Aunty Christ and the dark winter

I’ve read a fair amount of Virginia Woolf, though I don’t know much about her, other than the stuff that everyone over age 13 or a 70 IQ knows: rocks, river. I saw that movie with Nicole Kidman and the prosthetic nose, so that presumably covers any gaps in my education in that area.

Anyway, lately—the last few weeks or so—I imagine myself to be kind of a kindred spirit to good ol’ Mizz Woolf. Except not famous. And not brilliant. And not a great writer. Just in the rocks, river way, I guess, or the quickly spiraling downhill (and sometimes popping surprisingly uphill for a sec) way. I guess what I’m saying is that I fear I’m going crazy, or perhaps just rapidly downward-spiraling, though to put it in those terms certainly makes whatever this is seem far less glamorous than to say that I’m entering my Virginia Woolf period. Or my Sylvia Plath period. It’s kind of like when, as a 15-year-old girl, you’re moping about not having ever gone on a date, and your dad tells you that Cindy Crawford didn’t date until she was nigh on 20 years old, and that’s supposed to make you feel better for some reason. Of course, that was back in Colonial times, when I was young, and Dad was wearing britches and a leather apron and shoeing a horse. To compare a young girl now to Cindy Crawford would I’m sure evoke either blank stares or tears. I wonder what the modern-day equivalent would be: “Don’t worry, sweetie. Mischa Barton didn’t lose her virginity until she was nine.” And they’d be wearing vagina-revealing skirts instead of whale-bone corsets and panniers, as was the fashion in my times.

Oh, to be young again.

So anyway, back to my problems. Yeah, I dunno. I’m sure I’ll get over this, whatever it is—malaise, melancholia, heartsickness, homesickness—long before I need to start collecting stones to put in my pockets.