Rainy Days and Mondays and Vampires

Don't they always get you down? I think that they make it much harder to be awake, because my hibernation mode kicks in and I say, "The animals probably aren't walking around, why should I?" But alas, workers have to be awake. There's my tangent.

In my Victorian Lit class, we are reading Dracula. This book I have read a few times before, but never the way in which my professor is having us read. Instead of just a classic gothic novel, we have taken the approach of Britain being invaded by alien races, those that plan to break down the British ideal of civility. In this light, I have been thinking that this is much more interesting. When Dracula is a man who sneaks into London by cover of mist, and slowly drains the blood of people, that is the exact symbol of the threat of 19th century imperialism. Plus, there's really disturbing facts about Dracula that movies and modern interpretations overlook: hair on the palms of his hands?!!! I really don't want to think about that.

It's interesting as well that Dracula is old when the book begins and grows younger with fresh blood. This was portrayed well in the 90s movie version, and I liked that he was able to move around in London society even during the day (I don't know how, but he did.) When Van Helsing kills one of the women in the novel after she becomes one of Dracula's vampires, he cuts off her head. Wow, that's really placing the Victorian gavel on the man's side. The many sides of feminine ideas come from this book, to the disturbing "New Woman" and the gentle souls who help their men any way they can. What was wrong with the New Woman? The fact that they were "loud". Wow, need I say more.

The end is equally interesting because instead of seeing the action from the villain's side, it's always a second-person account of the action, which kept me interested because it's a story told from journal entries and letters. It seems boring, but makes the story that much more exciting because it's all of these different characters adding their own unique characteristics to the plot. Dracula is actually a group narrative, and it works.

Now, we think of vampires as mythic monsters who hide in the dark, when in actuality Dracula was out in broad daylight taking over everything with a copy, with the simulation of modern society, and it made him harder to catch because everybody thought he was normal. I think that this makes him more evil, because it makes the fact that you can't see him for what he is that much more menacing.

I have read this book in more ways than one, and this reading was especially great on a rainy day. Now, who likes Twilight when they got the original?

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vaast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distand northern sea.

The Sea of Faith was
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

A Snippet from My Poetry Book

I have had many crises lately. Not the crises of money (though I REALLY wish I had some more of that) or of family, it's me. The crisis of me. I was informed today that in my church, since I'm a divorced young adult, that there's basically no category to put me in. From my BISHOP. He said that I don't fit in the Young Single Adult area because the church manual basically states you are considered an adult if you have been married. So much for that ship. It's been very frustrating because I've been struggling with my faith already, and this adds salt to the wound. I'm not sure where I fit in either in my church. It physically hurts that I don't exactly have very many friends living in the neighborhood, but to have a place I thought I could meet new people kind of shun me makes it worse. So, I have turned back to my love of poetry for some sort of hope that I can find my faith again.

Ms. Lonely Hearts

I remember the scene from Rear Window, when the lady who dresses in green across the street from Jimmy Stewart is so lonely in her life, with no human attention, that she tries to overdose on pills. Although I am noway near that sentimentality, I feel her pain. I too feel that way right now. Although it's only been a few days since my boyfriend and I broke up, it feels like an eternity of isolation. I like that my friends are doing great things in their life, and being who they want to me, but I just don't feel like I'm there celebrating with them. I wish I could be graduated, it's so soon! Yet, my friends are in other places right now, and I am here. I could be in a green dress in New York City, with no date waiting for me. It's not a pleasant feeling I'm in right now, worse because I live in a suburb and there's nothing to do in suburbs.

I had a lunch with my ex-husband today, (what was I thinking) and he told me that he knew a guy who was my age and divorced twice. TWICE?!! I couldn't believe somebody could rack up that many marriages, so young. I hope 22 is young. It's a terrible cycle, to have to find some hope of friends that you resort to exes. And then when you sit down and eat a sandwich with them, you realize that they were just as cold and distant as when you were married to them. And you realize, that life can be just as cold and distant as this meeting. I watched Ms. Lonely Hearts with a hopeful future, and almost laughed at her despair because of Jimmy's sardonic wit about her Saturday nights. Until I realized, I am her. Maybe I could learn to appreciate the green dress, and live with it.