The plane crashed and I drowned in the Atlantic Ocean while the cabin burned around me.

Which is how I have somehow or another ended up in heaven. Or Italy. Whatever. It is pretty much the same to me. If God makes heaven individual for each of us, mine will look like Tuscany. I promise there is no place more beautiful on the entire earth.

Flying was an adventure, as always…. When we landed in Atlanta—my cousin Ben and I—there was a rather untroubled mother literally dragging two screaming children both under the age of six by those monkey-backpack-leash things (think Claire-and-Zane jokes). The two children were both bawling and shrieking and throwing things and sitting down and jerking away; it was like a circus. Then we almost missed our flight because of eating Chili’s Too—we wanted a good “last supper,” per se—and then had a longish lay-over in JFK—three hours—where we got to meet some other members of the group, and then the long and never-ending eight hour flight to Pisa (which was actually an hour early due to the strong tail wind). I slept maybe thirty minutes at the beginning, and that was it, despite gratuitous Benadryl usage. I’m not even sure what I did for all that time—read, wrote, listened to music, worked on a bracelet, stared out the window (ocean and clouds are good for zoning out), watched parts of Hotel for Dogs without the sound on (I don’t think the sound would have made it much better). Then we finally landed, and as we banked into Pisa and the Italian countryside and not-quite-mountains-but-not-really-hills came into view, I barely kept myself from starting to cry—partly from relief that that miserably long flight was finally over (the guy in front of me kept his seat leaned back the entire way, which I’m pretty sure is God’s way of making me thankful just to be going and not to worry about the extras… though all in retrospect; at the time I was not at all happy), but mostly because it was like coming home to somewhere that isn’t really home, but really is, in another strange way.

I didn’t really experience the holy-crap-I’m-in-Italy-but-it-is-just-so-unbelievable-that-I-am-not-processing-it like I did last summer. Maybe this is because I have been looking forward to it so much that half my heart has been here in Firenze and Scandicci for about six months anyway. Also, I read most of Chasing Francis on the way here, which is set in Tuscany, so I felt like I was already here in a way. Reading does that.

Then it was across the countryside and me drinking in every ounce of it in my sleep-deprived-but-not-tired-yet-because-my-body-didn’t-and-still-doesn’t-have-any-clue-what-time-it’s-supposed-to-be state of being. One of the weirdest parts of it, I think, is that even in Italy they have things like—I don’t know why this struck me so oddly—but places where there’s no grass because of whatever reason, equipment or foot traffic, places where the reddish earth is just exposed. To me that’s real, not the fantasy-land I sometimes make Italy out to be. But it’s not a fantasyland, not Narnia or Middle Earth, it’s real—you can actually go there, you can actually be there, you can live it!

And the villa—oh. It’s perfect. I honestly cannot imagine anything better. I was somewhat skeptical, because I couldn’t tell much from the pictures, but in truth, “Il Palazzaccio,” which according to the Harding website means “The Ugly Building,” is splendid to the inth degree. You can tell it was built in the fourteen hundreds—the layout makes no sense whatsoever, with crazy uneven, ancient staircases winding into each other and apart again and sometimes nowhere at all, rooms stuck here and there on different, random levels three feet different from each other, red tile floors and high wooden-beamed ceilings on the first floor with soaring archways and tapestries on the walls, toilets that you need a masters in plumbing to be able to operate, the olive grove with its hammocks and swings, roses climbing up the walls, a veranda, a balcony, and I think best of all, screenless windows that open to the most spectacular views you can imagine. People would pay exorbitant amounts of money for this kind of view. You can literally see the top of the Duomo peaking over a ridge from one of the windows in the dorm I’m sharing with six other girls, and around that, the entire Florentine valley spread out like a carpet. Right now, since it’s night (well, it’s dark outside, who knows what my internal clock actually thinks), it’s like God shook the sky out like a giant throw-rug and half the stars fell out into the plain, and they’re all glittering like thousands of orangy-golden, white-blue diamonds in the intricate pattern of the city and its outlying suburbs. Behind us, the infamous hill (which actually wasn’t bad at all) continues up into a larger hill-mountain, covered in umbrella pines and Roman pines and olive trees and other trees I don’t know the names of, but everything is lush and verdantly green in a thousand different shades, the grass and the bushes and the leaves and the terracotta roof tiles and all the new bird sounds (Zane, you’d love it—I don’t recognize half the sounds these crazy birds are making) and cars honking as they zoom crazy-Italian style up the tiny narrow hill street…. Although a lot of people went into Scandicci, the suburb (which is still magnificent and undeniably Italian) just outside of which the villa is located, and Florence, I stayed at the villa, first off because I am exhausted and want to be able to function tomorrow, and secondly because I just wanted to absorb what was right there, at my own pace, in my own time.

*sospiro* Mia bella Italia. (“Sospiro” means “sigh.”) I’m even starting to pick up the cadences of the language, just in a day of hearing it (there were Italians sitting next to us on the plane). It’s beautiful, too, just like the country, even moreso than Spanish, which I love. It’s almost like they’re singing, or doing a play, so animated and alive and lilting and throaty….

Okay. I probably sound like I’m having some kind of deep revelatory reverie, and maybe I am, but I don’t want you to overdose on my obsession or think I’ve completely lost my mind. But I just want you to feel an ounce, just an ounce (or should I say a milligram?), of what I feel here, of how beautiful it is and how somehow the landscape of this incredibly beautiful, rich land resonates with the deepest level of who I am, like perhaps when God was making my soul he used the wine from the vineyards for my blood and the dust from the streets of Florence for my body and the cadences of the Italian language for my spirit.

Maybe I’ll meet the ghost of Dante in some back alley of Firenze. Though you guys probably hope I don’t, because first off this run-on-sentence-stuffed-with-romantic-description manner of writing would only get ten times worse, and secondly because that would mean I’m probably never going to leave.

Three months. I think I’ve fallen into the mirror of heaven.

It’s been raining all day and I feel like my insides are flooding, too.

Sometimes, you know that the only cure to the insanity going on in your head and heart is to write, to get it down on paper in meter and metaphor, simile and symbol.

So you get on Wikipedia, and Random Word generator, and the first thing that strikes your fancy you follow, and follow, and follow, from volcanoes, to Heaven’s Lake in China, to caldera lakes, to calderas, to fumaroles, to Pele, and at the end all you have is a jumble of concepts and words and allusions that no one else except for a geologist or mythologist knows what under heaven you’re talking about and still no inspiration, because your Muse, the one person who is consecrated to enter that sanctum, is absent, and you’re left standing cold and embarrassed on the ancient, monolithic cathedral steps and no way to get that sip of holy water that you need to write, to be inspired, to let out whatever it is you need to write about.

And this happens because the Muse has decided to go on a trip to, I dunno, somewhere that people go who are so filthy rich and above normal societal constraints that they can afford to be as fickle as they please. Maybe to a villa on the Isle of Capri in Italy, or a palace in Monaco, or perhaps an entire sea village on the Amalfi Coast. Wherever she is, I’m sure it’s warm (unlike here, where the weatherman has decided to play yet another joke on us; it’s fifty degrees and the second day of May!) and sunny and she’s got her superstar sunglasses on, drinking a (probably alcoholic, the little monster) drink with a little umbrella in it, enjoying the beach and all the people waiting hand and foot on her.

Leaving me, of course, shivering and damp in Searcy, Arkansas. Thanks a lot, jerk.

In Eastern philosophy, there’s no such thing as “self,” and instead there is just a combination of impressions and perceptions and senses and memories. I don’t know if I buy into that, but to make my generally confusing mind easier to deal with, I’ve made up fairly vivid personalities for the different parts of myself that live inside my head. Some of them, like the Muse, who is arrogant and fierce and so beautiful she practically blinds anyone who so much as catches a glance of her through a windowpane, come and go as they please, leaving apartments vacant for weeks and weeks on end. Some of them stay on a pretty permanent basis even when they’re unwelcome, like Charlotte, who characterizes the Utterly and Extremely and Unrepentantly Female in that Traditionally Joyously Psychotic Way  part of me—totally unresponsive to argument or reason and completely determined to make life into a constant variance between Elysian Fields and a living purgatory highly interesting. Then you have the background ones, like Sydney, who is the insanely adventurous part of me, who doesn’t give a rat’s hindparts about anyone else and is constantly wild and free and dreaming and wanting to buy a stallion and ride off across the steppes and tundras and desert sands in some remote exotic corner of Middle Earth, or Marian, the librarian with flyaway hair, glasses that she is constantly looking over sternly in the direction of teenagers smacking their gum, and who always wears things that are knitted and has almost as many cats at home as she has books.

And somewhere in the middle I find what I call Myself, and I have to make these different parts not fight, communicate, and somehow merge coherently into something that I can present to the world at large.

……..

Tonight, we did something that I would classify as Unresponsible and Environmentally Unconscious. Bored with Searcy and Midnight Oil (the Underground was full of gothic concert-goers and we didn’t even stop the car—there were so many of them that they were spilling out into the street), we just went driving, me and Wes and Caleb and Daggett, down Beebe Capps (the less busy of the two main roads in Searcy), which eventually narrows to a two-lane road and goes trundling off through the pitch-black nothingness that the countryside is on cloudless foggy nights. We went all the way to Rose Bud down practically deserted, winding wet road about forty-five minutes from Searcy, and almost kept going to Heber but decided that would be slightly over the top, and on the way back, we took a detour, turning onto a dirt road and bumping along it until we were successfully enveloped in a labyrinth of cow pastures, where we parked and turned off the lights and tried to get scared, but couldn’t, and then we left again, and played “Don’t Stop Believing” twice by Journey, and “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls, and it was misty and foggy and drizzly and dark. And when we got back, and I walked back to my dorm from Patty Cobb parking lot, little pinpricks of not-quite-rain-not-quite-fog on my skin and my hair erupting with the humidity, I can’t even begin to explain the feeling I was feeling, except that it kind of seemed similar to that metaphor I’ve used before on here, about a well that reflects the sky and looking down into it, except this time it’s not reflecting stars, but just that faint red glow on the clouds from the too-bright, haunted, jack o’ lantern tungsten streetlight in front of a farmhouse out in the middle of rurality.

It’s probably time to go to bed.

“The Copper Hook,” a highly dense new poem I just finished.

Charlene’s phone just made the most horrible vibrating noise. It sounded like something from a horror flick. I rather feel like I’m about to get horribly, clichedly (if that’s a word) mauled with something unoriginal like a butcher knife or beat over the head until dead (lolz, rhymez) with a wrench.

This morning, Downtown church had its dedication for the new Family Life Center, which beautifully involved actually going out into the community and having a church-wide service project. Zane and Claire and Wes and I worked on the playground of the Sunshine School, which I am pretty sure is a school for special needs kids… and the playground had equally special needs as it looked like no touch-up work had been done in ages. Claire and I painted (Claire got the more detail-ish work of repainting metal horses that rock back and forth on springs, and I—according to the wisdom of the project organizer, smart man—painted a picnic table, and proceeded to get paint all over myself, including in my hair and all over my shirt… though the shirt was a little more purposeful, as I sort of want a shirt that is hard-core and I-worked-outside-in-the-hot-sun-painting-ish) while Zane and Wesley did the MANLY work with power tools, drilling new wooden boards into the metal framework of the picnic tables (they had great fun with this, let me tell you). All in all, a refreshing experience, especially since the weather was bee-you-ti-full. And I got to work on my Chaco tan. Absolutely no complaints, and the playground looks lovely.

Today, I finished a new poem. It probably has an odd flavor to it, one because it came sort of forced—I had only half-inspiration, which was still too much to ignore, but not enough to make the words and ideas flow freely—and second because, well, as Charlene pointed out when I read it out loud to her (as roommate she has the unfortunate position as permanent poetic guinea pig), it has a sort of weird topic. But there you go. It’s poetry, after all.

Oh… and I also thought I would let you in on the secret life of the just-barely-still-teenage poet. The poem which you will soon read below actually evolved from the lines the I scratched through originally, which are as reads below:

My love, my love is not a desert flood or the hot grin of sunlight on salt water

but the hard solid gold of coins sunk beneath the waves, the sand.

Hidden treasure.

Yes… absolutely terrible. Which is why usually I don’t share the beginning products with all of you, but perhaps if any of you are budding poets, that will encourage you to get past the really bad beginnings and at least progress to only mildly horrific products.

Sink your teeth into this one.

 

“The Copper Hook”

 

When I dream of you, I do not see your face.

 

I do not see your lips, wide as a conch shell.

I do not see your hands, wide and warm and strong,

strong enough to hold elephant seals, orcas, sea dragons.

And I do not see your eyes, eyes which are

green like the seaman’s searing stab of light at sunset,

the dying flicker of another day in the endless ocean current.

 

No—when I dream of you, I see a thousand species of whales,

all extinct—

on land, still furred but resenting their cousins, the sea otters,

dreaming of more water, always more water and less sand;

in the vast shallow Eocenic lakes, floating heavy and docile,

stupid with sleepiness and the unconscious knowledge of

their position as an evanescent evolutionary link,

nothing more;

in the bottomless ocean trenches, beyond the reach of light and air

(but not my thoughts),

hiding like guerillas in the colossal boneyards of their ancestors.

 

I do not see your face, but you are there,

in the bubbling oxygen that seeped skywards from their lips,

in the frequency of their courtship calls,

still reverberating in the slightest vibrations of the earth’s mantle,

bouncing back and forth in the yawning watery abyss,

in the lethal copper hook and spear of time,

corpses drying on a beachhead for a hundred miles of Laurentian shoreline.

 

Here, fifty million years later (or fifty seconds)

I walk beneath a cathedral of white bones,

older than thoughts of you, of me, of even my dreams of you.

As my hands brush the rib cages, the sand throbs briefly,

the echo of the heartbeat of a behemoth,

and you are there, in the heartbeat, in the blood that flows

through extinction’s veins, and along the deepest ocean floors.

 

All thoughts, interpretations, suggestions, and as usual, rotten tomatoes and mocking laughter will be greatly appreciated. Just please, please, please I’d love some sort of response. I will love you forever if you do, and that’s a promise… in a non-creepy way, of course.

From molecule to atom to particle to quark.

I’ve been writing in my own personal journal as I’ve been relying off the hospitality and generosity of others to be able to access the Internet and my blog, and I was honestly planning to post what I was writing and then as usual when I write things out longhand it got too personal and then I realized I couldn’t post it and that you all would just be postless again.

How sad. For you guys, that is. Especially because now you won’t be able to sleep, wondering what deep and telling secrets of the soul I’ve been writing in my little black notebook…. Ha. Stinks for you. I’m sure your disappointment is monumental.

But luckily dear Alicia let me borrow her computer. So I’m posting. So you at least get some of me, if not the little-black-notebook stuff, which is actually the secret of life. Too bad you will never get to read it!

Ha. Ha ha.

Here is a little of it, anyway before I drove pell-mell off into holy-cow-from-Bangladesh-I-don’t-want-anyone-to-read-this land.

Today I shadowed Dr. Pillow. I mean Mr. Pillow. [Internet insertion: I have a phobia of marking things out when they are written in pen so I just said “I mean Mr. Pillow” instead of marking through “Dr.”] He was very nice and the patients were interesting in a William-Faulker-Yoknapatawpha-County sort of interesting. It was… okay. I mean it was boring as a bad black and white movie shown with the lights turned out in a 7:30 class when it’s a beautiful day outside and the air conditioning isn’t working.

I can’t wait to be up to my elbows in placenta and amniotic fluid five days a week. I know it sounds crazy, but I think birth is one of those times in life when all the layers of chipping, boring, pastel-colored paint are stripped away and what we’re left with is Life. There’s blood everywhere, and sweat, and people are crying and screaming and, strangely, the greatest pain possible is conjoined with the greatest joy possible (and maybe it’s not “strangely,” after all, when you think about it), and a brand spankin’ new person is taking his or her very first breath of the air of this crazy world, air that’s been in and out of lungs and respiratory systems and circulatory systems for ages and ages, and is yet somehow still new. I want to be on this spinning, insane cusp of that Life every single day, I want to be splattered with it.

Maybe that helps those of you who think my I-want-to-be-an-OBGYN-PA-osity is completely insane understand just what about draws me so much.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my favorite poem, “In the Solar Wind” by Wendy Battin (if you’re curious, you can look it up on Google; I don’t think it’s as hard to understand as most poetry, but that could be because I’ve read it a thousand times and because it just strikes some kind of chord that runs through my mind the way your backbone runs through your bone). So I thought I would share one of the most poignant (ha! poignant! wordoftheday!) passages from the poem with you all so you can contemplate it, too….

I am sleep, from which everything falls
as the dream rises up.

You cannot hold me,
not even in your strong arms.

I cannot hold you,
though the story might hold us.

One of us chooses to leave,
or what we are chooses:

we have chosen a world
that splinters and shifts,

from molecule to atom
to particle to quark.

Our substance sinks
into its fractured wealth

while we are left behind
in the poverty of our bodies.

I’ve been kind of sad lately and I think this is just because it’s second semester and second semester is always never as good as the first semester so that is normal but still I had kind of hoped that wouldn’t be true in college, too. Oh well. I guess I can’t expect everything to change. Or I guess everything does change, otherwise I wouldn’t feel kind of sad like I do.

Oops. I said “always never” in the first sentence of that last paragraph….

Anyway… enough Being a Girl from me. Hi ho, hi ho, the merry-oh, and Cheerios, and all that good jazz.

By the way, I absolutely love mythology. I wish I could take a class on mythology but the only one offered at Harding is offered during the summer. That. Is. Stupid. It would even count towards my degree but they oooonly offer it in the summer. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Oh and in case you were wondering, here is my course schedule for next semester….

Monday-Wednesday-Friday

8:00 — SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP! Hooray!

9:00 — Chapel

10:00 — American Lit 1. Holy crap. I’m going to sleep straight through that. Bad news bears, said in an English accent that is only just beginning to become American because the Revolutionary War was like three minutes ago. Can you say snooooooze.

11:00 —French Advanced Composition and Grammar with dear old Robert. I’m actually pretty excited about this class, as we don’t do hardly any essay-writing in my French class right now and strangely, sickly, I sort of miss it. It’ll be fun to pick it back up.

1:00 — Christian Home. News flash number one: This is not my choice. It is literally the only Bible class that I can fit into my schedule unless I want to be in a classroom trying to stay awake at 7:30 in the morning. News flash number two: I don’t want to be up that early, therefore I am taking this class. News flash number three: I am not at Harding to get my MRS degree or any of the rest of that rubbish, I am here to get an education and to make friends and to develop myself as a human being. News flash number four: If you start in on me about this, you will find yourself speared through the stomach with a telephone pole, and I won’t even stop the wild dogs when they come to lick up your blood. In fact, I’ll encourage them. I’ll paint your dead (or slowly, painfully dying) body with barbecue sauce, in fact, to tempt them.

2:00 — Anatomy and Physiology I. Shouldn’t be too bad except I’ve heard the teacher is a real bore. Oh well. At least I’ve already learned all this stuff in high school and it’s guaranteed to be easier.

Tuesday

Abnormal Psychology at some point for a slightly too long period of time. But luckily I get to take it with Caleb so that will be great fun, and I know that Dr. Cameron likes me, even though I slept through his class last semester. Should be interesting—maybe I will find out what is wrong with me….

A&P I lab. Don’t know what to expect from this one. It lasts til four, though, so that is sort of sad….

To finish off, I’ll ask a question, because these are fun and I like to see your answers. If you could marry any Disney character (preferably the opposite sex), who would it be? Also, you can take a stab at who I would pick, too…. I’ll tell you in the next post. Ciao! (Because that’s Italian, baby! Yeeeeah! Oh and speaking of Italian I decided that while we’re dreaming, Roberto is going to drive some sexy Italian car so he can take me to all those far-away off-the-beaten-path places that you need a car to get to. Ah… this fantasy is getting better by the minute….)

A poem with a fancy German philosophical term for a title.

I should probably have memorized more Bible verses rather than write a poem…. But when the high-and-mighty and oh-so-very-stereotypically-female-aka-moody-and-fickle Muse grants the ability to write—or, as tonight, grabs a huge handful of your hair and yanks until you follow her—you have to write. There’s no choice.

So although I don’t know my memory verses, I’ve got a rough poem for you all to read. And—be excited—it includes footnotes to explain the ALLUSIONS. (T.S. Eliot would be so, so proud… except for the fact that I’m explaining my allusions. He would probably be pretty disappointed about that.)

Enjoy. Feel free to interpret at will. The little numbers in parentheses denote footnotes at the bottom. 

“Ewige Wiederkunft” (1)

 

I’ve met you before, a thousand times.

I know this and do not know this.

We shake hands, we smile, we make small talk, we laugh,

and I wonder, When will you remember me?

When will I remember you?

When you yawn, your throat is a glassless window to the pyramids,

and a blast of hot sand scours my face.

I’ve walked the Shari al-Haram before, (2)

and I walk it now, and I’ll walk it again.

 

We meet in a cathedral crowded with bronze statues,

peasants, princes, pariahs frozen here by some Medusa’s magic. (3)

You comment on how your eyes reflect in their cold ones,

how they seem to steal your eyeballs right of your head

and I agree.

On their emotionless, worshipping faces,

your eyes blink back at me, warped and skewed,

one hundred cobalt distortions.

 

You chance across me in my apple orchard—

harvest time, and I have empty barrels and full barrels.

We shake hands, we smile, you ask me,

What do you do here?

And I glance towards the top of my ladder.

Gold light drips down the rungs,

light you cannot see.

I try to get to Faerie, I say. (4)

Will you remember me,

remember when I’m gone?

 

We speak of love, a trifling toy,

We speak of love, a ploy, a ploy.

We speak of love, but not of joy.

 

We see each other in a dusty gas station in Nevada.

You say, I’ll bet those cigar Indians come to life at night

and hunt coyotes and hares—

that’s why their hands are red.

I say, No—no, they don’t.

And you ask me, scoffing, Do I know you?

No—no, I say, you don’t.

 

We meet in a zoo, in the reptile house,

in darkness like the shadows in some primordial temple.

Our heads press against the glass, and you say that

your eyes reflect in scales, too,

and I don’t agree,

but something is blue about the lizards that should not be,

something glints like indigo flame on an ancient altar.

 

We meet, we meet, we meet,

our faces running like mercury through fingers,

like Sisyphus’ boulder from our memories, (5)

and we cannot remember

meeting in Oslo, meeting at dinner parties, (6)

meeting in the smoke of séances, incense hot in our lungs,

meeting at the edge of Andromeda with stars choking our throats.

Through the suffocating blaze you ask,

Do I know you?

No—no, I say, you don’t. 

 

(1) This nice little German phrase is something that our dear God-is-dead philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche coined. It’s kind of hard to explain, and even harder to understand, so I’m not going to go into it here—Wikipedia it if you’re just dying for knowledge on obscure and irrelevant information, or take the same philosophy class I took my senior year—but it basically means “eternal return.” That should make sense with the rest of the poem.

(2) The road to the Great Pyramids, according to a slightly sketchy Internet site so I’m not positive about this, but it sounds good, so don’t argue. Great poets have made bad allusions before and not been hurt at all for it.

(3) Medusa is a figure in Greek mythology who would turn you into stone if you looked at her. Sorry if you already knew that, Greek mythology buffs… just trying to help out those of us who aren’t such huge nerds (a.k.a. blessed with a wealth of knowledge that allows us to make life richer and fuller through understandings of universal archetypes… haha).

(4) Faerie is the land where Fairies live. This is sort of obvious, I think, but then again, maybe not.

(5) I kind of don’t think we can be friends anymore if you don’t know who Sisyphus is, because he’s basically my favorite Greek myth next to Daphne and Apollo’s story, but I suppose I’ll let it slide. Because of something he did in his life (too complicated to explain, but basically he pissed off the gods), he was sentenced to spending eternity rolling a giant boulder up a hill to only have it come crashing back down again, and he’d have to start over again, ad infinitum. 

(6) Oslo, which is now the capital of Norway, fits into the rest of the poem because it is located in a region that, in ancient times, was closely associated with mythological characters from Faerie.

 

So… feedback would be greatly appreciated. Love, hatred, confusion, annoyance, fits of giggles, you name it, I’ll take it.

A few paragraphs in which I ramble incoherently and annoyingly.

It’s raining and I can hear the train off in the distance and it’s 11:07 at night and I am just about to go to bed. However, I felt the need to tell someone, anyone, that it is raining, and that I can hear the train, and I’m tired of text messaging, terrified of calling people, and no one is on Facebook.

Both rainfall and train whistle are at the top of my favorite-things-to-hear list. Maybe you guys will be blessed with the opportunity to read a new list by me, soon.

The train sound is my favorite in a lonesome and restless way, that makes my feet itch and my mind wander to places and times that are not here or now, with no familiar faces and none of the usual names. It makes me wish I were a hobo, in the romantic, old-timey sense of the word and not the crazy-eyed mugger connotation—always traveling, not caring what the world thinks, full to the brim of wanderlust with no room for much anything else.

The rain sound is a different sort of favorite. Few sounds exist, I think, that are peacefuller or contenter than that all-encompassing, whispering, undulating, soul-deep sound of a million drops of sky-tumbling water on the roof and the yard and the porch and the trees and the road, and the more muttery sound of the rain tumbling through the eaves and then down the drainpipe—it’s like that everything-is-okay-now, all-the-bad-stuff-is-washed-away-and-being-washed-away, inner-restfulness that comes after crying, only without first of all needing a reason to cry, and second of all without having your eyes all puffy and mascara everywhere and anyone who sees you asking what’s-wrong-are-you-okay. I wonder if the sound of rain isn’t actually rain itself, only this is a different sort of rain than the kind that makes the plants grow—this sound-rain falls into you, the essence of you, and pools there and calms everything down and recharges you and when it drains out again, you’re all washed-out and clean and green again, spring time only inside of you rather than in the forests and the fields, and a hundred thousand leaves and mosses and dandelions and treelets are growing and unfurling all over your kidneys and liver and stomach and esophagus and spinal chord and heart and intestines and brain, and somehow light is getting through, too, maybe through your mouth when you sing, and you’re all lit up inside, golden sunshine and verdant photosynthesis.

I guess where the two sounds connect, though, and why I always like them together, is what color would that hobo wanderlust be, if it had a color? I think it would be the color of rain—the color of rain reflecting sunshine, reflecting soft white cloud cover, reflecting angry grey cloud streaks, reflecting starlight from a puddle, reflecting white-blue street lights and golden-orange house lamps.

And here is my attempt to encapsulate this in a poem….

We talk of the deep things—

of molecules, of metaphors, of every lilting musical note

in Beethoven, but

every droplet of rain is quintillions of water molecules,

every train whistle is a piano key in a minor pitch,

and these together are hundreds of metaphors:

children playing in puddles,

moments of solitude in street lamp circles,

Germany,

Alpine icicles that summer cannot quite melt.

And here is me going to bed, to save you from any more of this drivel…. Although it’s drivel that I sort of like….

I suppose it’s silly to announce this in a blog post but….

I’ve made my decision. Irrevocable, final, irreversible. There is absolutely no going back.

I am in love, and always will be.

If you’re wondering with whom, then you needn’t wonder much longer, because I’m about to reveal it, although I will have to admit, I’m surprised that you don’t already know. It should be obvious—as plain as the fact that I have curly hair, it’s so much a part of me—indivisible and inseparable from my very essence.

My chest feels like it could burst with feeling—it’s actually tangible, something I can feel running vibrant all over my skin like the radiating heat from a campfire in the Swiss Alps.

I am in love… in love, and forevermore, so much that I would climb a hundred snow-blanketed peaks and slosh through a thousand stinking malaria-infested swamps to reach the object of my love…. I am in love…

… with the sunshine.

Yep… I just threw you all for a loop! Or I’m hoping that I did, anyway, because I tried quite hard…. I can just imagine the looks on your faces—Kellum finally lost her mind completely! Kellum finally found that Grecian god who could steal her heart! Kellum finally got clubbed over the head by Cupid’s uglier and stronger older stepbrother! (Because when it does happen, I’m sure it’s going to take something more like a battering ram instead of some dainty, idiotic little heart-shaped arrowhead trailing rose petals and Bing Crosby songs across a bluebird sky.) Hahahahaha…. gotcha!

But no. It’s just the sunshine.

Although saying “just the sunshine” is fairly misleading as well.

In case you were wondering—and I’m sure you were, and probably couldn’t sleep or eat or function at all for wondering—today after church, I dragged one of our porch chairs out into the middle of the front yard, grabbed a water bottle, The Moviegoer, and Carter’s sunglasses (for which I had to pay him four dollars to use… though I haven’t paid him yet, and am hoping he will just forget….), and slipped into a tank top and shorts (yay for being home and losing self-consciousness!… and the Harding dress code…) and my Chacos and settled into the chair for a long afternoon of sunbathing.

The fact that I love sunshine probably comes as a bit of a shock to those of you who know me… and know, perhaps even better, just exactly how pale I am. Someone told me once that I gave the face of the moon a run for its money as far as whiteness goes. (And that doesn’t even cover the whiteness that permeates below my skin… just go watch a few minutes of Spring Sing practice for proof of that.) But I do—I love it the way a nerdy kid from the late nineties loves Pokemon. Once it gets above seventy, there’s nothing quite better than just going outside and soaking up every last ray of that delicious sunlight, til you’re just a little bit sweaty and you feel hot right down to your soul, which is perfectly lovely after last weekend when I felt cold right down to my core. When you tilt your head back and close your eyes and let the sunshine trickle and pour and cascade down your skin like the biggest, gentlest, warmest waterfall you can imagine—it’s like the sun is kissing you, only it’s about a hundred times more pleasant than a real kiss, as far as I’m concerned.

Which is why I’m in love with the sunlight. There’s a reason Apollo was always my favorite Greek god, and why the story of Apollo and Daphne has always been one of my favorites, too—only if I’d been Daphne, I wouldn’t have turned into a tree—we would have lived in wonderful, blissful, radiant, warmth-filled matrimonial bliss for the rest of eternity.

Unfortunately today was one of those half-cloudy-half-sunny days, or more like sixty-five percent cloudy and thirty-five percent sunny. This means, because it was only about seventy degrees, and I’m profoundly cold-natured, whenever the mean-spirited, cruel clouds with their grey, frowning fluffy selves decided to cover up my beloved sun—I think if I ever have a girl-kid then I shall name her Sunny—it was, well, cold. So for the three hours that I was outside working on my sunburn—because, as you well know, I don’t tan, therefore I work on my sunburn instead of working on my tan—I was alternately stripped to my tank top, shorts, and Chacos (because I absolutely can’t tan/burn barefoot, I’ve got to start working on my Chaco tan!… or Chaco less-pale-ness, as it were), and covered up with my fleece jacket and a blanket. I know it sounds pretty ridiculous… and okay, I admit, it’s completely ridiculous… but it worked.

Also, I’m pretty sure if a camera had been hidden over in the bushes, whoever was watching the tape would have gotten a kick out of me speed-covering-up when the clouds gobbled up my darling sunlight and just as quickly speed-stripping-off-jacket-and-blanket every time the sun so much as peaked through a hole in a particularly grouchy cloud.

Also interesting was the way my sunglasses—I mean Carter’s sunglasses—tinted everything. They’re yellow-colored—I’m sure this has to do with some sort of high-tech make-your-golf-game-better gimmick—and so first off, the world automatically became yellow… but all of you know that already, probably. But the strangest thing was my water bottle. Some of the sunlight glinting off the water inside of it kept the usual, bluish quality, but at a certain angle, the glints turned coppery. It looked like there was a fine layer of copper floating around inside my Dasani bottle, coalescing and breaking apart again like (Caleb, this metaphor is for your sake) a bad acid trip. I probably stared at it for five minutes, swishing the water around and watching in wonder at the magic those sunglasses conjured up.

Probably even more magical was the way they actually made all of my white skin appear—tan. Kind of disappointing when you take them off….

Ahhh… being home is perfectly wonderful. I have time to think without a thousand other things to do, and it’s like in chemistry lab when you have a solution that absolutely refuses to go clear no matter how much you stir it, and you’re afraid you put too much solid into it and that it’s not going to dissolve, so you walk away for a second to go look at someone else’s and fret about it together, and then you go back, and all of a sudden your solution is crystal clear, and at the bottom are the tiny crystalline products you were trying to produce all along.

Yay chemistry metaphors (the best). Yay straight thinking. Yay for seeing clearly.

And yay Spring Break and feeling peace soak up through your Chaco-tanned feet all the way into your spirit, peace like you’ve been wanting and waiting for, and somehow the moment you stop looking for it is the moment you step right into a big puddle of it, and it wicks all the way up your jeans and your T-shirt and your hair until you’re soaked, inside and out.

Well… I’ve been trying to find a nice poem about sunshine to describe my sentiments to you… but I’ve failed. So I shall give a poem a go, although lately my creative ability has been somewhat lacking… but I’ll try for you all.

When the sunlight falls on my cat’s ears,

my cat’s ears, which are attached to my dozing cat,

who is attached to the narrow windowsill, asleep, twitching,

somehow never quite falling—

the sunlight pools there, flashing red, white, yellow,

pulling out a hundred colors from that dark hair,

then tumbling down his black fur, 

dripping to the ground.

He shifts but does not wake,

one white paw sleepily batting at an invisible beetle.

Mmm… don’t judge, please. I tried.

And by the way… I wanted to make a quick shout-out specifically to my darlings Celia, Justine, and Abbey for being my faithful high school blog-readers…. You kids are great and deserve a little credit for that greatness 😉

Ten quick steps to becoming a great writer!

Since the rest of today is sure to be utterly consumed by chemistry, I decided I would post something decidedly linguistic and writerly and just plain English major, through and through.

Today in American lit, rather than paying attention (I’ve already read and discussed and written essays on As I Lay Dying, and I feel little need to do any of those three things again—hello, Sparknotes) I came up with a list of Things One Must Do in Order to Become a Member of the Literary Canon. I’ve gathered these from the numerous biographies we’ve already studied this year, and from my remembrance of high school English. So… enjoy.

1. Be a poor, lazy student who hates school. Examples: William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’m definitely failing in this category, unfortunately…. Guess I shall have to try harder, or rather, less hard. At the very least one must have an unusual, unorthodox education, like Henry James… maybe going to IB and having my brains scrambled counts?
2. Be extremely unsuccessful at first. Examples: Basically all ground-breaking writers, especially when they’re writing novels rather than short stories, which tend to be more popular, and make more money. I guess I’m unsuccessful, but that is also because I am not writing very much and what I am writing isn’t exactly ground-breaking. Oh well. Moving on….
3. Meet other famous writers who stimulate you towards success. Examples: Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, practically all the Romantic poets. Well, maybe Svetlana and John Mark count… hooray for writerly friends!
4. Spend time abroad. Examples: Everybody who ever wrote anything that was worth an honorable mention in a classic literature anthology, unless you were Emily Dickinson, who pretty much never left her house. I went to Indonesia when I was six… and to Paris and Italy for two weeks last summer… and I will be living in Florence, Italy for all of this summer…. Seems like I’m moving in the right direction.
5. Have an unrequited love. Examples: W.B. Yeats, Dante, arguably Shakespeare, Faulkner. If you don’t have an unrequited love, you must at least have a tragic love story, like Fitzgerald and Zelda. I’m pretty much drawing a blank here…. I suppose I should get on that one, considering this is the age that most of these kids meet and fall drastically, dramatically, and desperately in love with someone, who is generally cold and heartless and manipulative…. Sheesh. Doesn’t sound so nice after all, to be a writer, but I guess I must…. I’ll be taking applications for callous, cold-blooded, unreachable, devilishly attractive males who would like to go down in history as the arrogant rapscallion who served as the source of both heartbreak and inspiration for M. Kellum Tate’s poetry and fiction. Don’t everybody jump at once.
6. Have a poor family life. Boo… I’m tired of listing examples. Just trust me. As for this, I don’t really know…. I get along with my parents and my brother really well, but who knows what will happen when and, okay, if I get married. I’ve already been predicted to be a bad mom….
7. Die early. Examples: Once again… everybody. Um… can I be an exception?
8. Be a heavy drinker or into drugs. Lewis Carroll, anyone? Yeah… I’m definitely way behind on this one, unless the glass of wine I had in Paris and the codeine after my wisdom teeth were removed count at all. Somehow, I don’t feel overwhelmingly confident about this.
9. Support socialism. Zane did tell me that, of all our friends, I was the most likely to join a commune, but this could just be because of my awesome green hippie shirt and awesome hippie hair.
10. Have people question your heterosexuality and/or that of the characters in your stories. Examples: Henry James, William Shakespeare, Willa Cather. I guess a few of the annoying rumors that went around in high school might do for this criteria, but I doubt any of that is going to carry over the annals of history when I am forever engraved upon the plaque of literary greats, and honestly I surely hope it doesn’t, just like the alcohol and frivolous drug use. If you will notice in the unrequited love section, I want a pitiless male to serve as my inspiration and thorn in my side.

 

Anyways… yes. Hope you enjoyed that.

The only post in which underwear and Eliot will ever be discussed together. I promise.

The title describes what this post is. Buckle your seat belts; this post is going to be a wild, crazy, disjointed ride… just like the Moses-Aaron-Miriam-Cushite-woman story, for you Dr. Manor-ians!

We have a frisbee tournament this weekend.

Fail-blog addicts, please ready your video cameras, iPhones, and other recording devices. It’s going to be epic.

Anyways, moaning and groaning about my utter lack of sportive ability aside, we have a Bible test tomorrow, the two-hour study session for which I just returned from, after a great deal of at least attempting to increase collective knowledge of the Old Testament with Zane and Claire and Wesley and Pearson (well, Wesley stayed for about an hour before the what-the-crap-am-I-actually-studying?! lightning bolt sent him scurrying from the scene), during which I read aloud from my prodigious notes (yep, I just used the word “prodigious” correctly in a sentence… I consider this an accomplishment… though I have to admit I looked it up in the built-in Apple dictionary to make sure I was using it correctly) and we had short semi-discussions, which at a few points (okay, lots of points) simply dissolved into heated discourses concerning the rather odd marital arrangements and relationships of middle bronze age Mesopotamia.

That entire paragraph above? Yeah. That’s all one sentence.

Okay, okay, it’s all one sentence with about the poorest syntax and concept flow since The Last of the Mohicans, but whatever.

Yep… I just threw my English-majority at you. Ha! *head swells*

*thinks about frisbee and head shrinks back down to normal size, if possibly not smaller

So last night our hall had its Valentine’s Day panty exchange. Yes; you are welcome to shudder right along with me. It was… well… okay. Never mind. No way am going to attempt to explain it.

But in lieu of this rather disturbing event (Charlene actually had a nightmare about lingerie last night, or lean-ger-ee, as Lisa pronounces it), Charlene and I have come up with a list of things to do with the, er, let’s just say PROFOUNDLY AWKWARD items of clothing that we received. Since otherwise they’d just be trashed, but who wants to be wasteful? Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

 

1. A great way to disturb your roommate. For instance, I decorated Pearson Bear with one of my gifts and left it for Charlene to discover… the look on her face was worth every penny of the hall’s collective money spent on the undies.
2. A great way to disturb your suitemates. Just leave that unsuspecting gal a little surprise under her pillow and when she goes to make her bed… instant fun! (Hope and Aerial actually have a pair of big huge granny panties hanging over their refrigerator to make them eat less… otherwise they will be able to fit into them, or such is their logic, anyway….)
3. Slingshot. Charlene and I had great fun with this concept while we both should have been studying for Calc II and Bible, respectively.
4. Mouse trap. We’re still working on this one but we have some pretty good ideas so far.
5. Hanging device. We have a few decorations that still need to be hung from our ceiling, not to mention if one of us has sudden suicidal urges… wait. No. (Charlene, I’ll kill you… although you would already be dead, so I’m not sure how that would work….)
6. Shin split wrap. As I think I am FINALLY developing a shin split (hooray! now I get to be epic!), this might actually come in handy sometime soon.
7. Ramen noodle strainer. No comment, just trust me.

 

 

For those of you who are wondering as to the appropriateness of this shared information, it just goes to show that I think this stuff is terrifying and should be converted to a better use. Like kitchen utensils (my own personal favorite).

I’m giving up chocolate for Lent for a semi-assignment for Human Situation I and for semi-because-I-just-want-to. I’ve made it since 12:30 PM today. Thirty-nine and a half more days to go…. But I figure if I reflect on God every time I have a craving, then I should think about God… *counts up*… yep, about twenty-five hours a day.

And you thinking I’m kidding.

So please don’t give me chocolate. Or tempt me. Be nice.

Oh yes… John Mark’s blog! Please follow THIS LINK and read it, too! 

Speaking of blogs… I’ve been a little discouraged about mine lately. I meant it to be this deep insight into life… and sometimes I feel like it just devolves into, um, well. You read the list above. It’s all fairly mundane, with something smart-alecky stuff thrown in here or there…. But today we read the fifth movement of “East Coker,” the second T.S. Eliot’s incredible Four Quartets poem collection, and I thought I would share one of the many parts that really “resonated” with me (I always feel like I have to quote that word since it’s Michael’s favorite):

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

So, basically… if you understood that you are a complete genius, and I want to be you when I grow up, or you are from our Human Situation class and you had the benefit of enlightening class discussions. However, the essence of this stanza is that we cannot hope to compete with such literary masters as Dante, Shakespeare, even Eliot himself (especially Eliot, as far as I’m concerned—I’m fairly certain the man managed to see and smell and taste and touch as well as hear the song that is at the heart of existence, and lived to come back and translate it for us), that “there is not competition.” They and unnumbered others have already traversed the paths of the human spirit that their poetry and prose illuminates for us. However, we must still “fight to recover what has been lost”—find ways to reword what the masters said to transmit it to our own broken and distracted and drowning generation. We must, at the very least, and at the very most, try.

That is what this blog is about: the trying. And the rest is not my business.

Luckily… part of the trying is trying to make you all laugh, which I hope I succeed in, at least part of the time.

Lastly, I am going to create another survey, because I think these things are fun, and because this is something I’ve been curious about for quite a while. And really folks, there’s no excuse for not participating… you just click and hit enter or something really simple like that.

And how about that emo-Gothed-out skin… pretty awesome, I think.

Ciao for now! (Haha, I rhymed!)

I wrote a poem! Hooray! And I’m not grouchy! Huzzah!

I know you love the parallel structure in the title… don’t even deny.

This morning dawned in a haze of cold-induced sniffles, the general foreboding feeling of yet another night of this-really-doesn’t-count-as-sleep, and my-alarm-is-going-off-and-it’s-only-6:15-which-means-I-have-to-study-for-that-Bible-test-oh-crap-I’m-going-to-fail.

Shower, then study, then breakfast, then test. Didn’t fail, I don’t think, even though some questions certainly went under the category of did-he-really-ever-talk-about-this-in-class-oh-wait-I’m-sure-he-did-only-it-was-probably-during-one-of-my-random-narcoleptic-fits.

But then—and I’m not sure exactly when this happened—sometime between going to English majors departmental chapel and organic lab, the completely dead-inside feeling began to lift. Maybe it had to do with the prospect of the nap that awaited me after lunch. Maybe it had to do with the fact that my mom is coming to rescue me from campus for the weekend. Maybe it had to do with telling God during my morningly prayer that if I had another day like this, I was dropping out of college and moving to India to start an orphanage, and being completely serious. I don’t know. But somewhere between waking up in a ninth-Egyptian-plague darkness and waking up from my blissful two-hour nap this afternoon, I felt… better.

Purged.

Cauterized.

Cleaned out.

Like I was really, truly, actually awake, not just in that semi-wakeful state that characterizes the days of an insomniac, like the Egyptians must have felt when they saw that those cursed Israelites were finally leaving—take our gold, our silver, all of our earthly possessions, just leave.

I’m fasting from my cell phone this week for Human Situation class, and from television—the latter of which is kind of a big deal because Heroes returned this week, and Lost will come out with a new episode tomorrow. I can’t even begin to tell you how freeing that feels, not having to have my cell phone, that is. On one hand, it is a bit of a pain not to be able to get in touch with people. On the other, I no longer feel that slight, vague guilt whenever I get back to the room and find my phone (which I pretty much always leave in the dorm, for the same reason that I’m fasting from it this week—I hate being tied to it) practically buzzing with missed calls and text messages. While I can’t just easily call someone up and see if they want to dinner, I’m having some well-needed therapeutic introverted recharging time.

I really need to go to Wal-Mart to get toothpaste and Zyrtec. Instead, I’m going to go to Walgreens instead, and just pay the extra two or three dollars. Wal-Mart is the antichrist… like chem labs, Celia.

There’s a creme soda bottle cap next to my laptop, the kind that you pop off of glass bottles, and a folded up note written on in pink highlighter from Claire, and a tube of Burt’s Bees chapstick.

Today I wrote a poem. Despite the fact that I hate admitting I wasn’t completely original, I will admit that it is modeled off of and inspired by the poem “Litany” by Billy Collins, which one can read here. It’s not meant to be about anything specific, so please don’t read it that way—just absorb. (Note: I got all T.S. Eliot-esque and made lots of obscure allusions, which I think you ought to know, though I don’t really expect anyone to pick up on them… but if you do, please tell me, because I want to meet you and become your best friend, because that means you’re just as insane about the written word as I am, and therefore a kindred spirit.) I’m hesitant to post because… well, I have just been hesitant about posting much of my writing at all lately, but… I think it is decent and has no specific topic and therefore should be available for public, um, consumption. (Yummy, poetry for breakfast, my favorite….) Also… the title isn’t for sure, but just an idea, and maybe just a reflection of my extreme love of using new fun words.

“Stellascript”

 

You are the moment before and after a hawk scream at night,

the reflection of winter constellations in a cistern.

You are the bird prints in the dust around the feeder

and the hoof-gouges in the ice where a fawn scrambled for footing

and fell.

You are the water gently stirring in the wake of a manatee.

 

You are the sky thirty minutes before sunrise

and you are the sky two minutes after sunset,

mirrored in another person’s pupils.

 

You are the echo of cowbells in the early morning Alps.

But still, you are not the children playing along the fault line

or the steady glow of the embers in the fireplace.

You are not the silvery halation of the cloud that masks the noonday sun.

You are not the blackberry juice on children’s hands,

the solitary song of the shepherd,

or the buzz of bees’ wings.

You are not the prehistoric butterfly frozen in amber.

 

You are the puppy scratches on my forearm,

the scent of cedar on my clothes,

but not the kaleidoscope of the Arctic aurora.

 

You glance at your reflection in tinted windows and you know

you are not the fire that scorched the first tree,

nor the soil around the surviving slumbering berry,

nor the rain that will awaken it,

 

nor the breeze that will ruffle its leaves.

 

Though you are not fire or earth or water or wind,

you should know

 

I am the flutter of dragonfly wings.

 

I am, too, the pine needles falling on a tin trailer roof,

the callused feet of a tight-rope walker,

the dripping of the ocean from the sea otter’s fur.

 

I am the feathery down on a premature baby’s skin

and the fox kit’s feet in the muddy floodwaters

and the howl in the throat of the lone wolf.

 

I am the wood and the sap and the buds of the laurel tree.

 

But you, you are the bird’s tracks,

the fossilized feathers of a flightless Jurassic bird,

the ringing in the canyon after an avalanche,

 

then the silence. 

Today, I am thankful to God that he has taken away writer’s block and helped me find the eye of the storm of my black mood.