Marginalized

I cannot stop thinking about my bleeding corneas. The optometrist tells me I have blood vessels creeping into my corneas because my contact lenses aren't allowing enough oxygen to get through. I have new, more permeable contact lenses on the way, but in the meantime, my corneas are bloody.

I just went and stared in the mirror, curious to see if I could discern the blood vessels in my corneas. I realized I don't know which bit of my eye is my cornea. I know the iris, and the pupil, and the lens, but not the cornea. I'll look it up later.

I imagine that I can feel the veins growing. It's creepy, man, that my body does this. That I'm not getting enough ambient oxygen, so the veins just go snaking into a place where they don't normally grow...

So I'm at work. I feel a lot better, but I'm still not my oh-so-perky usual self. In a couple of days I'll be all better.

I'm really enjoying Grendel. It's all literary and evocative, and it keeps making references to epistemological arguments and philosophical stuff that I'm familiar with, which makes me feel like I'm not dumb. Silly, I know, but satisfying. Like "Ho hum, foreknown is not foreordained, we know that, John, we've all read Petrarch." Also I've read Beowulf like a hundred times, and studied the historical context (major in english and very nearly major in history and you can expect that to happen), so Grendel makes a lot of sense to me. It's nice to see all the changes Gardner rings on the story. The only thing is... I bought this copy of the book used. And there's lots of marginalia courtesy of the previous owner.

Now, I'm not opposed to marginalia, per se. Personally, I don't write stuff in books. I prefer to take notes on a separate piece of paper and mark down the page numbers-- I find it easier to go through the book later and find stuff that way anyway, rather than flipping through and looking for my handwriting. I'm also a little anal-retentive, I admit it-- part of me still thinks books are sacred, not to be sullied by my pen. Probably a throwback to getting yelled at by mom for scribbling in an encyclopedia with a purple crayon. Who knows.

Billy Collins has a great poem called "Marginalia," which is a paean to margin-scribblers everywhere. I can appreciate that. Some marginalia is cool.

But the Intro to Lit student who had this copy of Grendel is just annoying. He wrote "Existentialism" all over the place. He keeps writing, like "Garden of Eden" and "Cain and Abel" and stuff by paragraphs that have nothing to do with Christian mythology. Sometimes they have nothing to do with any mythology. Often they have something to do with Norse mythology, of which my margin-scribbler is woefully ignorant. He brackets sentences and writes big question marks. These question marks make me think I'm missing something, because the sentence made sense to me. At least, I thought it did, but maybe there's some hidden meaning (I figure Gardner's not above having intentional hidden meanings, stuff that only close reading would reveal). So I all squint at the page and stuff trying to discern a hidden meaning that's not there. That squinting probably makes my corneas bleed more.

The marginalia is distracting. I should just ignore it, but it annoys me.

I'm cranky, aren't I? You can tell I've been sick.

Meg tells me these entries have been funnier than usual lately. If that's true, it's probably due to all the pamie I've been reading. I read her archived journals like I eat cool ranch Doritos. I'm probably unconsciously stealing her old jokes. I've only got about six months more to read before I'm current. That'll make me sad. I'll have to settle for new entries like everybody else. I'm all addicted to the pamie-crack.

People are sending me email about "The Fallen." People say nice things about the ending-- that it's unexpected but perfectly appropriate.

Man. That makes me so happy.

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