Happy March! Did you enjoy the nebulous half-existing February 29th yesterday? I wonder what children born yesterday will do about their birthdays. I guess they would celebrate their birthday on March 1st for 3/4 years? How very lucky we are to have easy birthdays. I think the luckiest birthdays are twins who are born one before midnight and one after, so they don’t have to share a birthday party. But regardless, we had the good fortune to be born six months and one week apart on the calendar. No ‘presents for both of you’ here. Except for my drawings to you, which I stare at probably more than you, like most artists.
This week has gone fairly uneventfully for me. Nothing but writing and schoolwork. I haven’t had much time to draw, and when I do, I’m too tired. I suppose you must be doing similarly in high school, which is more brutal than college. It’s a miracle anybody does anything else in high school, but perhaps I was just too used to homeschool when I tried. I have missed writing especially lately. There is nothing that makes you feel quite so starved without starving like making nothing at all for awhile. The small solution I’ve neglected was to write short narrative poetry, which is fun because the medium is very like a puzzle, and takes far less time than stories. Perhaps if you have ever suffered similarly, you could try something like that. But I know you’re in rowing — and though Mom always made you do classes you didn’t like, perhaps a productive hobby like that is fulfilling that part of your brain? It keeps you healthy, at least. Heaven knows I need exercise, perhaps Mom should’ve made me do more sports too.
Next week, I have to go to a museum for a seminar, so I will have something more interesting to tell you about next time, if I don’t write a sentence and fall asleep. The museum seminars are always so tiring, because of the train and the walking. But they are fun anyway, because it’s a museum. They have totem poles in the British Museum, which were simultaneously a pleasant reminder of home and enraging. Everything about the British Museum is simultaneously pleasant and enraging. I don’t know what I’d do if offered a job there — would I join a colonial hierarchy I despise to further my career? Would it be burdensome to Mom to not? Damn the English. Don’t ever move here, Soren. If you want to go abroad for college, go to Ireland. They’re nicer there. Their museums won’t cause any moral dilemmas.
This letter has been a bit all over the place. I suppose that comes with not having anything to talk about. I got glasses on Wednesday, and a new prescription a little before, if I mentioned that last week. I won’t be wearing them much, but it’s useful to have them. I feel uncomfortably like Mom (Mel) though. Mom always looked naked without her glasses. I feel masked in mine. Regardless of rambling, I hope you have a good week, better than the last one. You are ever dear to me.
With love,
Alice