Starry night

Hello, class. It's Friday night. And I'm pretty content.

That right there is the difference between my two lives, at home and at college. At college, I never ever (ever) spend a night chilling in the room. I just feel physically incapable of solitude on weekend nights. Usually because there's something happening, but even if there isn't, then by golly I'm gonna make something happen. People, people, people. I want people. I need people. The End.

That is my college life.

When I go home, something happens. My introverted nature emerges, and I can pretty much live at home for a week without venturing into society, even for a trip to Walgreens. In the evenings I read books and watch Masterpiece Theatre (why yes, I am a nerd, how did you guess) and sometimes my dad and I make a trip to McDonald's for an ice cream cone. A vanilla ice cream cone. Cue the strains of "Old Folks at Home."

And yet I know I still need people. Which is why I'm so glad when I do spend time with people: Val, Christine, Claire and Amy are in town, I had breakfast and good conversation with Mrs. Morgan this morning, and I get to see Kait next weekend. They remind me of our human need for relationship, community, friends who really see you. It's good for me to break out of my summer homebody cocoon.

Now, time for an episode of "Foyle's War."

***

I'm celebrating the 4th at Liberty Church (appropriate, no?), for a Sacred Harp singin. I hope we sing Bridgewater.

Reading Inkheart. Good for book lovers, and those in need of reality escape.

Done done done with class. Now to concentrate on research alone, which excites me. Next on the horizon: link between poetry and film. Is it weird that sometimes research makes me feel like an explorer?

Speaking of poetry: I revamped my poetry site. Drop by and leave a comment on what you'd like to see! Unless it has something to do with Edgar Guest . . .

Let Evening Come

Tonight,  something a bit different. I took an evening walk, and things were so sunset pretty I had to grab a camera (despite my lack of any photography skills. Leave that to artsy people like Joanna. Who took my profile photo! She's amazing). I just snapped pictures of random things I thought were interesting; here's what I found:

Recognize this fair leaf? All the folklore five together: It's a tulip poplar! 

We picked blackberries the other day. Mom made a cobbler. I'm content just to look at them. And then eat them raw off the bush.

Mountains. Ahhh. Fields and mountains. And . . . barbwire fences. 

I love marten houses.  And I love this one most of all because of its tilt. P.S., I also went half-blind from the sun trying to get this photo. 

Another strange fascination, in addition to tilting marten houses: the way this tree grew around a barbwire fence. Again: why do I like this so much? 

Hay. Dusk. Golden. Peace. 

***

Photos I did Not take: 

-the strange furry carcass (squirrel?) in our front yard (suspects: the Sweet Dog).  

-the vicious horsefly that attacked me

-our neighbor careening around shirtless on his bush hog (heavens to Betsy. Scarring). 

Last night I spent with Valerie and Claire in their lovely apartment. Thank you, dear friends, for letting me crash and sit in that amazingly comfortable chair. Oh, and getting me addicted to "So You Think You Can Dance." You do my heart good. 

Good night, sky. 

In which I go crazy for hyperlinks

Let's go right to the shore and forget our troubles here

I'm gonna gas up the ford, the waves are crashing

and the sky is clear - I want to be by your side

- the everybodyfields

I picked up a copy of "Christianity Today" in some office the other day, and flipped to the main article. It was on pilgrimage, and I was immediately intrigued (one of my favorite books during the Homeschool Years involved a boy and girl in the 1300s who go on a religious pilgrimage. I loved The Ramsay Scallop, and for a long time I put myself to bed at night by imagining medieval pilgrimage stories). The article was lovely and now I want to go on a pilgrimage. This makes sense. Pilgrimages are not aimless wanderings, and they are not all about the destination either. The journey is part of the discipline. 

So I want a good long modern pilgrimage, with the comfort of the passenger seat late at night and drowsing to Fleet Foxes or Kate Rusby and the stars over the highway. One of my playlists is already named "Starry Roadtrip Night" - I'm aching to just go. 

 Deborah, you are my music clone/road trip twin - let's go! I'll bring the hummus and fruit this time. 

***

Here we are at the transmission party

I love your friends, 

they're all so arty

-Franz Ferdinand

A couple of weeks ago, our home was graced by the presence of two very wonderful musicians. Stephen Gordon and Adam Agin played for a small group of friends and then we roasted s'mores outside and the boys swam and it was so. much. fun. Anna Rubia had gotten me hooked on Stephen's music when she introduced me to Doug Burr, so I already knew I loved his stuff. I hadn't heard Adam before though, and he was amazing. And I loved the feel of the tiny house concert, just a group of folks crowded in our great room and listening to two guys who happen to make incredible music. 

So I grilled Adam and Stephen on how they write songs (Adam is very emotionally involved, Stephen is detached - fyi) and really awful concerts in their past and whatever I didn't question, my mother did. Besides being astounding musicians, they are also super nice guys. Go listen to their music!

***

From all that dwells below the skies

let the Redeemer's praise arise:

let the Redeemer's name be sung

through ev'ry land, by ev'ry tongue.

-Isaac Watts

"Bridgewater," the tune to the words above, is my favorite Sacred Harp song. They didn't sing it today at the National Sacred Harp Assembly, but that's ok. I went and got my fix, and the sound - oh the sound. And I bought my own hymnal so that I can vary my routine, instead of pulling the usual number and singing the same line over and over again at really obnoxious volumes.

And yes, I know, watching to the video you will probably think What the heck does Anna see in that weird abrasive music? Well. I'm not always sure myself; I just know I love it. But that singing, it just fills you and swells up and makes me feel right and whole. It also gives me a headache after about three hours, but it's so worth it. 

And people recognized me and called me by name. How can you not love any group of people where that happens?  

***

Well. I didn't post on Daniel Craig this time. But remember how long it took me to get around to Narcissa Whitman? James Bond's time is coming. In the meantime, I need y'all's opinion on something. I've been a poem writing machine these past three weeks (ok, not really, but I have written three) and I need to know - what does the phrase "gypsy broom" mean to you? As in, a broom that a gypsy would leave lying around their caravanserai wagon. Does it seem weird for a gypsy to have something domestic - like a broom? Or am I crazy? Sigh. Poetic anguish of searching for the bon mot. Please help me out, people. Go to my poetry site if you're brave enough to read the poem and lemme know if the gist is getting across. Thankee. 

Announcement! Anuncio! Anunce!

My mind just turned off. It will remain off the rest of my life.


Thank you for your attention. Please return to your regularly scheduled activities.

[I have too much to do. It's my fault. It's getting better. Please tell me if/where/why I should go to grad school or if I should be a blueberry farmer. I'm trying to cut back. But there's so much to do. BALANCE, child, BALANCE.]

***
O-kay. That's semi out of my system now. I have a meeting with my research professor in half an hour and I feel behind on my research and I should be writing the article on "health insurance for new grads" that's due, um, tomorrow.


But you know what? I miss this blog. I miss it because it is how I process life, basically, and to just not write for over a week drives me cra-zy.


And more than that, I love you folks who actually read the musings of my crazy mind. Can I take this opportunity to wave frantically at Mr. McKeown and say how thrilled I am that you read this? You are the very jolliest person I know and whenever I hear you laugh (or even think about you laugh) I want to dissolve into laughter too. Please please (please!) come visit us soon.


There is nothing that makes me beam more than when people I love and respect take the time to read this blog. Thank you, dear people.

***
So in the time when I basically have fallen into a very deep hole and am feverishly working (I feel like a meerkat peeping out of its hole whenever I venture into the real world), I have shamefully neglected people. Like Kait, for instance, whose sweet sweet messages I have not yet replied to even though I have read them all, Kait, and yes I've put that on my calendar, and I had the very best time with you last Saturday (I want one of those wok burner things). And I just replied to Anna Rubia last night when she sent her email from Germany, oh, two weeks ago. And I missed Erin's phone call and really want to hear about her time in Italy. And to alllll the other people I have not responded to - know that every time I think about the unanswered messages, it's like a throbbing blister that needs to be cauterized. Sorry for the disgusting imagery.

***
(Yes, the post gets more fragmented.) In other news, I am currently experiencing a tiny bit of the life of a working mom. How so? you ask. Well. My mom has been in and out of commission the past four weeks due to excrutiating back pain (still trying to figure it out . . .). During these incapacitating episodes, I have realized just how much she does. Do you realize? Stay-at-home moms do not eat bon-bons (I mean, have you seen how skinny she is?). She does a lot.

So during an especially bad spell the past two days, I've been trying to balance my class, my research job, an interview for this article, exercising so that I will not gain 30 lbs from stress, fixing supper, and oh yes, trying to figure out God. And doing none of it well (actually, the ginger chicken stir fry last night was pretty good).


But I don't have horrible pain spasms. Please, sweet Mother, get better. We'll even keep on making supper and cleaning and all that, if you'll just stop hurting.

***
If you think this post has a lot of italics, you should see the pre-edited version.
So now I am sitting in the O'Neal library.

I read a chapter of poetry criticism (I disagree vehemently with Vernon Shetley. He wants to give poetry back to the intellectuals. Which is certainly better than having it die completely but I say, Poetry for the Masses!)

I bought a cup of warm lemonade from the curly blond headed siblings outside (2 boys and a girl, e-zackly what I want in that far-off day of motherhood. I asked them to mix the pink and yellow. They were not pleased but assented).

And after I write this article on health insurance, I am going semi-rogue for the rest of the day. Which means I will go home and make supper and work out and craft a Father's day card and chill.

***
P.S. Stay tuned for the next post, in which I declare my undying obsession with the new James Bond movies and how I've been dreaming poems about Confederate soldiers. Ciao.

Obscure objects of my affection

I love this book. I read it because I needed a break from academic articles. Submerging myself in the free-for-all, let's play forever with uncertainty in our ivory tower until we die - reading these had me down in the doubts. Just plain old aching. [I'm still asking God: How does it all fit, these valid points and You? I know they can, I just don't know the how yet. Why do I still have to deal with this? Can I be a meaning-of-life-deep-thoughts person and a real-life-feet-on-the-ground person? And I love new ideas and I know I could do academia, but do I want to? Could I survive it? And will I feel like a failure for the rest of my life if I don't pursue it? Can I be in it without being of it? And why am I regressing to Jr. High italics???]

So you see. I just needed some thing that doesn't use phrases like "performing identity" or "poetics of gender." So I picked up this slim and lyrical book. 

"A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all. Strange seizures beset us. Frank Conroy loved his yo-yo tricks, Emily Dickinson her slant of light."

And it got me thinking about the obscure things I love. Like a certain shade of pink, the one in the Dr. Seuss alphabet book that is the color of the fizzy drink and the weird crocodile creature. And tilt-top tea tables. Gaslight lamps. Real shutters on inside windows. Single drawers in bedside tables. (The last three are from Peter Pan the stage version. Umm.) The bowl of mush and dollhouse in Goodnight Moon. The rim of water surface that you look at in the pool through your goggles. Making half-moon indentions on aloe leaves or yellow squash with my thumbnail. The sandy stone doorsteps on old cabins. How when you press the button on our fridge to change from ice to water dispenser it sounds just like "A Million Ways" by OK Go. And the high heel shoes the girl wore in that Care Bear book at my grandparents' house! I have been searching all my life for those shoes. 

I've revealed enough of my weirdness. Your turn.

Sometimes, the unexpected. 

Let me explain. 

During Christmas break, I joined a freelance networking site. Premise is simple: employers post freelance jobs, workers post bids, employers award winning worker with job. This could be useful for my future life as a starving English major in the real world, I thought. So I joined and read some of the jobs posted and got intimidated. Thank goodness I don't have to think about that stuff for another year and a half, I thought. In May I saw I'd been invited to submit a proposal for some random project, and I thought, well, what's it hurt just to get some practice posting a bid. Have to start sometime. And promptly forgot about it. 

Then today I logged onto the email I never use, and saw I'd been awarded the proposal. Yes. $300 to update some book from the 1880s, and 12 days to do it. Whoops. 

So now I've got school in the morning, research project all afternoon, and ghostwriting a book in the evenings. 

As Stephen Fry says:

Lord-a-mercy, shut my mouth. 

***

Yes, I'm taking a class during the month of June. Heavy sigh. I really didn't want to. I mean, I really really really didn't want to. But it will save me from having to take thesis and Shakespeare at the same time as Brit Lit 1798-present (I just can't get over how relevant my chosen major is), so I'm taking the plunge. And it is Dr. W.'s last class ever before he retires. And I am one of only two students. Yep. Two whole students. Get ready for some absolutely rousing Coleridge discussions. 

***

In other news, today Mom and I went on a bike road. A pleasant, carefree, Sunday afternoon bike road around the mountain top. Until we rode by a massive beast of a German shepherd that was like two German shepherds packed together and we had to ride uphill past it and Mom's chain decided to break right then and I was just glad it wasn't the chain holding the dog to the tree (which I frown on as a rule, but approved of heartily just right then). When we got to the top of the hill and past the monster we didn't say anything for a while. For one, our lungs were shriveled ruins. For two, our mouths were dry as August cotton. When we finally could communicate, all we could manage was:

"That was a big dog."

"Uh-huh."

Blackball that road. 

***

And now I'm going to enjoy my remaining few hours as a free woman before I am consumed by work (and now I'm sidetracked because I just realized referred to myself as a woman instead of a girl. Umm). But before I leave - a poem (oh, you knew it was coming).

What is my apology for poetry?

The empty briar is swishing

When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face

Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

-Seamus Heaney, "Glanmore Sonnets"

Why should the fire die

After a day of slow-going research on poetry, I needed the actual stuff. 

Even reading quickly, it's time consuming just to read and summarize one article. Let alone the masses of books and websites and journals out there. So I spent the day immersed in a collection of interviews with poets from the early 1970s (in which Allen Ginsberg feverishly declared that all the oceans would be dead by 2000 and the apocalypse is here and if only people would recycle their bottles maybe we could avert disaster), and reading articles with titles like "Song, Ritual and Commemoration in Early Greek Poetry and Tragedy." 

So I needed to remember why I am doing this. I fished out my high school copy of Sound and Sense and re-read some of the stuff that made my heart stop four years ago, before I knew anything about poetry, or even liked it (yes, I used to hate the stuff. But I also used to loathe Kait, who has been a dear dear friend for nigh on ten years now. What can I say? I deal in extremes). I read "the mother," by Gwendolyn Brooks ("Abortions will not let you forget. / You remember the children you got that you did not get"), and discovered another villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop.

And then. I re-found "Sorting Laundry," one of those poems I love and cannot say why. I have loved it from the first reading when I was 16 or 17. The first stanza is my favorite.

Folding clothes,

I think of folding you

Into my life. 

Simple, no? And yet I love it so much I couldn't for the life of me be objective. I quote it to myself when I'm walking around the house, or going to class, or yes, folding laundry. And each time I hurt because I love this poem so much. Whew. Go read it, that's all I ask. Just don't tell me if you don't like it.

***

In other news, the smoothie obsession is still going strong (today's lunch = blueberry banana oatmeal, with the ubiquitous Greek yogurt and vanilla soymilk. Purple but good). Dad is watching Shane - oh good, here comes another brawl (I love Westerns). The Sweet Dog has not indulged his lust for chicken blood recently (though he does show up for breakfast each morning covered in mud and obscenely happy). And the moon is waxing, not waning. 

If you were to leave me, 

if I were to fold

only my own clothes,

a mountain of unsorted wash

could not fill

the empty side of the bed.