palace of winds

I’m sitting in a ladybug graveyard right now. A warm, sunshiney corner of the library with tall armchairs and windows and an airy ceiling opening onto the next floor, and it is where ladybugs come to die. They are scattered all around on the grey carpet like popcorn kernels, some cracked, some with their legs in the air, some bleached nearly spotless. I glance left or right and I see an inscrutable face, a sharp sliver of wing, a stomach brittle with crinkled legs.

The sun has ducked suddenly behind a cloud, the vent gurgles its water, and my naked ear burns as it cools. I am uneasy amid all of these fractured body parts. Spring has come.

God I love cool mint listerine.

I’ve been growling, feminazi, mess-with-me-and-die,-bitch! all afternoon, and I have to admit it feels good. It feels damned great sometimes to bare your teeth. Spring is in the air and getting under my skin, huff-puffing strongly in the big, cool wind. Spring is clawing up through the black earth and there are times when, as a woman, I feel at one with that rich silt, that riot of potential. Other women will know what I mean.

It started with Ovid and Livy and the rape of the Sabines. Really for me it started with Ovid, and people’s discussion of the positive and negative aspects of his account of the rape. “Project Rape” was an amusing title, but sick-amusing — for its “Project Mayhem” connotations and the linking of a planned military/governmental action with something as sick and morally despicable as rape. Anyway, my main point of contention was with the line about how, as the women were fleeing from the abductors, “many contrived / To make panic look fetching.” This, in my estimation, is Ovid saying They were asking for it. And some people in my class bought it. They actually bought that shit, hook line sinker. Wasn’t it nice and redeeming that at least some women were looking forward to being raped? See, women were different back then. Rape wasn’t seen the same way. It wasn’t just a one-night thing, it was forever. It was like getting married! Isn’t that a nice way to think of it? Women didn’t usually have a choice about their parents giving them away in marriage, and they didn’t have a choice in rape either. So that sort of makes it okay, right? Right? Sure makes me feel better. Oh yeah. It’s okay for men to rape women as long as their other life choices are nearly as horrible.

Mrg.

Daily observations: snow sprayed violently up against railing posts, thick and mottled like you’d see on a bad fake tree. Vulnerable teacher tummy.

I had others but they’re gone now. Today I also thought of time, and how little of it I have. There are 120 hours in a five-day school week. I spend 21 of them in class, 4 working, 6 in various club activities, 2 in practice. We’ll round and say I get 7 hours of sleep a night: that’s 35 hours sleeping. Maybe 8 hours eating during the week. After my alarm goes off it takes me 45 minutes, sometimes a bit longer, to get out the door in the morning; we’ll say that’s 4 hours. That brings me up to 80 hours of stuff blocked definitely into every week. Professors generally give two to three hours of homework per hour spent in class; 17 of my classroom hours I’m taking for credit, so being conservative I need 34 hours for homework each week. That’s 114. That leaves 6 hours (SIX HOURS) of spare time. In which to write, to practice guitar, to breathe. Of course I have slightly more cushion: sometimes homework isn’t that long, sometimes it’s longer. I can do homework during my work hours sometimes, and I do it while I eat lunch. There’s the weekend, of course. Nevertheless I’m feeling really awful about my schedule right now.