Rachel Writes a Blog Post

I'm going to this Bible study tonight, and it is going to last 34 weeks. That's thirty-four weeks. Longer than anything I've ever done continuously, with the possible exclusion of school, which is only longer by a couple of weeks. I have never met or seen any of the other people in this Bible study. I have glanced briefly at the workbook, years ago. And the people will probably be older than me and talk often about their children and family life, and I will not identify with that, but for some reason I'm very excited about this study, so it will take a pretty terrible group to make me leave. I have always heard about this study and book and how it changes everyone's lives, and now for the first time it is working with my schedule and I'll live in the same place long enough to do it all, or most of it. I feel as though I'm getting down to business. Finally. But it could always not be for me--that happens all the time, everyone but me loves something. I hold my mind ajar. We will see.

In other news, I saw Burn After Reading and laughed and realized I am that woman who talks in movies and wondered when that happened. It was very funny, very well-acted, with lots of good scenes, but they didn't add up to much of a movie. As I'd been forewarned, the Coens and I are still OK. I would recommend that you wait and rent it or, as the kids do these days, Netflix it.

I have pulled off the coup of the decade in my poetry class, with permission. I "wrote" an entire poem of eleven stanzas using only found text from the Reader's Digest Science Reader from 1963. If I can continue to write poems by stealing lines and have professors say it's a great idea, I am switching genres. Not really. I keep telling myself I'm here for a challenge, I'm going to research and write this book, I'm not going to fall back on memoir, and I'm going to like it, and so is everyone else. Of course, when one has never had a class in research, one wonders how to proceed beyond the library. Maybe I could contract someone to do the interviews and stuff. Except I would still get to travel and meet people, just not have to take notes or anything.

I started reading French Women Don't Get Fat. When I typed that, I put "far" instead of "fat," which makes the sentence funny but not true. It's surprisingly readable, and I look forward to putting its concepts into practice. I am also savoring The Moviegoer, sometimes reading sentences repeatedly because I like them so much.

Two lost things someone should write: the second half of Aristotle's Poetics, in which he probably wrote about comedy (the half we have is about tragedy); and accounts of mortals who were welcomed into the Olympian community--according to Edith Hamilton, this happened to several humans, but once they went to Olympus, they disappeared from literature. What was their life like up there? When I say someone should write these, I mean me. So no stealing.