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A Fairly Good Place to Start
And so, gentle reader, the blog of Milly doth commence. This is a rather unfortunate event, as I've always had trouble with beginnings. They manage to comport themselves in a distressingly awkward fashion. And, unlike awkward relatives, its absolutely impossible to just give them the boot. You may think that you've disposed of a perfectly horrid beginning when, lo and behond, you find that some other cheeky passage has taken its place. (Then again, perhaps it's more analogous to Aunt Charmlack than I've supposed. I'm told she often has a sister who objects to spontaneous demises, and that the sister may make herself more unpleasant and more difficult to avoid than even Charmlack herself had.)
At all events, a good beginning remains for me merely an elusive, Platonic ideal. One of these days I shall stumble across a beginning to really sweep the reader off her feet—to astound, intrigue, and tantalize her while maintaining that air of superior reserve that allows the writer to turn her nose toward the heavens. A beginning that will hint subtly at things to come, that will amuse the reader with Baktinian humor, but that will cause our reader to pause and reflect on life's more grave and important topics.
Lacking this at the moment, however, I wil simply ask that the reader go out into the literary jungle, hunt down and capture a splendid beginning, and return with the trophy to tack where my most excellent beginning ought to have been. I might even ask that it be properly stuffed and adorned with glass eyes, but I really shouldn't be too demanding. At present I will offer only the following as a placemarker:
Milly begins.
Now, should the reader take even a passing interest in this Milly, he might ask "but where does she begin?" And to this, unlike to the majority of questions, I have an answer. She begins on a plane.
To be more precise, she begins on a plane 36001 feet above the ground, that (were the plane to suddenly find itself at a radial coordinate 36001 feet closer to the center of the earth) would be near Wausau, Wisconsin. This plane has traveled 1001 miles since taking off from Boston, and (at rough approximation) has 2000 miles of further travel before reaching San Francisco. She begins while sitting in seat 6F of this plane. She also begins while she is in the process of heartily enjoying the conversation taking place in seat 7D, 7E, and 7F—owing largely to the fact that it is taking place in French. It is entirely possible that I ought to feel more than slightly guilty for eavesdropping, but my only excuse is that a family is traveling with a very cute little child, and that French is after all a very pretty language. Do you really think you could resist the temptation to perk up your ears upon hearing a father say to his coughing child: "Tu as un problème?" Exactly. Glass house and all that.
From my entirely Milly-centric point of view, however, the most exciting thing about Milly's beginning is that it signals that I have, at last, finished my final exams for first semester (as of yesterday at 4:30). I hope that—although the reader cannot hear my voice or see that nervous twitch in my eye that appears whenever I ponder the subject—my state of mind will be thoroughly understood when I remind the reader that I was left with two days between the end of exams and Christmas. I also hope that when the person responsible for the academic calendar is found floating in the Charles (or maybe on the ice of the Charles), nobody will foolishly conclude that I was in any way involved. Or that it's worth remarking on that damn spot of blood that I can't seem to wash out.