baby! baby! baby!

I would like to announce to anyone who cares to listen that little Gladiola Hope Huth came into the world at 11:30 on Tuesday night, at 7 lbs, 13 oz. I know, I know; Gladiola? I'm still not sure what I think of the name. Mari has plans to call her Lola, I think that's much nicer than Gladdy. In case I didn't mention it in a previous post, Dave and Lori work at the college as profs, but they have also gone to church with me for the past 2 years, so I feel rather invested in this baby. Pics below (I think the one of the baby with her two beaming parents is one of the most amazing, beautiful things I've seen in a very long time.

I recant...

but only because I want people to like me and think my blog is cool, (obviously more important goals that speaking with uncensored honesty) which at this rate is not the net effect of my publishing efforts. But I have decided to give you one of the poems I've been working on as part of my senior project (but remember that this is still only a first draft). Think of it as a propitiating offering and don't leave nasty comments.

Your wistful girl,
S.

Finding the Geraniums, Gone

With the winter coming on,
I guess they felt they had to do it.
But now the neatly landscaped
plots of geraniums have been
decimated. Each plant
has left a pothole, a crater
in the world of wood chips,
a conspicuous absence of form
and flower.

And I wonder who did it,
who decided that trowel and
shovel and wheelbarrow should
do the work that a jealous frost
had set aside or was just
saving for later?

It must have been a dirty job.
I think they struggled, as
they were torn from the ground.
I can tell, because around
each pothole there is a strewing
of dark flannel leaves, the
bright shed drops of blood
red petals,
like a scattering
of hens’ feathers,
in a butcher’s yard.

More crap from Houghton

This, I declare unto you, will not be a good post. I am doing this primarily to spite young Eddius, who thinks by his complaints he can push me around. I am a free spirit! an unbound entity! I am an artist! and I shall do as I please! That being said, I feel very contrary tonight. Very irritable, very...petulant. Basically I feel like throwing myself down on the floor and flailing and whining and having a big ol' tantrum about things that are nobody's fault but mine. I think the only thing that keeps me from doing so is the fact that our floor's not vacuumed very often. For example...I have been trying to get myself geared up to write this fiction story all weak. I am staunchly resisting my own attempts at persuasion as procrastination rears her ugly head. (Why is procrastination a woman? Why is everything unpleasant personified as a woman? Stupid male chauvinist trojan horse...) So tonight I came home and just felt exhausted because I feel like I have been spending a lot of time with people, a lot of time feeling exceedingly passionate and railing about things (like Star Wars kid and Cat Shaver kid, but also happy things like getting excited about spiritual reading and Project Paul) but my passion always exhausts me so. I am telling you, by the time I get to Wednesday, I just start to crash. Which would have been okay if I had worked on this story thing on Monday or Tuesday evening. But first, when I got home at 8 I took a nap. For an hour and a half. At 8:00 at night. No, no don't ask me, I don't know why either, I've just felt disfunctional all evening. And then I woke up feeling very petulant indeed and continuing to internally resist writing this story and thinking about maybe showering instead, but instead I went and cut out the comics for us to hang on the wall, I footled about with Susannah, I played with the e-mail and went to postsecret...you know what, I don't even know what I did but I have wasted the past 3 hours!!! doing nothing!!! And I feel malaisical about life and about how nobody writes me and I'm tired of having to think all the time, to be the kind of person who talks about gender roles and marriage and the future and the idiocies of Focus on the Family and who is concerned about the place of Christianity in the arts and environmentalism and craft and the nature of stewardship and dealing with friends who are dating and dialoging about the state of the Church and all of these things that supposedly make up my life, and do make up my life and I actually do love, but there has been no shower and no story-writing (which, by the way is another thing that I passionately do want to do and see thrive in its existence; the story not the shower, though that would be nice too) and I don't even know what all is going on in the soul of me. But by crackey, I can vent it all by writing a crappy post, which no one will read because it has no literary merit whatsoever. Well, see if I care, I don't care about excellence anymore, at least not for tonight. I should have just gone to sleep at 8 and then straight on till morning for all I've accomplished. (and look, the whole post is one paragraph...people hate when I do this but I'm not changing it!)

Assorted Pieces (or, The Mixed Bag)

So, for those of you keeping score Pneumonia Boy is more or less back on his feet by this point. Hooray! Not so well that I'd be willing to fight a duel with him and consider it an even match (but someday, my nemesis!) but he's not going have to miss the rest of the semester due to deathly illness.

In the fiction class of joy and...other things, no real travesties to date but last night's viewing of Star Wars Episode III (besides completing the first stage of my Jedi training) has also confirmed that there was really no original detail in that story that I was writing about. Sigh. So now what do I do? Furthermore, our beloved Lori Huth (fiction prof. extraordinaire) is leaving to have a BABY! She also goes to my church group thing and is generally an awesome person and so this is beyond exciting news. There's a baby in her tummy and soon it's going to come out of her tummy and into the world! When you really think about it, that's rather fascinating, how does that even work, a person, inside of another person, coming out of that person to live an independent life. How bizarre. Oh, but also on the fiction front, I definitely found some consecutive pages of somebody's story in the recycling bin of the print center when I was looking for some paper the other day. Definitely featured a stallion from the plains of Amythrec with a curling mane and shadowy forelocks, or something like that. Why do I keep bumping into this stuff?

And, just for fun, I am including Kubla Khan by Coleridge. I have long been fascinated by this poem, particularly the last stanza, and what it says about the mystic power of the writer to create worlds and the fear that that ought to inspire. Maybe it just feeds my ego...Something more profound later, friends, I'm just not up to it tonight.

Kubla Khan
OR, A VISION IN A DREAM.
A FRAGMENT.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.