Disclaimer: Why yes, I am an English major…

I need to wear a sign that says this ^.  I get ribbed for this a LOT.  I don't even correct people's grammar in casual conversation anymore (mostly) (although i always make the effort to correct my siblings, because they actually take it to heart, haha).  But people who read any of my papers or even some of my Facebook comments, as soon as I say, "I'm majoring in English," say something to the effect of "Oh, you would be."  Two people have said this actually intimidates them, which I find interesting, because I am likewise intimidated by their sense of humor or awareness of the world or creativity or ability to debate or…the list goes on.  Seriously, I think it's hilarious that anyone could be intimidated by me, period.  I mean, have you met me?  (Somebody was saying I needed to work on looking more intimidating after two different redheaded pessimists on the bus asked me out [and both of them were significantly older than me, and one of them had just divorced his wife, who left him after alleging he was trying to kill her…yeah.  I stayed far away from that guy after that conversation.  And then he got back together with her three weeks later and it was moot anyway].)  

*This is another one of those posts that turned out much longer than I originally meant it to be; and this time it's all on the same topic, so I apologize if it's somewhat mundane.*

Even my English professor joked about it:  we were discussing in class one day how our society is moving in a very visual direction, away from books and written entertainment to visual and audial entertainment like movies.  He said , "Most of society is trending that way," and then he looked right at me and said, "Well, almost everyone."  He also has made jokes about how I'm the only one in our class of 16 who said I enjoy reading literature.  

A couple of people on IM in the last few days have randomly addressed me as "Miss English Major" (followed with this emoticon –> :P ) for no apparent reason.  At least two dozen people at KVCC know I have a dictionary app on my iPod touch; one girl expressed mock surprise that I was willing to settle for an electronic dictionary instead of a full-sized print one.  I got into an argument with one girl about the use of "cacophonous" in a certain sentence, and after we worked it all out, another girl applauded her (teasingly) for holding her own in a linguistics debate with me. 

And then there's those moments when I'll unsuspectingly say something that uses either  1) an above-average number of polysyllabic words, or 2) words that are dated or downright archaic, or else typically employed only a literary context, which I don't realize because I learned them from spending my childhood reading novels instead of talking to actual people.  I've literally had people ask me to translate sentences before.  Is it something about college that suddenly my nerdiness for the English language is magnified in the eyes of my peers?  

I get ridiculously excited over things like proper use of apostrophes in Google auto searches.  And it's only in the last two or three years that it's really sunk in that that is not normal.  Being good at—or caring about—the printed English language, apparently, is sadly abnormal for a sizeable portion of my generation of fellow Americans.  Written English is apparently one of my idiosyncrasies., and I rather like it.  But it's manifestly amusing to me that so many people seem to equate "I'm an English major" with "Huzzah! I'm an alien!  You can't relate to me at all!  I doodle on my knees with Sharpies!"  (Which I do, but that's beside the point.)  Also, most of my peers seem to assume that people with an English degree automatically want to teach (which I do not; I don't think I have the patience or the speaking abilities for it), and once I say something along the lines of, "I want to edit books for the next fifty years of my life" the conversation is basically dead.  Nobody thinks editing is an interesting profession, and to the average person, it looks like a pretty straightforward job, so there's not much conversational material there.  The same thing happens when I tell people I want to write—they say, "Oh, like you want to be a journalist?" and I say i want to write novels, which apparently comes off as much less adventurous, even though, technically, with the help of your imagination, you get to travel to places and see things no journalist ever will on the job.

Thus, I feel that I should just save myself the awkwardness of all these conversations where people have this reaction ^ and wear a sign, so they can find out my major before even officially meeting me, run through their subsequent mental processes at their own pace, and then we can be friends, and they can rib me to their heart's content without that awkward first conversation about "What are you majoring in?", and I can go on geeking out over the proper placement of possessive apostrophes and studying mythic poetry and writing effusive blog posts in relative peace.  

Welcome to Kiersten's Mind, circa 2:47 am, Wednesday, 26 January, year of our Lord 2011.

HELLO.

{author's note, circa 36 minutes in the future:  this post is very long, and potentially tedious and absurd, and I'm sorry, and I ask that you not feel obligated to read it all if it turns out to be nonsense or just plain boring, or for any other reason which seems conscionable to you the reader.}
{author's note postscript:  Apparently "conscionable" is not a word, and I just invented it retroactively(?) from "unconscionable".}

SLEEP ELUDES ME.
Sleep is [insert witty, poetic, and eternally quotable metaphor here].
And what did I do?
I fell asleep in the middle of writing an essay around 5:00 this afternoon.
I accidentally drank three and a half cups of caffeinated tea at 9:30 p.m.  (Because the mint tea was decaffeinated!  But it was also nowhere to be found in the labyrinth of our untidy kitchen.  Thus, I drank vanilla caramel instead.  That turned out to be a mistake.)
And now—I sit.  Awake.  Alert.  My frenetically typing fingers the only endless sound in the oddly soundless night.  (Why isn't the furnace running…?)

And now my imagination wanders bravely through a dark and stormy night, a night rife with simmering resentments; events forgotten that may have changed the world, had we only the maturity to recognize them for what they were; plots that you thought were hidden from the world; musings about spiritual wealth versus materialism; theories about the potential of dreams of inventive metaphors for our deepest fears; vicious truths about sibling rivalry and debt and the nature of guilt and forgiveness; ambiguous endings; and the ultimate dilemma between true forgiveness and spilled orange soda as a metaphor for childhood fratricide.
Don't'cha just love writing abstract essays about 20th-century college literature?
Me too, folks.
Me too.
(But not at this time of the night.)

BUT I DO HAVE a working printer!
You know, the free one that they gave me with my expensive computer way, way, way back in July!  I finally set it up seven months later so I can print documents without having to convert the file, save it to a flash drive, drive 40 miles, and wait in line for a working computer.

So i can print out all my rambles (not these, the other abstract ones, roughly in essay form, about the college literature) and give them to my peers to review in class tomorrow, and they will tell me how brilliant the writing is but that its patent subjectivity places it completely outside the parameters of the assignment.  And they will write in purple pen, because honors students have been properly warned about the possible psychological danger (to the recipient) of using a red pen to give criticism on a school paper.
I actually know none of this for certain (save the part about the working printer, though who knows how long that will last?).  I rarely jump to the same conclusions about my 3-a.m. essays as other people do. Last year I wrote a five-page essay on the pros and cons of living life as a short person.  I prefaced this essay with three-quarters of a page about stratus clouds, including one very bad pun that made for a horrifically fabricated segue with possibly abused italics.  My entire class thought it was a brilliant opener.  Four hours later, I thought it was nonsense, even if the rest of the essay was pretty decent.

I have Parmesan cheese stuck between my teeth, because I just ate about four ounces of it. I hope all the expensive protein is worth it.

I keep writing these things ("things" meaning all the rambles of my mind in the middle of the night) down, because I hope that insomnia creates something worthwhile.  I think that insomnia makes me a lot of who I am.  i used to dream about archaeologists someday discovering the lost civilization of Kalamazoo, and my journals would become the definitive source of history for the early 21st century.  Now…um, I don't think much of that idea (to summarize a lengthy paragraph, which involved my writing a will and someone committing arson, which I decided wasn't worth the effort to translate for the non-Kiersten reader who has staunchly trekked through this post to this point).

If you read this post in its entirety, you win major points.  I don't know what sort of points.  Not "awesome" points, because that sounds somewhat presumptuous because this post probably isn't that awesome, because my brain is functioning on sleep deprivation and caffeine and English literature (that prosaic fiend that consumes the mind in molehill-to-mountain analysis).  (George Orwell would be doing the polka in his grave if he could see me breaking every rule of his seven-page paper on concise writing.)  But you are awesome, so perhaps they are just rain check points.  Rest assured, you may at some future date be able to cash them in for something awesome.

Baaah.  I cannot compose poetic gems of wisdom right now, as much I wish I could.  But that's already redundant, because I essentially have two concluding paragraphs, whereas Tobias Wolff has none.  Is it too subjective to discuss the inferred fratricide/reconciliation results of the ambiguous ending in a plot abstract resolution?

That might be the one sentence I've written all night that I know meant something, even if was something boring.

G'night.

So, my plan to get a decent night's sleep by going to bed shortly after 11 didn't work out so well.

I went to bed around 11:15ish, was up and down a bit until 11:45ish, finally slumbered off around 1:30 and woke up at 5:13 to the pattering of rain and the cold air in between me and my blankets and the buzzing of a housefly caught in my hair (!) and an iPod that has done yet one more unfathomably dumb thing it's supposedly not designed to do.  The rain was nice; everything else...I could potentially have lived without and been quite content.  Tea, food, a shower.  I can't believe I spent a whole eight and a half months starting school every morning at this time.  My bus rides and my four-hour afternoon break are definitely going to double up as naptime today...

I was going to write a sentence about something else, but I can't write it in the active voice without it sounding ridiculous and I can't write it in the passive voice without ending the sentence with a preposition.  So if I remember, I might just write an entire post on it.

Staples.

Today in Modern Culture & the Arts, someone played part of a SpongeBob clip that sparked a forty-five minute discussion about swearing in front of children.  Then we talked about Caravaggio and Rembrandt and Vermeer using a documentary series written by a nun named Sister Wendy (whose gargantuan Story of Painting book I totally checked out from the library three years ago.  I felt so epic when I found out we were studying her interpretations).

Then I got on my Facebook and laughed at my sister's suggestion that I name my teapot Clive Staples.  

Then I printed lots of stuff.

Then I lent out my mini stapler to eighteen people.  (No relation to Clive Staples.)

Then I listened to a guy from the Student Success Center talk about interpreting our StrengthQuest Top 5 Strengths.  (Mine are Intellection, Input, Adaptability, Connectedness, and Empathy.  I'll probably write (a) post(s) about this later.)  Then I managed to catch the 8:45 bus and got home an hour early.  Then I decided to write a blog post by starting a lot of sentences with meaningless conjugative prepositional adverbs. 

(Not really, but it turned out like that.)

Now I am going to follow Hannah's YouTube link and watch part of A Very Potter Musical, because I am bored and feel like taking a respite from homework, since that's what I spent all my "alone time" doing for the last six days.