some pictures of magnolias

Here's Jenny studying statistics under the star magnolias in the courtyard.






















Here are the star magnolias back in January, before the frost.








One magnolia bloom, fully open.












Yet another flower, half-open... you can see that it does look like a star.













These are the saucer magnolias, in bud. If they had bloomed, they would've been huge towers of deep pink blooms, like lotus flowers.










One of the flowers is almost open.

Bronte, Benedict, and Bible study

Warning: Long post ensues.

This morning Rachel and I ate breakfast together. After breakfast, I spent the time until Major British Writers studying. In MBW, we discussed critical reactions to Wuthering Heights. Most of the reviews we read (which were from the 1800s) were by people who thought that the book was wild and dismal and unpleasant (a sentiment which I heartily endorse :). Next came archaeology. The professor has been showing us slides of surveys he's done in British Columbia and Oklahoma. An archaeological survey divides a space of land into patches, and then people go out and walk over those patches to see what they can find that's of archaeological value. Since anything over fifty years old is classified as a site, this can range from old oil wells and cemeteries and homesteads (in Oklahoma) to prehistoric, donut-shaped houses and hearths (in British Columbia).

I practiced my flute for an hour after archaeology. I'm working on the "Cantilena" from the "Sonata" by Poulenc. It's the second movement--slow, meditative, airy, delicate. Like the traceried shadows that sunlight throws through a magnolia tree on a stone wall. It's very difficult to follow the arabesques of the phrases through. They start down low, in the octave of middle C, and climb all the way up to the octave that's two or three above middle C, then back down again--quite a leap, and all pianissimo, which makes it even harder.

The cafeteria was very busy when I went in for lunch. I ordered a dubious grilled turkey sandwich from one line, with a generous portion of French fries. The bananas were all brown, and the apples looked sickly, so what with one thing and another, my lunch consisted of a spinach salad (hastily tossed together from the salad bar), a few French fries, a glass of milk, and three-quarters of the turkey sandwich, which oozed pale cheese and buttery grease whenever I bit into it. I sat with a bunch of acquaintances, Nicole and Alex among them, and listened to them talk.

After lunch, I worked on my Honors presentation and on rewriting my paper about "The Lady of Shalott". When I showed my paper about "The Lady of Shalott" for MBW to Dr. F on Monday, she gave me some helpful comments about it, and so now I had to go back and revise it extensively. I cut out a bunch of nonsense about women, and just focused on the symbolism of the Lady of Shalott as a metaphor for the poet--which, in my opinion, is also rather far-fetched, but nonetheless interesting to examine.

In Honors class this afternoon, everyone was supposed to present a short talk about their community. Since we've been reading The Rule of St. Benedict, we're each supposed to come up with a community that shares some aspects and rejects other aspects of the Benedictine community. The first one to present was a young man whose community consists of an inner-city ministry. The goal of this "ministry" is to be as diverse as possible, and to expose young people to as many different cultural and moral options as possible. (Rachel and I, discussing it later, wondered if this would only confuse the "at-risk" youths even more.) Next came a young woman whose community was to be a loose group of artists who would work in rural areas, promoting the arts in poor schools.

Then came Russ, whose community consisted of soccer-playing monks. (Yes, he created quite a stir with this.) He was quite forceful and articulate, though, so he managed to convince the class after awhile that his community wasn't quite as ridiculous as it sounded. After that was Nicole, who talked about a community devoted to the study of political science (her major). It was basically a microcosm of the university, as she said herself. Finally was a boy who set his community in a post-nuclear-fallout America. His community of militants, similar to the Knights Templar, existed to protect poor farmers from bands of redneck raiders who were going around, robbing the countryside of what few resources it had left.

Neither Rachel nor I had the chance to present, but after class, we stayed a little and talked with Dr. A. Unlike everyone else, Rachel actually planned to deconstruct a community--to discuss how marriage cannot exist in a Benedictine setting because the loyalty and unity between husband and wife overrides the loyalty to the community.

I worked on my presentation for an hour after Honors class. There were several gaps that Dr. A had brought up as she critiqued the other students, asking questions and poking holes in their communities, which I thought best to clear up before she saw my community on paper (we're supposed to turn our presentations into essays). After the hour was up, I walked back over to Chapman Hall to visit Dr. A during her office hour. She was fifteen minutes late, and I stood in the narrow hall, listening to the secretaries gossip, and hearing a professor down the hall ordering home insurance, while another professor bustled past with reams of paper.

When Dr. A arrived, we had a good discussion in her office. She has a small office, with a high ceiling. It's dark and cool, like a cell, with floor-to-ceiling, east-facing windows that look out on the sunwarmed wall of the Business Administration Hall next door. She's so little and wrinkled, with such small, dark, sleepy eyes that I'm always surprised by her willingness to talk with me. Somehow, we started to talk about Augustine and creativity. "I often find, as Augustine does, that there are ideas in me, things I knew, but never fully grasped," she said, referring, I think, to Augustine's ideas about memory and the mind. She told me that she writes poetry, though she's never published it, and that one of her friends recently chastized her gently for not publishing because that's sort of the "final step" of the creative process for some.

We did talk about my community, and she helped me with solutions to some of the problems that I'd seen in the practical aspects (government, daily chores, teaching positions, etc.). The community I came up with is a community of writers who both teach and do research and writing (creative and scholarly). So I had to figure out a way for the members of the community to balance teaching with writing. Dr. A said that there's a couple at the University who split a position: the husband teaches one semester, and the wife teaches the next semester. That way they both have the opportunity to work on their own personal research and writing, as well as doing teaching. She also said that there's a woman who teaches a semester at the University, then takes a semester off to do her own research elsewhere (the woman is pretty famous, so she manages to live, though frugally, on her salary from one semester). Somehow, our discussion branched onto our own writing habits. Dr. A said that she's very particular, when she writes. She's found that she has to be in a certain place, with certain things around her: "It's hard to work creatively in a room full of dissonance." I complained about finding it hard to write in my dorm room, which feels sterile in comparison to my room at home, with all its books and pictures.

I walked back to my room, blue sky above and greening grass under my feet, my hair bobbing in waves against my ears, tossed by the wind, which smelled like smoke today.

I worked on my Honors paper and MBW paper until supper.

Supper tonight consisted of pizza downstairs in the Lottie lobby. A.C. was there, and I sat near her. She told me about a business project that she’s doing with another girl. They’re supposed to take a country, analyze its culture, and sell a product there. She’s doing Sweden. She said that she identifies with the culture there more than anywhere else. She plans to sell hiking boots since the Swedes, having been locked up indoors for the long winter, spend all summer doing activities outside. I munched my pizza and listened. The hot cheese scorched the roof of my mouth. After A.C. left, Alisha, Esther, and Jenny came in. I sat with Esther and Alisha on the floor. We talked about Esther’s exams last week, and Alisha asked if I was enjoying RBL. I grinned and said, evasively, “Tara is.” Both Esther and Alisha laughed. “It’s not really my particular interest,” I explained, “It’s so ridiculously melodramatic.” “What sort of literature do you like better?” inquired Esther. “Anglo-Saxon.” “Oh. Do you like ‘Beowulf’?” asked Alisha, making a face. I tried to explain “The Seafarer” to her as something she might like better, with its theme of finding peace in God. Jenny sat down with us. She twisted her ankle last Sabbath playing basketball, and now it’s swollen twice as big as it should be. She refuses to put any ice on it, though. She sat and laughed with Alisha and Esther about Art and Coffee (RUF talent night) this weekend. She, Spencer, and the two Davids are doing a dance together that (apparently) is supposed to look really weird and really funny.

After supper, I read Christina and Dante Gabriel Rosetti for MBW. A.C. knocked on my door and bounced in right before I had to leave for Bible study. We sat and chatted for a little while, nevertheless. She talked about her project, and about how few friends she’s had—only two, in her whole life. One of them was a Japanese-Swedish girl at her boarding school in Sweden; the other is a girl on the golf team here. As we parted, she said she’d stop by later—she wanted to hear me read one of my poems.

Downstairs in the lobby, I found Jenny, Rachel, Stephanie, Syneva, and Kathryn sitting and laughing and talking. Jenny was giving them a demonstration of her dance, and when she’d finished, she romped off to the lobby, where one of her friends was listening to air-headed rock from the 1980s and hopping around energetically. Their slaphappy contortions fit the happy-go-lucky, pie-in-the-sky music, with its jingling synthesizer and breathless vocals. (I’m not sure I would call what they were doing dancing per se.) I watched them through the door, laughing silently as they wiggled their hands in the air and jigged about. “C’mon, E--, you know you want to dance!” Jenny called. “Yeah, I want to dance, but not like that,” I laughed back. I sat by Kathryn and Rachel on the bench in front of Mrs. Lottie Jane’s portrait, and asked Kathryn about her home in Houston. Kathryn a small girl with glossy, wavy dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin, and a petite turn of speech—whenever she speaks, she curls her lips, like a kitten’s. Her mother is a church secretary; her father is a personal resources manager for a company. She said that when she moved up here, the pace of life was very different, and it’s taken her awhile to get used to it. She told us that, in the airports here, everyone is really nice and unassuming, laid-back, friendly. There’s hardly anyone in the airport, and the people who are in the airport don’t seem to be going anywhere in a hurry. In Houston, by contrast, the airports are full of people rushing to and fro at great speed, trying frantically to get where they’re going.

Syneva led the study tonight. Before the study, Syneva asked us all if we’d been watching the Olympics. A few of us had, though most of us, like typical college students, are pretty oblivious of what’s going on in the outside world. Jenny asked questions about curling, which she’d never heard of before. “I saw them pushing this thing over the floor, and I thought they were just cleaning the ice!” Anne said. “Yeah. It’s definitely not an American sport—no contact. It wouldn’t go over very well in a country where people like to hit each other whenever they play sports,” Jenny commented.

After Bible study, I showered. Once again, I was writing in my journal when A.C. interrupted me. She was in her blue fuzzy bathrobe, and said she’d just come by to say good-night. But she really wanted to hear a poem. So I invited her in, and she sat down, resting her head on her elbows. I scanned my files and finally settled on “Psyche Before the Gods”. I performed it as best I could, though, since I was reading from the computer screen, I couldn’t face her directly, and so some of the impact of the poem was lost. When I had finished, she smiled at me sleepily, and said, “It’s good.” She sat and stared at the poem on the computer screen for a long time. The room was silent. I rocked gently in my chair, wondering what she was thinking of it all. Finally, she sat up. “Sometimes things can inspire us so much that they become works of art,” she said. I looked puzzled. She paused. “I can’t believe how much you believe in this. I don’t understand,” she said at last. “Well, I don’t do anything. He works in me. I didn’t choose Him. He chose me,” I replied quietly. She nodded drearily and went back to staring at the poem. “It’s really good,” she said finally, and then invited me over to her room to read a paragraph she’d written. If she was a modern writer, she’d probably call it a prose poem. I read it over her shoulder on her laptop. It was titled “Oblivion”, and sounded cold, hard, and desolate. The imagery was all brittle, vividly surreal, reminding me of Picasso and Dadaists. Then, jokingly, she flinched aside from the exposure of her writing and showed me some poetry about golf that she’d found on the internet, by Andrew Lang. She read some of it out loud in a humorous, mock-Scottish accent, substituting the Spanish rolled “r” for the Scottish burr.

She hugged me good-night. I returned to my room for devotions and bed.

old books, blackberries, and basketball

Now Playing: (how did you know?) "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" soundtrack by Harry Gregson-Williams. Track 1, "The Blitz, 1940". Yes, I do listen to other music--lots of other music! Yesterday it was all three LOTR soundtracks and Beethoven's 3rd symphony.

My mother seems to think I'm getting bored with this blog. I'm not. It's just been a dreadfully busy week. Midterms are coming up, so I've got lots of studying to do, papers to write, etc.

Yesterday I ate breakfast with Rachel. She's been reading a book written by an economist who thinks that private property began in tribal societies with wars over women: one tribe would steal the other tribe's women, and so on, and whoever had the most women was the most courageous. Gradually it became not only the women but also the things they made. She and I both thought this was rather ridiculous. Her economics professor believes that people should stop working to let technology do the job, and that there should be a redistribution of wealth--another rather peculiar proposition, as it leaves out a great deal of understanding of human nature (our desire to work as being a good thing; our greed).

This morning in MBW we went on a "field trip" to the top of the library to visit Special Collections. The Special Collections head is a plump, sleepy man who has pale blue eyes behind thick glasses, and a stringy salt-and-pepper ponytail. He briefly walked us through the collections on display in the reading room. He asked us if we had any questions, sighing noisily when we didn't. I finally plucked up courage to ask about finding the book-of-hours I'd seen last semester in MBW when Dr. S brought us up here. I could feel the other five students (out of a class of 22, only 6 people showed up!) groaning with impatience as the little man walked me through the computer system--it was actually quite helpful for finding rare books for which I don't remember the titles. He asked me if I wanted to see it. I just grinned and blushed sheepishly. "You sure?" he asked, blinking like a hedgehog behind his glasses.

In archaeology, the professor marched in with his textbook in hand. "Do you all want a quiz?" he asked the class. "No!" everyone said. "Ok! We won't have one! See, this is a democratic class," he replied, and everyone laughed.

After archaeology, I hurried back to my dorm, packed up, and dashed down to meet my mother who came to pick me up just after eleven o'clock. On the way home we passed some horrible burned places where the black was like sickening leprosy under scorched grass. As we pulled into the driveway at home, Brother2 was shooting baskets. He grinned at me as I made faces at him through the car window. We were home in time for lunch.

After lunch, Daisy and my mother went to their Irish dance class. I stayed home to finish writing journal entries and to work on the Honors project. Daisy left directly after dance class to drive down to Oklahoma City for a basketball game. She rode with a family on the team. The rest of us waited to go down to the game until my father finished his committee meeting, which ran until five thirty. We made our suppers, then picked him up on campus. As we drove out of town, I saw half-a-dozen deer grazing on the edge of a field, like puffs of goldenrod pollen caught in blue evening shadow.

We listened to the "Two Towers" soundtrack on the drive as we ate our supper in the car. I munched a chewy bagel, spread thickly with crunch-sweet blackberry jam. We arrived at the gym in time for the second half of the girls' basketball game. My father sat next to me and excitedly watched the game, sometimes shouting directions to the girls. He winced when Meri took a long jump shot, but she made it. Our girls' team won, 37-33.

After the girls' game, Meri sat beside me on the bleachers. We talked all through the boys' game about our small affairs: the car wreck Meri was in this week, our school, professors, "Cinderella Man", Charles Dickens, Dorothy Sayers. Meri described giving blood today, and I told her about the time when Danielle tried to give blood but got horribly bruised because for some reason they couldn't get anything out of her though she tried desperately. Meri said that her English composition teacher told their class not to read poetry because "it will turn your brain to mush". I laughed at that. "If you read the sort of poetry he's probably thinking of, it would!" and I complained about the Romantics.

We watched the game, cheering Josh and David and Brother1 on. Brother1 grabbed a steal and made a great lay-up. Meri squealed, "Yay! He's my brother!" then looked at me, and we both giggled. Our boys' team won, 57-34.

On the drive home, we listened to one of the new "Father Gilbert" mysteries. All of us except Brother1 showered and went to bed. Brother1 managed to convince my father to let him go out and work on a robot that he's preparing for a competition. He was gone till about one o'clock in the morning.

various terse ramblings

Now Playing: "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" soundtrack by Harry Gregson-Williams. Track 15, "Wunderkind".

This is an edited journal entry. It's late--hence the brief language. Well, it seems brief to me, but when I actually sit down and look at the length of this thing, it's not. *groan* My fingers just keep dancing, like children to the Pied Piper.

If things are unclear, that's because I should have been either in bed or studying by now. Ask any questions you like.

As I settled in to practice my flute this morning after breakfast, Syneva came by and knocked on the practice-room door. We chatted for a little. She told me that Amanda had called her this morning, and that they’d had a good talk. Amanda is studying abroad in Spain this semester. Both Amanda’s “house mother”, her hostess, and her roommate are Catholic, which makes for some strange situations: her roommate sleeps with a rosary clutched in one hand.

I had MBW at 9:00 as usual. Dr. F was on a trip, so a substitute taught the class—Wuthering Heights. Next came archaeology, more site formation processes and discussion of the effect that wind and water have on artifacts. After archaeology, I sat in my room and furiously read Wuthering Heightsuntil 11:45, when I dashed downstairs to meet Mrs. L (she's a brisk little Chinese woman who has asked me to tutor her daughter Karis). She arrived at the Lottie parking lot in her long, maroon, fifteen-passenger van, to take me to her house for lunch and to give Karis a first lesson in poetry. She had all her children with her: Karis, the eldest, who’s twelve; Joshua and Thaddeus (I think those names are correct) who are young boys, probably eight or so—very lively; Hannah, a little girl who’s perhaps five or six, and Benjamin, the two-year-old.

The children all ogled me from the back seats and then, deciding almost immediately that I was not a threat, began to chatter, argue, giggle, etc. Mrs. L told me all about her extended family as we drove south through Tulsa to their neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. We passed through dense areas of businesses, restaurants, and hospitals. Traffic was thick. Finally, we pulled up over a steep hill and saw a deep, narrow valley, with another hill blue on the other side. Elegant houses lined both sides of the road, sheltering comfortably under grey trees. The Ls’ house is one of these—an older house, large, one story, with big windows. Joshua and Thaddeus found a good deal to tell me as we trooped inside. Hannah burbled quietly about her coat and her boots while Karis helped her to take them off. In the kitchen, I helped Mrs. L serve gigantic helpings of rice and split-pea soup into enormous bowls. Her father, a wizened Chinese man, stepped out of one of the back rooms to greet me and beam at me through thick glasses. All the children, Mrs. L, and myself sat down together to lunch. The boys brought out chips and eagerly suggested that I use them instead of my spoon. They chattered, tongues rushing over one another, about Narnia and LOTR, and all the books and toys they had related to these two. They prattled at me about their swords and bows-and-arrows, and asked me all sorts of questions about whether I thought balrogs or Moria to be frightening (they staunchly declared that such things weren’t scary at all). Karis listened and smiled at me occasionally, while Hannah occasionally lisped a corroboration to the boys’ tales through thick mouthfuls of soup. Benjamin stared at me between spoonfuls of soup that his mother poked into his plump mouth.

After lunch, Karis showed me the four anthologies that Mrs. L bought for me to use with her. Karis and I sat down in the living room under the skylight and started our lesson. I used the Grammar of Poetry book that my mother had given me to work through years ago. It turned out, as a pleasant surprise, that Karis is actually a good deal farther along than I had expected. She has a pretty firm grasp of rhyme, and understands such things as rhyme and meter. The trick will be to move her beyond mere understanding to get her to really use them—and I myself am not sure of that lesson, or of how I even began to understand it in my own writing. But I do know that reading good authors helps. I asked her if she’d like me to loan her some of my anthologies. She eagerly said, “Yes, please!”. I felt as though the first lesson must’ve seemed dull and scatter-brained to her.

Occasionally during the lesson the boys would peer in or hover around us. The children’s pet boa constrictor slumbered in its aquarium under a heat lamp on the bookshelf. Mrs. L was anxious that I return to campus on time, so we ended at 1:30 after barely half-an-hour of teaching. Karis and Hannah rode with us back to campus. Mrs. L dropped me off, and I walked straight over to Honors class. In Honors, we discussed the Rule of St. Benedict. Dr. A asked us what sorts of communities we’re considering. Russ described a community of soccer-playing monks who would honor God and witness through being good sports and excellent athletes. He couldn’t think of the word “witness”, and when Rachel supplied it for him, he leaped out of his chair and yelled, “YES!! That’s it! WITNESS!” so that she jumped back in surprise, and everyone laughed. Someone suggested that they play soccer in robes and cowls.

After class, I finished Wuthering Heights and also the second read-through of the Rule, in which we were supposed to look for personal/spiritual guidance for the monks (as opposed to the practical, every-day details from the first time through). My mind felt like a piece of mouldy bread. So I stretched and walked down the hall, to go out to the gym and run. On my way, Jenny called me into her room. She and Tara were looking at pictures from the RUF formal, and at a short digital video that someone had taken of the Virginia Reel. I stood and laughed with them at the pictures for awhile. They went to supper, and I ran. After I ran, I ate supper.

After supper, I came back to my room and thrashed out which poems I should send off to yet another small college magazine (at another college) for publication. One of my former teachesr in poetry gave this magazine my name. The editor-in-chief e-mailed me, soliciting submissions, so I sent her “Rain On the Day Before Communion Sabbath”, “Latin Tutorial at Sarah’s House”, and “Medicine Park, Oklahoma”. I have a deep dislike for all of them, except “Rain On…”. I kept scouring my files for something that was acceptable to publish (besides “Psyche”, which I’ve already sent to “Stylus”), and coming up with nothing. If I were to become a nun, my first resolution would be to give up showing people any poetry.

Bible study at 8:00 p.m. For a little, I was the only one in the lobby, so I amused myself by drawing sketches in my old journal. Then Crystal came in with a girl named Stephanie. Stephanie is a slim girl with close-set eyes behind narrow glasses, and a white face with pink lips. She and Crystal sat and chattered happily for awhile. Eleanor, James’s girlfriend, came, too. Eleanor is short, with brown hair and tanned skin. She laughs a lot—somehow, the name Eleanor fits her from LOTR, and is proper to James, for he likes LOTR, too. Rachel came, and so did Anne. Rachel told me about the paper she’s writing for biology class about pomegranates. Syneva arrived and stared at us all in surprise for a minute.

We had a good study, about Galatians 2:11-21. Anne made popcorn, and everyone munched it happily, leaving flakes of it on the floor like yellow pollen. Jenny wasn’t there because she had a meeting. After the Bible study, I walked Rachel out. She described to me the Honors House/LaFortune Hall dinner that she’d gone to tonight. They’d invited a speaker, a professor in psychology, to come after the meal and talk to them about romance in the workplace. Rachel said that it was entertaining, if rather strange. She sat at the table with all the other Honors House people. “Oh, the zoo,” I quipped, and she smiled slowly. It was cold outside, so we didn’t talk for very long. “I’m still trying to get used to the fact that it’s actually winter,” Rachel chuckled as she waved good-bye.

Now it's time for devotions and bed.

Violin's Four Things Game

Now Playing: "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" soundtrack by Howard Shore. Track 10, "Anduril". SwanElf has written a gorgeous poem about this track. Go to the War of the Ring website in the links, and click on "FanFic". Go to the first Elvellon account if you want to read it (or just ask me for a copy).

Four Jobs I Have Had
- babysitter
- petsitter
- secretary/internet sleuth (for Mr. Y)
- leaf-raker

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over
- the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy
- "The Village"
- "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"
- "Chariots of Fire"

Four Books I Could (and Have) Read Over and Over
- the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy (who would've guessed?! :)
- the "Chronicles of Narnia"
- "The Shining Company"
- "Til We Have Faces"

Four Places I Have Lived
- Stillwater
- Sweden
- Tulsa
- ....

Four TV Shows I Watch
- Three Stooges
- Beverly Hillbillies doesn't count because I only watch it under duress! :)
- nope
- not a chance

Four Places I Have Been On Vacation
- Michigan
- Colorado
- California
- Texas

Four Websites I Visit Daily
- blogs
- Weather Underground
- WebCT (not quite daily, but close enough since I have a couple of classes with required discussion groups on the internet)
- ....

Four Favorite Foods
- golden delicious apples
- artichokes
- mushrooms
- bell peppers

Four Places I'd Like To Be Right Now
- home
- Horn Creek
- San Antonio
- British Isles

Four Bloggers I'm Tagging Who Must Now Play This Game
- Daisy
- Princess
- Shadow
- Stupendous Man

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.

a surprise....

White rabbit, everyone!

:)

"It never rains but it pours!"

Now Playing: "Wings of Song", by James Galway.

A couple of housekeeping notes: In case you didn't notice, I just put up two more new posts under this one. One of them says it was written on Saturday, but it wasn't--that is, I started it on Saturday and posted it tonight. Also, thank you all for your copious comments on that last post! It's been a delight to read them.

And now, on to some "News", as Bilbo would say.

Last week was rather miserable, to be quite honest, and this week hasn't started out much better. Instead of giving you a summary of the whole drab week, I'll tell you about last Thursday, which was probably the best day.

This is practically my long, rambly, and pieced-together journal entry. Some of the day is retold in present tense.


I spilled apple juice all over my breakfast this morning. During breakfast, I tried to memorize definitions for an archaeology quiz, but the berries they served this morning made me think of home, and after breakfast, I "wasted" half an hour writing a poem about it. I practiced my flute until my lesson, which went fairly well. We actually reached the top of the third page of the Poulenc--I've been practicing all of it for nearly a year now, but my teacher hasn't had a chance to hear all of it, and ever since I've been studying with him, we've been stuck on the first page.

After Romantic British Literature, Tara and I picked up Alisha for lunch. Alisha wanted to see my scrapbook, so I showed it to her. During lunch, we talked about housing and SYR, the annual girls' dorm dance. I ate tacos while Alisha tried to eat fried chicken with spinach cheese sauce (under the elegant name "chicken florentine" on the cafeteria menu board). After picking at it, she gave up in disgust. "It's just not natural," she complained. SYR this year is a masquerade, and tonight my dorm is hosting a pizza supper with a mask-making party to follow. Since Tara had to go to a lecture tonight, I offered to make a mask for her.

I spent the afternoon studying. A.C. stopped by and tried to be cheerful by juggling a pair of oranges. She's quite sick. Various people were at the supper this evening in the lobby of my dorm. After most of the people had finished eating, a short, tight-knit girl with spiky blond hair organized people to make masks. She gave everyone plain, white, plastic masks to decorate. After eating pizza, I made a mask for Tara. There were plain, white, plastic masks to decorate. I slowly chose faux feathers to glue at the brow of the mask—light blue, aqua, and black, in a fuzzy plume. I glued blue sequins on over the eyes, and black sequins over the cheeks (the mask was a half-mask), and a silver rhinestone between the eyes. Hopefully, Tara will like it.

At 6:45, I left to meet Syneva, Alisha, Jenny H., and Asher. Syneva and Alisha play in the local semi-professional orchestra. They had a concert tonight, and the three of us went to hear them.

The concert hall is a lovely building, in the Art Noveau style. Jenny and I took seats in front of Asher on the right side, fairly close to the orchestra. Jenny told me to poke her if she fell asleep. She'd confessed in the car to Alisha and me that she's been staying up far too late, chatting with her friends in the dorm.

The concert introduced itself with a silly little tribute to Mozart's 250th birthday, a combination of "Happy Birthday" and the opening of one of his symphonies.

The orchestra began with Beethoven's "Leonore" Overture. Then came Schumann's cello concerto, played by a young Russian man with a smooth face, dark hair. He swayed to and fro as though dancing the tango with his instrument. His cello had a very sweet sound, shy, like his smile when he stood up to acknowledge the audience's applause.

During intermission, Jenny bought a package of rainbow Skittles. She sucked the pink ones, the citrus smell lingering on the air around her. Three rambunctious, scruffy young boys joked bawdily about their pranks and dashed up and down the aisle, while their father, a big man in a grey suit, with a Tigger tie and a long ponytail, ignored them.

After intermission, the orchestra performed "Fountains of Rome" and "Pines of Rome", both by Respighi. They're both lovely pieces. "Fountains" is full of trickling harps, reminding me of water flicking onto warm marble. At one point, the orchestra plays a fountain that is sculpted with Poseidon and various sea-horses. Trampling cellos, like stallions, leaped above the violins and the organ. "Pines of Rome" began with children's games, then moved to a row of pine trees near a cemetery. A trumpet solo played a reequiem to break your heart, while violas swelled like thin wind. A huge gong growled as though the grave had opened, and a dead Caesar had stepped out, with black gashes for eyes, like the holes in Agamemnon's gold burial mask. The piece finished with the Appian Way, the old legionary road into Rome. A second trumpet section played from the balcony behind us. The noise was overpowering: like pounding feet, and sun blazing on bronze armor, and the taut, tense faces under red-crested helmets. The weight of the music was immense. The conductor's baton wavered furiously, like a pennant in a hot wind.

Before the last triumphant chord, like the clash of spears on shields, had died away, the audience was cheering and clapping. Asher remarked, cynically, later that “If you play loud enough, they’ll applaud.” This last movement was supposedly called, by Leonard Bernstein, the loudest orchestral piece ever written.

The three girls were in a “warm” mood after the concert, though as we walked through the parking lot to the car, I bounced a few jig steps to keep myself warm. The parking lot was crowded, the narrow capillary roads around it congested with cars. As we pulled out, another car beside us, a “Park Avenue”, began to back up when we were still behind it. I glanced at it nervously, and Syneva honked her horn insistently until the car stopped backing up. “Old people,” she sighed. Jenny shared the last of her Skittles with Alisha and Syneva, pouring glinting, sticky beads into their palms. “Do you have anymore?” Syneva asked when her own tangy-sweet mouthful was finished. “No… oh, wait!” Jenny prodded around in her purse and came up with two more Skittles, which Syneva sucked.

On the drive back to campus, Jenny fell asleep with her head on Alisha’s shoulder, while Syneva and Asher discussed their cello quartet—trying to find two other players, and coming up with parts. Bright lights glided past in the luminous darkness—red hotel signs, blue Budweiser advertisements, white-toothed models posing for clothing stores or hospitals or car agencies. Syneva dropped us off in the parking lot. Alisha and I scurried inside our dorm, while Asher and Jenny strolled off to their dorm.

debate

Now Playing: "Wings of Song", by James Galway. Track 8, "Casta Diva", by Bellini. As far as I'm concerned, this CD isn't much good, except for the first track and the last track. Galway seems to like to play fluffy flute music instead of the real stuff, which is rather sad, since we could use a "real" flutist. He does have a pretty tone, though.

Last Monday, Rachel, Russ, Nicole, and I had a discussion about the Christian's capacity to sin. The four of us are in Honors class together, and we've been reading Augustine's Confessions (to give you some background). I took notes on the "argument"--here they are, as best as I can reconstruct them. Basically, in summary, Russ says that it is possible for a Christian never to sin, while Nicole says that it's not possible for a Christian never to sin at all.

Russ: Romans 6, especially verse 7. Romans 7:5-6. Galatians 2:20, 2 Corinthians 5:17. Non-Christians sin constantly, willingly. All good acts are for bad motives for the non-Christian. However, after our conversion it isn't our nature to sin. Your Christian identity is completely changed. We still sin because of old habits and our human bodies. Christ could sin but chose not to. We have the power within us not to sin, but we never tap into it.

Nicole: 1 John 1:5-10, 2:1-2. 1 Timothy 1:15. Paul is the "chief of sinners". Romans 7:13-25. After a person becomes a Christian, he can still sin.

Russ: Romans 7 speaks of non-Christian experience, not Christian experience.

Nicole: These verses are in the present tense. Christians don't yet fulfill the Law. They've been justified, not completely sanctified. Christ dwells in the Christian, and so does sin, the "already but not yet". [Yes, she used that phrase! :)] Romans 7:14, the Christian is carnal, still able to sin.

Russ: If the material world was stripped away, Christians would be sinless. Thought-sins are sins of habit. Temptation latches onto our memory.

Rachel: Even if we escaped our bodies, we'd still sin. If you think of sin, you commit that sin. Even mind alone, cleansed of "habit", will sin.

Russ had to leave at this point, but Nicole looked up the word for "sin" in her Strong's Concordance. It turns out that there are two words for "sin" in Greek: "Homartia", which is used to name original sin. It's the fatal flaw, hubris, man's pride. "Hamartano" means literally, "To miss the mark and thus not share in the prize." Nicole took it to mean the act of sin. "Hamartano" is used in 1 John 3:4.

I'm not sure where I'd fall in this debate. It seems to me that Russ is arguing for a simultaneous justification/sanctification, while Nicole (who, incidentally, is a five-point Calvinist but goes to an Anglican church) is arguing for one-time justification and gradual sanctification. If that's the case, then I'd support Nicole. However, I'm not sure that's exactly what they're saying. If anyone has input on this, I'd appreciate it. Is it possible for a person, after he's become a Christian, never to sin?

Random question: What is a "six-point" Calvinist?

explanatory pictures

Now Playing: The end of the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor, one of the most impressive recordings ever made: Emil Gilels on piano, with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic--a live performance, quite stirring.

And now on to Tchaikovsky's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major, with David Oistrakh and Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. As a note, this particular CD is "out of print", and once when I checked on Amazon, the only copy was thirty dollars, a CD from someone's "private collection". It was such a delightful surprise to check back later and discover that some obscure used-CD seller had a couple of cheaper copies for us "plebeians" to buy.

Marigold requested that I give her some explanations of the RUF formal photos from back in December. I thought I'd give you all four of them with some of the "main characters" in them, as references. Rachel's picture isn't in here since you all (or most of you at least) already know her.

You'll have to pardon the weird lay-out. For some reason, the picture-download-er doesn't like me. *grins*


Jenny and Tara (a rather bad picture--most of these pictures aren't too good because of the flash and weird angles)












Esther and Amanda













Syneva and Amanda














"Big" Jenny and "little" Jenny (Jenny H.), with two random boys (Austin and Jason), who leaped into the picture to be goofy the way Brother1 and Sam do occasionally.

"Gone paper-writing"

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

I have a paper due next Wednesday for Honors class, and I haven't had much chance to work on it. There are enough things going on that I often can't get any work done either in the evenings or the afternoons, which is rather discouraging. So I probably will be using just about every spare moment to work on it--and that means I most likely won't post on here either until the weekend or until it's been turned in. Though I can say that when I do post on here (or the other blog), I have some interesting questions and debates to record for ya'lls' reading pleasure. *grins*

SOMEONE, HELP!!!!

Ok, so I'm sitting quietly at my desk, minding my own business and listening to the "Master and Commander" soundtrack. Yo-Yo Ma is playing his Bach cello variations. It's all fine and dandy.

Until....

A sinister presence manifests itself! I hear something that sounds rather like a lion roaring in the stereo--or maybe only static.

But it's not static!

Playing over and above the cello I hear the "Narnia Lullaby" from "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" soundtrack. Creepy, creepy--I lent the soundtrack to Marigold; I don't have it with me, and neither is it saved on my computer. The "Narnia Lullaby" plays through over the cello variations, and then starts over again! As the cello comes to a climax, so does the "Lullaby". I hurriedly switch off the CD and close Windows Media Player. But the "Lullaby" (which now has me shaking like a feverish child) plays on.... and on... and on... repeating itself, endlessly.

I finally resort to turning my speakers off, and that puts an end to the queer experience.

There has to be a reasonable explanation for this. The CD isn't even in my possession, though, nor (as I've already said) are any of the tracks saved on my computer. What's happening here?

Explanations... suggestions... comments... ??

Moyse, Wordsworth, bricks, Leo, and Escher

Now Playing: "The Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd-Weber. Disc 2, Track 3, "Journey to the Cemetery". (courtesy of the Gamgees--thanks!) I love this track--it starts out with that desperate, sad, passionate theme for Raoul, then moves to Christine singing purely, simply, and at last opens up to a Gothic climax as you see the creepy, snowy cemetery with Christine's carriage and its spectre of a driver. Enough to give you shivers, dying away with the dismal tolling of distant church bells.

Let's see....

Rachel and I ate breakfast together this morning. We talked about the book by "Catullus" which made me so mad. It had angered her, as well, though we could both agree that later chapters were interesting, with their discussion of creativity in relation to the mind and also in relation to Greek myths about Apollo and Delphi (it was that first chapter that was incredibly offensive).

I practiced my flute after breakfast: chromatic scales, then long tones, working largely on trying to achieve a good pianissimo that doesn't sound pinched. It may appear easy, but it's really quite difficult to convince the flute to produce a soft sound without squeaking as though the flute had been transformed into a mouse. Scales came next, and some phrasing exercises which Dr. Gr assigned for studio class this Saturday, by Marcel Moyse. Moyse was one of the "fathers of the modern flute"--he was one of the first flutists to be a soloist, instead of simply playing in an ensemble. He fled France for America during World War II. After exercises came the Karg-Elert etude Dr. Gr assigned me at the end of last semester. For some reason, he's never had time to hear it, so (I think) I've actually had time to get it to sound decent. Finally, I practiced the first movement of the Poulenc sonata, which is also progressing. There are still a couple of spots where a phrase ends on a high eighth note, a note that should be sweet, like the flick of a cardinal's wing--somehow, though, I always manage to crack those notes. Also, the piece has a repeated theme that runs throughout. The first note of the theme is high E, an unstable note on the flute, and I have difficulty maintaining that note, even for a brief time, so that it rings, without falling flat. And, of course, there are the inevitable trills and double-tonguing spots that are tricky. My double-tonguing has been rightly accused of sounding like a machine gun, when it should be more like a ballerina floating around on pointe--which may give you an idea of how far I've progressed on that. *sigh*

I spent the hour-and-forty-five minutes until RBL reading Wordsworth and Coleridge and sending e-mails to people.

To start class today, Dr. A, the professor of RBL, asked if anyone had any questions from last time. There was a dead silence. "No questions?" she asked, throatily, looking around and blinking cheerfully, as she always does. I couldn't help remembering my nagging question of the entire Romantic philosophy, and, more out of impertinence than anything else, raised my hand. "Yes, Evelyn?" Dr. A said. "Well, I'm not sure I understand this Romantic idea that they could find fulfillment in incompleteness. That doesn't make sense to me. How could they be content with imperfection, with seeing the journey as the goal and not having a real goal?" I asked. Of course, the answer was quite plain to me: they were fallen, and rejected God, and looked in every other place they possibly could to find something to shield themselves from Him. But Dr. A said, "Well, I guess that's one of the paradoxes of the movement. They just did." She motioned to another student, a Philosophy major, as it turned out, and the Philosophy major proceeded to give a homily on the excitement of the search for Truth as better than Truth itself. "There's the search for Truth, and there's Truth. You can't do anything with Truth--it's just there. But the search for Truth--ah, now that's much more interesting," she said. I growled inwardly, but outwardly smiled as placidly as I could (though I couldn't get rid of the little perplexed frown), and just let the professor take over with her lecture.

Next came the First Seminar class, what I've been calling an "orientation" class. It's the class I had to read "Catullus"'s book for. Dr. A kindly let us out fifteen minutes early, so I had time to dash over to the cafeteria and pick up some lunch to eat in the classroom. The cafeteria had thick chicken-and-dumpling soup today, which was so heavy with flour and meat and celery that I could spoon it into my little foam "doggie bag" and carry it off without much trouble.

Rachel and I were the first ones to enter the classroom. Some previous class had obviously done exercises in desk art: many of the desks were covered with bright, color pen illustrations (some of them not very pleasant). The one I liked best was the portrait of a blond-headed boy, done in vivid reds and golds and purples, staring straight out of the desk with a little serious smile on his face. I hurriedly slurped down my soup, but not in time to finish before the professor entered.

Today the professor gave us an in-class project. He had asked one of the boys in the class to bring two bricks to class. The professor, Dr. T, then passed the bricks around to everyone. He invited us to make notes on its weight, size, color, shape, smell, taste ("Only don't gnaw on it!") in our sketchbooks (we're not allowed to use notebooks because we "might write on the lines" *shocks and horrors!* *cough*). Then he told us to make conceptual drawings of how we might support the brick on two pieces of paper. Some people had interesting ideas: folding the paper into accordion folds, or rolling it into cylinders. Once he'd heard our ideas, he gave us a little speech on "not being judgmental" and on "thinking way, way outside the Newtonian box" and on how we should not "take the world at its worth" but "always think of things differently". So he told us to come up with more ideas, ideas without limitation. Some of them were pretty nutty, I'll tell you: throwing the brick into outer space, or having aliens suspend it in their transporter beam (that was mine, with a laugh and a nod to Henry's "Star Trek" episodes), or simply telling it that it didn't exist.

Once we'd been through all this, Dr. T gave us a break, in which Rachel and I finished our lunches. I had a pecan-and-chocolate-chip cookie to finish--it was good. After the break (at two o'clock or so--this class runs from 12:30 to 3:15), he told us to use our ideas and support the brick on two pieces of paper. He divided the fifteen people in the class into two groups. My group sat around, pondering the possibilities, and hefting our brick, while bits of the fashionable "distressing" mortar on it flaked off in our hands (you know how people like to make their houses and clothes look older than they are--well, these bricks had had whitish-green mortar daubed onto them to make them look used). The other team rolled one of its pieces of paper into a lengthwise cylinder and managed to balance their brick on its end on top of the cylinder so that, in the end, the top of the brick was about eighteen inches or so in the air. We glanced over at them in despair, but continued to fiddle with our paper until we figured out that our brick was made lopsided so that, no matter how many balancing acts we attempted, we could never get it to stay positioned without the paper buckling.

Next, Dr. T gave us this assignment. He split us up into groups of four (Rachel and myself were one group of three, with a young man). Two people were supposed to talk, while the other practiced taking "organic" notes (cluster notes, like the highschool writing techniques book my mother used on us taught). Rachel and I talked about our papers while the young man took notes. She told me that Dr. G has been working with her to revise her final paper from last semester. Then the young man and I tried to talk. He was a very taciturn, unwilling personage. I managed to get him to tell me that he's a Psychology major who has lived in New York. He doesn't much like the pace of life "out here" because it's so "slow and conservative". I asked him what drew him to Psychology, and he said that he thought it was important to understand the human mind, which (he said) is the highest thing there is. "Oh, so you think that there isn't anything beyond what the human mind can perceive?" I asked. "No," he said. I was all set to start pressing him, but then recollected and told myself that this was a bad place and time to start arguing with someone. I must admit that I was rather intimidated by the young man, who was about three times my size and about as communicative as a sleepy elephant who's being pestered by a young parakeet.

When class ended, Dr. T assigned us each to watch thirty minutes of TV (or a movie) this week, and to take "organic" notes on it. I was in despair (despite the fact that he kept making sly, jolly comments about how easy it would be), since I have no TV and no desire to watch TV. However, the movie option is much more welcoming. With a glint of mischief, I thought of trying to take "organic" notes on a "Three Stooges" episode, but I think Rachel and I may end up borrowing one of Syneva's DVDs and watching that together, or something.

After class, Rachel and I walked outside and laughed. I flung my arms out in gladness to be outside. The gloomy clouds which had persisted this morning had blown over, giving way to a gloriously luminous sky, living blue behind the trees--like a sheet of rippling blue glass, with golden light glowing behind it.

Rachel and I walked back to the Honors House together. She told me about the paper she's been working on. Dr. G has gotten her to think of it more as a speech than a paper, which has changed some of her stylistic problems. In the Honors House, she showed me the common room (there was no one hanging out in it, as usual, so we were safe). On one wall was a mural depicting jumbled scenes: Athena standing under a tree, a city built of towers shaped like fountain-pen nibs, Greek helmets, a dark sky, and the words, "Leo is here", in reference to the ghost that supposedly haunts the Honors House. Here's the tale: Before the building became the Honors House, it was a fraternity (it is, after all on frat row). One night, some of the fraternity boys were playing around and they put Leo, one of their pals, between a couple of mattresses. They started to jump up and down, horseplaying, and in the midst of their merriment, they accidentally broke Leo's back, thereby killing him. The fraternity lost its commission, and the building was renovated so that it could be the Honors House. But it's said that the ghost of Leo still haunts the Honors House--supposedly, he was killed in the very room where Rachel lives.

As we looked around the common room, I noticed a shining grand piano standing in one corner, with a dusty green drumset scattered underneath it. "That doesn't work," Rachel informed me, "but that one does," gesturing to a battered upright propped against the opposite wall. "Is that a hymn book?" I asked, spotting a worn red hymnal perched on the music shelf of the upright. "Yes, but I've never heard them play hymns. I think it's just useful to hold up other music," Rachel said. "That's right--everyone supports their ideas by Christianity, but they never speak about it," I growled. She glanced at me in surprise.

She invited me upstairs and loaned me a copy of C.S. Lewis's Miracles. We stood talking about Lewis for a little while--how, though we don't always agree with him, he's still useful and thought-provoking. I looked at the Escher sketches on her walls till they made me laugh and cross my eyes, and she told me a story that someone had written about a pair of characters that go into one of Escher's drawings--rather like an Alice in Wonderland adventure. It's a drawing of a bunch of lizards that slither up over a stack of books and down into a piece of paper with geometric designs resembling their two-dimensional outlines, and then they slither back out of the two-dimensional design and into the third dimension.

I spent the afternoon rereading Wordsworth for RBL and e-mailing people. I ran in the gym. There were lots of interesting people to watch, which was rather distracting. One chap loped past me who was white as a peeled switch, even to his shaved head. Another hairy young man sprinted past, huffing and puffing like a jet warming up on the tarmac. A couple of girls flounced past, their ponytails wagging, giggling in whispers and tossing slant-eyed glances at everyone. A very tall, muscular man and a very short, thin young boy walked side-by-side. I showered after. Ate a late supper, though not alone--Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimil were busy talking on the slag heap outside Isengard, discussing their adventures from The Two Towers.

And now it's "Uranus, the Magician" from Holst's "The Planets"--romping, unpredictable, as though all the magician's spells and spirits had escaped from his tomes and coffers and test tubes to go frolicking and romping around his lair.

Off to RUF.

a couple of small things....

Here are two personality quizzes. The first is on Marigold's blog, for "which of the four Pevensies are you?".

I got Peter Pevensie!

The second is at www.narniaweb.com, a test for all the characters in the books. You'll have to look around for it a little, but it's there on the sidebar.

I got Mr. Tumnus (with Lucy and Puddleglum close behind--when I took this quiz last, I got Puddleglum).

home sweet home

Now Playing: "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" soundtrack by Harry Gregson-Williams. Track 3, "The Wardrobe".

This past week has been a great deal of reading: I finished Pride and Prejudice in a week and read about a score of Romantic poems, which were all by Wordsworth, except "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". To make matters worse, the professor assigned us to read each poem twice. That makes sense, since it is poetry and sometimes rather obscure, but it also makes the process twice as long. By the end of this week, my brain is all screwed up--I think like Jane Austen, and am tempted to eulogize nature like Wordsworth. Which is frustrating, since I don't much like either author!

During MBW class Friday morning, we started "Bride and Prejudice", the Indian movie version of Pride and Prejudice. It's gaudily colorful, flagrant, happy-go-lucky, full of lush characters and settings. I enjoyed it for the most part, except for a couple of scenes which (in my opinion) should've been skipped. Archaeology, which came after MBW, seemed rather dry and dull--all about smoke-blackened potsherds and chips of worn flint, instead of exotic saris and wind-blown palm trees and sharp spices.

I ate lunch with an Egyptian girl, a Lebanese girl, and a Chinese girl. The Lebanese girl looks to me like the embodiment of the goddess Athena (except that she doesn't have grey eyes). The Chinese girl looks like a pretty little porcelain doll, with a timid voice and a demure smile. When they left, Matt and Jenny sat with me. On Monday at lunch, Jenny made fun of me: "You eat like a rabbit!" she said when she saw my PB&J sandwich. "The only thing that disqualifies you is your chocolate chip cookie!" Friday, though, I teased her back since she just ate two apples for lunch--a green Granny Smith and a red-and-yellow Gala. Matt and I engaged in a hot discussion of a story he's making up, a realistic retelling of the Cinderella fairytale.

Princess came with my mother to pick me up this afternoon and take me home. I went running before they arrived, and returned from the shower the minute after Princess called my room to tell me they were waiting for me. On the drive home, the sun set in a blaze of splendor--a glaring and rather painful blaze, for awhile, as it shone directly in our eyes. Then it darkened, like old taffeta. The far hills were deep blue, reflecting the sky. In the east above the hills, the horizon was dusky mauve, rose and indigo, like the blending of glossy glazes on pottery. The moon swam palely just above the pink--a lucent blue, like frosted glass. It glowed with pale blue light like Marigold's eye when the sun slants into it. In the west, the sky burned translucent: vivid turquoise at its peak, fading to greenish aquamarine, then kindling again to saffron and apricot, like a wall of transparent flame. The butterfly-wing-colors shimmered across the sky, horizon-to-horizon, as though the sky was scintillating wings hovering above the earth's grey body.

At home, we microwaved leftover chicken for supper. We went to Daisy's and Brother1's basketball games, which started at 6:00 p.m. Both teams won easily. For the second half of the boys' game, Princess and I crouched in a corner with Meri and a bunch of the girls from the girls' basketball team (Meri is on the girls' team with Daisy). We teased each other about clothes. Laura and Katie, two of the girls, showed off their stylish, sequined purses. Katie and Meri laughed about mistakes they'd made in the game, while Laura critiqued the referees' calls as the boys sprinted down the floor. Claire stretched out in Meri's lap, and Meri proceeded to kiss and tickle Claire while Claire giggled and wiggled.

This morning Princess and I watched a little bit of "The Village". We wanted to watch it last night, but prudence told us that neither one of us would be able to sleep if we did. I had forgotten how lovely those first thirty minutes or so are: the stylized, flowing violin music matching the patterns of the trees against the sky and the water over the streambed, and the quiet, firm faces of the characters.

Brother1 took Princess and Daisy to robotics club this morning, while my mother and I went shopping. I bought art supplies for the First Seminar (orientation) class, and spent half the afternoon posting pictures, and half the afternoon at Brother2's basketball game. Brother2 plays on a public Parks&Recreation league. His team won handily.

I went for a walk in the evening. The sun set behind a steely grey sky, clouds like waves on a dark lake, drowning out the daylight. As I passed the Ys house, I saw Mr. Y working on his toolbench in the garage. Ray-ray, their little daughter, toddled out of the house with Kitty, their dog, bounding ahead of her. Kitty recognized me and jumped across the street toward me. Mr. Y called her back, without turning his head, but Kitty joyfully disobeyed him. She nosed around a telephone pole across the street from their house, then prepared to leap back into the street--just as a car was coming. I seized her collar and dragged her across the street. Mr. Y left the garage to see what the commotion was about. "Oh, I was just letting her stretch her legs," he said as he saw me come up the driveway. "A car was coming," I explained, fondling Kitty's ears. She grinned up at me, while Ray-ray stared solemnly, sucking one finger. "Drat--I was hoping to get rid of her that way, " Mr. Y laughed.

Since Daisy and (yeah! the start of track 9! GO PETER! save your sisters from the river! woo hoo! *pardon me* :) Brother1 were still slaving away at robotics, it was just my parents, Brother2, and me for supper. We had quite a cheerful meal, discussing classes, plans, basketball games, and the "Horatio Hornblower" books. My parents tossed a pun about moles (the animals/the unit of measurement) back and forth across the table while Brother2 and I listened, grinning.

This evening, my grandparents came over to watch a live TV broadcast of my cousin's basketball game on the internet. They're downstairs with my father and Brother2, watching the computer. I think it's the only time they've ever come over to our house to watch TV: we don't have a TV, so when there's a big sports event on, the boys usually go over to their house to watch it.

second semester, day 2

Now Playing: "The Village" soundtrack by James Newton Howard. Track 8, "The Gravel Road" (at least I think that's the name).

When I crawled out of bed this morning, I peeked outside, and was surprised to see pink snowflakes whirling through the dim, pre-dawn glow past my window. The street was wet, and the grass below my dorm was soggy with snow.

Rachel and I ate breakfast together. She told me about the computer program she's using for her calculus class.

After breakfast, I read the first two Books of Augustine's Confessions. I had forgotten how vivid and intense his writing style is, despite is denseness. Thankfully, there's an introduction to the Confessions at the start of the book that gives a concise outline, which acts as a helpful guide to the actual plot of the book so that I don't get lost in the elegant syntax.

I practiced my flute for an hour and twenty minutes. For awhile, the practice rooms were full of us: two flutes and a menagerie of pianists--Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and I'm sure there was some jazz or Joplin in there, too. Then a bass started to warm up. He's the same fellow, I think, as was practicing "The Music of the Night" from "The Phantom of the Opera" last semester.

After practicing, I dutifully marched down the hall to my flute professor's office for my lesson at 10:30. But when I knocked on the door, Dr. Gr looked at me in bewilderment. "Didn't I schedule you for Thursdays?" he asked kindly. "Since you have more classes on Tuesdays, I thought that would be easier for you." "Oh, yes, yes. I'm so sorry. Thank you!" My heart sank, and with many flimsy apologies, a flurry like the snow outside, I backed out of his office. As I returned to my dorm, I cradled my flute in my arms, pressing it against my damp coat, while snow pelted my face and snagged in my eyelashes.

"The Romantic Period in British Literature" was my next class, at 11:00, in the cramped graduate student seminar room in Zink Hall. That's the same room as my MBW II class is in. Most of the classroom is taken up with a huge table, fringed with chairs, and there are more chairs on the edges of the room. The room is much too small to accomodate two classes as big as MBW II and RPBL, since not everyone can fit around the table. Those who do sit at the table are crowded for elbow space to write in; those who don't sit at the table have to balance their notebooks on their knees and try not to bang the chairs of the people at the table.

Dr. A, the professor of RPBL, is a brisk, plump woman, but different from the professor of MBW. Dr. A has dark, curly hair, ruddy cheeks, and a slight accent--perhaps French or Arabic. She's businesslike but eager to engage the students (and she doesn't see everything as a joke!). She does blink a great deal, though. Thanks to MBW, RPBL, and Honors, I now have a grand total of three ten-page research papers due at the end of the semester. As I complained to Rachel later, it wouldn't have been nearly so bad if these papers had been for classes last semester: ancient literature (Honors) and Anglo-Saxon literature (MBW I) are my two "specialties", but Romantic British literature and modern British literature are definitely not my areas of interest--and those are the subjects for two of the research papers! I suppose I must find something interesting to write about the lurid poetry of Byron or Keats or Coleridge... but I'd much rather do "The Odyssey" or "Beowulf", thank you! *grins*

When class was done, I marched over to the bookstore and picked up my last two textbooks for the semester (hopefully!): a slim little volume on art and beauty in the Middle Ages, and a whopping Norton Anthology that could kill a person if I dropped it on them.

After lunch, Rachel and I walked to our next class, which we have together: a "first seminar". As we entered the classroom building, we glanced to our left and right, pausing to stare at the stiff portraits of the building's donors, a man and his wife, gazing at each other across the entry area. Our class was a motley crew--a jumble of students from a variety of Arts and Sciences majors. The professor is a heavyset older man with a deep, gravelly voice and deliberate mannerisms. His talk to us was sprinkled with "don't be judgmental" and "think outside the box" and "make the straight crooked", etc. The class certainly will be a variety of assignments--drawing, sketching, essays, discussions, lectures. One of the textbooks we're reading is Flatland, a novel about mathematic perspectives. I was a bit afraid it would turn out to be a relativist modern work, but it was written by a priest in the late 1800s and looks engaging.

As soon as we left the building after class, Rachel and I glanced at each other--then burst out laughing. Something about the loose requirements, the lack of guidelines, is completely absurd. He asked us to write an essay entitled, "Rating My Ability to Cause Change, to Cope (create stories, draw, sculpt, paint): I can...." "I have no idea what he wants!" I exclaimed, laughing despite my frustration. We sat up in my room and talked while I hung up my coat to dry--the front and sleeves were soggy, plastered with sleet. We discussed the class, and Dr. Ak from Honors. "She seems apologetic about religion. She kept assuring us that we wouldn't be discussing it too much in class, despite its importance in medieval life," I commented. We talked about Narnia. Rachel told me that one of her friends liked the battle a great deal, but wished that Aslan's resurrection had been his favorite scene, and I heartily agreed. Rachel didn't much like the depiction of the beavers as somewhat vulgar--more as comic relief than the stolid peasant types they are in the book.

I spent the afternoon when Rachel left doing homework. A.C. came over to check a class time on my computer (I guess she doesn't have internet). We chatted for an hour, joking about names ("Augusta Wind", and a woman whom A.C. knows whose name translates from Spanish, "A Rose of the Garden" since her first name is Rose and her husband's name is Garden), resurrecting old ancestors, and discussing literature--she likes Tolstoy; she's reading Anna Karenina right now.

The sun has set quickly, in just an hour. Streaks of cloud waver across the sky like hair snagged in a comb. The snow has melted, and the street is almost dry. People jog around the track, frozen in the glare from the white lights.

Suppertime....

second semester, day 1

Now Playing: "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" soundtrack by Harry Gregson-Williams. Track 9, "To Aslan's Camp", one of my favorites on this CD.

I just finished Volume One of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and am now working on archaeology homework, with two Books of Augustine's Confessions still to go (you'll be pleased to know, SwanElf, that I have to read both Einhard and Notker, who stammered, on Charlemagne for my Honors class).

After breakfast this morning, I walked over to the bookstore to pick up my textbooks. On the way, I met Rachel. "Rachel!" "E--! Good to see you!" A brisk hug. "How was your vacation?" "Good." "How was yours?" "Good." And so on. She told me about her brother, who got a haircut while she was there, and about her sister, who's turning ten next week and kept joking about breaking into the "double digits". In the bookstore, we had some confusion over which window to go to. As Rachel observed, there are far too many booths and windows in the bookstore. There were several other confused students standing around, waiting "to be helped", and three or four frazzled elderly women retrieving heavy sacks of books for the students from the stacks in the back of the store.

In the bookstore, Rachel and I ran into Jenny and Tara, who were browsing through the bookstore, looking for textbooks, and then on the way back to our dorms, we met Jenny H., who is almost-but-not-quite recovered from being sick just before Christmas. She was chatty and bubbly, partly thanks to her cold medication.

My first class this morning was at 9:00 in Zink Hall, the English building. The professor for Major British Writers II is a plump blond woman, noisily cheerful, very friendly and outspoken. She kept commenting on how quiet the class was. She plied the class with questions about society, culture, and why people comply with standards. She told us that the first novel was Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. "It's awful!" she exclaimed. "Ridiculously allegorical. Characters named Chastity or Prudence, who stand for the qualities of their names." Everyone nodded wisely, agreeing with her, while I frowned indignantly.

It would appear that our class is one of the most "diverse" I've had yet: a "returning student", as my father calls them (a woman who's probably got a family of her own by now); a young man from Venezuela, wearing a red Nike soccer jersey; a very dark-skinned young Black from a French-speaking country; a young man with a learning disability; and a young man who looks Arabic and has extremely thick, bushy black eyebrows.

At 10:00 came archaeology class in one of the little, weird, triangular rooms in Kendall Hall that look as though they were modeled on one of those unsolvable wooden puzzles--no matter how hard you try, you never can get the cubes and pyramids to fit perfectly into each other. The professor for archaeology is a short, older man with a bushy white beard and glazed blue eyes, wearing the requisite khakis and vest. He seemed quite eager to teach, and left most of the class period open for the students to ask any questions they liked, which was encouraging.

As soon as archaeology was over, I took my flute and music down to the practice rooms in Tyrrell Hall. I had reached the Poulenc sonata when I heard a terrifying howling, screeching sound coming from the practice room next door to me. It sounded like a fire engine--but then I realized that it was only a soprano doing her warm-up exercises.

When I left Tyrrell, I met Alisha walking to lunch, and fell in step with her. She described her break, and I told her about the ball. We compared notes about our first day of classes. The cafeteria was crowded when we entered. Danielle was there, bouncing happily from friend to friend. She put hot pink highlights in her short, brown hair over the break. Alisha and I sat with the two Jennys, near Matt and Andrew and Katie and other RUF people. All day it's been like this: the quick hugs with the girls, the bright exclamations, "It's so good to see you, Alisha! or Tara! or Jenny! or Nicole!"; the brief, shouted, "Hey! Matt or Alex or Andrew or Austin!" to the boys.

At 2:00, I marched to Chapman Hall for Honors class. The professor is a tired older woman dressed in plain, neat business clothes. She plied us with questions about our interests, and Nicole, Rachel, Russ, and I did our best to answer some of her questions. She inquired, "Has anyone read Augustine's Confessions?" Rachel and I both said that we had, and she pressed us to tell her our impressions of the Confessions. "Wow, my highschool education was sadly lacking! You two both read the Confessions in highschool?" Rachel and I admitted that we were homeschooled. When I piped up with an answer to one of Nicole's comments on the Black Plague, the professor seemed immediately to think that I have a specialty in the area of the Plague. "Ok. Now, has anyone read Don Quixote?" Rachel and I were the only ones who raised our hands. "Wow! I'm very impressed. Have you read all of it?" Rachel and I looked confused. "Did Don Quixote die?" the professor asked. We nodded. "Now I'm amazed. Later in this course, we'll be talking about the 'Song of Roland'. Has anyone read that?" Sheepishly, I raised my hand and muttered, "Yes, for fun." "Good grief! You must never have been allowed outside to play!" she cried.

After Honors, Rachel and I laughed about the professor's impression of us.

The wind drove misty clouds across the skyscrapers downtown, and my blowing bangs felt damp as I strolled to my dorm. They've finished the construction in front of the dorms, and now the lawn below the library, which is flanked by dorms and classroom buildings, looks very elegant, with broad sidewalks lined with straight rows of trees, alternating with lights. Strips of sod mask the scars left by dumptrucks and bulldozers, and the expansive sprinkler system keeps the new grass in a state of perpetual muddiness.

I spent the afternoon reading Pride and Prejudice and listening to the "Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack and "Invocation", a Celtic CD by Anuna. A.C. and I ate supper together. She described for me how her parents usually bake ham for Christmas dinner, and about the ornate nativity scenes that her mother sets up for Christmas (her mother is Catholic).

A weeping saint, haloed with gold leaf, sits beneath a tree on the cover of the Confessions, which lies on the desk beside me. Outside, fluffy clouds scurry past, blurring the lights of the skyscrapers with their speed and wetness. Right now (thanks, most likely, to having read too much Jane Austen), I feel as detached and satirical as any social commentator, and it probably comes across in this exceedingly dull post. Congratulations to anyone who managed to finish it. *haha*

a big black dog

This afternoon I went for a walk around San Born Lake. As I strode through the neighborhood toward the SBL trail, a massive black labrador retriever galloped toward me. It had been sniffing in the lawns along the road, but as I passed, it wheeled ahead of me and began to jog before me down the street. I supposed that it belonged in the neighborhood and would turn back when I reached the trail. It was one of the biggest, most powerful dogs I've ever met, with an easy, effortless gait. (When I retold the story at supper, my mother interjected that she thought the dog must've been part horse.)

However, when I set out on the trail itself, the dog loped ahead of me, his paws thumping the grass. If we came to a fork, he would run down one branch until, glancing back, he saw me on the other branch. Then he would bound toward me, paws thudding, tail wagging, and jog on ahead of me. If I ever got out of sight, he would stop and nose around in the brush until I caught up. When we crossed the bridge, he stopped on the other side and waited with head cocked to make sure that I was coming. Across the meadow, I jogged behind him. He lengthened his stride until he was out of sight, and I couldn't hear the jingle of the metal tags on his rough canvas collar. When I breasted the hill, though, there he was at the top, poking idly through a stand of sumac until he spotted me. We raced through the gully, his broad pads and my white running shoes raising puffs of dust.

Back in the neighborhood, he still marched ahead of me, though his breathing was somewhat ragged, and there was froth on his jaws. A little girl was pedaling her pink tricycle on a driveway as the dog and I went by. The dog loped up to her, his breath rasping but his tail wagging. She jumped and squealed, afraid. Her grandmother called her into the garage, and the dog turned away carelessly, glancing at me apologetically. "I'm sorry," I reassured the grandmother, "he's not my dog, but he won't hurt you."

When I reached my house, I sat down on the front porch. The dog had jaunted on down the street, sniffing the kerb. He stopped suddenly, realized that I was sitting, and leaped towards me. He nosed the gate expectantly. I got up and went in, filled a bucket with water, and brought it to him. He lapped, then paddled with his forepaws in the water until it was full of mud and crushed maple leaves. After slurping contentedly, he bounded onto the front porch. I called Daisy and Brother2 outside on the walkie-talkie. As they piled out the door, the dog surged toward them, but I twisted a hand in its collar and held it back. "He won't hurt you!" I cried breathlessly. Daisy scurried indoors to wake my mother, who was napping (she's been ill with a cough, and has spent most of the day in bed with Mandy snoozing beside her). My mother staggered outside. "E--, we are NOT taking care of that dog!" she growled as the beast, straining against my hold on its collar, pushed toward her. "No, no!"I said impatiently. "There's a phone number on its collar. Go call its owner!"

A while later, the owner pulled up in his red pickup. The dog had bounded down the street a little ways. A short, older man stepped out of the car (a geezer, if I ever saw one). "Bo! Bo!" he drawled, "Git in the truck." Instantly, the dog returned, and sprang gracefully into the cluttered bed of the truck. "Thanks, girls. He's real friendly. All he wants to do is play ball. As soon as ah opened th' gate, he made a break for it. Good evenin'," the man said, as he tied a rope to the dog's collar. The huge beast waved its plumed tail magnificently from the back of the truck as its master stumped to the front and clambered inside the driver's seat.

The sunset tonight was red and gilt silver, streaks of clouds, like upswept horses' tails.

During supper, when I retold the story of the big black dog and how it had diligently muddied its drinking water, Brother2 giggled. We hosted Bible study at our house tonight after supper. The Ps, except Mrs. P, and Mr. and Mrs. W came. Mr. P led the study on Luke 11.

After the Bible study, the children, as usual, raced outside. I spotted Will sneaking across the back porch, armed with a flashlight. Indoors, Brother1, Sam, Mr. W, Mr. P, and my father were discussing the airforce (Mr. W's specialty) and academics (my father's specialty). While my father described a peer review article he's examining right now, Mary flounced in and began to play with Brother1 and Sam. Brother1 stole the little yellow fuzzy lamb that Mary had been carrying around and stood it on one of the blades of the ceiling fan, seven or eight feet off the floor. Mary played with Sam, yanking his shirt, tugging his shorts. He whipped his shirt over her head, then whipped it off again, and she emerged, laughing, with her hair frizzing around her cheeks.

"Look up there, Mary," Brother1 coaxed. Mary stared up and caught sight of the lamb perched on the fan. She stretched a hand up to reach it. Brother1 picked her up easily, and Mary batted the lamb down. "Oh, look! You made it fall thousands of feet!" Sam reprimanded her. Mary giggled. They repeated this process a couple of times, until Brother1 swiped the lamb. He passed it from hand to hand around his chest while Mary skipped around him in circles, grabbing at the lamb whenever it came within reach. Her laughter nearly drowned the staid conversation of the men, who watched her antics with broad smiles. Mary kept dashing around and around Brother1, until Brother1 suddenly put the lamb back onto the fan. Mary didn't see this move until, overbalancing on the slanted blade, the lamb tumbled onto the floor. "Oh!" she giggled. Brother1 swept the lamb up, and Mary started to chase it again. He tried to pass the lamb off to me, but I refused it, so he laid it on top of the fan, sideways, so that it wouldn't slip off again.

"It's up there, Mary!" Sam said, pointing to it. "Lift me, lift me!" she chirped. Brother1 put his hands around her chest and tried to lift her. "Oooh, you're too heavy!" he moaned. "I can't lift you." She skipped over to Sam, who also pretended to try to lift her. "It must've been those cookies you ate!" Brother1 exclaimed. Mary glowered at him, her forehead creased with worry and puzzlement. "Jump Mary, jump!" Sam urged her. Mary bounced up, and Sam, lifting her as she jumped, hefted her above his head. "Wow, you're strong, Mary!" Brother1 said. Mary giggled in excitement and bounced on Sam's feet. "Owowow!" Sam wailed. Mary laughed louder. Sam picked her up again, but this time, his hands slipped, and she slid down, hitting his feet with a bump. "Owch!" she exclaimed, and picked herself up. "Don't you ever do that again!" she scolded, laughing. "Ok, Mary. Can you be quieter now?" Mr. P asked, shepherding her out of the dining room and into the living room where the women were chatting.