Here I am, back in Hershey, PA for another break. I am having a beautiful time sitting indoors and reading and sleeping. Funnily enough, even though I came up here with Eb and Emily and Michael and Ryan, I've felt that I've gotten the alone time that I've been needing all semester. This has been such a crazy semester, what with the play and not enough sleep and dropping classes and all. Then last week I got myself into situations where I had to watch the extended edition of The Two Towers twice. That thing is freaking long, and in my opinion, if they really wanted to improve it they should have cut out Osgiliath and Arwen altogether. Especially Arwen and her see-through night clothes. What a ho. So, now I'm free from schoolwork and stress and stuff like that, people. I don't know why I feel free from people. Maybe it's just the whole living with so many girls after spending most of my life living with no girls just really wears me out.
As a side note, everyone around me has decided to have a big rubber band fight and I feel rather stuck in the middle of it. I think I need to go shoot somebody.
I have one paper left to write this semester. First it was due on Monday, then today, then Friday. Now it's due next Monday and I, strangely enough, feel a little frustrated. Sure, this is a good thing, but I just want to get the paper over with and even though I know it could be done by Friday I find it highly unlikely since my work expands into the amount of time given to get it done.
You know, however much fire alarms mess up my life, I still kind of like them. Everyone is so tired and kind of cranky, but so half-there that it's hard to be really cranky. It's so amusing to see all these people in their pajamas lying around in odd positions trying to sleep, as Laura Neale astutely put it after the epic three-dorm fire alarm, "It's like carnage, only funnier."
On top of that this morning was terribly surreal by all accounts. I slept the whole time, accidentally, and that was weird, but even weirder was waking up and hearing about an emu loose on campus and Neal Howard running after it. I knew fog made surreal things happen. Wish I could have seen that, my life would be more complete then.
To make things more surreal I got on iTunes this afternoon to find a new music library called Valhalla. Hope and I have named our room Valhalla (really it's a three room suite). It's been Valhalla for awhile. And I know that this person is not any of the ten people from my room. It's so strange . . . I'm not saying I have any kind of exclusive claim to this name, it's just disconcerting.
There's something about having tea that just makes me feel alive. Tonight I sat expectantly in my room waiting until nine o'clock so I could go down to the Blink and get milk for my tea, but then they didn't have milk. It was terrible, I almost died. Eventually, magically, I procured some milk and so life goes on. I can't drink tea without milk. It is abominable. I would share my reams of poetry upon this subject, but they are not ready for public perusal.
I was just looking at the semaphore alphabet because we started talking about it at dinner. It is very cool and much more organized than I thought. I would suggest that more people at Covenant pick it up, but it wouldn't work because of the fog. We can never see each other at a distance too far to speak.
I just thought I'd say this, because my world was changed last summer when I found out, and I still always forget:
The word "passing" in phrases like "passing strange" comes from "surpassingly." So that means that "passing strange" means strange in the highest degree. I always forget and think it means passably strange or maybe transiently strange, but that last doesn't make much sense . . .
Last night I watched the independent film September 11. It was made up of eleven short films by directors from eleven different countries. Each film was eleven minutes and nine seconds long. I thought it was very interesting that they chose eleven minutes, nine seconds, instead of nine minutes, eleven seconds since the European way to write the date is 11.9.01 as opposed to the American 9/11/01. Anyway, the films themselves varied very much in quality. It started with an Iranian film that brought a child's perspective to things. Then there was an Egyptian film that was very confusing and preachy. You know things are going badly when a ghost of a US Marine appears as the Ghost of September 11 Past. It was like a bad Christmas movie. Other memorable interpretations were a French film with hardly any sound, a Mexican film with hardly any visual stuff, a story of American atrocities in Chile paralleled with the events in New York, and a rather out-of-the-blue American film, by Sean Penn, about an old man and his dead wife and how September 11 brings sunshine and beauty into his life.
I went to see this in order to get my own thoughts about September 11 straightened out. I am way more confused. I thought I would get some kind of international perspective, but I just got a few other people's ideas, some very bitter, some concerned, and some oddly apathetic. I think what I took away from the whole thing is that this affected the world when it happened; it is important . . . I guess, but it's not something to get carried away about. And that's pretty much what I thought when I went into the film. Oh well, it's nice to be affirmed.
It is freaking cold outside! The only good thing about it being cold outside is that I get to stay inside more. And my feet should not be cold, I have wool socks on. Winter is so wrong, wrong wrong wrong. I think I need to make more tea before chapel.
I was distracted from my work in the library the other day by an article in Mythlore, the journal of The Mythopoeic Society called "A Darker Ignorence." I haven't read the whole article yet, since I've been so busy with the play and stuff, but the beginning of it was talking about how Phillip Pullman, prize-winning children's author, was disgusted with C. S. Lewis because he left Susan out of Aslan's Country. Now this started me thinking, because in my childhood I was always a little perturbed about Susan being left out, but the reasons given were quite sufficient--Susan had become more interested in grown-up things and had given up Narnia. Reading Pullman's thoughts on this (see the nice little quote on the side there) made me think about the idea that I have had, and may still have, of growing up as a sin. In the books I read as a child there was usually something wrong about grown-ups (I mean, think about Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, and then there's E. Nesbit's books and Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl). There was always a clear division between the grown-up world and the child world. I see a lot of authors continuing this grand tradition today, Lemony Snicket (of A Series of Unfortunate Events), J. K. Rowling, who doesn't do this with grown-ups, really, but with Mr. and Mrs. Dursley and Muggles in general. I really do think this is a grand tradition and I'll tell you why.
Susan has allowed her mind to be limited by small things, nylons and lipstick. She is focusing all her energy on growing up and she has dismissed Narnia as a childish game. She has limited and darkened her mind. Grown-ups often do this. They have more trouble seeing beyond their world. Children see that there can be more. I don't know why and how, and in a way I think children are losing this now, but authors like Snickett and Rowling and trying to keep this alive. While children can live in more than one world, adults have more solid, more stiff minds. Susan sins because she wants this stiffness and coldness. She thinks this is the life worth living for, but she is chosing an illusion, like the dwarves in the stable. She is chosing an illusion over reality, as Puddleglum refused to do in The Underworld in Silver Chair.
There's a veil between this world and the other world. The sin is to see this veil as a wall or to pretend the other world doesn't exist at all. It is narrow-mindedness that is the sin; it is being easily contented, like the child in the mud. There's so much more, it's like Puddleglum explains, there's a sun, there's another world. King Miraz is a picture of this grown-up narrow-mindedness in Prince Caspian. He wants to pretend that the dryads and naiads and talking beasts don't exist. He refuses to deal with anything outside his world, outside his understanding.
The evilness in growing up lies in closing the mind. Susan has done this. The others have kept their priorities straight, they remember being kings and queens of Narnia. Susan has given up her royalty for this other world and is trying to be a petty, cheap queen with her nylons and lipstick.
I found this article yesterday on CNN.com and I just don't know what to do with it. I mean, talk about the objectification of women . . . I love the quote, "It's dehumanizing to be treated as a plate." I'm not sure what to think though, because it's sad, but it's just so ridiculous it's funny. People talk about how men objectify women, and they do, but women also objectify themselves. These women are just so stupid I have to laugh, I mean what else can I do here, kill someone? I'm not a radical feminist. I don't have the boots.
"For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed."
From Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Ever since the second week or so of getting a blog I knew that I couldn't handle sharing a blog for long. This week I decided that the sooner I got my own blog the less I'd have to leave behind. So here we have it, a blog of my own. A woman must have money and a blog of her own if she is to . . . well . . . I don't know, it just helps me think. So here we have it, A Girl With a Sword! Now I am going to eat dinner.