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November 11
I'm going to Christmas School! Oh, I don't think any greater happiness exists. I'm signed up for Beginning Rapper, Beginning English Clogging, Beginning English Country Dance, Fun and Easy Contras, and Harmony Singing. It's all going to be so lovely. It's also going to be exhasuting, because in the first place I'm almost incapable of staying awake past three. Combine that with a week of classes from 9 to 5:15, contra dances from 7:30 to 10, parlor from 10 until we're tired, and then parties until all hours. The result is a very tired Julia. Last spring at some garden fair Mom signed up to get a free load of wood chips from a tree surgeon or something if they ever had a load in the area. She never heard back from them and figured they had forgotten, but Friday we came home to find a pile of wood chips the size of a small car in the driveway. Literally the size of a car. So we spent Saturday afternoon covering the all paths in the back yard with wood chips. We've done most of it and we've only used a fifth of the pile. My shoulder is sore from shoveling them into the wheelbarrow. Then Mom was tired from raking wood chips and decided we were going out for dinner. So we all went to a pizzeria and were waiting for a seat when I recognized a boy from school in the booth in front of us. "Simon!" I said, scaring him half to death. Realizing the only reason he would be in a restaurant across town from where he lives, I looked over into the seat across from him - sure enough, there she was - "Bridget! Good heavens!" They've been going out since school began and they're adorable together. I swear her life would be so much easier if she would just follow my advice in boyfriends. This is the first one in two years I've approved of and the first one in two years that's lasted.
So my family all got introduced and took a booth across the room, and everyone remarked on how very tall Simon was. I told them my theory that he was just a taller Owen Meany, and then had to recount the plot of A Prayer for Owen Meany. Then while we were ordering Bridget started making faces at me, so I made faces back, and this was great fun until the waitress asked me what kind of dressing I wanted on my salad. I was in the middle of a Junior Bird Man face, which is quite complicated, and was thus unable to answer her question for giggling. Bridget found this very amusing and luckily, I think Simon did too. They left soon after that, which I don't blame them for. We're all three friends at school, but having your girlfriend's friend walk into the middle of a date would be very weird.
Feeling: blissful Eating: a popcorn ball. I was reading one of the Little House books yesterday and there was a part where Ma was making popcorn balls for Christmas. It seemed like a good idea, so I did. It was messy but I got it all cleaned up eventually and the popcorn balls are really good. I like making candy. Wearing: my mother's old red flannel slippers Song in my head: "Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound" by Tom Paxton. I taped a Folk Sampler show on folk groups from the sixties and seventies last summer, and I was listening to it this morning. Dreamed: that I was in my science teacher's kitchen making sandwiches for some little kids. There was a girl sitting at the kitchen table who said she wanted a sandwich, and my teacher told me to make her one. So I did, but I was supposed to be using this weird sausage instead of lunch meat, which was also there. I used the lunch meat instead, because sandwiches with sausage don't work. The bread falls off. Reading: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I don't mind reading it, but I don't agree with the author's point at all. It's funny because I was reading Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces right before I started this one, and there's quite a contrast between thier ideas of what a hero should be. Joseph Campbell says that the archetypical hero should leave the community, overcome great threats (bad guys, monsters, etc.), win glory and power, and then return to the community to use his power for the benefit of the population. Ayn Rand's protagonist is written as the ideal man, but he just seems like a jerk to me. It's not that he's arrogant; he doesn't think he's better than other people. But that's only because he doesn't think about other people at all. He does stuff just because he feels like it and this is supposed to be all noble. Then the female lead is written as the ideal woman, but her only two defining characteristics are that she's very beautiful and positively evil. She doesn't do things because she feels like it, because she doesn't feel like doing anything. She does things because she finds it amusing. This is supposed to make us admire their strength of will and stuff, but so far it's just annoying me to no end. Link for today: Sur La Lune Fairy Tales Picture for today: paintings by Virginia Lee on the poem "Inner Seasons" Highlight of my day: it's all sort of been the same. Sundays usually are. November 20 
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