some mighty fine trees

I saw an Australian Shepherd puppy tonight, walking through the Pit. I swear my heart stopped beating.

After nearly two full months of life, my orchid is beginning to show the first signs of decay. One of the six blooms just fell off. I feel like Zuzu. "Paste it, daddy! Paste it!"

Facebook is only interesting for so long.

The Telegraph (a U.K. newspaper) said "Middlemarch" is the greatest novel of all time. The Modern Library Association said it was "Ulysses." I haven't read either but now I want to read both. I am afraid to start "Ulysses" without an intense annotated guide, however. Travis recommended a British edition. I'm also considering buying UNC Press's "Allusions in Ulysses" when I do decide to tackle it. For the meantime, my big challenge is going to be vol. II of "In Search of Lost Time," which Moncrieff titles "Within a Budding Grove." This book also goes by the English name of "In Search of Young Girls in Flower." I'm not sure how one phrase can mean both of those things.

Windy and warm today. I dressed like I was going wading at the beach. Let my mane fly around my face, unhindered. It creates more frizz, but I am telling myself that it also creates more of an impression that I am a free spirit. This, albeit, is a false impression, but an impression just the same. Now I just need to stop shaving...

I finally uploaded a handful of photographs that had been rotting on my camera. I also put two very brief videos on Flickr: Franklin Street madness after the championship win and a snippet of Neko Case performing "Maybe Sparrow" at Meymandi.

Toni Morrison is endlessly rewarding. I started "Song of Solomon" yesterday and have been simply breezing through it. Not that it is a light read. But it is so engaging that I cannot put it down very easily. I am not sure what to take up next. My goal is to finish it before finals week, so I can read one or two novels during exams. Maybe even three. I only have three exams, which means I have lots and lots of time to kick around in the grass and read.

The boys on skateboards in the Pit make me so uneasy. Skateboards in general frighten me. It's such an unstable, risky form of transportation--to zip around on a little piece of wood with wheels on it. I can't understand what's saving them from a gratuitously graphic death every time they zoom past me on the sidewalk.

Even if you paid me, I would never be a political science graduate student. Never in a million thousand years.

Google Reader is still one of the best things in my life.

Most days, I like to think about what would happen if I started waving and shouting a random name at a stranger. What they would say if I went up to them and gave them a hug and pretended like I was a long-lost friend from high school. I've always wanted to do this, but I know I'll never have the spontaneous courage.

"A Meeting"

Wendell Berry

In a dream I meet

my dead friend. He has,

I know, gone long and far,

and yet he is the same

for the dead are changeless.

They grow no older.

It is I who have changed,

grown strange to what I was.

Yet I, the changed one,

ask: "How you been?"

He grins and looks at me.

"I been eating peaches

off some mighty fine trees."