Snow Thoughts and Sunday Thoughts

Every day I wake up and I look out the window and I hope that it has snowed. But it never has. Super lame.

Also last night I couldn't sleep at all so I read this lovely collection of poems by Louise Gluck. I'm not very smart and I don't know exactly what's meant to be happening in all these poems, but it was going through the cycle of the year and some of them were from the perspective of various flowers, others were from the perspectives of various natural elements/God, and others prayers, either Matins or Vespers. A lot of the poems that I liked the most seemed to be from a human perspective questioning God's apparent silence; the cycle ended with humans learning from darkness and silence and growing into a rebirth. It was really cool, and important to me because this is something I feel like I have a hard time with, since it seems like God is so often silent. Anyway, here's a poem from the beginning of the cycle that I really liked, and here's one from the end.

Matins
Unreachable father, when we were first
exiled from heaven, you made
a replica, a place in one sense
different from heaven, being
designed to teach a lesson: otherwise
the same--beauty on other side, beauty
without alternative--Except
we didn't know what was the lesson. Left alone,
we exhausted each other. Years
of darkness followed; we took turns
working the garden, the first tears
filling our eyes as earth
misted with petals, some
dark red, some flesh colored--
We never thought of you
whom we were learning to worship.
We merely knew it wasn't human nature to love
only what returns love.

The White Lilies
As a man and woman make
a garden between them like
a bed of stars, here
they linger in the summer evening
and the evening turns
cold with their terror; it
could all end, it is capable
of devastation. All, all
can be lost, through scented air
the narrow columns
uselessly rising, and beyond,
a churning sea of poppies--

Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor.

Some Thoughts

Good movies I've seen lately:
Batman Returns, especially every part with Catwoman, but also every other part.


Poltergeist



Fun fact: that is an actual dead body. Apparently they were cheaper to use than fake ones. They didn't tell the actress until afterward.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (non-Keanu Reeves-style)



Bad movies I've seen lately:
Captain America



OH AMERICA YOU ARE SO RIGHTEOUS WITH YOUR PECTORALS OH AMERICA THANK YOU FOR HAVING BLACK AND ASIAN MEN IN YOUR WWII CORPS YOU ARE SUCH A SYMBOL OF DEMOCRACY oh wait there was no integration until the Korean War. I'm just saying.


Thoughts about Harry Potter and death:
HP starts out as the boy who lived. He ends as the boy who died. Accepting death = becoming "master" of death and therefore life, unlike Voldemort, who kills people so he can stay alive. Ergo, staying alive forever = death, while accepting that we all die = life. Or dying = life. I love this series.

Good books I've read recently:
Crown of Earth by Hilari Bell. Feuding religions between a pantheon of gods and a narrow god? Paganism vs. early Christianity/Judaism, which selected the most warlike God from the pantheon and made him Elohim? In a children's book? What? Awesome. Coolest book award.
True Grit--just as funny as the movie, if not more so, and also very serious. Violence = you will lose a body part, symbolically representing the toll violence takes on a person. The old West! You will pay for all your sins. Awesome.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris. True Grit is the only thing I've encountered that has made me laugh as hard as I did reading this book this whole semester.

Going through a graphic novel phase right now. Recommendations appreciated.

Why is it that when you put some political statement on facebook, some kid you barely knew in the eleventh grade jumps in? Why does he feel like he has to make a statement? Why did you feel like you had to make a statement? Isn't that why you were putting it up there in the first place--to spark a debate, even if you're doing it unconsciously? So isn't it your fault anyway, not necessarily his?

Supernatural: a show that was awful last season but that is kicking so much ass this season. Love it.

Some days you just gotta feel a little bit like Sammy Winchester. Especially days when you forget to take your birth control so your hormones are all screwed up and you are crying for no reason and someone is punching you in the grief bone and you are terribly, terribly, terribly alone. All this without even reading Maus--it's still sitting on the bed next to me, glaring and weeping and gnashing its teeth.




I promise that this doesn't mean I will not shoot every person. Supernatural just gives me FEELINGS.

Poet of the Week: Richard Siken

Scheherazade

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
Until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

Five Favorite Albums

Afterglow, Sarah McLachlan
The Reminder, Feist
Tropical Brainstorm, Kirsty MacColl
Hopes and Fears, Keane
Amarantine, Enya

Other good albums:

Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, Sarah McLachlan
Acadie, Daniel Lanois
Picaresque, The Decemberists
Woman King, Iron and Wine
The Crane Wife, The Decemberists
The Village (soundtrack), James Newton Howard
Harry and the Potters and the Power of Love, Harry and the Potters
Dive, Sarah Brightman
All of the Lord of the Rings soundtracks, Howard Shore
The Suburbs, Arcade Fire

Mostly, I just like making lists, so I did. Also, I'd love to know what your five favorite albums are too.

THE END.

A Sunday Thought

Sacrament

God, I have sought you as a fox seeks chickens,
curbing my hunger with cunning.
The times I have tasted your flesh
there was no bread and wine between us,
only night and the wind beating the grass.

-Alden Nowlan

My brother, my captain, my king

I have finally reached a very satisfactory end to a relatively shitty day, shitty in both the literal and figurative sense. I went to two doctors today, one of whom gave me no real advice on my stomach ("Try eating no food except popcicles for a day and see if that makes it better." "Alas, you seem to have forgotten that I JUST TOLD YOU that I have eaten nothing but nothing since FOUR WEEKS AGO, and I have to go to work tomorrow without fainting, but whatever.") and the other of whom advised me that I might have a yeast infection as a follow-up to my other mysterious infection, contrary to the opinion of a different doctor. Good times abounded. I came home and ate some crackers, and felt quite nauseous.

And then.

LORD OF THE RINGS. HOLY EFF.

Here is the only thing nerdier than going to see The Fellowship of the Ring remastered in theaters for one night only with your younger brother:

Composing an essay on the environmentalism of Jackson's interpretation of Tolkien's fantasy world in your heard during the entire movie.

While composing your own answer, should you choose to do so, you might want to reflect on certain scenes, which might help if you're seeing the whole thing remastered and on a gigantic screen, so you can drool at the awesomeness of the gigantic landscape shots and the BEAUTIFUL landscape contained therein.

Things to consider would include:

-The Shire's/the Hobbits' obvious connection to nature
-Saruman = evil = a symbol of industrialization and the destruction of nature (cf "a wizard should know better")
-The GORGEOUS landscape shots throughout, as previously mentioned

HOWEVER, you should also consider that:

-Even though the Ringwraiths are destroyed by natural elements--fire, water--they still ride horses, who seem down with that even though all the other animals are afraid of them, like that one cute dog, who backs away while wagging her tail frantically. Good dog. Good acting skillz.
-The Ringwraiths have a weird affinity with nature too--see the Nazgul and also that super weird time when the little hobbits are hiding under a log and all these bugs come out and Elijah Wood's face gets all fat, so that's weird
-The Crebain! From Dunland! They are aminals/nature, but they are EVIL AND MEAN
-Also, why do Jackson's Uruk Hai get borned out of mud? Because that suggests a connection to nature too, albeit a kind of gross one, which messes up my whole nature is good/industry is evil paradigm.

My conclusion is that like good and evil in the film, nature is polarized too, suggesting that EVERYTHING has free will and agency but also that good and evil are fairly black and white. But since it's Tolkien and since we're a Western audience, the evil things are crows and wolves, things Westerners have typically vilified, so there's that too and it's kind of unfair. Typically, though, nature is good (cf the Ents) and industry/mining is evil, which makes perfect sense to me.

OTHER THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE BEAUTY THAT IS THE LORD OF THE RINGS:

-I have SO DESPERATELY missed the sound of a theater full of people sobbing quietly while Gandalf and later Boromir die tragically.
-I myself was tempted to cry at these scenes for the first time in my life, but the best I could do was make weird sobbing noises which just made me want to throw up rather than cry. Probably I'm too dehydrated for tears.
-I feel like I FINALLY GET IT. Because when I saw these movies ten years ago and I was all little, I loved the ANGST and the VIOLENCE and the EMO PARTS OF IT, but I feel like it just clicked in my head that this movie/these books are a reflection of the world as it is. Just like The Road. They're fictional places and characters and worlds, but the things the characters go through--the confusion, doubt, fear, despair, whatever--are just reflections of our own lives.
-I tried to make a list of all the things the Ring could symbolize, but mostly (and predictably) I just settled on how having it is like having depression.
-Why does Aragorn son of Arathorn wear a black glove on his RIGHT HAND ONLY. By the end of his awesome battle, though, his left hand is so grimy that it's black, so maybe that counts.
-I spent the entire troll battle scene trying to figure out if it was wearing a loincloth like I'd always thought or if I had just seen these giant dangling troll balls. Turns out it's a loincloth--but a rather diaper-ish and therefore quite bulging loincloth, so it almost doesn't count, maybe.
-Also, the first time I saw these in theaters, the characters weren't my bros yet. Now, after we all successfully got through high school together, we really are bros. I want to reach through the screen and give my bros a hug and tell them it's going to be okay and sit there and cry and cry and cry. Or at least make weird little sobbing/vomiting noises with my poor kidnapped/ring-carrying/arrowed/Heir of Gondor-esque babies.

In conclusion, Lord of the Rings once again saves both my life and my testimony. Aww.

AND I CAN'T BELIEVE I WAITED A YEAR IN BETWEEN EACH ONE no wonder I saw the first one nine times in theaters HOW AM I GOING TO WAIT A WEEK EVEN THOUGH I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS GAH.

The end.

Africa pics + apologies for this post being so long

Once upon a time, I went to Africa. I put a bunch of boring pictures on my facebooks, but here are some pretentious artsy pictures that aren't very good because my darkness compensation setting was waaaaay too high. Or low. Whichever one means that most of them are too dark. Also, JUDGE ME I'M SO SORRY THIS POST IS SO LONG but it's just pictures and not words so try not to be too overwhelmed. MY HEARTFELT APOLOGIES NONETHELESS.

First of all, pictures from the kids' schools at Touba, the Mouride holy city:

















Now pictures of the giant super old mosque at Touba.

First, Flor, a girl who worked for/was related to the Senegalese author who set this all up for us, being super hot:



Now some dude sleeping by one of the entrances, because mosques are cool because people just go there to sleep and hang out and be generally awesome:



Peeps from our group:



Beggar kids outside the mosque:



And now for ten thousand pictures of the cutest kids in the world, i.e. the kids in the Peul village that we visited while we were in Saint Louis. On our first night there, they had a huge celebration and all the kids dressed up in traditional clothes and had a huge dance party, so here are the pictures of that.















Kids looking at Mme Thompson in her new boubou, probably because white people don't usually wear boubous, which is the traditional and super awesome clothes that people wear all the time. Boubous are GORGEOUS.













OH HEY ARE YOU STILL THERE KEEP HANGING IN THERE THE END IS ALMOST NIGH
By which I mean there are still like fifteen more deal with it.

Here is a woman at the dying tiny village on top of a mountain where it was pretty and windy:



And Charles, a little boy who followed us around the whole time we were there and balanced this lumpy thing on his head perfectly, while scrambling up and down the rocky mountain:



In Saly, at poet/president/incredibly crazy person Leopold Senghor's house:



At seashell island, aka the island made entirely of seashells, even though I don't know that you can tell how seashelly it was in these pictures:







Pretty flowers by the hotel pool:



And some final pictures of Dakar:







The end! Congrats if you made it to the bottom of the page.