Silly-but-irresistable:

1. Who are you?
2. Are we friends?
3. When and how did we meet?
4. Do you have a crush on me?
5. Would you kiss me?
6. Give me a nickname and explain why you picked it.
7. Describe me in one word.
8. What was your first impression?
9. Do you still think that way about me now?
10. What reminds you of me?
11. If you could give me anything what would it be?
12. How well do you know me?
13. When's the last time you saw me?
14. Ever wanted to tell me something but couldn't?
15. Are you going to put this on your blog and see what I say about you?

Balancing my status?/destiny?/chemical imbalance? as a tortured artist with a more-demanding-than-anticipated assistantship has resulted in rehab-warranting caffeine abuse (I had to fight the hand-to-credit-card reflex earlier this week while scoping out this lovely specimen), the desire to cast aside the NSF Funding Files and curl up anywhere with a bulky tome of modern theory, and the means to purchase a number of arcane critical works but no time to crack them open. So basically, I've spent the last few days caressing the cover of my new Yeats Companion as I edit my grant proposals for instances of excessive alliteration. I had high hopes that employment would mark the end of my frivolity and the dawn of a new, neuroses-free era, but early morning meetings and ever-present legal pads aside, few improvements have been made. When I'm not collapsing on the floor with a bowl of penne with prosciutto and shouting maniacally to my family "I should make business cards that read Sarah Catherine Taylor Thomas: Verbose Document Drawer-upper Extraordinaire!!!", I'm responding to my mother's good-natured retort of "You don't assume your husband's middle name, silly! Plus, JTT is too short for you..." with an ill-willed stab of my pasta and a shrill "THEN I'LL DIE A CARPAL TUNNEL-RIDDEN OLD SPIN-STAH!"

In order to prevent this from occuring, I spend about fifteen minutes each day compiling cryptic "Which One of These Doesn't Belong?"-like MultilingualFutureHusbandLinkMontages and e-mail them to two of my dearest friends who are parading around Paris with their respective families.

Think:
une
deux
trois/trois
quatre
cinq

Anyone dare to attempt all five?

Speaking of prospective spouses, when one's most pressing problem is where to find a loverrrr who will allow her to name their firstborn Hartley, she ought to be counting her blessings. Of course it's not all that simple... there's the issue of how to fit Latin, Greek, French, and German into my undergraduate curriculum, the chronic case of My Father's Family Is Suffocating Me With Their Sudden Interest in My Life, and the incurable insomnia, but [insert appropriate passage from "Prufrock"--you know, to the effect of 'there comes a time for everything,' only stated much more life-alteringly and in terms of toast and tea], there does come a time for everything, Coleridge-inspired nomenclature dilemma notwithstanding.

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. 

Oh bother, I can't not Xanga.
I'm overworked yet overpaid, so I keep pushing through these stacks of
RFAs and donning pointy pumps (I like that part) and "I'm sorry, I
cannot, I have a 10 o'clock with Miles from the Endeavour Academy"-ing
[YES, his name is Miles! How
fab is that?], and even though I evaluated my pre-PR-job productivity
and found that I've actually been reading (about Art Nouveau, Iran)
more, writing more (but nothing draining, frenzied, satisfying), and
running more (almost with fury, while listening to the L'Auberge
Espagnole soundtrack), I've been daydreaming, beachcombing, and just
lying on my bed leafing through Ez's earliest works less, and I
haven't cooked a gourmet meal nor slept, really slept, in days.
Goodness.

Wealthy patrons of the arts who wish to support my
literature-devouring, florid fiction-writing, and French
cuisine-preparing habits step forward!, for this technical writing deal
is not going to work for me eternally.   

GUSTER IS FOR LVERS. Front row. Reducing
me to giddy exclamations like "soooo incredible!" Brian, Ryan, and Adam
momentarily cured this typically-chronic case of verbosity.

Next year I'm going to have a Guster/apple picking [recalls part of
"Spontaneous Me" by Whitman. Too lazy to Bartleby it as usual, will in
earnest hope that it's not too bodyelectric, for lack of a better
euphemism, instead. Soon will come the day when I can acknowledge
everything
without some sort of subtle disclaimer. I hope.]/DickinsonFrost (not so
much, but Quintessential New England all the same)fest in honor of the
Tufts trio playing whichever Five College they come to. Everyone's
invited to enjoy the bongos, my French Country dorm decor, M&Cs! RSPV on my Xanga.

Among the Multitude

Posting this is so petty, but honestly. I haven't the answers!

'Yet I dread what a flash of madness might reveal
If he said "Sir we have seen so much beauty spilled on the open
    street
Or wasted in stately marriages or stained in railway carriages
Or left untasted in villages or stifled in darkened chambers
That if we are restless on winter nights, who can blame us?"'

-Eliot, as always

--------

Thursday afternoon at my grandmother's house I complained ever-so-absently and
all too often of the heat.

And even just the lethargic,
get-me-a-Mint-Julep-and-let's-get-on-with-it,-only-we-haven't-anything-to-do-but-fan-ourselves-and-swat-mosquitos
"It's hot." The why      am 
I even…     wastingenergy…    saying this?, helpless, hopeless, and
infinitely unnecessary observation was repeated at least a dozen times as I
pouted, buttered biscuits, watched my grandmother thin a cast iron skillet full
of gravy with steak drippings then panic and thicken it again. After apron
unknotting (“Gracious! Could you help me with this?” The strips of pale pink
pinstriped linen had worked themselves into a tangle at the base of my back)
and tea sweetening (“We’ll ask the men to help us! I never can remember how to
get it just right…”), and with that I was shooed dining room-ward, bone china
bowl holding butter beans in hand and a “don’t forget the trivet!” floating out
from the kitchen after me.

Mid-meal the men were drawling, brow knitting, searching
both upward and back at once for tales we could all vaguely recall. The topic
turned to armed service, and bell-like, my grandmother’s cry of “Oh! Speaking
of the military!” caused foreheads resting thoughtfully between thumb and
forefinger to ease her way, amused. “The youngest son of…” she began, clearly.
Of their neighbors, across the street and one down to the right. Newly enlisted
in the Marines and just returned from his three months at Paris
Island. They had wished for me to
write, but I tend to romanticize these things, and everything in my life’s
already too delayed gratificationy, decentralized, and I haven’t really spoken
with him since we enacted some make-believe rescue scene that we felt the need
to perfect from atop the gracious, grassy slope in my grandparents’ front yard.
Over and over he’d run in and save me, and tow-headed, lace-covered, I’d
critique each approach.

 “Charlie’s there?!” my mother half-asked, half-restated suggestively, aiming her
Mary Jane for my shin at the mention of the family’s dutiful, Doctor-to-be of
an eldest son.

Someone suggested that we ask them over for cake (chocolate
iced with chocolate, bearing eighteen pink, yellow, and green candles in my honor), the
dinner plates  (here lunch is dinner, dinner is supper) were cleared, the
tattered teal address book was withdrawn from a drawer, I was directed rather
shrilly to “Go to the back bathroom and put some lipstick on!”

--------

There are other developments.

-Guster June 15th.
Stumbled across tickets at House of Blues last night. Glorious. If
anyone wants to come along, you are more than welcome to. If you like
Latin dance or Legos, added bonus--it's at Downtown Disney.


-Two final frenzied training sessions for the new newspaper team. Not
looking back. Will not be seduced (sidenote or sweeping Statement of
Purpose? You tell me.)


-I have been reading everything I can get my hands on but with a dire
lack of direction. If anyone would like to chart a course of summer
literary study for me, I would be obliged beyond belief.


-I have a new best friend

So we have to submit our tentative course requests online and fill out
questionnaires for our advisors. This presents a problem for
several reasons:

-I'm not sure how to include a reasonable mixture of writing-intensive
English courses and plain old creative writing courses. I know I'll be
advised not to write myself to death, but my summer English courseload
was quite manageable. Indeed I'll be taking two more courses
concurrently in college, but in terms of being overwhelmed with
readings and writings, I feel certain I could manage two.
-I need 4+ semesters of French, so that's a must. But should I continue
the study of Latin? I filled out that questionnaire, and I'd be placed
in Intermediate Latin I or II, probably depending on my AP Catullus
score. Or should I begin Greek now? Or later? Or wait for grad school?
If I do continue the study of Latin, there are only three or so courses
I could take. Would it be worse to let my Latin skills lay latent and
possibly deteriorate as I wait for junior year to resume study, or to
take three semesters before then and have exhausted my options and risk
losing The Power before the serious studies begin? I suppose I could
always brush up on it the summer after I graduate...
-So first semester I take an English seminar, French for Those Who Know
Minimal French, lesser-known Latin poets, and a history course?! Why
can't I take another English course on top of that? Can I seriously
take but two English courses a year my first two years? I'm so out of
the loop here.
-If I want to spend my J-term working on the Top Secret Writing
Endeavor, must I take a formal creative writing course first semester
in order to establish some sort of mentoringy relationship with a staff
writer? If I'm considering this for creative thesis material, should I
just postpone it until later (and can I anyway? Where would I put it?
If I don't take it first semester, can I take a 200-level English
course and a creative writing course my second semester (I already have
credit for two comp courses and three 100-level literature courses)?)?
But I wanted to work in it this
January. What should I do during January instead, then? Can I just go
college-hopping and crash with you all? I'm going to be so cold. Maybe
I'll move in with Emily in Greenwich Village and we'll drink lots of
cocktails every night and everyone will join us to discuss game theory,
Rousseau, and "cultural differences" like always (all both of those times ). Should
I look into fabulous internships? Are there any fabulous internships
available to someone who has only a semester of Latin and ONE writing
seminar and slightly-now-more-than-minimal French skills for three and
half weeks during a strange season in New York? Could I just write
instead? And again, what about the mentor-less situation?!
-I should probably throw a science course in there somewhere. But...

Right. Rome wasn't built in a day.

There's much more to mention... literary love (x 8,000), staff writer
scandaaaal, and essentially ignoring everyone I graduated with but a
week or two ago ["Man's life is powerless and brief and dark / It is not possible for me to make her happy." -Eliot, from TDS] (and 'R' is for reveling in it!)
Now I'm off to nap, then enjoy an enormous mid-day meal with the
Southern side of my family and help my mother load a practically
life-sized portrait of me (the joys/horrors of being a college-bound
only child) home from the studio. Some truly terrifying photographs
could follow.   

Oh, and it says I'm Currently re-Reading Ezzie, but fear not, Jules and I are petitioning for an "Everything!!!!" option.

Murphy's Law of Sunbathing in Sarah's Backyard: When you shed the
swimsuit top, the lawn care staff will appear. I had time to retie, to
snatch up the patriotic picnic blanket I was basking on, and to stumble
deck-ward, water bottle in tow, but left behind my volume of Ovid's
less yawn-inducing verse. I was reading The Amores,
which begin as a mock-epic and are entertaining beyond belief and
translated much more idiomatically (and delightfully so) than my crude,
too-literal attempts made in early April. But Penguin chose to couple
them with the Ars Amores and call the collection The Erotic Poems.

I'm not afraid of The Erotic in literature. I can remember scouring The Bluest Eye
when I was seven, and all of those other best-selling Oprah-endorsed
novels that I'm too Book Snobby to even skim now. My mother devours
romance novels and shouts out the more laughable adverbs; extreme
overuse of "infinitesimally" sent us into a synchronized Scottish
Breakfast Blend-spitting-fit that I'll never forget. I struggle at
times with seeing everything as Erotic, for unlike some of my Literary
Gods, life doesn't daily grab me by the shoulders and shake me and say "I'm
all about biological impulses!!!" but there's an erring-on-risque
Chagall print on my wall and sex is seeping from my bookshelves and I
bought this volume all alone a few months ago, plunked it down on the
counter at some big-name bookseller and may have just imagined the
mid-50s-ish salesman grimmace before pretending not to notice the
playful way he made the "joy" in his "enjoy" last an extra syllable.

But The Amores aren't even erotic in that sense, not in the least!

Try telling that to the staff of Southern 20-somethings who retrieve
your copy and hand it to you, smirking, eyebrow-raising, Why isn't
Fabio on the Cover?-ing.

On a less I Think I'm Beginning to Hate this Experience-y note... My
mother seems to think that my future relationships will fall into one
of several categories, each with a unique set of consequences
("consequences" seems needlessly pejorative. This isn't a bad thing,
and I've no disdain for her input, for she reads cognitive science
journals the way most mothers around here page through Southern Living
(absently, relating gleaned facts gleefully, scissors in hand; think
"Oh look, 15 Ways to Doll Up Your Formal Dining Room with Daffodils!"
only "Oh look, a factbox about Limbic Mode!", wears cat shoes
occasionally, and wrote new insect-themed lyrics to that "Baby I'm a
Thug" rap song of short-lived ubiquity ("'Cause I'm a Ladybug") to
liven up a science unit (ergo makes my Coolest People Ever list in an
instant). These are the broad categories:

1.) The Mr. Knightly:
Tall
Dark
Handsome
Will scold me

2.) The Sweet, Practical, Mindful-of-My-Passions Guy:
Great job
Well-rounded
Can enjoy the same things I do, but not nearly with the same degree of intensity
Tame evenings of cooking together, watching the news, reading our
respective Books of the Moment (his is probably a Grisham-y whatnot.
Kill me.), sleeping, arising, repeating

3.) The Self-absorbed Investment Banker:
Power suit
Power dining
Power trip
I do the entertaining

4.) The Implode Guy
Witty banter, hysterical laughter, reparterepartereparte!
Manic everything
Can't slow down
The Ted Hughes to my Sylvia Plath. Before things went to hell. 

My mother and grandmother have made it clear that I require a cross
between Mr. Knightly and our fairweather friend, The I-banker. .
"He won't understand my love of literature my Bohemian earrings my
Auden at 4 a.m. and won't want to stay up an hour longer to watch the
sun rise!"
"Good, they're your passions, not his. He'll keep you in check."
"You need a strong man!"
"You need a stabling influence."
"You need that Fear and Awe element."
"You need someone who relies on you for certain things."

And I? These days I think of nothing but Imploding.

Erin, have a
marvelous time in Mexico, traverse those Mayan ruins like no other, and
return with a plentitude of photoessay material and we'll stay up late
listening to Simon and Garfunkel and you know the drill.