My Year in Lists: 2011

Reading

• Final count: 47 books, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry!
• Most fun: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which I read twice! I also read the first five sequels in the Mary Russell series in a matter of months.
• Biggest surprise: Eat, Pray, Love. I can admit that I found it profoundly moving when I read it last spring. Sometimes books live up to their hype.
• Greatest accomplishment: Vanity Fair. It was looooooooong. Fortunately, its awesomeness was proportional to its length.
• Highest quality to quantity ratio: Winesburg, Ohio. Written about small town Ohio in the early 20^th century, Sherwood Anderson's tiny little collection of short stories was phenomenally beautiful, sad, and honest. I have no idea why I left it collecting dust on my To Read bookshelf for so long.
• Best poetry: Sleeping Preacher. 
• Fictional character I was most in love with: It’s a tie between Mary Russell’s Holmes or Mr. Thornton from North and South. (Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this!)

Television

I was all about period dramas this year. My favorites were

• The absolutely brilliant Downton Abbey from Masterpiece Theater.
• Granada’s beautiful 1980s interpretations of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. 
• The VampireDiaries. (Hey, there’s enough Civil War in there that I’m going to count it!) 

All three of these were superbly written and beautifully produced and addictive as all get out. Thank you, Netflix!

Music

What didn’t I listen to this year? Here’s a playlist of a few of my favorite songs from a few of my favorite artists this year. Most of these albums didn't come out in 2011, but they've all spent a lot of time on my iPod in 2011. 

Real Life

This year was tumultuous, at best, and while I was never bored, I was never quite at ease, either. 

The good:

• Three good friends got married and another got pregnant for the first time. 
• I got a new job that I love and am consistently challenged by.
• I traveled to Denver and Winfield and Manhattan, Kansas had a great time with friends at all three locations. 
• I did a lot of yoga and played a lot of softball and even did a bit of belly dancing. 
• I started a book club with my friends.
• I submitting my writing for publication again for the first time in years, and had a poem accepted for publication sometime in 2012!

The bad:

• I had an icky bout of bursitis that kept me on the couch for a good chunk of the fall. 
• My university went through a substantial restructuring process, and not everyone made it out unscathed. 
• My mom was in the hospital twice and recovering from surgery for a good part of the year.
• My grandma was in the hospital for a stroke and had to move to a nursing home with her husband in the fall.
• My grandpa was in the hospital twice, first for a hip injury and again for blood clots a few weeks ago.

The confusing: 

• Even awesome new jobs can be terribly stressful, baffling, brain-addling things.
• I set aside my first savings for retirement and taught myself about a bunch of grown-up stuff like building credit and buying cars and health insurance deductibles. Yay responsibility?
• I spent a lot of time thinking about Occupy Wall Street and the recession and global warming and the crimes at Penn State. The future seems more complicated and challenging than it ever has before.

When I look back on this year, I think that I’ll remember it as the first time that I realized that whenever life gets harder, sadder, or scarier, it also gets more interesting, gains a richer texture, becomes more precious and vital in its complexity. Life is a bit like beer: yes, Bud Lite (i.e. college life) is easy to drink, but it’s the bitter complexity of the hops that makes an IPA (being a 28-year-old) memorable. 

I’m glad I was here for 2011, whatever challenges it’s held, and I’m glad I got the chance to drink it to its dregs. So if you're lucky enough to live in the Midwest, go find yourself a Boulevard Single-Wide IPA and have a happy new year. See you again in 2012!

The Vampire Diaries: A Comparative Review

So for the past couple of months, I've spent a lot of time holed up in my apartment due to some epic hip pain. I have bursitis in my hips. That's right, bursitis. And, yes, this does mean that I'm an 80-year-old trapped in a 28-year-old's body: I also spend a lot of time cat cuddling and tea drinking and thrift shopping and grouching at the noisy youngsters who walk past my bedroom window and staying in to quietly listen to NPR. I'm cool with it.  ;)

Anyway, my bad flare up has had one good consequence: I've had the chance to spend a lot of time sitting on my couch,  icing my hips, and watching The Vampire Diaries. Created by The CW, The Vampire Diaries is one of those shows that shouldn't be good but is. It's a vampire show written for teenagers, but don't think Twilight--think True Blood with more high school and less nudity. 

The Vampire Diaries

The Vampire Diaries follows a 17-year-old girl named Elena who just happens to have two really fantastic looking vampire brothers fall in love with her. She spends a lot of time tenderly embracing one of them (Stefan) and kind of flirting with the other one (Damon) and fending off other mean old vampires who just happen to not be in love with her. And, of course, there are some witches and werewolves hanging about and a lot of relationship drama and witty repartee. Add in a whole lot of painfully good looking people and a dash of gratuitous violence and it makes for a heady, addictive mix. It's not quite as clever as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but The Vampire Diaries has more plot twists than a spy novel and surprisingly complex characters who actually manage to grow from episode to episode (which is more than a lot of TV series can claim). 

But after the first few episodes, I kept thinking, "Hmmmm, the names Damon and Stefan sure sound familiar." That's when I realized that the show was based on The Vampire Diaries novels written by L. J. Smith which I had owned and read when I was all of 13! I remembered not being a big fan of the series (I'm pretty sure that I sold them at a garage sale when I was in high school), but I adored (and--I will admit it--still own) her other four series: The Secret Circle, Dark Visions, The Forbidden Game, and Night World. I read and re-read those books, like, a lot. And I'm secure enough in my intellectual and literary tastes to admit it.  ;)

The Secret Circle and Dark Visions. (Oh, yes, I did find these on one of my bookshelves!)

All of these books involve witches, vampires, werewolves, psychics, or some combination of these supernatural types, and they're all very romantic and soul mate-y and "tragic" and probably horribly obnoxious, but I loved them all. I doubt that they would hold up to being reread by my adult brain, but I can't regret those hours I spent as a lonesome, awkward, angry, dreamy junior high student, laying in my bed re-reading those novels, wishing that something, anything, exciting would happen to me. (Heck, I wouldn't have minded a bite-y vampire boyfriend, so long as I had one!) Those books were just right for me when I read them, no matter how horrifying I would find them now, with their lovely, thoughtless heroines and their menacing, controlling supernatural boyfriends. 

The newest The Vampire Diaries edition.

But, of course, I had to at least try to reread The Vampire Diaries novels to see how closely they followed the show, and this proved to be one of those rare occasions where the screen version of something vastly improves upon the original text. 

The writers and producers at The CW have (thankfully) taken a lot of liberties with the novels. The books are abjectly awful; I made it through the first one only by reading every fourth word and flipping a few pages ahead whenever I was annoyed or horrified or confused by a character, a plot point, or an adjective (this happened a lot). The main character was awful, the writing was insipid (yes, tell me more about how Elena's furniture was Victorian cherry wood and she wore a peach colored silk ribbon in her hair, because that is both realistic and vitally important to my understanding of her character!), and the plot was mainly about how making out with vampires is not just fun--it's fulfilling! I mean, these books make Twilight read like Hemingway, all precision and restraint and deep, deep feeling. 

When will I ever learn not to read books whose cover blurbs start with "A DEADLY LOVE TRIANGLE"?!

But I would still highly recommend the show, no matter how sordid its origins. It does a great job of yanking out the best parts of the original novel's story-line and trashing the rest: Elena's personality is (thank goodness) drastically different, she's given a little brother and a slew of friends with compelling story-lines of their own, and the tumultuous relationship between the two vampire brothers is probably the most complicated and meaningful relationship in the show. Instead of being about vampires or (*shudder*) soul-mates, The Vampire Diaries manages to be about the strength of family bonds, self-transformation and redemption, and accepting one's past. 

And let's be honest: who would ever turn down two really pretty vampire boyfriends for the price of one? 

(Don't forget to wipe the drool off your keyboard before you go, ladies!)

How Way Leads on to Way

I've been away. You may have noticed.  :P

My new job has taken a lot of adjusting to these past few weeks. I like the work, but traveling back and forth has eaten up much of my free time, and I'm still getting use to it. On top of that, my poor, lovely, stubborn mother has been in the hospital with an unusually nasty strain of pneumonia. She's back home and feeling better now, but I was worried for her. So, dear blog, I'm sorry, but you just haven't been a priority.

But since I've last visited, I've been reading a lot and enjoying my Netflix subscription and trying (trying!) my best to take it easy in my time off. I've been in a particularly fun sort of reading/television watching path--it's one of my favorite things about being out of school and being able to direct my own reading. I choose books with perfect freedom and whimsy, and I never run out of new strands of interest to follow. Each new book I read has the potential to sling me off into some new interest that I never expected to love. In reading as in life, as Frost puts it, "way leads on to way."

Most recently, I've been loving all things Sherlock Holmes, which I never in my life thought I would be interested in. I used to think that I didn't like mystery novels or crime stories, and police detectives in tweeds smoking pipes seemed like the dullest thing possible. But here's what happened:

• I watched that fantastically witty Doctor Who episode where Agatha Christie solves a real-life murder mystery involving a giant space wasp. (Yes, that episode is as awesome as it sounds.) -->
• Curious about Christie, I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, and Death Comes as the End. They were great--very clever and well written and British and astute. -->
• Thinking that I now liked old-fashioned British mysteries, I rented the new Sherlock Holmes action movie with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. I surprised myself by really, really enjoying it. -->
• Intrigued by the eccentricity of Holmes in the movie (drug use, bizarre fits of melancholia, a deep and curious jealousy of his friend Dr. Watson, etc.), I spent some time researching Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle on Wikipedia.  -->
• Curious about Doyle's writing and the oddity of Holmes as a character, I read two of the Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles). They were fun, easy reading, as clear and fast-paced as if they'd been written in the late 20th century, not the late 19th. -->
• Because I enjoyed these novels, I decided to read Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice (which features Holmes in later life, living in semi-retirement in the 1920s and 1930s). -->
• King's version of Holmes was fantastically appealing, even better than the original! On top of the typical Holmes-style plot lines, there was a brilliant feminist female sleuth to keep Holmes in check (Mary Russell!) and a romantic sub-plot and really cool flapper clothing. So I read the next two novels in the series (The Monstrous Regiment of Women and A Letter of Mary) and loved them. -->
• Finally, I took Netflix's suggestion and started watching the Granada Sherlock Holmes series from the 1980s and 1990s with Jeremy Brett. I loved it and spent a good chunk of this weekend watching Holmes chase down Professor Moriarty and a dozen other amateur thieves and murderers. I never, ever thought I'd have an opinion about Dr. Watson as a narrator or the nattiness of Victorian-era men's clothing, but now I do. So yay!

So what's next? Inspired by King's Mary Russell novels, Downton Abbey's portrayal of pre-World War I Britain, and Ishiguro's conflicted post-World War II butler in  The Remains of the Day, I'll probably track down some more great modernist British literature. But who knows where I'll end up next?

Goodness, isn't reading fun?  :D

A Few of My Favorite Things: The Hippie Edition

As I've mentioned earlier, it's been a busy month. First came an editing job on a tight deadline, which was followed by an intense drafting process for an essay that was due to my writing group, and then there was yet another editing job. (Oy! Freelance work seems to come in threes, just like deaths!)

Basically, I haven't had a lot of down time since January, so I've been trying to take it a little easy this weekend by enjoying a few of my favorite things. So, in the spirit of Mrs. E's "favorite things" posts over on Easy Street, here's one of my own--but a Lawrence hippie edition!

I've been watching a whole lot of Slings & Arrows this weekend. It's a Canadian comedy about a Shakespearean theater company struggling through various artistic and financial crises following the death of their artistic director. The former artistic director returns as a ghost to collaborate with (read: torment) his old friend and replacement as the company puts on Hamlet.

 
I love, love, LOVE this show--it's so smart, so well written, and so damn literate that I can hardly stand it. It's intensely funny (one of the main writers was an actor on both Kids in the Hall and Saturday Night Live), and the characters are amazing. I am so sad that there are only eighteen episodes of it (three seasons at six episodes each)--I'm almost done already!

So why's it hippie-tastic? Helloooo! It's all about arts funding and dramatic actors and romance and Shakespeare--with that earring, you know he wasn't precisely conventional.

I've been listening to a band called Pentangle. They're a British folk rock band from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I've heard them described as "folk-jazz" and "acid-folk." Yup, hippie-tastic.

I've been using my new Neti pot since my "seasonal" allergies have decided to make their appearance in this unusually warm February weather. It's been helping a lot with what I believe to be dust and mold allergies.

Why's it hippie-tastic? Neti pots originated in the Ayurvedic and yogic medical traditions. Also, look at this guy.

I've also been loving my newest thrift store find (wearing second-hand clothes is distinctly earth-loving and hippie-ish, by the way):

It's a fantastic khaki-colored blazer, which I got from the Salvation Army for $4.99. It's perfectly preserved and made of a somewhat yucky-feeling, stiff polyester-cotton blend (it's obviously from the late '70s or early '80s), but that just means it's the kind of garment that's going to last, like, forever. And it looks damn good with a colorful, flowy scarf; skinny jeans; and cowboy boots.

And last but obviously not least, I made homemade granola for the first time. I was buying Kroger's 100% Natural Cereal and eating entire boxes in three or four sittings--it was not a cost-effective way to live! So I thought I'd try my own version adapted from Alton Brown's recipe, a famous and somewhat complicated Allrecipes.com recipe, and what I had in my cabinet.

It turned out really, really, really well. I had a hard time not licking the spoon even before it was baked, and it's pretty fantastic now that it's cool and ready for some milk or yogurt.

Yum. Hippie life never looked so delicious. (See the recipe below.)


It's been a fun weekend, but I'm not looking forward to getting back to the grind tomorrow. But at least I can munch on granola before work tomorrow, and no one needs to know what I'm listening to on my iPod. More songs about knights and thyme and meadows, please!

---------------
Lesley's Granola

5 cups rolled oats
1 cup sliced almonds
1 cup sunflower seeds
3/4 cup shredded coconut
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup craisins

Stir together rolled oats, almonds, sunflower seeds, and coconut in a large bowl.

Combine the vegetable oil, salt, honey, and brown sugar in a pan and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and add the cinnamon and vanilla extract to the liquid mixture, stirring well.

Stir the liquid mixture into the dry ingredients. Spread the granola on two baking sheets covered in aluminum foil. Bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes, stirring and flipping the granola every five to ten minutes to avoid clumps and stickage.

Allow the granola to cool on the pan before mixing together with the craisins. Serve hot with milk or cold with milk, yogurt, or cereal. Or just stick your face in the bowl and gnash--whatever floats your boat!

2010 Recap

As much as I'm looking forward to 2011, 2010 has already been incredibly novel for me. My life has changed drastically in the last year, and so have I. So instead of posting a list of resolutions or expectations for the new year, here's my list of my favorite novelties of 2010--I think they're worth commemorating.

1. Singlehood: Breakups are hell, but, damn, I love doing what I want to do when I want to do it. There are benefits to being single--I'm starting to remember that.  :)
2. New Job: No, make that three new jobs, including two part-times and my first real nine to five (not to mention the occasional freelance editing work!). Entering the working world has been challenging, but I love paying my own way.
3. New Apartment: Downtown Lawrence. Hardwood floors. Big, bright windows. Terrible insulation and laughable wiring and one very pathetic window unit. But I love, love, love it.
4. New Friends: You know who you are!
5. Yoga: I am officially that obnoxious yoga-obsessed person! I think a lot about posture now, and balance, and the importance of feeling strong every day.
6. Healthy Living: In general, I've eaten a lot better, drank a lot less, and worked out a lot more than I have since before I started grad school. It's been great, and it hasn't felt like discipline, really--more like setting myself up to feel good every day.
7. Music: I've been listening to music constantly these past few months, especially more of the ladies (Ingrid Michaelson, Kate Nash, Nina Simone, Cat Power, Erykah Badu, and Janelle Monae) and indie stuff (Ratatat, Arcade Fire, Yeasayer, and Phoenix). I've missed it!
8. TV Obsessions: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who have improved the hell out of my life. Thank you, Netflix, Joss Whedon, and BBC!
9. New Style: My hair is red again, and shorter, and saucier, with stiff little bangs. I wear my big nerdy hipster glasses every day now. I've bought all of my favorite clothes within the past six months. I look and feel like a whole new woman.
10. New Ways of Thinking: I've worked hard this year to think in healthier ways. I try to be kinder to myself, more understanding of others, and more protective of my own mental health. It's hard work, challenging my own assumptions about the world and shedding my mental poisons, but it's work that has made me feel happier and healthier than anything else this year.

As far as years go, 2010 has been both incredibly difficult and richly rewarding, and I expect nothing less from 2011. So I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books of 2010: Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.

People have (with the help of their conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult: everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us.

Thanks, Rilke, and happy 2011 to all!

What I Learned from Bertrand Russell and Doctor Who

I ran across this quote from Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness the other day:

Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in people and things.

I think that this is fundamentally true. However, I must be honest: my evidence for this comes from a) my personal experience and b) Doctor Who. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Now she's taking life lessons from that silly show?! Well, yes. (And famous 20th-century philosophers! Don't forget about them!)

But, really, one of my favorite things about the Doctor is how excited he gets about things, even when he really doesn't have much reason to be enthusiastic. By most standards, he should be unhappy: he's a 900-year-old time traveler with no family, no home planet, no one to understand his crazy alien ways, a distinctly junky spaceship, a bunch of cranky alien enemies who would really enjoy killing him, and a really rocky love-life with his human lady friends. Oh, and he only owns one outfit, and it happens to be a pinstriped suit, which seems really inconvenient for adventuring. Not to mention the fact that he sometimes has to depend on 3-D specs to save the day. For realz.

But he's really, really, really fascinated by the universe and things and life and people, and so he manages to keep happy on a daily basis. Example: About to be killed by a clockwork android? Beautiful! He thinks it's a lovely bit of machinery and he'd like to meet whoever made it! Has to depend on a half-genius, half-birdbrained human scientist to bring him back through a worm hole and save the world? Great! Randy the Scientist is his new best friend when he's in south London! Meets Satan right on top of an inescapable black hole? Fantastic! It just means that he didn't know as much about the universe as he thought he did!

Pretty much every life-or-death situation turns into a kind of romp of appreciation for the Doctor, and it's contagious. Yes, he's a fictional character, but that sort of indefatigable enthusiasm for life, that giddy interest in our diverse and myriad world, seems like a great recipe for never really getting bored or growing old.

So for the last few months, one of my goals has been to get really excited over something, anything, everyday. It doesn't take much: some article about a crazy new scientific discovery, a mind-blowing Wikipedia article, a good trip to the gym, hearing to a fantastic song I've never heard before, listening to someone tell a crazy story about his/her life, whatever. The topic doesn't much matter. The point is to love something, anything, for the sake of loving, to appreciate something purely for the sake of appreciating anything.

Making a daily practice of loving some bit of the world: this seems like one of the easiest, more rewarding paths to happiness I can imagine. And I I'm glad to hear that Mr. Russell thinks so, too.

Halloween & Doctor Who

Halloween was a little disappointing this year. It used to be my favorite holiday, but as a grownup, I've gotten a little tired of dressing up for what usually turns out to be a disappointing, bar-fueled debacle. I used to love Halloween because it's about imagination and playfulness and not taking life too seriously. It's about dressing up and taking a chance on being somebody else for a night, and it's about laughing at death and all the other scary things that go bump in the night. I mean, it's a holiday centered around candy--candy, people! It's obviously awesome.

Or, if you live in a college town like I do, it's a holiday about getting schwasted, wearing stripper heels and a miniskirt, and yelling outside my bedroom window until 3:00 a.m.

Ugh. Obviously, I've become that cranky old lady who wishes all those damn kids would just put some clothes on and go to bed already.

Anyway. I went out with a few friends this year. It was a nice time, but I wish I'd had enough time to come up with a costume. Going out as just myself in a bar full of witches and Chilean miners and Anchorman characters was really a drag. But next year, I already know what I'm going to be:

"Party time, excellent, whoooo!" I wonder if I can find a Flowbee to carry around with me . . .

In other news, a friend recommended that I start watching Doctor Who now that I'm done with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm completely addicted now. 

If you don't know Doctor Who, it's a British sci-fi show that's been on BBC since the 1960s. It's about the Doctor (a time-traveling alien "bloke" with a penchant for saving the world) and his travels with whatever lady "companion" he picks up off the London streets. The show's premise (the bored Doctor explores the universe for fun and do-goodery) provides the show's writers with ample opportunity to combine wildly imaginative story lines with strange British slang ("wotcher!") and silly British humor.

Of course, Doctor Who is sometimes serious and dramatic and philosophical . . .

but usually it's just plain silly.

He fights goofy-looking aliens . . .

 

and old fashioned robots . . .

and even Satan when necessary . . .

 How could it not be the best thing ever? 

Becoming Buffy

I'm pretty sure that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was instrumental in getting me through the first month after my breakup.

There's something deeply rewarding about watching a strong female character beat-up some grody-faced vampire dudes. More importantly, there's something deeply rewarding about watching a profoundly cute, intrinsically girly blond girl with a great sense of humor beat up a bunch of vampires while growing from a teenager into a mature-ish adult. Grrrrl power, much?

Buffy is part of the feminist-y kick I've been on lately. I'm listening to a lot of Madonna and Lucinda Williams. I'm reading Wonder Woman comic collections and rereading some of my favorite novels that feature strong female characters, like Thea Kronborg from The Song of the Lark. I'm reading excellent articles like this one on the importance of just getting over yourself and "writing like a motherf****r."

In general, I don't feel like I see nearly enough strong, independent, fierce female characters in movies, books, and television. When I do see them, these women are rarely allowed to be both independent and happy. Instead, we're usually shown uptight career women who can only be happy when they let their guard down, give up control of their lives, and marry a hunky Mr. Right. And don't even get me started on how terrifying it is that so many young women choose Pretty Woman as their favorite romantic comedy . . . oy, vey!

But I digress. Basically, I find it difficult to find role models for how to be a woman who is single, strong, successful, and genuinely happy, which is precisely what I'm going for these days.

So what can I do about all this, besides watching all the Buffy I can lay my hands on? I guess I'm given no option but to do it for myself: If there aren't enough Crazy Badass Amazon Warrior Artist Women in the world for me to emulate, then I guess it's up to me to be one of the first.

Now, don't worry, I'm already on my way. My hair is already superhero red . . .

 and the new Buffy-esque pleather jacket is already hanging in my closet.

If I can look like a superhero, why can't I be one?

Ten Tumbled Tidbits

I don't feel like writing anything sensible today, so here's a list of what's on my mind:

1. Spring begins in less than two weeks. I love that the color of sunlight is changing and that I can smell the earth again. Yes, PLEASE.
2. Easter is one of my favorite holidays. Everyone's joyful, the weather's usually beautiful, and, let's face it, Easter candy is the best holiday candy ever. What can possibly compete with jelly beans, Sweet Tarts shaped like bunnies, malt balls, and Cadbury cream eggs? (Yes, Halloween, I am calling you out, chump!)
3. (Nerd Alert!) I've been thinking about the benefits of AP Style lately. It's unflinchingly in favor of brevity, simplicity and clarity. I think it might be a good thing.
4. I've been in an essaying sort of mood. Writing poetry every day has made me grumpy: I've grown sick of forcing line breaks and of hearing that irritatingly "poet-y" voice I sometimes fall in to. So I've given in and started writing brief lyric essays everyday instead. I like how this is going.
5. Someone recently told me that I have terrible taste in music because I like Lil' Wayne. Are you kidding me?! You can disagree with his persona, his hairdo, his violation of gun laws, and his misogyny, but, good grief, you cannot deny that the man is a brilliant poet/rapper/lyricist. And his music is funny, which I think is a rare and wonderful thing.
6. Project Runway should never have a break between seasons. Ever.
7. I'm finally reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. I love Eliot's insights into human nature, but goodness, it's wearying to read such dry, relentless, scathing satire. Just like someone already, George!
8. I'm a redhead again thanks to the efforts of my cousin Sarah, who is an amazing hairdresser! It's been a few years since I've dyed my hair, and I'm enjoying the change.
9. OmigoodnesssoexcitedwhenwillithappenahhhhIlovebasketball! (Translation: I am suitably enthused for the NCAA men's basketball tournament.)
10. I'm reading a collection of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems very, very slowly. His work is beautiful; each line is stuffed with the complex music of sprung rhythm and constant alliteration. But his syntax is downright tortured by his sound schemes, and it's hard to pick out the meaning of some of his lines. I have to read each poem through a couple of times before my initial response ("Ooooo, pretty!") matches up with my desired response ("Aha! I see what old Manley is getting at!"). Anyway, he's good, so here's one of my favorites. Enjoy!

 ---------------

The Windhover

By Gerard Manley Hopkins 

From PoetryFoundation.org

To Christ our LordTo Christ our Lord This epigraph dedicated the poem to Jesus while echoing the Latin phrase, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, the Jesuit motto meaning “To the Greater Glory of God.”

I caught this morning morning's minionminion favorite, darling; also, an underling or servant, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphindauphin prince; a French historical term, along with “chevalier”, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimplingwimpling rippling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle!Buckle! to bend, attach; prepare for flight or battle. The verb could be descriptive of the bird’s action, or it could be the speaker’s imperative. AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!chevalier French word for “knight” or “champion”; pronounced Chev-ah-leer, to rhyme with “here” and “dear”

     

   No wonder of it: shéer plódshéer plód slowly, laboriously, and without break; these accent marks, inserted by Hopkins, tell the reader to place more accent or emphasis on those syllables when reading aloud makes plough down sillionsillion Fresh soil upturned by a plow (“plough”)

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dearah my dear Compare with the same phrase in the poem “Love (III)” by George Herbert, a poet Hopkins admired.,

    Fall, gallgall to become sore, crack, or chafe themselves, and gash gold-vermilionvermilion a vibrant scarlet color.

Between the Folds

I woke up chilly this morning, and thankful for my flannels sheets and the warm kitty nestled at the foot of my bed. There's a fine layer of snow outside. It's no more than an inch thick, but it's very pretty and white and clean on such a frigid day.

Since it's nearly the holidays and I have two part-time teaching gigs lined up for January, I'm taking some time off from my job search. Instead of spending another day slogging away at resumes and cover letters, I've spent my afternoon in a very warm kitchen. There's a loaf of white bread rising in the bread machine for dinner, a pan of gingerbread cooling by the stove (expect pictures soon!), and a package of spicy Italian sausage waiting to be cut up and simmered in marinara sauce for dinner.

I've been thinking a lot about how people discover what they really love in life and how they reshape their lives to fulfill their passions. I started thinking about this because of Between the Folds, a documentary that premiered last night on PBS. Part of the Independent Lens series, this hour-long documentary tells the stories of scientists, mathematicians, and artists who have dedicated their lives to origami. Each origami artist tells how he got interested in paper folding, and a few of them describe the fear they felt about abandoning successful careers as engineers and sculptors to pursue origami full-time.

Their work is beautiful, complex, and astonishing: life-like men and gnomes molded from thick, woolly paper; flat flowers that pop up into three-dimensional towers; dragons with a thousand scales made from a single uncut square of paper; flimsy white sheets folded once and twisted deftly to resemble birds and angels; and even simple pleated contraptions that twist naturally into flexible, springy parabolas.

I loved origami as a child and spent hours folding paper, but these men have transformed this seemingly simple craft. Their work is truly art, and, sometimes, it's even a mathematical playground that allows them to study geometry and theoretical algebra.

But what struck me the most about these men is how dedicated they are. Their eyes flash with excitement as their thick fingers crease and crumple sheets of paper. Their pieces show hours and hours of work: each piece requires hundreds of tiny and seemingly irrelevant manipulations that add up to something fantastical, and fantastically delicate--if a single step were missed, the construction would fail.

Yet no matter how complex and beautiful the final objects appear, each piece is still just a sheet paper, hollow and light enough to be picked up by the wind, delicate enough to be mashed by one misplaced elbow.

To live one's life for folding paper requires a passion and engagement that few of us will ever know. Last night, as I watched the documentary, I wanted to be like those men. I didn't want to be a paper folder, exactly, but I did want to be someone who loves what they do, whose eyes shine as they perform the same complex task again and again, endlessly inching closer and closer to mastery in their pursuit of beauty.

(For more on origami, read Susan Orlean's fantastic profile of Robert J. Lang "The Origami Lab."