PROMISES, DECISIONS OR DECLARATIONS I HAVE RECENTLY MADE WHICH, IN HINDSIGHT, WERE PROBABLY NOT WISE

(This is a whine. You have been warned.)

1. Offering to teach British Lit to my poor, trusting little sister.  I've mentioned once or twice before that I am profoundly unqualified for the job.  Now that I've used up almost the entire summer watching Gaudy Night and Lady in the Water*, and am consequently scrambling to put everything together, the realization of how completely inadequate my feeble murmurs about Paradise Lost will actually be when compared to good, sound pieces of scholarship has sort of plopped on me in one large mass of despair, like the blob.   I'm telling myself that if I behave in a very confident, businesslike way, there's a good chance she won't notice that I don't actually know anything.  My college British lit teacher might have been a total moron - but he was so sure of himself, and wore such nice Oxford don hats that I accepted every word as gospel.  

2. Declaring that I will read (or at least finish) a book a day for a year. Only a true fool would do such a thing.

3. Giving up sugar and bread for a week.  I can't.  I'm addicted and I accept it, and now I would just like to get on with life and eat Nutella and toast, thank you.

4. I should never tell people I have nothing to do with myself.  Kelsey, LISTEN. DO NOT do this ever again.  When you do, people send you to ludicrously early doctor appointments and you find yourself taking care of small children.  I really don't understand why people trust me with their children or pets or anything they value.  I wear sweaters backwards on a regular basis.  This afternoon, for instance.

5. Vowing not to buy any more music until I have learned the words to all the songs I've already got - and also get very familiar with the instrumental ones as well.  This is going to be embarrassing, but:

990 - soundtracks

120 - jazz

155 - The Beatles

1,538 - everything else

Grand total: 2,803 songs

I probably know - and I mean really know - somewhere around a third of that amount.  Nobody on earth except maybe Karl Lagerfeld has an excuse not to know the music they own.  And it seems silly for even Lagerfeld to buy so much. 

5. Also vowing that I will not check out any more library books until I've read all the un-read books I own.  Why did I even buy some of this stuff?  It all looks very nice and learned on the shelves, but they must change in transit - because when I've got them off the shelves and open, they've magically become boring. 

There are more, trust me.  But now I'm going to go do something fun.  Take a bath or read Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human.  Woof.  

(*You can probably guess which one I liked more.  I did admire Bryce Dallas Howard's blonde eyelashes, but I think I've watched Gaudy Night at least four times now.  I really am trying to give that M. Night guy a chance, but all the films I've seen have been let-downs.  I'm contemplating giving The Village a view.  The only thing is, I am a huge chicken.  To give you an idea of the level of wimpy-ness I have sunk to - I have to close my eyes when Gollum comes onscreen in Lord of the Rings. So will The Village scare me completely out of my mind? What about Signs or the Haley Joel Osment one, for that matter? It's hard to want to risk it when happier things are out and about.)

a volcanic ensemble

Moderate adoration.  Or maybe not moderate.  What can I say, the man oozes personality. 

Everybody is getting married right and left.  A friend and an acquaintance, both twenty years old, got hitched within the past couple of weeks.  (Not to each other.) What's the deal?  I didn't realize I would reach the proverbial age when all my friends would begin trotting down the aisle quite so soon.  Do people usually get married at 20?  Maybe these cider in lieu of champagne marriages are more widespread than I was aware.  21 and unmarried seems to make me practically an old maid.  

I'm trying to write my diary every day, and have also recently decided (like, as in this afternoon) to try to read a book every day, or at least finish one a day.   I think it's doable.  How is that a word?  Doable.  Is my spell check weak or something?

The internet is boring me right now.  I go online, delete emails from Teen Vogue, scan a weary eye over my Facebook page, read blogs - and then just sit there.  I feel like there's this super fun thing to do online that keeps my friends glued to it, but I don't know what it is.  I also feel like there is some secret site where all the cool people in the world go and talk about cool stuff together, and make themselves even cooler.  And it's called 

Could somebody kindly direct me to this site?  I mean, it has to be out there.   Some people I know could not be as cool as they are without some kind of outside help.  It just isn't possible.   Is it like a club?  If you people would let me join I would be very grateful and admiring and stumble over myself to write nice comments.  Or wait! Maybe I won't because that wouldn't be cool.  Aloofness is often deemed cool, from what I've observed.  This learning to be cool, studying for coolness, if you will, is certainly a tricky business. 

This actually used to bother me a lot more than it does now - but lately I've taken to embroidering "As My Whimsey Takes Me" on hankies, and it takes my mind off of it. 

No joke. Getting rather obsessed, what? Almost embarrassin', don't you know!

(Later edit: Ugh.  Is this too weird of me? No weirder than people slobbering over pictures of Johnny Depp on their blogs, right?  I'm just showing my adoration for Dorothy Sayers in a rather peculiar manner, that's all.)

I'm feeling a bit inferior right now.  Everyone is funnier and nicer and better at writing and taking pictures than I am.  But, oddly, I'm not too depressed by it.  It's an okay feeling of inferiority.  Like, I'm busy admiring the awesome people, and not so worried about myself.  I read some F. Scott Fitzgerald the other day, and even though I knew I would never be able to write like that, and the stories themselves were depressing, I didn't get mopey at all.  Felt very good, actually.  Just last year The Bell Jar was making me batty.  It's getting better all the time. I used to get mad at my school (Now I can't complain!) The teachers who taught me weren't cool...

Sorry. Lost control of myself there.  Writing singing down is almost impossible.  It just doesn't work in this (ahem!) medium.

I don't know why I expect greatness from myself.  I've never tried writing, so I don't see why I should get all depressed when I can't conjure up some fabulous poem out of the air with a flick of the wrist.  I'm quite happy being a nice ordinary egg.  

books about death and crime, mostly

Hey, my dashboard changed! My hands are flapping about in a helpless manner. This feels weird. Unsettled whimperings.

I started reading Rebecca this evening - whoo boy.  Danvers has just taken her on the horrible tour of Rebecca's room.  The atmosphere is incredible.  I'm sure a lot of people probably say they relate to the main character - but I'm going to say so too.  Maybe because she's young and awkward, I just see a great deal of similarity between us.  I feel a bit desperate to please people sometimes, and I bump into things and hide from people.  Schoolgirlish, self-concious. And I'm not good about clothes and hair and things like that.
Maybe I'm in a morbid kind of mood or something, but I'm getting terribly wrapped up in the story.  I need to see the movie after this.  I think Hitchcock is almost the only person who could have got the particular feel of this book right in a film.  It sometimes seems like he's driving off fumes, if you know what I mean.   He can put a fat lot of sinister thoughts into your head with a quite remarkably tiny pinch of scary images.  (Of course, I'm saying only he could have done Rebecca right and I haven't seen it, but I'm basing this bold and completely un-researched assertion on the feel I've gotten from the Hitchcock films I have seen.  And didn't it get an academy award?  The only one he got?  Or am I making this up?)

Okay, I have an awesome life.
Last night I went to a meeting of the Orient Express book club at Barnes and Noble.  Oh yes.  On the way there, I decided that I wanted it to be either:
1. So horrible that it was funny
2. Young-ish people obviously reading scary psycho books, so I would know after getting a peek at them that I shouldn't even sit down
3. Or actually good.  Pleasantly geeky

It was the latter.  They're all at least fifty years old, and have been meeting for twelve years.  They were very friendly.  The leader lady told me that they read for pleasure - don't dissect things (yessss!).  They go to mystery dinner theatre shows.  The leader asked me if I'd read any mystery books lately, and I mentioned Dorothy Sayers.  "Oh, which version of him do you like better?" She asked me.  And - get this - I KNEW WHAT SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT!  I felt like a genius.  (To explain - when Dorothy Sayers wrote Lord Peter Wimsey, she made him a cross between Bertie Wooster and Fred Astaire and intended to do a few books and then marry him off and be done.  But, from what I've read, she got attached to him and, in the later books, made him a more complete character.  Some people like the early, more Bertie Wooster LPW more than the more human later one. I don't know which I like better.  From a pure, shallow enjoyment standpoint, the Bertie Wooster version is more fun.  But I am hugely attached to the more human version too.  So I don't know.  That's what I said to the leader lady.)

I am so going again.  I have to find a mystery book involving some sort of royal personage.  The club reads books by topic, so you don't have to buy anything.  Nice, I think.  It's a sort of title-swop, I suppose.

Also, I am reading A Short History of Nearly Everything.  You already know, dear blog, that I adore - worship - Bill Bryson.  I have dithered about how hilarious and witty he is, and how I feel well-traveled and somewhat brainier when I come away from his books.  Now, I can say (with incredulity) that he is actually capable of making me take an interest in science.  Or at least make me want to keep reading a very long book about it.  Right now I'm reading a bit about how Yellowstone park is basically one enormous volcano. (The sort that look like a champagne glass below the surface, from what I understand.  The name begins with a c and sounds like caldera or something similar.)  From the hints he is giving, I think we will probably all die if it blows.  Oh well.  At least it would be quick and exciting, what?