The first thing that I’d like to do? Is to chug it it when it comes to working tonight instead of sipping it politely over the course of nine hours. Too bad I can’t.

So I found out some devastating news this morning. Part of me is wondering how I’m managing not to simply freak the dickens out, but I’m kind of sick and tired so it might just be taking its sweet time sinking into my processing cortex. But, here it is: The UC lady told me today, for the first time, mind you, that the only way I can test out of my prerequisite French classes? Would be to go back in time and take the equivalency test before I started taking my current French class. Groan.

I do have a little hope though. I’m pulling a “When Bank’s Compete, You Win” type scam, or at least trying awfully hard to. I emailed Kent State and asked them if I could test out of my French classes with their equivalency. Of course, it will probably be about mid-January of 2011 before I hear back from anyone, but ya gots to do whats ya gots to do, eh?

Sigh.

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There’ s nothing noble in

Being corpulent and spent.

Looking like a moody marshmallow or maybe

A sad sack of potatoes,

Who really cares?

You’re too broad to be narrow like this.

But despair looks lovely

On the slender and the slim

Who sit with bony knees uplifting bony elbows

With a board flat abdomen that curves,

The head in the hands is only the point that comes at the bottom

Of the body’s question mark.

And the question is:

What’s the point?

So, guess what? Delightfully  I got my french textbook finally. The joy of this most recent conquest almost caused me to pirouette as I bent down and picked it up from my doorstep. Giggling, I peeled back the tape on the package and looked inside. I drew out the mass of pages and opened it to the number for my assigned homework, and-

And-?

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If you really wanna know, you’re going to have to know it all.

So I’ve been working over at Writers’ Grope on Livejournal on the prompts from the JulNoWriMo website. So far I’ve done . . . two of them. But! I’m getting there. The reason I bring it up is that in this last exercise I was writing a letter to someone from highschool and I realized that there was a lot of my experience that this person didn’t know, and couldn’t have known. It was suddenly apparent to me that a lot of my life has been an exercise in duplicity.

Is this the common experience? What are those things that we’ve never told anyone? And is now the time to let them breathe?

I’m thinking about it. I’m mulling it over. Should I embark on recovering the past and recreating it to be what it really was? In some ways, I was probably doomed to be, well, something of a hypocrite. This won’t make sense now, but I believe it will become clear. Regardless, I’m not going to be that anymore. God is truth, and I love him. And so I will love truth as well.

My Best Part Time Friend

Every once in a while, you suddenly appear!

So maybe it’s just when you’ve drunk too much beer?

But whatever the reason, I know soon you’ll prob’ly

Show up all witty with a short email volley

And then all at once disappear off the planet

A word here, a sentence, and then suddenly vanish.

Now I’m trying to figure what all it’s about . . .

Say, are you secretly married and your wife just found out?

Do you cyclically go into hiding or something?

Are you a dangerous criminal  who has to keep running?

Did you remember you’re Amish and can’t use a computer?

Are you ashamed to reveal you were recently neutered?

Did you fall off a bridge, as I so casually offer?

Were you kidnapped by pirates or your long lost real father?

Regardless, I hope your adventures delight

And when there’s a lull, I’m sure you will write.

And I’ll be as baffled as always and then

You’ll return to being my best part-time friend.

I have a confession of my own: I heart St. Augustine.

We’re like soulmates seperated by hundreds of years, and by class, gender, education, and age. We’ve both been foolish, we’ve both been degenerate. And yet God in his infinite wisdom and grace was kind enough to show us fully what kind of jerks we really were and grow us into something better, more in keeping with who he is. And it is encouragement to me now to read the words of someone who has sought, as I myself need to continually seek, the absolute truth.

<—–see the resemblence?—–>

” Entrust to truth whatever truth has given you, and you will lose nothing. What is withered in you will flower again, and your illness will be made well, and all that was flowing and wasting from you will regain shape and substance and will form part of you again, and they will not lay you down in the place where they themselves descend, but will stand fast with you and abide with you forever before God who stands and abides forever.”

May I say it? HOT.

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(no endorsements are implied from this video.)

There’s a manic spirit of summer drifting in and making everyone wanting to Do Something, and I’ve decided not to fight the current this year. I will Do Something too. In fact, I’ve already got a head start, as I’m doing my laundry today. But maybe that isn’t enough. Yes, I’m almost certain of it.

Talking with my brother over the last couple of weeks has given me the inspiration and even the method of my new madness. He has a friend who did something called “NaNoWriMo” last year. And what might this wonderful anacronym refer to? Only National Novel Writing Month!!! Basically the idea is to crank out a 50K word novel within thirty days, aka the month of November. But check it, readers. For those insane enough that one month of sleepless nights spent beating their heads against the typewriter, begging, begging, begging for something, anything to occur to them, still leaves them with the shakes? There is apparently a secondary iditarod of fiction, namely JulNoWriMo (Psst! It takes place in July).

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That’s the name of a class I took in college, and the one in which I fell in love with the childish poetry of Stevie Smith and the extra-ordinary stories of Alice Munro. I invoke it’s title to remind myself of the first blush of desire that precedes a good old fashioned book lust.

So I’m off Simon and on to modern classic literature. My sister was kind enough to accompany me to the Half Price Book Store this afternoon and help me peruse the A-D aisle for a sampling of Adams, Balzac, Collins, and DeLillo, to name a few. I even procured a copy of A Clockwork Orange, which I’m already almost certain I’m going to hate.

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