Truth. If you read weird books and watch weird shows, you will dream weird dreams.
After dosing my brain with Jasper Fforde and Iain M. Banks, and Inception and Fringe season 2, I definitely had a dream in which I repeatedly kept waking up from a dream in which I was chasing someone (possibly another version of myself) through my own mindscape because I passionately wanted to torture them.
I’m doing better now, though.
I have been drinking a lot of tea and reading a lot of books. Periodically I will drive to campus and teach writing to students whose names I keep forgetting. This weekend I will commence writing the preface of my thesis, and then I’ll have a genuine complete thesis draft of about a hundred pages. Things are coming together.
*crosses fingers*
I have always been a future-thinking person–for evidence, my personal journal usually talks about things I will do rather than the things I’ve done–and I’ve begun to think of Moving On. I keep envisioning the many possibilities of what I might do after graduation in May, and the main one entails not living in this apartment anymore.
Last night I dreamed of painting walls blue, and they weren’t these walls.
Meanwhile, I bought six books in a month in which I intended to buy none, but I’ve read twenty books off of my official Unread Books list since December, so I feel a little bit justified. I’m reading one of my Unread Books now, Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. Before that was Steve Martin’s Shopgirl. My upcoming “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” post will be a bit schizophrenic, I think.
Fine. I give in.
My Year in Brief
January. Chera comes to visit, and I read a lot of books. My second semester in graduate school starts up, and I vanish into the Vortex of Busyness, but not before I manage to write the story that will become “The Mind’s Eye.”
February. I am still in school, reading modernist fiction for class and being the TA for three classes. I write a story composed of a series of vignettes and based on Katherine Mansfield’s short story “At the Bay,” because one of my classmates implied that not everyone was good at writing vignettes.
March. Is it bad that I can’t remember what I did for Spring Break? I probably caught up on reading and grading. Anyway, the most important thing that happened this month was that A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner came out and that I read it and loved it.
April. I work on my final projects all month. This is actually my best reading month of the year, in appearance, anyway, because I read a bunch of short books. I also begin my addiction to the Amelia Peabody mystery series by Elizabeth Peters; I will eventually read twelve or thirteen of them.
May. My first year of grad school is done! To my surprise, but apparently to no one else’s, I got all As. After everything is finished, I lay on the couch for a couple of weeks, recovering.
June. I can’t really remember what I did in June, either. I am out of school–oh yes, I am writing. I begin working on “WHATSIT,” a sequel to “THING,” and I pack up for the month of July.
July. Not only do we make the annual Fourth of July trip to Arkansas, but we also house-sit for my parents in Oklahoma for the whole month. I write a third or fourth version of my novel “Names of Water,” as well as a humorous short story called “Planet B,” and I do a lot of visiting of friends and reading in the recliner.
August. Class resumes, this time with me at the front of a classroom, to my horror. I almost hyperventilate on the first day of class before I begin teaching College Writing I. They did give me a cubicle, however, for which I am still grateful. I write “She Who Has No Earth” in the space of a single day.
September. This month is lost in the morass of the Grad School Schedule. Somewhere in there, I turn twenty-three. Plus, I learn to hate Cormac McCarthy. This is the worst month for reading and for writing–I do little of either.
October. After passing my German exam, I travel to Colorado with Chera to give a presentation at the Sirens Conference. It is a good trip, but altitude sickness is a wicked thing. I don’t think I wrote anything significant this month either. Or maybe I did: “The Conquest of the World” may have been written toward the end of the month.
November. Wishing I were able to write a NaNoWriMo novel, I write a paper about Russell Banks instead. I am able to take off briefly for Thanksgiving, but may have been too dazed to enjoy it. Sorry, everyone.
December. I finish up my three final projects for the semester, including final grades for my students, and at once we are off for a two-week, two-state road trip, to Oklahoma and Arkansas and back. After a marvelous New Year’s Eve dinner with friends, I stay up for ten minutes past midnight to farewell the old year.
I sense that 2011 will be the Year of the Thesis, at least at the beginning, and the Year of Taking It Easy and Enjoying My Master’s Degree at the end. At least, that’s what I hope. School made me pretty ragged, and I’m aware that I need a break.
Do I have one or more resolutions? Not really. To read and write and try to get things published. I’m definitely expecting to graduate, but beyond that, anything goes. I’m happy to entertain suggestions…
1. Chess. I’m on a losing streak, having lost eight out of ten games since May. If you’ve ever dreamed of beating someone in chess, you could always challenge me, since my luck (or else my attention) appears to be elsewhere.
2. Anastasia. On the other hand, in a move of pure lovableness, Anastasia slept on my chest right under my chin last night for an hour and a half while I was reading. She started out curled up in a ball and slowly unrolled until she was draped across my neck. Now I understand why people wore furs, because the two pounds and eighteen inches of ferret made me really hot.
3. God. I woke up to my alarm this morning, intending to get up for church, but instead slept another hour and a half. Sorry, sorry. I’m glad God isn’t much into lightning bolts these days.
4. Dreaming. I did manage to have a really bizarre dream. It was loosely set in a house where I used to live as a child, but the group of people with me–or rather, whom I was indefinably among–came from a book called The Magicians by Lev Grossman, which is a very strange book indeed. One of the party had just been bitten? or poisoned? and someone else was asking him what he wanted on his gravestone. He chose the epitaph from the movie The Royal Tenenbaums, which goes something like “Died saving his family from a destroyed sinking battleship.” And then we all went down the hall and got on a train and then I woke up.
11:00 last night. I realize it’s late and I go to bed.
11:00-1:00. I toss and turn, sleeping lightly and waking up too hot.
2:00. My husband and I are woken up by Anastasia, our ferret, who has mysteriously gotten out of her cage. Although it’s also possible that I forgot to close the second ferret cage door. Either way, now I’m really awake.
2:00-4:00. I fail to return to sleep, though I am earnestly trying. All the little tricks in my repertoire. I’ve never counted to 500 before.
4:00-5:00. I relocate to the couch and read a novel. Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King, mainly in preparation to read, at last, The Language of Bees, which I’ve been saving for just the right time.
Around 5:00. I make myself a snack of a cup of tea and some Nutella on toast and read some more. Insomnia is almost not bad when absolutely nothing relies on one’s being alert later.
Between 6:00 and 7:00. I turn out the light just as the sun is rising.
7:00-10:00. The next time I look at the clock, three hours have gone by. I think I slept through them, but the last twelve hours, by now, have been too hazy for me to be sure.
And with that nightmare of a night’s sleep behind me, I’m going to bed now to try again.
I hate to be a stereotypical church-goer, but my religious worship this morning made me exhausted. Or perhaps it was the old-fashioned donut that I allowed myself to eat for the first time in weeks. In either case, I arrived home and lay down on the couch with a book. And woke up about an hour and a half later, dry-mouthed and groggy. So I scarfed down an extra-thick roast beef sandwich to bolster myself with protein.
Eventually, when I finished reading Water Witch by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice, I did not regret the time I spent asleep. It was… all right. [Warning: Spoilers.] Deza is a con artist, pretending to be a princess of the Red City who can detect water in pools underneath the dry planet of Mahali. After a con-gone-south, (during which her father dies and his spirit takes up residence in an mbuzi, which is a fancy word for goat,) she meets up with Radi, a prince whom she mistakes for a pirate, and they decide to go through with the con against the off-world Tycoon. But Deza learns that she doesn’t need to pretend to be a water witch because she is a water witch, spirited away from the Red City by her father at age three. And she and Radi fall in love. And sort of save everyone too. It was fun, but it wasn’t remotely a surprise.
6.5 / 10.0.
After agreeing to work after closing, in order to unpack books and put them on shelves without the interference of customers asking for Animal Farm or The Awakening, I nearly regretted my decision when the clock rolled around to 1:00 am and for once I made it past the midnight mark. However, driving home on an empty highway with the windows open, music blasting, and cruise control set at 65, I believe I tasted what some people love about the night.
Here is a snippet from Kate Rugby’s song “Planets,” which I listened to four times in a row between 1:08 and 1:24.
On nights like these,
I could fly up to the sky above me,
Like Superman,
I would change the course
Of earth below me.
The moment of tranquility was not quite enough to win me over to the dark side (I will ever be a morning person), but the silence and solitude sounded a chord within me.
Would I volunteer to work late again? Probably…but only because I’m getting paid.
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