my post-prelim adrenaline is replaced by wanderlust, but i still have to go to my classes. the snow falls in swirls, melting as it touches the ground, before i find my way to the housing office to get a poster approved. once i emerge from the warren of hallways and rooms, the snow is falling hard enough to stick, the flakes big, fluffy, larger than my finger tips. i don't care much for snow in the beginning of winter--the first snow of the season only tells of the countless to follow--but the snow in early spring, when you're never sure if it'll be the last you see for a while, is far more wonderous and comforting.
instead of working on the homework due tomorrow, i spend too long talking to friends i haven't seen in recent days (spring break camping won't happen until the end of the week if at all, so i have some free time to just read at home... yay) and even more time looking at old houses in need of fixing up for sale that me and the upperclassmen fantasize about buying together in the dorm library.
"by the time he'd cleared the outskirts of town, he began to wonder how he'd ever left--the place at least, bare of people. the clinging sun threw a white shine as different from its english gray or italian rose as the tall pines here from the low umbrellas that sheltered rome. in its thruthful light the road, not flattered or pitied by the sky, narrowed to a dirt lane and curved on gently through woods--rolling fields of dry brown stalks with only the odd suspended buzzard to watch his progress." - the source of the light, pg 192
i've nearly put down the source of the light several times over the last few days, but i skipped my physics discussion (optional attendance because of the prelim tonight) to spend an hour reading it in the library and finally really got into it. i like price's style a lot, it has that crisp, silent feeling of an early christmas morning. not really sure how the book will go from here (i'm almost 2/3rds done now) but looking forward to it. hoping to finish it before break so i only have to take 11 books home to read instead of 12.
while not reading, i'm redoing homework and practice problems i've gotten wrong for physics. it's a very nice process once i sit myself and get into it. i take short breaks by looking out my window (the sky blue and dotted with fluffy white clouds). the window in my dorm is split into three vertical sections and i like to imagine that they are a set of stained glass. the leftmost one shows a yellow house, the middle a large tree bereft of leaves, the right the path students climb back to the other dorms.
"that simple line from forehead to chin seemed now to hutch all he'd ever meant to understand, praise, and save--its brave seal thrust toward the patient fruitful matrix of the world. he leaned, pressed his own mouth against dry hair on the ridge of rowlet's neck. 'i'm the orphan,' he said 'good luck anyhow.'" - the source of the light, pg 183
the snow comes and goes over the weekend. today it is still cold, but it is spring now. the morning air has a thickness to it, the kind that the butter knife of lew and hutch, hoplessly retelling the tale of tristan and iseult in a small cornish apartment, cannot cut, only glide through. as the day goes on, the air thins again, but it is still spring. the other side of the valley looks as invitingly blue as ever.
my two tests today go fine. i get the rejection email from iowa (my hypothesis that the application deadline being pushed back twice meant that they didn't have enough applicants was wrong). i bring one of my upperclassmen to meet my mother and i wallow around the library while she asks questions about work and graduate school. the bubble tea chain i've spent so long defending tastes really bad.
"quentin and shreve stared at one another--glared rather--their quiet regular breathing vaporizing faintly and steadily in the now tomblike air. there was something curious in the way they looked at one another, curious and quiet and profoundly intent, not at all as two young men might look at each other but almost as a youth and a very young girl might out of virginity itself--a sort of hushed and naked searching, each look burdened with youth's immemorial obsession not with time's dragging weight which the old live with but with its fluidity: the bright heels of all the lost moments of fifteen and sixteen" - absalom, absalom! pg 299
i like reading how other people approach education, talking to classmates and upperclassmen about assignments and exams. i think i'm too willing to accept that i don't know things, sometimes. as long as i'm having fun in a class (which is usually always, even with the anxiety induced by latin) i consider it a win, as long as i pass the exams, it doesn't matter how close i got to failing. this is perhaps a mindset that will not serve me well in the future--this is okay, i don't want to go to grad school for astronomy anyway. why am i doing an undergrad in astronomy then? idk man. the classes are fun.
recently i've been watching more varied video diary type channels. i like ones with weird editing and meandering natures and cars. i can't drive. i would like to never drive, but in the spirit of eternally chasing a half-remembered childhood, the only missing part now is summer roadtrips and camping out west, ancient and unarable land that seems to go on forever. public transportation is rather nonexistent in any place i'd like to actually go, so driving it may have to be. we'll see.
more of the books and themes i linger on are about transitions between life stages. faulkner, price, feintuch (at least rodrigo, less seafort), the shitty romance books my beloved upperclassman recommends me. i know what i want to do after graduation, i think, at least for a couple years (go back to taiwan, probably as an english teacher. if i do this for five years i can get a permenant resident visa and spend more time in the mountains since i don't have to be constantly employed like on the normal work visa. maybe farm workshares elsewhere). three more years before any of those plans can come to fruition, so for now i bide my time and get better at talking to people and try to save up more money.
to avoid the sharp shooting pain of whatever back muscle i somehow pulled wednesday, i am forced to finally adopt a proper, upright posture.
my lack of physical slouching does not prevent my academic slouching; instead of finishing (or starting) the latin translations i was supposed to do last night for the class i planned to skip today, i waste my morning on medieval depictions of jesus and john. this bent comes from a talk i heard yesterday about queer scandal in the lives of john boswell, st. aelred, and derek jarman (recommended to me by my beloved upperclassman). i still don't really agree with boswell or aelred about their interpretation of jesus and john but i get some new favorite paintings out of the rabbit hole (valentin de boulogne my newly beloved).
i skip the scientific ethics lecture in addition to latin because i'm not feeling well in the afternoon, returning to my room to nap with a documentary playing for an hour or two. after i wake up, feeling a bit better, i spend too long looking through online museum collections for another assignment, read a bit of genesis and play some stellaris.
"something cold struck his calf. he waited, then probed on down to find it...a dull table-knife. he drew it out quietly and held it to the moon...lew whispered. 'she lay down and tristan put his naked sword between them. to their good fortune they'd kept on their clothes. so they slept dvided in the heart of the wood'...neither of them slept at ease all night." - the source of the light, pg 97
today is even warmer, the only cool from the morning breeze--still not spring though, the scent not here yet. no buds, no sprouts. the plants are as yet unconvinced of this false spring as me. i sketch landscapes in an old notebook bought in a convenience store on the other side of the world, an artifact from a time where i found waiting nearly unbearable brought into a time where i wish i had nothing to do but wait.
a month ago, i started reading reynolds price's the source of the light, but couldn't get very far at the time. i liked the book just fine, i simply had no desire to keep reading. perhaps the weather suits it better now. i still care little about rob, but this is perhaps my fault for starting in the second book of the series.
though i skip afternoon lab with the intention of working on math homework, i get little done.
"maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilcial water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn't matter: that pebble's watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm" - absalom, absalom! pg 261
i spend the morning contemplating the face of god. out here, i don't get to hear the wind in the trees as much as i do back home. maybe that's one aspect of god's face (or voice)?
in the afternoon, i fix clay pots made from the dirt of the riverbed and dig up the rich black soil of compost and plant peas and radishes with my mother. we trim the miscanthus gigantus that gets bigger every year and use it to make trellises for the peas while the wind i've missed so much blows the bucket i left outside the garden gate to the end of the park, past both baseball fields. we walk around the woods in the back after we walk to fetch the bucket, examining the skunk cabbage (the first flowers of spring) and finding the other half of the bottom jaw of a deer skull i pulled from these woods years ago.
my mother tells me delightful stories of village life, that seemed nonexistent when i still lived here but somehow transformed into the idealized form i always wished it had as soon as i left. homework gets put off for spending time with friends and upperclassmen.
early spring feels more like fall on days like these. the grass is still yellow and dead, the fresh smell of plants not here yet. walking to the dining hall, the wind is cold and i have to keep pulling on my jacket (red, thin, the crowning piece of my country boy outfit--a plaid button up tucked into my jeans and the workboots i've finally broken in) to keep it around me.
i've pushed off the majority of my physics homework until today, due at 5pm, but i get through it without much issue. amazing what paying attention in class instead of reading does to a guy's understanding of concepts. to refresh my mind between problems, i do my spring cleaning. i nearly halve the amount of clothes in my closet, weeding out the ones i brought with me to college and then never wore. i'll hand them down to my sisters when i go home to visit tomorrow, but i'll offer the skirts to one of my dormmates first. i slightly reorganize my bookshelf--i'm far less willing to part way with my books, but i pull out a couple to bring home for storage, since i don't think i'll reread them anytime soon.
listening to music i last listened to a year ago, i talk to my best friend. after lunch (breakfast sausages and pancakes and potato soup, with a side of a few more pages of absalom, absalom!), i can't shake the feeling that i'm forgetting something, that some due date is approaching against my will.
"i learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books" - absalom, absalom! pg 241-242
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