Clouds

It's gray and windy out, and droplets of rain are falling at unpredictable intervals. I woke up at noon, after very vivid dreams of being ill (have you ever dreamed about vomitting? It's very strange), to find myself still sick, my throat swollen so that I could hardly swallow water. I choked down some pills somehow, anyway, and went next door to borrow my mother's bathtub for an hour or so, which helped at least as much as the medicine did.

Lunch was Swedish meatballs and Mountain Dew, with Pamela Dean's Tam Lin propped up in front of the plate. I read it first as a senior in high school, with aspirations towards working in a lab, locked up in small dark rooms with planaria for the rest of my life. Reading it again now, as a person holding a degree in English, and with some experience in Latin and Classics, I find that the beginning parts make more sense, and are also enjoyable in new ways. The book as a whole still moves slowly, with a curiously dreamlike quality, much as my brain does under the effects of cold medication and congestion. I'm well-suited to my reading material, today.

The book makes me feel a bit sad, a bit as though I missed something in my own college experience. Janet, the main character, meets these odd people, has adventures, quotes poetry, does interesting things with her roommates... I spent all of my time when I lived in the dorm trying to avoid my roommates and being irritated with them for leaving the television on at all hours and eating my food out of the fridge. There's this sort of sense of adventurous, communal experience that I totally missed out on. Maybe because I went to a largeish state school, maybe because I'm a bit stand-offish, and don't make friend easily... I dunno.

I've had that feeling a few times. I did feel like I was bonding with a group of mostly like-minded folk in the Honors English program, and in my Honors poetry section, before that... But I'm only in contact with a few of those people, now. The MagraPaloozas were like that, for me, too. I think WisCon might be. I hope it will. But I feel like college ought to have been more than it was.

Ugh. I'm getting very maudlin, now, which is a ridiculous and embarassing thing to do when you're twenty three. I guess I just feel like I always manage to get myself caught up somewhere in the middle between my own expectations, and everyone else's, and thereby satisfy no one. I should have gone away to school. I should have taken the opportunity to study abroad. I should have, I should have, I should have...

So what am I going to do now, anyway? That's a much more useful line of thinking.

Take some more cold pills, I expect.