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epitome of incomprehensibility
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I think this week I've been more sensibility than sense. And I'd even call it nonsensibility, except, knowing you, you wouldn't be impressed.
I have a confession to make: I haven't even read Sense and Sensibility. I just watched part of the movie last night with my mother and brother. The plot seemed too contrived, too many coincidences. Yes, yes, I know what I was watching wasn't your original, but it seemed like a more melodramatic version of Pride and Prejudice. Maybe the titles are too similar? And now you're all like, "Who's talking? Is it the girl who called one of her so-called songs and her unrelated oh-I'm-gonna-finish-it-someday novel the SAME FUCKING THING?!"
Why are you swearing at me, Jane? That's not nice. If you can't handle constructive criticism... Who's calling who a hypocrite? Okay, let's change the subject. I'm pretty sure my brother's straight. I'm also pretty sure he has a crush on Alan Rickman, who was playing Col. Brandon. When he appeared on screen, guess who got all excited and said, "Hey, it's Severus Snape!" And guess who said, "Rewind it, rewind it, I want to hear the man talk," after he'd gone out of the room for water?
I was thinking of you when I was walking home from skating this evening. Did you get much exercise? It's good for the body, but it also tricks you into thinking you've accomplished something, when all you've really done is skated around in circles or jogged to Jean-Coutu to buy your February bus pass and maybe thought of a tiny poem about a broken ink cartridge you saw at the edge of the parking lot near the grocery store.
Back to you. I know hardly anything about your life. I've read Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey. I thought Northanger Abbey had the best plot, but I know Pride and Prejudice better simply because it's like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, even though I like his Fifth better because it's a beautiful example of two themes stripped down to their rhythmic essence and merging into one - sensibility again, and now that I say it like that it sounds like it's about sex. Is Beethoven's fifth symphony about sex? Or cosmic doorbells? The opening part that everyone knows sounds like a cosmic doorbell chime, don't you think? The portal to the universe or something.
Please stop rolling your eyes. That isn't nice either.
Can I ask you a candid question? When what's-her-name in Mansfield Park, the musical girl on whom Edward had a crush at first, when she said the navy profession was all about "rears and vices" was she REALLY just making a pun about Rear Admirals and Vice Admirals? Hm. Not very candid. Let me rephrase: Was it about gay sex? That character, after all, is kind of naughty, and even if it at the time it wasn't, say, "kawaii" for girls to have a thing for male-on-male action, which I don't myself especially since it can be a bit silly and reductive as a fetish (think of the gender-reversed version and how easy that is to mock), she would've known about stuff like that, right? And by extension you, right? I don't mind if you were a virgin, but you must've had some theoretical carnal knowledge.
No, I don't have a one-track mind. I have a multiple-track mind and that's one of my problems. Or greatest mental assets. I haven't decided yet. It's just sad to be treated like you're somewhat less of a person because you can't finish a paper (okay, multiple papers) on time like other people do. In one province it's okay; in another province, I'm either a lazy bum or someone with a mental problem. I'll go with mental problem. That's what got me through, though it cost me some pride and showed me some prejudice. The tone in which that prof said "accommodations" still smarts.
And that's not the worst of it. It's the guilt from what I did that still lingers. I talked to Sybil - you know Sybil, or you should, you like to write about clergypeople, just picture a black woman instead of a white man, and make her talk too much but genuinely care about the poor, like a Protestant Pope Francis, and of course that's only scratching the surface - but she talks of spiritual redemption, not tangible forgiveness. Well, the Delphic Oracle can make predictions, but she can't make someone forgive you, just like the genie in Disney's Aladdin can't make people fall in love, and I can't resist mixing metaphors.
"The best-mixed metaphors of 2012" I wrote. S. liked that. And now she'll never talk to me again because I could have broken her nose or damaged her eyes, and how can I live with something like that? That is the second and last time I'll drink too much. As if that's the solution. Like Vladimir Putin musing, "Hmm, I think I'm an asshole. I must be badly influenced by something; I know I've eaten too many jellybeans once or twice! That's it. I'll stop eating jellybeans." But the problem with people like that is they don't think they're doing anything wrong and even their good deeds are petty and wrong-headed, they'll shelter Edward Snowden like some disgraced twentysomething volunteering to make and serve free lunches after (but a while after) she's regularly hit her parents and brother for, say, nine years, and by "they" I mean me and Vladimir Putin. But I usually know when I'm wrong. I just don't know how to make it right.
Why am I writing like this? What's my goal in life, Jane Austen? Am I to write the definitive chick-lit novel about an unreliable first-person virgin who (un)domestically abuses those closest to her and whose bad decisions in youth come back to haunt her? Is it wrong that I'm turning my teenage self into someone who is not myself at all, someone who isn't even a self but a construct? But see Lacan and his view of the ego. Or was it Kristeva? And am I to set it partly in Ohio? Is it fair to set it partly in Ohio when I've never been to Ohio? Do I apply to the substitute teacher thing my secondhand contact told me about? Do I have to like children? I do like children, but do I want to teach volatile immature humans all my life? They remind me too much of myself.
(You apply for the thing. You may not get it, remember. You can't be disappointed and hate yourself even so. Your brother wants to go to university and your immediates can't pay, say, for a TESL degree for you, and neither do you deserve that kind of support. You look for a job that will pay back your debt and don't beat yourself up over ones you don't get. You will live with your mistakes for the rest of your life. I can't take that away. But you need to keep writing and living and working. Once you have published your first major project, or two, you can look for something more sustainable. Keep on going... After all, you don't plan to produce offspring, so you won't harm the evolution of humankind too much. Your sincerely, Jane A.)
Thanks, Jane Austen. That was actually quite smart of you. Why are you writing as if you were jane_xo, though? Are you getting mixed up over a name?
(The names keep changing. Bafflingly, James Joyce.)
Oh, okay. I guess I better go to bed then and dream about Finnegans Wake.
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