halloween friday

cool things i saw today on campus:

1) automated toilet paper dispensers. (seriously people?)

2) three boys prancing around campus dressed as monty python's king arthur and companions. one had a crown. one had coconut shells. one had a lute. thank you freshmen.

3) a girl walk up to a boy in the cougareat and ask him out. it went like this: "hi, i was wondering if you'd want to go on a date with me next weekend." he hesitated, then said, "sure..." she then informed him it was a psych study on boys' reactions to girls asking them out. ha ha hesitating boy, the jokes on you!

happy winter, i mean!

apparently posting fall pictures taunts poor old mr. jack frost: this morning i woke up to...

one thing i do love about winter in provo is that i study better. something about scarves and sweater vests and gray wet winter outside makes me perfectly okay with spending hours reading literary theorists in the library.

which is what i attempted to do tonight. kant. immanuel kant. i find his name fitting--his writing is anything but "can-do"able.

here's the problem with the man: i know what all of his words mean, but strung together they make no sense whatsoever to me. example:

Now there are but two kinds of concepts, and these yield a corresponding number of distinct principles of the possibility of their objects.

i read that sentence three times, then read the sparknotes version of it twice. i still have no idea what he's talking about.

as i'm re-re-reading kant, dude in the library walks up and says, "that looks hard. from across the room i thought you were reading a dictionary." i laugh. i show him a page. he says, "is it english?" at first i thought he meant, "is it for an english major class." no. he meant, "are those words in english." beats me, kid! the next time he passed by my table, he didn't stop--he merely waved and whisper-screamed "DON'T GIVE UP! WHATEVER YOU DO!" thanks library dude.

and that, you see, is when i made my breakthrough of the day. after forty minutes (= two paragraphs) of kant, i began wandering the library in search of something better--something i kan do. there's a poem i keep in my planner, one that i reread quite often (aka: every time i find myself bored somewhere). it is called "ithaca" by constantine cavafy. to this day, i have not delved farther into cavafy than the rereading of this one poem. so tonight i decide what better way to postpone the inevitable kant but by diverting my attention to a poet! surely my professors (and twain, for that matter) would be proud. and then it hit me--somewhere between PA 5610 .K2 and PA 5610 .K3: the TRUTH behind the master's program. all the classes, all the impenetrable texts--they're not the content the professors are trying to teach us! they're just the impetus! the impetus for so overburdening us with the density of theories and criticisms and analyses that we run to tolstoy and wordsworth and homer for sweet sweet solace! my education is teaching me not to love saussure and barrett browning and semenza (heaven help that man), but to find what i love as i seek refuge from the oppression of the incomprehensible!

cavafy, you are one that i love.

thoreau, you too. but please don't be offended that

i love emerson more.

willy, the way your stories find a way into every construct of truth fascinates me.

hemingway, bless your soul for your simple sentences.

milton, don't worry: paradise lost is on my bookshelf for a reason. i'm saving you because i think i might love you and i don't want a class to ruin that. so you i will keep secret until i can read you all to myself.

eliot, i will fight for your wasteland to the death. (despite derk's derisions.)

clive staples...clive staples. well what can be said of you, other than you are the first to be read when i go home every christmas.

let's play house

i love being domestic,

on evenings when it's raining and the house smells like sauteed onions and pecans,

and it's chilly and autumn outside.

i feel like wearing aprons all day

and baking every recipe i have that uses pumpkin, cloves, or nutmeg.

i feel like making blankets

and painting

and any other craft i can dream up.

and i feel like throwing parties,

ones with six different kinds of cake:

lemon

red velvet

chocolate

marble

spice

rainbow sprinkle

and four different soups

and we'd all wear cardigans and argyle and after dinner we'd sit around and drink hot chocolate and talk about books.

happy fall!

go find a tree and HUG IT.

or a person. both are good and shall bring you much happiness.

*p.s. the above pictures were taken with my new camera lens! i squealed quite a lot today: when i picked it up from ups, when i opened the box, when i opened the box inside the box, when i pulled the lens out of the sweet case they sent it in, when i attached it to my camera for the first time....ahhhhh. i was very close to writing a love letter to it tonight, but decided that might be weird.

two things i like

today i ate four bowls of honey nut cheerios. i am awesome. kinda like this video:

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

music video monday: i want to change my face

lately, i have been bored of my face. i want a new one. not permanently. just for a little while.

bruce springsteen feels this way sometimes too. he says he wants to change his clothes, his hair, his face.

and tegan and sara sing his song about it.

career exploration

i think i'll be a photographer, because i like pushing buttons.

i like writing in fancy letters, so maybe i'll be a calligrapher, and people can hire me to write all their fancy letters,

like in love letters and stuff.

i like buying used books and figuring out how to arrange them on my bookshelves so one day

i might own my own bookstore.

it would have a hot chocolate cafe inside, because i like drinking hot chocolate.

i like sorting and classifying halloween candy into piles, so maybe i'll work at a

candy factory!

i like wandering aimlessly places on saturday mornings,

so maybe someone will pay me someday for noticing things that you only notice if you wander aimlessly

places on saturday mornings.

i like making lists. and especially checking things off the lists i make.

maybe i can work for santa.

i like staying up late when i should be asleep already. maybe i can get a job

making people with insomnia not feel so lonely.

i like eating honey nut cheerios.

A LOT.

maybe someone should come take my picture and it could say, "Hey! I'm

the girl who eats the most honey nut cheerios in the world!"

and they would give me a trophy maybe.

i like folding paper birds.

i think that has no practical purpose.

oh!

maybe i could work for the army and if they run out of fake model airplanes to do their simulations with, i could make them

some paper airplanes and they could use those!

or if the zoo's birds ever get sick, i could fold up some big paper birds out of glittery paper

and they would be so pretty that the people wouldn't mind that

the real birds

were

too sick to come out.

i like laying in my bed late at night listening to coldplay.

i don't think i can turn that into a job

but maybe someday,

a long time from now,

the world will be like, "hey we need an expert on this old band called coldplay...anyone know anything about them?"

and then i will be the

world's first professor on coldplay.

i like eating ice cream. and peanut m&m's. i should look into getting

a job in professional taste-testing.

i like typing on my typewriter. but then again,

that is just another way of pushing buttons. so

maybe i really will be a photographer.

music video monday: leftovers

all i could think about today was brick oven's garlic chicken pizza. i thought about it as i was eating my peach. i thought about it as i was reading horace. i thought about it as i was walking to victorian lit. so i finally resolved that i would do it. i would buy an entire garlic chicken pizza, just because i felt like it. of course, i did use the rationale that it would leave me enough leftovers to have garlic chicken for lunch every day this week. i love this plan. so as i'm enjoying my garlic chicken pizza leftovers all week (yes, it does have bacon and tomatoes on it too...mmmmmmmmmmmm), you can enjoy some leftovers from johnny flynn:

the four right chords

this weekend i went to abravanel hall in salt lake to hear rachmaninoff's rhapsody on a theme of paganini. i love the symphony because it carries me to a place where i can have perfect stillness with my thoughts, and wrestle through them, to the point that when i leave, i feel relieved--exhausted, but relieved. the rhapsody was performed by conrad tao (he's only 16!). to give you a taste of the magic of the moment for we the audience, he got a quadruple encore. both for his ability (of course), and also for the beauty of rachmaninoff's rhapsody. this rhapsody for me is part of the fabric of my SOUL. dramatic, i know. what i mean is it's one of those songs that i've known for as far back as i have memories. i know every note, every pause, every breath. better than i know my own voice, i know this song. here it is the second half for you to enjoy:

there's one part in particular, it's at 1:35-2:22. this is one of the most beautiful chord progressions in my book, and here's why: the chords build on each other. they are increasingly beautiful, but only because they are understood in relation to the one before, and the one about to come next. they are beautiful because of where the notes have been, and where they are about to go. the build up is the sound of the unlocking, then the lift-away at 1:48, when they resolve. the four right chords can make me cry, as third eye blind sings. any one of those chords, if played in isolation, would mean little to our minds. but when strung together, as comments and variations on the ones before, they combine to something of great emotional texture. they make meaning. meaning is not in each individual chord, but in the movement across and through them together. and it is in this way that it makes me wonder, a still nebulously forming idea, if perhaps we are the same--meaningless until understood in context to those around us, our experiences without texture until we understand them in relation to the experiences we had before, and the ones to come, which we yet cannot see. but the meaning, the richness, the melody is in them all strung together--the experiences, the people, the lifes. the four right chords. if the stringing together is the motion of unlocking, as bon iver sings, then that end moment of liftaway is when&where we create a place where love is safe. and maybe that's something.