licking the pages of Vogue

Grad school is fast approaching, and I will be moving to Virginia in six months. (Grad school is the University of Virginia. A foregone conclusion since the moment I was there in October, and yet a difficult decision to make.) While I'm there, I will be trying to live on a grad student's stipend. Now, I know that I'm very, very lucky to not have to pay to go to grad school, but a grad student's stipend is not exactly a whole bunch of money. As my father put it when he worked me out a sample budget, it's fine and it all works, I just can't eat. I could drink. Water. But not eat.

Which means that I need to cut my grocery bills by about $4.50 every month, by not purchasing Vogue. Not only is it a pretty useless expenditure (it usually doesn't even fit on the book rack on the elliptical!) but it fills me with lust for things I can't afford, like a little black dress by some British designer with an Arabic name, which would probably set me back around $1000 if he would even deign to sell it in Ohio. Sadly, I will probably never own this dress, as a) Virginia is no chicer than Cleveland, and b) asking one's parents, grandparents, boyfriend, boyfriend's family, and assorted other acquaintances to all chip in to buy you a dress is uncouth.
However. I know just from looking at this picture of this dress on a six foot one model who probably weighs less than I do that this dress would be fantastic on me. It would make me look like sex on legs, in a demure Audrey Hepburn sort of way. The neckline shows off the collarbones but no cleavage. The bodice is fitted but not too tight. The skirt is the perfect length and has the perfect amount of volume. It is, in short, the little black dress that every girl should have, and I can't have it because I'm not married to some weathly old fart or born into money.

Life is so unfair sometimes. It'd be more unfair, I suppose, if I didn't have friends who are artists with a sewing machine....

On a completely different note, here are two of my favorite literary quotations ever. Criteria: must be from a published novel/play/poem/whatever, and generally ring through my head at everyday moments.

"The twenty-five years I had lived since then tapered to a palpitating point, then vanished." Nabokov, Lolita

You might as well put the entirety of the novel down as quotable, really; I don't think Nabokov wrote an awkward sounding sentence in his life. But this particular sentence echoes through my head on a weekly basis, mostly because I like the way it sounds and I love the physics of it, of time drawing itself into a point and then disappearing. It resonates to the "tesseract" of L'Engle and the drawings in A Brief History of Time.

On another note, I don't think I've ever loved anything or anyone quite as much as I love an unreliable narrator.

"stange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? remember'st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Knew none before us, self-begot, self-raise'd,
By our own quick'ning power"
Milton, Paradise Lost

The thing I love second most in the entire universe is a good epic battle between good and evil, bonus points for angels and demons, double bonus for Satan. I've made it all the way through Paradise Lost; even with my love of stuffy epic poetry I can't bring myself to do it again. But from what I remember Lucifer emerges as somewhat of a sympathetic character, akin to Kevin Smith's angels shouting about "where was His infinite fucking mercy THEN?" The part about this speech that I really, truly love, aside from its gorgeous cadences, is that Lucifer is the very first evolutionist.

and here are some more of my favorite words/phrases:

enrobed, conceit, symmetrical, "forever and forever," caramel (pronounced "care-ah-mel"), pomegranate, forbidden, silken, strut, cryptonomicon, pedantic, wanking, pompous, word-hoard, valediction, bubble, invagination, thirteen, dignity, grey-spelled-g-r-e-y, gnocchi, burnt.