A Reprise

I'm reading an 1893 manual on sewing. I must be crazy. I cannot use this information. The tools sold now are completely different. But I absorb all details about this time period like a sponge, as I do with in vitro test procedures, which is a totally unrelated thing, but this is what I have always done, loving unrelated things indiscriminately. And I am starting to believe that one day I will be a scientist again. Today I rode the elevator and did not feel nervous. I asked myself on both trips if I felt nervous, but my mind felt bored with being nervous about the elevator. I challenged myself so much as to look out through the glass window going up and down, and I still did not feel nervous. I don't expect to be believed, but this is a triumph. I actually visualized for a moment that it could be this way for me in a plane, actually up there, looking down, and not afraid, at all. I am not there right now at all, but I actually see how it could happen right now. That is good be

What is it about ten years ago? I keep returning to my sixteenth year, with small recollections, longing and disbelief. I am listening to Enigma lately, and my Eden album, and both really evoke ten years ago for me. In retrospect we understand what our society was about, and I find myself nostalgic for ten years ago. That was a time when we were becoming interested in holistic care, aromatherapy, simplicity. I remember going to Sam's Club a lot, though why a three person household would need to buy in bulk, I still don't understand. But Sam's Club had a lot of books and music. You know what else I miss? DOS, Windows 3.1 and CD-ROM educational tools. I spent hours learning about composers from my CD's. The Internet is so distracting, and its more cerebral material is unengaging, so I find myself not learning as much as I used to. I love my laptop so much, and I am starting to have the kind of relationship with it that I had with my desktop 486. Basically that entails kno

An email with pictures from the Australians... Dad's Tomato Garden Journal... It's almost too much to take this morning, to remember the beauty that is around me. I didn't go out yesterday, I was taken with an urge to sew, and I'm so glad I did. I regained my confidence. I made a few mistakes, but I feel inspired to do more. I really want to acquire some dupioni silk for my work. I love the texture of it.

I miss Ophelia, and the others, but lately I have been thinking specially of Ophelia. She has possibly the strongest personality of my dolls. She is what I make her in a sense, tragic and death-like, but what makes her so real is her tolerance to the persona I give her, and her additional true personality, which is considerably more free-spirited, even wild. Really an opposite to the other. It comes out in the photographs I take of her, which never have turned out perfectly. The last set particularly exemplified this. She was far easier swinging on the barbed wire fence than wilting tragically against the post.

Look! It's my pretty lady smiling and signing autographs. She smiled at me and was so kind. I was so nervous, a major dork, but so fun, and worth the four less hours of sleep, worth so much more, really. I have much better pictures on my Sony.

This is an image of Melora Creager, lead of Rasputina. Rasputina concert.

I'm in one piece, but I feel stressed. Why do people have to drive so fast? Someone was cutting me off on my last exit, on an overpass, and those are my least favorite.

I am hearing the Ghost trio for the first time apart from my Immortal Beloved soundtrack. The piano is being played with an insensitivity that is a crime to Romantic music but... I did not know the song was so long. It is still going, and I must have a complete version of this song. It goes on and is even more tragic than I dreamed. Note to self, find this. I am bearing up really well today, but things have been getting on my nerves too easily. I should have taken more quiet time this morning, I am not being as good a person as I should. I had toast with chocolate on it for lunch as well as rice shao mai. I could not have had a better lunch.

I can't put myself into my work just yet. There are too many things lingering around me. I am thinking of the 1968 Romeo and Juliet, and my poor heart is taken with sensibility for my sixteenth year. It is one decade since, and perhaps that is why sixteen has been so much with me the past few months. I am not longing for the past, but I want sunlight and long moments to dream as I did then. I will work, because I know there is no other agreeable path to noon and Lucrece, but I am dying a little with this longing for high passion and reverie. Shelley, you are not far from me nor are my other dreams. You are the merest thought, just a moment away.

I have been reading Viktoria's Dance for the past two weeks and am over half done. To think of it, it goes so slowly, and yet it is more writing work than I have done in months, this precious lunch hour I guard so jealously. I am languid with despair to work today away from our new home, and the only thing keeping me alive is the vast amount of things I must do which don't mercifully, require a lot of thinking. When I woke up this morning at six the sun had not yet risen. I still can't believe how the sky looked- feverish and bright. I never knew how it looked when the sun rose. What can I say? Oranji no tayou. I must take a morning walk down to the woods and see these mysteries more closely. I am, as I mentioned, in despair and yet in rapture and my anticipation of going home this afternoon is insurmountable.

Take me away.

My apologies to the author of Possession: the plot device is built around a letter that a graduate student finds pressed in a book belonging to a pertinent poet. I had declared that device implausible and weak: if the poet was so renowned, surely the pages of his books would have been studied already if nothing for his pencilled notes in them. However recently a letter was discovered in Texas A&M's Cushing Library written by Christina Rossetti to a friend: a poet around whom the woman poet in Possession must have been inspired for her Pre-Raphaelite connections and feminism, if not her secretive personal life. I can't believe something like this was found, and in just those circumstances: anyone could have found it, even me. I never had much doing in the Cushing Library because obtaining one of their books is a laborious process and I don't like reading under a watch, but my interest is definitely renewed. The book is still there. Maybe I can see her letter next time I

"If you think driving is a race you have to win, remember: the winners are those drivers who reach their destination safely."

Really. I wrote Victoria's Dance a year before my creative writing class made me self-conscious of my extensive follies. But Victoria's situation really calls to me right now, almost like someone else wrote it. She's an in-between, not quite privileged, not quite not. Half of people treat her like a servant and the other half, interesting, eccentric people, treat her as an intellectual equal. It feels like my life. At that point in my life I was just conjecturing on what the world beyond my tower room was like. I wrote this overlooking campus. I was not that far off on my guesses. The professors can say what they will. I think I was right on it.