...but my bicycle got stolen last night & perhaps right at the same moment Naya undid her stomach contents across our bed, quite thoroughly across our bed and our room still smells of HCl acid/semi-digested food though I've spent the majority of the day scrubbing & laundering with the wee tiniest of washers in a country that doesn't readily believe in dryers & also, perhaps right at the same moment the secretary for the committee of a graduate fellowship that took months for me to compose hit send to deliver a "of the 8500 applicants only 1400 were chosen, and you were not one of them" message to my inbox & now today I attempt to read the books I must, with our sheets and blankets drip drying on every possible surface around our tiny room, but my stomach is churning & I don't know if it is because of the antibiotics working me over, the layered ill-luck, or the fact that Naya and I shared a spoon about an hour before she upchu@#d. I hope, like the bargaining optimist that I am (even though I feign atheism), that this means we've somehow "done our time" and can get on with the Oxford bliss momentarily.
It's not lost on me, however, that I have been a bit exuberant, perhaps annoyingly so on this blog...so the upside of all this day's weirdness is that I will not deliver an annoying peachy blog post where I detail how perfect my life is.
P.S. Naya is eating lots of food & feels mostly normal.
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So...we have made it through what I think will likely be our roughest period here--& I'm feeling caught up on my reading as much as one can expect to feel with 12 credits in 9 weeks Oxford style. Last night I collapsed exhaustedly into bed at 9 hugging my book to me that had to be finished, woke up at midnight and read it until I finished around 2. Slept for two hours, miraculously, no alarm, woke myself up at 4 to read another book that had to be read. Cheerfully, no kidding, got Naya ready for school, came home, wrote a 9 page essay on Joseph Conrad and Modernism by 12:45, rushed off on foot to print it, remember--no bike--and got to my tutorial meeting by 2pm to have it picked apart line by line. Pfew. So glad. Now to Marx, I need to finish a book before bed, because I have two more to read tomorrow...
ReplyDeleteGood lord, that's a lot of reading. Even for someone as voracious as you. Hope you don't lose your appetite. Remembered this:
ReplyDeleteEating Poetry
Mark Strand
I
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.