5. This project is ruining MIDDLEMARCH for me.

Setting up booby traps for myself like I'm Dorothea Brooke.

I have this semi-recurring nightmare where I get a butt-cheek tattoo. I never see the full tattoo, only lines of ink from the corner of my eye, but the assumption is it’s a leprechaun or kissy lips. Then a crack of sobriety rains over my consciousness, and I return to reality with an unwanted, permanent tattoo. In the dream, I scrub my bum until it’s red, and I wake up as dream-me signs away my meager savings at a laser removal clinic.

When I’m reading Middlemarch about a teenager who enthusiastically marries a cantankerous old man hoping he will educate her, it triggers something for me.

This education will be the beginning of her life, she thinks. Only through marriage can her life start.

Surprise! It’s a terrible mistake.

The Casaubons are a couple’s therapist’s wet dream of miscommunicated feelings.

George Eliot’s Middlemarch, published in eight parts from 1871 to 1872, is set in provincial 1829 Middlemarch county. Dorothea Brooke is an orphan of landowning gentry who, as a teenag…