Ceilings and Sundays

So a toilet in the room above mine broke and now there's a leak through our bathroom ceiling and thus begins my mundane Sunday morning.

Every Time I Sit to Write

...it all comes out wrong. This is draft number three or something, and it's just as self-involved as the first two.

This semester I am undoubtedly, ridiculously, insanely overcommitted. I'm working three jobs, plus the occasional babysitting gig, and I'm also taking an extra fifth class on top of my thesis (I don't know why I thought that was smart).

Needless to say, I have neglected a lot of habits and people that are meaningful to me. But on the plus side, I think I might be getting better at prioritizing tasks, managing my time and doing things from desire instead of obligation.

Maybe.

Beagle or Something

"Beagle or Something"

The composer’s name was Beagle or something,
one of those Brits who make the world wistful
with chorales and canticles and this piece,
a tone poem or what-have-you,
chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one
whose eye lids and sockets have been rashing from tears.
The music occupied the car where
I had parked and then sat, staring at
a tree, a smallish maple,
fire-gold and half-undone by the wind, 
shaking in itself,
shocking blue morning sky behind, and also
the trucks and telephone wires and dogs
and children late to school along Orange Street, but
it was the tree that caused an uproar,
it was the tree that shook and shed,
aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered
I was supposed to have one—for convenience

I placed it in my chest, the heart being away,
and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking,
golden-orange, half-spent but clanging
truer than Beagle music or my forehead pressed 
hard on the steering wheel in petition for release.

by April Bernard, from Romanticism (2009)

Love Love Love

- "Love Love Love" by The Mountain Goats, from The Sunset Tree (2005)

Terror (A Rumination on Sleep Paralysis)

Something truly scary happened to me last night: sleep paralysis.

If you'd like some background, here's a Wikipedia article about it. Basically, sleep paralysis occurs when a person's brain is awaking from REM sleep at a faster rate than her body. She'll wake up and feel unable to move her body, and might even hallucinate.

And that's exactly what happened yesterday.

Hoping to have an early, restful night, I went to bed early and began having strange dreams. I was living in Spain, squatting in a beautiful and somehow abandoned beach house with a bunch of other young people. We went swimming and ran around and had a generally good time. But then everyone had to leave because their visas were up. I was not into the idea of vacating the paradise we'd found, so I decided to stay in the empty house, which quickly morphed into an empty, shambly tenement. I began to get a little nervous, and was in the process of searching the rooms, when everything got really dark so I jumped onto a bed. At this point, I think my mind woke up. And this is where it gets really scary.

I was awake, in my bed, and felt like there was something else in my room. I saw a shadow move across my floor, and then suddenly these claws came up from the sides of my bed and grabbed onto my wrists and ankles. I couldn't move, but I felt like I was violently shaking. Then--and this is the really weird part--it felt was though my bed began to float toward the ceiling. I could've sworn I was four or five feet off the ground. Then I came back down, and was in control of my body once again. Naturally, I reverted to small-child-Claire status and began sobbing and calling my family, who lovingly assured me I was safe (thanks, Dad).

Now, let me be totally clear. I know that this sounds crazy, and I'm entirely aware that it didn't happen in reality, despite how lucid it felt. Pretty soon after I woke up, I realized what had happened (something very similar happened to me when I was about three years old) and that I was okay. What I'd experienced is commonly referred to as hypnopompic hallucination, which is basically a hallucination upon waking. Apparently these episodes are especially common among people who are sleep-deprived, young adults, and those with a history of mental illness. As a kid, I was really into the occult, and I remember once reading about the "Old Hag," a folkloric figure who would come into sleeping victims' rooms at night and terrorize them in their immobility. It scared the daylights out of me, even though I knew it wasn't real. I'd forgotten all about it until last night.

This GIF, courtesy of Reddit, sums up the basic idea of how it felt.

Needless to say, I hope very much that this does not happen again, but I'd be lying if I said I thought it would be as easy to fall asleep tonight...

Sugar Jets

This is an amusing window into the climate of 1950's American pop culture, at least from what I've been told by people who were alive then.

"They make you feel jet-propelled!"

- "Sugar Jets" cereal commercial, 1955

Bananas

I don't think I'll ever feel caught up on sleep.

My laptop is on its last leg and my library books are overdue.

El Table opened on Wednesday, which means a lot of people I love are together in one space again and also that I'm more caffeinated than I was.

This is a banana I ate.

At Seventeen

For what might be a long time, I will associate this song with watching SNL reruns on TV with my mom as a tiny tot.

And also maybe a little bit of crying into my pillow as an angry thirteen-year-old.

But mostly the former.

- "At Seventeen" by Janis Ian, from Between the Lines (1975)

Later, Operator (A Fragment of Autumn)

It's about to be autumn, and we all know what that means: peppy pop music and sad Russian poetry.

-"Later, Operator" by the All Girl Summer Fun Band, from their self-titled debut (2002)

But now for the poetry part.

I first read the below poem in my first semester of college. I was eager and scared and confident that I had the scientific abilities to become an astrophysics major enrolled in late-night labs while also rowing on the crew team at four in the morning and generally adjusting to the Wellesley workload.

Cue a brief fling with insanity, lots of self-doubt, and a very confusing autumn. In the midst of all of this, I was also taking a class about nineteenth-century Russian literature, which quickly became my favorite class. While physics required that I problem-solve to arrive at specific, correct answers, literature let me explore the very subjective and flexible manners in which language intersects emotion. I couldn't understand how people felt entitled to translate Tolstoy, or why English-speakers like myself thought it was okay to read translations.

The point around which I'm circling is that there's something unspeakably empowering about the ways in which language allows us to make sense of the world and ourselves. This feeling, among lots of others, was at the heart of my decision to study writing. While I'm still holding my breath for the post-graduation world, I--perhaps naively--feel confident in my decision, if only because I know I'm a million times more fulfilled writing verse than I could ever be writing research papers about (admittedly incredible) exoplanets.

But that's enough blathering for a day. Here's the aforementioned poem by Alexander Pushkin, who's widely considered to be Russia's answer to Shakespeare. My favorite part of the poem is in stanza six, when Pushkin compares Autumn to a young girl dying of tuberculosis. I don't think it gets more Russian than that.

AUTUMN (a fragment) "What then does not invade my drowsy mind?" -Derzhavin

1 October's here already; the grove already is shaking from bare branches its last leaves; the breath of autumn begins to ice the roadway, the stream still rushes gurgling past the mill, but the mill pond is frozen; my sporting neighbour hurries off with his pack to the far fields. The winter corn suffers his boisterous pleasure, his yelping hounds disturb the forest's slumber. 2 Now is my time. I bear no love for spring: the floods, the mud, the stink - I feel unhealthy, my blood ferments, longing chokes heart and mind. Better harsh winter; then I can feel happy, I love the snows, and then beneath the moon the freedom of a sleigh ride, gliding swiftly, a fresh-faced girl, wrapped in sable furs, giving your hand a timid, passionate squeeze. 3 And what a joy to race across the mirror of frozen ponds with sharp steel on your feet! And the excitement of those winter parties...! But there's a limit; the snow goes on for weeks and months, even a bear at length would suffer from boredom. After all, we can't devote a life to sleigh rides with these young Armidas or moping by the stove behind sealed windows. 4 Ah! gorgeous summer, I would love you, but the heat, the dust, the flies, and the mosquitoes! You torture us; our souls, once rich, grow flat, we suffer like the barren fields, drought-stricken, just longing for some freshness, for a glass - that one thought fills our minds. We miss old winter, and having seen her off with cakes and wine, with ice and ice-cream we recall her reign. 5 People have harsh words for these days of autumn, but, reader, they are dear to me, I love their unassuming light, their quiet beauty. Autumn attracts me like a neglected girl among her sisters. And, to be quite honest, she is the only one that warms my heart. She has her good points; whimsically dreaming and free from vanity, I find her charms appealing. 6 How can I put it? She perhaps appeals as sometimes a young sufferer from consumption catches my eye. Unseen, her death awaits, and without protest, quietly she sickens; she cannot sense the yawning of the grave, but life fades from the lips that still are smiling; a rosy hue still plays around her eyes, today she is alive, tomorrow dies. 7 A mournful time of year! Its sad enchantment flatters my vision with a parting grace - I love the sumptuous glow of fading nature, the forests clad in crimson and in gold, the shady coolness and the wind's dull roaring, the heavens all shrouded in a billowing mist and the rare gleams of sun, the early hoarfrosts, and distant grey-beard winter's gloomy portents. 8 Each autumn's coming makes me bloom anew; my health is well served by the cold of Russia; I feel a new love for the old routines, sleep has its turn, and after it comes hunger; the blood runs light and cheerful through the veins, desires flock in - happy again, and youthful, I'm full of life again - my organism is like that ( pardon my prosaicism). 9 Tossing his mane, my steed carries his rider over the open flatlands, and beneath his glistening hooves he rouses up the echoes in frozen valleys and cracks the ringing ice. But then the short day fades, a fire blazes in the forgotten hearth, now casting a bright flame, now crumbling slowly, while I sit there reading or give my drifting thoughts their hour of freedom. 10 And I forget the world, in blissful peace I am sweetly lulled by my imagination, and poetry awakens in me then; my soul, hard pressed by lyric agitation, trembles, resounds and seeks as if in sleep to surface finally in free expression - and I receive a host of guests unseen, old-time acquaintances, fruits of my dreams, 11 And in my head thoughts spring into existence, and rhymes dance out to meet them, and the hand stretches toward the pen, the pen to paper, and verse comes unimpeded pouring out. So a ship, motionless in motionless water, lies dreaming, then suddenly the sailors race and climb aloft, wind swells the sails, the vessel moves slowly out, bow cutting through billows, 12 and sails away. Where shall we sail to ...?

-Written in 1833, first published in Russian in 1841

A Woman's Place

My favorite part of this video is when Ward Cleaver asks Wally to pass him the asbestos gloves.

-from Season One of Leave It To Beaver (1958)