts wearing too much lipliner, and old men and seventeen year olds in overlarge black sweatshirts with rap star logos on them.

Lily’s friends have both finished study abroad: Neeley is headed home tomorrow with an internship in the Scottish parliament under her belt; Jason has come back to London to live with the Spanish boy he fell in love with fall semester in London. I feel unaccomplished. Moody and craving chocolate — it can only be one thing. The knowledge that hormones are responsible for my achievement-and-boy-and-sugar cravings is not as comforting as it should be.

In other (good) news, this summer is beginning to take (very exciting) shape.

( what I'm going to do with my summer vacation )

First of all, I want to give a huge shout out to my friend Laura, boyceterous, who is, along with other Princeton students, taking part in a filibuster in front of the First Campus Center at Princeton University. They're protesting the "nuclear option" - for anyone who is unaware of what that is, which hopefully is nobody, that's the Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's plan to stop Senate Democrats from filibustering judicial nominations. The filibuster is the one of the few tools to prevent a tyranny of the majority in this country. Frist and Bush want to put extreme right wing judges who are against a woman's right to choose, against affirmative action, and against gay rights among MANY other issues on the federal benches and on the Supreme Court. These judges do not reflect the opinions of most Americans, they reflect the opinions of a small minority. That is not even the point though.

The point is Frist is trying to collapse the separation between the legislative and judicial branches, a separation explicitly laid out in the Constitution, and he is so desperate to do so that he is willing to undermine the rights of the minority party in the Senate, a move which will not only hurt Democrats, but hurts all people in the US, and hurts the functioning of a valid democracy. Students at Princeton are taking a stand against this - and not just Democrat partisans, students from across the political spectrum, as well as professors and other community members. Check it out at http://www.FilibusterFrist.com.

The night before last Lily and I told Amir about the irregularities with the election in Ohio and he looked at us as if we were insane. "That's not real," he said. "That can't be real. Why aren't people rioting?" I didn't have an answer. Why aren't people rioting? We don't care? None of us believe in democracy enough to defend it? We just don't know? I think the last is probably as likely as any of the others - but I also think we're tired and defeated. This filibuster is giving me a little hope - not that it will change things, but that not everyone is defeated. They've been going for 160+ hours now.

In other news, yesterday I walked to St. James' Park and read a historical novel about the Tudors. Anne Boleyn is evil. There are chairs laying around the lawn and I claimed one, moved it to face the lake. The willow trees were lit up by the sun, the waterfowl skimmed the surface of the lake. I closed my eyes and felt perfectly content. I was writing in my notebook about how the only thing left to complete the perfection was the unexpected approach of a handsome young British man ready to fall in love with me. As I wrote this I looked up and saw a (not particularly handsome, I admit) young British man walking up to me. Could it be? I waited, my breath held. He held out his hand... and asked if I had a ticket for the chair. I paid him 1.50 and returned to my daydreaming.

On the way home a woman stopped me, half hysterical, and told me she'd just gotten back into town and found out her family was in a car accident. Her father had a heart attack and her daughter had a broken arm, and she couldn't get ahold of anyone, she had to catch a bus. She had money in her hand, but needed 6.50 more. She showed me her passport, and kept drawing in her breath quickly, unbelieving, frantic. I gave her a 10 and my name and address, and took hers, plus her phone number. Probably I will never see that money again. Probably I am an idiot, and she laughed at me afterwards - but she said her daughter was seven, and she was clearly in pain, and it was only 10 pounds. I think the guilt if I had said no would have been enough to make the money worth it. Sometimes you just have to take a risk and believe people aren't all horrible.

The Seder last night was a success: fluffy matzo balls, laughter, singing, soup, cinnamon, ceremony (this sentence has become an exercise in sibilance). Lily, Ashley and I spent the afternoon in the kitchen, nibbling at the food we were preparing, and were all full by the time dinner came around. Amir kept popping in asking if he could do anything and being sent away. At dinner we became hysterical over passages in the “Haggadah of Liberation” extolling the virtues of clean pajamas and bathtubs. We made up our own dayenus: when America has truly free elections, when Bush isn’t president, when there quality free beer for all. Lily and I agreed that we speak too loudly because in a Jewish family you have to, and Ashley and Amir shushed us. Ashley asked the four questions and Lily answered them with an (almost) entirely straight face. Amir declared he was in favor of slavery.

Now I am immersed in Shakespeare criticism. The world as a stage, the world as a prison. Both involve constant surveillance. That’s as far as I’ve gotten with my person theories. I can however explain how Hamlet represents the beginning of modern subjectivity — his claim of depth is unique and new, and yet unsubstantiated, the prince too is surface — and how Prospero’s treatment of Caliban is a displacement of his own self-loathing.

Yesterday I read two articles published in 1991 debating an appointment made by Lynne Cheney to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The first article is by a Newsweek columnist named George Will, arguing that contemporary academics, and specifically deconstructionism is destroying our national culture, that we should read for the aesthetic value not for a better understanding of seventeenth century colonialist culture. “The supplanting of esthetic by political responses to literature makes literature primarily interesting as a mere index of who had power and whom the powerful victimized…. Thus does criticism dovetail with the political agenda of victimology. The multiplication of grievances is…the core curriculum of universities that are transformed into political instruments.” Will claimed that “critics strip literature of its authority” and that Lynne Cheney was “secretary of domestic defense. The foreign adversaries her husband, Dick, must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal. Those forces are fighting against the conservation of the common culture that is the nation’s social cement.”

Will’s article was profoundly disturbing to me, partly because he called Lynne Cheney the “secretary of domestic defense” but also because I have myself complained about the prevalence of deconstructionism many times. I am constantly begging to read things for the pleasure of it, I go crazy in classes where I am asked to “destroy” literature that I love, to overthink every little thing, to speak in a vocabulary only a tiny percentage of the world’s population can or cares to comprehend in order to pander to other academics, because no one else cares anyway. Reading the article made me argue against it, against him, for all the things I usually complain about. To claim there is any kind of “common culture” is to completely efface difference; Will wants not to celebrate literature but to anesthetize it. Stephen Greenblatt, who wrote an article in reply, said “Art, the art that matters, is not cement. It is mobile, complex, elusive, disturbing.”

Reading these articles, I agree with everything Greenblatt says and disagree with everything Will says, but I’m not sure they’re really talking to one another. Greenblatt neatly undermines Will’s main ideological argument (the fabulous title of Greenblatt’s article is “The Best Way to Kill Our Literary Inheritance Is to Turn It into a Decorous Celebration of the New World Order”) but he does not address my concern, which is who are we as academics talking to, who are we writing for. I understand who we’re writing against — but if no one understands the arguments, if they simply circulate in the academic sphere — what is the point? I can deconstruct literature now, I have been taught to do that, I can write an essay in two days pulling a book to little pieces, significant sentences, arcs, images. But why? The Tempest has been analyzed as a postcolonial text, and people have written about how it illustrates early colonial assumptions, and people have written back, arguing that the postcolonial reading is simplifying, and I believe both arguments have valid points, they’re not creating something that isn’t there to be found — but what effect have these discussions had on the non-academic world? The one I can think of is that someone involved in the Cuban revolution, and I can’t remember who anymore, wrote a book justifying Cuban anti-Americanism through the symbol of Caliban’s rebellion. Symbols do have power and meaning. I think that is the exception rather than the rule, however.

I keep coming up with arguments against myself. Fanon, from what I understand of his theory, argues that the culture is the site of real oppression. I think I agree with that — at least, I find myself arguing it all the time, in subtle ways. Therefore maybe the only way to change anything is by deconstructing culture. Where does that leave reading for enjoyment though? Is it a betrayal to read, or to write — because I think all my concern about this goes back to that, to writing, to what I myself am producing — without questioning? To enjoy something, knowing all its problematics?

The book I found these two essays in has a section called “Why study critical controversies?” which attempts to answer these questions for students like me. Their answer is that this question is based on “an underlying opposition between reading for pleasure and reading for analysis and criticism.” The authors of this book “believe that under careful scrutiny the distinction is hard to maintain.” They think students who don’t like criticism have just encountered the wrong kind — “obtruse, jargon-ridden” or failing to “address the…’So-What Question’.”

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I don’t think there’s anywhere to go, particularly. This is one of my longest entries of the semester and it has no conclusion. It could continue forever. My break from essay writing is running long, however, and was not particularly refreshing. I was supposed to do something mindless, to relieve the burden of intense thought. Oops.

I was going to end there, but a Dar William song just came up on my playlist: “The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis of a Co-Ed.” I just had to note that.

I am balancing work and play, better at some moments than others. Tuesday I read all day and then Lily and I sat on my bed transferring music and talking until three in the morning. Lily says humans are the only animals that chat, useless communication. Hurrah for that. On Wednesday I outlined my paper and then went wandering because it had been too long. I walked through the Great Court at the British Museum, down Charing Cross Road, into Soho. I stopped outside the cafe where Rawaan and I had tea, but our waiter wasn't there. I bought tofu, and Penguin paperbacks for 1.50, perfect little books with Woolf essays and stories of Jeeves (who has a great amount of brainpower, I must admit). I meandered in flip flops and ponytails.

Yesterday I wrote my paper, and then I went to Ashley's for dinner and DVDs. Lily and I knit on the underground and a woman across the way whispered to her neighbour and pointed. Later in the evening I realized the spout and handle of my tea cozy were not in the right places, and I had to rip it all out to begin again. I stayed up half the night doing nothing, and slept all day. I have not managed to shift back into British time, or my version of British time is hopelessly skewed.

I told myself I'd finish my first paper by midday today, which I have done. Now I realize that the goal was wrong, because tomorrow we're having a Seder and will be cooking all day and drinking four glasses of wine at night and that I may not get much work done tomorrow or Sunday. Which leaves this afternoon, and Monday, to pick a topic in the category "Shakespeare," examine it, poke, read outside texts, ruminate, be brilliant.

I attempted to begin transitioning back to London time today, by setting my alarm for 12:30 (I said begin transitioning). I got up at 2:30. The fact that Lily got up at 2 and she's on London time made me feel a little better about that, but still.

I have not done nearly enough work today. I finished Brick Lane, which I may or may not even use in my paper. I read a little about postcolonial London. I went through White Teeth marking pages where London figured, a little, things I might use if I knew what I was writing about. I find it interesting that in all three books about South Asian immigrants to London I have read the men (at least some very prominent examples) want to return home, and the women want to stay. Why? Are they more adaptable? The loss of control is not as terrifying or intense, since they had just as little control of their lives at home? They see their children's futures as brighter in England, while the men see their children's futures as darker - or use that as an excuse to justify running from their own lack of a future? An interesting topic which I would happily write a paper on, except I'm not sure how it relates to London specifically, any more than Britain in general. Topics about London are whether it's a transnational city, and how the city is space or place, how its disorder challenges authority, or doesn't, and where the city exists in the interaction of physicality and representation. Interesting topics as well, but I have no investment in them. They are not about people. Also, I do not know enough postcolonial or urban theory to feel comfortable addressing them.

Lily and I made a three course meal for dinner, to procrastinate. Mozzarella, avocado and tomato salad, red pepper and tomato soup, and stuffed red peppers. During the second course Amir came in and somewhere in the conversation feminism came up. Amir muttered, "I hate feminists." We immediately jumped on him. "Are you trying to get a rise out of us, or do you mean that?" I demanded, aghast. He explained that he thought feminism was very important and good, but that many "feminists" took it too far, hating men. I recognized his attitude as that of many a liberal boy at Brown, and even in Eugene. Our generation thinks of feminism as outdated, feminists as men-hating bull dykes. It's not just young men, though I think the attitude is more prevalent there - young women don't identify themselves as feminists anymore. They say they believe in equal rights, but they're not feminists. It's frightening. The Handmaid's Tale is fresh in my mind - men so frightened of women that they have to change the entire world to control them. Women forbidden to read. Women as objects, as prisoners, as bodies. It's the same attitude, taken to a horrific extreme, the belief that any strong woman must be dangerous to men. Obviously Amir and all the other people I've heard express the exact same attitude toward "feminists" don't think that's the way to go... but deep down, maybe it's there, that fear. Maybe it's waiting.

Now I'm just freaking myself out. No one's about to make me a slave. I should be pondering postcolonial representations of London, not post-apocalyptic America.

On the other side of the computer room, someone is playing really annoying music really loudly. I have my music up too, like a battle between pop rock and the Magnetic Fields (in iTunes, I have them classified as Indie Music Hall). They're also smoking. Yech.

The stack of books on my bedside table is truly impressive. A good thing, since I spent the entire day accumulating them. From library to library, searching catalogues, trying to imagine what keyword those crazy librarians might have given the books that I need, which may or may not actually exist at all. I realized this morning that I have a week to write two 4000 word research papers. Panic followed quickly on the heels of that realization, and then libraries. I’ve been reading for four hours straight. In the morning I will wake up and continue reading, mostly likely all day and into the night. Wednesday, if all goes well, I will outline and begin to write Paper #1, thus freeing me up by Thursday afternoon to run to more libraries, search the catalogues again, begin making up another argument from insufficient sources (this one is likely to be that petite bourgeoisie women, like pb men, ended up choosing economic interests over ideological considerations — of course, there’s no real literature about what their beliefs were to begin with vis a vis the feminist movement, so arguing that they gave up those ideas for a more estate-centered policy is problematic, but this whole undertaking is problematic, and it’s almost 3, so I’m going to ignore that part for the moment).

Not so good to be back after all. It was so nice to live in the world of denial (ie Italy). Apparently I left a pair of socks there.

The quote I was searching for: “To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and the world from you? You read … You might as well stick with this other abstraction of travel, accomplished by the anonymous uniformity of typographical characters: here, too, it is the evocative power of the names that persuades you that you are flying over something and not nothingness. You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this demonstrates an invincible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence. (But are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading?)”

I wish I was doing that kind of reading, instead of what I have been doing, which is anything but evocative, and fails to absent me from the world. I shift, restlessly, and rub my eyes, and try to sit up straight, and collapse back onto the pillows. I skim forward, telling myself this page doesn’t matter, or that one.