so long sweet summer

i can taste the victory...

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:58:15 GMT

highlights from this week:

1) you guys, i am so close to being done with my thesis that it is ridiculous. (and yet, paradoxically, i feel like it's never going to be finished.)

2) i got in to grad school. it's an m.a. program in english, so that's exciting. at least i know what i'm doing with the next year of my life.

&...that's really it. okay. back to the thesis.

a baffled king composing hallelujah

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:45:01 GMT

I'm alive.

I'm also on spring break and frantically trying to finish my senior thesis before the shiny NEW deadline of April 1. Sadly, I had been under the impression that my thesis was due (as all theses have been due in the past) by April 30 and that I did not have to defend it. Then, a month or so ago, there was an e-mail in my inbox that was all, 'Hey guys! Guess what? You have to defend! AND your thesis is due April 1! Okay hurry up & finish!'

But, you know, I'm on chapter 3 out of 5 and, God willing and the creek don't rise, I'll finish this chapter tomorrow. The whole thing's outlined, so that's doable, yeah?

So how are you guys?

reading

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 05:06:35 GMT

i'm looking for something to read, because i have a twenty-pager to write and finals to study for, and heaven knows i need something ELSE to do.

so: i'm feeling nonfiction. essays. anyone? any recommendations?

(and i'm open to novels too, if you have something really good that you think i haven't read...)

please tell me they're kidding...

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:29:04 GMT

this terrifies me beyond reason. and, if you have easily shocked sensibilities (i.e. you don't want to see people cavorting around in their underwear and cheesy sexual-political puns), please don't click on that link.

however, it does make me curious: will the promise of a guaranteed booty call lure people out of political apathy?

insomnia

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 06:12:17 GMT

what do you lot do when you can't sleep? i re-edit bad, pseudo-literary sufjan stevens fanfic that i wrote months ago ~~and should have buried somewhere.~~ someone slap me for this, .

disclaimer: casimir pulaski day is a beautiful song and should never have been butchered like this. i am a HACK. the lyrics to the song can be found here and if you have any sense, you'll go buy this song off itunes at once. it's worth the dollar. TRUST ME.

Goldenrod

Seven (October)

Goldenrod is, technically, a weed. This doesn’t stop him from gathering a huge bunch of it from the vacant lot across the street from his house. Gathering is a nice word. What he does is more frantic and savage, as if by rubbing his palms raw on their rough stalks he can make some kind of atonement, can draw the illness from your body as he draws these roots from the soil. He wants to bring violets, because they are your favorite, but violets don’t bloom this time of year. Precious little blooms here in October outside of the floral aisles of the grocery store. Goldenrod, though underappreciated, is stubborn.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. You smile at the goldenrod; laugh when he says he couldn’t find any violets. That laugh turns into tears when you see what else he brought: the world’s ugliest paperweight. You won it in your 4-H (Head, Health, Heart, Hands) club’s semi-annual Consumer Decision Making Contest, back in the fifth grade, and gave it to him in the seventh, when he said he could use some luck.

“I thought you might like it back,” he says, shifting awkwardly. “At least for a little while.”

Then you begin to cry in earnest and he really doesn’t know what to do.

Six (November)

You hear him coming up the stairs too late stow the book behind you and reach for another.

“Your dad let me in,” he says, hanging back by the door.

“That’s a good sign,” you tell him and smile with all your might. This is untrue and you both know it. Your father has hated him for years, a steady and growing resentment nursed against his only daughter’s best friend. He sees a boy who likes his girls too fast, his music too loud, his drink too much. You see the person who talked you through your first break up, took you to your first dance, held your hand at your mother’s funeral.

“What are you reading?” he asks, as he always does when he finds you up here.

“Kierkegaard,” you say and it’s the second time you’ve lied in his face. He looks at you for a moment and you look steadily back, because you don’t want to have to talk about this book and words like epithelial and sarcoma.

He doesn’t call you on it, just looks back for a moment and then offers an attempt at quotation: “In Love’s service, only wounded soldier’s can serve?”

“Right on,” and you exchange high fives, though you know the quote is actually Thorton Wilder’s and that the play doesn’t have a happy ending.

This is the point where things get hazy, because he’s moved closer than usual and then he leans in and kisses you.

It’s your first.

Five (December)

At the Tuesday night Bible Study (held always, every week since you’ve joined youth group, at Michael’s house) neither of you look at each other. There’s too much flux in life as it is, and this particular change would be hard to explain. He doesn’t want to have to face your father, or link your name with his in all the small town gossip. You don’t want to have to deal with pointing fingers and probing questions breaking into something that should be private, should be a refuge.

At the end of praise chorus singing and a lesson on faith and patience (Anna, Simeon, the most-often skipped portion of Luke’s version of the Christmas story), the youth minister opens the floor for prayer. Jessica (if it hadn’t been her, it would have been Michael) suggests they pray for you. The group circles you, hands resting as lightly as butterflies on your neck and shoulders, and people begin to rebuke the illness in Jesus’ name. He hovers in the back, unsure as always where he fits in this setting, only here because of you and Michael.

Amens are said; the crowd drifts into the warm kitchen for Cokes and pizza. A few people approach you and tell you that they’ve been praying for you, if you need anything… You say thank you and really mean it.

To his surprise, you put your arms around him and rest your head against his shoulder, even though Michael and some others are still putting up their guitars.

“Take me home,” you murmur into his collarbone, because you’re just so tired. They’ve been quoting the Gospels, but you’ve been reading Colossians.

Four (January)

Three days before school’s due to start back the two of you fall asleep on your bed, long after he’s supposed to have gone home. He wakes at three and tries to leave, but you stop him with: “Stay. Please,” and “I’m so scared.”

It’s the most innocent thing in the world, but all hell breaks loose when your father opens the door the next morning, never mind that your wrinkled Polo is still tucked in your jeans. Your father yells and he yells, and you shove your feet into your tennis shoes and tell them both to leave you alone.

You run downstairs and outside, let the screen door slam like you haven’t since your mother went. It’s been four months since the diagnosis, though, and you don’t make it out of the yard before you have to sit down.

Three (February)

Things by now mended with your father, you go to church on Sunday night to hear the children’s choir sing.

He stays home, watches Grey’s Anatomy, attempts to clean his room. He doesn’t get very far when he finds Mere Christianity buried under a pile of wrinkled shirts and Rolling Stones. You’d lent it to him last spring break and he’d read thirty pages and gotten sidetracked by something more interesting (a detailed article on the Wachowski Brothers, as it happens, but he doesn’t remember this). When he picks it up, intending to return it, your makeshift bookmark slides out. It’s an index card checklist of Things To Do Before I Die. Number 7 is “See the Great Wall of China” and, still stranded in the book, is a Polaroid of your mother at that very place.

He is still crying when he gets the call, but dry-eyed when he reaches the hospital. He saves his grief for the bathroom there, because he still believes it isn’t manly to cry.

Two (March)

You see, you don’t go home that night, but to the hospital, because things finally get worse. Your father called him without being asked to, because he is finally beginning to understand.

You die on the stupidest holiday of the Illinois calendar, in a room filled with people who love you.

When the nurse comes in, he has to look away and that’s when he sees the cardinal beating at the window. He learned in third grade that it was the state bird; his grandma says a bird hitting the window means death. He thinks, at this moment, that it means the end of everything beautiful.

One (April)

He shows up at your house a few weeks later while your father is at work. He sits under the tree in your front yard and talks, talks until he’s hoarse. He says all the things he never said to you (all the conversations that can’t be now: You never told him you’d been reading The Journal of the American Medical Association; He’d never told you he’d been reading the Bible) and then sits for a while. Your father arrives while he is still there, and for once, he doesn’t run away.

He approaches as your father gets out of the car and there is an awkward, utterly masculine moment where the two of them try to find some ground, however shaky, to have this conversation on.

“I’m sorry,” he finally offers. “I loved her, too.”

Then (and the utter miracle is, at last, that there is no shame at all in it), he begins to cry. That is when your father steps forward, touches his face and then takes him into his arms. He says, “I know, son, I know.”

All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window
All the glory when He took our place
But He took my shoulders and He shook my face
And He takes and He takes and He takes
-Sufjan Stevens, Casimir Pulaski Day.

“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit.”
-1 Peter 3:18

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 14:18:35 GMT

i read two books (meno and mandragola) on my reading list, but have yet to write them both up properly. mostly this is because i do not properly understand right opinion and knowledge, though i think it might be the same as in the republic and i have no clue what machiavelli is on about in his play. also, i am lazy.

i have to go work now.

reading list of DOOM

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 23:31:08 GMT

one of the ~~dreadful parts~~ benefits of my program is that, to graduate, we have to pass an oral exam over a set of books we read. this exam, called the exit interview, takes place the spring of our junior year. we select the books, with the generous help of an advisor, from a really long list of every book that the people in the great texts department consider a 'great text'. each book is assigned a point value; our list must be worth sixty points, roughly divided over three time periods. that is, twenty points for ancient, twenty for medieval, and twenty for modern.

my exit interview will occur this spring. i have twenty-seven books to read. i have, as of this post, not read any of them. that means, sometime between now and april i must read, outline, and take copious notes on twenty-seven books. in hope that it will motivate me, i'm posting my list below. i'm planning on keeping track on livejournal of which books i've read and which i haven't, and posting when i finish a book. hopefully when i DO read something, some of you lot will be able to discuss it with me (if you've read it) or just say something along the lines of: "one down, twenty-six more to go! go get 'em, tiger!" (if you haven't).

without further ado:
books read: 11
books left: 16

Classical
Herodotus, Histories
Plato, Meno
Plato, Phaedo
Plato, Phaedrus
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Homer, Odyssey
Aristotle, Politics
Euripides, Medea
Athanasius, On The Incarnation

Medieval
Guillaume de Lorris, Romance of the Rose
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church
Marie de France, Lais
Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances
Machiavelli, Mandragola
Unknown, Beowulf
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Montaigne, Essays (Selections)
Boccaccio, Decameron

Modern
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Alistair McIntyre, After Virtue
Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality
The Federalist Papers
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Descartes, Discourse

i find the map and draw a straight line

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 04:32:55 GMT

People always ask me what I’m doing this summer (people generally being other people’s mothers, at church or in line at the grocery store) and I sort of foist them off with a sheepish, “Oh, nothing.” So here’s the real answer to the question:

What have I been doing? I’ve been practicing resurrection.

I’ve been re-learning (or rather, learning, because I’m unsure that I ever knew how to begin with) how to pray. I’d forgotten (or maybe never learned?) that praying, like writing, is sweaty, backbreaking work: that it involves patience and attention and discipline, all the things I lack in full these days. I wish I could say, like Jacob, that I wrestled with the angel in the watches of the night and found Him to be the Lord. More frequently, I wrestle with the darkness and find it to be myself. I’m learning though. Good Lord, I’m learning.

I’m listening to too much Snow Patrol and to Gillian Welch on repeat. I’m saturating myself with other people’s words (mysteries, theology, cookbooks, grammar textbooks) and emerging with some idea of what was broken in what I wrote last summer, and how to fix it.

I’m learning (little by little, inch by kicking inch) to live more purposefully, to listen more fully, to talk less selfishly.

So what about you: what have you been doing? Not, where are you working and how was your vacation, but how are you? What are you doing?

mysteries

Fri, 19 May 2006 18:14:22 GMT

i'm looking for something in the way of mystery novels to read. any ideas? to clarify: i'm a bit picky. mysteries generally bore me unless i find the characters interesting in some way.
past ones i have enjoyed:
dorothy sayers' peter wimsey
the amelia peabody series by elizabeth peters
martha grimes' emma graham books
sherlock holmes
laurie r. king's mary russell series

any recommendations? any awesome books besides mysteries that i should be reading also?

into this wild abyss

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 04:39:55 GMT

quote from the footnotes of our edition of paradise lost, commenting on a passage where Eve tells Adam she is going to store fruit: Too philosophical (i.e. scientific) for Eve, thought Thyer. But it is quite appropriate for a superintelligent prelapsarian woman to know about food storage. Eve stores only food that improves by keeping.

the violent bear it away

Sat, 24 Dec 2005 21:10:39 GMT

yesterday was my birthday, and it was a good one. thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday on phone or facebook...especially those who called long distance! you are all very sweet. also, i recieved both haircut, cappuccino and the new joan didion book, so i'm a lucky girl.♥

i hope all of you have a blessed and merry christmas, so here's some flannery o'connor to help you out:

God told the world he was going to send it a king and the world waited. The world thought, a golden fleece will do for His bed. Silver and gold and peacock tails, a thousand suns in a peacock's tail will do for his crib. His mother will ride on a four-horned white beast and use the sunset for a cape. She'll trail it behind her over the ground and let the world pull it to pieces, a new one every evening.

Jesus came on cold straw, Jesus was warmed by the breath of an ox. "Who is this?" the world said. "Who is this blue-cold child and this woman, plain as the winter? Is this the Word of God, this blue-cold child? Is this His will, this plain winter-woman?" The world said, "Love cuts like the cold wind and the will of God is plain as the winter."

spam spam spammity spam

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:06:34 GMT

no pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

you want to know what's weird? i have kept all of my clothes i brought home from school neatly segregated from the clothes that i found in my closet here when i returned. there's no reason in particular for this, except that i think i'm just strange.

eleven things i want, in no particular order:

one. some james joyce to read.
two. a cup of truly excellent cappucino.
three. very depressing post-war hp fic, heavy on the literary pretension.
four. my fountain pen, which i left in waco.
five. baylor friends. here. now.
six. some decent red lipstick.
seven. joan didion's newest book.
eight. a haircut.
nine. the willpower to write something, rather than moping around reading dorothy sayers.
ten. a jack johnson cd.
eleven. t.s. eliot. (in a box, with a bow on top)

update update tralala

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:34:45 GMT

mostly this is just me saying "i'm alive" and "whee! look at the new layout!"

being home is ~~boring~~ nice. that was tacky of me to say. i do like being home, even if it is... uneventful.

help.

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 04:01:10 GMT

there's a lyric (i know it's real!) that goes something like "broken hearts are destined to burst like static into late-night hymnals" and i want to know who sings it and what the rest of the words are. i've tried googling it and couldn't find anything. someone have any ideas?

yet another meme...

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 16:42:22 GMT

If you read this, please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want – good or bad – BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you.

all the glory that the lord has made

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:33:41 GMT

all who have heard "casimir pulaski day": what does the navy yard bit mean?

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 04:16:08 GMT

i'd like to marry someone a lot like walker percy.

that is all.

also, i survived the worst of this week, but you guys knew that. i mean, i'm posting, aren't i?

EDIT:
totally lied. i'd marry him, too:
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/s/stevens_sufjan-04/

drowning in the rain

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 06:38:01 GMT

i am torn between a desire for t.s. eliot and one for artificial sweetener. and maybe depressing minor character-centric hp fic. i won't be getting any of them, because i need to go to bed. last night i wrote two pages of a creepy little story set in a sort of alternate victorian period. sometimes my subconscious even freaks me out.

i have five finals, three projects, and three papers to do in the next three weeks. my life=ninth circle, but somehow i'm not as upset as i should be. for my med lit final project, i talked my prof into letting me write poems: one for each of the nine circles of hell, and seven for each terrace of purgatory. black dress will be for the terrace of the envious. now that i've gotten myself into this, i have to actually write the dratted things...

i'm tired; i think i'll go to bed.

emilytheodd, i am glad you had a lovely birthday. i mailed you a present, but since it's me it's going to be late. oh well... sorry dear. at least you have something to look forward to!

cold weather makes me happy.

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:40:01 GMT

it's cold. like, 50 degrees outside, which to those of you who live in the north is probably nothing. to me it's christmas weather, because this is texas and it hardly ever snows. valentine's day my senior year it snowed for about an hour and the schools let people out early. these things just don't happen here.

in any case, i'm sporting cowboy(girl?) boots and a peacoat. we're throwing a surprise birthday party for a friend this evening, so i'm going with luis to get a cake after french class. i <3 surprise parties. i also have pictures of san antonio from our crazy weekend, but i haven't uploaded them yet.

/boring entry

wake me up when october ends

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 05:31:36 GMT

Never and never, my girl riding far and near
In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood
Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,
My dear, my dear,
Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year
To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

dylan thomas makes me dream of autumn and forests changing colors with fallen leaves heaped like funeral pyres. i want autumn, real autumn and not this cheap imitation eighty degree weather. texas weather is such a tease; promises one thing and delivers nothing but an open hand and more flirtation. i’m tired of papers and piles of homework and an endless treadmill that delivers as little as the weather.

time to sleep, and season my nature.

the tenth circle, the terminally nerdy

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 05:34:55 GMT

i was sitting in my aquinas course yesterday and it was pretty much business as usual, except for the fact that we watched ten or so minutes of slacker at the end of class because louis mackey was in it and because dr. m is mad cool. mackey is dr. m's 'intellectual grandfather' (in other words, the thesis advisor of dr. m's thesis advisor) and was an aquinas scholar. justification for everything, eh?

then, as we're going through the summa dr. m starts snickering. "thomas famously never got angry at people and lacerated them verbally," he tells us. "there's one notable exception in article 8. look!"

we turn, and it reads "David of Dinant, who stupidly believed God to be prime matter..."

and i thought, i am doomed. we are all doomed: we are in some weird level of hell and don't even know it because it should NOT be funny, it isn't funny, and everyone is laughing... including me. i blame it on slogging through the summa, but wow. nerdiness^1000

EDIT:
a lovely mackey quote: Mackey observed that, unlike C.S. Lewis, he had never felt that he had any easily formulable, final answers. As his son remembers it, Mackey then went on: "I only know one thing: that in the Credo, there is a change in the verb at the end. The creed begins with the verb credo, 'I believe,' proceeds to list the matters of fact, as it were, of faith, but at the very end the verb changes to one of hope. I look with hope for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come."

rofl

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 03:19:34 GMT

one of my profs sent me this, and it's as funny as hell:

Shining: A Romantic Comedy by Stanley Kubrick

http://waxy.org/random/video/shining_redux.mov

stupid haiku meme

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 23:38:58 GMT

because it made me laugh... stolen from emily.

college field trips are the best

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 04:10:50 GMT

listening to scotty and luis sing "raoul style", which mostly consists in overenunciating everything and pitching their voices higher and whinier than usual. tomorrow i go to this: http://www.nd.edu/~ndethics/events/jit.shtml, which means i have to get up at six so we can all make it to the airport in time. i'm excited about this... i can hardly believe i'm getting to go with all of my friends. (and baylor's paying! woohoo!)

now i'm off, not to go to bed, but to continue with the impromptu POtO sing along. we're singing "past the point of no return" now...

surviving just fine

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 22:07:12 GMT

we're doing well here. campus is deserted, so it feels a bit like we're in a zombie movie. there were only ten or so cars in the collins parking lot when i drove by and normally you can't get a space there for love or money. it's really windy here but it looks like we're out of danger. however, i just got off the phone with my parents, who are right in the path of this thing. they're without power and we might possibly lose our gazebo due to the violent gusts of wind, but they seemed quite cheerful. thanks to everyone for your concern. please keep all of us here in your prayers. we still haven't heard from some of our friends in the affected areas.

and, something a bit lighter:

if you're reading this, quote some shakespeare in your journal:
Thyself and thy belongings
Are not thine own so proper as to waste
Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, ’t were all alike
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch’d
But to fine issues, nor Nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use.
-measure for measure (a.k.a. best shakespeare play evAH!)

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