Signs of the Changing Times

Okay, lame title, I know. Everything's always changing, the river is always in flux, etc, etc, thank you, Heraclitus, we got the point.

But you know how all you hear about anymore is economic hardship and fears about the future? Two small things are bringing it home for me (as if I wasn't already having dreams about a Dark Angel/Jeremiah future).

1. My mother used to buy several gallons of milk at once. Two with different milk fat quantities, and a spare one for when we run out. (An instinct left over from the days when all six of us kids lived in the house and from when my brother could finish one gallon in two days by himself.) Now, however, because milk is $5 a gallon, she's buying them as we drink them. So we only have one gallon of milk in the house at once, and I'm feeling guilty if I have one of my homemade lattes AND a bowl of cereal in one day.

2. I'd heard that the govt mint was putting more nickel, less silver into coins. It's true!! Working as I have been in retail for the past three years, I've watched prices go up, sales go down, and cosmetics get a hell of a lot more expensive. :( But yesterday, I opened a roll of those new state quarters (is that state quarter thing just an attempt to distract us from the lesser value of the money?) and started when I heard the coins fall into the drawer. I could have sworn they were FAKE bc of the sound they made. Not that heavy clunk but rather the light clink of aluminum.

Huh. So yeah. I'm thinking of adding Alas, Babylon to my library so I know what to do when nuclear bombs hit all the important cities. Not a good thought, when you live outside Atlanta. Is it lame if I admit it's one of the reasons that I want to go to grad school in Wisconsin or Michigan?

Mollymollymolly!

(to continue the theme of the last post)

Been working my way through D. H. Lawrence (whom I can't decided whether to call "mad" or "genius"). I decided that this hiatus in my schooling was a good time to catch up on that long list I've been keeping mentally of books that I really must read. I've been intending to read Women in Love since I wrote a paper on Lady Chatterly's Lover for my senior year of high school. One of the few things I remember about the author was that he was very close to his mother and suspected (except a hell of a lot stronger word for it) to be latently homosexual. I think this following passage can lay all doubts aside:

The two male characters are Birkin and Gerald. Gerald's sister just drowned in the lake during a party, and they're dredging the lake to find her body.

"But leave this, won't you? You force yourself into horrors, and put a mill-stone of beastly memories round your neck. Come away now." [said Birkin]

"A millstone of beastly memories!" Gerald repeated. Then he put his hand again affectionately on Birkin's shoulder. "God, you've got such a telling way of putting things, Rupert, you have."

Birkin's heart sank. He was irritated and weary of having a telling way of putting things.

"Won't you leave it? Come over to my place" -- he urged as one urges a drunken man.

"No," said Gerald coaxingly, his arm across the other man's shoulder. "Thanks very much, Rupert -- I shall be glad to come to-morrow, if that'll do. You understand, don't you? I want to see this job through. But I'll come to-morrow, right enough. Oh, I'd rather come and have a chat with you than--[you know that he's about to say, "visit Gudrun, my lady love" cause the whole book is about these two couples]--than do anything else, I verily believe. Yes, I would. You mean a lot to me, Rupert, more than you know."

"What do I mean, more than I know?" asked Birkin irritably. He was acutely aware of Gerald's hand on his shoulder. And he did not want this altercation. He wanted the other man to come out of the ugly misery.

"I'll tell you another time," said Gerald coaxingly. [why does Gerald keep speaking "coaxingly"?]

"Come along with me now -- I want you to come," said Birkin.

There was a pause, intense and real. Birking wondered why his own heart beat so heavily. Then Gerald's fingers gripped hard and communicative into Birkin's shoulder, as he said:

"No, I'll see this job through, Rupert. Thank you -- I know what you mean. We're all right, you know, you and me."

"I may be all right, but I'm sure you're not, mucking about here," said Birkin. And he went away.

I tried to interject as little as possible (and that's difficult, let me tell you. I even interject in my own writing!), and you STILL get the point!! This is also the first time in the novel that Gerald calls Birkin by his first name. And they previously had some interesting moments but nothing so hot and heavy. Ah, I wonder what will happen "to-morrow"!!