Bees, Dragonflies, and Abrupt Endings

My Chinese course has come to a most interesting conclusion. At first I was certain it would last three weeks, then was certain that it would last four weeks, and under that impression skipped this past Tuesday and Wednesday. The reasons for said skipping are diverse, and they seemed sufficient at the time, but now look a trifle silly. This probably sounds very irritating, but the thing is that I felt sickish whenever I was stressed, and when I relaxed it went away, so it was greatly preferable to relax. The other thing is that my mind is quite stuffed with fresh information, and I thought it best to let it settle before endeavouring to cram in more.

So on Tuesday I watched the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice and the Disney film The Swan Princess (less irritating than most of its famous brethren, but quite "meh"), and generally did an excellent job of taking it easy. By the way, I am now quite in awe of the BBC Pride and Prejudice. The opening scene could, I think, very easily have been filmed from life if cameras existed back in Jane Austen's day. Its pacing and detail is also excellent; you can really sink into the story and setting and characters. Evidently I haven't appreciated it enough in the past.

On Wednesday I devoted most of the day to writing and finishing my lousy-story-set-in-New-York. It's still lousy, but it was incredibly nice to write it. This time I didn't passively see the events and record them so much as plan out the events and then see them in my mind's eye as I wrote. It also feels so good to put to use my past knowledge (e.g. school Spanish) and experiences, and let them naturally fill out the bones of the story. Then it was fascinating to think out the past lives, personalities, etc., of the characters, carefully fiddling away at them so that they are as real as possible, and to know more about them than I put in the story. Apparently my imagination has also become far better, because I could see everything in great detail, especially the characters. Most of these delights of the scribbling art are probably clichéd, but in any case they kept me busy and happy for over twenty hours in all. (Word count: ca. 12,800.)

On Thursday I overcame my fear of being looked at askance for my delinquency, and of being utterly at sea in a class that had advanced far beyond my knowledge, and of displaying my ignorance, and went to Chinese again. I tried surprisingly successfully to bear any of the natural consequences of my absence bravely and with a good sense of proportion and humour. I arrived early and began catching up with the last chapter. Then, when my classmate M. had come as well, I asked rhetorically, and with a humour that was of course rueful, "Did I miss much?". She informed me that the course would be ending tomorrow (i.e. today), and that we would be having an exam then. !!!

Fortunately I wasn't taking the course expecting to be given a graded certificate (I'd have had to do the homework in that case, which would have been so much more stressful), so I bore this news with near-perfect equanimity. Last night I thought about studying, but upon consulting the state of my mind found it signally unreceptive to new information.

I woke up this morning not in the best of spirits, thanks to my dream. It was set at first in an underground research facility. The scientists (I was an innocent bystander!) annihilated a great quantity of bees as part of their research. Not long afterward an enormous swarm of bees came to avenge their fallen kin, and darkened the sky as they crept in through all the orifices of the building. Some of us crawled into airtight rooms, or rooms that were nearly airtight but might still admit bees, but I didn't want to be suffocated and preferred to die out in an open space, which preference was granted. At around this point, I woke up and realized (not a dream) that in the tension I was ripping open my blanket cover, or whatever it's called.

Then I went back to sleep and the scene changed to our old home in Victoria, in lifelike detail. The skies were grey, almost as heavily as during snowfall, and the bees attacked again, once again fatally. This being a dream, I was given another life, and found myself in my old room. Through the firs I saw a steady confluence of wild geese and other birds flying north (the east, in real life) in a black line. They were pursued by a massive speckled torrent of black dragonflies, which funnelled down to the ground like a webbed tornado, and then poured through our house. On my skin I saw the bumps that their biting apparatuses left behind, and at length was stretched out, unconscious, on my bed. Much to my surprise, I woke up after a while, quite alive. I went out to the living room and told my parents that we had to flee to the north, like the birds, at once. My parents admitted that the insects had been behaving oddly lately, but didn't think it was so urgent. After much vehement insistence, they agreed to evacuate anyway, and so did the relatives and friends who had happened to visit us then. I hastily packed up crucial things to take along, but couldn't think properly, so stuffed pens and random items of clothing and two pewter saucers into a cardboard box, and then went down to put everything in the car. It was even more urgent as I saw a (this time greatly diminished) flock of birds fleeing northward again, pursued by the vanguard of a fresh host of dragonflies, whose wings were fortunately battered by the great raindrops that had begun to fall. Downstairs I made sure that everyone else was coming (which is good, because in dangerous dream-situations I tend to forget about the others, who then presumably die off-stage), and then went to the car. My parents, who were convinced now, had driven the car out of the garage onto the driveway. I was going to get in the back of the car, where everybody else had found a place, but there wasn't enough room, so I had to run to the other side. The car rolled forward out of the gate before I could, and I ran after, not knowing if the car would stop long enough for me to enter . . . And then I woke up.

In this catastrophic state of mind, I was not precisely prepared for an exam, but cheered up fairly quickly. (The bedlinen badly needs mending, though.) Anyway, I learned at least three new characters, went to the TU campus and wrote the test, and suspect that I received 60-70% on it. Of course test and essay marks (like dreams!) tend to go by contraries, so that what you think you deserve is rarely what you end up receiving. (Opapa liked to tell an anecdote where a couple of professors were given the same German(?) essay to mark, and gave it everything from a 5 to a 1.) It was mercifully brief, and then I bade everyone goodbye and good luck, emerged out into the sunshine, and, in an increasingly cheerful mood, walked home at a leisurely pace by the long Siegessäule route. Hopefully I wasn't too much of an enfant terrible in the Chinese class. If I am ever a delight to teach, it is certainly not due to any industriousness.

For the rest of the day I've been playing the piano, eating, conversing with the siblings, going over my lousy story with J., singing a great and varied repertoire in my best (or possibly worst) mock-operatic voice, watching an episode of The Avengers, and trying to think What To Do Next. So far, What To Do Next includes eating less; when one is swiftly walking at least fifty minutes every weekday one can consume pretty much whatever one likes, and when one isn't it is evidently incumbent upon one to exercise moderation. Anyway, I've still become slenderer, which is a very nice surprise. I look in the mirror and suddenly I have a neck.