Finals comes a week earlier for me than anyone else–a choice I made to enable me to spend maximum time in Santa Fe this winter–which means that all my projects and exams are happening THIS week, which of course means all kinds of unpredictable emergencies are cropping up, which of course means last weekend I met someone and fell wildly in like and spend several hours every day sending and receiving flirtatious text messages and phone calls, which of course means I am distracted and swoony and SO not up to the task of translating vast passages of L’etranger or compiling the semester’s writing and analyzing it or copyediting galleys but HERE WE ARE and by some miracle it is all getting done and I am not too sleep-deprived and I am not catching a cold and everything is just fine and I am so happy?

More this weekend, from the most beautiful home on earth. And OH! Editor elections tonight. Y’all send me good vibes!

the past few weeks:

workshop poems marlys stress cooking orchids french homework roseanne galleys cat cuddling robyn bauhaus copyediting paperwork black eye crockpot oatmeal sister time auction dance parties gala apples new york research gchats new lover old geraniums santa fe rainy afternoons spent making out in the car mardi gras radio show grant writing jean cocteau author bios 8 course winter tasting menus run dmc tshirt keeping up with the kardashians blueberry jalapeno preserves bloody marys antiques roadshow blood meridian negative capability

I am not usually vulnerable to pop music, but Robyn is just KILLING IT these days.

Playlist for Black Warrior Radio (11/15/10)

Bela Lugosi is Dead, Bauhaus – Bela Lugosi’s Dead EP
Candy, Lisa Germano – Lullaby for Liquid Pig
Can’t Even Breathe on My Own Two Feet, Half-Handed Cloud – Learning About Your Scale
The Bleeder, Wooden Wand and the Sky High Band – Second Attention

Indestructible, Robyn – Body Talk Part III
Biological, Air – Talkie Walkie
You Can Have it All, Yo La Tengo – I Can Feel the Heart Beating as One

Lover’s Spit, Broken Social Scene – Beehives
I’m a Pilot, Fanfarlo – Reservoir
I Don’t Love Anyone, Belle and Sebastian – Tigermilk
The Dream of Evan and Chan, Ben Gibbard – Live for KEXP

Let it Take You, Goldfrapp – Supernature
Ex Paradis, Brigitte Fontaine – Libido
Crystallized, The XX – The XX
Nude as the News, Cat Power – What Would the Community Think

Heartstopper, Emiliana Torrini – Fisherman’s Woman
Back in the Day (Puff), Erykah Badu – Worldwide Underground
This is the Day, The The – Soul Mining
Things I Don’t Remember, Ugly Casanova – Sharpen Your Teeth

When I Was a Young Girl, Feist – Let it Die
Do Not As I Do, Hanne Hukkelberg – Little Things
Two Weeks, Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
Feel It All Around, Washed Out – Life of Leisure EP
Vapour Steals the Glow, Boduf Songs – Boduf Songs

she writes my best friend from college and then she writes a story about a man she started hanging out with a few months before she moved.

I went looking for affirmation that I am a piece of shit and lo, I found it.

Sunday. After being laid up with a stomach flu all weekend (I even took a trip to the student health center for fluids and an injection of Zofran, a chemo-strength anti-nausea drug), I am back at my goddamn big desk studying French and writing. I am also making crockpot apple butter to can in pretty jelly jars. I have been drinking gatorade and eating saltines all weekend but I am still unbelievably dehydrated. It is almost soup-and-hoodie weather. Though I still don’t have much of an appetite I can’t wait for it. The BWR auction is in a few days and I am overwhelmed and exhausted and nervous. My sister has moved to Birmingham for work and we have tentative plans to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas together. I am headed to Santa Fe in early December, NYC in early January. I desperately need boots and a new coat. I have a few more workshops and a proficiency exam left and the semester is over.

I could not be any more ready.

Thanks to QV for my belated birthday gift.

Another series of dreams about snake bites. Last night’s was the most urgent: my entire leg swelled around the ankle-height bite, blackened, went necrotic, tore away in great stinking hanks.

Letter in November

Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight
Splits through the rat’s tail
Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
It is the Arctic,

This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses – babies hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.
I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of the odd corpses.
I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden,
Imagine it —-

My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls
In a thick gray death-soup,
Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.

O love, O celibate.
Nobody but me
Walks the waist high wet.
The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

Sylvia Plath