Sunday night rambles

Had a pretty low-key day, which isn't a bad thing. I mostly hung out with my family for father's day, and now I'm at my grandparents' place, house and dog sitting for the week while they're on vacation. This is my first night here. They have a cute place and an adorable dog named Mabel. They also have a cat, whose name I cannot remember to save my life. She is a cute little cat and I would love to pet her and let her sit on my lap, but I am terribly allergic to cats, so ever since I got here earlier tonight, my entire face has been leaking...runny nose, watery eyes, sneezes, the whole thing. And it's about to get worse because I'm using their computer and the cat apparently likes to curl up for naps right on the keyboard (the one I'm currently typing on) when nobody's using the desk. It's going to be bad. I probably should have told them about this allergy, which gets worse every year of my life, so they could have my sister or one of my cousins watch the house instead of me. But that would mean giving up an entire week of living alone. Seven days of quiet, total control over what's on tv--if it's on at all. Seven days of not feeling obligated to talk to people anytime I'm home. Seven days of pretending I have my own lovely little place. No cat allergies are bad enough to forfeit all that!

I went out with my friends Christine and Emily last night and had lots of fun. Took some funny pictures, which I planned to post here tonight, but as I said, I'm using my grandparents' computer right now and of course my pictures are on my computer at home. So that blog update will have to wait til tomorrow.

Ok, on a totally different note, I have a new plan for my time here and my plans for the near future. I've decided to move to England, for at least a year. It's something I planned to do ages ago while in college, but never did for a number of reasons. You know how sometimes it becomes easier to forget about dreams, or worse yet, to convince yourself that your dreams have changed, in the name of practicality or..."responsibility"? It's certainly something I'm guilty of, and of course one of my hopes this summer is to try to remember what my real dreams are and then to pursue them. Well, I still very much want to live abroad, especially in England. I want this for pure experience, but also because I'm not thrilled with our own country these days and it sure would be nice to get out of this ethnocentric cesspool for a little while and have a life elsewhere. And if there was ever a time in my life when I could do this, it's now. Or, in about six months, after I've worked out some logistics and saved some money. I wonder if I can transfer to a starbucks over there..!?!

So there it is: my plan for at least the next year to year-and-a-half of my life. It means hanging out here in Florida a few months longer than expected, but I guess it's a trade off. Just after the new year, I'm off to England. Of course, I'd never be able to afford London, so I'm looking into some mid-sized cities, like Bristol or Leeds or Manchester. I'm super excited about this and am determined to make it happen--and I know I can.

Oooh, and maybe while I'm in England, I can follow JK Rowling around to make sure she doesn't get hit by a bus or fall down some elevator shaft or encounter some other horrible tragedy that would prevent her from finishing book 7. I mean, really, are they keeping her safe over there? Do they know that she is perhaps the most important person right now and that a whole bunch of us would be super annoyed if something happened and we didn't get the Harry Potter conclusion? Can't they just put her under house arrest or something until she's finished writing? (I don't really know who I'm referring to with "they." Everyone in the UK? Her publisher? The kids she keeps having which are surely sucking up valuable writing time?)

Now, however, I must scrub my hands and hope to avoid a ridiculously bad allergy attack from cat germs on this keyboard. Then, I need to walk Murphy and Mabel. And then I'm going to start reading a new book. Well, new for me. It's hardly new though. Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy. When I was in graduate school, I read and wrote a brief paper about Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and loved it. It's such an amazing novel. The Stonehenge scene at the end is honestly one of the most beautifully written scenes in literature. In my humble opinion, of course. I remember that the first time I read it, the details of the setting, the honesty, perspective, and character nuances in the scene actually made me gasp out loud. So anyway, I've always meant to read some of Hardy's other novels and hadn't gotten around to it before now.

By the way, that Sarah Waters novel I bought a few weeks back was awesome. It might be her best yet, in terms of style and skill.

I hate finishing a really good book because then I'm sad that it's over, that I can't be in that world anymore. I've always thought it's terribly unfair that we can't read some books for the first time again.