my heart is a glorious machine;

I've been thinking about this for several days, especially since I've been digging through colleges again and trying to understand how I can fit the things I want so badly to study into one interconnected whole. So, here it is:

I want to major in Story.

Watching this beautiful, beautiful video from Ukraine's Got Talent clinched it for me -- because this is a kind of storytelling that I have never seen before and don't really know how to describe. But I know that it's powerful. I know that it hurts and sings like steel and banners in the wind. And I love that. I love that there are so many ways to tell stories to one another, so many different ways to communicate our experiences, our ideas, or hopes, our imaginations. I've thought a lot about Story lately, because when you take all of the things that I love and set them together, that is what they are. Film, mythology, music, dance, novels, graphic novels, folklore, television, poetry, fanfiction, journalism, history, psychology, philosophy, urban legends, photography, drawing with brushes and pencils and chalk and sand, sociology, education. Everything. Story. Whether it's how you tell a story, how you listen to someone else's story, or how you learn to understand a story -- that's what they are. This is why I love public radio -- because they tell me stories, which is better and more real and more human than any of CNN's or Fox News' scandal-mongering. (I remember, after the earthquakes in China, an NPR journalist trying to describe the things she was seeing, and finally sobbing so hard she couldn't even speak. That was empathy and love, and it hurt. It got to the heart of things far better than the endless barrage of cold photographs on television, spoken over by comfortable, coiffed newscasters. This journalist cared about the story, about the people. And she cried. So I did, too.) 

So this is what I want to study. I want to study different kinds of storytelling, and I want to study different kinds of stories, and how to understand them and transform them and combine them. I want to study how to work with people and teach them to tell their stories, and how to listen to their stories when they tell them, and how to help them understand their own stories. I want to study how different kinds of stories affect each other. How mythology affects history. How poetry makes us brave. How stories and truth get all tangled up. How sometimes Story goes deeper than truth, illuminates it, is it. I want to understand how stories give us -- everybody us -- a voice. I want to study how different kinds of stories can bridge each other, how to find the best format for the kind of story you want to tell and who you want to tell it to and why. How to use stories to facillitate change, to show love, to further understanding. This is why I want to be a librarian (and a writer and a filmmaker and a musician and an artist and a scholar) -- because it's all about every kind of story and leading people to the stories they need and teaching them how to tell their own, both to other people and to themselves.

And there it is. Dear Emerson/Harvard/Hampshire (my current triumvirate of Schools I Want To Be A Part Of), this is why I want to be in university. I may have sucky math scores, but maybe this helps? (...can you send cover-letters to colleges? do they do much of anything?)

I think that every year in recent times I have been thinking, as one year passes into another, that I am tired. I try to make resolutions, but they tend not to go very well. I hope for every year to be better than the one before it: and in many ways this turns out to be true -- if it's not better, it's deeper, higher -- and yet every better year ends up bearing with it an equal proportion of worseness. This was the year that Kyra stayed with me for a week and we watched Order of the Phoenix late at night on my rooftop, that I spent my birthday in the city falling in love with the skeletons of houses, that I saw Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet play two magical shows, and Patty Griffin & Emmylou Harris & Shawn Colvin & Buddy Miller in a grand hall in Pittsburgh, that my hair stopped being its natural colour possibly forever, that I stayed home alone for several days and skywatched and lit candles and had a lot of bacon, that Alessandra and I (and sometimes Caroline, or Sarah, or Hannah, or Victoria) and I jammed up on her narrow bed in the cold and Watched Things and fell in love with various fictional people and learned "Once More, With Feeling" and Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog by heart -- and then Jonathan moved here and we watched Doctor Who and had NaNo parties and there was music, and I came back to the weird neo-traditional folk that seems to be my musical destiny. And ... I played my first gig. Sort of. And moved into a lovely house, after a great deal of angst. And acquired a job, though I wouldn't put that on a list of beautiful things of which this year was made. And I wrote 50,0016 words in a month, almost entirely by accident.

But of course for all of this I had horrifying new depressive lows, spent half the move sobbing in exhaustion, and all sorts of things went wrong and tangley and horrible and I am still sorting them out. I feel closer and further from humanity at large and fiercely, cynically rebellious against capitalism, and I still don't know what I'm doing. Anywhere.

Instead of making resolutions, which tend to be do more be more and stop eating so blasted much when you're depressed, I have to ask myself: what do I want this year? Well: I want to be alive. I want to be alive every minute. I want to be healthy clean through and finished with abandoning projects as soon as I start them because they're too exhausting to finish. I want to stop being defeated, especially by myself. I want to go to college. I want to hear more live music. I want to work a job that I love. I want to have a better idea of what on earth my novel is about. I want to be a better person in relation to other people. I'd also like to buy more books. In hardcover. And experiment with making ice cream. And buy a laptop. And do things myself, instead of hoping that other people will make them happen. (How I wish I had the resolve to make this last an actual resolution!)

Today: I slept in, but not too much, and spent all morning reading fairly intensely, and eating things, like cereal and chocolate pie, and I went to see Dr DiGilarmo, and acquired candy, and lit up the candelabra and listened to The Baroness straight through, as a kind of farewell, and there's a little thin curve of milky moon out the window, over the church spires and beyond the one stark tree, with a little spark of a star below it, and the sky's blue as the deep parts of the ocean. Soon: I am going to welcome the next year over the threshold with friends and foodstuffs and probably games of poker. Now: Mum and I are making calzones. 

I thank you, o God, for stars and snowfall, seashores, skyscrapers, semi-colons, black ink on white paper, skirts against my ankles, running barefoot to see the moon, bicycling, late-night conversations, papers on foreheads, flickering screens, words & stories, music festivals, kith & kin, a pen in my hand, a warm oven, sunsets and thunderstorms, paintings in halls, baby's laughter, candles in the dark, wide open windows, crimson leaves, worn wooden floors, adjectives, music in my ears and in my mouth, printer's ink, galaxies, October rain, branches hanging over the roof, hope & love & magic; impossible things.

(I thank you: midnight conversations (telephone & Gtalk), hands to hold, shiny new fandoms, love & insanity, banter, discourse and ideas, windows into other worlds.)

I have been cleaning my bedroom today, for it is sorely in need of a good scouring and shaping-up -- or at least I am trying to, but I keep getting distracted by things like the book I was reading and then a library trip because I had books come in and I didn't want to make the librarians hang onto them until Saturday, which is Banui's Official Library Day -- and sometimes when I am in a certain position or I catch a certain smell or angle of the light I remember things.

My house is full of ghosts.

They're nice ghosts, though. It's a very odd thing, living in a house you knew intimately before it belonged to you. It's a strange thing to have the same house you remember, with the carpets and the wallpaper and the same creaking boards, but the furniture is wrong and the people are wrong and the smells are wrong and now that everything's re-arranged even the light comes in differently and the colours are not the same. Sometimes I am standing at the window in my bedroom and then there is this -- ghost -- of me, of yesterday-me, on a fold-out foam chair under the same window, or I'm at the door and there are ghosts of Sarah and I standing awkwardly in the doorway the first time I came here, talking very loudly and excitedly, and how very much younger we were, and what different people. Sometimes there is a ghost of Mrs M stirring something in a cauldron on the stove (she really does use cauldrons, sometimes), or of three of us girls and our mothers sitting cross-legged in the living room discussing literature (and somehow politics always got into our conversations). There are ghosts of days: once we came stumbling through the back door singing, home late from a movie, and tromped upstairs to the little girls' room -- my sisters' room, now -- to tell Mrs M all about it. Once there was a costume party at the church next door (this is the rectory), and someone dug a dress out of the attic for me to wear -- I still have it; it's an old GunneSax dress, and probably used to be more blue than grey, and it looks a bit like an 1840s ball-gown -- and I borrowed Mrs M's makeup and did my hair in the mirror in the hall (which I always liked to peer into; something about that mirror and the lighting of the hall always made me look so much prettier than I do in other mirrors). When I first came here, most of the younger children were running up and down the stairs with wooden pistols and swords, playing something that might have been cowboys or pirates or both. I slept in the attic once, and we watched The Princess Bride on a little television with wonky colour.

It's the nicest house I've ever lived in, although most people would probably think the last house I lived in was better, but that one had no character (except in that it was built by someone who never actually lived in houses and didn't have a family, hence the two kitchens, neither of which really worked the way one kitchen should have, and the ridiculously tiny closets, and the rooms which were all very dark), and this one is a hundred years old and my closet has two or three layers of wallpaper and a stained glass window and in some places paint is peeling which really shouldn't be appealing at all but it is to me. People used to live in this house -- I wonder about them, and what they saw, a hundred years ago, peering out of windows that now belong to me -- and once one of them came back to visit, and she stood in our back-yard and told about how she used to go up to play on the hill, and where her bedroom used to be, when it was hers.

Funny, that the ghosts are such nice ones, and yet I sometimes feel pangs of loss when they come. I don't know what the loss is for -- the Meholicks don't live more than a few miles away now, and I am happier to be in this house than I have been in any other, happy to be living in it and not just visiting from time to time -- but it is there all the same. Perhaps I don't like things changing, except that I am glad about lots of changes, about living here in this house which has lots of light, where the downstairs hall turns gold when the sun sets and in my bedroom there are gold flecks all over the wall and the dresser coming between the shadows of tree branches, where I am close enough to ride all over town on my bicycle, where there are beautiful old trees on either side of the front walk. Perhaps I just want to get into the-way-things-were for a little while, despite them being better now. I don't know. It's raining and I'm going to go read a book.

Well, it's over. Roscoe died around noon today. We were all with him when he went, touching him and loving him and we knew he was loving us. He's always been an astonishingly loving cat -- even when he could barely stand these last weeks he made a point of coming to sit by the table while we ate dinner every evening. We discovered that last night he crept into each of our bedrooms to sleep for a while -- I know he cuddled with me on the bed for half an hour before he moved to the foot of the bed, then to the floor. He must have known he didn't have another chance and wanted to say goodbye to his family. (He didn't want to be an invalid, either -- after I cuddled with him on my bed for a while this morning, I brought him down to be with everyone else and put him on his favourite chair, the one he and Bart -- mostly he! -- have rent to bits with their claws. He lay there for a while, but after about half an hour, when our backs were turned, he tried to stand up and tumbled limply off the chair. After that, we filled his cardboard box -- he's always loved cardboard boxes, and laundry baskets, and other things he's not even supposed to fit in -- with soft cotton from the chair, as it's all tumbling out the back, and settled him down in there.)

I must have sat with him for three hours -- Mum woke me up at eight this morning to tell me that she thought he didn't have very much longer, and we all gathered around and stroked him, but after everyone else drifted off for a while to attend to general morning needs, I didn't leave -- I couldn't, I suppose. He was always my cat, by and large. He picked me, as we often say. Later Mum and Dad and Timmy and Heidi drifted back (Leandra too, after a while -- she was sleeping upstairs but later she wanted her breakfast so Mum went to get her and brought her down), as he worsened -- started gasping for breath, and twitching every now and then. We stroked him and stroked him; every so often we might stop and he would lift his head to look at us. That would drain all of his strength and he'd flop down into his box again. He loved having us near, I know. I'm so glad -- we're all so glad -- that he died in the morning with his family all around him instead of in the middle of the night, or outside someplace where we mightn't be able to find him for a while (he loved hiding under the house, for one thing). Dad was home, too -- he wasn't supposed to be, but his morning school client called in sick, so he didn't have to go in. We held our darling kitty and loved him and reminisced and wept, and took one last photograph of the family -- Dad, Mum, I, Timmy, Heidi, Leandra, Roscoe, and Bartholomew.

Finally, he started gasping for breath urgently -- that went on for a while. He'd gasp and then subside for a while and then give another great gasp. His legs kept twitching restlessly and spasmatically. He hadn't seemed to be in much pain before then -- he'd just been very solemn and sad, as he'd been for the past several weeks. Grotesquely, tufts of fur fell off in a few places -- his skin was seperating, or something; there was blood and it was horrible. There wasn't very much of this, thank God. We kept feeling for his heartbeat and it kept beating more and more faintly until finally there wasn't anything to feel. Mum had shut his mouth, which kept lolling open as he tried to breathe; Dad shut his eyes; Timmy and Heidi and I each held him one last time, and then we straightened his box and later put a cloth over his body. 

I feel very queer; I'm not quite sure what to make of all of the things going on my head and body just now. As I said, I've never watched anybody close to me -- anybody at all -- die before, and even if he was 'only' an animal, he was a very dear friend of our family, very kind and loving and giving even to the end. He was alert almost to the point of death. He just wanted his family with him. I've never seen death before, and I don't know what to make of it. I feel a bit numb, I suppose -- very, very odd, full of things I don't even know how to put names to. Sort of shaky, and quiet, and pulled into myself a bit, I suppose.

It's a rainy day, the sort I like best. Funny, this would be a beautiful, near-perfect day, I think, if Roscoe hadn't died. Dad took Timmy and Heidi and I to the library a while after lunch (I was hungry and yet I couldn't stomach much, so I had toast and orange juice and felt a little better), and that was nice, even if I can't get anything out that Dad does not charitably check out on his own card for me. I am reading one of my books now, another book by Madeleine L'Engle about life and love and living and God and ourselves. (I wish I could meet her. I feel like I know her, a little, and I think we would like each other. We think the same ways about astonishing little things -- about words, about writing, about love, about art, about God -- so many little things, the little things that turn out to be the big things. There are some writers, you know, whom you love to read, and maybe you live in their books sometimes, and maybe they mean something -- but then there are other writers whose writings are bits of you -- they're writers of your heart and they get into your soul and take roost there gently and irrevocably, and something about them is like being home, except it's a home you didn't know was home and it turns out it's more widely and fully home than the house you're living in, or the last house, or even a succession of houses. I've been feeling a lot of that, lately -- finding vivid familiarity, a sense of having been there before, in unfamiliar places. I'm trying to understand what that means, why it is.) All of the books I got were unfamiliar books by familiar authors, which is nice when one needs comfort -- there's always a risk with a wholly new book. You mightn't like it at all. It might offend you in some way; it might present ideas that are much too alien to the way you see the world. It might even, heaven forbid, turn out to be dull. Unconsciously I think I must approach most books this way. Some authors are like friends, though, and with a new book by an old author, you have both the sense of familiarity and the sense of discovery, which may amount to the best of all worlds.

We also went Mother's Day gift-shopping (what, really, Mum, don't look surprised; you know that's why we were gone so long and why we hid those bags straightaway! :D) and Timmy bought all of us chocolates out of his own pocket, which was incredibly sweet of him, and outside smells like rain and green things and there is still a bit of hope glimmering in the corners of the world. I know this, because when we were driving home in our great hulking monster of a van, the sun broke through a cloud or two and streamed down on the road like a benediction.

I am reading A Circle of Quiet (as I said) and it is exactly the sort of book I need right now -- quiet and reflective and serious and tender and wistful and loving. Bartholomew is very nice to have about, too; I can't imagine if we hadn't got him -- imagine a house with no cats at all! He's curled up in one of my dresser drawers now, being obstinately difficult to see in his blackness until he opens his startlingly golden eyes and regards you with the particular sort of haughty hubris that can only be found in the visage of a cat.

The world is very quiet. It's astonishing and odd and terrifying and fascinating and horrible that there was someone who was alive and breathing and moving this morning and now there is nothing left but a shell of flesh and bone and fur. Another mystery of life and time and death. The world brims with mysteries that cannot be solved or really understood, though they've got to be so commonplace that we don't often remember that they are questions without answers.

I'm glad my bedroom is clean, for once, with the bed made (it had ceased to be a suitable atmosphere for reading; I had to clean it, and I have spent the past three days doing a lot of daydreaming, thinking, listening, and being -- it's been oddly solemn). Outside is grey and also bright; I have the windows flung open and the breeze comes in and wends its way around every now and then. I have pale light coming in the window onto my pillow (I moved my pillow from one end of the bed to the other, so now I wake with the sun on my face, and when I am lying on my back I can see the other window with all the brilliant green of tree curtaining it) and onto my book. The world's shifted position. (A thunderstorm has started; the world out the window is a frightening, manic shade of green. Thunderstorms always seem to me like the world cracking and crumbling and remaking itself over again.) I'm not quite sure what to do about that, but I am feeling as if someday everything's going to be all right.

I haven't even got time for the checking of the f-list today on account of putting off the internet in order to read all afternoon, visiting Leandra, and staying up late watching a Woody Guthrie documentary with my father. Oh, dear; eventually I am going to make up for all of this neglect, really. But I need to write this: you'll see.

When Mum and the siblings and I were at Goodwill on Saturday, we found a book by Madeleine L'Engle about her marriage, which neither Mum or I had read, but we love Madeleine L'Engle--I have for years, since I read A Wrinkle in Time at nine and went on to read other things; she's one of the only writers I know who can write about faith organically in a novel, organically and beautifully and eloquently, without it feeling like a bit of lace frill sewn on at the end. I don't think that people intend to write faith so badly, or intend to write it in the awkward way they often do; it's just that it's so difficult: I haven't managed to do it, and most people who do come across as telling a lesson and it's what people remember about their books, that they had Christianity in them. L'Engle isn't like that--she has metaphysical bits on Christianity in novels the way people often have metaphysics in novels, and it's so natural and true and poignant. And yet her books aren't unaccessable to non-Christians. 

Which is all quite beside the point, actually. We bought the book. It's called Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, and it documents Madeleine L'Engle's relationship with her husband Hugh, but the centre, the core of the story is Hugh's struggle with cancer much later in life--it's woven into the reflections on the early days of the relationship until it has become the absolute story. And it's so--beautiful and tragic and tender and wise. The book is. The thoughts, the ideas, the stories and pains and joys and how L'Engle writes about them and what she writes about them--it's the sort of book that one has to recover from afterwards; you come out of it slowly, blinking at the brightness of the light, and you are very, very quiet for a few minutes afterwards, because you don't want to leave it, and because you have so much to ponder and to understand. (This is why I like Madeleine L'Engle, by the way.) I sat very still, wanting to know that kind of love, and that kind of trust, and faith, and strength, and wanting to be able to make others feel them as if the sorrows and joys belonged to them--if I can't do that, then I can't be a writer. I took a walk. It's Spring, as you have no doubt heard, and I love early evening, all pale and sharp-smelling and quiet and still, so I walked around the neighbourhood in the chilly March air and thought, not just about what I'd read, but everything, everything that there was to think of, because this is what walks do. (I like that kind of solitude--it's very rich and full and intuitive and I hardly feel alone in it. It feels like being near to something, and I love my long bicycle rides--when they're not in abysmal weather!--when I can think and exist as much as I please so long as I watch for traffic. I can't quite express it. There is a sort of communion, perhaps with thought, perhaps with God; perhaps I am more open to everything.) 

I don't know what it is that I am aiming to get to, in all of this verbosity, but this was one of those books, you know? It carves out a little space inside you and fits itself in. wanderlightasked, a while back, about books that have changed your life. I meant to answer but didn't get round to it because I didn't know how to say it. I think that most books burrow inside of me and put down roots, but I can't always see the repercussions. Some are more important than others, sometimes because of what they mean--Patricia MacLachlan's Baby was already a very personal book to me, and then I found myself re-reading it when Baby Jabez died, and the thoughts in it made more sense than they had even before. And some books climb inside you and make themselves at home, carve yourself into a slightly different shape so that you fit into the world differently. You can't explain the difference, but you feel it (or smell it, or taste it--you could talk just as easily of those, because it's a sense, but it's not one of the ones we are used to). Sometimes you want to be more, greater, fuller, and you want God and people and love and joy and pain more closely than you thought you did before. 

How does one do that, with only words? I want to know how. I want to reach into people and pull out words and set them in front of them: I want to reach into myself and pull out words and set them in front of people who have never seen me, but they recognise the words. I suppose I have to live first, gather up some experiences and knowledge along the way, because I can't write if I don't know about things. Perhaps, then, love itself is the key to art?

2006 is nearly over; to the grave with it, I say. I've had enough. I'm quite ready to wipe the slate clean. Preferably with wire-wool and disinfectant. 

I've had my triumph, though, I reckon, but I can't think of this year without seeing Baby Jabez's makeshift grave in my mind, and Dad's office empty and the walls painted over, and sometimes it seems that the world is so thin and sharp and fragile, and I might cut myself on the bits of it, and yet other times it feels so vast and wonderful and also very strange, but not--quite--awful. 

You've had your glory moments, Banui, you stupid git; you know you have: Virginia Beach, being swept out of all that mad aftermath into a sort of dream world (even if your CD player did die from sand inhalation) and romping with midenianscholar; standing on that rooftop with the dim purple thin-sharp-smelling softly glowing city below you and the wind pulling the water from your skin. You've had glorious bicycle rides and those magic Saturdays cosied up with quilt and cocoa and chocolate and Neil Gaiman for the very first time, and that burning October, kicking up leaves in the road, and you are living in a hundred-year-old rectory: what could be more romantic than that? You can finally really call your musical tastes eccentric, you've sung in public twice, you've got several songs, words and music, to your name (even if you only wrote the lyrics to two of them), your writing voice is finally distinctive, you've got a fountain pen, you've got a kitten, you're wallowing in fandoms, you've got the best friends in the universe, and somewhere, even if you're having difficulty lifting the curtains, there is a God who loves you tremendously. Don't be daft. Sometimes, life is a marvellous thing. And grief and pain and struggle might be--oh, like all the rubbish you've got to put into soil in order for things to grow, or like, perhaps more aptly (even though you've stolen this one), the waves that smooth out driftwood into something beautiful and unusual; you've got to learn to ride them, is all, or learn how to float, or breathe, or something, and maybe the trick is that you haven't got to do your own breathing; maybe that's the only reason anybody ever gets to shore. 

Here's to a new year, with--so far--no mistakes in it.

but tension is to be loved
when it is like a passing note
to a beautiful, beautiful chord

Well, I suppose things have gone rather well, considering. In a fit of angst and burning sleeplessness, I cleaned my bedroom before collapsing into bed at two am. I am discovering that I can only ever clean the thing if I am in a very bad mood or it is very late at night: if both elements are present, there's no stopping me, I suppose. Slept in, and we had a large and late breakfast--coffee cake, banana bread, oatmeal cakes (bread cakes, not sweet cakes; splendid stuff), fruit; watched the parade (I don't know why I watch it; it's so commercialised and full of pop singers I want to strangle--I suppose it's a Happy Childhood Memories sentimentality, except that we didn't get a television until I was nine), and spent most of the rest of the day cooking. I am, apparently, the dessert maven: I was in charge of pie (pumpkin) and gingerbread (my idea; I was craving it), and it did feel nice to keep busy. But I missed the bustle and warmth of last Thanksgiving--it was the first time in years we'd spent it with anyone, with the exception of the year my uncle dropped in, and he's not, er, always the best of company. I remember all of us sitting around the table--our neighbour and her two children, a friend of Mum's, Mum's father and his wife, and us--and talking, and there was this weird, potent sense of community. I miss that. I miss that a lot. It all seems to have dribbled away since last year--our sense of community with the people around us. A number of them have stuck closer, but a lot have quietly drifted away, and I'm so tired of that.

So, we baked and cooked and cleaned and played music, and it was nice and peaceful and sort of lovely, but I can't forget that image of looking up from my plate of pie in the living room to watch the snow falling delicately out the window; it felt a little odd to be preparing all of this food for the five of us. Blimey, I'm coming out negative. It hasn't been negative. It was a good day. It's just late, and I'm sleepy, and I read a bad review of something I liked and those sorts of things always upset me even though they shouldn't. We cosied up and and read our Thank-You Box, which is our personal holiday tradition--all through the month of November, we write notes to each member of the family and God in thankfulness for something: serious things, like Mum thanking God for baby Jabez, even though we had him such a short time, and silly things--Dad thanking Him for cherry vanilla ice cream. It's very sweet to find what it is that your family members appreciate about you--it's somehow more special than Christmas gifts, in a way.

And I suppose when we've got people over, I can't do silly things like wear my lacy white Jane Austeny gown to dinner. :)

Now there's the pressing question: I am thankful for...what? Loads of things, in the back of my mind, most of which I can't remember. I suppose I'm thankful for chocolate, and autumn, and the colour blue, and candles, and hot cocoa, and rain, and love, and commas, and my fountain pen--silly, wonderful things. I am potently thankful for fandoms this year, actually--fanfiction is, as usual, affecting my life in odd ways. (I think I may have exorcised a few demons in the writing of The Wise and the Lovely, and I've also got to know several people through the fanfiction world--again!--and, blimey, I'm actually thrilled with what I'm putting out these days. I feel silly saying anything about my work, but I know it is different from what other people write--I am saying different things (usually) in different ways, and I am having fun with it, too!) I'm so glad for my beautiful hundred-year-old house, and riding in wind and rain (and glom of nit, sometimes, though I haven't got any snow yet) to the library and the chocolate shop and guitar lessons, and I love meeting with my co-op girls, and I have such splendid parents, and I have wonderful friends. Egad, I love you lot. I don't know if you understand how much you mean to me.

And you know what? There is some bit of me that is intensely thankful for even this hell of a year.

I am also quite thankful for gingerbread, and pie, and whipped cream--and grasshopper pie ice cream, although we haven't got any.

Er. Yes. I am going to bed. Don't scold!


Also: NEW LAYOUT. (Squee!) Because I found someone who does S2 layouts, and I have sorely missed making myself headers.