Monday, April 23, 2007

spring break, abbreviated, and more

Okay. I don't think I'm going to write so much about my travels for a couple reasons. Reason numero un: this week is kind of nuts, as the Reid Hall semester ends in two weeks and I, like the dedicated student I am, didn't really work during vacation. Reason numero dos: mes parents sont à Paris cette semaine, and I'll be busy squiring them around. (Don't worry, though; althought this means I won't be writing about les vacances, it doesn't mean I won't be blogging at all. Upwards and onwards, I say!) Reason numero tre: I just can't. Sorry.

(You should all be impressed that I got all three languages - French, Spanish, and Italian - in there with the numbers. I am a linguist like whoa.)

Also, I'm kind of self-conscious about my writing style right now; my dad read my blog recently for the first time in a while (read: since the last time I reminded him to read it), and commented on how "stilted" my writing had become. I've re-read some of the post from the past couple weeks, and I think I must disagree, although I'm totally open to your opinions, dear readers. I don't think I've become stilted; rather, I think I've been writing less stream-of-consciously and more essay-ly. I pondered this on my last train (from Florence to Rome, absolutely beautiful), and realized something horrible: I don't have my own writing style! I mean, I guess the stream of consciousness thing is about as me as you can get, but I unconsciously chameleon into whatever author I'm reading at the moment. For the past couple weeks, as I've been reading Adam, I've been essaying, as he does, using lots of semi-colons (although I'm kind of obsessed with semi-colons anyway, and have been using them excessively for years) and parenthetical asides (see above). When I read all my old L.M. Montgomery books, my writing drifts into language like, "she gathered the dear, blossomy, filmy things to her breast with rapture," and when I'm in the middle of a Terry Pratchett novel I have an incorrigible urge to irreverently footnote. I can't help it. It's horrible. Well, no, it's interesting, actually, but I wish I was a writer enough to find my own style!

Maybe I'll write my next post entirely in haiku.

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