I fully intended to go outside this morning.  It snowed last night and the pebbles outside my bedroom window were covered with frosting.  I wanted to hear the muffled crunch under my feet and run my finger along the outside of the window ledge, but the snow has melted under a clear blue sky and now the ground is dull and puddled.  Instead of playing in the snow (okay, so there was only a thin layer, but I could still have been playful) there was essay writing for Narrative and Subjectivity.  The draft has to be handed in today, so I’ve been finishing that up.  I wonder why, despite every good intention, I can never write an essay early.  I also wonder why I write essays.  What on earth is the point in the observation that Richardson’s Clarissa and Austen’s Northanger Abbey both deal with heroines who are unable to understand the gap of meaning between signifier and signified?  When I write essays I use a foreign language that I don’t believe in.  I listened to the comments in class last night about how it can ruin the magic of literature to analyze it, and I started wondering whether that was what was happening to me.

I’m feeling cynical today.  I might think I don’t believe in this theoretical jargon I use, but it’s like a drug.  I can’t read a book without a pencil in one hand.

Another thought: why is my desk always such a mess?  I wonder what you could tell about me from this desk.  Something about overabundance of stationary, printed sheets, books and pens and CDs and mugs of tea, a globe, bills, hand cream, scrap paper with addresses, an empty pen holder with its inhabitants scattered about.  Most of these pieces of paper belong on the cork board above the desk, but I never quite manage to pin them up. Instead, the most prominent item on the board is two adjacent pieces of paper, one blank, and the other one with an arrow and the phrase ‘A Blank Page’.  It was meant for inspiration, but it sometimes seems to embody that feeling of starting an essay and not knowing what to write.