Woman is sphinx. Woman has writ it.
If you understand her, never admit it.
----Ogden Nash
ouch!
Okay, so I'm a sucker (but only a small one) for internet quasi-analytical quizzes, but this one actually hit the nail on the head in one way, anyway.
It's supposed to tell you about a book that suits your personality. According to the six rather weird questions that I answered, I am A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.
Now, the personality description isn't really much like me (I don't think!) -
Despite humble and perhaps literally small beginnings, you inspire faith in almost everyone you know. You are an agent of higher powers, and you manifest this fact in mysterious and loud ways. A sense of destiny pervades your every waking moment, and you prepare with great detail for destiny fulfilled. When you speak, IT SOUNDS LIKE THIS! - which more or less describes the character Owen Meany from this great book (which you'd have to read in order to understand what the heck that description is talking about. While it's true, I don't think it conveys the truth well to people who have yet to read the book.) Anyway, I hope I'm not too much like Owen Meany, who is one of those people you'd rather know than be.
Still, I read that book a couple of years ago now, and it was so cool. I had kind of forgotten about it recently but I'm going to go back and read it again. It was really not like any other book I've read.
One of my roommates said that the other day, and it was too good not to make public.
Yesterday was the first snow day at Covenant that I actually used sensibly. Sensibly, in this context, means doing something involving other substances besides snow. I sat at my computer, with my notebook and phone, and called colleges all over the US in an attempt to get some research done for Student Development. Sheesh. For about seven hours. And I had fun doing it, what's worse! Oh, mercy, it's funny to care about things that I didn't even know existed for most of my life.
So Kevin Eames (who reminds me very very much of a drawing of Dickens' Fezziwig that I had in an old copy of A Christmas Carol back home. This is not the same picture, but you get the idea.) is really a generous and fun kinda guy. Hooray Kaleo Center. I'll give them credit for the snow day, since it helped me out so much in finding my calling.
My favorite thing about the day was that I spent it in my pajamas, until I dressed up to go accompany Jenny Brown in her senior recital. Said recital was highly successful, due to much prayer from lots of people.
Which brings me to my question. Have any of you ever had the weird certainty that someone was praying for you right then? I'm not talking solely about the certainty that God is supernaturally managing things for you, but added to it, the sense that other Christians are involved in the process?
Discuss.
There are beautiful things. Like those microscopic snowbits that were falling the other day - almost too small to see, but if you stood still, they stung your face.
Rachel found me a new poem.
Walking to Work
by Ted Kooser
Today, it's the obsidian
ice on the sidewalk
with its milk white bubbles
popping under my shoes
that pleases me, and upon it
a lump of old snow
with a trail like a comet,
that somebody,
probably falling in love,
has kicked
all the way to the corner.
So there's this Gender Genie that takes text you've written and applies some algorithm to it and decides if you're male or female.
You can set it for fiction, nonfiction, or blog entry, and that makes it differ somewhat. I tried putting in all sorts of stuff I had in my MSWord folders and only once did it tell me I was a girl. (Female Score: 1103, Male Score: 1087 - only sixteen points difference, you notice.) More typically, I was more than three times as masculine in my writing as I was feminine. I don't take any pride in that* (who wants to be a sucky girl?) so I'm wondering if it'll work as badly for the rest of you.
Oh yeah. Something else that has been making me smile at odd moments. I found a food company allegedly formed by a married couple, one Jewish, the other Chinese (I think, I was scanning it). They named the company Soy Vey. Um, yeah, anyway. Sorry.
*although I have to say that at some points in my life that kind of mistake would make me quite happy. Also being mistaken for a kid who wasn't homeschooled... yi yi yi. Reject one stereotype and you become another, fool! I don't care what proof is in what pudding. Eat the pudding. You'll be happier.
I see that I have changed the language of the dates on this blog to Estonian.
In my sleep.
Or maybe in someone else's sleep.
I have a poem for you. Don't let the title fool you - it is actually a thing of beauty, I think. Just a, um, different kind of beauty. Mad Goat, dear, the last line I particularly dedicate to you.
The Excrement Poem
by Maxine Kumin
It is done by us all, as God disposes, from
the least cast of worm to what must have been
in the case of the brontosaur, say, spoor
of considerable heft, something awesome.
We eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are.
I think these things each morning with shovel
and rake, drawing the risen brown buns
toward me, fresh from the horse oven, as it were,
or culling the alfalfa-green ones, expelled
in a state of ooze, through the sawdust bed
to take a serviceable form, as putty does,
so as to lift out entire from the stall.
And wheeling to it, storming up the slope,
I think of the angle of repose the manure
pile assumes, how sparrows come to pick
the redelivered grain, how inky-cap
coprinus mushrooms spring up in a downpour.
I think of what drops from us and must then
be moved to make way for the next and next.
However much we stain the world, spatter
it with our leavings, make stenches, defile
the great formal oceans with what leaks down,
trundling off today's last barrowful,
I honor shit for saying: We go on.
Wow. There are good things in life. I would like to introduce this Maxine to Mr. Halvorsen, who enjoys the body's earthiness in a manner lovely to overhear him talk about. It reminds me of something that happened this summer as I worked for BEST, cleaning bathrooms for the conferences that Covenant hosts. Hehehee. I hope someone out there also remembers the incident. I will spare the rest of you a description.
Actually, my favorite line is the one about thinking "with shovel and rake." I'm quite taken with the idea of thinking with things other than one's brain. My problem with my music is that when I play, I think with my shoulderblades and not my brain. This is why I get into the music but forget notes. I also hear with my imagination and not my ears, so that what other people hear is not what I play. In Ballet Shoes(a book whose worth I knew long before Meg Ryan talked about it in You've Got Mail, which is a good thing, because I don't believe everything I see on TV), Posy has to think everything with her feet, or she won't remember it later.
Grief. I wondered if I could find another copy of Claudia online, and when I looked it up, I found it endorsed as one of those great helping-kids-especially-tomboys-to-understand-themselves books. It's as if I had this friend who was really fun to be with, a good listener, and then found out they were a paid counselor with ads in the paper and everything. I liked this book better when I thought no one else had read it.
Aha. Yet another person fallen for idea that the new way to be mainstream and cool is that you have to be fringe and unique. No! Like what you like, ingest what other people say, and poop out what you don't need or can't store for later.
