Wednesday, June 22, 2005 10:55 pm

My stomach has been upset for the past couple of days. It was probably the Cajun food--just my ironic luck. I have eaten 3/4 of it and thrown the rest away in the make-shift garbage bag under my desk. I expect my room will smell of rotting food now, although perhaps it will anyway, considering what I've been doing with my breakfasts lately.

There now. Isn't that cryptic and revolting?

I have noticed just now that my hair has fallen into ringlets--I can't think how, unless it is the peculiar air here or my neglect to comb it before it dried. And now I mayn't comb it at all, or my precious curls will go away, and I shall be dreadfully disappointed. Now I've only to discover how to wear uncombed hair without appearing careless and dishevelled. (I do not mean "careless" and "dishevelled" in an "artless" sense--merely that it would be shocking for me to go about having simply drug myself from my bed and done nothing with my hair. I'm sure those who have had the misfortune of seeing me in the morning would concur.)

I've only just finished reading Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, in which I have discovered something wonderful: a human being in very many respects like myself. Of course, he does have rather a low opinion of women; this tendency I do nmot understand at all--it is not quite fair. But perhaps European women of the time were inferior, or perhaps I am very masculine in some of my traits.

At any rate, I like Pechorin very much, although he's a bad man, and I oughtn't. Only, he's so very much like myself. He is a young man of superior talent, bored with life, cruel and selfish, trying desperately not to allow his emotional impulses to overcome his reason... But that doesn't sound right at all, and it quite glorifies myself, which is not my intetnion. No, you really must read the book yourself.

Why is it that I find it so easy to identify with bad people in books? I think that on the inside I must be dreadfully wicked. I think also that goo dpeople in books are usualy insipid and false, but perhaps that's my opinion as a wicked person and hasn't any weight. I know, for example, that nobody can stand the sickening sweetness of Beth March, but perhaps some people find a Melanie or an Amelia believable.

For my part, I find it much easier to believe in good men--a Percivale, an Alyosha Karamazov--but perhaps that's only because I'm not a man. I've certainly been told by every male I personally know that men are all boringly practical and not in the least pure, and my own experience supports this. Still, I can't help hoping that somewhere there is an earnest Prince Myshkin for my whirling Natalya--and there you will see how I am not at all like Pechorin.