winged words

(A piece from last semester I found in one of my notebooks. Enjoy!)


People's faces here are like books. A little weather-battered, too many flapping pages. A bit of a breeze will knock us over privately, and then we return to our pages with the gravity of a monk, checking and re-checking to see if all the old words are there.

In this quiet space, we see - we cannot help but see - one another, and in the spark that is eye-contact a page may shudder, shine or melt into itself (they call this shyness).

That boy clutches his phone, the necessary escape-pod. That girl wears long white socks, reaching up past cargo capris. She will never be cool, I could tell her that, but she had somewhere to be.

"Did you get your information?" a desk librarian asks a man in plaid, wearing a cap. He said he did, something about the census, and then apologetically joked about "someone asking a weirdo question like that."

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Photos from yesterday.



-well, this isn't antique glass; it's just old and dirty :P
















Other notes from life lately:

-People, by and large, do not change their ways. If you need information from a certain Latin professor, do not be surprised when the e-mail he sends you about independent study is entirely in Latin. As was the syllabus and every quiz and test you took with him some time ago.

-I'm getting addicted to So You Think You Can Dance again. They just got through the 'Vegas' round, and let me tell you: if I were a dancer and in that, I wouldn't have survived that. Stay up all night to choreograph a group dance to perform in the morning? Super-intense criticism and even more intense choreography you have an hour to learn? No, no, and no. People were weeping about every ten seconds.

- I do not recommend Benjamin Button. It's excruciatingly long, the computer imagery on his face makes everything look vaguely fake, and it makes you think about death, dying, and the aging process the entire time. Nope. Didn't like (although it did help me to understand why people equate Brad Pitt with male beauty. The buildup to him looking young and awesome is sooo long that I think you'd tend to come to that conclusion in almost any case).

-Summer class starts next week. As it's a history course, I'm not doing my usual geeky thing and looking at the reading materials ahead of time. But perhaps that's because I have material still to finish from the last semester.

-I planted my flower seeds finally, nasturtium and zinnias. It will be exciting if/when they sprout, and blossom. I would love to photograph something I actually grew.

I went exploring in a back pasture the other day, taking pictures, and happened upon this really tough, intimidating-looking bush.




The thing had branches coming out of it from everywhere, kind of like a bush trying to be a tree.

As I'm bending over, inspecting it for photographic possibilities, a bird silently swoops out by my ear and sails away without a peep. That's weird. Maybe, I thought to myself, she was sitting on a nest.

I poked in there and, to my surprised delight, it seems there was just enough square footage to allow for one.







By the way, this is me blindly sticking my camera above where I know the nest to be and hoping to get something cool. I wasn't prepared, however, for the two types of eggs in there - the fat speckled ones, and the smaller white ones.







Does it mean another bird took over that particular nest? Does she then have to deal with the other brood - perhaps kill them? Or you could wait and let the speckled vs. the non-speckled hatchlings duke it out in the nest (quite the scene, I would imagine). Not too hard of a guess who would win there: big speckled dino eggs all the way, baby, unless appearances deceive.

Still, strange. Anyone know?

And while I'm thinking about birds, that Nelly Furtado song blipped into my brain: "I'm like a bird, I want to fly away..." My sister and I like taking out one of the nouns that follow: "I don't know where my home is, I don't know where my phone is." We like the idea of Nelly singing so plaintively about her cell phone missing - something, I guess, that I could do at times, but definitely wouldn't set to music.

I wish I had a nice thought-fox right now, something easy I could kill that would make me write and exorcise all my demons, all my insecurities.

In college (thus far) I have never taken a creative writing class. One turned out to be sort-of about creative nonfiction, which wasn't too hard. I have Intro to Creative Writing in the fall. Funny, an English major just dipping her toes into it.

I would have struck a parenthesis in there after "just," but except for a few poems written on the Texas coastline, up in my crude bunkbed lying on a sandy sleeping bag, I don't write stories, or poems. They frighten me. Theoretically, I'd like to be good enough to publish work here or here or here, anywhere with a masthead and cool cover design, but I no longer put forth the effort. Why earlier and not now? Is it that, like Hughes' tormented speaker in "Thought-Fox," I'm scared of what's hiding in my own "midnight moment's forest"? It's really dark in there, or at least it appears that way. All it would take is to watch someone sauntering through my own particular darkness, my own loneliness, crash down all my ideas of who I am and how I work for it to stop, and my pen to start. That's how the poem works.

I'm attempting to write a paper for the end of a class about that one, that Hughes one I linked to. I'm not entirely sure what happens at the end. I could write about the differences between the animal and the human, the biblical references I see, the blanks and spaces scattered throughout. It's for a literary theory class, and I guess it's supposed to be difficult, or at least weird. So I'm trying. I'm writing the outline, and the thing is that that alone is becoming as scary as writing a short story. I'm avoiding it. I'll probably behave as usual, submitting somewhere right up to the deadline, making things harder than they are.

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In honor of this girl's birthday, I'm posting some pictures I took about a month ago at her house.

When you're little, it's all about the wings :) (Mine were a bit scruffier than hers at her age :))





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The people who sell pastels, I've learned, want you to believe happiness comes in every of the 10, 15, 23 or 56 shades they offer.

Maybe it's true.

I'm taking an "Expressions in Pastels" class, and today went to a crafts store to load up, my teacher's list in hand. I had to ask for help, after being distracted by the poster prints section (a painting of a woman with flowers by Diego Rivera caught my eye). Now everything is placed on a folding table downstairs. Giant board so I can work outside = check. 3 charcoal pencils, 5 large colored sheets of pastel drawing paper, a pastel drawing pad, check. The box of pastels.

I could have gone for one collection that was around $80, or one at around $56. I went with something humbler, and ended up laughing as I pulled out the slip of paper serving as directions:

"Using purest degree of pigment, Gallery Semi-Hard Pastels have unsurpassed bright colors and highest degree of light-fastness."

Having worked in a Japanese restaurant, I recognize the blunted syntax of someone for whom English isn't a first language. I'm just a little confused - how can pigment be "pure"? Isn't pigment pigment?

"Light-fastness" - that's actually very beautiful. My pastel chalks have "light-fastness" against paper, like something out of Genesis.

They offer 120 colors in full: Cadmium red, Vermilion, Prussian blue, Cobalt blue, Deep phthalo blue ("phthalo" - may be a good one to hoard away for a Scrabble game, if it's a word!), True green (true green?), Deep chromium oxide green, Viridian, Hooker's Green (I'm serious - and it looks like a pretty mellow tone), May green, Light green field yellowish (again, serious), Pale bister, Van dyke red hue, Light flesh, Medium flesh, Dark flesh (all salmony pinks), Warm grey I - VI and Cool grey I-VI. As well as others that don't strike my poetic ear the same way :)

But I'm curious where the words come from: bister, delft, phthalo, viridian, carmine.

All with "highest degree of light-fastness."

***

I have my first assignment to do, and it will involve another cool word: "scumbling." It's very evocative of what your fingers and the pastel stub actually do. From the handout: "...scumbling involves using the side of the stick in a loose motion to create a thin veil of color which doesn't entirely obliterate the one underneath. The effect is rather like looking at a color through a thin haze of smoke." The picture closeup of a hand "scumbling" fits a little better for me. The fingers drag a pink stick into a series of mazy lines, which, on the brown paper, resemble bark.

Three pictures below show "finished" projects. One, "scumbling light over dark," looks like birds in flight. The two others look like tree foliage and water respectively.

I'm really going to enjoy this class.

Do you ever feel as if you have days which can only be described as 'weird'? Today was. Whilst friends post things like, "donedonedonedone" on Facebook, I have this critical theory paper hanging over my head that scares the bezonkers out of me. (I don't know how that adds to my day, except that - oh yes! I was on campus.) I talked to my advisor, whose first words were, "What's wrong? You look so worried. I'm so concerned!" (I'm serious.) I convinced her I was fine, and she tried to drudge a schedule for me out of, sadly, what's poor pickings; I've missed my upperclassman early registration days by a lot. A lot.

And then I had a counselor appointment to kill time until. I ran into (intentionally) a Latin prof I haven't seen since last fall, and he was carrying about five books with one arm. He looked extraordinarily educated and intelligent, leaving a meeting with some grad-dish looking folk. I felt rather superfluous, asking about independent study.

Then I found a spot outside and read. I ran into a girl who helped me realize that not-nabbing that awesome summer-and-fall schedule is, in the long run, really not the big deal my brain is making it. I have a slice of rather suspicious pizza, and keep getting distracted by some rather fantastic cumulous clouds. I've written about clouds before, I believe, but these were monster clouds, every gradation of grey and super-bright at the edges, as if there's an angel sitting just over the edge. On my way back to my car (I was lost for about 5 minutes, trying to find it in the garage, which always seems to happen to me), I took pictures of the clouds. And the back of a professional window-cleaner. And some tulips past their prime, some graffiti, and some nooks and crannies in the parking garage.

In this mood I like to think I am being really arty, that these shots, edited to be really grungy and contrast-y, will end up in a book somewhere with, I don't know, Allen Ginsberg poems (who the girl my friend mentioned today, when talking about options for post-college life. Ginsberg apparently says choose nothing, and have that be cool, which she wants to do). The thing is, a) a lot of the time I'm full of myself, and b) it turned out I grabbed my parents' camera, which gives me even less control over the camera's operation than does my normal one.

All day I've just wanted to float away on a cloud. No more literary theory, people graduating (including my sister), nothing. Trail it away like a balloon. Climb up past the highest level of the parking garage, where you're level with the banking buildings and can see the tower by the library, and these little steeples that always look like the cutest things in the world. Just go, airily disdaining the man washing windows and the surreptitious-looking one jamming to some beats, and turn your head against the sun (it was bright today). Feel the expanse of cloud; a million little sizzles of cold. Look down through the whiteness, remember planes, and laugh. You can come home whenever you please.

I wrote some poetry whilst in Texas; very odd for me. Usually the idea of writing poetry is nerve-wracking enough that I don't begin. But there were too many rich things to think about while I was there, on the Ike-devastated coast.

The first is about the beach in Galveston. The second is in remembrance of a freaky tree on the corner of the street.


( Her footfalls vanished with the water )


( This insistent life will sing its song. )


Some pictures, finally, from the trip. Local churches, as you can see below, are a major force for change. This one, which I helped sort donated clothes at, was holding what they called "Grace-Mart": free clothes and food to anyone who needed it. Quite often people would wander around the premises, asking when it would be open.




A Salvation Army just down the street was dealing with its own deluge of donations. These "packages" of clothing are going to needy people overseas. Only the best of the donations will end up in the store. We helped sort here too.






Lots and lots of donated shoes.



We also spent considerable time making-over the church we stayed at. Playground equipment, no matter how poor, received a rather Ronald McDonald kind of treatment - fresh costs of red and yellow paint - and we also did plenty of other painting projects and general upkeep things all over the house.

I made friends with an insane dog at a lady's house, where we cleared out brush and generally got dirty. All the guys kept commenting on how they'd never felt like such a "man" before, what with manually breaking down rotting fences and "conquering trees." Guys are interesting.

And thus concludes my Texas post. I'd love to include more, but there's only space for so much.

I was driving home tonight when my cell phone rang. It being past 10 and I, rapidly approaching a rather finicky intersection (can they be?), spoke a bit brusquely on the phone, saying I was on my way home.

"That's fine," my girlfriend said quickly. "I just wanted to let you know... I'm engaged!"

Like an idiot, my first word was "WHAT?" Then followed the congratulations, the exclamations, quick questions of what had happened that evening. But it is undeniably bewildering. I remember when the two first started dating, the fear in D's normally irrepressible eyes. I watched them together after they made 'the leap' from friends to something more - no real difference in their behavior that I could see. It was all very natural.

I met D graduating high school, and then recognized her name in a roster for a college English course a couple years later. Even though the common joke was that she and J were like an old, married couple, bickering away, I could never tell for certain whether she was smitten or not. Yet, whenever I asked how things were going between the two of them, she'd grin broadly and say everything was great.

And now she's wearing a ring.

It's a whole different level of playing field from what I and my closest circle of friends go through. We have our crushes, our boy woes, sarcastic declarations to join or form a nunnery.

As much as we complain, though, I don't yet want to be in the group wearing rings and flipping through bridal magazines. Yes, I turned 22 on Tuesday, but I still know so little about who I want to be and what I want to do. In the meantime, I'm amazed that people find one another, get together and do the whole song-and-dance of marriage in America. The small tastes of romantic love I've had in my life have convinced me there is nothing like it on earth, but the potency of it hearkens to the words of Solomon: "Do not awaken love before its time."

I hope not to. In the meantime, I'm going to be thrilled and dazed at how things have turned out for my friend.

For some reason, this is what I feel like doing with this post.

-Soothing writing:

"The Day is Done" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Such songs have power to quiet
  The restless pulse of care
And come like the benediction
  That follows after prayer. (...)"

The whole thing is so lovely. I underlined and wrote notes all around it in a high school English textbook. Every part of it is like a lullaby.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Wiliams

This is one of those classics that is never, never going away.

-Soothing pictures:

Taken by me. Do not use without permission.


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