Friday, November 28, 2008
Unless memory fails, there exists not a single family photograph of my parents embracing each other with any degree of positive emotion. I could be incorrect; maybe one of my aunts has photographs about which I am unaware, but from what I recollect out of our photo albums, for any photograph involving both parents, they are standing apart (huge family gathering) or side-by-side, but not acknowledging each other. Pictures of myself with any of my four siblings also convey distant attitudes. We might be touching, and there might be smiles, but someone is getting pinched.
I was viewing various Thanksgiving Day 2008 photographs friends have already posted, and for all of them, I sensed something odd. Hugging, I finally realized, my friend's parents are hugging. This is what people who like each other a lot do. A thirty-minute voyeuristic search for happiness ensued. I shook my laptop upside-down in the air a few times, thinking love would fall out of it, but, as usual, the only feeling the computer emits for me to seize upon is frustration.
Labels: aunt, family, friends, frustration, happiness, hugging, laptop, love, parents, photographs, pinching, siblings, Thanksgiving
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 3:46 AM]
Less Than A Month Until I Am Rid Of My Little Effer
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Although the annual, official celebration of toilets occurred earlier this week, now seems the best time to reflect on how drastically different life would be had I never sat upon or viewed one, for after what I ate for dinner this evening, tomorrow will be a day spent intimately with that which receives the feasts of my bowels.
The non-existence of such receptacles as toilets would necessarily have precluded the existence of my neurotic fear that an over-sized spider will crawl out of one, bite a chunk out of my ass, and bring about an agonizing and premature, though somewhat comic, death. I saw Arachnephobia when I was six or seven, and never since have I failed to check under, over, around, down, into, and through for spiders or other potential death-causing beasts.
Were the world bereft of toilets, I would not be as well-versed in English poetry, for the toilet has been where I tend to read such material: poetry differs in density, as does a cheeseburger or a blueberry that has passed through my digestive system. With a poetry anthology, therefore, one may consume it in one sitting, or interrupt it and return later without completely severing the flow of thoughts required for reading the entire text. Prose literature-reading on the toilet hardly ever works.
To discuss this further would be to digress farther from the task of gathering research material for a paper I am supposed to have been writing all semester.
Labels: anxiety, Arachnephobia, beasts, bowels, death, digestion, dinner, literature, poetry, research, spiders, thinking, toilets
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 4:47 PM]
I Woke Up This Morning, And My Penis Was Missing
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Ich habe diesem morgen aufgewacht, um zu finden, daß ich eine geschlagene Stunde mehr haben. Ich soll meine Uhr stellen.
Jetzt kann ich weiter den Iliad lesen, die Werke Juvenals weiter bilden und ins Papier beschreiben, einen Netflix-Film ansehen, den Penthesilea Kleists weiter lesen... aber vielleicht werde ich nichts machen.
de latineque graece studiosa sum, sed non satis. linguae declinationum sunt difficiles. meh.
With the unwritten paper concerning the hundreds of manuscripts of Juvenal floating around, for which I have conducted not nearly enough fruitful research, looming over me in an almost physical sense, I took about three hours of this afternoon (mentally discounting one of them) to work out and swim at the student recreation center. The past two days I haven't moved much, reading and taking notes on points of Latin grammar for which my knowledge and comprehension are wanting. Swimming about fifteen (I did not count them) Olympic laps improves the posture.
Beforehand I listened to The Wizard of Oz soundtrack on an elliptical machine, then read the next two acts in Kleist's Penthesilea on a recumbent bike. I had forgotten how well such a combination helps me focus; after having exercised this way for three years, my body usually doesn't become too worn out, especially since I no longer work at a forty-hour week job that requires I stand on my feet six or eight hours straight. Granted, thinking rationally still comes with difficulty, but now it at least comes occasionally. Freshman and sophomore year I almost never dreamt.
Labels: dreaming, German, grammar, Greek, Heinrich von Kleist, Juvenal, Latin, manuscripts, Netflix, Penthesileia, research, routine, swimming, The Iliad, The Wizard of Oz, thinking, working out
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 1:29 PM]