DEAR DIARY
03.17.2026 11:51pm
Today:- woke up
- felt bloated
- made coffee and toast w/ PB and honey and nibbled on scraps & nuts & seeds & chocolate
- did ? (unsure what)
- taught students on Zoom
- saw blue sky from window
- took 1 hour to leave dark room in dark house for really no reason
- walked from house to port meadow to St. Margaret's to perch to Godstow Abbey to perch (sat for maybe 15 mins, spoke to mama on phone, drank warm cider, listened to birds), back through port meadow as the sun set all cotton candy, home via jericho
- near collapsed on couch
- walked to chester arms for steak platter bday celebration with the boys. ate FAR too much. had good time. walked back.
- final step count @ midnight: 24,100
So the thing is I've gotten funding for a PhD. I'm unsure how this happened or where I am. This is probably the time for me to -- at last! -- learn how to use an astrolabe. Or at least a compass. This is definitely the time for me to be guided by fables. But also by a compass. And by the stars. The stars were really bright tonight. There were so many of them. I'm not used to seeing stars. They still really do take me by surprise.
03.17.2026 2:17am
So much to record. It will wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow I will record. Today, that is. Once I finally sleep and it is real morning.Can't put down Cruddy by Lynda Barry -- got digital copy via LAPL Overdrive/Libby. God bless the LAPL. God bless Libby. God bless digital lending, files dropped into phone and then snatched away again after x days have elapsed.
Started reading today and am almost done. It's been a while since I could not stop reading like that. One thing I am usually capable of nowadays is stopping reading.
I remember reading daddy's old copies of Girls + Boys and Big Ideas as a kid, pulled down from the shelf along with B. Kliban etc, all those narrow-paged low-slung volumes of sick funny comics. They made me feel odd, and icky, and confused. They disturbed. They disrupted. They made me laugh. I wished I hadn't read them, then would read them again.
A lot of girlhood really is about fear and disgust and involuntary secretion.
I used to read those comics in the living room, which was and is the most warmly comfortable room I know, welcoming, loving, and cozy, filled with beauty and livingness and ongoing projects and books and music and good lamps. I read and reread daddy's comics curled up on the living room couch, where only a few years earlier he'd spent all his spare time dying.
I don't know why or how or when I taught myself to punch myself down like yeasted dough, rising and punching until there was not much rise left, only the sour, flat bliss of fermented inaction. It really is a shame. It really was a waste. Not only of years but of good rich anger.
03.03.2026 in bed, still sick
I have this nasty mucosal cough that forces itself out every few minutes. I have this snot gushing from my nose at all hours. My stomach is bloated tight because I'm sick and bored so I keep nibbling on things like bread and honey -- like that one queen in her parlour.The queen eating - I mean, her eating-bread-and-honey-in-her-parlour - is a nervous pre-event - without knowing itself to be. It hovers in l'imparfait with other habitual gesture - the king counting money in the counting-house, the maid hanging clothes in the garden - when suddenly the passé composé rushes in all violent - the blackbird swooping down to peck off the maid's nose, I assume in an act of vengeance for his 24 brothers.
1 routine action is being performed in location 1 by person 1, a 2nd in location 2 by person 2, a 3rd in location 3 by person 3, when along comes a 4th character who cuts straight through habit !! Severs it entirely! Violent disruption can slice the nose off habit/routine -- is this good, bad, or neutral?
It is sick, anyhow, pecking off a maid's nose for something her employer did. It is typical!! I wonder if the palace kept her on after, and how she coped with the hole in her face, and if she had health insurance. I wonder if the violence actually disrupted the routines of the king and queen, or if the royals just got on with counting and eating, unperturbed.
(Also I assume blood got all over the clean clothes the maid was working so hard to hang up -- having your nose sliced off is not the sort of thing you expect to happen to you when you're hanging up the wash.)
I hung up a load of laundry today. My nose ran, but stayed attached. I did a cold-ish water wash but I still need to do like 4 more loads before I can consider the piles of laundry in my room conquered: 1 (one) Very cold Very delicate load (for those really demanding fabrics that threaten to shrink or unravel or change color or whatever if heated or agitated to ANY degree), 1 (one) wool wash, 1 (one) underwear/sock rough warm fast tumble, then also my bedding (especially on account of my having been in bed so much the past three days on account of being SICK).
Meant to write real nice good log-type entry today - have been losing days rapidly without record, so hoped to shift from pseudo-self-analysing ramble to cold hard fact (what I did today, what is happening in world, what, if anything, I have learned, who I have seen, where I have gone, etc etc) but too tired and wiggly. Almost always tired and wiggly nowadays, but being sick heightens and refines (ie, further vitiates) wiggliness until it feels almost like a spiritual state. What a pleasure, to feel horrible in a way that isn't TOO bad but prevents you from thinking anything or being anything other than sick. What a pain. What a nuisance. What a way to be.
[I think this is all I remember of French - that is, when (in theory) to use passé composé v. l'imparfait. Also I can haltingly say "Je vais au supermarché pour acheter l'épinard. Tu aimes l'épinard?"]