Still Life with Amaryllis

In spanish, a "Still Life" is called "Naturaleza Muerta"-- "muerta" meaning dead. Interesting implications between the differences in the languages. Story: the amaryllis my mom got me for Christmas, which I tended to and watched bloom, was beginning to die, but I thought it deserved one last day of glory in the hot sun. Also, this blog is the first to publish my brother's precocious poetry.


In the glory of a wilting orchid
I persist, survive, live, thrive.
My sun is setting, and I think the stars will suffice,
While in naïve anxiety, I sip at the air
Watching in anger,
The light camber through
The longest horizon.
The moon absent
While the invisible sun retreats
And nothing but sky.
Celestial Litter
Collapses
Upon my conscience,
Asking me answers I can’t question.
And I,
In a train of confusion...

-Sam Golightly, 2010


I can't just blog about something serious all the time, so I thought this was a fun picture. This is what happened after I cut the stem of the flowers to preserve the bulb. It reminds me of my childhood (cough cough... college freshmen) days of playing Zelda. This guy might have showed up in the Kokiri forest, perhaps a relative to one of those Deku nut spitters. And I bet you can guess who is holding the "sword" ;). Yours truly. Over and out.

All the Single Ladies

This semester has awakened the feminist in me. I do believe it was there all along, waiting to come out of hiding, but it took just the right combination of a theory class, Shakespeare, and one X factor which I can only refer to as Doctor Brandie "Freakin' Awesome" Siegfried-- to call it to full consciousness.

Now, before we get our undies all in a bunch that I've gone crazy and joined a herd of Amazons, I'd just like to state:

1. I have no desire to burn my bras. That would be harmful.
2. I still like men. (Sometimes)
3. I don't want to overthrow the family proclamation

But seriously. There are so many things that really need to be rethought concerning the codes and systems we're currently using to construct gender. I know some of you who I've discussed this with will be grimacing. I'll pretend you're grinning.

I'm still in the stages of developing my own beliefs on this, but I just feel really strongly that we need to look closer and harder at what paradigms are being used in our world today which come to signify "man" and "woman." A lot of them, probably harmless, but a lot of them can also be incredibly harmful and misleading. To more clearly see this, take Chinese foot binding. What began as as a trend to accentuate the natural beauty of the woman's tiny feet (I know-- feet, right?) eventually came to the place other, peripheral effects of this practice (women not being able to move as far, not standing a lot, being more physically submissive) as the primary, natural attributes of a acceptable women, even long after the foot binding tradition was gone.

Laura Mulvey writes extensively about "the male gaze." Hollywood Cinema today is all about this, and you don't have to be a critic to realize it. The very ways in which shots are taken of women during movies are sometimes meant to show them as being 1: Eye candy 2: Subliminally threatening/seductive. Granted, Mulvey was writing during the 60's and 70's, but I think she makes some valid points concerning our attitudes toward the portrayal of women in media. The biggest thing I wonder is "Why are we so complicit?" No, we can't single-handedly change the porn industry or challenge COSMOPOLITAN's constant suggestion that the value of woman is based solely on her biology, but we can be armed with knowledge about the way these images attack us and infiltrate our thoughts. We can call a spade a spade, and help others around to do the same (even if we don't see the same spades... not talking about Kate Spade vs. Prada, either, for those of you more fashionably inclined.) Bottom Line: Look harder. Thank you, Rafiki.

That's why I applaud my girl Katrina Hodge for wanting to rid beauty pageants of their swimsuit competitions. Use your brains folks: if the swimsuit section weren't so inundated in the tradition of the pageant, and if the Donald Trumps and Hugh Hefners weren't patronizing these shows, the mere idea of a swimsuit competition would be absolutely absurd. Because yes, gentlemen, I can somehow equate my platform of world peace with the shape and smoothness of my legs. Uh huh. Yeah.(whispers in the crowd: I think what she means is a piece for the world...)

I know more people have to see the absurdity in all this. For our children's sake and our own, let's meet it head on, riding into battle with our helmets down and heads high... (whispers... for Frodo..)

Well, that's enough for tonight. I could really go on about this forever; Twilight and beauty pageants are the two things in this world that I feel are not only plain stupid, but also poisonous. The article about modern day Joan of Arc is here.

Mis Palabras Grandes

I’ve been thinking. I want to put some of my thoughts down. Let me say how I feel, let me say how I feel before it gets burdened down by my inculcated tendency to use big words. Doi! I can’t stop. Have to be on the look-out. You see, I’ve been accused of using too big of words-- words like monsters so fast that they come out of the cave of my mouth and eat up all the little words while they have their backs turned (The little words share the same cave).

Let’s be honest. We don’t need gigantic, presumptuous words in the English Language if we have all the smaller ones that make them up anyway. Like instead of saying, “I was flummoxed,” why don’t we just say “I just didn’t get it—it was so retarded, like ‘what the heck…’” . Why do I default to saying: “That’s so archaic,” when I could say “That’s so last…(insert time period, month, year, etc.).” The other thing about big words is that they are inconsiderate of other’s space and time. Like bad guests, or the guy I sat by today on the bus. Who has time to text (or, gosh, for that matter, even speak) a word like ambivalent? People are offended by these words, and rightly so. The other day, I used “harbinger” in a conversation, and my friend looked at me as though I had just yanked her braids. Confronting a new word is like being forced to be talk to someone you haven’t been introduced to. Like what… you’re supposed to stop the conversation and ask a name, or what the word means? Both instances…so rude. I’m so excited that we’re cnslidting everything. I didn’t get it before, but I mean, like now that I have a life and a phone, I see that ‘breviations are the future. Look out, SOS, because, like, what’s more universal than the language of LOL?

Jk.

Ha ha.

Fellow English Majors and lovers of truth, beauty and goodness: don’t banish me to outer darkness to trudge beside the Twilight series— not just yet, anyways.

All joking and satire aside, I sometimes feel troubled by the way I can’t transmit everything that I feel or want to express into words. I should be an expert on this, by now, right? I mean-- having come so far in the study of my own language and its literature, you would think I'd have it down pat. But there’s something elusive about words and thoughts and the way they come together (or sometimes die trying). Believe me, there have been volumes written on this, so I won’t go into the theory of it now. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. The common saying is “Cat got your tongue?” You’ve felt it? (Personally, I’m not exactly sure how much of the trouble has to do with my tongue. But if you like cats, tongues, or have a quirky sense of humour like me, you should check this out.)

I used to view words like they were proud, seafaring vessels which bore our thoughts and ideas over oceans and onto to foreign shores—- ambassadors, if you will, between individuals, groups, nations. Sometimes the ships would transport just down a shoreline, from harbor to harbor, to disperse value and work out meaning within the system of one mind. But sometimes, the ship-words aren’t strong enough to carry the thought, and, topheavy, sink. Or the ship-word is too large to carry the thought, and it gets blown off course to meander in a sea of ambiguity and confusion until they too become lost and forgotten.
Or… like I have this great idea… but how can I narrow it down without using words? Or--and this might be the worst of the afflictions-- when I have a whole flock of ideas surging through my brain, wild-fire like, but I can’t make the words come fast enough to capture the impressions, can’t find the right ones to embrace them, and the thoughts escape like doves of light toward the sky, never to be recaptured. The ones I do manage to catch lose some of their luster, they whimper like caged nightingales. And I sigh, wistfully wishing there was some better way to speak what I think and feel. To say what I mean and to mean what I say. That would be something.

Writing is hard. Communication is hard. Maybe that’s why we have tried all the other ways we know to do it. Art, photography, film. Everyone knows music exists precisely because what it expresses can’t be contained by words.

But I will still try. I have read writing that soars above the daily grind, and is able-- in one swift, fluid motion-- to communicate not only content, but beauty—the type of beauty that threads like silver through the very warp and weft of the textual fabric. I have heard the people speak with power-- because they have something to say and not just the urge to say something. Language is a gift, one which, I believe, we are still opening.

Short Story...

Or that's what they say these are called. Not so much short, when you get down to it..:). This one ended up being about 4000 words, but I entered it into the 2010 BYU Hunger Banquet's Creative Competition. And it won one of the prizes!!! I was really excited. I'm really proud of it too. Billy Collins once said that writing poetry makes him feel... like writing more poetry. This is how I feel about writing. So, rest assured, I'm far from being done.

There is a copy of the story posted on the BYU Students for International Development Blog (here). However, I accidentally sent them the wrong copy and for some reason they haven't put the right one up. So that one can be proof of my greatness, and this other one you can just read- if you love me, that is. And please let me know what you think, if there is anything that doesn't make sense or you have questions. I really want to polish it up as much as I can. No pun intended :).

Breaking News

PROCRASTIN… what?
NEW JERSEY--Merck Laboratories announced today in a press release that they will begin public marketing for their newly developed drug called PROCRASTIN ™. Meant to battle the ongoing battle many face with deadline anxiety, the general passage of time, and other stress disorders, the new drug claims to cool down overly active endorphin levels as well as providing a general calming relief to the user.

In early animal tests, the drug was hailed as being the Prozac of stress. The scurrying of lab rats declined to a light skip and a jump. What’s more, the hamsters’ mating habits and subsequent offspring production decreased by nearly ten-fold. “Suddenly,” says Dr. Weightmore, Procrastin’s production team leader, “It was as though the hamsters, after being administered the drug, considered each other, and just thought: ‘Meh—this can wait.” Dr. Weightmore ensures that these types of libidinal results will not affect humans, only rodents.
“The point is that they’re calming down. It’s really a miracle, and we’re excited to present it to pharmacies all over America,” said the doctor.

Side effects of the drug are still being studied. In some early human cases, the strength of the drug was so potent that participants actually stopped taking it, some citing that after the first few doses, they just decided “I’ll take another tomorrow.” A handful of other cases revealed people losing their jobs, destroying relationships, developing acute cases of boredom.

On the other hand, another set of cases revealed that participants in the testing experienced high bursts of creativity and spontaneity: results which other drugs have seldom produced. Some participants (or those close to them) reported the drug causing a manner of strange symptoms such as: singing loudly along to Journey in bedroom mirrors, taking uncharacteristically long naps, extending and elaborating during conversation, developing engaging hobbies such as cutting out fashion magazines, and of course, eating. While these activities are highly interesting and engaging, they are perhaps not efficient, relevant, or beneficial to the parties involved. “It was just weird,” Henry Mow (Pittsburg) says of his wife, Molly, one of the first to try Procrastin. Says Henry: “She started… learning piano, cooking. I think there was something else she was trying to ignore, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was. And yeah, I ended up doing the taxes this year, hours before the April 15.” Molly herself commented: “You know, I do feel like there’s something—strange about the product, in a way that I can’t put my finger on… but I don’t need to find out right now, it’s really not that urgent. I mean, I’m fine, right?”

Despite the ambiguous and evasive compliments given to the drug by Molly and those like her, critics predict that the reception of the drug by the masses will fail miserably because it can only suspend symptoms of stress, and will not actually treat the cause. “Sometimes,” says Dr. Footbear, one of the drug's foremost critics, “the only way to really get that nagging feeling to go away is to actually sit down with the stressor and work it out. Get it done.”

On the historical cue of Dr. Footbear, Dr. Weightmore stopped waiting and discussed the possibilities of perhaps developing a parody drug to Procrastin called Prudentin (not to be confused with Colgate’s Prodentin) which will get people up and moving. His first words after meeting with Merck's execs a few days ago: “Well, I talked to the heads. They kind of want to wait and see how this first batch of Procrastin goes. You know, it’s more chemically difficult to make a drug that will enliven people than one that will slow them down. Science has proven: entropy’s always easier. I think the real answer is because our desired slogan for this new drug has already been taken by Nike. But like they said, we’ll just wait and see. It’ll happen some day, I’m sure.”

Until that day comes, there’s nothing wrong with trying out the newest trend in medicine! Procrastin will be available in drugstores everywhere tomorrow. Or the day after that.

Words A-part.

So, I was thinking... about this word. Don't judge me.
It's really cool.

Um... here goes.

You've got the word "a-part"

Now, if you put "a-part" together like this-- apart-- it means separate.

However, if you separate it, like this -- a part-- it becomes inclusive.

Just like the word cleave, which carries two opposite meanings within itself.
When we use it in some contexts, it means "to bind." Like in the Bible, when God commands Adam to cleave unto his wife. There is a unity, a wholeness. But "cleavage" ... like in geology, or other things :)... means a separation. A cleaver divides.

Other words like cleave, which have two opposing meanings in the one word, are called contranyms. Wikipedia world has a list of them here.

Check it out. Could change your life.

Rodents, etc.

The Olympics are over. All good things must come to an end, but I really think that Canada started something during the Closing Ceremonies that other generations of Olympiads are going to be hard pressed to forget. Namely, I mean the HUGE blow-up animals that came out during the song. More specifically, the Beavers.



Just check those babies out. If you're wondering whether or not we've gone too far in anthropomorphizing animals, the answer is-- well, yes. As long as those come-hither red-tinted eyes aren't a result of the Twilight pandemic (Even the rodents want a bit of Edward with their cheese, it seems)--we should all be fine, right?

Meanwhile, meese float above the ground, grinning. I surmise they are either 1: daydreaming that they have been chosen to replace Santa's reindeer, or 2: Fondly remembering the Bambi days of innocence and forest yore. We can only hope their tails are up in a unified gesture of peace.

You just gotta give credit to the minds behind these guys to make these balloons so fantastic on so many different levels. That's gumption right there, folks.

P.S. If you can't get enough of great rodents, check this out.

In the Beginning was the Word....

Word.

So... This is my first blog and my first blog post. I'm treading into uncharted territory here. How do you handle such a vast expanse? There are so many places I could go, and not go. Where are the limits? Obviously there are none. Anything goes that can be contained by the text. Should I give myself rules for what I will write or how I will write it? I don't know.

Pardon all the questions. I should address them in private to myself, and not to my audience. But why not address them here? Is this blog for me, or for other people? Is it first for me and then for you as readers? How honest dare I be? This isn't just an online journal. How much of my soul can the words carry? Is it my soul I want to impart? That seems dangerous. But what's life without risk?

Some people will limit their blogs to certain topics. That seems practical, but kind of reductive. I want to think of this blog as a blank slate, dream catcher for my mind. A room of one's own, but with room for unexpected. How do we know?

I guess that comes later. Too much Joni Mitchell, probably. Makes me go all meta.

The making of a blog has been in the works for a long time. But today was really springy and it feels like an auspicious time to start something new. (I've always thought they should start the new year when the weather can help to bolster people's spirits and resolutions. ) Something great is coming. I can feel it-- don't make fun of me now. (And I have no idea who will read this-- stop Em.)

So here's a new resolution: not blog... write. Right. I don't know what's going to happen, so I guess I just follow my feet.

Theodore Roethke wrote once that "we learn by going where we need to go."

I kinda like that.

Most religions endow language(Christianity) or the utensil of writing(Islam)with the primal creative power. Man speaks Language. Language Speaks Man.

So with those words, I do now dedicate this blog to the use of for me for the purposes of whatever I feel like writing/thinking/speaking about. May we have a happy existence together (my blog and I). What else can I say?

The Beginning.