Yesterday, my friend and I went out into the night with the intention of finding alcohol that does not cost too much and does not taste too much like alcohol. We were supposed to have gone out on Friday, when the darkness would have been swimming with orange lights and random beats and people in twos and threes searching, but unfortunately, we both appear young enough to make an ID check necessary and someone (re: me, I, unfortunate) neglected to bring something to prove that I have breathed for at least nineteen years.

I thought she was going to brain me with my own stiletto, but she was pacified with the promise of carousing on Sunday instead.

(I like the word 'carousing' because it sounds so much better than, if not as honest as,'getting shit-faced drunk')

One of the things I like best about going out is preparing for it. I like making my eyelids shine like the scales of a dragon, or like some glowing, enchanted jasmine; I like putting rose on my cheeks and the dream of a kiss on my mouth and I love, love dressing up. Pretty skirts, pretty blouses, looking into the mirror and liking what you see and then not looking again for fear that your hair will be too messy and your face will be too round again; your lips too big, your eyes too scared.

The drinks were sweet and cold and went down like snow melting - I don't care if ordering mixed drinks is 'girly' or weak because straight alcohol tastes like nail polish remover and if I'm spending money, then I had better enjoy getting drunk as well as being drunk. As it was, we stopped at 'enjoyably tipsy' and were able to walk in a straight line home! I love going out at night because it's so private and lonely and you can hear the uncanny rumbling of unseen waterfalls like the call of Cthulhu. To scare him away, we sang trashy Disney songs and hummed when we couldn't remember the words.

It was thoroughly delightful, and I did not wake up with a headache. I'm still trying to get used to the feeling of not having to be scared of exams and essays. I feel like a balloon let out on holiday!

Soon, I'll be able to write letters again, which I'm very much looking forward to! I am beginning to remember what it's like to want to write and write and write more - if anyone would like to receive letters, please tell me so!

It's such a summery afternoon, I feel like I'm being washed into a faded, 70s polaroid.

'The gift of wings' is L. M. Montgomery named her inspirations - the ability to lift oneself high-high-higher than a Whomping Willow, stabbing straight upwards into an endlessly blue sky and right through a heart-shaped cloud. But the price to pay is stiff - "the gods do not give their gifts freely" - and when you fall, each tattered feather is a heartbreak and when hungry gravity seizes you and crushes you into her bosom, each breath is a mouthful of dirt and sand, snot and tears.

I put him into a glistening, black beetle of a taxi and smiled and smiled and smiled in the rain.

(It rained, like a cliche)

He turned back to look at me and I waved, when all I wanted to do was howl.

His spring eyes.

His dear, tousled autumn hair.

(Hishandsthesmellofhisleatherjackethisstubbledchinandhairylegs)

I managed to get back into the house. I closed my door and faced my empty room - already looking neater for the lack of him.

And then, I burst into tears.

(Like another cliche)

My room is in a hideous state - my mascara is spidery, reaching far along the edges of my eyes - the world outside is the ugly duckling incarnate, grey snow melting into dead, brown grass - and yet, despite these dreadful circumstances, I am happy.

That is strange, especially for me.

But seated in a rusty, autumnal chair (that I pulled out of a trash-heap with the help of my pixie-friend), the whirring of his dream-machine and the sound of my typing filling up my golden room, is a dream boy. He has long lashes that I would kill for, and eyes that are the beginning of spring (brown and green and gold, like when the sun flickers through new, green leaves), his hair is brown and tousled and his cheeks are pink. He has a smile that would melt your knees till they puddled about your toes. And now, he is no longer just a dream-boy, a memory-boy, but a real boy. And he really is seated in my autumn-throne, smiling at me in puzzlement. And when I grin back, something in my face must warn him that he's being discussed because he asks me what I'm doing and I tell him that I'm weaving my JuJu and now he's worried~

He slows me down, he speeds me up and he's here for a whole glorious week. Sometimes I flinch away from so much human contact after so little for so long, and sometimes I mourn my lonely-times-lost when I was my own girl but he makes me giggle and it's so, so, so good to press my face into his shoulder and sniff his own scent into me.

(Isn't that a trifle creepy?)

(Just a bit.)

Exams are coming, essays are due - but when are they not? Letters dance to be written and books yearn to be read, but today, paper and words and all their ghostly witchery will have to wait - just for a little while.

A dream boy reached the shores of the waiting dream girl today. And he will be here till Sunday whereupon a piece of my heart will go again with him and he can store it with all the other shards.

My planner. Senseless and colorful and patched-up-scrappy, like your favorite old toy.



Warning! Very image-heavy.

( Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event. )

Aiee. I do not like how it protrudes from my pretty white page. But I am currently too chock-full of grey (my own, other people's, I don't know, I don't know any more...) to split the pages up. It is late. I want to dream of holding hands again and being pressed up against a wall and kissed.

I tried very hard to find a picture of that scene in Order of the Phoenix where Luna Lovegood goes skipping down the halls, her long white-gold hair flying... sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in people's heads (oftentimes, such daydreams happen when I'm supposed to be, oh, finishing up several articles that are due tomorrow). I suspect Luna's would be a strange and terrible place - beautifully deadly. Wrackspurts that bite your head off, card games that end with "Off with your head!"s, chess matches that involve thunder and lightning, great things with saliva strings from their fanged mouths hiding in mistletoe...

As she skips down the hallway, would you jolt and fumble inside her airy-fairy, nary-carey hair? Would you fly out of her left ear and hang on for dear life on a strand that is as unearthly as moonlight?

When I was a child, I used to skip a great deal. Small tot in the buttery hot sunlight, bowl-cut flying into disarray, glasses toppling off my nose as I skipped and lifted up into the air, pretending to be a Madame Butterfly.

Skipping is a lost art these days. Maybe one day, when no one is around, I will skip down the walk and bellow out ABBA songs. One day, when there is no one else in the world.




PS:

gothania and my_head_is_blue, I owe you letters and I will send them the moment my monthly share of filthy lucre comes in and I can trade it for stamps. It is CRIMINAL how much they cost these days. I'm so sorry it's taken so long!

I really want Luna's earrings.

Today, while I was preparing to get off the bus and into the ice-scented night. I got out of my seat, seesawing my way towards the exit and waited for the bus to come to its usual halt - with a great deal of screeching and jolting and actions generally injurious to those presumptuous enough to wear silly shoes when they are too poor to afford taxis.

There was a very tall boy, getting off the same stop as I was and he reached the doors before I did. We stood there for perhaps five seconds as the bus drew to a halt and I fell in love with his back.

Here are some unimportant details about him: he had curly hair. It was brown, I think.

Here are some important details about his back: It was broad and tapered down to a narrow waist. His black corduroy jacket was stretched across the expanse of his shoulders and there was a scent - like new clothes and washing liquid that has chemicals added to make it smell like sunshine and just a hint of musky deodorant. It was a good smell, to match the reassuring look of his back. There seemed nothing limp or overly taut about his spine, it was relaxed like an upright cobra lazily swaying side to side in rhythm with the bus. I wanted to lean forward, press my face against his back, clench my fists into the warm, reassuring corduroy and just rest.

The door opened with a blast of cold air and carbon dioxide. He stepped out, and so did I, and so did a girl with a flowered luggage bag. The wheels squeaked against the ice and there was a corset lacing of snow on the ground.

He was always before me and as I unlocked the door, the boy and his back disappeared around a corner.

Ah.

I always stay up late, but tonight, I'm doing it with a purpose. I'm waiting for 11:11. I remember when I was small, small - a few inches less and I'd've been a hole in the ground - I was always fascinated by that tick of a clock, the tipping over of a second that would move the hand squarely into the little line signifying 10:05 exactly. It's more exciting with digital clocks because that change sneaks up on you. Now you see it, now you don't!

The world is much more full of toys when you're five.

Tonight I wait with a purpose though. I'm going to wish that I can write a ripping good essay, my exposition of the female roles in male-narrative quests schemes thingummies will render my professor speechless. The only thing the poor man will be able to do is draw an A+ and because that won't be enough to express the magnitude of the ripping, tearing, mauling-ness of my paper, he will have to scrawl another +++!! in bright blue ink.

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

Lean over. Fall. Close your eyes. Breathe. Wish.

My old word is 'Sorry'. Sorry I haven't been writing! Sorry your letters are so late! Sorry to my TA that I borrowed your book and didn't return it in time; sorry to the man on the bus whose foot I stepped on when I was locked in a world of gyrations and the angry, wonderful words of Alanis Morissette.

My new word is 'Avid'. That's what I feel like now - the sharp angles of an 'A', and then the upside-down jolt of a 'v', a happiness perches just atop me like the dot of an 'i' and I ride the whorls of the 'd' and settle down in that round enclove, my back against the long, straight post.

I've had many ups and downs this January, this February. So, so busy, with essays and presentations and people and places! Yesterday I dressed up in a cream-colored dress with flowers curling randomly about it, lace bordered, and went out with a friend. We went to Ikea. That store reminds me of a grown-up, modern-day's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland - you walk along a winding path, crowded with swatches of beautifully arranged furniture. Shelves call out for your attention, mirrors blink at you and the hotdogs are fifty cents each at the end! I came out with a big, cloud pillow and three perfect, plastic bookends to prevent my babies tomes from falling all over each other.

We spent the whole day on that age-old hunt for beauty (as cheap as we could find it - five hats for ten dollars, an adorable tin shaped like an old timey mailbox on fifty percent off, with lemon tea cookies inside!, shoes with hearts on them, and shoes with white buttons on them) and finished off with a appetizer-dinner with her family. Being in that atmosphere again - of friendly yelling and sly digs at the atomic-bomb state of your room and still so much loving worry - made me want to cry a little. Tears of strawberry and chocolate and salt, I missed my own yelling, digging, worrying, atomic-bomb family.

Ah, but I had a wonderful cupcake of a valentines' day, capped off with icing sugar and conversational hearts (they look adorable, but taste like stale toothpaste!) by a card and rose-shaped lollipop from my boyfriend far, far away from me. Too far to lace fingers and toes with.

Today I will:

Write letters to the lovely gothania and my_head_is_blue, the sweetest strawberry to ever berry, and the bluest blue that ever blued, respectively.

Write essays. Ah, Tennyson, Conrad - did you ever forsee you'd make one student in the wilds of Ottawa very, very miserable?

Gloat over my hats.

To indulge in a bit of Engrish:

I hope you all have a lollipop life! Ah, hats~

I am sick. My head throbs, my body burns and all my muscles seem to have little needles entwined deep within the tendons so that twitching my toe sends a sickening wave of achiness up and down my spine. I am cold, and then a hot flush washes over me and I feel disgusting. Several tiny pimples have popped up around my forehead and chin. I lay on my bed, uselessly fidgeting and attempting to read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and failed miserably. Then, I tried the audio-book (God bless Gutenberg) and fell asleep halfway. Whether this is the fault of the novella or whatever strange and weakly being that decided to crawl into my shell for a bit, I really can't say. Because I find Heart of Darkness really VERY boring. Has anyone read it? Can anyone make it vaguely more palatable?

I should go to class today, but the snow falls soft and unrelenting and when I cough, it feels like my entrails are trying to escape. This is not a pleasant state of affairs, to say the least.

All my letters are bills and all my songs are noise.

Also, my room-mate watches South Park much too loudly in the other room. Did you know headaches can throb to the rhythm of 'You don't eat or sleep or mow the lawn/ You just fuck your uncle all day long!!'?

This is the first time I've been sick in a place where there is no one to fuss over me. I must remind myself not t die because it is very likely that my corpse won't be discovered till it begins to smell.

Excuse the melodrama - but I am so seldom ill that when it happens, it feels like all the world is topsy turvy and a very ugly color besides.

Ah, screwt. I am not going out to get more frostbite on the tender tips of my ears than is already there.

Cheer me up, please? By the way, if I owe you letters/you want to hear from me, please post below. I need some motivation currently as this is what my inside looks like: !@#$#%$%*(! 0000000 !@#@#$$% 00000

I wish it were always spring and autumn. No other seasons. Just those two.

Sometimes - and this may be any time: the crack of dawn, the depth of night, curling up in the afternoon sun - I get a deep down feeling of satisfaction. 'Deep down' is no empty (or naughty!) euphemism, the feeling really does swell out of my belly and suffuses through me like a particularly purple smoke. At such a time, I can truly believe 'God's in His heaven, all's right on earth". There is no onetwothree, aybeesee, connect-the-dot way to this heavy feeling of satisfaction, it comes and goes like a smug black cat that likes to curl up on your stomach on her terms, not yours.

Sometimes, I read something that smells like a pink and blue and lemon-yellow afternoon. Sometimes, I am walking down a street that makes me think of the sea. Sometimes, I may be washing the dishes.

First star to the right and straight on till midnight, indeed.

Sometimes, it is the simple feeling of a job well-done; a loneliness conquered by a story; the discovery that all things pass - and so, by default, your misery will too. And at this revelation, that flash may come and leave you certain; drop dead, double dutch, dog-doo certain that you will, indeed, be O.K.

There may be a million and one reasons why you will not survive. A most compelling argument for you not to be happy. But there are things in the world - books, dresses, pearls, the right song and even the right time and it is hard but daydream a bit more and concentrate a little, and there you are: content as a clam. And maybe sharp, shocking glee will follow.

What's got you so het up, people may ask (with a sexy little eyebrow raise, p'raps?).

Simply this:

I finished two (gothania & my_head_is_blue) letters today! I've still a few to plow through, but still!

I am writing in this blog again and it isn't a lackadaisical post that I won't want to reread.

Making my own reasons to be gleeful.

And now I'm going to bed, chock full of good intentions that will melt away with the first shrill neigh of the alarm clock that I can't quite throw out the window. But what dreams!

I'm home, home, home, home, home!. Here's a quick list of gleeful things before I have to rush off to meet my boyfriend (who makes me emanate glee all by himself anyway):

Sitting on a bench outside the airport, breathing in the cold air, bundled up in a long scarf and a pink and plaid hat and waiting for my family!

Seeing that familiar silver color, the shape of a bullet and watching my mother's face burst out into a smile at the sight of me.

My sisters piling out, yelling and screaming and making a scene.

My boyfriend coming out from the side with a suit and a red, red rose. Oh, he's so much sillier and sappier than I am - and I love it!

Racing past everyone else and throwing myself at him. It's been so long since I've given in to free and easy instinct like that, I laughed and he cried and his tears slid through my hair.

Being part of my dysfunctional, fairy-tale family again.

Staying up late all night and making owl noises and cat giggles.

Christmas decorating with my boyfriend's mother; wrapping lines of scratchy, plastic pine wreaths around the stairwell, nestling wee, cunning little gold lights into the tree, tucking poinsettias into crevices and tying ribbons around everything that they may be tied to!

Receiving a hug and a hair ruffle from my boyfriend's brother.

My mother's cooking.

Carpets under my feet.

Making a snow Totoro with my littlest sister and my boyfriend!

More laughter than I know what to do with.

Being able to be as random, as moon-touched and bewitched as I want to be, around people who are used to it and willing to join in. I literally feel my heart expanding when I'm here!

gothania and my_head_is_blue, I received your letters just before I left - having just enough time to snatch them out of the mail box before I ran for the taxi! Your words were read while this little stranger was arcing through a black-sea-sky and the hours were whiled pleasurably away. Thank you so very much! It will take me a bit longer to answer - but I'm near my stickers and papers now so I'll make up for it! I promise!

I feel like the whole world is dancing and I hope your own private universe starts to piroutte as well. I'm just thankful-shivery all over like a star.

At the present, I'm reading Jane Eyre (which is very bad of me because that twice-thrice-damned poetry explication demands still another 157 words) and I sincerely regret that I didn't get hold of this book when I was younger. No, maybe it's just as well I didn't, because I don't think I could have appreciated it half as much and I'm sure this is one of those books that grows old with you and keeps you young. With each rereading, I'm certain this is one of those books that will continually surprise me with some new flowering idea.

In terms of language, I wouldn't say that it's a very beautiful book - unlike my other compatriots this month, Barrie and L. M. Montgomery, Jane Eyre is not fanciful, nor the worse for it. The language is detailed and antiquated and can be hard to follow, but that's my fault and not Charlotte Bronte's. And I unashamedly admit that I have developed a crush on Mr. Rochester. He's fascinating. No wonder that every ill-written hero is every bad romance book is a parody of him! The man is nineteenth century sex.

But those who say it is primarily a "very tender love story" have, I think, got it all wrong (but then Jane Eyre is one of those prism-books, hold it one way and you reflect one thing, hold it the other and behold yet another and all beautiful, somber and glorious). This book is a feminist manifesto, its truth startles like the sight of a deer in the forest in passages such as:



There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.



And then it rings like carillion bells in that much quoted line:



'...Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?'

Still indomitable was the reply - 'I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.'



It's hard to believe the way the electricity crackles off those italics! I'm not being very original by admiring that line I just quoted, but imagine being a quiet, bookish nineteenth century little bluestocking - imagine being told you matter, not as a daughter, a sister, a friend, a mother, a lover, a wife - but as yourself.

Jane is infinitely believable and loveable and relateable, I find. She's so refreshingly un-stupid, innocent without being naive, passionate without being promiscuous and dutiful without being a dolt. I'm sure she wouldn't be crouched over her laptop (with Harry and Luna stickers on it, by the way, as well as three rainbow hearts and a butterfly swooping over Lucius Malfoy in the corner) and driveling away when that accursed poem that blinks like a deviled changeling, its meaning obscured in crafty clouds, laughs scornfully in a corner to be excavated.

Sigh!

Off I go then!

PS: Hello to all those people who thought that it might be worthwhile to friend me! I'm afraid that your troubles aren't being totally justified (who else has a fetish for nineteenth century book reviews?) but I dearly appreciate it anyway! You're stardust and old books, baby.

It seems I'll do absolutely anything to avoid having to start on actual work - rather than begin a poery explication (a form of critical writing I don't care for, I think it's like slamming a baby down onto the table and ripping its guts out to see what makes it crawl and coo. Poetry and babies don't need to be questioned, they just need to be), I think instead, I'll let some thoughts out. They've been meandering through the tangled seaweed of my brain like fat, uncurious goldfish with goggle eyes and fan-tails...

I believe that you are what you read. More than what you listen to (which seems to be the preferred method of personality-divination these days), more than what you wear or what you eat. As a person who grew up reading and reading and reading, I think a large part of my personality and my attitude to life was gifted to me by those thick-thin-dark-colorful shards of other thoughts and lifes, like Briar Rose and her long line of fairy godmothers.

But my conundrum is - do the books shape you? Or do you choose which books to be shaped by?

For example, there's a blog I enjoy reading - the unicorn diaries - and one of her favorite writers is J. M. Barrie. You can really see Barrie's whimsy in her writing. I like Barrie too, he makes me think of hazelnut creme, but he's not someone I can dive into anytime, even though I agree with him and laugh with him and cry with him. His books are like airy, beautiful things that I can bother to catch only once so often, but they float around the periphery of me. Is she the way she is now because she followed the trail set by that first Lost Boy? Or was her own White Bird that pulled the Never-Neverland towards her?

My favorite writer is L. M. Montgomery. I've read all her books and they never fail to lose their wit and magic for me - even if I don't always agree with them, even if some of her notions are racist and out-of-date, her characters still live and love and laugh somewhere inside my head. They tangle in my hair and slide out from under my fingernails, and I feel the swish of their skirts besides mine somedays - that's how deeply I love her books. Unlike Barrie, she's not an exclusively whimsical person. Barrie writes as one who has seen fairyland and has that image seared irrevocably into his mind so he follows its twisted, silvery footsteps; L. M. Montgomery's writing has two kinds of laughter: the first is a belly-laugh that rolls out from inside and cleanses as it goes, the other is the mocking, elfin laughter that you can only hear when your ear involuntarily twitches at the right hour. And this state of duality resides in her novels with little to no pushing or shoving - the garden of Eden is side by side the Blue Castle, common sense and the oldest of old romances.

Thinking about it, I don't know if I'm attracted to the contrast her novels offer or if the Me-s that battle for supremacy in this frail, human body of mine were indirectly fragmented by her books.

So I follow this little goldfish thought of mine on nights when I can't sleep for the sound of melting snow.

When I first moved here from home, my father and I stayed in the old heart of downtown. It was a strange looking place, a mix of utterly ugly offices and beautiful, baroque style buildings. One street I would walk down was covered almost entirely on one side with reflective black glass and sometimes the sun would beat down on me and other times the wind would chill me. That's what it felt like. It was like bandages had been wrapped around and around so I couldn't see anything but could still feel the bleeding of tiny little paper cuts all over me. My loneliness broke the kaleidoscope and all the pretty pictures became nothing but scraps of colored paper and shards of broken mirrors - seven times seven years of bad luck.

I hated walking down that street in those first weeks of a new place. I could see myself from head to toe and I hated what I saw. I looked dumpy and common-place, out of place. I didn't believe I could ever put down little soul-roots. I hardly believed I had any soul left.

Today I walked from Lush, carrying a tub of Angels on Bare Skin cleanser and Imperialis moisturizer, to the bus-stop and before I realized it, I was standing before that same, many-eyed, many-windowed building with its black, black glass. But this time, the wind was playful and the sun was sparkling and these streets were my streets and my scarf was striped.

I gave mirror-Me a friendly little smile and she nodded back. I wonder if the building kept a memory of my first reflection? Either way, I told her to "Look. See. I'm still here and surviving."

And, God willing, I will continue to do so.

Gleeful things:

I got myself a lovely warm pair of creamy tights to wear with a swirly dress tomorrow. Take that! Pants in winter! Forsooth. That's what buses and taxis were invented for.

I've a new collection of pretty Christmas music with notes that fall with the softness and lightness of falling snow. Perfect for whirling by myself around the room!

I've a huge pile of reading - the old, beautiful, yellow-paged, gilt-edged type of tome which is the only real and proper thing to think of when you say book.

I'm going home for Christmas! That deserves far more exclamation marks than it's going to get. I can't wait.

A boy told me I looked like a valentine.

Knowing that my letters have been received!

Being able to buy a bar of hazelnut creme chocolate for 99 cents.

Nervous meetings of potentially kindred spirits on Mondays when pretty dresses will be a definite.

It doesn't take much to make my step bounce just a bit more - though admittedly, I'm just as easy to deflate as a balloon, with the same sort of farty noise as I run around my room yowling.

Research proposals, essays, exams, I'm looking at you. But you can't stop there being fairy lights outside when I walk home from work and you can't stop the winter air in my lungs. So there.

Today I was happy when I got off from work. It was a cold, drizzly day and I teetered in one of my favorite pair of high-heels. Everything seemed like an adventure, from the mud squishing beneath my feet to the rain making little crystal lines in my hair. The backdoor was locked somehow and jammed so even though I stood for about half an hour, turning my key with small, cold hands that aren't very mighty for all their turqoise-and-fire-engined striped nails, I couldn't get it open.

So I climbed in through a window, balancing precariously on flower pots. There's something quite exhilarating about breaking into a house and the sense of achievement is only heightened by the wearing of impractical shoes. The last time I had to shove open a window that feels more like a wall and ease through from the wet into the dry, I was wearing one of my favorite dresses - a rose pink, Innocent World concoction with fleur-de-lys scattered over it, the ends of the dress edged in embroidery that makes my heart swell if I look at it too long, like a bad parody of a F. Scott Fitzgerald character.

I think a recipe for fulfillment is to do something that calls for practicality in the most impractical, ridiculous, whimsical and overblown way possible.

Here are some writers I plan to catch up on:

Terry Pratchett. Nation. I tried reading it in Chapters and it's a book of such awe-inspiring wonder, such cunning wit and such big, big ideas that you soon feel like there's a whale in your brain, with its tail sticking out in an ungainly fashion from your left ear. I couldn't finish it in one go, I had to keep stopping and blinking at a world that seemed to have been turned in over its head. I like that feeling.



J. M. Barrie. I love Peter Pan with its charming thoughtlessness, its childish cruelty. I used to own a copy that was wondrously illustrated in such a way that it seemed everything was happening by the light of a sly, laughing moon. I need to steal away again to Never-Neverland. It's been a long time.



Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita. Everybody worth their weight in hardboiled eggs and a sprinkle of salt has read this book. I tried to scout it out in the Carleton library, but the only copy I was able to dig out was in Russian. It was a while before I realised I had it upside down, but now I think I want a collage of the Russian alphabet running up and down my room and screaming.



Lisa See. Peony in Love. The moment I saw the title of this book, I had to read it. I got halfway through before my father dragged me off to look at hams. Partly, it's narcissism. You almost never see the name 'Peony' being used for a romantic heroine. So I might be a bit biased when I say, I liked this book. While reading it, I felt like a sultan, bending over to examine a roll of tapestry spilled before his feet. The details are lush and rich and just a little stilted, but the overall effect is pretty and absorbing.



Now I'm off to sit beneath a fall of white netting with a bottle of cold, cold water beside me and pretend I'm writing something more epic than a research proposal. Maybe later I'll have some time to draw a present exchange between a naiad and dryad.

I'm so tired right now. I want to sleep, and I don't want to sleep because I want time to do things that seem like a 'me'- a million useless things. I want to write my stories and draw my pictures; read long, pretty blogs and write my letters; wash my face and dance around my room softly to a sort of music that is both cheesy and drawn from the stars. But at the same time, I want to appease my conscience by reading articles for school, I want to make myself healthy by getting enough sleep (which is, of course, why I'm writing this late at night and not really doing anything at all...) - it seems like there's always two flip sides of a coin inside me, struggling deep in me, playing epic war games of 'heads or tails'...

Sometimes it's hard to remember that there is a 'me', a person, a brain, a heart, a soul, two eyes and a song. When I walk through the crowds, I seem to meld right in - I become the slim blonde girl who tiptoes up to kiss her boyfriend, the African woman who seems so out of place in this hustle bustle with her long, ebony litheness wrapped up in sand colored robes. I feel the old Asian woman's confusion as she sits alone and wrapped up like a dumpling on an ugly bench, watching the world with a blank face, a hideous hat on her head.

If there's one thing I hate, it's seeing old people alone. It hurts more than anything. I hate people to hurt old people - there is something more cruel in it, more pathetic than any sort of child or animal abuse could be, to me.

I want to catch up their wrinkled hands, I want them all to hug me and tell me that I am that great-great grandchild they never had. Maybe I'm just lonely and a little love-starved. But then I want more time to myself.

A little disappointment slams right through me like a battleship made out of winter wind and I find I cry a rather more easily.

I prescribe for myself a bit of chocolate and a whirl around my room in my favorite pair of impractical high-heels and then I'll sit on my bed and breathe, and breathe and breathe.

At one o' clock, it's time to end this.

Take in a deep, deep breath. Does it taste like sultanas and Turkish Delight, strawberry jam, honey and cinnamon? Does your nose tingle as if it were stuffed with little baby clementines?

Smile at yourself in the mirror - you teeth gleam like pearls, your lips are cupid-bowed arches of fascination. Outside the streets are cold and some people are dead and still walking and getting fearfully in your way, but what does that matter?

All the letters came today!!

Can you imagine? I came in with a boiled, limp, cabbage feeling swirling in the bottom of my belly thanks to a salesgirl who made a little shopping-treat venture of mine particularly unpleasant (I don't even know if I can use the stuff I bought, they seem to have her patronization stewed right into them right now... ) and as I sighed and flipped on a light switch (which instantly flooded my red, honey, white room in even more liquid gold - I love my lamp!), I noticed that my room-mates had very kindly left a little bundle of rather fascinating letters lolling like puppies on my blood red quilt.

All of them came the very same day - bringing breaths of England, and Germany and Poland with them. I ripped them all open, read luxuriously (all of you write like drunken spiders, by the way, hee!) and then sat and beamed. After this, I want to yank out another sheet of paper and begin writing more letters - never mind the fact that I've a quiz tomorrow, a research proposal due the next week and an essay and exam the week after next! What do things like that, and petty sales girls who make you feel poor and silly, and hours of uninspiring work matter when there's a little breath of soul from across oceans?

Now I must know, have any of you gotten my letters yet? I feel really inadequate now! The covers of my envelopes are uninspired and white, with a pathetic scrawl of a doodle sitting in a corner like a dead rat. My dearest wish right now is that my letters will - even for a moment - make me feel as I did when I received yours.

Thank you so much, gothania, inmywindow and my_head_is_blue!

You brought inspiration like downy white feathers into my world again and now it feels as if my room must glow with the light of them.