"what sholde he studye and make himselven wood?"

Yesterday Liz called me. She said, "Hey, we're standing outside [some Philly art museum]. Do you know who made the Thinker?" And I said, "Rodin, I think."

The end. Well, I mean, I listened to them debate whether to go into the Rodin museum or the entire museum, and then we said goodbye, and that was the end of the conversation. To borrow Bethy's words: "Up it so much cracked me." Or, to use the vernacular, as it, um, as it were, "I thought it was pretty hysterical." Even though maybe I'm wildly jealous that they live in a place with tons of art museums (by which I really mean I thought wistfully of an afternoon at an art museum rather than an afternoon with the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1, Eighth Edition).

As you might be able to tell from the title (if you're wildly well educated or just a serious English geek), Chaucer is currently eating my soul. (Basically the quote means "Why should he study and make himself crazy?" And that, my dear friends, is the question of the week.) We're reading him in, if not the strictly original English, pretty darn close to the original Middle English. Samuel Smith was reading it aloud today, and it's really very musical. Sounds vaguely Irish (by which I mean the vowels are very Scottish sounding, but not nearly so much as Old English, and the rhythm/emphasis pattern is very much like a heavy Irish accent).

I feel much better at the beginning of this week, even if I'm not precisely excited that it's Monday again, due primarily to some serious self-dosing with chccolate, fiction, and sleep. So let's keep our fingers crossed, yeah? That maybe I'll be sane, and that the Petunia time of month will not descend on my birthday.

Much love,
The Kenzie