NYChildren

Cool stuff...
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/80893/900638

So, I am living off campus in a new apartment this year (well, not new -- along with 2 other girls, I occupy the top floor of a house that's over 100 years old), and the place is delightful. Its novelties include the following:
- a quirky professor/landlord who occupies the first floor. The man loves to pontificate -- he's got a story for everything. While his anecdotes can be entertaining, however, I think I'll refrain from taking any of his classes...
-endless opportunities to hone my parallel parking skills. Prior to my residence here, the last time I successfully parallel parked was... let's see.... driver's ed. Sad, eh? Not for long.
-a name! Carved into the sidewalk below my front steps is the inscription: "Hill House -- 1897." How refined.
-2 awesome roommates.

Enough about the house. Not too much else to report. I did, however, get added to the payroll for my new job this morning. Starting next week, I'll be working as a consultant at the campus writing center. I imagine that helping those freshmen get their papers up to snuff (or closer to snuff anyway) will help my own writing, and will be a tiny taste of what teaching might be like.

Marginalia - Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

A blog is born

Here I sit, over-rested at 1 in the morning, with no homework (not counting the senior thesis...), no job (yet), and no friends home from school. Apparently, these are just the conditions under which blogs start popping up! So Bea and Ruthie, I suppose I am joining your ranks.

Firstly, the UK recently revealed a new currency design. It is sleek, clever, and basically awesome. Check it out!