maybe i am a little long winded..

as my friends begin to move on with their lives i, once again, find myself feeling sort of left behind. the same thing happened in high school: i was a sophomore and all my senior friends left to go to college, moved on with their lives, lost touch with me (to a greater or lesser degree).
when i first started college, i worried that i wouldn't make fast friends, that i'd just sort of solo my way through and feel lonely and lousy pretty much all the time. while that has been true a little (i haven't made boatloads of new friends), i've cultivated the strong friendships that i developed while in high school and i feel like i'm approaching a new awareness of myself and my peers through my lonely excursions.. i feel as if my alone time has given me time to expose my own thoughts on things that i would otherwise never have encountered.
this separation from matt is killing me -- i would love to be living with him right now.. come home to him smiling after classes, prepare dinner for the two of us while he works on some class stuff, plots out a new film. i would love for him to cook us dinner while i read aloud to him. i would read him catherine mansfield, in keeping with my newfound adoration of her beautiful writing. her words are fresh and as beautiful as woolf's but without all the 2-page sentences. she is easily as delightfully ambiguous though -- reading her is like puzzling through a challenging mystery: i have to connect each detail to the next and cultivate a real sense of understanding before i can determine the thrust of the story. i'm enjoying every word and every work.

i went to the honors advisor today: she basically told me that, in order to graduate with honors over the next three semesters, i'll have no social life and i will spend what little "freetime" i have outside of my intense classes holed up in the archives of the library gorging on literary criticism and scholarship. i'm delighted! it'll be a refreshing change of pace -- i'll feel like i'm actually contributing a body of scholarly work, not just leaching off it for my own deeds. it'll be a beautiful scenario of give-and-take, if i can qualify for the honors program, that is. otherwise, i'll not write a serious thesis until grad/ph.d work.

i've downloaded a recommended reading least from stanford's ph.d program: i intend to pursue it over this coming summer and during my teaching period in japan. it should be quite interesting to work on austen, thackeray, and milton while working at a contemporary bank and while teaching children the basics of english communication. i'll be spelling words in ways that were conventional hundreds of years ago, speaking in literary tongues archaic and delicious. yum!

now, onto spenser and his lovely "faerie queene" before i retire to my junk-covered bed.