Pointless Spillover from Facebook

The plural of the noun 'fly' is 'flies'.

The verb 'fly' conjugates as follows:

I fly                     We fly
You fly               You fly
He/She/It flies     They fly

It is never, under any circumstances, spelled 'flys' or 'flyes'.

I want to put this in my status update so badly but I can't do it without hurting people's feelings.  Instead, I'm putting it up here.  Unbelievably, three different people have spelled either of the two incorrectly in their status updates over the past 72 hours.  What iz the world coming 2? 

Thanks for your patience with my orthography-bile! 

The Other Side of Envy

I did tell myself in my strictest tone that I was to go to bed at 10.00, no arguments. It worked last night. Here I am, however, at 1.24am. I finally got really excited about going to London. I've spent a great deal of time with boxes and back pain this week. It's about forty minutes of packing, ten of whinging followed by three hours of sitting on the couch with the hot water bottle.

I have an ink stain on my couch, annoyingly: this is the price I pay for building nest on the couch out of blankets, pillows, my journal, several pens because I can never seem to find the same one twice, books of various kinds, both reference and fiction, my knitting and one or more shawls. I think I shall be quite content to be 65 and eccentric, once I get there. There used to be a cat and a pack of biscuits in there too but those have disappeared (and no, the disappearance of the biscuits was not an easy thing for me either). Somehow, the cap seems to have come off the pen - I only use ink pens for proper writing on paper - and somehow re-attached itself in the night for when I picked it up this morning, the cap was on but the pen was entirely empty and there was this big black mark. Time to get out the rubbing alcohol and old paper and rags. This has nothing to do with anything in particular so I shall return to the subject at hand...

...renewed enthusiasm. During all this knitting, pen covered, hot water bottle couch sitting, I have been watching movies set in London. I didn't start off doing that on purpose: I just picked one and then another one. Now I'm excited and my accent is doing that shifting thing that it does. We have an Oxbridgian Classics professor at the university and whenever I talk to her I get accent shift and then turn tongue-tied because I'm worried she'll think I'm making fun of her.

It's an odd, rather moth-eaten accent that I get living in England. It sounds British to Americans and American to Brits, although I do get the occasional confused inquiry as to whether I hail from Ireland or New Zealand. That mostly happens when I'm drunk. But it shifted enough today that when my sister called, she teased me about it.

She also told me she envied me a little. She hasn't been the only one to say that recently and it feels strange to me. Many of these statements come from people whom I envy. I tend to be envious of their ability to graduate from university in a normal amount of time and to hold down jobs and to settle down and get married and, in spots, enter into the property market. This has something to do with my impending 29th birthday, I'm quite sure, but a few (well, only one out of that list, to be quite honest - going to grad school has put paid to my worry over my ability to graduate with my BA, hold down a job, since I have a good reason not to for a whole year and I have no overwhelming desire to entangle myself with real estate for the time being) still hold. I only have intermittent envy over their mental boringness since I can see two sides to being mentally interesting.

I have spent the vast part of this summer longing for that one thing, as though I were a transplant from the earlier part of the 20th century. I would rather have that than an MSc, at the moment. I've had to sit myself down and, again in my sternest tones, tell myself that if I can't have it, at least a year in London and a good degree is an excellent consolation prize; and really, it is. Still, it's funny to see that while they have what I want, I have something that they want. Even my sister, whose life to me seems so well-run and complete and perfect of its kind and whom I would envy with an ill grace if she weren't such a lovely person and good, beloved sister to me.

I miss my cat. All this taking myself aside and giving my self stern talkings-to is a bit more to the side of madness than it was when he could be involved. Then it was more like being Alice through the looking glass. She had three: a cat and two kittens. Of course, things turned out rather more oddly for her than they have for me.

I find I'm on the other side and it's a strange place to be: it is strange to have something that can be envied, especially something for which I have had an incomplete desire all this unending summer. I don't know what to do with it, nor to think of it. The world has switched sides while I was otherwise occupied and I'm disoriented. That has happened fearfully often this summer but to elaborate would need another post.

Speaking of posts, this is no way to end one but I have been on an anaxiolytic-induced shambly rambling tropos all evening so I shall just give in. Did you know that in both Latin and Greek, fearfulness is such an important and prominent emotion that there are 'fear clauses' in the grammar? They are usually followed by the subjunctive, occasionally the optative in Greek (if I remember rightly - the optative is a verb mood so alien to English that I have always had a great deal of trouble distinguishing it from the subjunctive, not least because the conjugated verbs are spelt nearly exactly the same way) and even, in Greek, make use of a different negation word than most sentences. Now whenever I use 'fear' or 'fearfully' my subconscious shouts 'fear clause!' at me. I wonder whether, by virtue of lacking a formal fear clause, English is braver or just less realistic about human nature.

I Fear That I Read Too Many Novels During an Impressionable Youth

I really wish that I didn't talk like someone out of an Austen novel when I get nervous. Who, I ask you, says 'if that would be amenable' when asking someone out? And then follows by saying 'I have so enjoyed your company this past week'? It's as well to be polite but it has to be said that this borders on the absurd. I know I'm laughing (nicely) at myself right now. Yikes.

Work Avoidance

I thought that the biggest obstacle I would have going back to school would be the depression part of the bipolarnesses. I was completely wrong, at least so far. It's the anxiety that gives me the most trouble.

Case in point: the fact that I am writing a post instead of getting on with the Greek. As soon as I pick up a piece of homework I become extremely anxious that I'm going to do the wrong homework or do the right homework badly or not be able to finish it all or that my feeling that the medication has made me less intelligent is about to prove itself to be true.

It turns out that it's a good thing that most of my classes are very early in the morning as I simply don't have time to wake up enough to become too anxious to go if I have to leave the house at 7.20 am to get the bus.

Taking the bus is itself a strategy to foil the anxiety. The university is only about a mile and a half away from my apartment but since I live in urban Appalachia, it is a very uphill and downhill and up a very steep hill kind of walk to get home. So, if I take the bus instead of driving it is much harder for me to change my mind and leave or go off campus between classes and fail to come back. This works because, being urban Appalachia, our buses come only once an hour and the routes run in circles rather than back and forth with the result that while going to university takes about seven minutes, coming home on the bus takes at least a half hour. It's faster to walk, which is what I do, but all those hills make me less eager to leave.

So far I haven't been anxious in classes, which is fantastic. This also makes me think that the anxiety will ebb as the semester goes on. It is, as is usual for me, the transitions between doing one thing and doing another that throw me. I quite understand the ancient obsession with Hermes and Mercury; the same sort of anxiety surrounding states of change has led to me attaching my St. Christopher medal to the inside of my school bag so that I can't forget to bring it with me and holding on to it when I feel particularly worried. It helps, even if he isn't officially a saint anymore.

Maybe I should strand myself at the library today. Either way, it's time for me to stop working on this and go look up sixteen more verbs that will all mean anger, death, plague or destruction. If the vocabularies of a language say anything about the people who spoke them, then the Greeks were very concerned with war and spirit and death. The same would make the Romans extremely passive aggressive for saying 'amabo te' for please: 'amabo te' means 'I will love you.' Can you imagine? Sometimes it would work better than our 'please'; if you were hanging from a cliff begging for help, it sounds stronger. But in everyday life? 'Would you please pass the butter' becomes 'Pass the butter and I will love you,' with the implication to my ears that a failure to pass the butter would result in the alienation of affection. Then again, this could just be a reflection of their much stronger sense of duties towards others. I wonder.

See how easy it is for me to distract myself? Off I go, now, truly this time.

anyqueensway

Does anyone else remember when the Queen of Hearts tells Alice (in the book of course) that "all ways around here are [her] ways"? Thinking about that used to make me smile whenever I'd go to or through Queensway, a neighborhood in London. I miss it. London: not Queensway. It's hard to miss Queensway. Or the Central Line, for that matter.

Well, friends, I think I might have a touch of the euthymia. I was speaking to my ex on the phone earlier and she asked me had I been drinking? what had I been doing?

I haven't done anything but wash the dishes, said I, except that I came back in the living room and found two mugs and a plate and thought, oh well, I'll just do them tomorrow.

But you're making me laugh, says she. What's going on?

Oh dear. What a regular ball of sunshine I must have been being!*

I should probably crack on with the Greek homework. Nothing mixes better with an effervescence than Greek and I've got 42 lines of Homer to tran and scan. (Like the abbreviation? See, you can tell I'm so cool that I'm part of the app. crit. crowd. {which is an extremely dorky form of cool wherein classics students show off by referring to the apparatus criticus [critical apparatus - it explains variations and misreadings of other texts and manuscripts and helps with weird verb forms] as the app. crit.})

Needless to say, this is a variety of cool not recognised in the general taxonomy.


I am, however, very excited to be following the same educational syllabus as St. Augustine, which is probably not a form of excitement recognised in the general taxonomy. But then, I'm an anomataxic girl at heart, really.

Ah, the nonsense. But at least I found my Carmex this evening. Can't have been a total loss, then.


*(Ah, the past perfect participle. Nothing could make me happier, except for the timely use of the future perfect.)