the habit of being

Tonight I lay fully clothed under my dirty green comforter, turned upside down so it is really off-off-white, and read Virginia Woolf (With all her pretty, long sentences describing things in such a shockingly complete way, how she can use commas so well, as if they were actually part of the music and not simply breath marks or barlines. It just occured to me that my endless dots, in earlier years of online communication, were intended as the grammatical equivalent of fermatas, so maybe the reader would not forget my words too soon). Only fifty pages or so, but I should be reading about gel electrophoresis or the Sanger method instead, in much shorter and more pointed segments. All this after spending four hours on eight calculus problems, and whining about it, though I didn’t really mind, because math is afterall pretty, and someone like me can’t really tell with certainty that I’ve done anything wrong. It feels like time sacrificed to something horribly clean, I come out of it feeling refreshed, as if maybe some peasant girl sat about scrubbing my mind with a loofa for a few hours. Still one can see the necessity of To the Lighthouse after staring at numbers and things for so long.

“And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her, but that his look had changed. He wanted something - wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much easier than she did. He could say things - she never could… A heartless woman he called her; she never told him she loved him. But it was not so - it was not so. It was only that she could never say what she felt… Then, knowing he was watching her, instead of saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him” (184-185).