Photobooth and I go to an all-day meeting

Dude, I need a haircut.

You'd be awake at 4 in the morning, too

If you had this song stuck in your head:

I look like a Hermione, but I identify as a Luna

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!

<

Said Ravenclaw, "We'll teach those whose intelligence is surest."

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron's affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine's editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter
Quiz ever created.

Get Sorted Now!

Reviving Ophelia

Sometime around the fourth or fifth grade, my girl scout troop participated in a sleep over at the Museum of Science in Boston. It was a rowdy night, and my memories of the event are a haze of petrifide dinosaur poo, cutaway models of the reproductive system, and the view of the city skyline after dark.

One memory, however, stands out with crystal clarity: I am lying in my sleeping bag near the "Welcome to the Universe" exhibit, my feet too hot inside my pink Dr. Dentons, my perpetually clogged nostrils making intermittant whistling noises in the dark. It is after the offical lights out. I'm staring at a dimly lit model of the solar system, listening to whispers and giggles in the surrounding darkness. I can't remember what came before this moment, but I know that I have just done or said something incredibly stupid.

I make myself a promise: someday, I will be cool. I will wear a black leather jumpsuit with massive shoulderpads and I will have hair like Max Headroom. I will live in an apartment with high ceilings and concrete floors and a view of the city skyline, and I will never say anything stupid. And most importantly, I will invent a time travel machine. I will come back in time to this very moment, and I will tell myself what not to say, and what not to do, and I will never, ever, have to be embarrased by what a dork I used to be. Because I will have always been cool. This will never have happened.

The Nora of 2007, however, has much more in common with the post-nasal dripping, feety pajama wearing Nora of 1987 than she does with the plastic haired saviour of the future. So, in aid to any future time travellers (I'm not giving up on that leather jumpsuit yet!), I have compiled the following list in order to aid in distinuishing the 10-year-old and thirty-year-old me.

Then:
Mom nags me to clean my room.

Now:
Mom nags me to update my blog.


Then:
I have a disconcerting habit of humming to myself, and live at least half the time in an elaborate fantasy world.

Now:
Hm.


Then:
I am tall for my age, with unkempt hair and a goofy grin I have trouble controlling.

Now:
I'm um, taller?


Then:
My career ambitions vaccillate between artist, advocate for the disenfranchised (mostly kittens), and mad scientist inventor.

Now:
I'm pretty sure I don't have the right degree to become a mad scientist inventor. I had this really great idea the other day for fried beer on a stick, though (you could deep fry beer ice cream! Then put it on a stick! Don't steal this idea!).


Then:
I have trouble finishing things, to the constant frustration of my parents, my teachers, and myself.

Now:

You Are The Fool

You are a fascinating person who is way beyond the concerns of this world. Young at heart, you are blissfully unaware of any dangers ahead. You are a true wanderer - it has be difficult finding your place in this world. Full of confidence, you are likely to take a leap of faith. Your fortune: You are about to embark on a new phase in your life. This may mean changing locations, jobs, friends, or love status. You are open about what the future will bring, and free of worry. You have made your peace with fate, and you're ready to start down your new path.

What Tarot Card Are You?

Another poem

The White Fires of Venus
by Denis Johnson

We mourn this senseless planet of regret,
droughts, rust, rain, cadavers
that can't tell us, but I promise
you one day the white fires
of Venus shall rage: the dead,
feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each
of us will have his resurrected one to tell him,
"Greetings. You will recover
or die. The simple cure
for everything is to destroy
all the stethosscopes that will transmit
silence occasionally. The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
solitude as one admits
the bayonet: gracefully,
now that already
it pierces the heart.
Living one: you move among many
dancers and don't know which
you are the shadow of;
you want to kiss your own face in the mirror
but do not approach,
knowing you must not touch one
like that. Living
one, while Venus flares
O set the cereal afire,
O the refrigerator harboring things
that live on into death unchanged."

They know all about us on Andromeda,
they peek at us, they see us
in this world illumined and pasteled
phonily like a bus station,
they are with us when the streets fall down fraught
with laundromats and each of us
closes himself in his small
San Francisco without recourse.
They see you with your face of fingerprints
carrying your instructions in gloved hands
trying to touch things, and know you
for one despairing, trying to touch the curtains,
trying to get your reflection mired in alarm tape
past the window of this then that dark
closed business establishment.
The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music
converged on by ambulance sirens
and they understand everything.
They're on your side. They forgive you.

I want to turn for a moment to those my heart loves,
who are as diamonds to the Andromedans,
who shimmer for them, lovely and useless, like diamonds:
namely, those who take their meals at soda fountains,
their expressions lodged among the drugs
and sunglasses, each gazing down too long
into the coffee as though from a ruined balcony.
O Andromedans they don't know what to do
with themselves and so they sit there
until they go home where they lie down
until they get up, and you beyond the light years know
that if sleeping is dying, then waking
is birth, and a life
is many lives. I love them because they know how
to manipulate change
in the pockets musically, these whose faces the seasons
never give a kiss, these
who are always courteous to the faces
of presumptions, the presuming streets,
the hotels, the presumption of rain in the streets.
I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become.

Quiet

I'm having trouble sitting still. There are -- let me count them -- seven windows open in my browser right now, one unfinished email waiting (five if you count the ones I'm intending to write, but havent started), and (if we might go outside my computer screen for a moment) two open books and a magazine perched on the armrest next to me. I can't concentrate on any of them, but I can't put any of them away, either. I'm just too restless, too unsettled, and I can't let them go.

So, here's a poem to quiet me down:



In the Garden, by Anne Pierson Wiese


On the edge of the pond a great white
egret catches catches five-inch fish, it's trick neck
now a bone-china handle just thick
enough to curve without cracking -- sleight

of spine and cup -- now a javelin in flight
traveling with frugal grace: quickness
made slow by the instinct that missing
what's aimed for's what comes of haste, or eyes

too big for your stomach. Among the weeds' dead
shoots giant carp feed--a tea party of stiff-
tongued brutes sipping algaed shadows, exempt
by size from a predator whose slight kisses
yield up what's small enough to swallow instead
of choking alone on a single wish.

It's too darn hot

Summer days, in their full bloom of sticky hotness, are rarely seen in San Francisco. This week, however, we've had an embarrasment of riches -- a string of miserable, moist, still-hot-in-the shade days. Of course, according to my google weather bar, it's only 77 degrees, with 35% humidity. But we're San Franciscans! Don't you understand we're not made for this sort of punishment!?

My office has no windows, and only one door. The uninsulated ceiling is only inches from the hot tar roof above. I've ben here two hours, and I may have already bonded with my office chair at a molecular level. Send lemonade, Stat!

Mind the Spherical Voltage Oblongata

More About the Cat's Habits

The cat has a new game he likes to play: One of us (usually me) tries to go to bed. The other then sneaks outside through the cat door and lets loose with a shocking and bewildering array of nocturnal noises, concluding a few plantive mews at the bedroom window. The one in bed then cries out "be quiet kitten, that won't work this time."

"That's right," says her boyfriend. "You'd better not let him make a habit of this."

The one outside then proceeds to make a few more intermittent mews, mews with just enough time elapsed between them to allow one to (theoretically) begin to drift off. The one in bed's boyfriend may have gone to sleep by this point, or may be off getting a glass of water, or maybe it's one o'clock in the afternoon, and only those who have trouble sleeping nights are abed. Anyway the mewing continues. And the one in bed's willpower crumbles, and the window is opened, and purr purr purr purr purr, the cat was never cuter.

And then the window is closed, the cat runs outside, and the game begins anew. Finis. (Except not really).

Statistics

Hours of sleep I got last night: 3
Hours before I have to teach: 4
Ratio of clean clothes to dirty in my bedroom right now: roughly 1:five billion
Days since I last showered: two? three? ten? I'm not sure.

At least the cat's happy

I just woke up from my second nap today. The cat is a major fan of my new sleep schedule. The rest of the day, he prances and demands and hisses, but once I'm recumbant on the couch we become the best of friends. For the last two hours, he slept on the open face of Aristotle's Metaphysics, while I dreamed that I found a baby that no one else could see. Once I realized this, I started wearing said baby on my head. You know, because I could.

But now I've got to get back to all the other things I was supposed to do today. Like laundry, and lecture notes, and other things beginning with 'l' (lesbianism! lying! learning Latvian!).

Hypnogogia

Oh, I can't sleep. Or at least I can't sleep during normal sleeping hours. Just strange, sleepy person times. Last night I tossed and turned until the wee hours, only to sleep the (sunny and springlike) day away. And now I'm up again, restless, reading and listening to all the funny night sounds (some rowdy street noise, but mostly just the rustling of the cat as he searches for new nooks to nap in, and the stompy stompy stompy of the upstairs neighbor as he trundles out of bed to run some nocturnal errand).

Actually, for all my offness, I think I'm actually sleeping more than usual. I'll probably go to bed pretty soon, this in spite of the fact that i was hardly awake at all today (I crawled to bed at eight this morning and slept 'til eleven, then went back to bed and slept from two til sixish. And this was after a tossy-and-turny but nonetheless moderately sleep-filled night). Mending bones, I'm learning, is exhausting work. And I'm so out of it, even when I am awake. But between the meds and the mending, it's no wonder my brain's hardly stirring. You don't want to know how long this has taken me to write (and how many times I accidently typed 'sleep' in lieu of some other word).

Oh, I was going to write more, but my brain's shutting down now. Off to bed.

Whoa. It's Wednesday? Whoa.

The weird thing about having my mother here is that, like, 90% of this blog's readers are spending all day, every day with me (how large are mom and Brian that they make up 90%? How small must my other reader(s) be to make up 10%? Oh, this is impossible, and strangely discomfiting).

And yet! And yet not a day goes by that someone, some 45th percentile doesn't say, "hey, why haven't you updated your blog?" And I'll say, "I'm right here! Ask me how my day was! Tell me about your socks and I'll blog about it!" But do they comply? No. They go right back to being un-anecdotal, threading beads or knitting or whatever it is you do when you're keeping the newly surgiated company.

Brian just doddered in and asked if I was ready for bed. "Go away," says I. "I'm blogging!"

"About time," says he, taking of my shoes (I'm pretty good with most dexterous things, post surgery, but my shoes are very far away). "Come to bed soon, though. I'm turning off the lights and you might hurt yourself." I scoff. Our bedroom, dear 10th percentile, is very straightforward. No moats or casements or aligators or catamounts. I will not hurt myself. My collarbone has been resectioned, not my in-the-dark-navigation bits.

So anyway, that's that. Lump gone. Clavicle resectioned (is that even the right word? Sounds off). Blogger sleepy. Readers restless.

Busy busy busy

Brian's been nagging me to post more ("'Pondering!?'", he says. "You're still pondering your silly Quaker tree?"), and even though I have no new argyle stories to tell, I'm caving.

So. How you been? I am busy. So busy, in fact, that I have become paralyzed by the sense of my own business, unable to finish any task, be it laundry or course proposals, because don't you know I'm busy!? I must lie here and eat goldfish crackers, so busy I am.

Course proposals for next semester are due on Monday. On Friday, I go in for a second round of surgery (remember that schwannoma way back when? Yeah, that). Thursday, my mom arrives from out of town (hi mom!). I'm hoping the house will be at least moderately clean by then (she's not a judgemental woman, my mother, but I don't want her to feel like she's raised some sort of squalid so-and-so). And Aristotle! I've got to read me some Aristotle before Friday, and get some percocet-proof lecture notes together for my first post-surgery class next week. But have I done any of this? Of course not, I'm far too busy. Oh, and plus? The prospect of surgery has me a bit scared. Not that there's any risk or scariness this time 'round. But my lizard brain doesn't know that. My lizard brain says needles are bad. And knives. And those drugs that steal your consciousness away. Oh, ack. I'll stop now.

Pondering

Its been raining like crazy lately, huge storms replete with thunder and lightning and hailstones like gum balls. On the way to the grocery store tonight, I noticed that a huge branch (half a tree, really) had fallen just outside the neighborhood friend's school, blocking the sidewalk in front completely. Which makes me wonder: if a tree falls outside a Quaker school, does it make a sound?

(Insert Wookie Sound Here)

Star Wars Horoscope for Taurus

You are a dependable creature, but you do tend to be stubborn. You like material possessions and love to win at games. You hate being bossed around or losing. You may succumb to your physical strength when upset. Star wars character you are most like: Chewbacca

What Is Your Star Wars Horoscope?

Seriously, though, how would you spell the wookie roar? Mweaaaaaah? Rwea-a-a-a? Mehraaah?

P.S. More information about wookie roars can be found on the internet

[EDITED TO ADD: G-g-g-g-geeaaah?]

How I spent my Wednesday morning

10 Zen Monkeys has posted an article entitled 5 Freaky Muppet Videos complete with YouTube links and videos. If you're anything like me, this'll send you trolling through YouTube for hours, until you finally dissolve into a puddle of tears watching Deborah Harry sing "The Rainbow Connection" with Kermit the Frog.

Words fail him

From Salon.com's War Room:

What Americans really think of Bush

Twice a year, pollsters for the Pew Research Center ask Americans to say the "one word that best describes" their "impression of George W. Bush." As late as February 2005, the top two volunteered responses were "honest" and "good." The new top two: "incompetent" and "arrogant."

"Honest" has fallen to No. 3. Rounding out the top 10: "good," "idiot," "integrity," "leader," "strong," "stupid" and "ignorant." "Ass" checks in at No. 13, "president" sits at No. 18, and "unconfident" brings up the rear at No. 32.

-- Tim Grieve

What's funny to me is that the pollsters don't prompt at all -- they just ask for one word (and accept two, but don't prompt for the second). And since the last election, the list of words that jump out of people's mouths at the sound of his name has just been getting longer and longer, with nineteen words between "honest" and "selfish" in February 2004 and thirty one between "incompetent" and "tough" in March 2006. The longer the man's in office the harder it gets to sum up just what the American people think of him.

Socks and Monsters

For a few months now, Brian has been contemplating the aquisition of some argyle socks. As with all major life changes, this sartorial switcheroo has been carefully pondered, researched, discussed with friends and significant others. "I've been thinking about getting some argyle socks," he said to me one day. "I think they'd go nicely with all the corduroy I've been wearing."

Of course, not everyone was supportive. Our friend Jason called them old man socks. I just teased and brought it up (repeatedly) over dinner with friends.

So the weeks went by, and like many people finding themselves at life's crossroads, Brian stalled out for a while. H&M's socks had skulls on them. The socks at the fancy shoe store near our house were twenty bucks a pop. Then he needed a new hard drive, and then a new planer. And the Search for Sock fell by the wayside, for the most part. So far, he only has one pair (selected for him, as a gesture of support, by the aforementioned Jason). But argyle remains a funny little obsession with him, and it's become one of our little rituals: window shopping wherever we go, looking for argyle socks, and then judging said socks on various criteria to determine whether or not they are in fact the argyle that he is looking for (pink and brown argyle will not do. Neither will argyle impersonaters that lazily substitute mere diamond shapes for the more complex traditional pattern. I'm looking at you, Donna Karan).

Anyway. That's that.

Today Brian and I went to the grocery store twice -- once for dinner things and once for juice. On the way back with our dinner things (pasta sauce has been on sale lately, it's all we eat. Well, we put it on pasta), Brian and I started talking about cats, and how he'd read this article about this parasite common in domesticated cat poo that causes "mass personality changes" in affected populations, the most consistent being "guilt proneness (a form of neuroticism)." Apparently when this same parasite makes its way into rats, it causes the rats to become "active, less cautious and more likely to be eaten by a cat, where the parasite completes its life cycle." And Brian was telling me that this isn't the only parasite like this! There's another one that affects ants, and needs to complete its life cycle inside a sheep. So it actually causes ants to climb up stalks of grass so that they'll be chomped up! Just like that!

So, yeah. Apparently Brian's infected with some sort of argyle parasite. It's just not ready to complete the cycle yet. And pink and brown just won't do.

Poor Brian. This is what he gets for bugging me to update my blog more.

In other news

It's time to give the cat his monthly flea treatment.



The first time we tried to do it (a mere dab of Frontline between the shoulder blades), he howled so loud and long that I worried our upstairs neighor would think we were strangling the little guy. And for months after, just the merest waft of fleagle treatment was enough to send the clawed beastie scurrying for the cat door. But these last few months, we've had it down to a science: one of us distracts the Monster with pets and treats while the other -- in the next room -- cracks open the dread treatment. Then while the boheamoth's attention is elsewhere, squirt! Another thriving flea metropolis is no more.

Hello, you.

Oh, it's been too long. After last November's post-every day challenge, I swore I'd never neglect this blog again. So easy, this posting every day! So rewarding! So connected to the outside world I was! But then November was over. And with nothing to say and no reason to say nothing anyway, posting fell by the wayside.

So, what have I been up to? Hard to say. Teaching, but I don't want to discuss that too much on these here internets (my students are all web-literate, as are my bosses). Writing, but nothing too noteworthy (click here for some oldish news). Organizing my vaguely ordered stacks of paper into actual labeled and color-coded files. Updating my CV and dreaming of full-time work. The mundane day to day of growing up, in other words.

Figures

So I just went on the library's website to see if they have the book on procrastination that I was looking at in the bookstore today. Turns out, they have five copies. And every single one is overdue.

Top Ten: The Final Few

Still one short. There are a few more good books I read in 2006, but great? The best? I'm not entirely sure.


8. A Loeb Classical Library Reader, by the Loeb Classical Library

V. Detrahere igitur alteri aliquid et hominem hominis
incommodo suum commodum augere magis est contra naturam
quam mors, quam paupertas, quam dolor, quam cetera,
quae possunt aut corpori accidere aut rebus externis.
Nam principio tollit convictum humanum et societatem.
Si enim sic erimus affecti, ut propter suum quisque emolumentum
spoliet aut violet alterum, disrumpi necesse est,
eam quae maxime est secundum naturam, humani generis
societatem. Ut, si unum quodque membrum sensum hunc
haberet, ut posse putaret se valere, si proximi membri valetudinem
ad se traduxisset, debilitari et interire totum
corpus necesse esset, sic, si unus quisque nostrum ad se rapiat
commoda aliorum detrahatque, quod cuique possit,
emolumenti sui gratia, societas hominum et communitas
evertatur necesse est.

V. Well then, for a man to take something from his
neighbour and to profit by his neighbour’s loss is more contrary
to Nature than is death or poverty or pain or anything
else that can affect either our person or our property. For,
in the first place, injustice is fatal to social life and fellowship
between man and man. For, if we are so disposed that
each, to gain some personal profit, will defraud or injure
his neighbour, then those bonds of human society, which
are most in accord with Nature’s laws, must of necessity be
broken. Suppose, by way of comparison, that each one of
our bodily members should conceive this idea and imagine
that it could be strong and well if it should draw off to itself
the health and strength of its neighbouring member, the
whole body would necessarily be enfeebled and die; so, if
each one of us should seize upon the property of his neighbours
and take from each whatever he could appropriate
to his own use, the bonds of human society must inevitably
be annihilated.

9. Only Revolutions, by Mark Danielewski

A rounding circles with hooks,
shimmying duckily, if
the Bentley Mulliner blasts clouds
now of hotoil seizure. Rusty shrapnel
plincking Picnickers, Fishers, Weary
Laborers failing at leisure
Towards worse
By Bobo to Hushpuckena
By Dinkering Eskimo Chickens.

Allways away with Sam.
Even if I've scraggly hair. Gross
overalls. Have to pick my nose.
He's why September never goes.
Our Subaru SVX releases curves.
I'm a thousand Septembers. And he's
all deserts east when the payloads explode.

Top Ten: the Year-end Rush

I know, I know, the year's almost over, and I'm only 5 in. And unfortunately, I've lent some of the best books I've read this year out, and can't quote directly from them (the hazards of being a best book, I suppose). So I might end up falling a bit short. Regardless: onwards!

6. Number 6 gets included on the list on a bit of a technicality -- the book came out in hardcover in 2005, but the paperback came out in 2006. And the publicity resulting from the publication of the paperback brought me to one of the best readings I went to in 2006. So there.

Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link

Jeremy runs all the way, slapping his old track shoes against the sidewalk for the pleasure of the jar, for the sweetness of the sting. He likes the rough cottony ache in his lungs. His coach says you have to be part masochist to enjoy something like running. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Its something to exploit.
Talis opens the door. She grins, although he can tell she's been crying, too. She's wearing a T-shirt that says I'm So Goth I Shit Tiny Vampires.
"Hey," Jeremy says. Talis nods. Talis isn't so Goth, at least not as far as Jeremy or anyone else knows. Talis just has a lot of T-shirts. Shes an enigma wrapped in a mysterious T-shirt. A woman once said to Calvin Coolidge, "Mr. President, I bet my husband that I could get you to say more than two words." Coolidge said, "You lose." Jeremy can imagine Talise as Calvin Coolidge in a former life. Or maybe she was one of those dogs that don't bark. A basenji. Or a rock. A dolmen. There was an episode of 'The Library,' once, with some sinister dancing dolmens in it.

7. Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
Graphic lifted from Salon's review, as I've lent out my copy

Maeby Baby

Welcome to the world, Georgia Maeby Green Rogalski! . You couldn't have chosen a better set of parents. Way to go, kid!

Home again

It's 3:16 AM here in Boston. That's just after midnight my time. Brian and I actually went to bed hours ago, but I woke up at 2:30, far too awake to be in bed or even think of sleeping.

So now I'm downstairs with the dog, who thinks all rules must be suspended, if I'm home and we're up so late. He keeps trying to climb into my chair with me (instead of staying in his chair, as he's trained to do), and he's sniffing around, convinced that treats are afoot. Oh, poor thing, he's blinking so sleepily.

Anyway. Happy Christmas(ish)! And to all a good night.

More towards the top ten

5.
Light and Shade: New and Selected Poetry, by Tom Clark

Vagabondage

Summer night
klang of stars


inner acoustic


water diamonds
around
the oars

Towards a Top Ten, Take Two

3. The Ladies of Grace Adieu, and other stories, by Suzanna Clarke

There were horned heads, antlered heads, heads carapiced like insects' heads, heads as puckered and soft as a mouldy orange; there were mouths pulled wide by tusks, mouths stretched out into trumpets, mouths that grinned, mouths that gaped, mouths that dribbled; there were bats' ears, cats' ears, rats' whiskers; there were ancient eyes in young faces, large, dewy eyes in old worn faces, there were eyes that winked and blinked in parts of the anatomy where I had never before expected to see any eyes at all. The goblins were lodged in every part of the house; there was scarcely a crack in the wainscotting which did not harbour a staring eye, scarcely a gap in the banisters without a nose or snout poking through it. They prodded us with their horny fingers, they pulled our hair and pinched us black and blue. Dido and I ran out of End-Of-All-Hope House, jumped up upon Quaker's back and rode away into the winter woods.

Snow fell thick and fast from the sea-green sky.

4. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party

A man in a topiary maze cannot judge of the twistings and turnings, and which avenuue might lead him to the heart; while one who stands above, on some pleasant prospect, looking down upon the labyrinth, is reduced to watching the bewildered circumnavigations of the tiny victim through obvious coils -- as the gods, perhaps, looked down on the besieged and blood-sprayed Troy from the saftey of their couches, and thought mortals weak and foolish while they themselves reclined in comfort, and had only to snap to call Ganymede to their side with nectar decanted.

So I, now, with the vantage of years, am sensible to my foolishness, my blindness, as a child. I cannot think of my blunders without a shriveling of the inward parts -- not merely the dessication attendant on shame, but also the aggravation of remorse that I did not demand more explanation, that I did not sooner take my mother by the hand, and --

I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.

I do not know what we may do, to know another better.

Towards a Top Ten

So the year is drawing to a close, and, never one to pass up the opportunity to reccommend books, I thought I'd list my ten favorites. In the interest of imposing rules (so as not to range all over as I am wont to do), I limited myself to books published in the last year.

I do hate ranking things though, so these aren't in any sort of order, just the order that they come to mind. And in the interest of not exhausting you, poor reader, with too much reading material to take in at once, I'll be posting my selections, with excerpts from each, in dribs and drabs over the next few days.

These first two seem like they should go together. I'm often introducing books to one another in this way, placing them side by side on the bookshelf as if I were seating them next to one another at a dinner party (and so this is why Elizabeth Cook's Achilles can be found between the Fagles Illiad and Tom Clark's Light and Shade. I do have a system, after all).

1. What is the What, by Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng.

I was sitting with my mother, helping her boil water. I had found kindling and was feeding the fire, and she was approving of the help I was providing. It was unusual for a boy of any age to be as helpful as I was. There is an intimacy between mother and son, a son of six or seven. At that age a boy can still be a boy, can be weak and melt into his mother's arms. For me, though, this is the last time, for tomorrow I will not be a boy. I will be something else -- an animal desperate only to survive. I know I cannot turn back so I savor these days, these moments when I can be small, can do small favors, can crawl beneath my mother and blow on the dinner fire. I like to think I was luxuriating in the final moment of childhood when the sound came.

2. Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, translated by Anne Carson.

Midnight my ruin began.
Supper was over, sweet sleep was drifting down,
after songs and dances and sacrafice
my husband lay in our chamber,
his spear on its peg.
He was not watching
for Greek sailors
to come walking into Troy.

I was doing my hair,
I was binding my hair,
staring down into the bottomless lake of my mirror,
before I fell into bed --
a scream cut the town,
a roar swept the street...

I left my bed in just a robe
like a Spartan girl
to supplicate holy Artemis. Useless! Sorrow!
I saw my husband killed.
They drove me down
to the salt sea.
Then I looked back as the ship set sail,
pulling me further and further from Troy
and I fainted away.

On the killing of darlings

The hardest thing about writing a syllabus is the editing down. Last semester, I had the gall to actually edit the Iliad (and I questioned throughout the course whether I'd done the right thing, though I'm happy I included all the supporting texts I did).

But this time it's even worse. There are stacks of texts I consider essential to a course in Classical Philosophy, and only a finite number of classes in the semester. Must I sacrifice the pre-Socratics in order to include Seneca and Epicurus? But the pre-Socratics are so nutty and fun! And how can we read the Republic in its entirety if it means sacraficing either the Crito or the Apology? And what about the Phaedrus (my absolute favorite)? Aaaaugh!

So, brilliant readers: what texts do you think are absolutely essential readings in Classical philosophy? What shouldn't students be allowed to live without?

Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle!

It's raining, I have a headache, and I've been listening to nothing but Chrismas music for hours. Is it any wonder I'm in an odd mood?

The last few days have just been dingey. Thursday night, I had a bunch of poet friends for a reading, which was just so much fun, but as soon as everyone was gone, or even before, I got into that funny way of thinking I have, wherin I think everyone's just humoring me, and they couldn't possibly like me, and oh, I should have worn a different shirt. Then Friday I started in with this head cold I'm sporting, and now I'm just sitting pathetically on the couch, worrying about insurance and medical stuff and wishing I'd done everything up til now differently and for God's sake, Nora, what else do you want out of life, that when everythings so nice you've got to sit around and mope about it?

Do you ever have images just pop into your head? I was just sitting here, staring at my desk (note to self: shouldn't that teetering pile of books find their way back to the bookshelf?), when suddenly I saw with three dimensional clarity the little beach near my family's summer place up in Vermont, that twilight wash of red rocks and cedar trees, and the murky depths of weedy water. Hm.

My iTunes Christmas shuffle just popped on "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing," and I misheard it as, "Come now, count thy every blessing." Perhaps it's time I did.

Anyway, before this post gets any more schizophrenic, I'm off to count every blessing. And do laundry.

Insert funny, self-depriciating title here

Check out the latest issue of Five Fingers Review! That's my piece on the cover:



And you'll have to buy a copy to see the rest, as my blogger layout goes all screwy when I try and put them in (or if you're really cheap, go to my flickr page. Cheapo). Anyway, it's a collage based on a poem that I *think I posted an early form of up in this here blog (I'll have to poke through the archives a bit and find that). But, yay! I'm published! I feel so excited, and so, so exposed.

I don't think this issues in stores yet, but you can eventually find it at your local Barnes & Noble, or order it online (sometime in the next few weeks) through Small Press Distribution.

Eek!

Things that were inordinately confusing Sunday morning at 9:00, after having stayed up until 6:00 the night before

1. The line at Starbucks
2. The infinite variety of green tea (3 different kinds? How do I know what I like?)
3. The xerox machine at school
4. Keirkegaard
5. Sunglasses.

Oh dear

What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?

You will be smothered under a rug. You're a little anti-social, and may want to start gaining new social skills by making prank phone calls.
Take this quiz!








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Advent

I know, I know, it's not official until Sunday. But it's advent-calendar season, at least, and that's enough for me. We (finally!) bought our tickets home today, and a good thing, too -- we weren't even able to get seats together on the way out, the flights are so full (and our only options were redeyes or a million different layovers and transfers (we took the redeye)). Hmpf.

Not much to report. A trip to the lumberyard this morning, followed by a very lazy day for me (including a two hour nap -- I was grouchy and decided I needed a time-out). It's December! Hurrah!

Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

Today was one of those days when I found myself wondering what it might be like to have a child. Such thoughts aren't rare of course -- I'm almost thirty, and Brian'll be inching into late-thirties territory come May. Some might even say we're adults (though they wouldn't say that whilst looking over our finances, or while evaluating our housekeeping skills, for that matter).

Anyway, all sorts of things trigger these thoughts -- friends getting ready to welcome their own bear cub into the world, pictures like this one, the little boy who stopped in front of Brian and I while we were on our way to the post office and cried out "I'm jumping up and down!!!!" while leaping clumsily into the air -- even the advent calender my dad sent (which looks just like the one my sister and I used to take turns opening as kids) got me thinking of the long slow march of time and the need for some sort of generational continuity.

One of our dog-park aquaintances runs a little dog walking business on the side. He's out of town this week, so Brian and I have taken over walking some of his clientelle, which includes a funny little pair of Maltese that Brian and I walked before I headed off for work today.

As little dogs go, this pair seem to fall into the cute-but-awful school -- neither smart nor socialized, and somehow undoglike in behavior, refusing to walk or be walked with any sort of discipline or enthusiasm, but rather dragging against their leashes, and alternately cowering from and attempting to chase pasing cars and pedestrians.

Despite all this, I do like these small dogs, and so when one of them (I never learned to keep them straight), ended up with a small remainder of poop stuck to his backside, I did what any responsible doglover would do, and attemted to scoop said remainder off, my hand safely wrapped in poop bags, as Brian distracted the dogs (now within the sight of home, and straining eagerly at their leashes) with the promise of invisible treats. Unfortunately, right in the midst of this delicate procedure, the dog's long lsutrous and fancy tail moved, creating a poop-smear flag that danced jauntily behind him for the rest of the walk home, mocking my efforts.

It's an oft-repeated bit of wisdom that pets -- dogs especially - can work as a stand in for actual human parenting. And as I Brian and I held the wiggling dog betweeen us in the bathroom, endeavouring to wash poop out of white fur, I realized that parenthood can wait.

So not cooking dinner right now

I should be making carrot soup. I found a recipe, I've got the ingredients -- heck, I have enough carrots to fill a small village with carrot soup, thereby creating an underwater city of in-the-dark-seeing, orange inhabitants (our veggie box has been carrotacular these past few weeks).

But am I cooking? No. I'm eating goldfish and wondering if I have a toothache (or am I just tense?) and poking around on these here internets. Because apparently I am determined not to eat healthy, fresh or local. Ever. Ooh, I wonder if there are any brownies left.

So I found out today I will most likely not be doing Latin next semester -- the grad student who was the independant-study impetus is going to France for a year, and there's going to be an actual, formal class offered (the Classics department! It just doubled!), so I don't see much of a point in offering it around to anyone else. Ah well. The good news is that my life is a heckuva lot more managable, what with not having to prepare an extra course in a dead language I've never taught before.

Anywho. Brian's home from jujitsu. Best go see if we can't scrounge up some soup somehow. 'Night all.

Obviously, this posting every day is starting to wear

You know what song makes me angry? That "More Than Words" song by Extreme (do you italicise band names? I'm too lazy to check). I mean, how lame is that song? Ooooh, how do I know if you love me if you won't have sex with me? Oh, boo hoo, I'm so pensive. Plus, the hair. Ugh.

Hmmm. According to Wikepedia, that song came out in 1990. Maybe it's time I let that anger go, eh? I mean, I can remeber hearing that song (and being annoyed by the lyrics) on the bus on the way home from Junior High. I'll have to add 'get over Extreme anger' to the List of Things I Need to Do Before Turning Thirty in April (ha! what an awesome addition to any to-do list).

And it's entirely possible that I'm just dirty minded. Cause reading over the lyrics, all he ever asks for is some hugging.

Intake

Oh, so many things to take in over the past 24 hours. Last night, my friend Hope took me to see Cat Power at the Fillmore ("to cheer you up," she said, which makes me wonder how down I've seemed lately). Whatever the reeason, I'm glad she persuaded me to go (easy to do: just hand me a ticket and say 'here'). Chan Marshall's such a lovely singer, and so endearingly awkward on stage (usually the awkwardness of others bothers me -- I'm so shy and clumsy myself that I find it excruciating when it's reflected back at me. But this was just such an honest and straightforward awkwardness, it was welcoming).

Then tonight we went and saw Vajra Sky at the Rec Vic on Haight Street, followed by drinks and food at the Alembic. Plus to top it all off I'm reading Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life," from which I get this morsel:

Of all people only those are at leisure who make who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but annex every age to theirs. All the years that have passed before them are added to their own. Unless we are very ungrateful, all those distinguished founders of holy creeds were born for us and prepared for us a way of life. By toil of others we are led into the presence of things which have been brought from darkness into light. We are excluded from no age, but we have access to them all; and if we are prepared in loftiness of mind to pass beyond the narrow confines of human weakness, there is a long period of time through which we can roam. We can argue with Socrates, express doubt with Carneades, cultivate retirement with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, and exceed limits with the Cynics. Since nature allows us to enter into a partnership with every age, why not turn from this brief and transient spell of time and give ourselves wholeheartedly to the past, which is limitless and eternal and can be shared with better folk than we?

What more can I add to that? Sometimes you just gotta be mute.

One of my favorite poems

Leda and the Swan, by W.B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins, engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

One of the things I like about this is the way that it presents the stark inevitability of the story -- from Helen's conception, we go to the "broken wall, the burning roof and tower/And Agamemnon dead." It's just so beautifully done.

The cat is objecting to my typing and I should go (I'm jarring him slightly everytime I move, and he gets this look in his eye. Could I be any more of a tim'rous beastie?).

In other news, I want this. Anyone got 60,000 Euros lying around? I could be your hermit-for-hire.

Oof.

I simply can't stop eating beer bread. And it's so easy to make, and the house smells so good when it's baking, and oh! is my life hard.

Here's the recipe. I made it up (using half-remembered recipes from my youth and whatever I could find in the kitchen) Thanksgiving morning:

3 cups flour (this was the one thing I had to run out and get Thanksgiving day, and they only! had! white! flour! at the one grocery store still open. So the bread I've been playing Chronos-and-his-children with is made completely of unhealthy and uncomplex carbohyrates. Oh well).

3 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt (plus a little bit more)

3 tablespoons sugar

approx 3 palm-fulls of fennel seeds

a little more than that of sesame seeds

about half a stalk's worth of rosemary leaves

grated cheese (I've been using Pecorino Romano, which has a nice sharpness that goes well with the yeasty beer flavor. As for amounts, I have no idea -- I've just been going with what looks right - maybe 1/4 a cup?).

1 bottle (12 oz) beer (I've been using Sierra Nevada).

Preheat the oven to 375. Mix together the dry ingredients, then add the beer. Stir until you've got a nice dough-like consistancy (you might need to add more flour if it's too sticky). Oil up a bread pan and plop it in. Bake for about an hour.


So yeah. It's pretty yummy. And you've got to start eating it, see? 'Cause if we all gain a few pounds at once, we'll look the same as ever relative to one another, and won't seem to have gained any weight at all. And that's what makes America great.

You know, now that I think of it, we totally have oat flour in the pantry. Hurrah! Time to try out a new recipe!

restless

Sleepy and restless today. Perhaps my tofurky did not agree with me. But we got a fair amount done today, nonetheless: walking and feeding two (well three if you count ours) housefuls of pets, making a long overdue trip to RadioShack (finally I have toner cartidges again) and generally cleaning up after yesterday's messy cooking extravaganza (we went to a friend's house, but I managed to trash our kitchen anyhow, even though all I made was beet salad and beer bread. Cooking is an art. Oh, yes).

In other news, I've become addicted to looking at Craig's List real estate listings for other cities. Do you have any idea how cheap land is on Prince Edward Island? Or apartments in Crete?. Oh! Or a secluded island home!

I'm ridiculous. Someone really needs to take my internets away.

Simple Gifts

Oh, I'm just so gloomy today. Hardly appropriate for thankgiving. So, in honor of the day, a list of things I'm thankful for:

1. My writing window looks out at ground level. This part of our apartment, towards the front of the house, is partially below ground, so I look out at the garden at the garden's own perspecive, flush with the clover and well beneath the roses. It reminds me of when I was a kid, and loved looking at things from underwater. The simplest change of persoective does so much sometimes.

2. Brian is a wonder. He's talented and educated and possesses a native intelligence about the workings of things that puts my absentminded movements through the world to shame. Plus, as my mother noted this past summer, "he's very good-looking" (and now my mother's blushing).

3. We got fresh herbs in our CSA box this week, and the kitchen smells like a holiday.

4. I have a wonderful mentor at school (the word 'mentor' seems bandied about a lot in buisiness contexts these days, but to me it'll always be the goddess Athena appearing in disguise to Telemachus). He's got me teaching Latin next semester, and is almost entirely responsible for the rest of my teaching career as well.

5. The cat is fat, and likes to lie next to me, snoring.

6. I've got more good books to read right now than I know what to do with. Some I can't mention because they're Christmas presents to be (I have to make sure they're good before I go giving them away after all), but they are, each one of them, so satisfying and fascinating in their own right that I'm having trouble deciding which one to pick up next, and so just keep handling each one in turn.

7. My family is far away, but I know they love me.


Seven seems a good number. Happy thanksgiving everyone!

Another poem today, because I'm working

Gnosticism VI
by Anne Carson, from Decreation

Walking the wild mountain in a storm I saw the great trees throw their arms.
Ruin! they cried and seemed aware

the sublime is called a "science of anxiety."
What do men and women know of it? -- at first

not even realizing they were naked!
The language knew.

Watch "naked" (arumim) flesh slide into "cunning" (arum) snake in the next verse.

And suddenly a vacancy, a silence,

is somewhere inside the machine.
Veins pounding.

Like a little motor

My hand is on the cat and the cat is om my lap. Kind of a funny sensation: purring in three dimensions. The cat's so much frendlier now that the weather's cold. He comes running to greet me when I get home, and pops up next to me sometimes in the night, his fur still cool and smelling like outside as he kneads a soft patch by my head.

Anyway. Working on a plan of attack for Latin next semester; I'm thinking we'll work our way up to Ovid, then spend as much time as possible on the Metamorphoses. I figure it's good fun for poets and gossip-lovers alike.

Tomorrow i've got to turn something in for workshop. I'll most likely go with Metis revisions, unless inspiration strikes sometime in the night. It could happen.

Mmmm. Cat is warm. All we need is a cozy fireplace and a library. And a haunted tower with a secret passage that leads to a damp, neglected crypt. Or something.

Chiasmus

by Tom Clark, from Night Sky

Black doldrums, then a stir, then tackle snapping —
Which would you prefer, the calm after, during
Or before the storm? Anxious news flutters
Its broadsides across our ragged, tattered
Sails; lightning darkens, and it rains more
Than if the sun, drunk the night before,
Staggered by a wave, fell below the hatches;
While the moon, tossed overboard, washed ashore
On that island which no sailor reaches,
Returns to haunt our sea-locked ship, and night
Comes back to unsettle restive stagnant day.
A rotten state, finally, bearded by flies,
Dogged by the death of the wind at noon
And the breathless simoon at evening;
Black doldrums, then a stir, then tackle snapping.

Instructions for Being Sick

1. While reading, realize you have a headache.

2. Decide to rest your eyes for a moment, see if you feel better.

3. Sleep for five hours.

4. Wake up, feeling groggy and feverish.

5. Decide to read a bit, see how you feel.

6. Repeat step one.

Headache

Headache plus crashy Firefox. What better recipe for snappy blogging?

Do you want to see my desktop image? Of course you do:

Just a report today.

Oh, I just don't have the posting in me today. I'm neither happy nor angsy enough to generate blog content.

Brian got up early today and cleaned the house. The house is so much pleasanter clean, but I somehow never think of that when it's dirty. You'd think cause and effect would be easy enough to figure out.

I found out today I'll be teaching agian next semester. The course the committee chose (wow, there's a lot of double letters in 'committee') isn't my number one favorite of all the courses I proposed, but I'm thrilled nonetheless.

So,I'm working on Latin for tonight, and reading Marcus Aurilius.

Eh, that's all I got. Take that, NaBloPoMo.

A Thursday List

Five Things About Me You May or May Not Know:

1. My face's overweening youthfulness is well-established. At twenty-two, I got carded on my way in to see "Fight Club" -- an R (or was it PG 13?) rated movie. At 29, I'm still semi-regularly carded for alchohol, and the first thing I remember after waking up from surgery this past fall was the nurse saying "how old are you honey? 'Cause you look 12" (in my post-surgical haze, I felt obligated to tell some sort of joke at this, and was really frustrated that I couldn't think of one).

2. My lucky color is green. My favorite color is infinitely mutable (right now it's orange), but green has been my lucky color since the third grade. I've never lost a game of parchesi, I always play green and that's that (I also have not played parchesi since the fifth grade, for fear of losing my streak).

3. My favorite number is four. I don't know why. I also like the word twelve. I can remember, as a kid, looking forward to saying, "but I'm only twelve!" when called upon to performe some great feat. As near as I can recall, the situation never arose.

4. I don't particularly like cake. Cheesecake I despise*. I do like chocolate, though.

5. For the longest time I was convinced that, at some point in the distant and hazy past, I had known how to make sandcastles with rooms and hallways inside. As a child I was very frustrated that I couldn't remember how this was done. My sister could make timy wigwams out of moss and twigs. My twigs always snapped or catapulted the moss off their backs. Which doesn't have anything to do with the sandcastles, really -- I just wanted the list to look symmetrical (with long entries on either end).

* EDIT: As I was falling asleep last night, I got to thinking: I don't think I actually dislike cheescake -- I often like it once I'm eating it. It just doesn't tempt me at all for some reason. So I guess I'm against the idea of cheesecake. Lemon mirangue, too.

Lazy Wednesday

Class, then wine with poet friends. Now I'm on the couch with fizzy water and cheese and crackers awaiting a late dinner with Brian. Not a bad life, but what I really want is a way to segue into this image (via Boing Boing):



It makes me larf.

Sunny Tuesday

Sure enough, it's sunny today and I miss the rain. Everything's so green though. That's the odd paradox of winter in San Francisco: it's cold and rainy, but never so cold that things stop growing, so the rain only makes things greener, pushing out the gold dry grass and replacing it with bright new growth.

I've found out I'll be teaching at least on class (an independent study in Latin translation) next semester, but I'm still waiting to hear back about the rest. My aim is to get enough teaching gigs to quit my day job and just write & teach. Here's hoping anyway. I do like my office job (as office jobs go, anyway), but I'd so much rather just structure my own schedule around doing the things I want to do (as opposed to the things I don't mind doing, so log as I'm getting paid.

Anyway, speaking of which. Back to writing for the morning, then off to work.

No prayers for November to linger longer

Actually, I'm rather enjoying the rain. But, gah! has it rained a lot the past few days, that chill-bone, tree-stripping rain particular to November. Today was just so chilly and wet, which made the poem we read for Keats class seem as if it were written for an entirely different season (and to be fair, it was written in September, which is a season unto itself):

Ode to Autumn, by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.


And speaking of Keats and other heroes who died too young, Achilles by Elizabeth Cook is proving to be brilliant. Definitely reccomended for the literature dork in your life.

Chilly Sunday

Oooh, it's so cold here -- low 60's according to my widgets! Brian's usually the more-easily chilled of the two of us, but for some reason he's decided the house needs airing, so I'm sitting here, all bundled against the cold, while he sits obliviously next to the open door in nothing but a tee shirt (and pants, you dirty-minded guttersnipes). Brrrrr.

I just finished mopping the kitchen floor. I'm such a hopeless mopper -- I really just moved the dirt around a bit. But it actually does look much nicer, and I feel like I've done something at least, so I can justify taking the rest of the day to hit used bookstores with my friend Justin. I'm probably not going to buy much, as I could blow through my whole savings if I allowed myself free reign in bookstores, but the copy of Achilles (by Elizabeth Cook) that I ordered through Modern Times last week came in on Friday, and picking that up should satisfy my book buying urge.

Noonynoonynooo. I guess that's it for now.

an open letter to the monster cat

Herr Katze:

I understand that, as the weather gets colder, it is only natural to seek out the body heat of other warm blooded critters. But would you please stop lying on my chest with your face scant centimeters from my face? It's kind of creeping me out.

thanks,

One Who Feeds You

PS: I would like to get up now.

Ten things I've been enjoying lately

1. The latest issue of Tin House (esp. the interview with Lynda Barry).

2. "The Red Balloon" on You Tube (Oh, except it was removed for 'terms of use' violations. Poo. Nevermind).

3. Dream Angus, by Alexander McCall Smith (thanks for the reccomendation, mom!).

4. Soup with leeks and potatoes in it.

5. Wearing sweaters and generally bundling against the chilly fall weather.

6. The 'Dykes to Watch Out For' archive on Planet Out.

7. Sneezing

8. Homemade pizza with tomatoes and green olives and yummy melty cheese.

9. The wine with a cowboy on it that we got over at Bi Rite.

10. Latin.

Maybe I’m amazed

In a comment over on Tricia’s blog earlier today, I mentioned how reluctant I was to move to San Francisco lo these many years ago. Nothing against the city itself, really – at the time I’d never even been to San Francisco, and could hardly imagine what it’d be like (I didn’t even imagine there’d be hills. How could I not know about the hills?). It was the change that frightened me: the huge, life altering, move-across-the-country-and-what-do-you-mean-I’ve-got-to-fly??? of it all.

But looking back, I can’t believe that the rightness of our move out here, or our lives out here was ever in question. Everything in our lives, it seems, has come together in amazing and unexpected ways. Case in point:

Brian's latest work-in progress

When we lived in Massachusetts, Brian wasn’t really sculpting – one piece a year for Christmas, maybe, but that was it. I wasn’t writing, either. In the going-on-four years we’ve been here, the essence of our lives have been transformed, brought forth from itself in ways that are at once the most natural and the most amazing things.

When the Dog Bites, When the Bee Stings

I really love teaching. It's without a doubt the hardest thing I've ever done (think you know about something? Try preparing lectures on it and then fielding random questions about that and everything else you know for three hours), but it's also absolutely, positively the most rewarding job I've ever had. Think of all the best conversations you've had in your life, and multiply them times a million. Plus you get to make people read things you love. What's not to like?

It is hard. And I can't beleive how busy I am (I'm teaching one class this semester. One. How do people ever do this full time?). My writing is paradoxically hindered by teaching and fed by it. One of my old writing profs used to say that teaching takes us a lot of oxygen, which is true, but oxygen's rare on really high mountain peaks too, right? And people seek those out. Once you get used to how thin the air is, you can enjoy the view.

In other news, yay!


via boingboing

And now, a bookshelf interlude

One of the first things I do when I find myself at someone's house is start poking through their bookshelves. Partly it's curiousity about the bookshelf-owner -- do they like Jane Austen? Do they own a copy of The Story of O? And part of it is that I'm just plain addicted to reading. I can't go a day without it, and can't have any text in front of me without wanting to read it.

When I was a kid, my mom would often ask me to clear the table for dinner, only to find me a half and hour later, completely absorbed in the leftover newspapers from breakfast. I'm the world's slowest filer, too -- do you have any idea the things that get stuck in files? They're facscinating. And don't get me started on the internet -- for every hour of research I do, I spend at least two hours on blogs or wikipedia or true life ghost story pages.

Anyway. Here's a picture of my bookshelf (the one in the living room, by the front door):

Oh, Monday is such a very long day.

I just got home at 11:00, having left the house at 9:30. But I do love Mondays. I get to have my Keats class, and I get to hang out and drink beer with poets afterwards. Which is why this post is so short. The End.

A bit of what I'm working on

The Age of the Earth:

First there was the void. And from the void were born the primal things: the earth and the pit below the earth, and gloom to fill the pit, and love (also known as desire), and night.

Night was the world’s first mother. She lay with Gloom and gave birth to Day.

Next Earth brought forth from herself Uranus, the sky, to cover her. And Uranus lay down upon the Earth, and they had many children.



The Principle of Intrusive Relationships:

When an igneous intrusion cuts across a formation of sedimentary rock, it can be determined that the igneous intrusion is younger than the sedimentary rock.

First came triplets, the Hecatonchires, all boys. They were strong and wild, and Earth laughed as she watched them, each hundred-armed and fifty headed, as they gadded clumsily about, stumbling and interrupting and doing many-handed somersaults, which is really the only way to do things when you have one hundred hands. And Earth was happy. She soon gave birth again to three more: the Cyclopes. They were loud and clever, and so she named them Lightening, Thunder and Bright.

Uranus lay with her again, and in time she gave birth to a dozen children: six boys and six girls. These children were beautiful, well-formed. They moved freely between their mother and father. Some guided the sun, and planets in their courses; others were more conceptual, and embodied fertility and memory.

Uranus loved these handsome children, but despised their siblings. He hated to see the hundred-armed boys crawling on their mother, their rough flesh an affront to her purity. He hated the flash of the Cyclopes’ hammers, hated their alien rumbling cries.

So he exiled them from his sight. The Hecatonchires he cast into Tartarus, beneath the bed where their mother Earth lay, and the Cyclopes he forced beneath Earth’s mountains. There they scrabbled amongst the hot, fractured rocks, living only on sulfate minerals and hydrogen split from water by uranium’s radioactivity.



The Principle of Cross-cutting Relationships:

Faults are younger than the rocks they cut.

Earth loved all her children, and could not forgive their father’s cruelty. She sang lullabies in the dark, pressing her lips against the rough mattress, and could hear her hundred armed boys clap and moan. When the Cyclopes lit their forge, she would cry out in pain, and Thunder would echo back a rumbling cry.

The universe in those days was a bedroom. It was small and dusty and all that was in there was an old bed and a wardrobe with a door that stuck in hot weather. Earth lay in the bed, broad-breasted, the secure foundation of all forever. She smelled like copper and wore a flannel nightgown.

She mourned her exiled children, and could not bear to look at the sky, her husband. Finally she went to her free children, the Titans, with a sickle she had forged from her own flinty flesh.

“Take this,” she said, “and end your father’s cruelty; set your brothers free.” The elder five Titans trembled, fearing their father, the distant lord of stars. Only the youngest, Chronus, dared take up the scythe against his father, for he, of all his brothers and sisters had no calling, and embodied nothing but himself.

He secreted himself behind his mother’s bedroom door waited in ambush. When his father was distracted, he leapt forth from behind the door, swinging wildly. So Uranus was unmanned, and his castrated flesh sunk into the sea. And where his blood and semen hit the Earth, giants and nymphs and the goddesses of vengeance were born.

Earth took the ancient ocean as her second husband, and life began: trees and flowers springing forth, and animals, and the first men creeping from the folds of her nightgown.

And Saturday, too!

Isn't it frustrating how, when you're in a funk, it's completely impossible to remember what being happy feels like? I know I was happy just last week. Ecstatic, even. Poop.

Brian's off at his studio. I drove him away with my histronic discontentedness, what with the sighing and the moaning and the flying off the handle at things which are really fine most of the time. Maybe falling to the floor and demanding he find a sane girlfriend is not the best way to keep a man. Hm.

Monster cat is very much attached to me today. I can't sit or lie down without him curling up on top of me. Frustrating and comforting all at once.

I wish I were a lighthouse keeper (why? What would lighthouse keeping do for me that house keeping does not? I think I just want aloneness, wet rocks, a snug room, and the wild sea). Stupid automated lighthouses. Stupid sonar.

Friday friday

I don't work on Fridays. I don't have school, and I sit around the house and think of all the work I need to be doing... lecture notes for Wednesday, line-edits for workshop this Sunday, reading for my Keats class on Monday. Plus housework, and writing, and I should be going to the gym, too, to try and keep too much scar tissue from building up inside me, making the next surgeon's job more difficult.

Have I mentioned that I hate my scars? When the bandages first came off, I loved them -- they were so narrow and elegant and neat looking. But now the lower one has gotten all raised and bumpy and just horrible looking and I hate it. And there's nothing I can do, really, except smear more cocoa butter on it, and feel its ugly wormy edges, and wish I'd somehow done better at forming scars, that my body didn't have this embarrassing tendancy towards excess.

So anyway, I have plenty that I should be doing, and even plenty of fun, interesting books that I could be procrastinating with, but instead I'm sitting here, with the cat as usual, wishing I could think of something to do.

Tonight the moon has a silver ring

There's a ring around the moon tonight, which always makes me a bit morbid and over-dramatic. I blame childhood exposure to poetry. It seeps into your bones at that age.

"WRECK OF THE HESPERUS"
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.


It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintery sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

The Skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
for I fear a hurricane.

"Last night the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church bells ring,
Oh, say, what may it be?"
"Tis a fog-bell on a rock bound coast!" --
And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns;
Oh, say, what may it be?"
Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light.
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf,
On the rocks and hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!

I used to love this poem when I was a kid. A sort of horrified love -- I was afraid of rings around the moon and sea weed, and had weird nightmares with cartoon sea captains lashing themselves to masts on dark stormy nights (am I just making this up, or did Mighty Mouse do a version of this? Is that just my id?).

Oh, November. I'm not so fond of you.

I mean, November's nice and all, with the Thankgiving and the pies and the harvest and stuff, but I'm really not digging it this year. I know, I know: we're just one day in. But that one day? It has been sucky.

It all started last night. The jelly beans my co-worker generously shared got me sick. Like, literally sick, with the urping and the moaning and everything. Not exactly what I needed to get me going on my lecture notes for Agamemnon. Then 10 people were shot in my neighborhood.* 10! Shot! With guns! And then I lay awake all night imagining how horrible if Brian got shot, or I did, and what if a stray bullet came through the window while I was up late working at my desk, and Brian slept through it and woke up to a dead me on the living room floor.

Anyway, most of today was merely mediocre. My class tonight was low-energy and blah, and I really couldn't seem to engage the students for any length of time. And then I made an embarrasing mistake and gave my students incorrect information which I'm going to have to correct next week (nothing says 'I am an authority on the subject matte who you can trust' like telling people to forget what you told them the week before). And then I opened a letter from my insurance company letting me know that they are "reviewing" whether or not to pay the latest of my medical bills, which totals $55,499.15.

Which is kind of an awesome realization: I spent (more than) $55,499.15 in only three days. And I barely got out of bed! But think of all the better ways I couldv'e incurred that much debt in three days! Brian and I could have gone out for Thai food in Thailand! I could have paid off my student loans -- and gone out for pizza!

Anyway. I'm sure the rest of November will be just peachy. For tonight, though, I think I'll just pretend it's April. Happy Easter everybody!

*okay, so nine people were shot. This morning the paper said ten. Humor me, I'm grouchy.

I'm trapped under a sleeping cat

I'm working on a poem for my next workshop, and my feet keep coming out all wrong:

Métis (a fragment after Keats)

I.

Volcanic Age: young gods but newly bound,
And she a barefoot girl with owl's eyes
The source's maid, Oceanus' sound
And gentle counsel; mother of the wise
Girl Tritogenia, migrainous surprise
Athena: seahorse child of Zeus' crown.
Wise Counsel slept mornings in, hair unbound
Gainst Zeus’ thund’rous arms, soft igneous thighs
Like rocks smoothed soft by rivers; longing lovers drown’d.

II.

As dreamers sleep conjoin’d in Jungian fens,
Their exit breaths informing ev’nings gloam,
And lovers drown in exhalations -- men
Drawn off the path by light from phantom homes
As Aphrodite, luminescent, roams
The cookie-batter continents again.
So Métis, turning in her sleep, a wren
Spelunking snugly in her mountain home,
As biggest boy exhaled a soft psookhen.



But really. You try fitting Tritogenia and Oceanus into a Spencerian stanza. And that psookhen bit? Totally not sure about it. But see the liguistic path from 'psyche? Eh? Eh?

An Update for my Mother, Who Wishes I Would Update More.

Oh, hello. The cat is sound asleep and I'm sitting in a pile of books and papers. I had class this morning at ten and stayed up 'til four last night. Somehow that seems to be the way my mind wants to work; it gets more and more awake as the night goes on, and then by the time I force myself to bed (because the room is a little wobbly and my eyes keep wanting to shut) it's racing so fast that I can hardly sleep. I didn't mind getting up five hours later, either. Though I did take a bit of a nap this afternoon.

I'm working on course proposals for next semester. One I like right now is 'Odysseus and the Search for Self' looking at the Odyssey, Philoctites, and Ajax. And maybe that new Margaret Atwood book. I'm not sure.

I'm also applying of to San Francisco State for a second BA (in Classics this time). Every time I tell one of my old professors, they say I should go straight for the Masters and just make up the languages somehow (I mean go to class and stuff, not re-invent them). I wonder if they think I'm smarter or more learned than I am, or if they have a more realistic sense of what'd be expected of me in a Masters program.

Part of me just wants to be a kid again, an undergrad only smarter this time, happier. Better dressed.

I need to call my seester. Hi, seester.

So.

So I was supposed to go into surgery yesterday. Unfortunately, though, my insurance won't cover this whole shebang until January (when, apparently, it'll cease to be a pre-existing condition), so here I am, out in the world, neither hooked to a morphine drip nor free of my schwannomic influence. Alas. (It just occured to me that I could start blaming my schwannoma for all sorts of things. "Excuse my absence from work today... I am under a schwannomic pall... What? I must pay for these groceries? But my schwannoma, it is hungry). Anyhow.

I'm kind of sad not to have this all done with, but I can't say that i regretted not being in surgery yesterday (though I was in an odd mood, like perhaps I really shouldn't be around at work and in class. And I slept til noon, perhaps in protest).