Привет, Привет

"Hello, Hello."

All right…here is the long-awaited (maybe) inaugural post. Welcome to our blog.

Our apologies for any repeated information. Our memories are not our strongest points.

We are Mary and Amanda. As we've already said somewhere, we are two Comparative Literature majors from the University of Oregon (and Amanda is a Religions major, too). This site will probably never amount to anything consequential; or you might be reading, right now, the intellectual meanderings of two future literary superstars. Who knows.

Mary came to Oregon in the Fall of 2006 after eighteen years spent in Phoenix, Arizona. She currently lives with her grandparents, a cowardly Siamese cat, and various wild beasts in the southern hills of Eugene. After a brief flirtation with the UO's School of Journalism and Communication, Mary decided that literature is where she first and foremost belongs. (That might be why she's writing about twenty quarter- or half-finished 'books' right now.)

Amanda will be walking 500 miles across France and Spain this summer over an arduous period of forty days; it will be a spiritual journey to raise her worth in God's eyes, and is known (when it is not being referred to with an excess of drama) as the Road to Santiago. Amanda is 4'8" of smoldering cynical literary brilliance (though she never ever admits it). She hails from Portland, Oregon, but spent a semester being silly in the Midwest before coming to the UO to reunite Mary with the other half of her severed spiritual binary. Amanda likes books, coffee, and semiotics - not necessarily in that order - and is fond of both cutting her fingers while slicing bagels and tripping over the forty-odd books she has strewn haphazardly over her bedroom floor.

Mary and Amanda's favorite author ever is Joseph Conrad. Amanda's favorite work is 'Heart of Darkness;' Mary's will forever be Lord Jim. They're also rather fond of Alexander Pushkin…but Conrad takes the cake (sometimes literally).

The Mary/Amanda binary (in case you should desire to look it up in reference books, under the 'Literary Black Holes' section) is also referred to as Virgil/Dante, Marlow/Lord Jim, and/or Cyrano/Christian. If you want to know why, you'll have to meet us and ask us…but it will become rather apparent after fifteen minutes spent in our company.

Lastly…Mary and Amanda are well aware of the fact that they would be defined as 'losers' by the majority of their peers: they each take at least twenty-one credits (Amanda sometimes likes to take more); they are both unnaturally fond of Baroque music, although other periods of classical composition have their merit; they converse in Russian on the bus in order to giggle at the confusion of the other passengers; they prefer going to lectures at the UO rather than parties (and we mean the kind of lectures that are not included in their class schedules and which are not attended for extra credit); they read up on literary and film theory just for the hell of it; Amanda has developed several infatuations with Ford Mustangs ('60s models preferably); Mary has fed these infatuations by making her dear friend a model '69 Mustang and painting it herself, inhaling enough carcinogenic fumes to lighten the brain of a bull elephant; Amanda can identify, solely by the music, the scene where the black swan enters in Swan Lake; Mary's "mental age" is fifty-one, while her "physical age" is a tender twenty; they celebrate the end of terms by drawing Ikratkayas in the beach sand and then letting a wave purge the little devils from the face of the planet; and you get the idea. Mary and Amanda stopped wondering long ago why very few of their peers enjoy their company.

Mary hopes to become either a foreign correspondent or a professor. Amanda hopes to become either a pastor or a professor. They have agreed on one commonality in their adult lives: they will travel up the River Congo in a riverboat (preferably an early-1900s tramp steamer, but you know how hard those are to come by nowadays). When or how this will happen is anyone's guess. The rest of their lives shall be left up to Fate.

This concludes the inaugural post by Mary and Amanda.

Enjoy the blog. Добрый вечер.