Journaling the journal

I am feeling a bit lost as of 3:42pm yesterday when I FINALLY finished the first book in The Wheel of Time Series by Robert Jordan.

Although it took me 4 months to read only 890 pages, I felt like that book accompanied me through my life - and am now therefore attached to it. I read it when I was bored, euphoric, depressed, outside, enigmatic, doubtful, and fulfilled.

I finished the last 75 pages yesterday while home with a migraine and really enjoyed the last bit (even though I have no idea what I read - sometimes fantasy can be a bit confusing) and closed it with a small shutter of nostalgia...

Dare I pick up the next one? I think not for a bit - though Joel has already set it out on the coffee table to tantalize me.

But usually I feel so lost after a book - I get rather connected to those pages...the wine stains, the watermarks, the tears in the cover, well-worn with use.

I am keeping myself perked up by Sylvia Plath's Unabridged Journals and I tell you, I didn't think I could adore a woman more, but I do...by golly, I DO! I was having a conversation this week in which I confessed to having very little role models as a woman - It takes a lot for women to impress me so much that I actually want to emulate them - and I find that I look up to very few indeed (save my grandmother). What I realized and vocalized in that conversation was how I really do cling to authors of the past as my role models.

I always adored Miz Plath for her poetry, prose, and dominating, progressive presence, but reading her journals have enlightened me to oh-my-god-we-are-so-similar thoughts, and a deep understanding of her introversion, depression, and plight as a writer. It's really creepy how much I relate and while that sounds self-aggrandizing, know that I certainly am nowhere NEAR as talented as she (even at age 18, her journals sound like something I would be LUCKY to write as a seasoned older femme), I find my eyes eating up every.single.word of her journals. I am underlying like a frenzied scientist who just discovered electricity and wish to god I could share all of it with you dears...

In last night's 1am reading, she captured a date she had - and I wish I could speak so accurately, so surprisingly, so plainly. She PERFECTLY described the sexual tensions, the game playing, the enthusiastic conversation, the hamburgs (i love that she calls them that) and coffee...and I am just entirely, enthusiastically TRANSPORTED!

Shall I include a quote from said passage?

"I dressed slowly, smoothing, perfuming, powdering. I sat upstairs in the moist gray twilight, with the rain trickling down outside, while the family talked and laughed with company down on the porch. This is I, I thought, the American virgin, dressed to seduce. I know I'm in for an evening of sexual pleasure. We go on dates, we play around, and if we're nice girls, we demure at a certain point. And so it goes" (14).

In short, I don't remember enjoying a book so much...not like this.

It's as if I am voyeuristically looking at my own life...only it's hers. And the best part is the writing that pours out of me due to her.

In BOOKSTORE news,

I am officially turning in an application at Half Price Books,

which is 0.2 miles from my sweet little doorstep.

I have NO idea how I will work two jobs for a bit,

but I think the experience will be invaluable

even if I have to work nights and weekends...

but let me tell you,

it's the easiest application this book lover has ever filled out.

I will,

for sure,

keep you posted.

I leave you with this:

"Perhaps someday I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow" (23).

~mme. bookling