hammah

i am leaving in 36 hours to travel the country for 7 weeks!!
holy crap!

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read

6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series- JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four- George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22- Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (i highly doubt that anyone other than shakespearean scholars have really read every single one.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace- Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland- Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code- Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White- Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World- Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita- Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (well i listened to it on tape...)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryce
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (i started it, but god, sylvia plath. geez.)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary- Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

wow... not bad. wasn't expecting that many. thanks stuyvesant and english minor :)

assholes

i am almost 25 years old and i am still a mess.
but no one ever really grows up right? its just a bunch of older people walking around pretending to be grown, right?

so i finally went to drop off my prescription for vicodin today... i don't really need it but i imagine i might want it at some point... and i had to wait ten minutes just to drop off the prescription. so i'm standing there staring at the "family planning" display, which is all lube and condoms and a couple of boxes of latex gloves "one size fits all" at the bottom. and here i am standing in the middle of walgreens thinking about sexuality, mine in particular, and fear, and so many things.
and i don't know where i stand, i think i prefer it that way, thinking that i'd like anything, but i also want to see. and maybe me wanting to like everything is making me hang onto things, people, i shouldn't be hanging onto.

and my apartment is infested with fruit flies. five of them fell in my wine tonight. even dumping the compost every day, they won't go away. meh.

i just went to the store to get ice cream and chips to heal myself
and there was a trio of young girls, 11, 12 maybe, and they bought almost $20 worth of candy, and the one girl with the money, was talking about her bank account, and then threw the twenty dollar bill on the counter.
it was just a weird weird experience.

i am nauseous and grinding my teeth which means i am anxious. probably due to the fact that i'm having surgery, however minor, on thursday. i'm not anxious in my head thinking about it constantly but i am anxious.
also other life circumstances are probably not helping.
but i need to make sure i am hydrated and well rested for thursday.

stupid lesbian drama
wrecking my progress towards emotional stability.
haven't felt on the verge of depressed in a while
but i am there right now
and i don't want to go back
not for a second.

despite the fact that last week my therapist told me i'm on a "sharp curve," i feel as if i've made zero progress in the department of telling people how i feel at appropriate and convenient times.
here's to a week of worry and obsession, even though i'm supposed to be "over that"

i am a wreck today.
i'm really sad about people.
i can't take anymore rejection right now.

fellowship decisions get mailed tomorrow.
i hadn't really been thinking about getting a fellowship until they sent out an email saying that fellows had been picked and the decisions would be mailed on the sixteenth.
now i'm kind of really hoping i get one. mostly because it would be amazing.
but i'm not holding out too much hope. its kind of a lot to hope for.

i really don't need to be doing this right now.
and i need my perfect apartment to not be right around the corner from his house. literally.

i am frustrated.
i want to let it go, but part of me keeps saying that its a mistake
but really, waiting two months?
crazy.

I feel like all these bad things keep happening to me and the people around me the past couple of weeks.
i hope that it stops soon.
no more sicknesses and no more scary things happening to people.

i feel like time has rushed by and tons has happened since i got back from my trip.
i'm moved into my sublet but looking again for the perfect place starting may 1st (i hope!!)
bossman broke it off with me due to the fact that hes, well, my boss
peggy is dying
i'm a jumble of different feelings and time is flying by like crazy.
my biggest priority is to find a great place to move into may 1st, but there are so many other things on my mind that i'm having a hard time dealing with it all.

went to the gym this morning
and felt so so great
and then my mom called
and told me my cat might be dying.
*sigh*
waiting for more test results.

amazing trip home
life is looking good these days
people are moving to the east bay which is great
some from near and some from far
but it all makes me a really happy mama

i am exhausted
sore and sick in various places.
my ribs feel broken but they are assuredly not.
i'm really excited to be in nyc tomorrow
not so excited to be on a plane for 5 hours in the physical condition i'm in
but i'll live.
going home with dirty laundry because my ribs hurt too much to do laundry
but i'll have enough clean clothes to do it up tomorrow night
can't wait!!

i can't stop thinking about penis.
its not really something i've had to think about much in the past, oh, seven years or so.
but its sort of stuck in my head.
i mean, it makes sense.
but i'm slowly coming to accept what happened as fairly normal, and as the shock and confusion wears off a little and i start letting it into myself, i'm struck by the fact that i want it to happen again.
i mean, i really really enjoyed it.
if it hadn't been a pleasurable experience, i don't think it would really be this big of a deal to me. it would be sort of like "well, that sucked, guess i remember why i don't do that"
but its more of a "why haven't i done that more??" kind of feeling.
which makes me want to do it a whole lot right now.
and at the same time i have this sort of sixteen year old girl fear about how and what and the fact of it. like what does a panis feel like soft? what do balls feel like? what ways should i touch it to give him pleasure?
these are things that 24 year old women who sleep with bio-men know about. these are not things i know about. and my not knowing is not something that is easy for me to admit.
he knows that i haven't slept with man-dick in a seven years, but i can't seem to explain to anyone the sort of ground-shaking blow that this has struck at my identity.
not that it makes me not queer. i am still queer and always will be, and the beauty of queer is that that fits in pretty nicely. but how do i explain that this sort of shakes the core of who i thought i was? its like coming out again.
i always sort of thought it would happen again, but in that sort of far off, when i have a mid-life crisis kind of way. i didn't think it would happen now, and in such a dramatic and life changing way.
and i hope he understands what it means to me. not that anything has changed about what i want out of life or people right now, but he certainly will stay with me forever as the first time i had pleasurable hetero sex.
i feel the need to process with him sometime this week, just because it was so life-altering for me, and i need to talk about it, and i need to talk about it with the person it happened with, but i'm also cautious not to send any mixed messages about what i want. yes it was big, and he is important to me because it was so huge, but no, i don't really want to fall in love or have a serious relationship. that hasn't changed.
but he must be pretty awesome if this happened.

i can't help but be struck by the beauty of identities shifting.

oh god.
my head is pounding.
very hungover.
and i slept with a man last night.
which has me very very confused.