PA

So I am now living in the woods. Yesterday I saw two groundhogs, I forget how many squirrels, and a doe. Apparently having seen only one doe is unusual. There are two houses next to this one that are literally being taken over by the woods. You can see them through the tangle because they're white and still somewhat standing upright. I am sure that they are wildlife havens. Out here you can really see the battle between woods and civilization (if you want to call a house or two civilization). Other wildlife includes about 50 billion dust mites and lots of mold, mildew, and moss. Thankfully a lot of this was purged out of the house by its former inhabitants, but we're still fighting. It's kinda nice, really, apart from the whole dust thing. The house has lots of sun and there are trees all around, but at the same time, it isn't in the middle of nowhere.
And now for something, completely different.
I got to hang out with one of my good friends yesterday. I hadn't seen her in a year and a half...
we talked for I think two hours. It was good. Good, in part, to actually see and hear her talk, instead of reading words off a screen. =)
that's all for now, folks. Hope your day is a good one.
over 'n out.

food for thought- at last!

Today was a day of much thought for me, a sort of clarity and depth I haven't forced my mind to probe in many a month. Thank God for today. I felt like me again. I read in this book, The Once and Future King, a passage about what it calls the "seventh sense"- the one that people get around the middle age and that allows them to calmly brave the crazy waves of life, where the basic dichotomies that young people experience don't matter so much any more. I guess what it means is that people give up trying to figure life out and just "roll with the punches", to quote K. shucks. I can see the attraction. i mean, then you wouldn't be worrying about stuff all the time. But I think you'd loose something precious, too. You'd lose clarity, and poignancy, and beauty. Do you get tired of those things? Maybe. I don't know yet. Maybe beauty and poignancy and clarity can get boring, just like collecting seashells gets boring, when it seems like you've seen the same smoothed over, beaten-by-the-waves shell several hundred times, with its delicate coloring and smooth edges and evenly curved lines. Doesn't matter. For now I want to still be able to plunge to the depths of some terribly complicated problem that I've no hope of solving and try to discuss it out with some good thinkers.
but not at 2:35 AM.
goodnight, reader.

p.s.: ok, so i know this post isn't particularly lucid. I mean, it doesn't really have to do with any of the specific things I was thinking about that blessed me so much. But this is the... the outsider's version. After all, I'm not about to share my innermost thoughts on the internet. How silly (in all respects of the word) THAT would be.

swimmer's conversations

I was at a swim meet today. Those things can last for a very long time- 6, sometimes 7 hours to get through all the age groups and all the strokes. So naturally, people get to talking. Well, a group of friends and I were having a great time laughing, and joking, and being excited about the meet, when one girl said "We should really quiet down, we sound like we're high." I found this interesting at the time, but didn't think much of it. Later though, it occurred to me that really, we weren't the ones at fault. We weren't acting like people who are high. I think that maybe it's the other way around- maybe (some) people want to get high in order to enjoy the laughter and lightheartedness and camaraderie that we were experiencing. In a way, it's a sobering thought.

And then of course there's the inevitable chaser-thought: why should we be ashamed of our enjoyment because there are those who would look down on us for being like people who abuse their bodies in the hopes of having a similar experience?
ah. the more I type this idea out, the more sides there are to it. I will bullet them, as it's late and I'd like to sleep tonight.

• the not being ashamed of our enjoyment part could be construed as heartless, since it overlooks the pain that individuals that get high are often in
• how ironic is the use of the word "chaser"

goodnight. -evening, -aftenoon, -morning, whenever you are when you read this.
enjoy yourself. be merry every once in a while. :)

giant 'OFF' switch

So my experience with summer vacations is that you let your brain just sort of switch off. Sometimes it gets even to the point where someone asks you the time and you go "Um... I don't know..." even though you have a watch on your wrist, a cell phone in your pocket and a clock on the wall. The fact is that time just doesn't matter any more and stress is a thing of the past- but then, so is brain activity above the level of, you know, sleep.
In an effort to somewhat counteract this colossal mental shut-down, I've been doing absolutely nothing. After last year, and considering the year coming up, I decided my head needed the break from forced activity. Let it wander where it will, and I'll pick it up again from wherever it went before classes start up again. Last year it went to Timbuktu (well, actually I think it might have got lost on the way and ended up in Cambodia, but oh well).
I wish I really COULD go to Cambodia or Australia or Sri Lanka or somewhere...
oh well.
ttfn

a question for the cosmic void

So I won't go into the whole long story, but it comes to the fact that I have a new game of Scrabble. I tried playing with my fam, but we never got the time and now they're off. I tried playing with my "roomie" for the summer, but she'd rather watch golf. I didn't even try playing with the "dorm parents" 'cause they were exhausted from a father's day party and getting work etc organized for tomorrow. So, eager to play Scrabble with real wood tiles for the first time ever, I simply decided to play with myself. As I said to a friend of mine, I played Myself. Myself won, by 41 points, and I wasn't very happy, but was resigned to the fact. :P
Anyway, I know scrabble doesn't sound very fun or cool or anything. But you have to understand the fascination behind it. You see, for me, Scrabble is rooted in the things that I love. One of the first great teachers in my life used a bag of Scrabble tiles to rule the class with. Those things ruled our lives. The suspense was a part of our daily lives. There were no favorites. You never knew who would be called on- the person goofing off, the one who knew the answer, the one snoring in the corner... or you. Who would be given the prestige of blackboard cleaning and writing the date? Who would- well, you get the picture.
Then there's the fact that some of the people whose lifestyle and joie de vivre I admire most play and love this game. Games are a part of my community. We span most of Europe and some of America. We are few, but we are loyal, passionate, and hard-working. When we get together, we play games: Dutch Blitz, Big Boss Little Boss, Egyptian Rat, Uno, Gin Rummy, and, among others, Scrabble. The thing is, I get the idea that cards and board games are often seen as being boring things that old people do. In my experience that is not so. This community I'm talking about has taken games and enjoyed them thoroughly. People used to like card games because they were a way of getting together and enjoying the people you were with, and that is why we enjoy them still.
Now my community is scattered once again, and I can't spend time enjoying them. So I spend time doing the things we do together, and enjoying those things out of love for my friends.
Ah. But I was forgetting my question for the cosmic void.
Has anyone else ever played Scrabble with themselves?
:P
And with that I leave you, and wish you a good Day, whatever stage of the day you may be in.
over 'n out.

meets, failings, and other summer firsts

So this summer has been full of firsts for me. I here list them, in the hopes of discovering that I've actually learned something from 'em.
1. First time driving a car.
2. First time taking a driving test
3. First time failing a driver's test
4. First time being on a swim team
5. First time swimming butterfly
6. First time doing a flip-turn
7. First time participating in a swim meet
8. First time understanding the between-the-lines part of a conversation w/an American peer (this is big. Like, huge. People always talk between-the-lines, and once you start to catch on, you can officially say that you've acculturated)
9. First time filling out a job app.
10. First time meeting triplets
11. First time taking care of 3 kids under 9 all by myself
12. First time passing a drivers test
13. First time driving somewhere all. by. myself.
14. First time watching my sister drive
15. First time driving someone else

So yeah, those are several of this summer's firsts. I've been doing other things I've never done before, but they don't count as firsts, since they're either one-time things, or sound too small to count (like all the different swimming techniques I've been observing/learning/trying to force my body to imitate)
The way life looks right now, there are only more firsts to come. Huzzah! This is the whirligig of change that I love to go through every several years.

idioma pensado

Last post I talked about music, and said I had more to say. I do. Music... the other day I babysat for triplets, seven months old, along with the family's AuPair. Now, I don't know much about babies. I haven't spent a whole lot of time with kids less than two years old- and most of my two-year-olds are precocious, so they can talk to me. These kids, I was nervous about (partly because there were 3 of them and 2 of us, but hey, who cares, right?). They can't talk, and the only way to know what they want is to implement "people skills" aka, the ability to read people and anticipate what they're thinking. ... Ok, so it wasn't THAT bad. Still, I didn't know what to do with the tykes, so when Ve (not her real name, but it'll serve) left the room, I sang to them. The little girl, Em, seemed to like it. She stopped bouncing in her swing and just stared at me with her big sky-blue eyes. So did Dan, though he was shyer about it. If I looked his way he promptly got embarrassed and started biting his toys busily. =) It was fun, singing to those kids. Later I found out that the only thing that will keep them quiet when they're hungry is this show of kids singing songs and dancing. Now, granted, it could be the visual stimulation, and the fact that they're used to those videos, and the routine that follows. However, I still think that the fact that they're music videos is intriguing. What is it about music that strikes a chord (no pun intended), even with 7-month-old babies?
Music isn't just melody and harmony. It's rhythm too, and lyrics. And some types of music even separate these elements from one another. Some more classical pieces, arias for example, are pure melody and harmony. Rap- or some of it- is almost pure rhythm. Poetry is the lyrical part of music. So what is the underlying unifying something that makes music so important to us? Is it like language, the importance of making meaningful sounds? Or is the whole of music greater than the sum of its parts? I have already said that I think music is more than just meaningful sounds. What that more is, I cannot, right now, discover. All I know is that the acoustic guitar is the most comfortable sound in the world; vocal harmony one of the most beautiful; screamo some of the most pained and painful; drums one of the most moving; a band one of the most exciting. But then again, that's all subjective. :P

idioma primero

Well, so like I said, this summer is CRAZY. I have so many babysitting gigs I don't know what to do with myself. Still, life goes on. :P Much more hectically than before.
I have been thinking about music. Right now I am listening to a choral arrangement, which prompts me to tell you a story. A few summers ago I was a councilor at a summer camp in Spain, just north of Barcelona. I worked there for a total of 4 weeks. The camp was full of music. There were songs every evening around the campfire-sub (there was a drought that year, so no campfires allowed by the dept.) and every morning before breakfast to get the kids (and their councilors) woken up. We had a bagpipe, and flutes, and bass, and guitars, and a violin, and many, many voices- loud, soft, happy, reluctant, beautiful, off-key- you name it. Also, I sang to myself as usual, and there was praise music on Sundays, when we had our church service. But though our joie de vivre and worship was honest, there would seem to be some quality lacking in the music. I would not have known this but for one morning (a morning of rest, because it was between camps). By that time I was a kitchen hand, and so shared a cabin with my friend instead of a tent with 8 kids and another councilor. We were packing our belongings in preparation for the move to our next assigned cabin, when the most beautiful sound hit my ears. During camps, usual wakeup song was some atrocious kids' song about a rooster with a banjo, sung terribly off-key. So on non-camp mornings the designated DJ played something different. On that particular morning he chose a simple string and wind arrangement in major key, that just struck me, right in the heart (for lack of a better, less sentimental way of putting it). It filled, all of a sudden, the lack I had felt in all of the music of the past four weeks. I stood still and listened, hand over heart. At that moment it might have been one of the most beautiful sounds I'd ever heard.
So I know, you see. I know that music speaks to the soul. Even if it's not as amazing as that one camp experience of mine. My Dad's music, that I have known forever (or so it seems) still runs through my head, and I use it to express what I'm thinking, or to change its course.
But music can also grow stale. It can grow old and lose meaning. That, I think, is partially why we write so many new songs. And of course, greed in the corporate world. But I'm not discussing that. I have a few other musical observations, but it's late, and I've run out of steam. I'll be philosophical about it next time.