I talk too much, read voraciously, and I'm trying to curb my swearing habit. I have degrees in geology and creative writing, but my job (which I love) doesn't have too much to do with either. I'm married to MB, the coolest guy on the whole entire planet. We bought our first house in February of 2008, and now share it with a Machiavellian cat and a far-too-clever Lab/Chow puppy. It's a good day when no one has made an attempt at world domination or tried to eat anyone else's face. I firmly believe that in spite of it all, the world is awesome.
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Marginalia (Billy Collins)
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
-- (c) Billy Collins
Friday, July 03, 2009
Photo Friday
View the entire Photo Friday collection on Flickr.
MB and I have always known that we wanted to have kids, when the time was right. We knew it would take a lot of planning, a lot of guesswork, and -- ultimately -- a lot of luck. Appropriately, on May 1st -- a day once celebrated as a fertility festival -- this happened:
And last week, there was this, kicking and kicking and kicking its precious little chicken legs:
The pregnancy has been really, really, blessedly boring and uneventful so far, for which I am unspeakably grateful. I eat a lot these days, in the way that a 40-ton brachiosaurus could be said to eat a lot. In weeks 7 - 9, the fatigue nearly killed me, and it's most likely for the best that I wasn't blogging about it at the time. But so far, I haven't puked, so I'll take it.
Today I am 13 weeks pregnant. I have started wearing the ridiculously cute maternity pants that my kickass friend Rachel sent me, and I'm looking forward to being able to spend my workday doing something other than sucking in my gut every time someone walks by, as I finally told my coworkers the news today. Pretty soon maybe I'll even look pregnant instead of like I had too many Cheetos!
We're calling it the brachiopod. I think I'm already falling in love.
Who wouldn't want a never-ending supply of Reese's Cups?
When I was a kid, I had what I guess you could call a rich inner life. I made up stories and scenarios in my head, pretty much all the time. There were scenes and dialogues and crazy adventures. Sometimes I was myself, but I was usually a character. This was in addition to playing pretend with my friends and cousins. Even when they weren't around, I was making stuff up. I did it at home, at school, even (maybe especially) at church.
I would also come up with imaginary scenarios about my house or school. I never pretended that I was a princess whose real family would come looking for her. Instead, I imagined secret passageways and hidden rooms. Once I concocted an underground room that extended from my basement bedroom under the neighbor's driveway, and decided it was full of snacks. Rows upon rows of candy bars and cookies and all the stuff I usually had to save up my allowance to buy. What? I was eleven! Even as an adult, I daydream sometimes about finding secrets. When we moved into our house, I was mightily disappointed that our attic contained only some crusty linoleum scraps and a dusty artificial Christmas tree.
Looking back, I have to wonder if that kind of imaginary exercise prepared me to be a writer. My process for writing fiction in high school and college wasn't all that different from the play-pretend I used to do as a kid, really. To my chagrin, I don't really write fiction anymore. Maybe I should start by imagining some secret tunnels or something?
How about you guys? Did you have any favorite for-pretend things when you were little? (Or not so little)
SpoutBlog (found via Pajiba) posted a great list of the 10 creepiest kids' movies, and it inspired me to dust off an old draft I had sitting around on a similar topic.
I haven't seen all of the movies chosen for SpoutBlog's list, but I did see and agree with the inclusion of Something Wicked This Way Comes (Have you seen it? It is, at times, HOLY SHIT scary, as is a movie that is for some reason forever associated with it in my memory, The Watcher in the Woods.), The Witches, and The Peanut Butter Solution. I probably would agree with the Care Bear movie if I could remember it. I didn't find the Tim Burton Wonka creepy so much as annoying. My only major disagreement came with the inclusion of The Dark Crystal, but only because the author said my beloved Landstriders were the creepiest part. Let's compare, shall we?
Landstriders (ugly but cute, in a weird otter / walrus sort of way):
Podling slaves / Skeksis:
And finally, Aughra:
Now, I love Aughra (even though this must be an out-take, because she sounds like Yoda, not Aughra), but dude, come on. She can remove her eyeball. How is this less creepy than a Landstrider?
That said, even though I adore it, The Dark Crystal definitely makes the list of Movies That I Loved as a Child, Which Scare the Bejesus Out of Me as an Adult.
Others?
The Secret of NIMH (particularly the owl that Mrs. Frisby goes to see)
(I can't embed, but here's a video. The owl appears at the 5:50 mark.)
The Dark Crystal Haggard, the Red Bull, Mommy Fortuna, the freaking harpy? All pretty creepy, but somehow the talking skeleton is the worst. I used to think he was hilarious when I was little. Now he creeps me the hell out. Just thinking about how he screams "Unicorn" is giving me the heebs.
Rankin / Bass's 1987 Wind in the Willows As creeped out as I am by the scenes of Moley in the Wild Wood and the stoats overrunning Toad Hall, for some reason it's the scene of Badger talking about Pan that makes the hair on my arms stand up. I can't find clips or photos for any of these, unfortunately.
The Neverending Story The loss of Artax in the swamp is horrible, and the Nothing is scary, but the talking wolf thing is first-rate freakout material:
The Watcher in the Woods
Really, looking back over these, it's amazing all people who grew up in the 80s aren't in therapy. The movies back then were scary as hell!