Plans and Pancakes

No longer the open meadows of thought, free and green for sitting and smelling, holding a watermark concept up to another for a starker, more meaningful picture. Not, at least at a time like the end of a fall semester, where any stray thought must belong to research paper or project formulation and not traipsing in the Free Meadow of Creative Thought. Textbook phrases, quantitative data, and professors' monotones and exaggerations crowd in, demanding their priority as "school things" and "the future of my career."

I'm not really a list person. I mean, I work better with lists, and more efficiently. Yet evening after evening, I fail to make any real sort of schedule for the next day. There is something cage-like about scheduling, and no matter how smoothly things go because I managed a plan beforehand, I never make it habit. So my mind can be found floundering and inconstant as to what I should be doing with my time. The silent, monstrous zeppelin floating over my tooth-brushing, my teatime and my walks to the mailbox, is that I should be doing something for school.

But I do have to have other things, things that get me to the teatime from the tooth-brushing, and to the schoolwork as well.

About a month ago, I bought a 49-cent copy of the novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier from a Salvation Army, on a whim because I have sort of always wanted to read it. My English teacher in high school assigned it to some of her classes, but for whatever reason she didn't assign it to the one I was in. When I opened to and read the first page a couple of weeks ago, I had already been reading another book on my Nook, but the plot was slowing up. Reading, waiting for something to happen in that Nook book, was like searching for arrowheads in the backyard.

Reading Rebacca has been just the distraction I've needed. It's a haunting mystery that was written in the late 1930's, and the protagonist is a young woman, awkward, thin and pale, who falls in love with and marries a widower almost twice her age, and goes to live on his estate. But no matter what she does, the girl cannot escape the ghostly memory of Rebecca, her husband's late wife who was killed in a boating accident. Or was she murdered?

Okay, obviously this is a purely self-indulgent read. But who doesn't need those? I'll finish the other book, of course, which is Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. I have a nasty habit of starting and rarely finishing - whether it is in reading or writing. So, I'm trying to shake this.

Swamplandia!, as it happens, is actually a really good book, just slow near the last quarter.

As a last note, I want to mention that I made pancakes yesterday morning, just for me and no one else (especially not the dogs). After smattering them with butter and maple syrup, I sat in the quiet at the end of the kitchen table, and indulged my breakfast fantasy (which is, it so happens, a rather dominant one). I thought of this blog, a namesake of the morning pancake, and let my various, schedule-less selves settle and resolve into a complete girl-woman-creature. I found a moment, and heard my voice, singular and peaceful, in my head.

My voice, no one else's.