Saturday Night Life

I am doing nothing exciting tonight, unless you consider dyeing my hair and painting my toenails to be a scintillating proposition. I did something I'm not particularly proud of today. I bought dollhouse furniture. A sofa and a chair and a baby in a pink crotcheted dress and a lion cub, to be exact. I went with Lisa Marie to A.C. Moore and they have an entire section devoted to dollhouse furniture. LM said that we should do a stop motion film for You Tube using the dolls. Brilliant. I already have a narrative for the dollhouse family in my head. The dad is a closeted gay man (come on, he wears a tight flowered shirt and tie and pants that appear painted on) and the Mom, consequently, is a drunk who often wakes up on the kitchen floor with her head resting on a pat of butter. The daughter tries to ignore it by playing piano all day and torturing the baby. I don't know how the baby will factor in, though I suggested to LM that the baby could be a hermaphrodite who the parents are trying to force to be a girl.

What I should be doing right now is finishing the rest of As I Lay Dying for my Monday night class, but it is a frustrating book to plow through, particularly b/c there are about 15 central narrators named Tull and Vern and Cash and no one's voice is very distinct and you never really know what the fuck is going on, just that they are very poor but also philosophical, even the four-year old (Cardaman?). And also because Faulkner writes like this:

Ma come to the house and had the face of an angel and I thought about the fish and the horses and I said in my head, Ma is a horse too maybe a Palomino and then the dog barked and daddy shot off his rifle into the white sky, killing a broken-winged peasant or so I imagined as the sun streamed down onto my head sending stars and stars and stars around my burning eyes. What you doing, Jude? said Julian and he disappeared into the lake like something from hell or heaven, I don't know which. But that was long ago and I might have dreamt it all. Where did I leave them fishes?

I wrote a poem once that sounded a lot like Faulkner. It was meant to be tongue in cheek but I won this poetry prize for it accidentally (she said, modestly). I don't know what happened to that poem, otherwise, I would retype it here for your benefit, so you could wonder why I chose to use dialect.

If you are not highly focused and if you are not trying to bat a myriad of cats off your bed while reading Faulkner, you could easily get confused and frustrated and throw the book across the room.