Spires

Just a nice shot of a beautiful local church, taken a few months ago. I was walking down the street and I loved the way the spires looked in front of the bright blue sky.

Quote of the Day

"My husband's not a criminal! He's won awards!"

--from the new episode of Law & Order last night

Fire Hydrant

I like this one. I don't really know why, it's rather blah. The colors, I guess. I like the bright yellow and red next to the white and little patches of green. Oh well. No accounting for taste!

Carpe Diem

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fancy Feet

Here's an old one from an old high school friend's wedding the summer before last. Several of my friends and I road-tripped in (we're from Iowa and the wedding was in Oklahoma), got a hotel room together, and spent several days there as a kind of a girl's getaway weekend. We've all scattered, so we are rarely all together, and make the most of it when we do manage to meet up.

Malaika and the Bathroom Sink

My roommate's cat Malaika has an odd predilection towards curling up to nap in our bathroom sink. It's really cute, because it fits her perfectly. Maybe that's why she likes it so much?

Jubilant

I'm not really sure why I put this picture up, the only explanations I can offer are that I like the angles, and I'm really tired.

Today has been a loooooong day. I worked from 7am-5pm, yes, another 10-hour day--which also meant that I missed all the inauguration hoopla. That was really disappointing; I've been looking forward to this day since Nov. 4th! However, at work we keep a radio/CD player in the kitchen, and luckily Obama's speech came during a lull in the meeting we were catering, so my roommate and I were able to actually listen to Obama being sworn in and then giving his inaugural address live, while it was actually happening, rather than just catching repeats on CNN later. Of course, as soon as we got home we made a beline for the TV, instantly tuning it to CNN and collapsing on the couch with our eyes glued to the screen, not to move for several hours (aside from answering the door to pay the pizza delivery guy, of course).

My reaction to the day's events in DC?

Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.

Another good poem

Lost Sister
by Cathy Song

In China,
even the peasants
named their first daughters
Jade —
the stone that in the far fields
could moisten the dry season,
could make men move mountains
for the healing green of the inner hills
glistening like slices of winter melon.
And the daughters were grateful:
They never left home.
To move freely was a luxury
stolen from them at birth.
Instead, they gathered patience,
learning to walk in shoes
the size of teacups,
without breaking —
the arc of their movements
as dormant as the rooted willow,
as redundant as the farmyard hens.
But they traveled far
in surviving,
learning to stretch the family rice,
to quiet the demons,
the noisy stomachs.

Whirligig

Can you guess what it is?

Another of my favorite poems

The Song of Wandering Angus

by: W.B. Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;




And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.




When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.




Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Queen of the Mountain

I recently walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge and leaned down to pull something out. When I straightened up, I just happened to glance up. Guess what I saw?

Malaika!

Playing queen of the mountain again, I guess. We consistently find her perched on the highest thing in the room.

What dreams may come

I had this nightmare last night. I barely remember the dream itself; what I do remember doesn't seem all that terrifying. But wherever the fear came from, it was there. I woke up absolutely terrified. I don't think I moved for 10 minutes from the moment my eyes opened, because I was just too scared to. Even after I woke up enough to know what was going on, that the terror was irrational, I was still terrified. That kind of fear is something I'm not accustomed to. I guess most fears are irrational by nature, but it still confounds me, that I could be so absolutely bone-shaking scared of nothing. Just...nothing.

After spending the day ruminating on it, I've come to the conclusion that it must have been a stress-induced nightmare. I'm really stressed out right now, and I have a long and distinguished history of not dealing well with stress. I ignore it when I'm awake, so it bides its' time and my subconscious hits me with it when I'm asleep. That explains why what I remember of the dream itself is so innocuous; it was more a stress thing than a straight-up nightmare, brought on by events currently taking place (or not taking place) in my life right now. Knowing that, though, doesn't make me any more eager to fall asleep tonight.

Tempus fugit

"There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."

- T. S. Eliot

an excerpt from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Impossible Things

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

- Alice in Wonderland.

Disclaimer: I did not take this photo. I found it on the Internet.

Intelligentsia

The local coffee shop. My roommate and I had a long discussion here over coffee earlier tonight. We went to a presentation at our alma mater by an alum and her husband who are in the Peace Corps, about their experiences with it so far (they still have 18 months left). It was really fascinating, and cleared up a lot of questions we'd had about the program and whether we wanted to do it or not. We're both leaning towards "not". It sounds like an amazing experience, but maybe just not quite right for either of us, for different reasons.

French Doors

My apartment building is really old, which for the most part translates as run-down, but it means that it has these great french doors and hardwood floors, a huge clawfoot bathtub, and all this dark wood paneling. I love old buildings, they have so much more character than the brand-spanking-new utilitarian condos and high-rises. If I had my way, I'd always live in old buildings.

Mortality, and immortality

I've been thinking about death a lot lately. Not in any morbid, macabre, suicidal way--don't worry, I'm not going to off myself with my Gillette Venus any time soon. Maybe it would be more accurate to say I've been thinking a lot about mortality lately. Death in the detached intellectual abstract rather than the in-your-face reality of it that far too many people are far too familiar with. Luckily for me, I'm not one of them. Most of my experiences come from books rather than real life, something that can be frustrating at times but which I'm grateful for at others. This is one of those. To me, death is a concept rather than a reality.

I've always had the Hamlet problem; I think too much. And now I've been reading too much with too much time for thinking. I like my job, but it usually doesn't require a large amount of brain use (gotta love menial, manual labor), leaving far too much time for my thoughts to wander off in different directions. Also, the very nature of my workplace leads my cogitations down this particular path. I work at an assisted living retirement home. NOT a nursing home; most of the residents maintain the majority of their physical and mental acuities. The thing is, while all are mobile and some are positively spry, with mostly complete memories and active brains, they are still old and getting older. Occasionally we lose residents to the hospital or the nursing home. We rarely lose them straight to death, but it has happened. When I'm there, I can never forget that death is waiting for them, and every step they take brings them closer to it. None seem to fear it, in fact most are ready, or at least resigned. Some even seem to welcome it, as they have lost spouses who they believe are waiting for them in another life. Don't get me wrong, as I write this. I LOVE the residents, I truly do, I enjoy joking around with them and hearing their stories, and I'll be sad to leave them when I finally get a job. But the fact that I just can never seem to shut my mind off makes getting to know them rather bittersweet. The straight truth is, you never know if they'll be there the next day when you show up for work.

If I've learned one thing from my time there, it's this: I never want to get old. It's miserable and humiliating and sad. That thought has led my twisting and turning musings down one particular road I never thought they would go: that maybe it is better to die young and vital, in your prime. Now, don't think I'm convinced of this, because I'm definitely not. I think it's always better to live than die; that to die young is the worst tragedy in the world. But I'm starting to understand a concept that just never made any sense to me before.

There is this idea of a "glorious death" that constantly appears and reappears in history, in literature, in art, everywhere. It's even in the recent "Lord of the Rings" movies. I first ran across this particular idea in an ancient Greek lit class I took at the local college my senior year of high school. It is one of the resounding themes of The Iliad, appearing on page after page, interwoven so thoroughly into the story that there is no separating the two. The basic tenet is that according to contemporary thought, it was better to die young and strong and vital in the heat of battle, than to slowly wither away of old age. And it wasn't just the Greeks. This idea has popped up numerous times in my history classes, showing up in ancient Rome, with the Vikings in Scandinavia, in Renaissance-era Britain. Even now, among soldiers fighting modern wars. And each time, I thought that was crazy. It's always better to live than to die, right? But now, I don't know. Maybe I've gained some wisdom in the ensuing six years, or just learned to validate opposing opinions. At any rate, I understand the concept better now. I still don't quite agree with it, but I understand it and can even sympathize with it.

The best example of it is Achilles, from The Iliad. In fact, he's pretty much the ultimate example. His mother, the goddess Theta, offers him a choice: to go to Troy and fall in battle but have his name live on in immortality, or to not go to Troy, live a long and full life, have lots of children, and die peacefully in his bed. If any of you have seen the movie "Troy" you know which option Achilles chooses. He believes it's better to die valiantly in the prime of life and be remembered forever for it, than to live to a ripe old age and die "shamefully" in bed. I always thought he was crazy.

After working at the retirement home for 9 months, it's finally starting to make sense.