June 17, 2004
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I obliviously began referring to the project I'm working on, which
involves gleaning important information from 60-page-long requests for
applications and then doing... lots of stuff (my Eloquence, my
Eloquence, why have You forsaken me? Because I'm so sleepy, that's
why!) with it, as the FundingOpsSheet/Underwriting Calendar, or in
evidently-obscene acronym form: the FUC.The ohmygodyou'resonaiveyou'vebeencallingthisFUCKforoveraweeknow!
reaction that this generated from the invoice-reading meanies recalled
an incident from last summer in which my scribblings, my shorthand, my
severe lack of something sex-related
resulted in extreme embarrassment: We'd been comparing Blake's
"Nurse(')s Songs" in my Romantic Lit class, and in the margin of the
parenthesisless poem, I'd scrawled a few quick notes on why the verse's
governess grew green at the sight of her naughty little charges darting
around the daleIthinkitwas. Of the twelve that waded through
Wordsworth, savored the Shelley, and bonded with Byron every Monday and
Wednesday from 3:30 to 6-and-sometimes-later, seven were grad students
and two were auditing and over the age of fifty. And of these twelve,
only one could never catch the overt sheath imagery, the snowy
white-turns-sordid symbolism, the oft-encountered whisperings of
sexsexsexsexsex--Saaaarah!...so before long, I'm recording every allusion that's not nature-, religious-, mythological-, or feminist-related verbatim,
hoping I'll get the hang of this "temptation! Desire! Latent
homosexuality!" game and be able to hold my own in the freak-ayyy
conversations that once-innocuous-seeming Keats seems to spawn. And
next to Blake's embittered portrait of overseer-related Experience lies
a loopy Sexual Envy: then an inch or two away, I am jealous because you are having sex with the person I want to have sex with. Sexual Jealousy: (same scenario) I am jealous because you're having sex and I'm not." You know, specific to general? Just a casual jotting-down in Professor Flesch's precise words, something I'd be sure to remember for the final (and thanks to the encounter I'm about to recap, forever).A few days later I was reading Blake's prophetic books in that really
stuffy Widener reading room where everyone acts as if they're On a
Mission (which they undoubtedly are, but still...) and you're
disrupting them by not having a Harvard Law School patch ironed on your
laptop case. I had the Oxford Anthology of Romantic Literature
splayed before me, as well as a few stray handouts spread across my
quarter of the table. After scrawling several notes on the back of one, I
flipped it over, photocopied-side-up, and pushed it aside, in the
direction of the tie-wearing Econ Type to my right. I initially
interpreted his peripherally-spied stare as a Score One for the High
School Harvard Wannabe!!! and went on with my perusal of the Proverbs
of Hell. It was when he began thrusting his desktop replacement into
its oversized case, capping his Mont Blanc, and casting one final You sick freak! expression my way that I realized he'd interpreted the poem-relocation maneuver as a note pass and the "I am jealous because you're having sex and I'm not" as a message meant for him.Will it ever end?
Off too change forty Task Order headings from FUC to UFC.
Comments (7)
hilarious! i have a friend who would say "hysterical" instead, and it makes me bite my tongue. but if you were telling this story to that friend, you definitely would have gotten a, with emphasis, "That is absolutely HYSTERICAL!"
"liminal" is yet one more inescapable word you inevitably must face and swallow in every graduate literature course ever to be taken. for all of how titillating the word is at first, by the time you have 24 hours of class or more under your belt, you just kind of groan with every utterance....
see what you have to look forward to?
And all I kept thinking of was Blake! While in London I saw a Blake exhibit at the Tate: "William Blake" (9 Nov 00 - 11 Feb 01). The exhibit was arranged in 4 sections: One of the Gothic Artists; The Furnace of Lambeth's Vale; Chambers of the Imagination; Many Formidable Works. It was really beautiful. And I had just finished a class where we had given some discussion to Blake's poetry, but not really his art. It was really cool to see. Anyway, uh, sex is great!
FUC? I LOVE IT! I think you experienced some aspects of HarvardI never truly enjoyed...like some parts of the libraries...*sniff* I loved Widener...
even though I don't have your mt. h email I'm writing here cause you are the greatest....thank you -so much- for our talk today....I always leave feeling like there's nothing to worry about in the world. you are a braniac and such a loving person....I will miss ya so much next year sary :p
ok enough of the deep shizz....your boobs look awesome in the Guster pics :p
Are you trying not to Xanga again? It won't work!!!!!!
you'll never guess who I saw at panera
Oh, he told me... remind me to deliver my Dissertation on J.R. to you sometime soon--I haven't been formulating it since December for nothing!
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