I won't be living at home this fall. *Score!* We've talked about it and as long as I have a job, it's financially feasible for me to move in this house with five other girlfriends. The two jobs I'm going to apply for both fit my major, English, so that's awesome. And I get to sing some more with a songwriter I know - she's heading up this night of ( Read more... )

I finished I Know This Much Is True, a 900-pager by Wally Lamb in just days, and I have to say: I don't know if it was the length, or what, but I've never had the impulse to clap after finishing a book. I've never worried about whether a book would wrap up well or not, not wanting it to end, and then been so satisfied with the answers that it put ( Read more... )

Today was John Milton's 400th birthday. And we celebrated.

The English department threw a party as only we literary folk can: an all-day reading of Paradise Lost (people actually attended), complete with refreshments (birthday cake for Milton and apples, as in, the apple the serpent entices Eve with), and "entertainment," should we have time for a ( Read more... )

PR people/spokespeople need to put the "person" back in "spokesperson." Honestly. Try to be a little less robotic?

I want to be able to characterize people like Chaucer does in The Canterbury Tales. I suspect I would love him just as much even if I'd never seen Paul Bettany's take on him.

My English teacher is funny. I want him to read to us more in ( Read more... )

"In America, if a woman has to publicly claim, "I'm not insane," it pretty much means the opposite," claims Salon Magazine, in an old piece about genius nature-lover essayist-sometime-fiction-writer Annie Dillard. "In 1992, Dillard made an amazing admission to Mary Cantwell in the New York Times Magazine, saying that she spent the night 'crying ( Read more... )

I like the life of a university student. You are allowed to choose to be engaged; to notice things and people you pass every day, or allow it all to seep into a broad category of "normal." You can choose to check out in class - tempting when you don't respect the professor and disdain the classwork being given. However, the only way to make ( Read more... )

I thought I was done taking school photos.

We just took "mug shots," so called, the entire newspaper staff, after the opening meet'n'greet. It's a little more intimidating than the high school/grade school sort, because you're not just walking past some giant, light-blue, sky-patterned standees, a couple umbrella-lights and a middle-aged person ( Read more... )

I really hope Paradise Lost isn't just a political treatise.

There is nothing better than a mom to feed you at 9 pm at night and to tell you the truth, even when you're supposed to be back in the dorm at a floor meeting.

I love flowers, and this picture I got this morning (and Cheryl, I DELETE like, half, if not over half, of my pictures because of ( Read more... )

Last day at ye olde waitressing job, and my am I glad it's over. For some reason, I'm not really jumping for joy about moving into the dorms, though. That is probably because I enjoy having more privacy and my own space. Ah well. All the better to get me raring to get an apartment the year after this.

I saw about the cutest thing ever tonight. A ( Read more... )

We have to read A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich for a Women's Studies course, which makes me happy because I destroyed my mother's copy years ago. It was old anyway, held together with masking tape. I read about Abbie Deal and her dreams of leaving the prairie to become a great singer, listened along with her to her sister spinning ( Read more... )