Last week, the lovely Academic, Hopeful tagged me in a meme-type post about folders and photos.  An easy diversion, a good way to kick-start the blog again.  Pick the 10th photo of your first folder of photos and post it.  So here’s Greece, the summer I graduated from high school.  My toes in the lower right-hand corner; a Vodaphone ferry taking off from the port at Parikia on Paros.  I was sunbathing after a breakfast of yogurt, honey, and fresh fruit. I was reading either The Green Hills of Africa or Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I was recovering from a nasty cold, wearing a new candy-striped bikini I’d bought in town the day before.  Look at that sky.  That sea. It was the mildest water I’ve ever felt.  It’s easy to fall into this photograph now, in the grey and gloom of an Oxford November.  I wouldn’t want to be seventeen again, abroad on my own for the first time.  Everything felt so intense–the colours, the tastes, everything I did, smelled, felt.  The sunburn and the cool relief of an evening wind.  I was over-saturated in experience.  Still, it was beautiful, and still, on a night like this, only half-past-four and the darkness settling in,  I think I could use a little nap in the sunshine.

Since we’re talking of sunshine, I’m tagging my mom, who writes this beautiful blog from her warm home in California…

1. What’s your current obsession? I have far too many.  Today’s list includes: money; my future career; whether or not I can be bothered to go for a run; the abrupt end of my MA.  How I can fund a seven-week hike around the southern tip of England.  Africa and the possibility of a trip there.  Travel in general.
2. What’s you favorite color and why? Green.  I no longer remember why, but I do remember picking it when we learned about primary colours in the first grade.  Blue?  Red?  Yellow?  No.  I like Green. I should have known right then that I was destined to make things more difficult for myself than necessary.
3. What are you wearing today? Dark jeans, brown jumper with elbow patches.  No socks or shoes.  My classic Saturday outfit.
4. Why is today special? For its un-specialness.  The Man and I get to flop around the house drinking tea and spending impromptu moments snuggling.  It’s been too long since we had one of these days.
5. What would you like to learn to do? Control my anxiety.  Also: make my own dresses, dance the tango, and mix cocktails more complicated than a gin and tonic.
6. What was the last thing that inspired you? A talk by two writers, one of whom described her life when she was working on her first book as impoverished and antisocial, the other of whom pointed out that jealousy is a waste of energy.  I’ve been taking both of these things to heart ever since.
7. What’s the last thing you bought? Some apple juice from the pub yesterday.  The last non-edible or non-disposable thing I bought was several weeks ago–a book from Blackwell’s used section on representations of Oxford.
8. What are you listening to right now? Music and wind.  Music: mostly Stornoway.  Wind: mostly stressful.
9. What’s your most challenging goal right now? Writing The Book by September and staying sane doing it.
10. What’s the last thing you read? I’ve been especially enjoying Sharon Olds’ poetry of late.
11. If you could have a house totally paid for, fully furnished anywhere in the world, where would you like it to be? Nestled in green hills.  Big garden–with rose bushes.  Within walking distance to the pub and a body of water.  Cycle distance to the train station would be nice, too.  Alternatively, I think I could quite happily reside in the center of a not-t00-big city as long as we could have a garden and/or a deck or terrace of some kind.
12. What would you like to have in your hands right now? An advance cheque for my first book.  However great or small.
13. What would you like to get rid of? Debt and guilt.
14. If you could go anywhere in the world for the next hour, where would you go? For a massage.
15. What super power would you like to possess? I toyed with the idea of saying telekinesis because of the prospect of being able to make my cup of tea come to me; but actually I think I’d quite like to be able to speak and understand all languages.  If nothing else, think how employable I’d be…
16. What’s your favorite piece of clothing in your own closet? The garment generally known as my “anti-dust bunny coat”–sometimes described as something an Eastern European elf might wear, a glorious embroidered coat from Anthropologie.  When I wear it, I am not, according to my family, allowed to express any self-doubt or debilitating anxiety.  Everyone should have one of these, because, believe it or not, it works like a charm.
17. What’s your dream job? Writer of things for which I am regularly paid.  Also, while we’re at it, can I have a column in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine?  Thanks.
18. If you had an unexpected $1000, what would you spend it on? Tickets to a far-away place.
19. What do you find annoying? People who walk too slowly down the street.  Petty rules and regulations (e.g.: no hot food on the Oxford Tube.  One of these days I’m bringing the stinkiest brie I can find on board to prove the ridiculousness of this rule).  Astronomical visa renewal fees.
20. Describe your personal style. Confused but well-meaning.  I secretly want to dress like I’m living in 1940s rural England, and I’m attracted to flowery, vintage-y things (especially paired with wellies), but can most often be seen wearing jeans and a blazer.  Or a dress and a blazer.  I have an unhealthy love of blazers.
21. What fashion show would you want tickets to? My knowledge of high fashion is sad at best, but I’ve always had a penchant for Marc Jacobs.
22. Whose closet would you want to raid? Someone with expensive but unusual taste.  Including lots of well-preserved vintage pieces.  In my size, obviously.  Meaning she has to have very small feet.  Know anyone who fits that description and wants to donate their collection to a starving artist?
23. What are you most proud of? The things that I’ve done, in spite of circumstance or ease, because they make me happy; sticking with writing and moving abroad come to mind.
24. The beautiful bloggers I’d like to know about are: Anyone and everyone who is reading this…

→ Now the rules of this tag:

1. Respond and rework: answer the questions on your blog, replace one question you dislike with a question of your own invention.

2. Tag 7 other people you would love to learn more about. (see no. 24)

Badaude called this to my attention. She wants me to open a book–the nearest book to me, which in my house means that no matter where I am I never have to anything more than stretch my arm out–and count five sentences down. Then write down the next three sentences that appear. Lying in bed on a Saturday afternoon (we’re slightly fuzzy-headed and it’s overcast outside), I pick up George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books from the chair-that-serves-as-as-a-night-table/book-receptacle and read:

“How does lovemaking in Basque or Russian differ from that in Flemish or Korean? What privileges or inhibitions arise between lovers with different first languages? Is coitus also, perhaps fundamentally, translation?”

In my second year of university I took a course on evolutionary biology and learned that memes are sort of like the cultural conduit for evolution: ideas transmitted, if you will. We read a lot of things by a woman called Susan Blackmore, but I was mostly too tired and student-y to retain any of the information. Then I went to a taping of BBC Radio 4’s new show, The Museum of Curiosity. And they started talking about memes. And Susan Blackmore. Go figure (and how perfectly beautifully appropriate). Have a listen to the first show, which aired on Wednesday and is brilliant (I’m biased, as some of you know, since I get to sleep with live with love with one of the researchers but I also genuinely appreciate the endeavor to make people laugh and think at the same time), and you’ll hear about memes. I don’t pretend to understand them, but I know that somehow, there’s something poetic about the way they keep fluttering in and out of my consciousness.

To be fair, I haven’t read the George Steiner book yet. I bought it on Thursday on a particularly expensive trip to Blackwell’s, where I perused each floor with great attention and had to send my lovely museum researcher a message that simply said: “I think I have a book buying problem.” Then I had to cycle back home with very heavy books and a bottle of prosecco in my basket, and it was wonderful. But I’d read a review of it on The Guardian’s website and was struck by how sexy the excerpts was: and not just overtly sexy, though as much of the book, or a good part of it, is about Steiner’s sexual exploits, they were that. Sexy to someone who loves words, because of the beauty and the eloquence and the way each sentence seemed to fit into the next.

So I haven’t yet read it–but I like that in a post about words and ideas, we can discover the suggestion that, perhaps, sometimes it is the physical interaction that translates (and transcends) all else.

(so to whom should I pass this project on to? Cynthia might like it, as an exercise in words and web-bonding; and George, I suspect, would weave something full of wit and wile…)