I found the quote

I was looking for last night before the party got under way. B is reading Cat's Cradle and read the line about writing being a miracle drug, and I recalled a line from Pale Fire that is also very writerly, but I couldn't find it. (Incidentally, I thought it was on the left hand side and at the end of a note, but it's in the middle of one and on the right!) Anyway:

"I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all" (207).

I also booked a flight to Scotland yesterday. !! How cool is that? I'm very excited.

Today I'm going to go print out a copy of my thesis draft to take with me tomorrow, when I'm meeting with my adviser (eek!). I will spend the evening making notes to myself on that.

It's so scary, all this. Writing is never easy, not even when you're writing for yourself, in your journal or wherever, not even when it's quote/unquote meaningless. Does that mean that we stop putting so much effort into _every_single_word_? Hell no.

I just realized that by beginning each entry in the title line I might possibly be challenging the whole 'the title isn't part of the text, it names the text' thing. But if we delve into this further, go up another level, we see that "making (non)sense" is the title above all entries within the blog, so there is still a title that is not part of the text. Perhaps I should challenge this with my next entry (to be continued...). If we want to really flip things around, though, I could repeat the title (for lack of another word) at the end of the entry. But that goes against the order of reading in terms of titles - we read from the beginning to the end, not the other way around. (Except for all you sneakies who read the last page of a novel first, which is just weird.) And by bookending the text in such a way, are we merely serving to perpetuate the illusion of the text as an enclosed space? Hm...

So I cooked for the party last night. To be more accurate, I should say I 'baked' and 'prepared food.' Some friends of mine are vegan, so I set myself the challenge of giving them some options, especially because I thought my roommate was going to prepare corned beef and cabbage or some such meaty monstrosity (which I'm sure would have been lovely, and I definitely would have tried it at the very least), and I think at our housewarming party the only vegan options were chips and salsa. No, I made guac too. (My roommate made stuffed mushrooms and gingerbread cupcakes - both with creamcheese among other things - and sausage/cheese muffin things.) Anyway, hooray for the internet. I made Hummus, Artichoke and Red Pepper Dip, Moroccan Carrot Hummus (which was quite interesting; a little spicier than I expected, but very good), and Irish Beer Bread (which was a huge hit). I added about a tablespoon and a half or so of olive oil to the hummus because it tasted a little too lemony to me. I also had about a cup of leftover chickpeas, so I mashed them up with a little roasted red pepper and some olive oil, a little sea salt, and ate that for my snack-while-cooking. Everything was really easy to make. Not at all Irish, of course, but tasty. We have a ton of leftovers. More for me!

Off to the computer lab with free printing. Do I make my thesis more about the act of writing? I've been thinking about that from the beginning, and now that I'm reading Of Grammatology, but I've been thinking about it even more since I found the quote.