holy moly

TOUGH first day of school kiddos.  Commute was Dis-gusting.  The walk to my subway was a nice mix of skating rink and slushie.  Bronx-flavored slushie.  Almost died falling like six times, finally made it into the station as the train left.  okay no biggie.  sat down to wait, and wait, and wait and wait and wait and get up and look at the train which is one stop away i can see it but why isn't it coming and wait and wait and wait and then it finally came and SURPRISE! it's a local because it is too icy to go express.  of course when it gets to manhattan it's underground so it can go express but then i need the local to get to 68th street and the local train takes FOREVER.

So I went to my 9:40 am class closer to 10:20.  dang.  The teacher was incredibly chill though and I had fun in the class and the reading looks interesting.

The books for school are TOO expensive!! I haven't bought proper textbooks in years... but they were very expensive, even more than when I was an undergrad and those were expensive.  now they are like $120 dollars!! I mean c'mon!  So I bought one as an e-book and i'll try that and see if I can read/study from it but I think I can for that class because it isn't that hard.  The rest of the books I am renting.  Renting books!! sheesh.

um what else... i was super hungry at school because i was there for ten hours and all i had packed was a mini p.b.and j.  brian and i are going to get school supplies and foods tomorrow before I go gym/writing group/night school.  

I am so tired.  I never wake up early.  I'm changing Wednesday to Challenge Day in my calendars because this is a very hard day!!

oh i want to write more but I am too tired.

I have to take linguistics and it is impossibly hard because i had no training in grammar.  I know grammar intuitively but not formally and have no basic understanding of it to build off of.  This is very unfortunate because it seems somehow that my classmates were instructed on this stuff at some point and I was not.  maybe it was sixth grade?  I missed most of sixth grade because my appendix ruptured.  linguistics is hard like math.

it's been a while

         I thought i ought to check in with everyone here on the blog-o-sphere-o-world-ee-verse.
i'm reading this book today. gogol is so weird. one of his stories, Ivan Fyodorovich begins with the narrator being a very old man who forgets things and he tells us how he likes to write them in his notebook but his wife is also very old and one day she is baking pasties (you won't find better pasties anywhere, I warrant you) and he picks up the pasties she has been baking on some paper and there is writing on the paper and it was just as he suspected she was using the paper from his notebook! and he can't have a fight with her, can he, because his wife is also very old. and then he tells us about a year ago he was driving through Gadyach
and he has tied some knots in his hankerchief to remind himself to ask Stephan Ivanovich about the end of a story, and reminds himself that if he sneezes when he is town he must remember to ask Stephan but he sneezes plenty and forgets so he suggests that the reader go to Gadyach himself and ask Stephan Ivanovich the end of the story and gives us great details hw to find the gentleman himself.  Then the story begins and we met Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and his Aunt.  We watch young Ivan grow up, join the military, have great success in his career. 
Next he gets a letter from his Aunt who is in charge of his farm, asking him to come to the country and take over the farm and he does and he likes it.  But his aunt tellshim there is this paddock of land that will soon be very valuable  and that the land actually belongs to him as this other man had ceded it to him in his will.  He goes to see the man's nephew who ought to have the deed to give him but the man, Grigory Grigoryvech Storenko, tells him there is no such deed and to bad and feeds him a magnificent feast and makes him drink vodka.  Then Ivan goes home to his aunt who tells him that Storenko is a fat swindling bastard of many chins and they resolve to go together next time.  While they are there and Storenko is out the aunt devises to leave Ivan alone with a maiden who is Storenko's daughter as she has designs that the two should be wedded.  Ivan is terrified and they sit together for half an hour and do not speak except once, to comment on the fact that there are many flies in the summer. 
Then Ivan and his aunt go home and Ivan is very nervous and has mad dream about wives with the heads of geese and tiny wives in his hat and in his pocket and then dreams that a "Wife" is a new type of material that the dry goods man is trying to sell him, saying that it is very fashionable and everyone is having frock-coats made of this material so he buys some and takes it to his Jewish tailor who tells him that it is very poor material indeed and that no one with any sense of fashion is having frock-coats made of wife anymore.  and then he wakes up and is troubled and meanwhile his aunt is coming up with a scheme in her head, which we are told we will learn of in the next chapter, and then the story ends.  Have you ever read such an absurd story as this?  I have not.  And Gogol is considered great Ukrainian literature, is he not?
So the moral of that story is that I ought to write whatever weird and wonderful fancies come to my head and in whatever bizarre way I desire because perhaps I will end up writing great Ukrainian literature.  Tee hee.
Have you every read any of Bruno Schultz's work?  He was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher, who is widely regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. Schulz was born in Drohobycz, in the province of Galicia, to Jewish parents, and spent most of his life there. He was killed by a German Nazi officer.
His work is as ethereal and bizarre and magnificently weird as Gogol's, perhaps more so.  I want very much to own several collections of his work but they are very expensive.  I would like to recommend a film Santorum Pod Klepsydra
or the  Hour-Glass Sanitorium.  It is as surreal and brilliant as the book and is the most beautiful Polish movie I have ever seen.

It is available on Youtube, but lamentably only in Polish.  I used to have a copy of it with English subtitles, and I am sad to say I no longer do, nor do I know where could get it.  If you can solve that problem for me, I would be very grateful to you.

Thanks for reading!

love,
oni

here's a clip with subtitles that you might get a feel for the film:

birthday post

good birthday.  good morning.  and walk in the park and bodega coffee and nice lady on the bus liked my earrings and other lady was so sweet and thankful that i gave her my seat of course i did she was old and had bags.  bought food for the week in the labyrinthine lines at trader joes in manhattan and read for a long while on the train.  im reading  the good wife by stewart o'nan and i'm enjoying it even though it is very sad.  it feels real and makes me glad i'm not married to someone who has done something to ruin my life.  i am glad to be married to me.  i take good care of my life.

i took the food home and ate and went to ps 108 and voted and walked around for a bit and saw brian and then looked at the computer.

i'm going hiking on the 13th.  i'm looking very much forward to that and to visiting my family this weekend upstate.

i had many birthday wishes today and they were all loved. especially mama and kara and annika calling to sing me happy birthday and my mama sang "baby noni" and i caught a cry in my throat because i know how much she loves me and she is my mother by choice not by birth but still my mother in every important way and i love her.

i am tired and i think i will sleep a while.  then i am going to go to the gym because i find myself with a surfeit of feelings and that is a good and constant outlet.

TILT!

i'm loving a lot of things this week.

• Helpful clerical personnel.  Shout out to Michelle at the Registrar's Office at the New School for hooking me up with super-fast turnaround on that official transcript request.  You saved my butt and you didn't even give me crap about that fact I had months to take care of it but put it off until the day before.

• My big sister Miriam for post-midnight telephone consultation during crisis and for yummy sushi.   And the city of Philadelphia for having the best sushi roll for yummy bagel-and-lox from the Orient flavor.
• Reading with my girls.  I'm getting to explore the next generation of Children's and Tween literature and I'm really loving it!  Junie B. Jones, Fancy Nancy, Pinkalicious, FreckleFace Strawberry, all that :)

• halloweenie!! i got to make pumpkins with the girls which was awesome and also i am having a halloween-themed birthday party. very excited!!

ok i gotta go to the gym real quick then shower and edits for the ponies and head to manhattan :)

other things i love: that i can now almost do "dips" on the captains chair at the gym, my new sweaters, cantaloupe,  that light therapy exists to help me with S.A.D., dittocat, ECA STACK, unlimited Metrocards, cheap costume jewelry and hairbands, really good salad, homegrown herbs and tomatoes, and KEFIR.