...

one two three

2011-02-01T08:23:00.004-05:00

i drove past mr. t's pizza on sunday. it couldn't have taken more than 3 seconds--but it all seemed like one moment. it didn't seem like a succession of events, but a smooth, swift firework of motions all at once that exploded into a little story. beginning, middle, end, all at the same time--little sparkles hanging in the air to look at for 3 seconds. a moment is 3 seconds, i think. it's just the right amount of time to contain one neat sliver of existence--a sliver that doesn't easily break up into smaller segments of time in one's memory.

see, first i saw a big black dog romping through the parking lot at mr. t's. no place for a dog in a busy area like that.

the car kept moving--i didn't even need to flick my eyes to see a woman near mr. t's window. she stood about two feet away from the building, but she was leaning forward from her hips so that her face was very close to the glass. her back was to me. i saw four white corners framing her ponytailed head: a flyer. my brain said, "maybe that's a 'help wanted' sign? maybe she's looking for a job." i didn't think it in sentence form, because there wasn't time, and because brains don't need to do that. i thought in keywords and just general wordlessness, i think.

just then the woman turned around. she was scrunching her eyebrows together and her chin was warbly--but i could tell that this wasn't a reaction to the bright sun, because the movement of her head unobscured that flyer so that i could read it. i was reading her face and the flyer together. the woman's ponytail slapped against her cheek. "LOST DOG," the paper declared desperately beneath a photo of a big black mutt. the woman's mouth opened and i saw but didn't hear her holler at the dog that was now thirty feet from her.

and then mr. t's was behind me. it wasn't an earth-shattering moment. but hey, then again, maybe it was. if it weren't, why would i have gotten a little shiver down my spine? and maybe that dog is home now!

doing things

2010-12-04T23:33:00.000-05:00

some foggy saturdays i think,
"i am going to do a lot of things today,
and my last thoughts before i fall asleep
will be pure admiration of my own productivity."

so today
i sewed a button onto my coat
clipped my toenails
taped up a photo on my desk
rewound some tousled twine
blew my nose 86 times
listened to this song 86 times
ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
had conversations
lined up my shoes in a row under the bed

and decided that i would fall asleep
admiring something other than my own productivity,
like foggy saturdays in general
and the smooth restraint of tidy toenails in particular,
because those things are usually better
than homework anyway,
and also because the notion of "my own productivity"
has not yet made an appearance in reality.

duh!

september

2010-09-16T14:56:00.005-04:00

doctrine I, MWF 14:00.
his voice rumbles, or maybe
it purrs
—but not like that.
strongly, lion-like.
when his words dip down
into that golden decibel,
that cavernous, cozy, loud, warm hum,
i feel the polished cover of
the textbook in my lap
vibrate beneath my fingertips,
shivering like a struck bell.

twenty-four freshly-sharpened pencils
(all yellow)
are never too many pencils.

my blue blue backpack is
the heaviest thing.
my red red heart is
all light.

first impression, june 1908, dust jacket preferred but not required

2010-08-14T01:15:00.004-04:00

you might not have known this about me, but it's been my secret goal for a while now to walk into the thrift store downtown, beeline toward the bookcase, happen upon a mint condition first edition of anne of green gables, discretely carry it against my stomach to the register, casually place it face-down on the counter for the nice lady to ring up for fifty cents or maybe a dollar tops, and walk out of the place with a pounding heart and a book that i could sell for a thousand dollars but never ever ever would.

right now

2010-08-07T20:31:00.016-04:00

thanks to the compact dimensions of my room,

i was able to reach my camera without moving.

as i was sticking some pins into my dress form the other day, i managed to plunk a toe over the edge of my little pin bin and flip it forcefully. i didn't get a single prick--the pins just piled neatly on top of my foot. i let out a single short snort-breath sort of half-chuckle. i have dangerous and inconvenient sewing methods. note the sewing machine...on the floor. i fiddle with that machine lying on my stomach. ridiculous. the floor of my room isn't quite big enough for me to stretch out completely, though--my feet slump awkwardly against the couch behind me. i think that description makes me sound like a giant flailing fish wrestling (limbless) with needles and thread in the middle of a carpet. oh well.

anyway, as i stood there with those pins swarming politely over my toes, i thought about what a singular situation it was. i didn't move for a little bit, appreciating the metallic coolness of those pins on my skin. i wondered what everybody else in the world was doing right then at that very same moment on thursday afternoon. somewhere, somebody was grinning into a mirror to check her teeth for stubborn salad particles. somebody was hollering to his neighbor across the street--was her power out too, or was it just his? somebody was re-buttoning his shirt because he'd done it wrong the first time. somebody was screwing the lid on a peanut butter jar and licking her thumb. somebody was unwrapping a birthday present and trying meticulously not to tear the paper and giving up and plowing through it. somebody was tugging tiny socks onto a baby. but had anybody dumped straight pins on her left foot at the exact same moment i had? i bet. i bet somebody in the world had.

july

2010-07-14T21:42:00.009-04:00

july-- that's a pretty word to look at and write and say.

maybe that prettiness comes from the shapes of the letters-- from the low, gentle curve of j, from the smooth inverted arch of u, from the slim confidence of l, from the harsh angle in y softened by that elegant tail. july: a cat lounging on a windowsill.

or maybe it comes from the sound of the word when spoken. it reminds me of eating a perfect grape--not the grape-eating sound, just the feeling--and not the physical feeling, just the feeling.

but i'll tell you what. maybe the prettiness comes from what happens in the middle of that month made up of those four strong, fluid letters. maybe it comes from sitting on my grandmother's wraparound porch in a tiny town in vermont. the local library is glowing fifty yards from where i sit. order of the phoenix and a glass of pink lemonade are hangin' out on the table next to me. it's ten p.m. and this little street is as dark as can be, except for the aisle of warm windows i see when i crane my neck over the edge of the porch. it stretches on and on into the night, the squares of window-light getting smaller and smaller, closer and closer together. i think this road might stretch on forever, circling all the way around the globe and ending up right back at this old porch. there's nowhere else in the world. just this road. old vermont homes with vermont doors and vermont yards with wet green vermont grass, wet green blades that reflect the light from the windows, that reflect the big ol' vermont moon.

p.s. harry potter. i keep trying to read other books and keep coming back to the summer staple.

p.p.s. harry potter. "motion picture event of a generation"? that's so dumb. no wait, that's SO TRUE.

rain sails us in a leafy boat down the street

2010-06-15T23:05:00.003-04:00

the innocence mission's new album is called "my room in the trees" and i think you should buy it as soon as you can, or even sooner. (it comes out july 13th, but if you pre-order it, it should find its way to your doorstep in a real jiffy, like mine did.)

i don't seem to have any words to say about the innocence mission. i suppose it's because i love this band so much that i can't be levelheaded enough to avoid slipping into sappiness. and sappiness is the last thing the innocence mission warrants. their songs are much too unassuming, noble, and true for sappiness. see, even that was sort of sappy, wasn't it? words aren't working. well, you and i would be better off listening to the words karen peris sings, anyhow.

how to bring home the big bucks

2010-06-08T18:55:00.002-04:00

last night my sunburned fourteen-year-old brother sprawled out on my bedroom floor and coached me for half an hour on how to make more money during the summer. i thought others could benefit from his cornucopia of pecuniary wisdom, so i'm sharing some of it here.

a few of his ideas:

be a road worker. "they just stand around a hole and eat lunch all day," he said.
be an englishineer. "make people pay you ten dollars for every grammar mistake you fix on their billboards," he said.
be a construction worker. i told him it might be a weird job for a girl. "oh," he said.
invent edible socks. "easier than shirts, because socks are smaller," he said.

get to it, people!

apple summer

2010-06-02T17:30:00.006-04:00

and i could tell
what form my dreaming was about to take.
magnified apples appear and disappear,
stem end and blossom end,
and every fleck of russet showing clear.

-robert frost

today i bought eight dollars' worth of apples

and some apple juice

and i wrote you a letter about apples

and i drew small apples with black ink on scrap paper

and i thought about making an apple pie

but i read shakespeare instead.

maybe i'll make that apple pie tonight

while everybody's sleeping

and when i go to sleep i'll dream of apples

and when i wake up i'll eat one

and it will be just as good as my dream!

APPLES:

THE ATTAINABLE DREAM

may 16, well after dinner

2010-05-16T22:04:00.009-04:00

a walk around the neighborhood.
dusk. mosquitos.
lights glint blue off the river
that swallows up my apple core,
which i lob feebly, like a girl.
well, i am one of those.
father, brother, sister--
even the big ol' dog--
but not the mama,
because she is in the kitchen
canning chunked chicken
for the impending apocalypse.

jackson pond

2010-05-10T23:11:00.004-04:00

top: a strange photo including a corner of the pond,

whose waters, as you can see, are much lovelier than many people think

bottom: the jumping tree and drew belz's high-up hammock

on the night before leaving school for the summer, we go down to jackson pond, like we like to do. we find our way through the woods with flashlights. no, with cell phones, the dim cold light of cell phones, because we have forgotten flashlights. cell phones! i am abashedly aware of the way that my twenty-first centuriness barges into this walden without knocking first. we are tripping over roots and stumps, slipping in sludge. spiderwebs catch on our lips and noses. oh--there is the moon shining softly off the pond! but it's dark dark dark, still. the moon is only bright enough to help distinguish between different degrees of darkness. and there is the bonfire on the other side of the pond, and there is the laughter of friends that tumbles happily over the surface of the water. closer, closer, here are their faces: here are our friends with stories and with guitars and in hammocks and with root beer and all glowing with the light from the fire and from their hearts.

we sit and sit and sit. i put my face in my hands to hide from the smoke that burns my eyes and throat and i smile into my fingers.

suddenly a handful of us are walking back around the pond to the jumping tree. we climb up in the darkness. i tilt my head back and watch the faint silhouettes of four friend-heads as they bob up branches against the blueblack sky. the night hides their mouths and eyes--joy is only patent in the sounds they make, in the yelps and jokes. and then there are four successive splashes that i hear and feel but don't see. i am at the top of the tree now. maybe i am fifteen feet above the water? twenty? i look down but it's the same as looking up, only the water is too churned to reflect the stars.

i leap blindly and hit the water before i expect to. the top layer of the pond is warm and perfect, but beneath that the early-may water bites. so i float on my back with my ears underwater. silence silence silence is in my ears. the sound the pond makes is silence. fish aren't making any noise. the midnight sky is pouring into my eyes. i am not even trying to look and it's just pouring. no clouds at all, just stars and stars. do you know what a star looks like up close? well, the sun is a star and it looks like the most beautiful thing. it looks like this:

and so i suppose the stars above jackson pond look like that too, except i am just a little tiny human cheerio floating very far away in a bowl of jackson-pond-milk, so i can only see them as a numberless collection of bewitching white freckles. and this moment, this moment, this moment. i know it has to end at some point, but for now i'll just float.

literary studies in spring, 1:00-1:50

2010-03-24T22:17:00.002-04:00

class outside.
the sun is too bright at last and i'm glad.
i sit on a rock--
head cocked,
left eye shut,
forehead folded,
nose and mouth struggling to switch places.
i think my face is a disorganized picasso version of itself.

dr. tate is backlit.
his face is too near the white sky--
i can't look at it
but i know his eyes are wide.
i know his brows are raised.
sunlight outlines his knees, shins, elbows.
he is glowing a little bit.
he is royal a little bit:
the king of cacophony.
the duke of diction.
gerard manley hopkins reincarnate.
he is "like shining from shook foil."

it hurts my eyes.
i lower them to his shadow:
slightly foreshortened tate-shaped ink
pooling definably at his feet,
ink that climbs the tips of his black shoes
and hides beneath his heels.
his earnest shadow-fingers clutch hopelessly at mulch,
wave over tufts of resolute grass.

"why do men then now not reck his rod?"
his voice has caught the sunlight too.

i think what our student-faces must look like to him.
twenty tense young spring grimaces.

one long question, one short remark

2010-02-01T15:32:00.002-05:00

you know how sometimes you're walking to the library
and the sun is shining so brightly
that your face gets all squinty and you bite your lip,
but you're cold and shivering so you suck in a bit of air,
and because you're biting your lip while you're sucking in air,
you accidentally make a half-whistly sound
somewhat like a feeble human birdsong,
and just as that tweet escapes your lips
you trip over a discrepancy in sidewalk uniformity
(partly because your boots are too big
but mostly because you aren't very good at walking),
and then you notice that two people emerging from the library
are looking at you as if you had just--
well, as if you had just done everything i've just written?

i enjoy that moment of silly pathos.

i remember with 5 senses

2010-01-26T19:05:00.001-05:00

the days when i was 5
taste like bubbles
(non-toxic, wand inside)

the days when i was 8
look like tempera paint on the back steps
(each brick a different color)

the days when i was 11
smell like mod podge
(satin finish on magazine clippings)

the days when i was 15
feel like grainy cement under the lifeguard stand
(spf 35)

the days when i am 19
sound like pages
(a crush on e.b. white)

about football

2010-01-09T14:20:00.009-05:00

i'm an american but i don't know very much about football.

chalice and i spent the last few days of winter freedom being pummeled to and fro by a great deal of football-related entertainment, namely many episodes of friday night lights on netflix (oh dear) and a trip to see the blind side. so much football. so much violence. so much yelling. so much team spirit. so many confusing rules.

"what does it all MEAN?" we asked ourselves.

we tugged our snuggies tighter and pondered the significance of the sport. (i distinctly recall the first time i saw a snuggie commercial on TV. i laughed heartily at the family sitting on bleachers at an autumn sporting event with their brightly-colored sleeve-blankets protruding from the crowd as i imagine a large pikachu or charlie brown parade balloon might do in the middle of a monday evening traffic jam. no more i laugh at the snuggie. no more.)

after a while we figured, "hey, we've been seeing a lot of this nonsense on the screen. maybe we'll pick it up just by watching. after all, we have a patriotic duty to know the facts about this game." but with all the crazy lingo and fast-paced television editing, we couldn't tell left from right.

we made a list of everything we knew about football:
-touchdowns are great
-tackle the fella with the ball

it was a very short list.

"how to play football," we asked everyone's favorite search engine awkwardly in a sort of non-question. it was a slice of a sentence that was entirely unsure of itself, grammatically confused, answerless, yet holding so much promise. those four words were the confident blue plastic lid on the giant footballian tupperware containing all the answers of the great american pastime. all the black and white stripes of the referees' shirts. all the whistles and shoulder pads. all the baseball caps being plucked on and off coaches' heads in muffled frustration. all the yard lines and yellow flags and mouthpieces and coin tosses. it was all there, a melange of sweaty, bruised, helmeted glory, there for us to pop into the google-microwave and dig into thirty seconds later, mulling slowly over each crunchy bite of football knowledge.

i still don't know very much about football. but i know more than i used to know, and things are looking up. someday i will know it all. someday i'll make it to the NFL. hey, i dream big.

you know, i feel a lil' bit more american.

here is autumn

2009-10-30T10:30:00.004-04:00

walking beneath bright trees

leaves that are too beautiful

friends that are too beautiful

funny faces

little forest elfs

knitting parties in cozy homes

how to save money at walmart

2009-09-24T18:43:00.005-04:00

only buy things that are purple.

p.s. this does not actually save much money, because granola bars and various adhesives are rarely purple and you'll probably need to buy some of those, and you'll probably accidentally end up buying ladybug-shaped pushpins and a nice tin of colored pencils, but purple-themed shopping IS pretty fun.

here i am up on a mountaintop

2009-09-12T11:38:00.006-04:00

oh golly. it sure is great.

important fact: my roommate is made out of gold.

here is a silly picture of us with some carter hall room #360 flora:

(the humble green plant, clusia, is apparently capable of reaching a stately stature of over thirty feet. i did not know this when i purchased it for $1.99, but the prospect excites me, however impractical and improbable it may sound when considered in the confines of a room the size of a small canoe.)

my job is to clean things. i have acquired many useful skills that i previously struggled to perform gracefully. you should see with what adeptness i can coil a vacuum cleaner cord these days. you should see how smartly i scrub toilets. i don't mind so much. in the chapel at seven a.m., birds come and sing on the windowsill while i spray and wipe the glass. i can't hear them chirp because the glass is so thick, but i can see their little mouths move sharply. piano and violin strangle each other in a lovely muffled mess, played in side-by-side practice rooms. there is genteel and amusing tension there. i spy on the practice for west side story while i tidy the auditorium. i held a small grudge against a certain group of people who ate powdered donuts in the same spot every day until i realized it was just the ceiling crumbling a little bit and snowing down onto the chairs and carpet.

i have a little collection of apples that i take from meals and forget to eat. they punctuate our room nicely but soon they will get mushy. for now i'll admire their shape and color and continue to forget that they are food. how pleasant and wasteful! oh dear.

pancakes

2009-08-12T21:16:00.006-04:00

chalice is home from new york!

to celebrate we made pancakes for breakfast,

but they did not turn out very well.

they looked like this:

but three-dimensional and more arresting to one's sense of smell.

but they really DID look like two-sided feet

because,

for lack of more appropriate cookware,

we fixed 'em on a pan with ridges,

which i suppose was meant for meat.

they also did not taste very great,

but we are blaming that on the 1975 church cookbook recipe,

and not the baking powder mix-up.

the main point is that i am glad that my friend chalice is home for this week so that i could make pancakes with her, however unpancakelike those pancakes might be.

no slugs

2009-07-27T21:07:00.003-04:00

last night my family rushed out to the front yard to see a space shuttle. i was confident as i walked through the blackness blindly, barefoot, trusting the brick walkway that's been my friend for so many years that by now it knows not to let any slugs slide under my feet. it's not a good idea to tell someone that i probably won't ever wear the shirt she bought me for christmas, but it's okay if it's my mother because she understands. she wants me to tell her. it's not a good idea to go shoeless down a walkway on a pitch-black summer night, but it's okay if it's my very own walkway, because my walkway understands. it wants my feet to fall upon it heavily and without hesitation. sometimes you can do dangerous things around people and walkways you trust. or maybe this is just foolishness by dint of familiarity, but it seems to work out pretty well.

anyway, we never saw the space shuttle. there were trees and clouds in the way. but we never saw any slugs either, and for that i am glad.

p.s. these days i am 98% certain that my mother would never buy me a shirt i didn't like.

here's a little true story for you

2009-07-19T21:43:00.005-04:00

during the entire month of august, but particularly on saturday the eighth from five till nine, some photos and i will be hanging up and hanging out, respectively, at the lovely little joie de vivre gallery downtown. if you and your good-lookin' face would like to come and keep us company for a minute or two, i will give you a hug and m'photos will politely refrain from interrupting. there are remarkably tasty chocolates and cappuccinos two doors down, at your service for an ulterior motive.

tossing photos

2009-07-12T14:06:00.004-04:00

i've been instructed to "toss these pictures up on a couple of blogs" so that is what i'm doin'!

i possess a white slimline telephone with automatic redial

2009-07-07T14:31:00.002-04:00

hyacinth bucket (that's "bouquet"):

the greatest character in all of television.

well hey, it's been a while

2009-06-28T21:34:00.005-04:00

so here's a picture of a dachshund named fred and one mr. elwyn brooks white, a man whose words are the clearest and cleverest:

hey friends, it's summertime. i heartily recommend a bottle of orangina and the essays of e. b. white. tell me, what do you recommend?

old is the new new

2009-05-12T12:17:00.011-04:00

a little bit ago our curiously top-heavy external hard drive had a little arm wrestling match with gravity. it was the kind of arm wrestling match that ends before it begins. gravity has very toned biceps.

i thought i would be pretty upset at losing loads and loads of photos and such, but i wasn't. i am more or less wholly fine with it. what do these things matter, anyway? for here we have no lasting city. what a floating feeling it is not to be distressed when distress is expected.

now my clever dad's got me backing stuff up (hm, a novel idea). this is great fun, because i've been going through some pretty old files. looking through old pictures, i see new things. here are some photos i rediscovered.

i like my family.

my brother's face is good for photos

2009-05-07T17:28:00.006-04:00

(in the parking lot after church, october 2007)

friday, may first

2009-05-01T23:29:00.000-04:00

the funniest part about today was when i was late for work

because i couldn't find my rainboots

(which i wanted to wear because it was soggy outside)

--and five minutes later i still couldn't find them,

so i settled for cowboy boots

(which aren't even waterproof)

and i got fifty yards down the road and it started raining.

so i ran back home for an umbrella

(which happened to have cowboys on it,

which lent my outfit an accidentally overt western theme)

and as i flew out the back door,

the umbrella

(which was the kind with a hook-shaped handle)

got caught on something

and i went jerking backwards like a ragdoll,

like a bungee-jumper,

and i laughed out loud.

two darlin' friends

2009-04-20T16:34:00.006-04:00

i hang out with posie and levi every monday. they are eleven and nine, respectively, and we talk about creative writing and the scientific art of punctuation and the importance of specific nouns. we also discuss music and movies and books and the way sandwiches are always better when somebody else makes them. they are two of the coolest human beings i know. if there were any two people in the world who would be perfect candidates for a variety show, posie and levi would be those people.

oh wait! they totally already have a variety show.
here is the most recent episode.

in our writing club we are working on short stories. thus far, their joint effort involves wayne coyne, matt groening, and libraries in new york city.

my favorite band, circa 1995

2009-04-07T21:31:00.004-04:00

the innocence mission : bright as yellow

please call us upon receipt of this notice if this new appointment time is not convenient for you

2009-03-28T09:17:00.007-04:00

the other day i got a letter in the mail from my friendly ol' dentist's office. the sheet of stationery was folded in a manner that would never have occurred to me, sporting three obviously intentional creases instead of the usual two. i know nothing about so many things, and i find out that i am knowing more and more of nothing every day. now i'm pretty sure that i know nothing about folding paper.

when i get a letter i like to imagine the sender's hands folding the paper so carefully (or hastily, depending on the precision of the folds). it warms my heart, even when it is just a letter from the dentist.

fold! what a nice word. you can fold eggs too.

fold /fōld/
–verb (used with object)
1. to bend (cloth, paper, etc.) over upon itself.
2. to bring into a compact form by bending and laying parts together (often fol. by up): to fold up a map; to fold one's legs under oneself.
3. to bring (the arms, hands, etc.) together in an intertwined or crossed manner; clasp; cross: He folded his arms on his chest.
4. to bend or wind (usually fol. by about, round, etc.): to fold one's arms about a person's neck.
5. to bring (the wings) close to the body, as a bird on alighting.
6. to enclose; wrap; envelop: to fold something in paper.
7. to embrace or clasp; enfold: to fold someone in one's arms.

anyway,

"we have rescheduled your appointment for may 7th at 11 p.m.," the letter from my dentist stated plainly, referring to "unforseen changes in schedule" and "sincere apologies" and "appreciation of flexibility."

i was a little skeptical.

here are my theories:

a. nocturnal dentistry
b. gangster booby trap
c. typo

i just don't know, i just don't know.
i am going to have to fold up my theories and think on them a while.

my little brother is a teenaged old soul now

2009-03-24T19:43:00.006-04:00

and he gets funnier every day.

em bee dee

2009-03-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

you might look at the above photograph and come to the conclusion that shara worden is pretty pretty, pretty serious, and pretty skilled in the hairdo department. if you're like me, you might give a defeated sort of sigh and say, "she is just too cool for me." your voice will probably crack, and chances are you'll trip over uneven pavement and spill a potentially delicious beverage down your shirt.

well, hang on just one second!
okay, she is too cool for you, but she also knows how to be totally lame in the best way possible. the way that makes you say, "i love my brightest diamond."
check it out.

she'll be at covenant college on march 21st, but i won't be there for another six months. ouch! my heart! ...so if you happen to be there or nearby, you had better go. okay? she'll probably sing you the song about her grandfather's apple tree and watching you fold so carefully the clothes, and she will definitely dumbstrikify you with her vocal and guitar-playin' talents. you don't want to miss that.

p.s. you know who took that picture? mr. david m. stith. i think he is one stellar fella.

dear ipod,

2009-03-06T00:03:00.002-05:00

hey buddy.
listen.
i am so fond of you.
the past three (four?) years i've spent with you have been some of the best i've ever lived.

i don't know what's happened between us lately.

at first, when your glossy screen would suddenly begin to fade--to divide into horizontal lines that would dissolve one by one--and the sound would cut off mid-song, i assumed it was just a little fluke. no big deal. a bump in the relationship. we mustered up all the courage in our stubborn little hearts, i held down the center and up buttons simultaneously for six seconds, and we trudged right on through. you always blinked slowly back to life, groggily displaying a half-awake grey apple (the almost imperceptible icon of a certain near-monopoloid enterprise) before the cool glow returned abruptly to your voltaic cheeks. things went back to normal.

but then you started doing things i'd never seen before! "cannot be synced because the required disk cannot be found." what are you talking about, little friend? you ARE the required disk. you are right there. i found you. here you are, cradled in my cold hands. i bet you can feel the pulse in the crook between my thumb and forefinger. i bet it feels funny.

remember that time you did sync, but when i turned you on, you didn't have any music in you? weird.

remember that time i took you out of your case, and you turned off and wouldn't turn back on? it was then that i realized that your case is the only reason you keep functioning at all. it's like in signs, when mel gibson's wife is pinned to a tree by m. night shyamalan's truck, and the only reason she's still alive is because the truck is holding her together. a gruesome comparison, but an accurate one, i imagine.

now hey, i really want this to work out. i want to be with you forever. i can't have any of this one-sided relationship stuff going on. i'm working hard, here. man up, will you? i'm not paying for another one of you. SHEESH. might wanna take a page of out of my trusty ol' dictionary's book. i mean--you get me.

choose.
me or the trash can.
pal.

not messing around,
annie.

meet my dictionary

2009-02-26T15:53:00.001-05:00

when emma and i were ten, my mother took us to walmart for school supplies. i remember standing awfully before the dictionary and thesaurus displays, which stood in a spot of prominence in the middle of a main aisle, as the month of september is prone to place them. they didn't exactly tower over me, because i wasn't very short even back then, but it was still a significantly dazzling sight to behold: a repetitious array of primary colors, tiles of "dictionary! dictionary! dictionary!" yelping at my eyes over and over in evenly spaced margins. i didn't know what a thesaurus was, so i wrote it off as some archaeological primer concerning mesozoic reptiles (ah! what a shame). but that fat little red book, with its sharp corners and glossy cover, boasting 75,000 entries and promising "revisions" and "updates"--well, i decided that i needed to have one. my mother bought two copies, and my sister and i went home with shiny new dictionaries on our laps.

a week later i dropped mine into a tray of bright red paint, which, i believe, was being applied to our front door. i was devastated for about a month, and then i realized how awesome it looked and embraced the accident.

eight years later, my little lexiconical friend still serves me well (even if it does not actually include the word "lexiconical"). it always seems to be readily at my fingertips whenever i am at a loss for definition. i have a bad habit of misplacing particular books just when i'd most like them to be in my hands, but i've never lost my dictionary once in all these years. when i need to look up words like "coruscating" or "lissome" it is always right there, like lassie, like that thank-you note i keep forgetting to write, like the light switch in the howards' kitchen. i am pretty darn attached to my dictionary, and i think i'll always have him, forever and ever.

(i realize that this is kind of lame, so you're allowed to laugh if you wanna.)

(also, pages 315-316 are missing, so if you need to look up the word "gravy," i would advise you to look elsewhere.)

oh! and while we're on the topic of dictionaries, check out the photographic dictionary, a conglomeration of two of my favorite things: photographs and words. some of my favorite entries are hang, distance, no, bulge, and void.

you know what is super great?

2009-02-18T22:39:00.004-05:00

honey!

bees make it!

i think that is just amazing.

seriously, think about it for a second.

bees--make--honey.

i think it is one of the craziest things to think about.
and there are a lot of crazy things to think about,
like atonement for sin
and gravity
and the way strings get tangled
when you leave them sitting all by themselves.

bees make honey so that i can put it in my tea.

also,
here is a pair of photos
from a little adventure jedd and i went on a few weeks ago.
jedd does not get cold, ever.
--even amongst small icebergs in the choptank river.
he is a twelve-year-old rock.

my brother uses a pilot precise V5 extra fine rolling ball pen with admirable results

2009-02-09T13:12:00.009-05:00

my baby brother jedd will be thirteen in a month (what!). he has very elegant, if childish, penmanship and relies almost solely upon script rather than print. sometimes i think this is funny, because he's not a very elegant sort of person. his hair is always messy and his glasses are always broken. (my brother is a real-life harry potter. it's true.) --and he never wears button-up shirts, no matter how politely i ask him to. he has about twelve sitting in his dresser, untouched. my mother keeps buying them. i think she is in denial.

but secretly, jedd has a very elegant side to him that i catch glimpses of every so often. his penmanship shows it every day, but one night while i was writing letters in my bedroom, he came in and wanted to test out some of my favorite pens. he rarely draws anything because he doesn't like to. (and he doesn't like to because he thinks he's no good at it. ah! he won't listen to me tell him otherwise.) but once he popped the cap off one of my pilot precise V5 extra fine rolling ball pens, he had to drawing something. those pens have that effect on people, i'm telling you.

check this out. this is jedd's rendition of the raconteurs' R sticker. jedd is a big jack white fan. (i am too! but i prefer the stripes.) he carries the sticker around, but never sticks it on anything. i think it's awesome that he thinks this sticker is so awesome, but i think it's even more awesome that jedd's version has teeth.

below, a misspelling turns an exclamation of surprise into a pity party with a classy capital W:

well, anyway, my brother is one of my favorite people in the world.
just sayin'.

the welcome wagon

2009-01-31T18:14:00.001-05:00

if you haven't heard of the welcome wagon, you must be a crazy person. just kidding. but seriously, folks, you should really give a listen to the welcome wagon (a little band of sorts centering around vito and monique aiuto, a brooklyn pastor and his wifey). their debut album welcome to the welcome wagon was released in december, and it is really just great. i'm sure it began as a pretty humble endeavor, but that darn sufjan stevens got his hands on it and it turned into a pretty fanfarishly magnificent ordeal. (and by "darn," of course, i really mean "mind-bogglingly talented.") the photo below (by denny renshaw) is practically oozing with metaphoric qualities, for realz.

mr. stevens has surely got a way with words, and i always enjoy reading what he has to say. recently he's written a series of short pieces about each track on the welcome wagon's album. definitely worth a read. (plus, you get to listen to each song for free! now you have no excuse.)

you know it's really winter

2009-01-17T15:21:00.006-05:00

when, instead of actually washing the dishes, you just lean against the sink with your arms glorying in the all-encompassing warmth of running water, staring out the kitchen window at the pale, frozen grass and discolored sky and wishing you'd remembered to put on a pair of socks.

some people try so hard

2009-01-07T17:20:00.000-05:00

colleges are funny.

the way they choose to market themselves says a lot about them, i think. with the slew of college brochures i receive in the mail every single stinking day, some are trying to stand out from the crowd with bright colors and childish fonts. others are depressing in another way. take, for example, one art school who mailed me a single sheet of fluorescent green copy paper with bunches of 10-point bold times new roman scattered in clumps around the page. spelling mistakes everywhere. are you seeing this in your head? probably the worst design i'd ever seen from any college ever--and it came from an art school. that is sad, my friends. that is failure. also, one should generally avoid using a bold 10-point serif to write an entire letter. its emotional impact is synonymous with the word "stranglehold." just a tip.

the postcard below, which came in the mail today, is probably my favorite of the love-to-hate-it variety. it is yet to be determined whether this was sent from an actual university, or from an internet dating service that happens to share the name of said actual university. observe:

oh dear oh dear oh dear.

but some schools know what's goin' on. like covenant college! i think they got it just right. the letters i get from covenant are always so nice to my eyes. and they spell my name right.

two things of which i am in awe

2008-12-27T21:51:00.006-05:00

1. envelope templates. i first came into contact with these plastic-y wonders on october second, when my dear pal chalice came to my house and brought her magical envelope template set into my bedroom, where we sat on my small carpeted floor and used beautiful papers to make our very own envelopes in an assortment of official envelopian dimensions (4-bar, A2, A6, A7 and 5 3/4" square). we did this for hours, and we may or may not have choked out various renditions of a certain whitney houstin yuletide classic as our pile of cheery mail-carriers grew higher and higher and the sweet scent of rubber cement wove its way into every inner nook and cranny of our heavy, empty heads. it was a magnificent experience.

and then i got my very own set for christmas! i will never tire of making envelopes, and i'd like to send you one. so if you'd like a letter in the mail, please give me your address.

2. puzzlemaster will shortz. he is the crossword puzzle editor for the new york times, and he is more or less my hero. it's true. he's the only person in the whole world to hold a degree in enigmatology, the study of puzzles! that's no joke. i love his friendly face. you can hear his smile when he presents the puzzles on national public radio on sunday mornings. the tone of mr. shortz's voice when the words "for example" roll up from his clever throat each week will forever hold a sense of total comfort for me, as well as make me sit up a bit straighter in my seat. he is featured in the documentary wordplay, which i highly recommend. it's exciting! it's hilarious! it showcases the quirky brilliance of humanity at its finest! you can purchase it previously-viewed at blockbuster for $1.99!

oh! so excellent.

2008-12-19T23:09:00.007-05:00

photo by joshua bast

last sunday, my dad took me and emma to go see wilco in baltimore. true story!

my favorite jeff tweedy borrowed a neck brace from some unfortunate car-accident-stricken fellow in the front row and wore it while he sang "kingpin." let me tell you, i was laughing. look at those little chipmunk cheeks. ha! and then little beardyface pat sansone took a polaroid picture of mr. tweedy, and i wanted to yell out, "oh, save polaroid!" but i did not, because a) i generally do not yell things in large crowds and b) it would've been futile. (just a few weeks until production ceases, my friends.)

anyway, i sure do love wilco. that's for sure. and i'm awfully happy that i got to see them in real life, right in front of my very eyes and ears.

and jeff tweedy has the best voice ever, and i know you will not argue with me, because it's just the pure honest truth, and opinion has nothing to do with the matter.

here's a funny photo of my famile

2008-12-11T15:12:00.003-05:00

there's my mother, kissing my father through her phone.

there's my father, standing next to the bare foundation of what will soon be a house, boots muddy, eyes closed, brows raised, impatient but on the brink of laughter.

there's my brother, wearing a too-big t-shirt protesting canadian government (i think) and belting out "bohemian rhapsody" at the top of his lungs.

there's my sister, swathed in vibrant fabric for no particular reason.

there's me, takin' a picture.

there's our kitchen, cozy and golden.

history class

2008-12-04T12:11:00.004-05:00

i didn't think i would miss my history class at all until last night, when we got out two hours early. i was right in the middle of a sketch of my teacher, who, i am 98% certain, was reepicheep in his glory days. he has big round eyes and fluffy white half-circle eyebrows that are perpetually raised beneath arcs of small wrinkles. those curves are echoed in a mustache that almost entirely obscures his delicately small mouth, so that when he speaks the motion of his lips is nearly undetectable. there is a deep horizontal crease above the bridge of his nose, between his eyes. i don't think i've ever seen anything like it. it really interests me. he has thin, slumpy shoulders and beanpole legs, and seems to lean forward a bit when he paces (which he often does, with his hands clasped behind his back). sometimes i think i catch a glint of a saber hanging from his belt loop, but i'm always wrong. hm.

as you may gather from the poor state of my handwriting below, the only reason i take notes during this class is to help me pay attention and/or stay awake. (long story short: for this particular class, notes are not helpful when studying for exams.) i just realized last night, in our last class before the final exam, how much i am endeared to my teacher and his face, so i began to sketch it. sometimes he would catch my eye as i pored over his friendly weathered features, and i hoped he didn't notice how intently i was measuring the distance from his eye to his nose. i was actually incredibly disappointed when he dismissed us after only an hour rather than the usual three, because i hadn't gotten a chance to properly capture his nice little countenance as he talked about the changing state of the middle class family during the late nineteenth century.

so, here are some things i like about december, which is very soon:

2008-11-28T22:21:00.002-05:00

my twin sister's birthday on the 7th. i'm excited to give her some presents, 'cause i got her good ones this year. i do surely believe she will like 'em a whole lot.
me. wilco. in the same room. inhaling the same oxygen. december 14th.
welcoming the welcome wagon's "welcome to the welcome wagon" into my ears. (what's that you say? you haven't pre-ordered your copy yet? geez, people. get on it.)
"christmas is coming" by vince guaraldi
christmas eve, and christmas day, and fhamily
looking at the big beautiful lights on the old firehouse
not looking at the little dweeby lights wrapped around two-by-fours and slapped straight across the archways at the library. they didn't make an appearance this year. hallelujah.

hang on, i don't think you're seeing the mental picture of #7 quite as clearly as i'd like you to. allow me to illustrate via a photo-realistic rendering a la microsoft paint:

it's enough to make a grown man cry, i tell ya. it's like--it's like--it's like putting a kitschy holiday necktie on james bond. taking something regal and stately and turning it into a bit of a joke. sigh. but! this year there are no christmas decorations on the blessed establishment, and it's just as beautiful as it is every day. and i'm very glad. book sales every second saturday morning. y'ought to come sometime. i'll be there.

anne hutchinson

2008-11-18T22:28:00.005-05:00

my name is annie huntington.
my history teacher, however, is under the impression that my name is anne hutchinson.

anne hutchinson was a nice little puritan lady from back in the day with "blasphemous ideas," and history textbooks far and wide devote at least a sentence or two to her. she was also was featured in the exam we were given last week.

i find it interesting how our names do look pretty darn similar at a glance. if you're getting on in years and reading names off a list, i can see how my name could easily morph into hers. and if you happen to be a history teacher, then gee, the long-deceased anne hutchinson is certainly on your mind, and annie huntington is just some girl twelve feet away brushing day-old eraser shavings off her desk and trying very earnestly not to mix up north carolina and south carolina.

so the time comes when bradley hollers that he goes by brad, and kevan insists that her name is pronounced "keevan," not "kevin." well, i think being called anne hutchinson is awfully amusing, and i don't think i'll correct our good ol' teacher any time soon.

sometimes, when you're writing a paper, it helps to lean off the side of your chair and rest your head on the floor to find a new perspective.

2008-11-07T15:39:00.012-05:00

keep leaning backwards until your spine gives a nice loud crackling sound.

you might notice something lying on your floor that you never noticed before--perhaps a small wooden grizzly bear statuette lying on its side, wedged half-beneath the piano.

but then--ouch, goshers, all the blood'll run to your head and you'll have a terrible headache and then you really will not want to write your paper anymore at all.

p.s. d'you see that picture behind the basket in the last photo up there? it's a poem i copied out when i was seven. i did it at the howards' dining room table as a surprise for my dad for father's day. i accidentally spelled the word "house," which was part of the poem's title, with a lowercase H. "oh no!" i said. (i was really into capitalization back then.) mrs. kate showed me how to turn that "h" into an "H" simply by adding one line to the right side. it revolutionized first grade.

do you have eleven seconds? okay. good.

2008-11-03T22:33:00.000-05:00

a few thoughts

2008-10-30T12:23:00.000-04:00

// i just looked out the window in my little old neighborhood that's quite far from any sort of metropolis, and i saw a voluntarily bald almost-young man with slick frames and a classy black suit and an i-mean-business man-bag and shiny shoes and a styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. his tie was flapping in the wind and he was walking down my little old street, taking long strides, as if he were within plain view of his skyscraper destination, as if he were this close to being late and yet still confident that he'd make it on time. what big city spat him out? "hey man," i thought at him, "do you know where you are?" i was amused.

//you know those scholarship search sites? you enter some personal info, it finds scholarships that match your qualifications. the short descriptions of some of the scholarships actually make me laugh out loud as i sit here researching them: there's one for high school seniors who are not of polish descent but whose primary scholastic interests revolve around polish heritage. ha! another involves writing a 1,000-word essay on the topic "can you tell me how we did this?" (no elaboration). another calls for a "book-length monograph" on methodist history. somehow the two-thousand-dollar reward doesn't seem like much. particularly if you don't win it. also, isn't "book-length" relative?

//sometimes, when i find myself with spare time, or when i find myself with no spare time and a severe lack of motivation, i like to read reviews on amazon.com. see people's opinions of things. you know, just anything. camera equipment i'll never be able to afford without remorse, books i've been meaning to read, writing instruments i'd like to buy in bulk. that sort of thing. i think i like the pilot precise V5 rollerball pen reviewers the best. they're so enthusiastic.

wishing you would watch this video

2008-10-21T10:51:00.002-04:00

do it, do it!

sometimes technological advancements are inconvenient

2008-10-16T19:55:00.006-04:00

here's something i like:
walmart can develop 120 film for just over a dollar a roll! (they don't know they have this power. if you ask that old santa claus fellow at the photo center, he'll say, "mmeh, 120? what does that mean? photographs? what are those? no. go home." but if you just stick a roll in the envelope without explaining yourself, it'll come back like magic from fuji!)

and here's something i don't like:
actually, in an attempt to be positive about the situation, i will phrase this as a question: does anyone have any affordable mail-order suggestions for 35mm processing?

here is a shot from the last roll of 35mm i shot. and by "last" i mean "last for a very long while, until alternative developing options can be had that do not cost fifteen dollars and are reliable enough to actually develop the film instead of magically making it disappear."

in any case, i am awfully excited about this 120 steal at walmart. expect lots more medium format goodness in the future! hurrah! everybody--grab your holga (or, if you're quite fortunate, your lubitel or maybe even hasselblad) and go at it!

(those are liam's feet sticking out of my dad's locked truck to retrieve some sort of power tool. he and jedd built a real staircase up to the tree house out back. it's nothing short of amazing.)

a lack of adequate footwear

2008-09-28T22:26:00.003-04:00

ya know how in shoe catalogs they'll show a lovely photograph of a lovely pair of shoes, followed by a brief, personified, sensual description and a list of available sizes? well, have y'ever noticed that the list of available women's sizes generally always reads like so: "whole and half sizes 6-10. no 9.5."

what the heck, yo.

my feet happen to prefer the comfortable dimensions of that elusive 9.5 whenever possible, but, more often than not, are totally dissed. that negative little statement at the end of each shoe description is like a little mocking snicker at the stubborn precision of my shoe size. "no 9.5. no, annie. no shoes for you."

there must be a logical reason for this. i really am curious. i'm sure all the shoe companies didn't just hold a convention and arbitrarily decide not to manufacture size 9.5 in practically any shoe style.

can any good soul enlighten me here?

i'm actually feeling a really good story behind this one. it's gotta be good. it's so good, i can't even begin to think what it might be. and that's the best kind of story.

teen

2008-09-23T19:58:00.005-04:00

my mother has that fancy-pants new windows vista.

it has a font in microsoft office called "teen" that isn't on my old-school windows xp.

i find it mildly offensive to my font-related teenage discretion--heck, i find it offensive to my individuality as a human being.

dear windows vista: i am more than a component of an age group seeming to display a certain uniformity in handwriting and/or design preferences.

hmph.

i dunno, maybe i'll go make a gaudy stereotypical font and call it "middle age."

oh my dear sister.

2008-09-18T11:45:00.002-04:00

roughly translated: "emma screaming. that is me."

we went through a harriet the spy phase when we were six.
the other day i found emma's "PRIVATE NOTEBOOK."

this is one of the gems inside that set me laughing till tears were comin' out of my eyes.

i sure don't remember her being this crazed all the time.
i mean, for heaven's sakes, have you ever MET emma? she basically doesn't ever get angry or sad.

(i've always liked the way emma draws.)

a toast! to emma, and the tormented secrets of her six-year-old self.

two things for you to visually digest

2008-09-11T17:57:00.008-04:00

thing #1. here's a way-close-up photo of a little sump'n-sump'n i whipped up. can you guess what it is?

i have no idea why you would be able to guess what that is, seeing as it was only just invented a few weeks ago. it's part of the new line from over the moon designs--crocheted wire jewelry is our new thing. so much fun. here's what it looks like to the unaided eye:

thing #2 the take-away shows. (known in france as "les concerts à emporter.") just wanted to alert you of the presence of this magnificent endeavor if you'd never heard of it before. it's one of my favorite features of the internet machine, don'tcha-know. video sessions of incredibly wonderful musicians performing mini concerts as they wander the streets of france, and occasionally in elevators or on rooftops (see below.)

this one is obviously my favorite, for two reasons:
a) it's sufjan.
b) he's singing a cover of my number one favorite song on the planet, "the lakes of canada," by the innocence mission. now seriously. what are the odds of that happening? i am still dumbstruck each time i listen to it, ever since i discovered it sometime last summer. i used to daydream about the wondrous magic that could occur if my dearest innocence mission and sufjan suddenly collided, and then that dream came true one day. that just DOESN'T HAPPEN, people. it doesn't happen. and it happened.

here's what sufjan had to say about the song on NPR:

"I'm in awe of big songs, national anthems, rock opera, the Broadway musical. But what I always come back to, after the din and drum roll, is the small song that makes careful observations about everyday life. This is what makes the music by The Innocence Mission so moving and profound. 'Lakes of Canada' creates an environment both terrifying and familiar using sensory language: incandescent bulbs and rowboats are made palpable by careful rhythms, unobtrusive rhyme schemes, and specificity of language. What is so remarkable about Karen Peris' lyrics are the economy of words, concrete nouns-fish, flashlight, laughing man-which come to life with melodies that dance around the scale like sea creatures. Panic and joy, a terrible sense of awe, the dark indentations of memory all come together at once, accompanied by the joyful strum of an acoustic guitar. This is a song in which everyday objects begin to have tremendous meaning."

okay. good grief. thank you for expressing the beauty of this song in a much more rational way than i ever could.

anyway, if you're not into that (pssh!),
you can watch this
other
rather
excellent
one
full of clanking glasses and lovely light and a deep manly baritone.

i miss these days

2008-09-01T19:14:00.002-04:00

dear friends,

2008-08-30T09:30:00.003-04:00

rubber cement is on sale at target for thirty-four cents a jar.

i thought you should know!
--put this knowledge to good use!

love, annie

my very favorite music video of all time

2008-08-21T18:19:00.003-04:00

i could sit and watch this over 'n over 'n over.
(and it's short enough that i can do just that.)

tongues that possess the earth instead
by half-handed cloud
(based on psalm 73)

john ringhofer is the most darling human bean i (n)ever did meet.

with cool air comes great cleansing

2008-08-15T23:10:00.007-04:00

upon the arrival of central air conditioning upstairs, a contraption birthed untidily to a welcoming audience one summer evening (like a percentage of infants are wont to do), i decided to embark upon a bedroom-cleaning adventure in cool artificial freshness.

my secluded third-floor bedroom generally had not been rearranged or redecorated even in the smallest of ways since i first moved up there, around age twelve. it was very dusty and cluttered and juvenile, to say the least. it was almost as bad as miss havisham's eerie twenty-of-nine clock-stopping and wedding-cake preservation (but not quite). and it was mostly all because of the heat! that dreaded summer sweat that adhered my shirt to my back and tickled my upper lip. eeueghsh. i didn't like that very much. and come winter, it was so cold that no number of sweaters could ease the icy numbness. (fall and spring, of course, were muddled in the terrible studying frenzy of geography and biology, etc., and i could scarcely even tell i was in my bedroom at all for all the papers and pencils strewn about.)

and so i never dwelled long enough in my bedroom to move things about or take down the ugly little pictures on my wall and replace them with pretty things better representing my maturing interests. eventually my bedroom became a cage plastered with the unwelcome reminders of my awkward twelve-year-old self, an unopinionated, unimpassioned, uncomfortable child (shudder).

but since the installation of central air--oh sheesh, my imagination and vacuum cleaner have been running wildly. it's such a liberating task, deep-cleaning my room. it's taken me a while, but it is daily becoming easier for me to throw things away. you see, these stupid little things have been in my room so long that it's almost as if they've surpassed the stage of mere existence and moved on to some state of immovable intangibility. "no," my subconscious yells, "i can't throw away that gaudy faux-porcelain figurine--it's been sitting in the same spot on that shelf for so long that it's lost its ability to be disposed of, and if i move it, i think there will be a small, bear-shaped black hole forever and ever and ever."

but i toss it in the trash, and hark! no black hole! rather, a blank canvas. with what shall i fill it? oh, it's so exciting.

it has taken many days, and will take many more (i am an easily-distracted cleaner--i found a box of ten-year-old letters from my summer camp pen-pal! i couldn't just leave those unread, you know). but now, when i walk into my bedroom, i begin to think to myself, "why yes, the present annie huntington does reside here. the annie huntington who actually knows who she is and what she prefers to display on her shelves."

taking her favorite pen from her pocket

2008-08-14T21:15:00.007-04:00

"mopper's medley" by midlake makes me smile every time i hear it. (i really mean that! --i'm not just saying so.)

actually, you know, those midlake boys write some of my very favorite lyrics in every single one of their songs--simple and sometimes slightly mysterious pedestrian narratives full of ache-y hope--a sort of humble defeat filled with hopefulness (not hopelessness!), which, i suppose, is an odd combination, but quite true. and i love this combination very much.

the trials of van occupanther is one of the greatest albums of all time--and that is not an opinion, my friends! it's pure truth. it fills my heart with warmth and homeyness whenever i listen to it. and check out the funny masks!

here, read "mopper's medley":

and he sings when he mops
seems to help him a lot
where there's uneven stairs
mr. landlord is there

well he mops all day
can't get away too long
when he's through
there's windows too

then nellie comes to see him
with a straight face she comes to see him
taking her favorite pen from her pocket
she writes it down
the things that she's found
and he always sometimes gets a little nervous
but he'd like for her to stay for a day

"would you care for a drink?"
"this is business," says she
"tell me where are the vents
for these apartments?"

so they go upstairs
to inspect air
the air is good
it's really good there

she's glad that he cares so much
about the safety of electrical outlets
taking her favorite pen from her pocket
she writes it down
the things that she's found
and she always sometimes gets a little nervous
'cause she'd like to stay with him for a day

see? wasn't that funny and dear?

double-take

2008-08-06T17:43:00.007-04:00

gee, this photograph in the july 2007 issue of national geographic looks an awful lot like the album art of this KILLER AWESOME may 2007 album...

what a funny, unexpected thing to come across as i clipped up some old nat geo's.

i sure do love my little brother.

2008-08-01T17:53:00.002-04:00

check out cryptacize.
check out my little brother.
check out waterproof camcorders.

color

2008-07-28T17:05:00.007-04:00

did you know color photography was invented in 1904? i don't think i'd ever actually seen actual color photographs from so long ago, but i've just come across some, and they quite literally left me a little bit breathless. they make the century between us seem like perhaps a few days, or maybe a week at the very most. and not only that! --these pictures are so utterly gorgeous that i think i might explode.

they are called autochromes.

"Photography’s earliest practitioners dreamed of finding a method for reproducing the world around them in color. Some nineteenth-century photographers experimented with chemical formulations aimed at producing color images by direct exposure, while others applied paints and powders to the surfaces of monochrome prints. Vigorous experimentation led to several early color processes, some of which were even patented, but the methods were often impractical, cumbersome and unreliable.

After decades of wishing for a practical color process, photographers were thrilled when Auguste and Louis Lumière announced the invention of the autochrome process. The Lumière brothers, inventors of the motion picture camera, presented their invention to the French Academy of Sciences in 1904. The process used a screen of tiny potato starch grains dyed orange-red, green and violet. Dusted onto a glass plate, the dyed grains were covered with a layer of sensitive panchromatic silver bromide emulsion. As light entered the camera, it was filtered by the dyed grains before it reached the emulsion. While the exposure time was very long, the plate could be processed easily by a photographer familiar with standard darkroom procedures. The result was a unique, realistic, positive color image on glass that required no further printing.

George Eastman House has significant holdings of autochromes, including over 3900 examples by amateur photographer Charles Zoller of Rochester, New York. The museum also holds autochromes by Edward Steichen among others."

-from the photoset description on flickr.

see more here!
read more about the autochrome process here!

"The George Eastman House is the oldest photography museum in the world, housed in the former home of Mr. George Eastman, the so-called father of modern photography and founder of Eastman Kodak company." -flickr blog

tip of the day

2008-07-19T21:41:00.005-04:00

dear world,

the past perfect tense of the verb "go" is "gone," not "went."
please contemplate this universal truth and apply it to your lives.

help helping verbs help themselves!
don't butcher the perfection of the past!

love, annie.

oh my goodness!

2008-07-09T22:47:00.005-04:00

remember this post about willy schlossbach?

funny, about that.

the other day, i was sitting in the studio with my back to the door, soldering lobster clasps onto lockets. (smells so good.) it was about quarter to noon, because the church bells across the street were yelling out familiar old hymns, like they do every day at quarter to noon. i suddenly heard someone say, "hey annie!" cheerily behind me. i turned around, and there was willy schlossbach, holding in his kind hands the printed pages of my blog post about him. it took me very much by surprise. (hello, willy, if you're reading about yourself again!)

he told me he liked the post, and that he was glad that i like his paintings,
and then, you know what he did?
he told me i ought to come pick out a painting from his studio. any one i'd like.

!!!

and so i did, and i didn't even know what to say, and i was just so happy and it was incredibly wonderful. i can't even believe it. i picked out one called "the old plow." it's so lovely. so lovely. i brought it back into my studio and set it carefully against the wall and sat down at the table to solder again.

except for i couldn't! i couldn't just start soldering with that beautiful painting sitting behind me, glowing at my back. i was antsy and a little shaky and grinning. so i jumped up, sat down at another table across the room, and started crocheting some wire earrings. this was a little better. the frantic, spastic motion of hurried crocheting was much easier to bear than the focused anxiety of precise soldering.

but i was still too excited to do anything neatly.

oh dear!

somehow i managed to do a bit more, and then ann and i went out to eat at the new mexican place by the drawbridge, and we talked about friendship and baseball and student loans, and then i scrambled home to show my mother the painting. she was terribly jealous and we hung it on the wall in the living room, above the red chair.

today is the 4th of july

2008-07-04T11:58:00.004-04:00

some videos to celebrate our independence!

so here's what i know for sure:

2008-07-02T22:00:00.002-04:00

charles dickens writes perfect sentences that strike that verbal chord in my heart just so.

i like to take a very, very long time to read each page. none'a that rush-rush-rush.
it's a real treat, it is.
(his comma usage is exhausting but endearing.)

needle & thread

2008-06-18T17:15:00.010-04:00

the other day i had a sudden urge to make a pillow and embroider something on it. it struck out of nowhere, particularly considering that i don't regularly sew things and really haven't ever dabbled in embroidery at all, ever.

but instead of making a pillow, i got terribly wrapped up in the art of embroidery itself, and set to work experimenting on little things. and then bigger things. the fruit of experimentation:
three cheers if you can guess who it is! don't feel bad if you can't, though. i don't think it looks too much like him. emma says it looks like elijah wood, which it most certainly is not. oh well.

i don't really know what to do with it, though. i wanted to embroider it on a shirt or something, but i didn't exactly have one at my disposal when the inspiration struck. it's on a large piece of card stock. hm.

i must sheepishly admit that it took me all day to complete. i cleaned the house a bit and did paperwork for my dad, but otherwise, this little project occupied my day. i enjoyed it immensely. i do believe that embroidery and i have a future together. so exciting! and embroidery floss only costs twenty-three cents. an infinitely less costly hobby than photography, i must say.

a funny sum

2008-06-08T13:18:00.012-04:00

i never really realized how very many stairs there are in my life until i tore a muscle in my ankle and relied on crutches to hobble about. i found myself confronted with so many stairs that it made me laugh with some conglomeration of amusement, pathetic woe, and boredom. (it really does get boring. it just takes so long. hobble, hobble, up, up, down, down. "there are so many other things i could be doing right now," i would think to myself at about the halfway mark.)

it amused me so much that i decided to count all of them.

___33______ stairs from my third-floor bedroom to downstairs
___31__ ._ __ stairs to the studio
+ __5_____ front steps to my house
________
-_---69_____
x-_--- 2 --------(up AND down, you know)
________
= 138

is that average? i am curious--what is the average number of stairs in a person's life? hah. it just cracks me up.

hallelujah! i only had the crutches for a week!--which i sure am glad about. now i just have this monster robot astronaut immobilizer deal on my ankle till july. it's kinda cozy, though. it's like when your mother tucks the quilt under your body and under your feet and over your arms and all that's left is your chin peeking up over the hem, and you can't move at all, like a happy little nighttime mummy--it's kind of like that, except only on the lower half of my left leg.

(summertime, feet up on the dash)

annie huntington's guide to complete computer virus eradication, including a short section on the maintenance of mental and emotional sanity

2008-06-01T13:37:00.002-04:00

here's how to tell if that "anti-virus 2008 pro" is TOTALLY LYING to you, despite its classy design and professional lingo:

it uses an excessive amount of exclamation marks to convince you that your computer is in EXTREME DANGER!!!!!!!!!!!

it can't spell "scanning" or "immediately"

it utilizies wholly unnecessary commas, semicolons, and apostrophes ("please, click yes to kill the 3441002 bug's; found in your system!!!!!)

these are the signs, my friends, these are the signs. take note.

oy, hackers! good grammar pays.

i spent the majority of my week attempting to rid my computer of this little blessing, and i have some advice to share!

here are some stamina-boosting things you'll need if you're going to fight it out:

a knitting project
tea (recommended: "constant comment")
joanna newsom
a blank sheet of paper and a pencil (for doodling and making lists of things you'll accomplish once you return to normal life)
spybot search & destroy (a free virus-kickin' program that's most helpful and is awkwardly yet sweetly dedicated to the Most Wonderful Girl On Earth)

with these five things, you really ought to be equipped for anything. (i've discovered that the addition of warm sips of tea at intervals exponentially increases the fantasticality of joanna's epic, twelve-minute-long "emily." i tell you what, i tell you what. and i thought the song stood poetically on its own.)

now the computer's fresh 'n clean, and i've come away from this experience with a very, very long plum-colored scarf and a fascination at the malicious intent freely exhibited by hackers. what compels a human being to wreak havoc on the innocent hard drives of undeserving people around the globe? i think sufjan should write a song about them, à la "john wayne gacy, jr." there is a significant point to be brought up concerning serial killers and hackers, though: even though in my best behavior i'm just as much a sinner as john wayne gacy, i'll never be quite nerdy enough to write computer-killing codes.

anablog

2008-05-24T13:35:00.002-04:00

harrison withers and his 26 cats

2008-05-14T23:17:00.009-04:00

there's a painter named willy schlossbach who has a studio at 447, where i work. he mostly paints the houses and buildings around cambridge--i recognize the scenes on each friendly canvas. he wears buttery-soft old leather loafers (at least, they look buttery-soft--i've never actually walked up to him and rubbed his shoes, you know). he has an excellently weathered nose, and i wish more than anything that he would paint a self-portrait.

he sure is a funny man. more or less everything that comes out of his mouth is quiet, calm sarcasm, said with a dead-serious facial expression. he'll poke his head into our studio while ann and i are caught up in a conversation and say, "i don't pay you to talk. come on. mmph, it's hard work running a sweatshop." i can never help laughing, but ann always plays along gravely. "you're tough on us, willy," she'll say earnestly.

his studio is just across the hall from ours, and ann walked past it today on her way to the storage room.
"hey, annie," i heard willy call out (to her, not me).
"hey, how are you, willy?" she asked.
"i'm good," he said; "how're you?"
"i'm good too," she replied. there was a short pause.
"hm. i guess we're both good, then," he said.

i don't exactly know why it was so funny to me, but i sat there, alone in our studio, laughing really hard (the silent kind of hard).

i sure do like willy schlossbach. his paintings always leap into my eyes, too. i mean they really leap. they don't just hang on the wall--they're not passive paintings. he has a way of making sunlight bounce off roofs and walls and windows in just such a way as to suggest that this familiar architecture is very much alive, and grinning right at you.

(photo by david harp)

happy sabbath

2008-05-11T15:28:00.004-04:00

"This is what it means to be born again: to fully and completely disengage with the preconceptions and preoccupations of the adult world and its religions, to dismantle all laws - of physics and society - and yield yourself to the birth canal, and what comes after, in which everything begins to shake and tremble with all senses fully turned to the centre of the universe, the creator, God the Father, in whose cultivation we begin to know and understand our true selves, our real selves, as a reflection of God's image, his creation, like newborn babies, full, fresh, suckling, elated and laughing at everything."

-sufjan stevens

so, i dunno what was up today...

2008-05-08T19:39:00.004-04:00

but as i walked home from work, i saw about a hundred (really) tandem bicyclists floating about my little neighborhood. and most of them were couples with grey hair, and they were all--every single one--smiling.

it was a slightly out-of-body sort of feeling, walking down the street with so many of these funny contraptions gliding past.

AKR FTW!

2008-04-30T16:09:00.004-04:00

okay, this post is going to be chock-full of exciting things (exciting to me, anyway. ha!).

you should know: asthmatic kitty records is my favorite record label--home to sufjan stevens, half-handed cloud, my brightest diamond, and lots of other lovely musicians.

(in case you were curious):

"Asthmatic Kitty was named after Sara, a voluptuous orange and white longhair who wandered out of the woods in 1995, pregnant, starving, and afflicted with various parasites and ailments, including feline asthma. Although she still wheezes a bit, especially when being chased by her sister Tabby, Sara today enjoys a healthy and happy life of luxury. Cast-off animals make the best pets!"

and... they've just signed on a whole boatload of new artists! i'm so excited! particularly about welcome wagon, a brooklyn pastor and his wifey-wife who make pretty little songs. they haven't actually released a whole album yet, but they're totally destined to become a new favorite of mine. with names like monique and vito aiuto, it has to be good. (yep, that's the same vito for whom sufjan wrote "vito's ordination song". you might recognize his lovely voice from a couple of sufjan's christmas songs--like "once in david's royal city".)

also looking forward to osso--a four-piece string quartet (which includes marla hansen, who makes gorgeous songs on her own, singing and plucking her viola!) who are currently in the process of making a string-quartet-version of sufjan's electronica album, enjoy your rabbit. how awesome is that?

they even signed a not-musical-artist, laura park. she draws really fantastic pictures & comics that make me smile and wish i had skills.

check out all of the new goodness! --> asthmatic kitty records!

alright, so, all that might not be a big deal to you guys, but i was just really excited about it all. hah.

but wait! the subject has not yet changed!

asthmatic kitty has just sent me a package of GLORIOUS things all for absolutely free!

(aw, what adorable handwriting.)

it's a very long and complicated story as to WHY they sent me these things, and it probably doesn't make much of a difference to you, but just know this:

after some really dear & funny emails were exchanged,

they sent me a t-shirt!

AND a cd!

for free!

even my mother likes the t-shirt.

(my thumb looks ugly 'cause i slammed it in the front door last week.)

yes, yes, i sure do love asthmatic kitty records. they are just so refreshingly friendly! (me and diane, who answers emails, we're like this. haha.)

they send out free sampler cd's with every purchase...i have a whole bunch of them. let me know if you want one. ha!

ALSO!--

1) i won a copy of encyclopedia asthmatica!
WHAT ON EARTH? i can't even stop smiling. i feel famous or something. (well, but i'm glad i'm not famous. i wouldn't ever like to be famous, i think.) i mean, i don't win things. it just doesn't happen. but this really did happen! to me!

2) it's a SIGNED copy. (signed, not singed.)

i love visually digesting people's handwriting. especially if they're practically celebrities whom i greatly admire. (i'm not sure WHO signed it--they didn't say--and it's not here yet, so the anticipation is kinda killing me.)

a grand rescue

2008-04-20T21:36:00.003-04:00

well, here's a small event that made my wednesday:

my favorite hannah singer and i went to the zoo, and we saw this mama duck and her eight little baby ducklings walking down the path. they were just so stinking adorable that we followed them for a while. and then--and then! one of the ducklings waddled right into a drainage grate (you know--the kind you see on the side of the road). it just wandered right onto the grate, lost its footing, and for a moment only its tiny little head was visible, wide-eyed in terror. and then it slipped down into the dark, scary old sewer. oh! oh! oh! i saw it! its pathetic yelping cleary wafted up through the ground.

"OH! HANNAH! what are we gonna do??" i said.

we fetched a zoo employee to help us. he was skinny and had duct tape wrapped around his left sneaker. "on average, only half of the ducklings survive," he told us. after surveying the scene, he braced himself against the ground and began to tug at the grate. i thought it was hopeless: the thing might as well've been the foundation of some ancient fortress. it was a bit rusty and the earth had begun to swallow up its edges. but lo and behold, he pulled the darn thing right up, like superman. he reached down, gently scooped the duckling up, and set him in the grass. "there ya go, little buddy," he said.

we thanked him and he walked away, smiling, his khakis heroically peppered with fresh dirt.

love love love

2008-04-14T20:07:00.012-04:00

isn't karen peris so pretty?

she has the prettiest voice in the whole wide world, too.

and she writes the prettiest lyrics, too.

if she made a book of her song lyrics,

i would read it every day.

and she does all of the artwork

for the innocence mission albums & website.

she amazes me with so much beauty pulsing through her very veins!

oh (little) brother

2008-04-08T16:34:00.003-04:00

don't stop, don't break! you can delight because you have a place!

2008-03-31T21:15:00.011-04:00

I HAVE FINISHED MY RESEARCH PAPER.

hallelujah, hallelujah!
oh oh oh oh.

i've given it a swift kick in the pants and never want to see or hear from it again. (except that was only the rough draft, and i've still got to turn in the final copy. --not thinking about that at the moment.)

i feel rather unhealthy today, but i am drinking blueberry-pomegranate tea, and my bedroom could almost be called clean, and i am listening to (what else is new?) "majesty snowbird" (which--have i mentioned?--is more or less the most incredible song in the entire world; words are useless). every ten minutes it ends; i click the center button of my ipod five quick times.
one-two-three-four-five.
music>artists>sufjan stevens>live>majesty snowbird.
it begins again. heehee.

and i got this ridiculously fantastic t-shirt in the mail yesterday, which i'd been wanting for literally months&months&months and was recently able to purchase for the drastically reduced price of only nine dollars. (it has suede ink and glows in the dark. thank you, threadless.) my mother doesn't much like it, but that's okay. she doesn't have to. personally, i think it's basically the greatest design since times new roman.

you can't stop looking at it, right?

me either.

(or maybe that's just me.)

all things handmade

2008-03-22T22:25:00.000-04:00

i'm setting up at etsy site for my lovely boss! and i'm pretty darn excited about it. it's still in the making--i've only got a few items up so far, &c.--but just you wait. it'll be snazzy stuff in no time flat (or maybe some time flat).

you can have a special sneak peek if you'd like.
--> click!

observations

2008-03-13T12:35:00.006-04:00

so, i play pick-up volleyball every thursday night at bennett middle school.

i love being around all the people at volleyball. i'm so glad that my dear lil' rachel and i are usually among the youngest people there. (if i took all the ages of everyone there and averaged them out, i'd probably end up with a median age of about...35, maybe. hah.) --i like observing adults. generally, some adults are terribly boring, but lots can be awfully interesting. volleyball is a good place to go to observe the interesting ones, because it weeds out the boring, business-obsessed adults who come home from work on thursday nights, watch "deal or no deal," clip their toenails, and go to bed. at volleyball, you get the sort of adult who's excited about life, and will take a few hours out of their day for something fun, like volleyball.

let me just tell you why i appreciate this one guy named matt.

matt works for NASA. he's probably in his early thirties. he's rather thin, and is approximately the height of the average adult male (sidenote: i'm a full inch taller than the average adult male, dangit). he's got neat, dark hair with short, sweepy bangs. he wears rimless glasses, and has an excellently unique nose. his teeth are rather large, and when he closes his mouth his top lip sticks out a bit. he wears these endearingly dorky, walmart-esque sneakers, and whenever i look over at him, he's always smiling or laughing or making some hilarious little face. a friendly little soul. he is so stinkin' adorable. (somebody told me he wears a pocket protector at work. heehee.)

he doesn't discreetly flex his biceps on the opposite side of the court or grab the volleyball between serves and slam-dunk it into the basketball net. he doesn't have anything to prove. he's just happy and content and himself. (p.s., he's pretty killer-good at volleyball.)

and THAT is why i think matt is great.

haha...oy vey.

there's also a fellow named enoch who's probably in his early forties. tall and lanky and slouches a bit. has a ponytail and sad eyebrows and a friendly personality. stands with his hands clasped behind his back. the first time i met him, he was wearing a they might be giants t-shirt.

there's a rather creepy couple in their late forties, trying to be in their twenties. mr. has strange red hair & moustache, wears a white wifebeater and gaudy gold necklace, and is the epitome of "ball-hog." his wife (girlfriend?) is ridiculously thin with a dreadfully fake tan and very dyed blond hair. wears a hot pink tank top and tiny white shorts. (they both wear the same thing every week...?) lots of PDA going on. they just craaack me up. they're like a couple out of some movie or something.

i think people are great.
man! i love people.

ten minute break

2008-03-11T19:21:00.004-04:00

heehee...microsoft word is a funny little beast.

a squiggly green line appears under "well-being," and upon right-clicking it, i am told that it ought to be "well being." so i nix the hyphen. the squiggly green line appears again, and lo and behold, the suggested form is "well-being."

i found MS word's weak point. ehhh heh heh heh...

there are many things i'd rather be doing than writing this paper that's due tomorrow--i.e., writing a blog post about this dear fellow named matt, and going outside and jumping on the trampoline, and drawing a picture, and setting up an etsy site for my boss, and finding a college scholarship lying on the side of the road.

but i stinkin' can't--

(yer all curious about this dear fellow named matt now, aren'tcha? don't jump to conclusions. just gimme a sec [read: couple hours slash decades] to finish my paper.)

like spaces in an abandoned parking lot, or crayons that somebody dropped which miraculously arranged themselves into neat rows upon landing

2008-03-02T20:01:00.006-05:00

have you ever sat in a hard wooden chair writing for such a very long time that you find your metaphors and similes turning into particularly ridiculous nonsense? good grief.

aaaaahaha.

p.s. a gold star to anyone who can guess what that simile describes! eh heh heh.

"nobody knows, darling, nobody knows how they are loved..."

2008-02-29T18:46:00.008-05:00

the local acme supermarket closed down a few years ago. or maybe last month. (i've never been any good at pinpointing specific happenings on a timeline.)

anyway, when i was very little, my mother and sister and i used to frequent that magical dietary menagerie for all of our grocerial needs. i loved those enormous speckled apricot-and-beige checkerboard tiles that lay flat beneath my small, light-up-sneaker-clad feet.

there was a particular employee there who would always smile and exchange a kind word with my mother, and tell a joke to and grin at my sister and me. his name was darryl, and he was big and happy and friendly and wearing an apron.

he stopped working at acme quite a while ago, and then the place shut down altogether. darryl became an old memory, like a ten-dollar bill in the secret winter-jacket pocket of my brain: forgotten, but soon to be gloriously, triumphantly rediscovered.

yesterday, in my english class at chesapeake, a discussion about jobs sprang up. this fellow named darryl, far older than the rest of the students in the class, mentioned that he used to work at acme. my heart jumped a bit before my brain had quite processed it, connecting the darryl sitting in my classroom with the darryl i used to see in acme, and a general sense of lightness and happiness and childhood nostalgia was suddenly injected into my chest and spread quickly until i somehow didn't really mind sitting in that darn class with that darn teacher who clearly didn't know where that darn comma really went.

i was, at that moment, standing at the deli counter, reaching up for the cookie with sprinkles on top that darryl was handing me, free of charge, just like always, out of the kindness of his happy heart.

oy vey, i'd so much rather write about the things that interest me than the things i'm assigned. like right now. you see? i sat down to write my essay for class, and this is what happened.

10:05 + 5:20 = 15:25

2008-02-26T12:06:00.008-05:00

in case you were wondering, which on all accounts you most likely were not, it takes me exactly "majesty, snowbird" plus "barn owl, night killer" to walk to chesapeake college, and it takes me from track one to the middle of track six on "befriended" to walk to work. here i shall note that i typically walk briskly and broodingly to college, and slowly and happily to work. --always chomping on an apple, regardless of the destination. (routine: i finish eating said apple precisely as i walk by the post office, where there happens to be a trash can into which i toss the browning core, even though technically i know apples are biodegradable and would do just as well in the gutter for the birds to eat. do birds eat apples?)

changing the subject (kind of):
you should probably sit still for a minute and watch this.

isaiah 55:12
for you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing, and

all the trees of the field will clap their hands.

If I am alive this time next year
Will I have arrived in time to share?
Mine is about as good this far
I'm still applied to what you are
And I am joining all my thoughts to you
And I'm preparing every part for you
I heard from the trees a great parade
And I heard from the hills a band was made
Will I be invited to the sound?
Will I be a part of what you've made?
And I am throwing all my thoughts away
And I'm destroying every bet I've made
And I am joining all my thoughts to you
And I'm preparing every part for you

not even in chalk

2008-02-25T15:57:00.004-05:00

so, i'm writing a research paper on amelia earhart.

...while researching, i found this rather lovely poem. i really just love it.

it's by kate timmers, and it's called

Beginnings

In a Kansas schoolhouse in 1938
a girl in gingham
will draw a picture of me, winged,
a breasted mock-Icarus
plummeting into the sea.
She gives me long hair.
Why the wings don't save me I don't know.
In this version, as in all, I crash.
No one lets me defy
gravity, not even in chalk
on a slate. Millennia of myths
prevent it, prevent upturned heads
from searching the skies instead
of the beaches and the waters
devouring them. Therefore
with this end let us begin.

you have GOT to be kidding me.

2008-02-19T13:10:00.007-05:00

polaroid isn't making polaroid anymore.

pardon me while i gather the shards of my shattered heart from the cold wooden floor, after which i will go sob on the couch. good afternoon.

two things

2008-02-14T22:20:00.006-05:00

1. i plan on enjoying coffee someday.

so, if for some reason you were wondering what my schedule for upcoming days looks like, it includes acquiring a taste for said cozy/dignified beverage (as well as photographing chalice for her dance application and brainstorming research paper topics).

2. in case i haven't already gushed to you personally, this is the new darlin' i've recently been enjoying sonically:

his name is sebastian (sebastian!) and lovely songs flow from his fingers and mouth. you can download his EP for freeee by clicking on the above picture! or you don't have to. you know. either way.

A Rock Tumbler Might Be Nice, But It Can't Get You to the Park, or, How I Triumphantly Conquered the Forces of Gravity, One Bloody Elbow at a Time

2008-02-13T12:25:00.009-05:00

an excerpt from the essay i'm currently workin' on.
based on pure truth, with a few extra details for good measure.

The day after Christmas often comes crashing down on the generally happy souls of young children rather like an early Wright Brothers' airplane prototype: awkwardly, and reeking of bottled-up bitterness and unmet expectations. When I was nine years old, all I wanted for Christmas was the bright red plastic rock tumbler that beckoned me from the pages of the latest Discovery Toys catalog. “Turn rocks into gleaming gemstones!” the description boasted. “Makes a great gift for the budding geologist or jeweler.” I had highlighted the latter phrase and left the catalog open on the kitchen counter for my mother to notice. However, come Christmas morning, I did not find myself the proud parent of a Gyrotek Rock Polisher 2300. Instead, there in the living room stood my very first real bike, a fifteen-speed teal and chrome Schwinn, shining just as gloriously as any freshly-tumbled stone. I decided to abandon any dissappointment, and admitted that this was an adequate substitute for the single item that had been on my wish list.

hmmph, i need a shorter title. any ideas, dears? i'm suppose i'm rather bad at short-ness.
oh, and that first sentence might not seem like it fits in, but it does tie in to the next paragraph. no worries.

ha. hah.

2008-02-09T11:16:00.000-05:00

in my opinion, microsoft paint is fantastic. i have sentimental childhood attachments to the dear program. i love it in all its lo-fi glory.

that being said, this video cracks me up.

mmehhh...

2008-01-29T20:18:00.000-05:00

well, i became a little discouraged today with my english class at chesapeake college. they just don't seem to want to foster any sort of creativity over there. the teacher specifically said we won't be doing any descriptive or literary papers whatsoever--he said he tried it before, but some students just didn't "get it" or something. (which i don't doubt, but HEY, shouldn't we try to teach the kids, not just cater to their un-willingness to learn and exercise their brains? er, that's my rant for the day, sorry.) so, uuh... well, i dunno.

this is what i wrote for my assignment today (just a paragraph on a pet peeve--not supposed to be describing it, exactly, but rather "what it is, why it bothers you, and give an example"), but i don't think he'll like it much. it's probably too descriptive for his taste. but. i. don't. know. what. to. do. with. myself.

oh well.
he'll just have to deal with it, i suppose.
heh.

or you guys could give me tips on how to make it more fundamental-stick-to-the-formula-paragraph-lover approved, tell me to throw it out and start over, tell me to get a life, if you felt so generous--

Oh, that curious phenomenon known as a pet peeve! There is a particular sight in this world that grates intensely against the well-being of my soul, a sight that I find wholly intolerable, if inexplicably so: the door of a microwave oven left open by some careless, impatient creature who has recently nuked a cardboard platter of some gloriously processed mystery smorgasboard. The microwave gapes, shamelessy ajar, glowing from within like a grotesquely cube-shaped industrial firefly. Flecks of unidentifiable orange grease grace the walls of its belly, and my offended eyes immediately command my hand to slam the door shut. Can people not be considerate enough to simply close it once they've finished their radioactive meal-making, rather than leave it swinging in the air like a half-finished thought? If there is one thing I cannot bear, it is an open, open, open microwave door.

(whoa, check out all that capitalization! yeah, i do know how to capitalize. there's proof. hah.)

well, i think it's a little much. i feel like a try to cram too many things into a paragraph. too many unrelated thoughts. i'd much rather write a three-page essay on a pet peeve, quite honestly.

emma says i write too "abstractlystractional," which she then changed to "abstractlyconcrectical," and i'm gonna have to agree.

geez! that paragraph is dramatic, pretentious crap!
the more i read over it, the less sense it makes even to myself.

the more i dwell on this whole deal, the more flustered i get. i am so ridiculous. i am so ridiculous! good grief! i'm going to go drink a glass of cold water and close my eyes until i can think about nothing.

oh yeah...and now you all know how i feel about open microwave doors.
it's pretty intense.

january's coming to a close...

2008-01-27T15:15:00.000-05:00

as i was walking to st. ives, i met a man with seven wives.

he asked me to make a list of my favorite things to do in the whole world,
and i said,

"well, i can tell you one thing for sure: taking down christmas lights is at the very bottom."

and now, a joke made up by the dear john ringhofer:

Q: what do you call a waffle at the beach?
A: san diego!

"(get it? is it a joke or a riddle? who cares, it's magical!)"

an exercise in polar equilibrium

2008-01-17T15:04:00.000-05:00

downtown caught on fire.
i did not catch on fire.

i cannot find the lens cap to my 50mm lens.
i can find my 50mm lens.

my eyeglass prescription is too weak and i squint a lot.
i am not blind. also, if i felt so compelled, i could put in my contacts.

the staff at chesapeake college all seem to be meanie-grumpy-sassy-britches.
my friends are not meanie-grumpy-sassy-britches. also, aforementioned staff aren't all THAT bad.

there are no apples in the kitchen.
there are apples growing amongst the branches of the trees in some tropic region, i'm sure. some island native is enjoying an apple right now, just not me. also, there are apples in the grocery store.

i have to take the SAT's soon.
i get to shade in those little bubbles with a pencil that i'm sure will fade from freshly sharpened to dearly dulled, just as i like it.

the pc froze up while i was editing photos and all that time i spent is toast.
the originals are safe 'n sound.

my YMCA membership expired.
my NRA membership didn't. just kidding.

hear hear, i feel quite balanced.
i should do this more often.

familiar words

2008-01-06T17:21:00.000-05:00

so here's the deal:

sometimes, no matter how badly i'd like to become acquainted with new literature, books i've never read, classic and modern works alike, acclaimed and praised and recommended, stacked riskily on my bookshelf (all quite unopened and smelling lovely),

sometimes, i just have to read a wrinkle in time or anne of green gables or jane eyre again. just once more. turn the browning, moisture-warped pages, recognize a phrase that i particularly relished during last time's re-reading, and laugh at calvin o'keefe's happiness and diana barry's hysteria and outdated verb forms, respectively.

yeah--i severely enjoy re(-re-re-re-re)-reading books. and i'm okay with that.

know what's funny?

2007-12-26T13:21:00.000-05:00

emma and i bought jedd a ten-pack of carnivorous plants for christmas.

explosions of happy cheer in the heart

2007-12-20T13:37:00.001-05:00

that's what happens here.

it's the dearest thing ever.

you must check it out.

particularly if you aren't already in the christmas spirit (gee, what's wrong with you?)--and be sure to check out the runners-up.

oh dear.

2007-12-14T15:54:00.001-05:00

note to the wise:
these are just my rambling thoughts.
don't read any more if you feel the need for something productive or thought-provoking.

today i walked home from work, my head accepting but not welcoming the knowledge of my impending chemistry test. i had my face turned up to the sky. completely. i could easily have tripped on a walnut or been struck by an old grumpy man in an old grumpy car, and i probably would have deserved it, too. it really isn't wise to be so careless in the middle of the street.

anyhow, as i was staring up at that glorious ol' sky, i began to wonder what i'd do if i saw a person falling from it. i wouldn't try to catch him or anything dumb like that for obvious reasons of gravitational force and momentum. or whatever. but i couldn't just watch the flailing shape of his rag-doll silhouette steadily increase in size in my pupils as it sped toward the rocky earth. what could i do?

and then my imagination went all macgyver on me. i'm not really the inventing sort, though, so i was limited to some sort of parachute-suction-cup-pop-gun. an inflatable mattress might be nice in theory, but inadequate and impractical in reality.

but man, this poor guy. he'd come crashing down onto the cement and just be all squashed. and i'd be standing there having done nothing about it. and it would probably scar me for life. and this situation has probably happened to someone in the world, you know?

and then i just decided to forget about it, and i strolled on, humming along with some christmas songs, trying very hard not to dwell on being home alone(ish) with a dear chemistry test.

on the bright side, i saw mrs. kate on high street and she said kyrie and sienna are coming home tonight! phew. good thing. maybe you guys can help me snap out of this.

what He whispers we will shout!

2007-12-11T17:31:00.001-05:00

hot chocolate on the roof
Originally uploaded by wheresthegiant

today i sat on the roof of the shed with the little brother-man and did school and listened to that silly ol' danielson famile and shivered and sipped hot chocolate out of a thermos shaped like a crayola crayon. it was rather nice.

it's december!

2007-12-03T16:12:00.000-05:00

how great is that?

also great: i have almost all of my christmas shopping done, thanks to my trip to king of prussia on saturday with (most of) my dearie small group girls.

i consider this a serious accomplishment.

p.s. hey, christmas is pretty soon.

we can walk out after dark
because it's christmas time!
colored lights glow from the park
because it's christmas time!
and the bells on the reindeer sled
say it's christmas time!
and the quilts on the back of the bed
say it's christmas time!

y'all know what i'm listening to...

whoa whoa whoa.

2007-11-25T15:22:00.000-05:00

did y'all know that they have

it's a wonderful life

in color?

what is this??

why isn't this some hot topic on NBC news or something? why are they not broadcasting this controversial accomplishment across the nation? why did i not know about this until today? so so so weird. i don't know how i feel about this. ehhhhuhhhhh....

six percent sales tax?

2007-11-18T15:35:00.000-05:00

what?

let's kick 'em in the shins.