Happy Day After Turkey Day

Thanksgiving, as it turns out, wasn't nearly as awkward and depressing as I thought it would be. Actually, it was pretty nice. I still can't quite get used to my family acting like a family--for so much of my life I've had to put up with petty squabbles and hurtful, barbed remarks and constant criticisms from my tiny extended family, and it was very odd to see us hugging and conversing normally. It was actually apparent last night that my family really loves one another, go figure.

We divided up Nonnie's jewelry last night, with surprisingly little drama. Actually, there was no drama at all--no one even argued about the division of the "good" (read: worth lots and lots of money) stuff, which I had been a little worried about. Anyway, most of the "good" stuff went to my mom and her two siblings, but I got a beautiful star-shaped diamond and white gold necklace, and a wedding ring that's engraved with the date 1907 and was originally my... let's see here... great-great grandmother's (because who knows, I might actually be needing one of those wedding ring dealies someday).

I also got a completely obscene amount of "costume" (read: not particularly valuable) stuff. It's weird-- we all knew that my grandmother was a big fan of QVC and HSN and whatnot, but I don't think any of us knew that she was singlehandedly keeping these places in business. I swear we could have opened a secondhand jewelry store with the amount of stuff on my aunt's living room floor last night. Hundreds and hundreds of necklaces and rings, bracelets and pins, ranging from the elegant to the gaudy to the absolutely hideous--I mean seriously, what would possess someone to buy a huge silver and turquoise lapel pin in the shape of a spider? So I picked through and pulled out a largish wood jewelry box full of stuff, which will be a nice change from my current cigar-box full of crap--I swear, up till last night I had like a 12-year-old's collection of jewelry.

I actually had fun going through the jewelry and picking out stuff. I could tell that my mom and aunt were getting a little misty-eyed, especially going through the good stuff, because Nonnie wore so many of those pieces to parties and such when they were kids, when she was beautiful and young and alive. I'd never seen any of it before, and so there was no emotional attachment-- just this feeling of being 8 years old and playing dress-up with grown-up jewelry, only this time I got to keep whatever I wanted afterward.

What really weirded me out, though, was the food and gloves. See, my aunt had gone grocery shopping for Nonnie the day before she died, and charities won't accept perishable food items. Rather than throw everything away, my aunt just brought it back to her house with her and divided it up, so I now have a freezer full of tv dinners. That was weird. My aunt also brought back a bunch of coats she wanted people to take, and while I was trying on one of them I found a pair of really nice leather gloves in the pockets that I ended up taking with me. Wearing my dead grandmother's leather gloves, gloves that I know she was wearing to keep her warm less than two weeks ago... very, very strange.

Dinner was pretty unremarkable. No one was really up for cooking anything this year, so my aunt just ordered a pre-cooked meal package thing from Kroger. What they failed to mention was that everything was cooked but not heated, and the turkey took almost two hours just to heat up, which meant that pretty much all she saved was a couple hours prepping the turkey, and since the food wasn't terribly impressive I think she's going to go back to cooking for next year.

My cousin Ray and I didn't hang out as much as we did last week, since I spent so much time knee-deep in my grandmother's jewelry, an activity that is singularly uninteresting to a 16-year-old boy. I did help him pick out something to give his girlfriend, though, which was fun, and we decided for sure that I'm going to buy his digital camera from him at Christmas. Among other compelling reasons for owning such a handy gadget, I'm slowly beginning to realize that I have less than 6 months left in my college career and have taken virtually no pictures to document my time here since Freshman year. I really gotta work on that.

Went grocery shopping with my mom today... not that she paid for anything, but I really hate shopping alone, so it was good to have the company. And oh, the foody goodness in my kitchen right now. I've been spending so much time recently either stressed and working or in denial and vegging in front of the TV that I haven't gone shopping in... I don't even know, several weeks I think. Of course that means that I totally failed at supporting National Buy Nothing Day, but it'll be good to not be surviving on goldfish crackers and yogurt anymore.

Oh, Bravo. You picked pretty much the worst weekend possible to run your West Wing marathon. That show is like crack, I tell you, CRACK!

Dragging my feet

*sniff* I miss Aubrey. I mean, being able to walk around the apartment naked with impunity is nice and all, but the tiny place just feels empty and cavernous without her to wander into my room and initiate long, in-depth conversations about nothing when I really ought to be doing work.

Speaking of which, I'm having a dreadfully hard time getting started today, since I know as soon as I drag myself out of here and into the Fishbowl, I will essentially have to chain myself to a computer, except for bathroom and food breaks, until I've written 10 pages.

This is the price I pay for the West Wing marathon.

Okay. Clothes, breakfast, teeth, hair, shoes, backpack, iPod, GO!

Hi ho, hi ho...

...it's off to work I go.

In which Melanie takes a brief break from thesis writing to expound upon the weirdness of her mind

My mind works in mysterious ways.

So I'm sitting here, pounding grimly away at my thesis while trying to convince myself not to delete the whole wretched thing and start over again, when out of my busily-typing fngers comes the phrase "memory and desire."

The first thing that pops into my mind is that this is a line from T.S. Eliot, so I google it. Yep, it's from the first few lines of The Wasteland:

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Okay, great, you may now revel in my extreme English major nerdiness. But something else has been nagging at the back of mind this whole time, so I do a little research and find out that I am, again, correct. See, I've been reading discountsatori's online journals on and off in their various incarnations since I was a wee sophomore in high school and she was a Wise and Witty Senior. One of these incarnations, begun somewhere around the time she started college and I began trudging through the angst-ridden hell of 11th grade, was called Memory and Desire. Oh yeah, and let's not forget to mention that not only do I remember that T.S. Eliot was (and, for all I know, still is) her favorite poet, but I also very clearly remember an entry from back in the Zen and the Art of Psychoanalysis days, which involved the line "Til human voices wake us, and we drown*," and was my first-ever introduction to the wonderful "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

If I ever spent that much brainpower on, say, writing, I could have graduated by now.

See, this is why I have such a hard time in classes where I have to memorize stuff. All of my memory brain cells are tied up with random shit like this, not to mention the lyrics to every song Oldies 104.3 played between roughly 1985-1993.

And now, after wasting who knows how much time doing pointless research to prove myself right and then writing about it, it's time to return my nose to the proverbial grindstone.

It will be a miracle if I survive this weekend.

*EDIT: I remember now. That particular entry ended, "Human voices woke me. I did not drown." And yet I can never seem to get it straight in my head whether the car crash that nearly killed me happened in 11th or 12th grade. I mean, seriously. What the fuck?

P.S. Hey Laurie, I promise I'm not stalking you or anything. Tomorrow, I may well be struck suddenly by the exact lyrics for a cereal jingle I last heard in 1989. This is just the way my twisted little mind operates.

Just call me The Little Engine That Could.

Back from a not-so-brief dinner break with Becca and Amy. Becca left a message on my phone that went something like, "I know you, and when you're this stressed you won't eat if I don't feed you. So come over and relax for an hour!"

Becca, in case you didn't know, is adorable.

I was, predictably, there for significantly more than an hour, as I got caught up in eating yummy gourmet mac and cheese with sauteed veggies and salmon, not to mention reading Cosmo out loud and giggling at the particularly heinous stuff. My personal favorite was the ad for "fashion on a budget" featuring a $90 sweater and a $70 shoulder bag-- and let's not forget to mention the $80 J-Lo pants. I don't know what universe considers that cheap, but it certainly ain't mine. Oh yeah, and there's always the oh-so-valuable tidbit of knowledge that guys think it's a total turn on when we say "Me want sex now." Pfeh. Anyone who thinks bad grammar is a turn-on isn't getting into my bed to begin with, thank you. And you wonder why I'm still a virgin.

Anyway, now that my hands have thawed a little from the cold walk over here, I should get back to work. I have, at minimum, 4-5 more pages to write before I sleep tonight-- and it should probably be closer to 7-8.

12 more days to go.

I think I can, I think I can.