I am still reading Sylvia Plath’s journals in the morning. It’s not the official book I am reading–that honor goes to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson–but I read Plath’s journals off-and-on.

I don’t really care about her suicide. I just like her poetry and I relate to her struggles as a writer. Also, I get a lot of pleasure out of her little human moments, like today’s:

Another fresh May morning gone to hell, for no reason but this crampiness. If childbirth pangs are real, why aren’t cramps real? And why should I have them if I think they’re ridiculous?

Somehow, these sly moments of humor, which are the things I most enjoy, never seem to get into any rendering of her life. Where was the Plath who grumped about her cramps in the movie? Instead we got all the horrible stereotypes— the crazy, jealous, “deep” woman who burns her husband’s work and stares moodily at the ocean. The weirdest thing about Plath is that even though she shouted her personality into everything that she wrote, whenever people try to get at who she really was, she slips from their grasp.

On Sunday, my friends and I took a ferry out to Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay.

In the first half of the 20th century, Angel Island was used for official purposes, all of which have morbid undertones. The government quarantined people with tuberculosis and other contagious diseases on the island. Thanks to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese immigrants were trapped there for months while bureaucrats decided whether to let them into San Francisco or not. And the island was also used for military purposes. In several wars, troops were housed there to prepare for possible invasion.

On our hike around the island, we came across the old 70-bed military hospital, built in 1911, which was also headquarters to the Nike missile operation. The delapidated remains looked like a cross between an Italian villa and an insane asylum.

Although the stairs had been knocked out to keep us from going onto the second floor of the building, there was nothing to stop us from wandering around the first floor. One wing of the building had a hallway with black walls. Someone had written in white chalk, “This way to the orgy.” Even with all the light coming in from the windows behind us, the farther we went down the hallway, the darker it got. At the end of the hallway was a tiny room, also painted black. It was too dark to see what was inside. Maybe it’s best we never know?

There were other creepy things in the ruin: bars on windows, “redrum” written on a column, a medieval-looking power switch. I wanted to explore the second floor, but wasn’t strong enough to do the climbing necessary to achieve that, so I took some photos instead:

1. An evil scientist puts you in a time machine, sending you to your least favorite place during your least favorite time in history. His kindly assistant adjusts the settings to give you control over your race, gender, marital status and profession. Where, when, what and who are you?

Although there are many periods of history that don’t interest me, I’m pretty sure cavemen had it the worst in terms of overall dirtiness and daily boredom. So I would probably be sent back to caveman times in, say, northern Europe. What a mean scientist! Language hasn’t been invented! Cavemen are hairy! I’m cold because fire has not yet caught on the way it will five years from now. This sucks.

Given all this, I don’t want to be human. I want to be a Woolly Mammoth. First of all, I’m warm. Secondly, I have adorable babies. Third, when I die by being frozen in ice, 30,000 years later, scientists will take my DNA, combine it with the DNA of an African Elephant, and make a clone-hybrid out of me, thus making me kind of immortal. That rocks.

2. In the year 2000-whatever, your adult children put together a photo album — or its super-futuristic counterpart — chronicling their favorite moments with you during their childhood. Describe some of these moments.

“Wow our Mom was cool. Remember when she won the Pulitzer for her fifth novel? We were very proud of her. Oh and remember when we all graduated from nice colleges and became doctors? That was awesome. Here’s a picture of Mom and Dad standing on the Great Wall of China during our trip there. We saw sooo many monkeys on that trip. Man, we sure had lots of happy Christmases involving good food and love. Oh here’s Mom and Dad on their 50th anniversary. Mom looks only 35 there. Our genes are amazing.”

3. You can choose to be any character in literature for three days. Which character do you choose and why? What part of his or her life do you choose to start your three days?

This is the hardest question you asked. I realized I would not want to be any of the characters in the books I most admire. Who would want to be Mrs. Dalloway or Sethe? So I’m at a loss. Of course, I could pick a tragedy and be, say, Romeo and have him behave more rationally about his secret marriage, but that would make the play boring. Or I could pick something mushy like Scarlett O’Hara and make her introspective enough to realize her love for Rhett Butler, but living in the Old South would scare me. It seems like it would be fun to be Don Quixote until you realize how embarrassing it must be to be him sometimes. So I will pick Moby-Dick. As Moby-Dick, I would swim away so that boring book would never be written.

4. You are a hard-boiled news dame from the 1930s. You have the choice between breaking the story of a lifetime, thus cementing your status as coolest news dame ever, or moving to Morocco with the man of your dreams, effectively giving up any chance to become a serious newspaper gal. What is the story you could break, and which choice do you make?

Hands down, I would cover the story. Whatever, man, if you can’t wait for me to cover my story, I don’t think we would work. I would be like Martha Gellhorn, who married Hemingway and then refused to be a housewife, instead going off to World War II and becoming one of the most important war correspondents of the time.

So what story would I cover? I suppose, logically, the biggest story of that decade would be the rise of Hitler, so I should say something like breaking Hitler annexing Austria. However, you know what would be really awesome? An exclusive interview with Bonnie and Clyde. First, they would take me–blindfolded of course–to their hide-out. They would let me sit in the latest stolen car and Clyde would show me his guns, which would make me nervous but it would be okay. As the evening progressed, they would open up about their poverty-stricken childhoods and descent into crime. The next day, every paper would print my account of their tale of desperation and love. Who needs Morocco?

5. You wake up tomorrow and discover that suddenly everyone in the United States speaks only Chinese. You still speak only English. What do you do?

Once I figured out what was going on, I would move to England where people speak English.

The End.

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Sylvia Plath on needing other people (aside from Ted Hughes) to read her work:

I need an outsider: feel like a recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can’t understand a word he’s saying.

I know exactly what she means.