Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you.

I am disappointed at the number of people who have approached me with exclamations regarding my attire today. That is, as a redhead, no, I am not wearing orange. I am not in costume. I am not wearing fangs. Being the youngest full-time employee at the bookstore, it is expected of me, and I just didn't feel like it this year.

I did, however, wear my Starlight Mints shirt, complete with kind of creepy logo. Nobody noticed that. Granted the logo is on the side, which is what I wanted when I bought the shirt, anyway. Their loss.

There are a number of reasons I didn't dress up this year:

1. Nobody ever gets what I'm supposed to be. I hate explaining things, usually.
2. I have a midterm tonight, and I'll be damned if I take it with glitter in my eyes.
3. This year breaks my three-year streak of wearing the Absinthe costume. I even gave my green wings to Sharon so that she could wear them to Costumed Gays for Patsy (contra dancing at the Unitarian Church in JP).

I am looking forward to drinks with friends this evening, though. Points to Josh and Emma for their gender-bending couples costume, Kermit and Miss Piggy. I have my camera charged in my bag as we speak.

Boo! And happy Halloween.

Ah, the decline of the academic paper.

So tonight, in order to quell my own poetic fury, I accompanied my outline-writing with a glass or two of wine. It was working really well...

"Both Ajax and Pentheus reach the same fate they planned for their enemies, presenting the strongest female characters the greater grief and real, not divinely inspired, madness of their own."

...until later, when I decided to expand on each bullet point...

"Ajax stabs himself when he would have stabbed Odysseus, Menelaus, and Agamemnon, thereby causing his wife and mother to wail madly and lose their shit."

Perhaps it's time I go to bed.

Procrastination is painful.

I have always been one to procrastinate. Even when I was little - my dad called it "the Jesse Parade". Even now he calls it that.

I do so much to break through. Last night I meditated to clear my head, turned off the music, cleared off the table, and compiled a to-the-minute schedule of how I would write the two papers that are due Wednesday night. When it was time to get to Time Block One: Making the Outline, I stared at the page for a solid thirty minutes. That was half of Time Block One. I was going to be behind schedule all over again, and a new schedule would have to be devised.

It's terrible to be me working on a paper.

I have an active imagination, which is usually a blessing. I would have had such a lifeless childhood without it. The problem is that I don't need physical distractions to make my mind wander. It has never been classified as ADD, and I have never considered it as such. I always thought it was this sort of intellectual hedonism that drew my mind into things that pleased me more than the task at hand.

Yesterday my Furor Poeticus paper on the near-equivalence of femininity and madness in The Bacchae and Ajax was clouded by thoughts of the third book of the Maisie Dobbs series, which I had finished Saturday afternoon. The books satisfy all that I want in a book: I am taken to another place, in another time, I am discovering new things, I am learning about something I'd never considered, and I can't put the thing down.

Maisie is a sleuth/psychologist in late-1920s London who still suffers from memories of the Great War, in which she served as a nurse at a casualty clearing station in France. Her approach to solving cases is mostly meditative and empathetic, and determining who the Bad Guy is takes until the very end of the book, as each suspect is considered without bias.

Recently the books by Jacqueline Winspear have stimulated a latent curiosity about World War I, about which I really only learned while depressed one summer in London and Belgium. And now I wish I had felt more of an interest while walking the trenches in Ypres or looking at the paintings in the Imperial War Museum. At any rate, I don't have any time to learn what I want to at present.

I have a paper to write.

She's gone.

Samantha (Sammy) Mullen. March 2, 1989- October 12, 2006.
My girl.