Literary Hero

Do you have any literary heroes? People whose writing inspires you, makes you want to change the world, or at least become just like them?

One of my literary heroes is Dorothy Sayers.
Brief bio: Sayers was a British citizen who lived from 1893 to 1957. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were some of her contemporaries (another reason I would have liked to be her!). She was well-educated, being among the first women to be awarded an actual degree from Oxford University, and she became a writer: copywriting at an ad agency, poetry, a translation of Dante, essays, plays, and works of fiction all to her name.

I first discovered Sayers’ writing while at my grandparent’s house one summer. Looking for something to read, I stumbled across one of her detective novels, Murder Must Advertise. I found it amusing (I admit to laughing aloud while reading a Sayers mystery), witty, knowledgable about the world of copywriting (which made more sense when I found out more about her later), and written by someone of obvious academic and literary talents. Besides, who could resist a monocle-wearing protagonist whose surname is Wimsey?

Gradually I read more of the Wimsey mysteries, and was introduced to his love interest, an authoress of detective fiction named Harriet Vane, whom I suspect had much in common with Sayers herself, though of course, Harriet is a fictional character. I can sympathize with Harriet, and reading about Oxford (in the novel Gaudy Night) makes me rather envious of her educational background….

Eventually I branched out and read some of Sayers’ prose, the excellent book The Mind of the Maker, and an essay on education, The Lost Tools of Learning.

…Now I am just rambling, and it looks as though I am about to construct a bibliography of Sayers’ works, so I will curb my enthusiasm and simply urge you to read at least something she has written! She wrote several short stories with Lord Peter Wimsey’s skills of detection, so you might start with those, or try the first (it’s rather short) novel: Whose Body? Anyway, I am always anxious to introduce my friends to the books I love, so if you have never met Miss Sayers’ literature, consider yourself introduced.

Too Many Moms?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am back. At least for the moment. I could spend this post apologizing for my lack of posting, and I could lament the fact that I have not been more engaging, etc. but I don’t think I really need to do any of that. So if anyone still checks occasionally to see if I write anything, here’s something for you.
[Also, why is it snowing on my page right now? Apparently it's cold on the internet too. ]

It’s funny how you mention to someone that you are sick, and they immediately respond to the statement. This is how multiple conversations have gone the past few days:

Person 1: “How are you?”

Me: “Well, I’m ok, but I have this terrible cold, so I’ll try not to breathe on you….”

Person 1: “Oh I’m sorry to hear that!”
…and then they proceed to share all their remedies for curing or shortening the length and severity of a cold.

I suppose it is because sickness is ubiquitous in human experience that it immediately elicits a response. While I am appreciative of the sympathy and the advice, it does strike me as humorous when I have three almost identical conversations in the span of fifteen minutes. I cannot cast stones though; I do find myself sharing (or being sorely tempted to share) my mother’s advice for curing colds when someone tells me they are sick. At the very least I inquire about their plan for taking care of themselves.

Why are we so interested in finding out all about someone’s illness though? And why are we so eager to share details of symptoms and remedies we’ve tried with their varying degrees of success?

I’ve been told to
drink tea,
eat chicken noodle soup,
drink orange juice and pomegranate juice,
eat fresh pineapple,
buy zicam, airborne and herb drops with an unpronounceable name from a health food store,
get sleep,
rest and stay at home,
drink emergen-C so that hopefully the 1000 mg of vitamin C it contains will do something,
and probably several other things that I’ve forgotten to mention. But really, what I mostly have to do is wait. Once I’ve done my part by lying on the sofa for several days with a drink in my hand constantly and an ever-shrinking box of tissues at my side, I must wait for my body to finish fighting off the germs and deal with the unpleasantness of symptoms which tell me my body is unhappy right now.

So I guess the bottom line of sickness is this: you can help your body out with medicine, vitamins, nutrients, and rest, but in the end the only thing you can do is wait for the germs to be fought off, which is something you cannot rush and cannot control. Apparently I still have a long way to go in learning patience.

Dear Girls of UVA…

…leggings are not pants. They never have been and never will be. Do not wear them instead of pants.

…it is not necessary to use approximately one fourth of a bottle of perfume before walking out of your room (besides, it’s cheaper to use only 2 squirts instead of 26).

Falltime Schooltime

For about four days, I thought that maybe I wanted to go to law school. I am not exactly sure why I thought this, but I did. I looked at an LSAT book and got excited about learning the best and fastest ways to do logic puzzles, and thought that actually, the analytical section didn’t look too bad, though of course I’m still fairly slow because that part of my brain is out of shape.

For those of you whose eyes glazed over as soon as you saw “LSAT,” I’ll summarize: I am a nerd and I like logic puzzles and I miss school.

So for four days I’ve looked at law programs (well, a cursory look), studied logic problems like they were my job, and actually felt mildly better about my life. (besides, seeing that Yale Law has a very small number of students and they don’t give grades sounds amazing… wait… the rest of the country thinks so too, that’s why it’s at the top. ok it all makes sense now.)

Today I realized that going to law school would mean that I want to be a lawyer. I don’t really know that I want to be a lawyer. I just want to go back to school, and studying very hard and using the analytical part of my brain sounds fun. Yes, you shake your head, but being in an environment where my brain is challenged sounds perfect. Living in a college town makes me realize how much I enjoy learning, and how much I really want to study again.

But what do I want to study? I want to know what I’m going to do after I finish this hypothetical grad program, and that really is the hang-up. Oh, that and getting into a good/decent program, because I haven’t done anything impressive with my life thus far, but I will eventually need some kind of job to pay off the debt that will be up to my eyeballs once I finish.

Pop Culture and Daily Life

I saw a sign today advertising an upcoming neighborhood hike which said something like

Twilight nature hike

This is how I know that pop culture has an effect on me: I immediately thought does the sign refer to the time of day at which the hike will occur or does it refer to a type of hike –one which might involve vampires in the woods?

Family Time

My brother (looking at the row of small scratches on my right arm): What happened to your arm?

Me: The fountain got me while I was trying to assemble it.

My brother: Oh. I thought you got mauled by a hamster.

Ah, family.

Homeschool Moment

Confession: when I arrived at college my freshman year, I did not know what double spacing was, nor that papers were supposed to be double spaced.

My first paper of college was assigned in Freshman Seminar. The professor handed out the assignment, which included specifics of formatting. I do not now remember the topic of that paper, just that the formatting instructions included that it should be 2 pages in length, 12 point Times New Roman or Arial font, and that it should be double spaced.

I stared at the page in front of me. Double spaced? what on earth was that? I looked around the room, and no one seemed to have any problems with the assignment, and I was too embarrassed to ask what double spacing meant.

Later I sat in front of my computer, staring at the blank page in Microsoft Word, wondering how to begin. It was, after all, my first paper of college. I wanted it to be good. I wanted to be (at least somewhat) eloquent. I wanted… I wanted to know how to double space.

I figured out pretty quickly that double spacing meant to leave a line blank in between each line of text, but knew that there had to be an easier way than hitting ‘enter’ after every line. I glanced surreptitiously at a classmate’s computer and saw that she was typing and did not have to hit enter after every line, but Word cleverly left spaces in between the text for her. At least my hunch about leaving a blank line between text was correct! Now to figure out how Word magically does that for you….

It took a good 20-30 minutes to discover the paragraph setting, but at long last, just when I was almost prepared to admit my ignorance and ask for help, I found it! Oh the triumph of that moment. Now it was time to start the paper, after losing half an hour of my life to the formatting search.

Looking back, it is strange to me that I never learned how to double space in high school, but it is one of those funny things that got left out when I was writing papers in high school English as a homeschooler. I suppose of things to be left out of one’s education, it is a mere blip on the radar. Also, it meant that it would be two years of college before I wrote a paper that rivaled the actual length of my longest high school paper.

My senior year of high school, I studied American history, and my final project was to write a research paper on a president — any president. Since I was the oldest, my paper had to be the longest: 10 pages.

Remember please that I was unaware of the joys of double spacing. Yes, my paper was actually around 20 pages long. This is why I picked Franklin D. Roosevelt as my subject. I wish I could go back and read that paper, in all its single spaced glory.

Big News for the Continent

In breaking news today, scientists revealed that the Eastern Seaboard of North America and the tip of Europe (commonly known as the United Kingdom) have switched places in a rare continental shuffle. While residents of U.S. States had suspected it for some time, it was only today that leading geologists and meterologists went public with the information. This explains the cool and unusually rainy spring and summer the eastern United States has experienced this year, but the reasons for the sections of the two continents to exchange places has not yet become clear. It may be the first test of an exchange program between the two continents to experience other weather patterns–top scientists are working even now to discover more details about the fascinating switch. We will update you as soon as we have more news, including the latin scientific name for the continental shuffle which is currently under discussion.

Head Colds and Gilmore Girls

Having a cold in the summer is no fun. Colds at any time are no fun, but a cold in the summer is almost offensive. In the winter I expect to get sick a time or two, but summertime is not for illness, especially one that sounds like it came straight from January — what else would be the point of calling it a “cold”?

So I have an unseasonal illness, and with that comes many hours of sitting on the sofa, hoping that my body will fight off the germs soon and go back to normal. While I’ve been reclining on our gold sofa (I don’t think one can call a gold piece of furniture a couch), I’ve been watching episodes of Gilmore Girls. I have decided that the show may actually be some form of drug, because it is addicting. It is so easy to stick in a DVD, push play, and watch for hours. My brain will probably rot and fall out any moment. Why are tv shows so addicting? It’s so easy to slide into the world of witty dialogue innumerable pop culture references and shake my head at the train-wreck decisions the characters make of their lives….

Surely that 1000 mg of vitamin C will make a difference in the duration of this atrocious head cold? Maybe that, the fluids I’ve been constantly consuming, and the many hours of sleep I hope to get tonight will work their magic by 9.00am tomorrow. We shall see.

Of Pipes and Plumbs …er, Plumbing

This weekend my roommates and I experienced one of the worst things that can happen to one’s kitchen: a clogged sink. Actually, “experienced” is the wrong tense–we are still experiencing this horror.

I would liken a clogged sink to a natural disaster. Think about how often you use your kitchen. Even if you go out to eat, you still use plates and cups and silverware a good bit, and if you cook food, you use pots and pans and spatulas and bowls. The kitchen is a central place in the home, and a clogged sink throws the entire house slightly off kilter.

Saturday and Sunday we tried several forms of Drano and super-intense-heavy-duty-drano-ish substances. Monday morning it was decided that a test run was in order, so someone started the dishwasher. The dishwasher accordingly filled up with water and swished it around and did whatever dishwashers do to clean kitchenware. The trouble came when the water needed to drain so the contents could dry. The water had to go somewhere, and the pipes were apparently not an option, so the next best option was the kitchen floor. Ah the joy of stumbling into the kitchen on a Monday morning to find water dripping from the front of one’s appliances.

Apparently all our efforts of the night before did nothing to solve the problem. Whatever is in our pipes scoffs at our chemicals and seems resolute in its decision to remain in our plumbing.

Meanwhile, the rest of the kitchen is a mess. Dishes are piled high, and the cabinets are nearly emptied of dishes and silverware. Without the ability to wash them in the sink or dishwasher, we are severely handicapped, giving the room a distinctive disaster feel. It is amazing how quickly a room goes from clean to chaotic. I pray the plumber makes an appearance in short order.