Hamlet was reading words

Tonight I was reminded of why I am an English major. I love words. We string words together and we use them to describe things and we line them up and erase them and find new ones and fish out old ones and we communicate with them. Words are magic. They can mean nothing and everything. Sometimes I read something and it wakes me and makes me different. Sometimes I write something and discover things that I never expected--an excavation of myself.

I took Shakespeare 382 (course number?) from Rick Duerden. One day in class he asked how many of us had gotten "so-what-are-you-going-to-do-with-that?" questions about being English majors. All hands went up. He asked how many of us were worried about getting jobs once we graduated. All hands went up. Then he did something very Mr. Keating-esque: he made a speech. I can't remember much of what he said--but he talked to us about how studying like we were doing was teaching us not only to think, but to think for ourselves. He talked about how we were studying Shakespeare at a high level (perhaps the highest) and it was up to us to decide how the world would interpret Shakespeare. And he talked about when he met and dated his wife. He said, "we fell in love, and suddenly the world was reinvented." I don't remember why he was talking about that, but I remember feeling this rush somewhere around in my ribcage. Using his words, he made me believe again in literature and yes, in studying English. I hadn't felt that way in a while. It seems that the farther along you get in your studies, the more disillusioned and jaded people get. It was so unexpected and just cool to find someone who still... believed.

I'm thinking about all those great books I read when I was twelve to sixteen. Those books that seemed to open a window in my mind and shoot off a firecracker and gave me a knew lens to see and think through. You know, a lot of Newberry medal stuff. Walk Two Moons and The Giver and Mick Hart Was Here and The View From Saturday--those books. How could they not be magic?

At any rate, today my love for words was lit up by a note someone had written on their profile. We hear so often that "words can't describe," or "I don't have the words to tell you," and that kind of thing. And sometimes that is completely true. But sometimes words can get pretty close. They can allow us to hold our thoughts and feelings and experiences in the palm of our hand and extend our arm to someone else, someone outside. We can uncurl our fingers and let everything we have sit on our hand, a still firefly.

Lemon Buoyancy

In one of my favorite books, Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech, the main character talks about a dream she has about her mother. Her mother has died recently. The girl dreams that her mother comes to her and suggests that they build a raft and float away down a river together. I think about that raft every now and then. Sometimes the raft in my mind is floating on water that has lemons bobbing in it. Why that is--I couldn't say. But sometimes I can't think of anything better than building a small raft and floating away on a river that's sure to take me somewhere, but takes me slowly and quietly. And wherever that somewhere is, it's everything I needed it to be--which is, of course, so much better than what I thought I wanted.

Non-malignant Slacking

You know those days when you wake up and you know it's just not going to happen? "It's" being... well... the day. You open your eyes and you know there's no way you're going to class. I started to feel that way last night. As I was going to sleep I was pretty sure that I was not going to be going to my first class, history of rhetoric (which, by the way, I had no excuse for missing and is a class I really should NOT miss). When I woke up this morning I decided I should probably go, but then I fell back asleep until it was too late anyway. Missed it. Bummer. Then, somewhere along the line I decided not to go to my second class either (Spanish phonetics--another one I should be there for...). I temporarily reformed and was getting ready, but then the reformation ended and I found myself texting a girl in my class to tell her I wouldn't be there today, but could we meet to do an assignment later?

Aside from the guilt, it's quite a nice feeling to suddenly not be going to class. It's this gift you weren't expecting and you're delighted to receive. So, I was thinking to myself as I was eating Golden Grahams in my pajamas while my fellow classmates were toiling away at fricatives and glottal stops--what is better: to know beforehand that you're going to be missing class, or to have it suddenly happen? I would have to say the suddenly happen scenario. It's so much more pleasing. You thought you were headed off to the hum-drum world schoolwork and cranky professors, then WHAMMO! You suddenly have a deliciously free hour before you. You could do anything! Now, to my credit, when all this time suddenly opened up this morning I thought of a million things I needed to do: go to the library to pick up a number of poetry collections that I should be reading, ordering a book online that would not be in the library, critiquing some poems for tomorrow's workshop, reading aloud in Spanish, researching the specific phonetics of Cuban Spanish, etc. etc. It's not like I really had free time, but at least I could redirect my time to something else that's been hanging around my neck like the proverbial millstone.

So. Today's lesson: sometimes skipping class is just nice. Not often, mind you, but a rare incident of sluffing does the soul some good. Of course now I will have the pay the consequences, but... Ah well. Such is life.

Black and White

I miss the piano. The condo I'm living in doesn't have one near by. Some complexes have pianos in the rec room or something--not that I ever use them. My fear of playing for anyone other than myself runs old and deep. Just knowing I can be heard puts me on edge and makes my fingers sweat and splay all over the keyboard. Recitals were always mortifying experiences. I would sit there, waiting for my turn to play while hacked out versions of "Jingle Bells" "Star Wars" and "Fur Elise" plinked and stumbled along. By the time it was my turn to perform my limbs were weak and perspiring coldly and I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to play anything. I would then proceed to make the most elementary of mistakes, lose my place, and flood the pedal.

Despite that, I love to play the piano. By myself. The only people I can play for are my parents--and that's only when they are obligingly bustling around doing other things. The moment my mom sits down near the piano to listen--I lose it and make mistakes like mad. But if she's quietly rustling about in the kitchen while I'm tramping through some new age something, I'm fine.

I play very poorly. I took lessons in elementary school, but hated it so much my mom let me stop. Then (my freshman year of high school...?) she said that she wished someone could and would play the piano, so I started lessons again, only by that time I couldn't remember a single thing and had to start from square one, or at least near it. Unfortunately, I was embarrassed at not remembering anything and didn't admit to my teacher that I didn't know what the counts were for any of the notes for maybe a month or so. I got by because I would try and play something, then she would play it correctly and I would just mimic exactly the way she played it. She thought I was understanding, but really I was cheating. When I finally fessed up she told me, "that's the second time I've heard that today. But the other girl was six years old." Ah, pride.

Piano is something I love. Playing relaxes me, clears my head and seems to pull me together. Sometimes it makes me feel the same way running does, or even praying. There's something simultaneously exciting and frustrating about learning to play something new, and there's something satisfying and freeing about playing something you've played a thousand times before.

Music is a different language. The more I learn about it, the more it shares with me.