rushthatspeaks | (no subject)

I have spent the entire evening on my thesis, and am solacing me with The Duchess of Malfi. It is certainly unusual to be reading Webster for, well, for pleasure at all, really. I was in a mood for that sort of madness, I suspect. The Duchess of Malfi, of course, has the most beautiful allusion to werewolves that I have ever seen ("In those that are possess'd with't there oreflows/Such mellencholy humour, they imagine/Themselves to be transformed into woolves,/Steale forth to church-yards in the dead of night,/And dig dead bodies up: as two nights since/One met the duke 'bout midnight in a lane/Behind St. Markes church, with the leg of a man/Upon his shoulder; and he howl'd fearfully:/Said he was a woolffe: onely the difference/Was, a woolffes skin was hairy on the outside,/His on the in-side: bade them take their swords,/Rip up his flesh, and try...")and so I've been familiar with the play for years, since I try to keep up with allusions of that nature, but six acts of it can have me thinking in metre, which is bad for other writing. It's been that sort of weekend, though; the more exhausted I am, the fonder am of Webster.

Saturday evening was the Delaware Ball, which was the first of the balls I have been to in which I sat out nothing, not even the three waltzes, so was on my feet and dancing for four hours, give or take, with tea. Got back to Bryn Mawr about twelve-thirty to find the campus in its usual Halloween madness of drinking, which I cannot tolerate, so off to SWILoween on the last Swat van, and arrived at Swarthmore about two AM. Unfortunately we had to share the van with a lot of drunken fraternity idiots. Drunken fraternity idiots make me despair of humanity. I was glad to be in the company of Syona Keleste and fiddledragon, as I would not have been well pleased to be alone and female given the way they were talking. There is a certain school of drunken fraternity-type conversation which is even more egregious in treating women as objects than the usual drunken aggravations, as said type of discussion reduces all human interactions to the sexual and all women to-- well, I could gladly have set these men loose in a barnyard, as I think sheep would have been indistinguishable for their purposes. They might have preferred that, actually, sheep having no pretenses at individuality. Fortunately none of this was actually directed *at us*, per se, or I would have been really worried; as it was, with that merely in the air, it took me most of SWILoween to calm down.

We stayed from about two to about five, and played the oddest game of Truth or Dare. No one ever took any dares. I didn't know the people well enough to ask good questions, so I just tried to sleep, but my incipient paranoia caused me to have to go back to the Mawr to do that.

So I went to bed around six AM and then Mom got in about eleven and there was brunch and then there was more sleep and then there was Lantern Night. It was the smallest stepsing I have ever been to, but it was one of the most enthusiastic. And the class of '07 song and the sophomore parody were both really, really good. I hung out in the Denbigh Backsmoker much later than I intended, and so I am massively sleep-deprived. But was good weekend. Back to Webster.