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enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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in a haze and smog-filled 40 degree southern Ontario kitchen

OK, well, phew, I have completed one paper. One to go before Tuesday.

I think I'll step out to the mall before commencing the next one, however. Since my feet are blistering in the humidity like crazy, I've decided that I need to buy some K3ds-like shoes--like I used to have when I was a kid. I don't have the slightest clue where I'll find them. I wish I could wear sandals but...I have the ugliest feet in the WORLD.

Ah, age. I've crossed the threshold from invincibility to tenderness and hesitation.

I woke up this morning well-rested for a change and spontaneously went to the bookshelf and started picking out books. I don't know how many people read twenty books at once, but I have a bad habit of doing this (a reflection of my characteristic of indecision, unwillingness to commit to finishing anything, and the general chaos and pungency of my desires). The precise stack of books that sits on my table by the window, on either side of where I sit and eat or drink coffee or concoct great and ill-fated schemes, is composed of the following:

--Mason's New English Grammar--Intermediate, 1915 (this is the one that for some reason I wanted to read snippets of over breakfast)
--Plan de Paris par Arrondissement (1936) (just dreaming)
--Cassell's guide to London (1905) (also dreaming)
--RW Emerson Nature Essays (1912) (now that I'm taking the conservation, preservation, and book-binding course I find myself unable to resist sniffing pages of books like this)
--John Rusk!n, Selected writings
--Somerset M@ugham, The Partial View
--French Poets of Today (Bilingual edition)
--Teach Yourself Books, Italian (1962)
--Charl0tte Bront3, The Professor
--R0ss King, Michelangelo and the Pope's C3iling
--Simon Sch@ma, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Int3rpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (interesting as it is, I have never been able to get through the whole of this unbelievably dense monster...it distresses me somewhat that in the introduction he states that "Even a big book [like this] seems a paltry offering for the daily riches of her companionship." She must be fantastic ;0).


The pi�ce de resistance:

One very dog-eared copy of the the Decameron, which is funny.

In my book binding course the other night the professor presented an interesting example of binding by a heritage bookmaker and it happened to be a print of one of the stories from the Decameron. Opening it up in class, I of course popped it open exactly to a line about nuns and cocks and what is required for satisfaction. Oh, Boccaccio.

Actually, on the bus to Toronto, I read the funniest little book that I have had in my collection for ages and never read. It is a little book on the history of Italian Cities, written by some professor of history from a college in northern NY state in 1905 (Cecil Fairfield Lavell, to be precise--poetic, huh?). What was amusing about this book was the language with which this professor tried to reconcile Dante's obsessions with the ushering in of Boccacc!o's, in only a few pages. Delicato.

As you can tell, I have a weird fascination with historical perspectives of historical situations; I'm the only person I know who actually loves to go into the government publications section of a library and read actual reports of things like The Commission of Enquiry on the Relationship between Labour and Capital in the Dominion, 1887. The Parliamentary Hansard, too, is my friend.

I have an ILLNESS.

So that's about it, except that I would like to mention a revelation that I had at a party the other night. I was a little bit tipsy and tired and I was in a kind of zone--too tired to say much and working hard to concentrate on what the guy who was speaking to me was saying--when I realized that the guy, though pleasant, was a know-it-all. I'm afriad that I must appear like this as well. I'm going to have to learn to temper my curiosity and desire to spew the trivial, with quiet and patience. I don't want to be as insufferable as that guy appeared to me to be at that moment. I mean, he has a reputation for being like that--and what he had to say didn't strike me as particularly untrue or inappropriate,--but it was too much. Too, too, much. I have a feeling that I am a person such as this. I do not want to present as the all S., all the time show.

I think I've procrastinated sufficiently by now that it is too late to force myself to go to the mall with any expectation of finding it open.

Oh. Have I mentioned that after nine months of living here I have finally clued into the fact that the guy next door is a drug dealer? I think I've mentioned that I live in a gentrified area, but only on the cusp of it. I've been watching this guy come out of his apartment in the house next door, get on the bike that he leaves unlocked by the fence facing the window behind my computer, shoot a glance my way, ride off for ten to twenty minutes and return...a couple of dozen times a day. I've often watched him with his wife and little girl thinking: caring parents; cheerful; wonder how they can afford not to work at all, since neither one seems to have any sort of a pension-generating disability? I'm extremely clever and observant, aren't I?

Cheerio.


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3:13 p.m. - 2006-06-18

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