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it burnses
Dec. 17th, 2004 02:42 pmI can feel it burning in my chest like a dense phlegmy star. My body spreads out from it like a groggy nebula, feeling strangely undefined, shifting terribly slowly, as galactic currents might.
Children, I think I'm finally sick.
The timing could not be better, since I am about to leave town to have an extended holiday with my extended family, and this gives me an excuse to stay in bed all week reading crap novels, eating chocolate oranges, and generally ignoring my relatives. I don't in fact happen to like any of them apart from my immediate family, but they are going to die one day and then I'll Wish I'd Gone. So I'm going, but then hiding. They wouldn't want me coughing into the shortbread dough, now would they, children?
I'm achy all over, which hints at the 'flu, but I've been exposed to something that claims to be pneumonia. Let's call it flumonia. Nobody ever actually knows what flavour of minor virus they have anyway. (If only mine were Lime instead of Mucus. It's like having your teeth cleaned all over again. That was never bubblegum flavour.)
The work training is back On, and I have decided not to have any mood swings until the new year. Being sick should serve me just as well for something to talk about. I went in today and signed all the paperwork, had my picture taken for my I.D. card, and was told where to pick it up from security on my first day.
Since this is the beginning of my exciting new life, I ask that you frame all comments as enthusiasm.
* * *
I've been re-reading the Narnia books in haphazard order, borrowed from the always-generous Grumpy Bastard. I read The Magician's Nephew first. I still don't like it. Then I read The Dawn Treader. I still love it. There are fragments of the language in that book that I hadn't realized, until looking into it again fifteen or twenty years later, had become a part of my own fantasy vocabulary. I think I read this first out of the series, and maybe most of the magic of it settled there for me.
I've never much liked the sequence in the middle about the Dufflepuds. I think this is because I have the wrong sort of sense of humour, and this seems to confirm that I was born with it. I don't really go in for the Comic Working Classes (Aren't they charmingly rustic!) line of humour. Classism apart, (In Lewis? Nevah.) I've just never really found jokes about people being stupid very funny.
And I know we've all been through the betrayal of recognizing the Xian allegory in Narnia, but I find it less obnoxious in Dawn Treader. The book has such a dreamy, questing mood, and the Utter East is reminiscent of heavens other than the Xian.
I stopped reading a few pages from the end, to stay in the Utter East a little longer. It was just as I remembered it. The lilies. And Reepicheep sailing his coracle up the wave at the end of the world. Eustace peeling off the dragon's skin. Whatever ideology Lewis used his work to forward, and however much that ideology irritates me, these images have entered my sense of the fantastic -- and more, of the numinous -- and I can't help but love them.
{rf}
Children, I think I'm finally sick.
The timing could not be better, since I am about to leave town to have an extended holiday with my extended family, and this gives me an excuse to stay in bed all week reading crap novels, eating chocolate oranges, and generally ignoring my relatives. I don't in fact happen to like any of them apart from my immediate family, but they are going to die one day and then I'll Wish I'd Gone. So I'm going, but then hiding. They wouldn't want me coughing into the shortbread dough, now would they, children?
I'm achy all over, which hints at the 'flu, but I've been exposed to something that claims to be pneumonia. Let's call it flumonia. Nobody ever actually knows what flavour of minor virus they have anyway. (If only mine were Lime instead of Mucus. It's like having your teeth cleaned all over again. That was never bubblegum flavour.)
The work training is back On, and I have decided not to have any mood swings until the new year. Being sick should serve me just as well for something to talk about. I went in today and signed all the paperwork, had my picture taken for my I.D. card, and was told where to pick it up from security on my first day.
Since this is the beginning of my exciting new life, I ask that you frame all comments as enthusiasm.
* * *
I've been re-reading the Narnia books in haphazard order, borrowed from the always-generous Grumpy Bastard. I read The Magician's Nephew first. I still don't like it. Then I read The Dawn Treader. I still love it. There are fragments of the language in that book that I hadn't realized, until looking into it again fifteen or twenty years later, had become a part of my own fantasy vocabulary. I think I read this first out of the series, and maybe most of the magic of it settled there for me.
I've never much liked the sequence in the middle about the Dufflepuds. I think this is because I have the wrong sort of sense of humour, and this seems to confirm that I was born with it. I don't really go in for the Comic Working Classes (Aren't they charmingly rustic!) line of humour. Classism apart, (In Lewis? Nevah.) I've just never really found jokes about people being stupid very funny.
And I know we've all been through the betrayal of recognizing the Xian allegory in Narnia, but I find it less obnoxious in Dawn Treader. The book has such a dreamy, questing mood, and the Utter East is reminiscent of heavens other than the Xian.
I stopped reading a few pages from the end, to stay in the Utter East a little longer. It was just as I remembered it. The lilies. And Reepicheep sailing his coracle up the wave at the end of the world. Eustace peeling off the dragon's skin. Whatever ideology Lewis used his work to forward, and however much that ideology irritates me, these images have entered my sense of the fantastic -- and more, of the numinous -- and I can't help but love them.
{rf}
