estrogen & epithets

"Ah, my dear God! though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not."
-George Herbert, Affliction I

 "Batter my heart, three-personed God...

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me."

-John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14

Song: "I Want You So Bad I Can't Breathe" OK GO
Art Work: "Marriage a la Mode"  William Hogarth

Or be humbled by others...

"Because of you I will never look at the Butte the same way again, I will always lock my car doors while stopped in the middle of nowhere, I am a better Mao player, I have an incredible rosary, I appreciate people's differences more, and realize that they can actually bring us closer together. Because of you, I've realized that coffee dates can last for four hours, I've laughed so much. Because of you I have a true friend."

Thank you, Aimee.

If these were the last five books on Earth, I think I could get by just fine.

I am deathly afraid of my Brit Lit professor.

Well, until today.

The time to schedule classes for Winter and Spring is upon us, here at The College of Idaho.  Meaning, ya'll better be meeting with your advisers.  Lucky me, I get that adviser that I fear most. 

I'm scared because he grades my papers--he sees what a sham I am, and I'm just positive that he will call me out, and demand my immediate removal from the premises.

I get to his office--and he knows my name, and he has a gigantic Much Ado About Nothing movie poster on his wall, so Kenneth Branagh is smiling down on me the entire time; and the Prof is impressed by my preparedness, and he's excited for my Modern Art class, and he asks me how Greek is going; and he is surprisingly un-scary.

It was a kick in the pants--a trouser punt.

Now I'm all planned out for the year--

Greek Language & Literature II

Theories and Methods of the Study of Literature
Marlowe/Shakespeare/Jonson
20th C British Literature
Modern Art after 1940
New Testament Introduction
Greek Readings

I'm ecstatic, and I'm raring to go!

John Milton, "On Shakespeare"

What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones
To labor of an age in piled stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a livelong monument.
For, whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving
,And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

The heater makes the smoke detector wail.

Under circumstances that did not include a 52 degree rainy day, I could make a joke of that, but...well, I'm cold.  But mostly, the heater has just gotten me mad.  I have cleaned the filter, and,m if the heater would open more, I would more than attempt to eradicate the dust build up in the coils inside.  But the heater is against me.

And while I try to keep myself from going postal, and blaming the school for freakin' installing a heater that cannot be cleaned (one more reason to hate the school, right?), I look out the window at the chilly, rain soaked yard of the College of Idaho, I am reminded, almost violently, of Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights.  The outer painting depicts the world after the flood, which, obviously, should lead me to a post about God's love, but, rather, reminds me that things here at the school--They are going to get better.  I just gotta hold out.

And change my major to Art History.

Concerning a person who sat next to me in English Lit yesterday:

Do drugs smell like bad cologne, Big Red chewing gum, and sweat?

Because I've never smelt them before.

Just some things I have made...that make me glad.




























I have made these things, and given them to others.  And we all got joy out of them.

I could use some joy right now...so, off to my scissors and pens, papers and stamps!

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage; 

do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.

Joshua 1:9 NKJV

Wants nothing more than to read books in a tent in the rain in the pine trees.

I said I wasn’t sure whether I was looking for God or for humanity. 

Here’s what I found out:

They are the same thing.

God is in everyone, as was so apparent during my week at Camp Ivydale.  The camp is full of beautiful people, as it is full of God.  He works there in full force.

The theme was “Meeting the Messiah.”  I came to camp feeling out of the loop, almost feeling as though I had gotten over religion, over this whole “dependence on God” thing.  Baptized less than a year ago, and I had already given up.  It is easier to pretend that everything in my heart is alright when I am part of the world than it is when I am full of God, I suppose.  Lessons from the Gospel of John (delivered by two of the hugest influences on my life) re-personalized Jesus Christ for me, and made me realize that I have no strength compared to that of God.  I saw myself in Thomas and Simon Peter, and literally felt the love that Jesus had for them hit me as I listened to the Scripture being read.  And they didn’t read the Bible like one might normally, monotoning a steady, “Blah blah blah blah.”  They read it to life.  Every line had importance, every word had motivation.  This was the first time reading the Bible that I could see that the disciples, and especially Jesus, felt emotions, strong emotions. 

I met Jesus this week.

A boy got sick one evening as the camp was gathered around the campfire for devotional.  He almost went into a diabetic coma.  We joined hands and prayed for him, prayed hard that God would bring him through the night.  Ten minutes later, we were told that he was eating and feeling better.  John 17:20-26 records Jesus as praying for unity between believers.  That is exactly what happened when we all joined together to pray for that boy.  I met Jesus then.

I believe that there is a Living God.  I don’t know enough, and I let that hold my relationship with God up last time.  August 1 is my one-year anniversary of commitment through baptism.  I am committed for life.  And a life-time is time enough to dive deep into God. 

“As the deer thirsts for the water Lord,
So my soul longs after you.
My soul thirsts for the Living God,
My soul longs after you.

And I pour out my soul deep within me,
Deep within me, I pour out my soul.
Draw me deeper Lord, deeper Lord, in you.”

Thou mayest.

We all have a choice in life.  I have a choice.

I.  Have.  A.  Choice.

From the story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 5, I believe), John Steinbeck created a monster of a fable in East of Eden.  I loved every word of every single one of those six hundred and five pages. 

But let's talk about God.  God and Steinbeck, and how I have one and not the other.  I feel Steinbeck, right here next to me, a separate character as I read through his works (I just devoured Of Mice and Men, waiting for Travels with Charly).  But God, really, has been reduced to a character in a cardboard kid's book.  But for one brief second, I got the old feeling back, the feeling I had last summer at church camp, that God is here.  It was while reading East of Eden, when Lee and Samuel and Adam are discussing the naming of Adam's twin sons.  They read Cain and Able aloud, and Lee brings up timshel.  Cain gets thrown into the wilderness, and told "Though mayest conquer over sin."  Not "You have to," or "You better," but, "You can, or you cannot.  Your choice." 

Rejuvenation, I suppose, is what I felt on reading Steinbeck's words.  Gone was the mold to fit, the omniscient road map.  For one moment I knew definitively that ultimately, I had control over my life, rather than it being predestined.  I am not saying that I believe in predestination, just that I didn't ever care to think about what was what in that area.

But still, I continue to be disturbed at the way that I see God and particularly Jesus as fictional.  As kiddie stuff.  The Gospel of John and Slaughterhouse-Five constitute my new reading material.  I can't help but ask myself if I am looking for God, or for humanity...

I confuse myself.  For now, I choose the NKJV, and I will leave it at that.

I am gearing up for a summer full of fantastic reading!  There is a list of books that I want to read that could possibly stretch to Montreal and back, but I've narrowed them down to a "short" list.

Bless Me, Ulitma,  Rudolpho Anaya
Go Down, Moses,  William Faulkner
For Whom the Bell Tolls,  Ernest Hemingway
The Dharma Bums,  Jack Kerouac
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momoday
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men
Travels with Charly
The Joy Luck Club,  Amy Tan 
Slaughterhouse-Five,  Kurt Vonnegut
The Color Purple, Alice Walker

Having already read Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) and The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan), not to mention a bummer of a book club book, The Wives of Henry Oades (author to come later...I can't remember who she was for the life of me.  Any-who, terrible book.), I am off to a great start, reading Steinbeck as we speak.  My first experiences with Steinbeck were horrific, as I think that all high schoolers experiences are, but East of Eden has got me.  The first sentence, "The Salinas Valley is in Northern California." is so seductively simple.  I am at the point where all of the story lines converge---I can hardly wait to read again once I put it down.

Also on my mind are There Is a Bird On Your Head and Elephants Cannot Dance, by Mo Willems, and Skippy Jon Jones, by Judy Schachner.  Being extremely gifted children's writers, Willems and Schachner are my top picks of the summer, both for my library drama productions and for my niece and nephew.  : )

Finals week is coming up fast, and Memorial Weekend has given me a breath of that grass infused air of freedom.  I hardly feel like going to my third year.

Last night, I had a dream that I was sitting and laughing in my living room (all my furniture was exact) with my friend D and my sister.  The door bell rings.  I answer the door, wearing a blue terry cloth bathrobe.  There, bathed in porch light (not quite like Bathsheba), stands Mr. G and Mr. M, my English professors.  Mr. G smiles big, hands me two manila envelopes, and says, "Just thought we'd drop these by!!"  He turns and leaves, Mr. M giving me a half wave and a smirk as I stand nearly naked and nearly speechless in my bathrobe.  I turn back to D and K, and open my envelopes.  One holds a check from Mr. G for $9,000 to continue college.  The other envelope is marked from Mr. M.  (Thirty silver coins, perhaps?) The check inside is for $12.95.

Is this a sign that I should persevere?


PS
I love Miss Aimee Kapie, my beloved girly!!  I love being her "inspiration!"

I have been writing A LOT of poetry for my Creative Writing class.  What's the good of all of that work if I don't share it??

Here is some of my favorites (reproduced as close as possible):

The king he is hunting the deer; I am coursing myself: they have pitched a toil; I am toiling in a pitch,--pitch that defiles: defile! a foul word. Well, set thee down, sorrow! for so they say the fool said, and so say I, and I the fool: well proved, wit! By the Lord, this love is as mad as Ajax: it kills sheep; it kills me, I a sheep: well proved again o' my side! I will not love: if I do, hang me; i' faith, I will not. O, but her eye,--by this light, but for her eye, I would not love her; yes, for her two eyes. Well, I do nothing in the world but lie, and lie in my throat. By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme and to be melancholy; and here is part of my rhyme, and here my melancholy. Well, she hath one o' my sonnets already: the clown bore it, the fool sent it, and the lady hath it: sweet clown, sweeter fool, sweetest lady! By the world, I would not care a pin, if the other three were in. Here comes one with a paper: God give him grace to groan!

-Berowne, Love's Labours Lost

Act IV, iii 

Sunday, March 7 was closing night of Antigone, our beautiful college play...how fitting that it was also Oscar night. (If Antigone had been a film, we SO would have swept the awards!)

What else would one expect a bunch of theater nerds to do at a cast party than geek out about the most successful films of the year? And geek out we did. Accompanied by chocolate chip cookies, organic carrots, and an inordinate amount of shrill giggles (compliments of our FAVORITE girly...) we took in the antics of hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin and ooh-and-aah'ed over our favorite actors and presenters.

Party favorites: Inglorious Basterds, Avatar, and It's Complicated; Meryl Streep, Gaby Sidibe, Queen Latifah, Chris Pine, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Robert Downey Jr; costumes from Nine, music from Up, and make-up from Star Trek.

Some of the best fun of the night came from the fashion icons...and the train wrecks.

The best:


Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side

Her red lipstick sort of reminds me of Lora's as Queen Eurydice....

















Penelope Cruz, Nine

So gorgeous...Chloe and I loved her in Vicky Christina Barcelona. I smell an Antigone reunion party when Nine finally comes to video.














Robert Downey Jr., Sherlock Holmes

Who else could pull off the blue bow-tie, excepting Mr. Hottie Robert Downey?












(By the way, I LOVE the shoes.)






Colin Firth, A Single Man

Wow. I mean, WOW. Wow.

Hmm...wow.





















And the worst:

(There were a lot of worsts, disappointingly enough. But here are the highlights.)

Zoe Saldana, Avatar


Not gonna lie, I think Zoe Saldana is beautiful, but this dress...was bad. No one could figure out just what she was carrying around down there. It's almost like her dress is half Muppet. Bad, bad, bad, BAD dress.














Miley Cyrus

We couldn't look away from the horror that was Miley for a few reasons:

1) The dress is like a Disney princess bustier. Soooo not cool.
2) She was talking. It's hard not to stare when she talks. Like a traffic accident on your morning commute....
3) Miley Cyrus? At the Oscars? Really?













Jennifer Lopez

I think that Lora's comment sums it all up pretty well: "Her dress has a tumor!"


















Sarah Jessica Parker

Racoon eyes, a choking dress appendage, and sex hair. Need I say more?



















The fashions of my fellow Antigone cast members proved much more successful.

(Photos to come later! Post to be continued another day!)

Yes, this is a terrible little form poem, compliments of one of my English professors. (The Shakespeare professor, as a matter of fact. I'm still wondering why we couldn't have written a sonnet or something, you know, just a tad more Shakespearean.) But, it was fun to write anyway.

Kelsea--

Simple, robust, exquisite, and plain;
Sister of a girl who can make a meal of anything, a guy who is a preheating pro, and a man who knows his way around a wok;
Lover of saucy retorts, crusty bread, and a spicy bit of something;
Who feels fed up, chewed out, and hungry for more;
Who needs eight glasses of water, twelve hundred calories, and vitamin C;
Who gives good morning pancakes, late afternoon chapatti, and good-bye brownies;
Who fears poultry, peelers, and Cuisinart;
Who would like to see Julia Child’s kitchen, Adam with a sixty-four ounce steak, and Bourdain in her boudoir;
Who lives eight hundred miles from a Voodoo Donut;

--Jones.

Today's Top Three

1) The late night Olympic talking head sounds like Bob Costas, which would make her a man.
2) My friend experienced "rape and pillage" by a four-toed manila-taloned lady. I'm paying for therapy.
3) I socked "Bane" in the face. With my shoulder. BWAHA!

Today's Top Three

1) OMGosh, it's sunny outside!
2) Jackie Robinson + Barack Obama + Olympic Gold = Shauni Davis, the most patriotic man in America.
3) Buying Kylie a candy bar because I lost the bet on Lindsey Vonn's win.


It's gorgeous outside. And I got to sleep in this morning. But I feel a little sick, and I have Antigone rehearsal tonight until nine o'clock, which is never fun, especially when there is a sociology paper hanging over head, and Men's Figure Skating on NBC. (Enter Shamless Plug for Evan Lysacek.) Bright side, though, I have costume call, and I finally get to see my little old man get up! Mahatma Hamliton-Briers lives! I am crossing my fingers that seeing the costume will help me generate some great body language, because so far, I have been having a bit of trouble with the whole "old" thing. Springy, I can be. Elfish, I can be. Lecherous, I can be. (Winkie face, anyone?) But old has definitely been giving me problems. Hmm....hip problems.....that could be an idea....

To finish, some text from my favorite Antigone ode, the Paean:

God of many names

O Iacchus
son
of Kadmeian Semele
O born of the Thunder!
Guardian of the West
Regent
of Eleusis' plain
O Prince of meanad Thebes
and the Dragon Field by rippling Ismenos:

God of many names

the flame of torches
flares on our hills
the nymphs of Iacchos
dance at the vine-close mountain
come ah come in ivy:
Evohe evohe! sings through the streets of Thebes

God of many names

Iacchos of Thebes
heavenly Child
of Semele bride of the Thuderer!
The shadow if plague is upon us:
come
with clement feet
oh come from Parnasos
down the long slopes
across the lamenting water

Io Fire! Chorister of the throbbing stars!
O purest among the voices of the night!
Thou son of God, blaze for us!

Come with choric rapture of circling Maenads
Who cry Io Iacche!

God of many names!

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.
-A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The world must be peopled!
-Much Ado About Nothing

Is my affection for Shakespeare true love? Love at first sight? Nauseating “in love with love” love? I say all three.
I see an old couple sitting on a weathered bench on a porch, hand in hand, when I think of true love. The couple will go to bed at ten o’clock and wake up the next morning at eight, because that is what they have always done. There isn’t much conversation at the breakfast table, but affection can be seen in the way that the wife sets a plate of toast in front of the husband, and in the way that he refills her coffee cup to the halfway point, just the way she likes it. True love is comfortable. True love is what I feel for the plays that I have already read or seen or studied. I know that when I fall into them, there will be a clown to cheer me up, a woman tormented in love to save, and a hero that reforms in the end.
Love at first sight is the excitement of opening a play that I haven’t read before. The pages flutter quite like those clichéd butterflies in the stomach when one sees an attractive member of the opposite sex. The first lines can make or break the play, but more often than not it seems to me, one can’t know the true character of the play from the first date, as it were. The first attraction develops after each subsequent venture into the play, until the love at first site reaction is changed into the comfortable feeling of true love.
Finally, the “in love with love” love that I feel for Shakespeare is the feeling that I get when I read the plays out loud. There are times when I read them out loud to myself, for the pure pleasure of hearing the words spoken. There is a certain Narcissus-like quality to this. Narcissus was in love with his reflection, and I do not go so far as to say that I am in love with hearing myself read Shakespeare aloud, but reading out loud can feel like receiving a Valentine from myself.
Reading Shakespeare can be an awfully attractive thing to do. Really. If a man was inclined to woo himself a lady, Sonnet 18 would do it. It is a well used sonnet, a little tired, but the idea behind it of woman being more beautiful than the sun, and unable to be eclipsed by anything like clouds or winter is the definition of romantic.
Even passages that are not strictly about love can make the reader attractive. If you doubt it, men, find a copy of Othello, turn to Act I, scene iii, position yourself in front of a mirror, and read Iago’s speech at the end of the scene. Iago is the ultimate bad boy of Shakespeare, which, as evidenced in movies from the 1950s and the amount of tattooed and pierced men with dates, sounds with the ladies. Read it like you mean it, and try to tell me that it did not enhance your machismo.

Today's Top Three

1) "Dude, Kelsea, I was buying a pack of cigarettes..." Probably one of the weirdest sink conversations ever.
2) I share my one wit with my horse. Thanks, David.
3) One of my favorite pastimes: Playing Gay Hitler.

Friday 29 January 2010

1) Have you ever been interrogated by frenzied lunch ladies? Not fun.
2) David ate twice his weight in pizza. He did not spew in the car.
3) Pregnant women in college are distracting...

The Top Highlights of the past couple days...

Thursday 28 January 2010

1) Kylie's hat looks like a cow bra. Really.
2) And then a pill packet descended from the heavens, delivered unto us by a orange school folder.
3) Women sparked the "let's-hunt-an-elephant-to-prove-our-manhood" movement of the late 1800s.


Tuesday 26 January 2010

1) He drives a rapist van!
2) "American girl" really is synonymous with "prostitute." Thanks, you pre-med pig.
3) Shakespearean nudity is just another type of mask....right?

I'm in a Creative Nonfiction class. I know, it sounds like a bore, right? That would be incorrect. It's great fun. Where else can you air real life issues and be accepted?

Our homework for this week? Take this clothespin everywhere you go for the next week.

Obviously, there was some confusion in the class. It wouldn't be community college if someone didn't ask, "Do we have to shower with it?!" (At this point I went out into the hall and blew my brains out.) Mr. M offered no further explanation: Just take it with you.

I clipped my clothespin onto the lapel of my jacket, a rather lofty position for a clothespin, and smiled at the clothespin. I wasn't going to over think this. Just take it with me. Everywhere.

Yesterday, 13 January 2010, I took my clothespin:

• To the Bistro, to get a hot tea. The clothespin and I are watching our health.
• Through the freezing rain, to sociology, where the clothespin learned about social deviance.
• Back through the slightly less freezing rain, to where the wild things are, or rather, to the Weese building where Maegan and David were supposed to be waiting. We instead waited for them.
• To the cafeteria with Maegan. Kylie brought me lunch from home--I neglected to share with the clothespin. Maegan and I discussed flea markets. I wondered how much I could sell my clothespin for.
• To the ceramics building. We cut through the industrial buildings, and consequently, had to avoid a lake. The clothespin reminded me not to take the shortcut after it had been raining. We sat down to throw, and I couldn't find my groove. I made a wonky-vase. Inspired if I say so myself. More to come on that later.
• To my first rehearsal for Antigone. We learned about Oedipus/Mommy love, what the word "marshaled" meant, and all about our nauseatingly pretentious co-actors. The clothespin and I agree: We hate them. I have very few lines to memorize. I never want to see the clothespin again.

I took the clothespin off of my lapel, and threw it onto my bed side shelf. I say it this morning when I woke up--I forgot it when it was time to leave for school. Unconsciously removing myself from the horrors of last nights rehearsal? Maybe. Even so, I will collect the clothespin before tonight's reprise.