I don't think this counts as making a joyful noise unto the Lord

It's quarter to one in the morning. Currently, there are two tour buses double parked and idling outside of my apartment building, much as they were doing for over an hour earlier in the day. As a new refinement, however, there is a small car--triple parked, I suppose--with one of those bone-rattling stereo systems playing at (what I certainly hope is) full-blast. The riders of said tour buses are milling around on the sidewalk--at least *they* seem to be reasonably quiet, though it's hard to know.

From the best I can tell, these buses, etc. are related to a fair that one of the churches up my street was having, which makes it rather doubly ironic that they're not showing a lot of concern for either air or noise pollution in the neighborhood. And while I've more or less grown hardened to the depredations of car stereos on this street, this is actually physically stressful.

At least I'm not actually trying to sleep--the lack of blogging in the past ten days has been due largely to my desire to complete a draft of the Romanticism project that I can send to my committee member, The Professor, and possibly a few other people and then not think about for a week while I work on the Victorian project. The work has been progressing slowly, but more or less steadily, but I really want a break tomorrow and in order to do that I have to finish it tonight. And I didn't really want to swoop in like this, but the vibration is making it difficult for me to concentrate on the willing suspension of disbelief.

Fortunately, I think actually switching accounts to make this post has done the trick--the buses, loud people, and obnoxious car have all departed. I wonder what other annoyances I can write away. Hey, how about those nasty little bugs that keep crawling up my kitchen sink? I will expect them gone in the morning through the magic of blogging!

Since I'm here...well, not a whole lot to report. Schedule drama with teaching, but maybe it's not the worst thing in the world to only end up with one class. A good conversation with a high school friend. Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, which is also a kind of sublime, but with more boobs. Study / writing dates that keep me sane even if they don't get a total lot of work done. Discovered the joys of the $4 pints in the afternoon at the bar near my apartment; was less thrilled by the place being filled on a Saturday afternoon with people with babies and funny looking college students. More tastiness from the greenmarket, especially in the form of beets, interesting-looking summer squash, and goat cheese rolled in cinnamon and dried cranberries. Tonight's dinner was a sauteed pork cutlet, ratatouille, and crusty bread.

I haven't been talking to The Professor lately because I still don't feel like sparring. And I've had a couple of emails with K, but I didn't see him in the library this week, and I feel like maybe that's okay.

I'm going to a bar in Williamsburg on Monday night to celebrate the City Hall wedding of my old friend A. I wrote about the last time I saw her here. We've exchanged a couple of more or less cordial emails since then, around the time of my exam, but there wasn't really an effort to get together. I plan to be perfectly nice and to not really talk about my personal life.

Except that...I finally changed my Facebook status from "single" to "it's complicated," admitting something that has been true for awhile now, which is that I'm in a relationship with The Poet. It's been about four months, actually, since I started seeing him regularly, and that makes it the longest actual relationship I've had since breaking up with the Ex in February of last year. Well, the longest romantic relationship I've had, anyway. My relationship to to the Romanticism project is almost at the two-year mark, which may explain some of my fatigue in trying to refine my interpretation of the sublime over and over again. But--to go back to the main point--this clearly means something, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps that I'm just more willing to own it lately, to see it, as my often eminently reasonable fellow Victorianist M puts it, as simply "having sex with someone who makes me happy." And he does make me happy, regardless of how the relationship looks on paper or to other people. So I'm just going to go with that for now.

Okay, I should get back to work. What's frustrating is that none of what I'm trying to write is new, exactly--I have pieces of it scattered everywhere, and one of the weird things about this long term relationship with a text of my own making is that I keep finding places where I anticipated myself. (Oh, and I also found my notes to the Biographia Literaria, which I blogged about not being to find during my orals reading.) But the transitions! And the framing! But at least I have more or less followed my committee member's advice and just stopped reading for the time being....