Monday, July 18, 2005

I was supposed to be having the time of my life

While everyone else is reading Harry Potter, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar has caught my attention. Blame it on the rainy weather that stopped me from walking out for lunch. I headed to the library to unwind on the cushy blue couches after a quick bite in the canteen. I definitely should have read this book earlier.

"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction - every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."

"Look at what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the way town for nineteen years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullubaloo."

Why is it, post Lit A-Levels, that I still get the itch to annotate? When I get some literary work in my hands I am almost sure that, if I had a coloured marker, highlighter and pen, I'd be driven to do so. But otherwise, I'd just do it in my head. I like it this way though. The novel is a rich tapestry of characters, plot, the writer's style, and so on. And being able to see the development/stagnation of the story, the growth of characters, to chart the story's progress, does give me great satisfaction, as opposed to reading without appreciation.

+Payday
+Last day of work
+Haircut
+The Bell Jar
-Rude people working at the university who spoke to me in this DUH voice when, in the first place I wasn't informed of anything so it's not my fault I DIDN'T KNOW $!@&^*

I'm living on to-do lists from now till school.

rachel at 11:12 PM

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