10/01/2003 - 12:29 a.m.

And here I am.

By 11 today I will be back at UNI. Thankfully. However, noting the date, I have five days to write a No Shame piece and pick a monolouge for my Mockingbird audition. I both do and do not want to get in. I want to be in a show, but not that one, basically. So I think I'm going to have to do Agnes of God, because I know that one. But I feel it's getting too used- for me, that is. No one else has seen it, but I feel I've done it more times than Judy Garland's sung Over the Rainbow.

Written word slips are one of the weirdest things in the world. We'll make an example of my friend Turtle. I go to school with her, and know her by both her names, Turtle and Julie. Other people know her as Julie, and I try every now and again to call her that around other people. Generally, if I mess up, I correct myself. In the spoken word, this is a slip and makes sense- it got out before my brain could stop it. However, doing it with the written word, when the written word can be altered, hints at deeper inmplications. The person could've changed that, they could've deleted the slip, but why didn't they?

I've been reading some of my brother's English papers, and I certainly hope he's not getting A's for them. I'm not great with English grammer. I didn't know what a paragraph was until the third grade. I can't put a name to any of the things that I do, but teachers all the time comment on all these grammatical things that I apparently do right. My seventh grade teacher was convinced that I'd plagarised one of my papers because I correctly used a semicolon; that's something seventh graders can't do.

At any rate, I see my brother's mistakes as great black gaping holes in his papers. I would expect any English teacher with half a brain to have kicked his ass over them by now. They're not bad, by high school standards, but they're not good. And that does not simply mean they're not as good as mine were, but I would at least expect him to be a little more careful with his punctuation. Though, that is not something anyone has ever bothered to teach me to any satisfaction, so I suppose I shouldn't expect it. He doesn't read as much as I do, so he hasn't got as much to copy. I never would've learnt to punctuate dialouge at all if it hadn't been for my reading. Like Faulkner said, people who want to know how to write, need to read. (Something along those lines, anyway.)

Along with my brother's papers, I read some of my own from high school. The ones for my 11th grade class are quite good. The ones for last year, I can't believe Mr. Holcomb let me get away with all the cheeky things I wrote in there. It's incredibly obvious to me now just how he knew that I hated most of the books we read. I liked Hamlet, and that's obvious, but it's also terribly apparent that I thought that precious few other people in the class did. And Crime and Punishment I did genuinely like, and was glad to have read, and you can tell reading my paper that I liked it. The Illiad paper though, oh dear. It was a bastardised version, and I hate reading those, and this was one of the second things we read in class. It's obvious in that paper that I hated the class and the book. If Mr. Holcomb missed all that, he oughtn't to have retired believing that he knew all. I certainly missed it at the time.

My King Lear needs going over. At the time, all I did basically was change it line for line to more normal English and change two or three plot devices. The dialouge, however, needs simplifying and bringing down. It's quite terribly formal at the moment.

I've bitten my nails all the way down again. Now they're Frodo length. Time for me to buy some nail polish and start over again. If I keep them coloured, I won't bite them- the stuff tastes horrible, and when I bite it I have either to take it off, or put more on. Neither of these are tasks I adore. Or, I could simply keep my nails short and live with that. Yes, much better idea.

My mother was fussing about how long my hair is. For the record, it's longer now than the Lady Galadriel's (though not blonde). Why on earth I would want to cut it, I can't understand. The thing is though, I don't feel that it is so incredibly long. Everyone is always saying, "oh my, what long hair you have," as though I were Little Red Riding Hood's hippie grandmother or something.