And limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields

Thursday, while I was hurriedly getting ready to meet up with friends, I noticed a letter on the table addressed to me. I was expecting something (in addition to the usual notices from DSW and Borders that I should go buy more things) but I wasn't expecting what I got.

Inside the envelope was a hunk of grass (I was later informed is genuine Radford grass, from in front of Russell Hall) and a little notecard with my name on one side and this on the other:

Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat;
Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best;
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
-"Song of Myself"

Admittedly, I'm somewhat of a cynic when it comes to things like this.I'm not very good at being wooed. I've never liked chocolate, I prefer to pick out my own jewelry, I think it's silly to send someone dead plants (regardless of how pretty they are), and I have been unnerved by displays of genuine human emotion on more than one occasion. Usually, I make inappropriate jokes that make the other person disinclined to act that way again. When people tell me about the great new guy or girl they just met and how they have magically found their other half--I'm dubious. I don't know why, I just don't think much of this stuff.

Notes like this make wish I could turn down the dube. It was unexpected and sweet and wonderful and I'm completely smitten. I'm also confused. The longer we go on like this, the more confused I will probably get. On the one hand, he thinks to send me leaves of grass. On the other, during our conversation last night he told me how great it was that I was also in graduate school because it means we both get how dating is impossible right now. I have no idea what that means or how the one even relates to the other. Frankly, in the last couple weeks he's gotten more time out of me than my ex-boyfriend did and he didn't have to share me with graduate school. I would argue that the distance makes the dating impossible. But that's the obvious argument.

I guess I'm just worried that I am going to screw this up because I have no idea what it is how how to approach it. I suppose, as before, I'll just have to wait and see.

This short blog can be made longer. You can help Meredith by adding to it.

Thanks to xkcd, I discovered Simple.Wikipedia. No one should have pointed this out to me:

Deconstruction

I don't know what I find more troubling, the article itself ("the book or poem works because all of those meanings work together." Really? I'm not sure the emphasis should be put on teamwork when discussing deconstruction) or the implication that there are words in it some people (who know enough to use computers and navigate to Wikipedia or look up "deconstruction") might not know yet.

More Larkin than Whitman...

On the list of things I should really be dealing with right now are the following: my taxes (so I can file for FAFSA and thus take some of the strain off my pocketbook right now), file for FAFSA, get car insurance (mine is gone at the end of this week), pin-point what it is that I'd like to discuss on the aforementioned bibliographical essay (proposal due Friday--I've narrowed it down to Walt Whitman, which is decidedly not narrow enough), figure out exactly how much I need in order to move out as quickly as is humanly possible. This is all in an effort to say that I probably should not have spent essentially every evening last week talking to a fellow well into the past-my-bedtime-hour. And yet, that is exactly what I did.

It's just that he's exceedingly distracting. This is both fantastic and, as the above-outline list suggests, not the world's best way to spend my time this week. Also, it's hideously confusing. While I knew him briefly while at school, I did not spend any significant amount of time talking to him there (mostly because I was dating Walt at the time and he had a habit of getting unnecessarily jealous of non-mutual male friends.) Fast-forward to last weekend. While staying with Laurel for her birthday, we all hung out and everything just clicked. We wound up staying up well after everyone else had left or gone to sleep, just talking (well, ok--not just talking.) I won't go into the details because, frankly, if you tell too many people I thing like this it becomes less and less special.

So here we are. We've talked pretty much everyday since I left Laurel's and he mentioned coming to visit me at some point. I'm certainly open to going back down there to see him. But to what end? I'd really love to go with the flow on this one and see where (in anywhere) it takes us, but I'm a to-do list kind of girl. When I travel, I make packing lists. I have musical playlists for most occasions (with tentative ones in my notebook that I have not perfected yet.)Lists of books to read and songs to download. I have a list of movies I have yet to add to my Netflix queue. If there is a way to organize a task into a series of cross-offable steps, I will. I will also probably write it down along the way. If I finish something that isn't on my list, I will include it only for the purposes of immediately checking it off. I'm not good at "wait and see." Granted, I probably would not be asking these questions were not it not for the distance. The distance makes this an undertaking.

I don't know, I suppose I'll wait and see.

When can I go to the supermarket and buy what I want with my good looks?

Occasionally, I don't mind so much living at home. Money that other people would spend on important things like water bills can go towards shoes. Only, I can't live in my shoes (not unless I buy a few more pairs and build some kind of fort, then it just becomes a problem of fortifying the property.)

Then there are the other times, when I visit the smallish, cozy apartments of friends who never have to ask anyone to turn down The O'Reilly Factor or wake to find the food they'd bought for lunch has been replaced by a five dollar bill. I keep looking, but I haven't found an apartment that's less than a paycheck and does not require a roommate. Roommates (while I have had one good one) leave the door open and the stove on (ok, that one wasn't a roommate but I don't see why someone else wouldn't do it.) I'm not really inclined to move in with anyone I don't know and the people I do know would either also prefer to live alone or I would prefer not live with me. I suppose an economical experiment is in order. Or I can hold out for a magical studio apartment that is neither too far from work or school and well under the sum total of my biweekly paycheck. I have a feeling it doesn't exist, not that I won't keep looking.

Then again, I could just be inventing something to talk about so as not to mention the finer details of my weekend (or else, I fear I may get away from myself and sound them from rooftops and I think that just might kill them. I have to be able to keep something for myself.)

Things I purposefully left off the "25 Things You Might Not Know About Me" List

1. I do not like what the 5 most recent calls on my phone say about me : Mom, Mom, Mom, Chinese Food, Micah (who called to have me look something up for him because he was out and was surprised to hear that I was also.)

2. Whenever I climb a set of stairs too quickly, I worry that I will fall forward, land on my front teeth and they will lodge themselves into my head. I worry about this for mostly cosmetic reasons.

3. I've lost about 20 pounds since I graduated college. Saturday was the first time I can remember my mom telling me that I looked better in a smaller size. She's been telling me I am a large since I was in the 7th grade. I didn't weigh 100 pounds in the 7th grade.

4. my homework is not done yet. I should get back to it.

5. Sometimes, I resent my dog. That bitch hit the lottery.

6. sometimes, I wish I was gay. I don't find women desirable at all but I think it would really fuck with my ex-boyfriend.

more conversations in the office...

Meredith: I don't think anyone goes to jail for not reporting an extra $48 in my paycheck.

Jacob: That's good because they'd love you in lady-jail...They'd just eat you up in lady-jail...well, not literally, but...yeah.

Incidentally, I reported the extra money. Please don't fire me higher-ups who may happen upon this blog.

Conversation in the new office...

Meredith: I think the problem I have with unfortunate men is that I am generally nice to them and occasionally they confuse polite conversation with flirtation.

Meagan: Actually, I can get solidly into the Friend-Zone in about five minutes.

Meredith: Really? How so?

Meagan: it's all about your stance, if you slouch the guy will start to think of you as a guy (here she gets up to explain her meaning, slight bend in each knee, hips forward confidently, shoulders hunched just so) This says to the guy "dude." Then you can just be yourself.

Meredith: (aping Meagan's posture awkwardly thanks to 15 years of ballet) so this? See, I was just cursing and drinking and making jokes about boobs.

(Meagan leaves the room)

Jacob: Yeah, that's never going to work. Also, don't joke about boobs. That will just draw us in. Pretty much, you're screwed.

(Meagan returns)

Meagan: I'm telling you, slouching every single time.

I'm pretty sure slouching is not the opposite of pigtails. Also this is not a social experiment of which I am likely to conduct as I have to try very hard to slouch and would not be able to carry on a casual conversation while doing so. I guess I just have to home my letting-socially-awkward-dudes-down-easy skills.

Meredith Finally Attends Class. Spends Three Days Geeking Out About Annotations

Despite the warning from Doug Hill that there would be 1-3 inches of snow inside the D.C. Metro area, we finally had class. Granted, the professor had the wrong room number and was a good fifteen minutes late (before anyone starts about the 15 minute rule, I'm a) not sure that applies to graduate school[where you should really want to be, right?] and b) I once waited over an hour and a half for a professor to show up when I took Linguistics one summer at Mason. It was a one month, three hour course. I was not going to miss a day just because the teacher didn't show up.)

It was magical. Really, he could have read from the syllabus in the style of HAL 9000 from 7:20 to 10:20 and I still probably would have been satisfied. Mercifully though, he did not. It's a research methods course and he started by warning us that he occasionally gives homework problems meant to stump us. We are to make note of the time it takes us to complete each problem and should never spend more than an hour. I don't know that I won't occasionally spend more time on something. Once I'm given a question to answer, I like to, you know, answer it.

There is also a 15 page bibliographical essay (in addition to two shorter papers [5 pages] on the two course texts and two oral reports, one on a field covered by Mason faculty and the other on our research for the essay) on a topic of our choosing. I am kind of stumped as to what to do and completely open to suggestions. Monday, I started re-reading Leaves of Grass and now have Whitman on the brain (which has a way of bringing Melville to mind, as the two are exceedingly similar, especially if you look at the Calamus poems and the read "Squeeze of the Hand"...which I will probably do tonight.) I was considering looking at how or where to the two men intersect (male-male bonding, images of masculinity, and radical democracy). The Former Professor has suggested that I look into whether or not they were even aware of each other. This is a possibility as I could translate it into a potential thesis later on. Then again, it's really not stepping out of my research comfort zone at all. I already know the big names in American Renaissance from the Melville thesis. Also, there is just so much information in that field that the problem isn't finding sources but rather eliminating them.

Then again, I could go wildly in the other direction and look at something I know nothing about at all but am intrigued by. Earlier this summer, I read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and still have no earthly idea what I actually read. The entire novel is a conversation between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan, wherein Polo describes fantastical cities to Khan. Turns out, each one is actually Venice. Experiments with form have always interested me (that was part of the initial appeal of both Melville and Joyce and a big part of why I loved Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) but I can also find them annoyingly gimmicky. I don't want to get annoyed by my topic.

Oh, decisions, decisions...