Let's get the bad news out of the way, first.
The last 24 hours have seen a troubling return of my mood swings. Ever since I finished my first paper ever with supreme confidence, which still holds, I have been feeling a significant social anxiety. So many new friends who actually like my company and who don't care what I do or how I do it...and I become horribly flustered, apologetic, soul-bearing, calling Mom and annoying her when things get hairy, sweating buckets over a tiny stove in someone else's apartment...but the thing is, now I know, and now I can do something constructive. My mind is unable to conceive of the idea that other people see me differently from how I see myself, and I am convinced that since I am never satisfied and always want to prove things to myself, I have to prove things to others. Peter hammered in the spike when he called it "execessive empathy."
I think I need counseling. Not extensively, but enough to help me know for sure that other people do not hold me to the demanding standards I hold myself to. Writing about it and admitting it is the first step.
But last night's pot luck where I made an imitation tomato-vodka sauce bow ties was a load of fun, as was orientation today when I met a lot of new people, actually got a girl's phone number (if for no other reason then to prove I could handle myself), and joined the Pub...and decided to eliminate beer from my diet. I've had four in two days and I think that's helped me become mentally out of sorts.
But what I was thinking about today, emerging from a shroudy mist of Bela Lugosi playing God (enough to turn one agnostic) and imagining what the world would be like if it was only the U. of Chicago with its annoying ombudspeople, and using Foucault's literary theories to get to the heart of Sigmund Freud (a BIG perhaps), is Amelia.
Four Amelias who have become inertwined in my soul.
Amelia Johnson, who will finally be born only to die in March 2010, almost three years after I dreamed her up after a chat with Stephen Christy on the streets of Santa Monica, and back then she was called Emily, but to my great publisher's mind An Elegy for Emily Johnson sounded too much like The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Can I argue with the man who's done so much for me, along with Dave "Imagist Supreme" Valeza?
Amelia Pace-Borah, the lovely, good-hearted MAPHer from Austin, Texas with pixie blonde hair, a really cool fiance, two dogs, and a basement apartment. Not a bad symbol for the sort of person I hope to set up housekeeping with someday.
Amelia Last Name Unknown, Peter's friend in the city, whom I know only by proxy, but whose name is too striking and coincidental for me to ignore.
And Amelia Sedley. I finally got my copy of Vanity Fair, 2008 Oxford Edition, for Elaine Hadley's class, and tomorrow I begin re-reading (Nabokov would approve) my third-favorite novel of all time. And as I mused over my happiness it struck me that when I first read it during the Conference Summer, William Dobbin had stood out for me, the poor, earnest, heart-the-size-of-a-watermelon-and-pure-gold (Lawrence S. Ritter/Jimmy Austin) soldier who makes good, but who cannot get over his love for his dead best friend George Osborne's wife...even though he knew Amelia Sedley was far too good for George and, by the end, not good enough for him. But as a figure of hopeless devotion, I felt I understood Dobbin more than any other character...and maybe I was reaching back to that when I chose the name Amelia for my figure, a woman more worthy of lifelong near-worship.
Today at the Smart Museum our tour ended with a series of artworks by a seventy-something black man who traveled the world and came to draw multi-colored landscapes which combined the real and the way he thought the real felt, like taking a picture with your subconscious holding the camera.
The Amelias are like that for me.
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