Six Posts

I have been in the Pit of Despair for the last ten days. Which is to say, I've been grading papers for the last week and a half. It makes me crabby and short-tempered, plus, I don't have time to do things I actually enjoy - like blog. So I've been thinking about blog posts for the last few days but have been unable to actually compose them. So, here are six short blog posts all in one. Enjoy.

Friendship


I've been thinking a lot about friendship lately. I just finished reading Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett. It's Patchett's memoir of her friendship with fellow writer, Lucy Grealy. It's beautifully written and so full of the love and forgiveness that we all crave from those we love. As I was reading it, Maryn and Avery were both having struggles with their friends at school. Is true friendship so hard to find because it's so important or is it so important because it's so hard to find? I've had the same best friend (besides Suzanne, of course) for twenty three years. We keep in touch and maintain our friendship partly because it's just too freaking hard to find new ones.

Rejection of the Week


I want to start a new feature on my blog: rejection of the week. As you know, my favorite phrase right now is, "I reject that." So I was thinking I'd pick one thing a week that I just outright freakin' reject. This week? Dishes that are hand-wash only and clothes that have to be hung rather than put in the dryer. Seriously. It's the twenty first century and you're telling me I can't put this green plastic cup in my dishwasher but that instead I have to lovingly soap it up like some ancient relic? I reject that.

Spring
Yesterday was the first day of spring. Here is my favorite springtime poem. It's by that old grammar and syntax rebel e.e. cummings:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

That about sums it up, eh?

Speaking of Spring


When I was nineteen years old, I attended the National Undergraduate Literature Conference at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. It was April and, while Idaho was still a gray bog, Utah was in bloom. I remember driving up to the campus which was, to me, huge and gorgeous, and seeing all the apple and cherry trees blooming. Forsythia was everywhere looking like Mother Nature's crazy daytime neon. I was dazed. It was practically narcotic and I loved it. To this day, blooming trees are still my favorite thing about spring. They look like frozen tidal waves of color and bolts of lightning. What's not to love?

Justified
The season is more than half over and I'm still waiting for this season to work up half the momentum the last one had. Too many villains and subplots with not enough of Raylan Givens being his cool self. On the last episode, Raylan was being framed for a murder he did not commit. The bad guys had a bullet with his fingerprints on it because he had tossed it at one of them earlier in the season and said, "Watch out or the next one will be coming a lot faster." When he told the investigator about it, the interviewer chuckled and said something like, "That's the coolest thing I've ever heard." I think he was speaking for all of us.

Dancing With the Stars
I haven't felt the DWTS vibe in a couple of seasons but this one is firing up with a vengeance. An interesting bunch of has-beens and never-weres with some serious skills. It's not like there's an obvious ringer like there has been the last couple of years. Instead, there's some real competition. Plus, Gladys Knight. Need I say more?