Has it been two months? It has been. A long silence, and yet I kept thinking about this place. I have to admit that this thinking was a source of stress more than a source of pleasure: I have been reading quite a lot in the past 62 days, and I kept thinking I should come back here and report. And I kept not finding the time. And it felt like an obligation I was not fulfilling.

What was I doing instead?

Reading. A few fiction books, some literary criticism, a lot of class material. I finally gained access to the website for my distance learning class on November 27th, and I then discovered that a lot of mid-year reports were due for mid-January, so there was that to get ready for. I learned (or relearned, for I had studied it in high school… Fifteen years ago) an insane amount of Latin: only level 2 Latin was open, so I had to cram levels 1 and 2 into my head in 6 weeks (you are supposed to take one level a semester, so that was… a lot). I also started translating for kiva.org (that one is more an excuse, as I really haven’t done all that much yet) and working at my local university, which needed an adjunct to teach French 101. With all this going on, my husband and I still found a week to travel to France over Christmas, another week to get over the germs we collected there from my niece and nephews. And we bought a house for my in-laws, who need one.

It’s been busy, and not a little stressful… I love it though. I love the university environment though I haven’t had much chance to properly explore. I love my classes. I love dreaming about next year’s master’s, because I already know that I want to enroll for one (and I’m even beginning to ponder on subjects). I love struggling with Proust, and Simon, and Barthes, and Rilke, and all these crazy-difficult-twisted-unusual writers in my program. I love the moment when you finally crack the code, and even though I started the year highly disappointed that I skipped the 19th century and was sent straight into the 20th, I am finding strange rewards in it.

But I need to release some pressure, and I want to come back to writing here every now and then. It might get more bloggy, more rambling, more… I don’t know. Personal. Stilted. Notebooky. Whatever comes! Everything goes! An online journal where I sometimes play the wannabe lit major, I guess, even though I’m not sure what the point of an online journal is. Even though nobody wants to read the excruciating thoughts of a rookie student muddling through a program for which she’s wholly unprepared.

In short, I have no idea what I’ll be doing. Even this note… Stream-of-consciousness, and except for a little check-spell, I don’t think I’m going to edit it. I’m just not going to think too hard about this space for now. Just going to go on instinct for a while.

Ok, let’s try. Multiple Reading Personalities, take 2?