my heart is a glorious machine;

Cross and tired and want to go to bed with a cosy book. Yesterday was (mostly) quite good; today was, predominately, not nearly so much.

We spent quite a lot of yesterday out shopping, because I have been desperately in need of some respectable-looking jeans for a very long time and pay-day had just happened for people who are not me and are still in charge of my pants. There was some Goodwillage, at which, exactly as I predicted, I found nothing -- trousers are the only things I have never had any really good luck with at thrift shops. Ever. I have never found that serendipitiously perfect pair, and certainly not the ones which fit me like a (pleasantly corduroy) dream. All of their jeans are what I would call "grunge jeans" -- very blue lighter washes, and the only ones that ever look as though one could dress them up with a nice blouse and a pair of heels are, inevitably, about a size .5. I did find a very nice warm nightgown, however, which was another thing I am in some need of.

I haven't mentioned my old jeans, have I? They've gotten to be quite the disaster. Finding trousers that fit me attractively is so accursedly difficult that we only undergo the process about once a year, especially as we are nearly always forced to buy them new. These are, of course, last year's pair -- and they have somehow grown since December -- grown quite a lot. I am sure I can't have lost nearly that much weight. They are always in danger of falling off, they are scuffed and drab and limp-looking, the bottoms are terribly frayed, a hole's started on the side of one leg, and, strangest of all, they smell peculiar. It isn't exactly a bad smell -- not a body-sweat smell, nor a these-pants-haven't-been-washed-for-months smell, but -- strange. Sort of like detergent, like trousers you wash in the machine and then leave them to dry on their own. Except musty. I would keep washing them and washing them, trying to get the scent out, but it wouldn't come out. And anyway they had stopped looking respectable long ago, traitorous things.

Anyway, we went to Ross Dress For Less, which has lots of very nice new quality clothing for less mind-boggling prices. I bypassed the regular trouser section and went straight for the clearance rack and managed to pull off about six pair of trousers to try on. Heh. Look, I haven't had a good pair in a while.

So, the first thing I discovered: skinny jeans? Kind of look fabulous on me. Who knew? Certainly not me. I sort of liked the idea of them -- I have a lot of very -- fluffy is the wrong word -- blouses, babydoll tops and peasant tops and the like, which would certainly benefit from a narrower jean, but I am naturally quite pear shaped, and I thought a narrower jean would only make me look ridiculously more so. But hey, contrary to popular belief I do look out for trends if they are pleasing to my aesthetics. I can't help it. I'm very silly. So I tried on a pair and discovered that they are bizarrely slimming and besides which compliment flats very nicely. So I have a lovely new pair of skinny jeans -- I think the official colour term is charcoal, but they have the tiniest hint of purple to them, which pleases me -- and another pair of regular dark wash jeans (which came to about twenty dollars, total). It is the first time in several years that I have had two pairs of presentable trousers to alternate between.

Also, Claire's was having a sale with quite a lot of fabulous items, including button earrings, apple jewellery, and turquoise lace not-gloves, for a dollar apiece. My new paycheck was very happy to accomodate.

Then we ran into a friend of Mum's and ended up talking for a very long time. And then I ran to the library, absurdly admiring my jean-clad reflection in the shop windows along the way, and returned and collected books in the seven minutes before it closed.

Today, around two-thirty, I called my job to find out my hours: I had realised that I didn't have any on record for this week and didn't really know who to ask. It was the beginning of the week, you know? So it ought to be a good time. I ended up being on hold (I don't even know; I think the manager was out and they had to go find her?) for -- ten minutes, at least? -- and finally a woman came onto the other end and said, "Um, actually, you're working today, and you were supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago."

Says I: "ULP."

(Truly, Reader, I was mortified.) 

Mum rushed me over, and I was very cross and unhappy, because I wanted a ruddy nap so very badly, after having got to bed very late previously, and I want to impress my new employers, not make stupid embarrassing mistakes that force a lot of people to shuffle things around and accomodate me. (Mum and Jonathan tried to console me a bit -- I was, thankfully, not in the hysterics I likely would have had a year ago -- and it did make me feel a bit calmer, but still. I am still quite ashamed. Certainly, no-one told me anything about how I was to find out my hours, although I should have asked, and certainly should have asked Saturday, or even Friday night, leaving.) So my shift was only about two hours this time, and I made exactly two sales (drat you people! come on, let me use the cash register with its wonderful clicks and dings and whooshes!), and then I got to learn how to close up again -- I do enjoy putting up the curtains, with their hooks and zippers and padlocks on the zippers, and counting out the money is horrible in a mathematical way, but nice in a texture way, although when one realises exactly how much cash one is casually flipping through it can sometimes be faintly overwhelming.

However: Person In Charge who was showing me yet again how to close up was exactly the sort of person who puts me most on edge -- one of those perpetually negative, abrasive people who makes you feel that no matter what it is that you are doing, you are most certainly doing it wrong. And I know that's just how her personality displays itself, and she doesn't really think I am the scum of the earth -- she even admitted some of her own mistakes on things like counting out the cash and such, presumably to make me feel more confident -- but I still felt -- squashed, and insignificant, and very very young, and after such a ridiculously collossal mistake, too. And of course when I am nervous I make still more mistakes. At least I didn't knock anything over, but by the time I was picked up I just wanted to curl up and go to sleep. Only we went to BiLo instead, so Jonathan (who never ended up getting dropped off -- he rides with us to church and usually stays the afternoon -- and instead went with my mother to Wal-Mart?) could fetch milk, and Mum tortillas and parmesan and (at my begging) chocolate mint ice cream; and then there was a Goodwill sale, and then we came home and I holed up and read a book and it was marvellous. (I am, by the way, madly in love with Eva Ibbotson. Why has no-one ever forced me to read her before? A Countess Below Stairs was one of those marvellous, good-hearted books, with such fantastic writing and characterisation and Britishness -- the sort of warm, bright book you wrap around yourself as a shawl. I started reading it over again right away -- it was exactly the sort of book I needed after feeling so desperately out of sorts.) 

And then I wrote a thousand words. And now I want very much to go to bed.

I should be writing about the general hobnobbing and adventures that have been going on lately, but I tried and they're so muddled together in my head (quite comfortably, sort of like my bookshelves) that I can't quite figure out which pieces go where and it's too late at night to bother, so I shall just set down some pertinent facts.

So, Christmas.

Christmas Eve my senses all woke up. I'd been feeling as though I'd been walking through gauze, and suddenly it wasn't there anymore. I baked cookies and spun round and round the dining room singing.

So, yeah, this is me, back from holiday. REALLY EXCELLENT HOLIDAY. Will discuss this later, but there are much more pressing matters at hand.



Like I said, proper post about more of the things I liked and didn't like later, but I have very very very late dinner to find.

I'm a bit overdue on this one, but -- comment and I will name you 3 interests from your list, and 3 userpics, and you explain them in your own post, asking the same of your f-listers.


And today was a good day. I bicycled to my guitar lesson in spectacular weather, thereby getting some much-needed exercise (and sun!), and then I stopped by Rosie's Bookshop on my way home and was redeemed for That One Time when they had two copies of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and I didn't purchase either of them because there was a new copy on the shelf and it is now mine (!!!). (I will have to post about the book when I am finished re-reading because it is amazing and possibly the only book that comes close to being comparable to Tolkien in any substantial way.) I also found The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (!!!) and a new copy of Anne of the Island (mine has pages missing, and the book itself might actually have finally got itself lost, as it is not in my bedroom nor the box with M-authored books in the basement), and got a little sack of chocolates, and made cupcakes when I got home (cupcakes that were not sour).

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?

i.  Last night, lady_moriel inadvertently forced me to recall in vivid detail the worst novel I have ever read. She doesn't know it, because the really long comment I wrote got eaten by Vox (and what I was replying to didn't have anything to do with really bad novels), but, oy, I am dying to recap what I remember about the book, because it was so bad that it was really brilliant. I hunted it up on Amazon somehow, despite having forgotten the title and only remembering the female protagonist's truly terrible name (Volanna. VOLANNA. I kept imagining her with whiskers.), and it is all flooding back to me in great, nauseating waves. I really am going to have to recap it. I almost want to read it again, so that I can piece together what I remember about The Mysterious Child From Nowhere (Except Totally Not) and "some stars and planety stuff crashed! Let's betroth our infant children right now!" and The Really Buxom Girl From The Bakery(?) And Her Scheming Mother, and the Really Hawt Blacksmith-Except-Not Protagonist, whose physical fantasticness had to be mentioned at least five times per chapter, and the Awkward Prophecy, and The Evil Bloke Volanna Is Supposed to Marry (look, rule of thumb, do not promise your children to people with names like Lomar. It is just a bad idea.) and, oh blimey, the heavy-handed morality lessons and jarring references to the Old Testament (in a fantasy novel, and it wasn't historical fantasy, either). I also found out that there are sequels, which a very sick and disturbed part of me also wants to read, and egad I need therapy now. 

ii. builtofsorrow (in particular) will be interested to know that Simon Winchester, author of the fantastically titled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (!!!!), has written another book about our beloved OED, by the name of The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. (I couldn't help but think forty-two! it's forty-two! over and over again, because...well, because.) I checked it out from the library this afternoon and can hardly wait to read it. 


iv. I totally forgot to add to the Deathly Hallows release date squee, which I am definitely having, but it is a lot more mild than it will get later. I mean, when we start getting spoilers, or a book cover, or maybe when summer is getting nearer, I am going to be a lot more frenetic in my fangirly glee. Right now, it's mainly just 'oh, nifty, now I know where to direct the squee'. (Still, the next time I visit Waldenbooks and there is a preorder sign on the desk, I am going to skip joyously. Again. Er. Did I mention that a while back, before there was a title or a release date, my local Waldenbooks was advertising preordering, and I scurried behind some shelves to skip gleefully, and then skipped, beaming widely, through the mall, cackling to myself?)

I pulled up Amazon to look for something else and impulsively clicked on the Deathly Hallows advertisement (ad-VER-tis-ment). There was a page of forum discussions, one of which was titled 'shipping' and had forty replies. I thought, 'oh no, what are they bickering about now?' and clicked it out of morbid curiosity.

It was about shipping, all right. The sort involving boxes and the kinds of dates made of numbers and UPS. Nary a romantic pairing in sight.

Fandom has ruined my mind.