{"id":1963,"date":"2010-05-14T00:31:10","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T00:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/?p=1963"},"modified":"2013-03-26T04:12:12","modified_gmt":"2013-03-26T04:12:12","slug":"sometimes-transliterated-dostoevsky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/14\/sometimes-transliterated-dostoevsky\/","title":{"rendered":"sometimes transliterated &#8216;dostoevsky&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I look awful. My face is puffy.   My eyes are overlarge.  My head is terribly unstable.   Hubble keeps telling me my speech is slurred.  He&#8217;s right.  The muscles in my throat are tight and uncomfortable.  But that&#8217;s not it.  That&#8217;s not the cause of the slurring.  I just don&#8217;t feel like opening my mouth enough to elocute.  I want to roll my tongue in large exaggerated jabberwocky gestures.  It loosens up my face. <\/p>\n<p>I used to do this all the time when I was a kid, whenever I was sick.  My sister HATED it.  She still hates it and tells Hubble he should hate it too.  My high school choir teacher called me obnoxious.  Once, in college, I had a professor ask if I were on drugs:  &#8220;Buffy, are you&#8230;are you stoned?&#8221;   <\/p>\n<p><em>You can sod right on off.<\/em>  <\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s what I wanted to say.  It was exactly how I felt and I&#8217;ve always found it a fabulous turn of phrase.  \ud83d\ude42  Then he went and gave me a C.  I hated those things &#8211; Cs.   They were average and I was already average enough without them.  So, I went back later that week.  To explain.  I left with an A.   I didn&#8217;t thank him.  <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Roman-Column-Brittania-.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Roman Column Brittania\" width=\"450\" height=\"338\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1972\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Roman-Column-Brittania-.jpg 450w, https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Roman-Column-Brittania--300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 450px) 100vw, 450px\" \/><br \/>\n<center>This photo is completely irrelevant.<\/center><\/p>\n<p>This afternoon I went to bed and slept for three hours.  I thought it&#8217;d help.  The sleep.  It didn&#8217;t.  <\/p>\n<p>Once every five years, my brain explodes.  Oozes out my ears.    In cold little streams filled with something very hot.  I always think &#8216;this is something Dostoevsky would write&#8217; just before I think &#8216;how <strong>do you<\/strong> transliterate that name&#8217; and &#8216;how did he ever write at all&#8217;.  Then I remember how, or think I do.  Because now, when that part of my brain that normally sits quiet doesn&#8217;t quite sit quiet any more, I do some of my best stuff.  I&#8217;m not sure that one is at all related to the other.  But I know it limbers up my mind.  Frees me of all sorts of inhibitions I didn&#8217;t know I had.  But it leaves me feeling awful.  Just, lousy.  Really out of sorts.    <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to write when you&#8217;re really out of sorts. <\/p>\n<p>I might read poetry.  Poetry helps.  Spiritual things.  Not the deep stuff.  Song of Solomon is sometimes nice.  I used to be partial to Oswald Chambers.  Elizabeth Gilbert is okay too.  The Guru scoffs at Gilbert.  And that&#8217;s fair enough because he <strong>is<\/strong> The Guru.<\/p>\n<p>I used to read the New Testament in Koine Greek.  Then I admitted, but only to myself, the only reason I did it was because it looked more impressive than reading it in English.  Classical trumps Germanic.  Any day.  I don&#8217;t think that way anymore.  Anymore, I read Elizabeth Gilbert.  Eat, Pray, Love, my darlings.  That is all. <\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I look awful. My face is puffy. My eyes are overlarge. My head is terribly unstable. Hubble keeps telling me my speech is slurred. He&#8217;s right. The muscles in my throat are tight and uncomfortable. But that&#8217;s not it. That&#8217;s not the cause of the slurring. I just don&#8217;t feel like opening my mouth enough<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[65,66],"class_list":["post-1963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hum-drum","category-photography","tag-dostoevsky","tag-seizures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1963"}],"version-history":[{"count":39,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5348,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963\/revisions\/5348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}