seven is a good number // a self indulgent entry

it's time to channel all my energy and heart into studies and life here at brown. since spring break, i've been floating around either out of happiness or confusion, and now it's time to descend back to earth. i feel a little sad tonight but i don't know why; maybe it's that feeling of stepping off that rainbow and realizing that on the ground there are so many small earthly anxieties and disappointments to deal with... trying to get over these. no person or event deserves to make me feel sad.

so aside from that classes are fine (except i got a B on city politics midterm, yikes). japanese and english are both sailing along smoothly; actually, i've been lulled into complacency because those two subjects are going well. my English professor was very kind, pulling me aside during seminar break to congratulate me and also to tell me about the opportunities in the seminar to work with poetry. this memory makes me smile because i was touched, and i find it a little funny that he would assume that one piece of work could be so self-defining. i guess english allows its students to imbue parts of themselves into the work, much like drama and literary arts. we eventually carve out our spheres of interest and attempt to become specialists.

this is all self-indulgent contemplation :), but i do have to seriously start thinking about my focus areas for graduate study. in the statement of purpose, i only listed novelists because prose is more in line (no pun intended, hahahaha!) with my potential dissertation topic. but i have always loved poetry. it's condensed hence a little easier :P, it allows you to walk away with memory-friendly lines inscribed in your heart, and one gets to talk about things like half-rhymes and chiasmas and rhythm. actually, it was a poem we read in grade 9 which made me love literature in the first place.... Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'. (Gray coincidentally also went to Pembroke College!)

some friends may have heard me say that i went into English over a boy (half true - oh he eventually went to Oxford to read English. he also turned out to be gay), but it was ultimately Gray's poem which pulled me in. after i received the news about Oxford, one of the first things i did after getting home from the mail room was to read through the poems which have inspired me throughout senior year: Donne's A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts and Stephen Edgar's The Secret Life of Books. please look these up when you have time. the last one is the most accessible, the second one only makes sense if you read up on Ovid's story of the fall of Icarus and look at the painting Breughal, and the first... well, let's just say that i have been kept sane by reading Donne's poem about once every two weeks. it's a poem which almost makes me happy that i am geographically far away from loved ones.

//
* an amusing moment: today i asked WS how much he missed me, and he indicated with his thumb and index finger a distance of about three centimeters. :( that little?, i asked. (i had expected him to fling out his arms and say THISS much). he smiled and said, did i tell you the scale? :) and then what could have been a romantic interlude quickly became a lesson in what nanometers are. they are apparently one thousandth of a micrometer which is one thousandth of a millimeter which is one thousandth of a meter. yay, so missing is a constant, and sometimes rather painfully so, but i guess hopefully one day it will go away.