A quotable family moment
My adorable, docile, Catholic grandfather: I find this whole marriage-in-the-Church debate ridiculous. Of course priests should be able to get married. They should be made to get married! Why shouldn't they have to suffer like the rest of us?
My dad: Exactly! The same is true for the gay marriage debate. Only then they ( Read more... )

I find that most of the girls' names I like are old-fashioned, extravagant, multisyllabic affairs: Genevieve, Colette, Vanessa, Adelaide, Olivia, Rosaline. The boys' names I like best begin with G: Gawaine, Gareth, Gavin, Gabriel, Gregory, Glenn ( Read more... )

Today we had to put down Velvet, our singularly neurotic but also graceful and heart-breakingly affectionate cat. She was fifteen or so, her once sleek black coat dreary and unkempt and her always lean body suddenly shrunken down to five-and-a-half pounds. All of her organs had basically failed. I will miss her--she in no way conformed to the ( Read more... )

I have spent much of the past two days in the alphabetical solitude of the filing room. I think in A-B-C's now. There's somehow a very poetical, almost Zen quality to having real people reduced to the anonymity of the first few letters of their name, then filed away with thousands of others in tall gray cabinets in a bare room ( Read more... )

Perhaps someday I will stop putting Nabokovian quotations in my LiveJournal. However, this is not that day. Here is something from Speak, Memory that struck my fancy:

"This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something ( Read more... )

In the immortal words of Samwise Gamgee, "Well, I'm back." I whole-heartedly miss my favorite Grinnellians, and being away from them is indeed a pure, exquisite sort of pain ( Read more... )

My darling Vladimir, writing about his childhood when he would go up the stairs with his eyes closed:

"This slow, somewhat somnambulistic ascension in self-engendered darkness ( Read more... )

I think that this summer, I'd like to be a mysterious, willowy, silent figure that haunts the shelves of public libraries. I shall come back every day, always appearing to be in a thorough search for something very particular and imperative, growing more hollow-eyed every day that I do not find it. If any library staff asks me if they can be of ( Read more... )

Боже мой. How in the name of sweet St. Swithin did it get to be this late in the year? After two more weeks of class and a week of finals, I will bid farewell to all of my comrades (perhaps sing a stirring rendition of "Leaving on a Jet Plane"), and then a plane will soar me away to hopelessly distant Maryland. Don't get me wrong--home is ( Read more... )

Sometimes I wonder whether, on my deathbed, I'll look back on my life and realize that I have produced nothing but a long series of blood glucose numbers and Freudian slips ( Read more... )