21 XI 2001 - 13:28 - brevis27

I found this morning a poem by Cavafy:

On The Ship

Certainly this little drawing
in pencil resembles him.

Hurriedly drawn, on the deck of the ship
one enchanting afternoon.
The Ionian Sea all around us.

It resembles him. But I recall him as handsomer.
He was sensitive to the point of suffering,
and that illumined his expression.
He comes to mind as handsomer
now that my soul evokes him out of Time.

Out of Time. All of these things are exceedingly old -
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.

//

I don't know why I'm putting that up here. Actually, I do; I'm just not all that sure I want to go into it. You know me; you know I'm young, and that I have no time to pull old faces from - but it still seems halfway familiar, the tendency to make things better, to find leavings which do nothing for what they were tended to bring to mind...

*shrugs*

And that red-brown hair of Alexander's is beautiful (possibly only astroturf knows the person I'm talking about), and I have been told so many times in the past week that I would be a good boyfriend it's beyond amusing, and I have been told fewer times but still enough to be funny that I would be a good father and a good husband - and just once I was asked why I hadn't found myself a nice girl yet. And apparently I am somewhat emo (an unclear term to me if ever there was one) without realizing it, although holyfuckaroo is even more so:

I am 56% EMO.

Emo Kid. Well.. I've made the cut! Now I'll go buy some promise rings and knit myself a sweater. Take the EMO Test at Fuali.com!

La. And T. says that I have all this UST with Al, which is just wrong, because, no, except it might be true (oh God oh God I hope it's not...) but it was so funny the way she accused us of it, making her voice go all high and saying things like "I'm going to touch you and we're going to fight now, and maybe I'll pull your hair" in a really breathy imitation of - me? her? us? and really, considering how much we fight, you'd think I'd choose a different girl to have all of this with, except maybe that's why we fight so much. There is so much I don't understand, and I'm not sure that I want it all to become clearer to me.

I think I've mentioned everything that I wanted to mention in this entry, and yet I am curiously loath to cut it off here. I went to the library near my school yesterday - speaking of the library near my school, the hours it keeps are weird - it doesn't open until 1 on a lot of days, and some days it's just open 1-5. I guess that's because it's in a residential neighborhood, but it still strikes me as somewhat pointless to be open for just those four hours. The one near my house is open most days starting at 10 or 11; the only exception is Sunday, and then its hours are 1-5, but that's more understandable because of the whole tradition of Sunday being the day of rest. Anyway, I went to the library to return the LPs I'd checked out and maybe to make a photocopy of the e. e. cummings anthology, the one I've found that has the poem which runs "for prodigal read generous / for youth read age -" but it wasn't there. So I ended up getting Thucydides's Peloponnesian Wars and The Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam (sp?) and an anthology of Cavafy's poems - actually, two of those - and also a collection of poems by this woman Wislawa Szymborska who I know nothing about, it's just that her book was on the shelf near the other books I was looking for, and sometimes it's just neat to pick them up, you know? And actually the title of the anthology (view with a grain of sand) reminded me much of the title of this other book I read, science fiction it was, by Samuel Delany (there might be another e between the n and the y, I'm too tired to get the Nev�r�on book out to find the correct spelling) - its title was Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. Free association rocks. Especially when you consider that the subject matter, and the style of writing (although I realize the translator does much in the Polish poet's case), are so different.

I love penguins.

PBS is telling me that one hundred million unique sperm are made in my testes every day. In history this morning, I learned that if I had had a nice voice as a child and had been sent to a Church school, I could have ended up without my testes.

Ouch.

I think I'm going to go to bed so I can wake up refreshed and coherent. (It's about 2:45 now, by the way.) Or if not coherent, at least refreshed... no, wait, that never happens.

Maybe I'll write something less trivial, less off-the-wall, later.

Maybe I'll just, you know, get over all of this *gestures wildly* - the UST, the desire for long walks on the beach, the desire.

I'm thinking no.

olea, oleae f. olive, olive-tree