lovely day

Now Playing: "The Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd-Weber. Track 10, "Masquerade".

This is my 108th post. And it's disgustingly flowery, too, so beware.

I managed to get seven hours of sleep last night instead of the usual six. That made a big difference.

This morning before Major British Writers, I worked on my paper for First Seminar, about The Courage to Create. We actually started to write our papers in class yesterday. Rachel told me that she'd managed to crystallize some of our collective thoughts in her essay about how the courage to create is really the courage to obey God and go against men. She said that she talked about Socrates, Christ, and Joan of Arc, all of whom are mentioned in the book as "saints", and all of whom, incidentally, were urged on by some sort of "spiritual force". I, on the other hand, wrote a pompous and sappy piece of work about how we all face the daunting task of creativity and how some people have chosen to overcome that formidable challenge. The only bright spot was at the end, where I managed to say that as we take courage to create, we honor the source of courage. On the whole, I was quite disappointed with myself, but now that Rachel is doing her own essay, I don't want to steal her ideas, and it isn't so bad, I suppose.

In Major British Writers today, we started the Victorian era. The professor thinks that Queen Victoria was both weird and a hypocrite. I'm just glad that we get to start Tennyson on Friday. I've only met three people that I like during Major British Writers II: Jane Austen, surprisingly, John Keats, and Alfred Tennyson (whom I already knew I liked). The rest of them are either too strange or (to speak plainly) very stuck-up.

In archaeology, we went on a field trip. It was much more fun than the oceanography field trip last semester, though I wish it had lasted longer. Of course, I had to find a ride, but one of the boys who's both in the archaeology class and in the First Seminar was already taking two other girls, so I went with them. He had a nice car (not a jeep :), though the one drawback was that he played loud rock music the whole time. It was sad music, too--selfish and angry. The singer, a woman, belted out her depression and disappointment with a string of lovers and friends because they didn't treat her as being "special". Everything in her lyrics was centered on herself, her own feelings, and how other people didn't give her her due, or how she was searching for satisfaction in someone--satisfaction meaning someone just to stand and "listen to me cry". Empty music. There's no hope in a world like that.

We drove out to a place called Bird Creek. It's on the eastern edge of Tulsa, near the port and also near limestone quarries. As we approached the place, the road became thick with heavy trucks trundling past, some of them tooting long blasts on their horns. Limestone dust hung in the warm air, veiling the naked trees and the gaping pits that had been blasted in the flat sweep of prairie. Towers puffed smoke into the air, and long metal chutes rattled with gravel. Heavy tires tore up the soft ground, punching soft grass into harsh tread patterns. We pulled off the road near the bridge over Bird Creek. Trucks roared by. The wind from their passing and the stench from scorching diesel caught in my throat and made it hard to breathe. We sat in the car at one place for awhile before realizing that we were supposed to meet everyone at a spot just back the road a few hundred yards. We were the last to catch up with the rest of the class.

It was a relief to get away from the highway. I pushed through dense scrub--bare sumac and pokeberry, my feet sinking deep into the thick golden grass. Long spears of grass, spotted maroon, snagged on my jeans. Cottonwood leaves splashed silverly around my feet--as though the Milky Way had, snake-wise, shed its scales on the earth.

We stood on a gently-sloping bank on the east side of the creek while the professor told us about the geology and hydrology of the area, and told us how natives a thousand years ago could've lived. Warm sunshine freckled my face and the green water of the creek below. The creek foamed over low rapids before fanning out into a broader area. It had slashed the west bank steeply so that we could see the stratification in the soil. Cottonwood and oak trees grew sparsely on both banks, towering over the scrub. I fingered a pliable cottonwood branch, its tips spiked with leaf buds velvety and pointed as rabbit's ears. The dull green outer casing, like the juvenile feathers of a hawk, was beginning to open and show the silky-wet copper of the young leaves beneath.

I desperately wanted to push through the woods, perhaps even to scramble down to the bank and walk by the water, but everyone left immediately, as soon as the professor was done with his brief lecture. When the young man who gave me a lift dropped myself and the other two girls off on campus, I paused beside the parking lot. A thick quince bush, with little yellow flowers, was humming with bees. They staggered over the curly petals, energetically pushing their fuzzy bodies into the pollened interiors. I sniffed the faintly sweet smell, delicate as the drop of honey at the lip of a honeysuckle's tube. Then I nearly jumped out of my skin, for a mockingbird was watching me suspiciously from the interior of the bush. It silently hopped away when I eyed it, its grey plumage blending with the still-grey twigs inside the bush, and I glanced up to where its small, raggedy nest perched among the top branches.

I ate a fast lunch alone. They didn't have any whole wheat bread, so I had to make do with white bread for my sandwich. Like eating sugary air.

For the earlier part of the afternoon, I edited my Honors paper, which I turned in early, and also read Tennyson for Major British Writers. When I had finished both of these tasks, I decided to try and practice my flute, but all the practice rooms were full--a soprano, half-a-dozen pianists, a flutist, and a violinist.

Back at Lottie, I took some pictures of the magnolias in the courtyard. There are not only three or four low star magnolias in the center of the courtyard but also two tall, grand saucer magnolias growing in two of the corners. The saucer magnolias are beginning to open. The tree in the most sheltered corner, the northwest corner, has one bloom that is nearly fully-open, its huge, silky, dark pink petals unfolded luxuriously against a vividly blue sky. Hot sun warmed the yellow sandstone walls, which basked gratefully in the afternoon light. You could almost feel the heavy petals unfolding on the magnolias. Jenny came outside while I was in the courtyard, and sat down to read her Calculus book under the star magnolias.

Since the weather was so delightful, I went running outside today. There's a basketball game tonight, so they were preparing to shut off a couple of the parking lots. Construction crews have started to dig out the north end of the football stadium, above the endzone, to put in a new sports administration building. As I jogged by, all the racket of a demolition/construction site assailed my ears: the woodpecker rattle of pneumatic chisels, the clank and scrape of backhoes lifting concrete into creaking dumptrucks.

After running, I briskly cleaned up my room. I was surprised, as I wiped down the mirror, to see how pink my face was. I did my devotions and then, at last, went to practice my flute. Blue evening shadows had begun to creep across the lawn, as though the sky was crawling down to earth, to sleep under the sycamore trees.

The flutist was still in the practice rooms, but the soprano had been replaced by a trumpeter. There was only one pianist left--not a very serious one, for he kept doodling around on the keyboard, playing snatches of Bach and "Linus and Lucy".

After practice, I went straight to supper, which I spent mostly reading The Two Towers, until Nicole marched over and commanded me to put down the book and come and sit with herself and her two friends. She thought I was studying, which was rather funny to me, since my copy of The Two Towers doesn't look anything like a textbook: for one thing, it has no underlining in it; for another thing, its cover is far more disintegrated than any self-respecting textbook would ever be. I keep finding bits and pieces of the cover, like flakes of parchment, lying around in my knapsack or on my bookshelf. Pretty soon the elegantly stylized watercolor of Fangorn will be completely obliterated, and there won't be a cover anymore. But I like it because the book is soft, and fits easily in my left hand while I eat with the right.

Nicole's friends were talking about going to the basketball game tonight. Nicole asked me about my paper. She'd started hers at one o'clock this morning, but had managed to turn it in a couple of hours early (at three o'clock instead of five o'clock this afternoon).

Straight after supper I came back here. As I walked through the Lottie courtyard, mourning doves were cooing. One of them sounded just like the doves in San Antonio--so much so that my heart nearly leapt out of my breast, for longing to go back to the warm mornings in my grandparents' back yard, running on the wet St. Augustine grass, and whizzing through the air on the tire swing under the pecan tree.

Listening to ROTK, Track 3 now. Outside, radio towers glimmer like aliens in the darkness, three or four red eyes winking on each bronze spike.

Bible study in thirty minutes.

Here's Gondor: I can hear the seagulls crying, their whistling calls and the clatter of wings as they circle upward, over pounding hooves and flashing walls.