in our moment of makeover

and maybe makeovers of many kinds.

i haven't updated because i honestly don't feel like i have much to say. and though that hasn't changed, perhaps it'll be a sort of welcome back to the internet for you.

so, i'm taking a graduate-level comparative lit class ("comparison and cultural difference") and it makes me nervous. did you know that the discipline is in crisis, jessica? like your painting! well, probably not in the same way. or maybe yes. comparative literature has absorbed so many things from so many other disciplines that right now it's in a sort of identity crisis. what are we supposed to compare and how? how many languages should we know and how well should we know them? the market value of literature, do we value theory over the literary, can we choose what we encompass. and did you know that the field of areas studies was borne out of the cold war and the desire to know the enemy, etc. etc.?

i've been composing poems in my head before i go to sleep and then forgetting them by the time i wake up.

i don't know. i feel like if i were to make love to someone right now i would cry.

to end: hovering is harder than flying.

Like people in bear costumes

I was taking out the trash, and there was some hawk-like bird--I say 'hawk-like' because it was bigger and had a hard, curled beak--killing a pigeon. At first I thought they were mating, but it seemed to go on too long compared to other bird matings I've witnessed. Can hawks mate with pigeons anyway? The 'hawk' was holding this pigeon down with its talons, and the pigeon was fluttering its wings as much as it could. I thought I should stop things, considered throwing a rock. What kind of imposition would that be? Also, would the hawk attack me. It made me think of the movie Dan and I saw the other day, Grizzly Man. The Grizzly Man preys for rain so the bears in Alaska can eat. Then the bears eat him (and his girlfriend).

Took the trash to the dumpster, and when I came back the pigeon was dead. The 'hawk' was plucking feathers from its head. There were feathers everywhere.

There are also dead locusts--not their shells, but whole bodies--upturned, sometimes being eaten by ants. I was collecting them, at first, because they seemed special: remains intact. Then I realized how many there were, and today I found one dying. I think they die when they get stuck on their backs, a possibility I had considered but dismissed because cockroaches can flip themselves over. Though turtles can't...

Anyway, I turned the locust right, and it wasn't there on the walk home, so I'm hoping it survived. I saved one of thing, at least.


Edit:
Wait, found this,
"A locust placed upside down on a flat surface uses a predictable sequence of leg movements to right itself. To analyse this behaviour, we made use of a naturally occurring state of quiescence (thanatosis) to position locusts in a standardised upside-down position from which they spontaneously right themselves."

So I'm not sure what's going on.
Found at, http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/204/4/637