Mariel > Recent Status Updates

Feeling little tugs of inspiration and wonder that take me back to when I was 17 and passionate but conflicted about picking English Lit as my major — specific 17 y/o decisive moments including hearing Prof. Pierce's sample lecture (that made me choose Queen's) and watching Dead Poets Society (for the first time) in my Gr. 12 Writer's Craft class. First essay had me revisit (and renew) that feeling again. ☺️

ok so maybe every chapter ends with "but that was ... Before The Ruinous Event 🤫" but i am EATING this up. it feels like what the secret history was for me as a young arts major, or actually, like the clique-adjacent books i'd read as a teen about young women at elite institutions. read4fun winter!!!

life's so fun life's so fun got my mini skirt and my rollerblades on

it's been the LONGEST time coming (can't believe i've lived so long without reading it)

can't believe i've been so deficient in the only canon that matters* (*books that people that i love, love!)

english major canon event 😘

"subways are only fun when you're feeling sexy" kinda real ngl

getting caught up on the male manipulator literary canon let's go 🙏🏼

"I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time, the way it was almost always so empty, and then, with no warning, came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was..." unfortunately relatable 🧐

no one has ever been more down tremendous than selin justifying her compulsive re-reading of ivan's messages like "but literary scholars re-read balzac's novels all the time"

"I imagine the gods saying, We will / make it up to you. We will give you / three wishes, they say. Let me see / the squirrels again, I tell them...

Let me at least fail at my life ... Let me fall / in love one last time, I beg them. Teach me mortality, frighten me / into the present. Help me to find / the heft of these days. That the nights / will be full enough and my heart feral."

oh man 🧍🏻‍♀️

perhaps the most topical airport read of all time <3 (thank u glenn's recs for making me feel like the most esoteric ponderer in this terminal)

"He smiled sunnily at Sophie, and stepped out among the spires of Kingsbury. 'And you think that makes it alright,' Sophie growled as the door shut, but the smile had mollified her." LMAOOO so real sophie, princess of "i can change him" nation

every year i hyperfixate on some random niche christmas aesthetic and this year i'm rocking with 19th c. christmas cottage, like garlands of dehydrated oranges strewn next to candles lofted on sconces, so cozy but also ... conducive to spectral encounters esp. on dark nights with winter storms that force you inside <3

the old king just passed (heirless) and someone just announced "there has appeared a sword in a stone" let's GOOOOOO

"Loud is my lament, for I believed despair could last and love could last." BROOO

"Man has been given to understand / that he lives only by the grace of those in power. / Let him therefore busy himself sipping coffee, catching butterflies. / Who cares for the Republic will have his right hand cut off. / And yet the earth merits a bit, a tiny bit, of affection. Not that I take too seriously consolations of nature, and baroque ornaments, the moon, chubby clouds..."

"Again imagination seethes, / again that touch / has fired the blood within my withered heart, / again the ache, again the love!" okayyy passion 😮‍💨

"We, whose cunning is not unlike despair." dang

"...and each time / recognition and caress, / the repeated pleasure / of finite things." let's goooooo michael

soooo ... when do jason derulo and james corden show up 😹😹😹

feeling an anticipatory ache of loss as the pages left for me to turn grow slenderer and slenderer ... damn y'all maybe desire IS no light thing

"...running both hands all the way down / from the base of the neck / to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain."

"These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood."

y'all .... why am i emo

5 months late to the party (the party being my assigned readings 💀) but WOOOO some of these lines HIT

"'How does distance look?' is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless / within to the edge / of what can be loved. It depends on light."

"If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating...It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it." ok guys i might have to change my fake flippant ways fr

"...you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends." goodreads users confirmed #TEMPTED

"she gregor on my samsa til i metamorphosize" 😪😪😪

prolonged over/deferred by 3 weeks but i am in fact, getting to it <3 (and surprisingly ... enjoying it?) (sorry to the haters i find the writing a lil dazzling/playful and i'm emotionally attached to harvey and rema)