I checked youtube for the original of this song, fully intending to post some arbitrary video with the song playing behind it to talk about the inherent beauty in Stephen Merritt’s low notes. For one of the first times in a while on youtube I found an amateur cover that I almost like better than the original recording. The Magnetic Fields do it a little more like they are in slow motion in the middle of an empty ballroom.
The simplicity of the song is what strikes me about it I think, and how even in plain words there can be a line that strikes like:
“the book of love is long and boring/ and written very long ago/ it’s full of flowers and heart shaped boxes/ and things we’re all too young to know”
It’s so true, Stephen Merritt, it’s so true.
The song itself struck me today more than most in that today has been a day I’ve let my mind wander to an idyllic future, one that doesn’t involve papers and instead involves friends and family, music and laughter. I’ve begun to think immensely about my future life, questioning the up-till-now firm career plans I’ve made (such as my devotion to not becoming a teacher.)
I moved across campus this past weekend which is something I’d like never to repeat; sweat and sailor’s curses down narrow hallways at three in the morning (put a procrastinator and her procrastinating boyfriend together and you get a moving job that’s started on the last day at midnight.) But the view is lovely, front quad gridded in my window; and to be honest, it’s alot nicer to have a giant room again rather than the shoebox I had in Tinker.
I’ve written a little poetry lately, not much, and certainly not as much as I’ve devoted to a gargantuan screenplay project of epic (but not ‘an epic’) proportions. It’s enough to make me feel confident that I will indeed become a prolific poet again. I’m reading to high-schoolers on Friday at my old high school; this is a tradition I love to keep. I get to play the cool kid in a place where I never inhabited the role before, I get to answer questions as if my life up until this point is a novel that can be broken into chapters, as if my experiences are “examples” of how college life is. The question inevitably comes up, “Your school is all girls?! Don’t they fight all the time?” The answer I’ve always given has been something along the lines of, “Ha ha noooo.” (note: I still do not, and doubt I will ever, find offense in the term all-girls vs. all-women.) Now, who knows what I’ll say; perhaps I’ll flatten my smile and say something like “People who want to fight will fight, and that’s life.”
I wanted to write, “It’s too bad that this time all of the poignant vignettes about best-friends-forever and ‘crazy times downtown with friends’ will have to be nixed,” but then I realized, to be honest, last time I visited the high school I couldn’t really come up with one I wanted to tell. Foreshadowing, perhaps.
I’ll be going home to Baltimore this weekend, the first weekend in– really? can it be? the first weekend in MONTHS that I haven’t spent with my boyfriend. The three hours is a plight in our relationship, but somehow we’ve made it to see each other for long spans of time these past months. The budgets have caught up with us now, and like every tragic love story, we had to put a “To Be Announced” on the next visit’s date.
I am excited for the visit home, the inevitable video game battles and “come listen to this, come listen to this;” the three am jam sessions, the jokes at everyone’s expense. I am not looking forward to (but in a sense, I suppose I am) the adult chat, the budgeting session, the revealing of super-secret-super-future plans, those of which I can’t disclose but can only say that I am looking forward to 2009. It will be a successful unwinding of stress, the first time I’ve seen my parents since twice moving rooms and visiting the hospital. And then I will have nothing to look forward to until spring break, until july, until oh-nine.
So, I like the way Kafka keeps his journals; they’re the best I’ve read so far.
“There is a certain hothouse delicacy in the way in which I shrink from a puff of wind, if you like, even something affecting in it, but that is all.”
I empathize with his writing style, the way its a mix of metaphor and fluid language, with words like delicacy and seduction, with words like hollow sophistry. He’s fun to read.
“18 October Eternal childhood. Life calls again.”
(that’s my brother’s birthday, p.s.)
