i am stressed. stressed! nothing will fit in my suitcases. i shouldn't have said i wasn't coming back this december. maybe i should. ordinarily i would think, oh well, i'll leave this here, not likely to need this till next semester, so i'll pick it up in december. but now i think, no, gotta squeeze this book/skirt/thingii in now! otherwise i won't be able to get it if i want it! i didn't think i wanted to come back this december, though my dad keeps asking me to. and i never realised how easy it was to pack when i knew i was coming back in january to bring a second load of things.

when i think about leaving i go into a panic thinking about all the books i'm leaving behind. i am looking at one shelf now and i see so many books i want to bring but have no space in my suitcase. i really mean it. i tried and i can't even lift my bag. i'm not kidding. they'd think i'm smuggling gold ingots or something. i don't know how to get them up so many flights of stairs. i really want to bring both my ji mi books, xiangzuozou, xiangyouzou, and dixiatie, to show chris chen, my taiwanese friend at uva, i bet he hasn't seen it cos he hasn't gone home for three years! and i would like to bring my hongloumeng, i bought a really nice new 2-volume edition when i was in china, with good annotations! there's a thin copy of cs lewis' essays on fantasy and children's lit that would be really useful, and i want to bring my borges, my 4 copies of chinese children's lit that i thot i would work on translating, my book on translation theory (choonping lost my eugene nida, but i have another book by a different fellow that would help!) and i have those museum guide/art commentaries from beijing, and i grabbed an amsterdam guide from the library book sale, and that's just some of the books i'm leaving behind. dash it, i think i'm coming home in december for them. i must. dammit, i'd better get into uva next year otherwise i'll have to move all this barang to durham or providence or something. that gives me a very good reason to work hard. oh no. the more i think about moving the more horrible it all seems. ugh. i have to get into uva next year. *resolved*

oh yeah, i have no keys either. in previous years i've got my keys at the i/c, police station etc , but the girl in charge of ishp this year hasn't got back to me on where to get my keys, so i'm very cross. i can stay the night with jared of course, but i do have storage ppl coming at 8 the next morning, and i won't be able to let either them or myself in! and they are giant boxes i swear. ton of bricks. many many tons. and if i get them to leave it in the corridor i'll be causing major obstruction to other people, plus i'll have to heave them in myself later when keys appear. this looks to be impossible. ever tried lifting 60 pounds of books? i am told ants can lift several times their body weight, wish i were one.

being about to go back screws up your reading. my "have read" list has got stuck at martin amis. i am not not reading. it's just that i begin lots of different books at once and never get through any of them because i'm so anxious to get to some others. this past week i've been dipping into a collection of essays and reviews by david lodge (i've just read a fascinating bit on graham greene's life. having recently read the end of the affair, this struck me as very apt and more autobiographical than i thought. i'll move on to the heart of the matter when i get back to school. themes, i think, that affect me very deeply.) and a volume of jg ballard's essays - i think i like him as a critic much less than a novelist. ballard i mean. lodge is good as a critic, if a bit too personal. empire of the sun was one of my favourite books as a teenager. i knew the book was based on his experiences as a prisoner of war in shanghai, but i thought he went in as an adult, and that's where the setting and background came into it. was sitting on a 153 to holland village and reading about lunghua when he recorded his father calling him "jamie" and i was very taken aback. it did not occur to me that the j in jg ballard stood for james. not that i thought the initials concealed something awful and more dramatic - clive staple is bad. elwyn brooks too. certainly pelham grenville is a terrible name. though there's no earthly reason why any author shouldn't go by his initials if it pleased him, and i never bothered to find out. i didn't think how autobiographical it was in that he too went in as a child, was called jamie too, and that the jamie/jim of the book was much more closely related to ballard than i thought.

i have pratchett's the science of discworld, a tourist guide to amsterdam, and alistair fowler's kinds of literature for the plane. hm. none of that seems very suitable. though i will prob conserve them for the airport waits and the domestic flights. i look forward to my big fat greek wedding and the importance of being earnest on the plane later. right.