if you're still reading, then i guess the answer to this question is yes. so, my day today. truly, it's the first day in a long string of days that i've felt....calm, not crazy, normal, not anxious or angst-ridden or in a hurry and unable to tell which way was up. i wrote this morning. i finished my mocha (read: automatically that translates into a saner me). then i went and paid a bill and picked up a couple of books i'd ordered from the bookstore (read: i think i paid more for them in the bookstore than i would have if i'd ordered them online). i went to teach. i came home. i waited for UPS. and then i starting reading one of my new books, just out of the UPS driver's hands. the perks of being a wallflower by stephen chbosky (more on the experience that reading this book is later). and after two and a half hours, having gotten to the point where i could no longer ignore my growling stomach, i was forced to put my book down and get up to make dinner. pasta. which i have been craving for about a week now. and while dinner was cooking i even did some dishes. i know this all sounds so banal and boring, but truly, in my book of days that have so far made up 2009, this one has been a treat. and as i'm sitting here waiting for the pasta to come out of the oven (because you can't get the full effect unless the cheese is all nice and bubbly!), i'm sitting here asking what exactly has made this day so wonderful, and how can i duplicate it over and over and over again? that, my friends, is indeed the million dollar question.
i must admit, i think it has something to do with the book that i'm reading. it's stylish and real and beautiful. beautiful in many of the same ways that i've always thought that the great gatsby is beautiful. it's written in epistolary form, and i'm serious when i say that i really do feel like i'm the "dear friend" that is being addressed in these letters. and i can almost painfully imagine the moments that the writer is describing, almost like i'm sitting in the room right next to him watching it all unfold. i'm almost halfway through and i have no idea how it will end. i have yet to discover what the perks of being a wallflower are. but i do know that i'm along for the ride.
though i don't want to say this, i think it's true. this is the first thing i've read lately that's really touched me on an emotional level. it's the first thing that's made me want to keep reading. i have no idea what this means for my future hopes of being a twentieth century lit scholar, other than i think i will find myself wanting to read and write on more contemporary stuff in the future, after the diss is done and i have some kind of job.
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