Straight No Chaser

Restitution

oh, and the fun thing we did yesterday in strange's class was the "chastity" exercise, wherein you have to generate a paragraph of some set number of words, adjective- and adverb-free. strange is, of course, smiling openly at yours truly, because she and i both know that adverbs are my crystal meth. i can't do anything without them; it is my greatest weakness as a writer. the paragraph i wrote, and i can barely call it a paragraph, really, ended up being about the process of trying to write an adverb-free paragraph. i scrapped and restarted about sixteen times, feeling very much the cripple.

we talked about it later, when i had my solo midterm conference with her. her office smells like incense. i wanted to get my grades and bask in her genius; she wanted to psychoanalyze me. she thinks my exaggeration is a crutch; she says it makes for vivid writing, but that it's alarming, to her, that everything has to happen with such a tremendous crash. that unless i can make the reader feel extraordinarily whatever, the whatever is not worth much. overall the conference went great, though. this woman is a genius, the full-grown embodiment of my seven-year-old self (have i said that before). i might be in love.

hmm.

i finally got the peace i was looking for, with marcus. don't want to get into too much detail, but i will say, there is this moment, this recurring moment, that invariably comes between the two distinct phases of our times together, that is so consistently and significantly perfect, it makes even prior hells worthwhile. i told him the thought about david copperfield, totally joking, of course; he responded in the perfectest way imaginable, and i wanted to leave then, on that ripertonian high note. i didn't.

in the interest of minimalism, i'll leave it at that.

again, poetic justice: where yesterday it was just tracey and i, with about five thousand students needing tutoring, today there are four of us, and absolutely zero students. whoever did the scheduling should be shot, unless it was the tid, in which case she should be speared, flogged and then shot. add "overstaffed tutoring shifts" to the ever-growing list of circumstances that make me feel violent.

apple dumpling has been stealing my blank cds, my quarters, my paper towels and my "blow" dvd, repeatedly. we are going to have to have a chat when i get home.

better yet, i'm just going to move in with aaron, who is going to feed me everything (everything!), until i am twice the size i currently am. i'm pretty excited about this, because it has been a hungry week. we will start with m&ms and skittles, mixed together in a bowl. finally, fruit and chocolate in gustatory harmony. then, when i'm big enough, because i doubt i am now, we will start giving back to this great nation; by my count, we have promised the world three tremendous gifts: the science prodigy, the literary nobel winner, kailani. alternatively, we will start taking notes for our first collabo novel. ripe fruit will rain down from our tree.

having struck that note of randomness, i'm a little dismayed, to be honest, to see that it's time to run home. we've got that shakespeare thing today. thank god (and that's a command, you should literally be saying prayers of thanks) you don't have to see me making the world's biggest ass of myself, playing falstaff in our class production of henry iv.