Posted at 8:27 PM | Permalink

— ee cummings

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

(via In a Dark Time)

Posted at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The secret to happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and personas that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

(via Russell Davies)

Posted at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A bit of beauty helps as well.

Posted at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Still in Fort Smith just doesn’t have the same ring. (But the lyrics still apply in a way that probably makes sense only inside my own tired brain.) Anyhow, we’re in Arklahoma for the next bit helping a very ill family member. Send prayers or thoughts or Cheezits, or you can just emit rays. Whatever. Thanks!

Posted at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My friends know me too well. Even the ones who only officially finally met me in person this morning.

Posted at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So Fresca hauled off and made a nifty list of things to do also, and in my comments she said something about making a list of wishes she fulfilled. And then Jenny made a mighty fine list, which also contains one or two things I’ve done. And that got me thinking: what would a list of 32 Things Already Done look like? What have I already done that counts toward an interesting life? Let’s find out, hmmm?

1. I was born Southern. This was a major step.
2. Persisted through a life-threatening disease.
3. Became quite deaf. Learned to deal with that.
4. Relearned how to walk twice. Relearned how to talk once.
5. Dropped out of high school to go to college.
6. Eventually finished the BAs. After 10 years.
7. Fell in love. Fell in love again.
8. Fell in love with the right person.
9. Learned to travel alone. (Fell in love with New Orleans and Chicago.)
10. Learned to bake bread.
11. Learned to cook in an exploratory fashion.
12. Worked for a religious organization not my own and learned that religion reasonably well.
13. Been to a huge-ass blues festival in the Delta. Twice.
14. Traveled outside my own country for the first time.
15. Looked for Nessie.
16. Slept in a castle.
17. Overcame my American aversion to organ meats and ate haggis.
18. Looked for Bigfoot.
19. Moved to another section of my own country with a very different culture.
20. Realized childhood dreams of living somewhere with consistent snow.
21. Became digitally literate.
22. Taught others digital literacy.
23. Learned some ways to think about all of that. And be critical of the thinking, and ways of doing that.
24. Found a vocation.
25. Grew a garden. Learned I can do something difficult in memory of someone else.
26. Stood under a redwood tree and bonded with it.
27. Gotten a multi-stage tattoo.
28. Been to beaches on both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
29. Visited both ends of the Mississippi. (And also walked across it on a night when temperatures were in the single-digits and the moon was full.)
30. Spoken to a standing-room only crowd.
31. Visited aquariums on all four sides of the country.
32. Spent endless nights on a porch swing (handmade by my great-grandpa) with a glass of sweet tea, talking to my parents and to friends.

Posted at 6:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This photo pretty much sums up yesterday, which was one of the most awesome birthdays in a long time. I was blushing and laughing because Lord-knows-how-many grad compatriots were singing Happy Birthday to me. And this was after a smaller dinner with friends, which was after receiving so many excellent Facebook messages and emails and tweets and gifts in the mail. And all of that was after Mister Husband finally returned from two weeks in Oklahoma.

My life is full of wonderful people. Many thanks to all of you.

(The photo is by Marnie, btw.)

Posted at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Pursuant to my 50 Things Before 50 list, I shall figure out where I am with the whole ‘read all of the plays’ project. Fortunately, I was not just an English major, but an English major who took a seminar in this very topic. (This would be the same Shakespeare seminar that Mister Husband and I did not meet in.) Of course, plays only count if they have been read, not merely viewed in one form or another. Here goes:

1. The Merchant of Venice
2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
3. The Tempest
4. Cymbeline
5. Hamlet
6. Julius Caesar
7. Macbeth
8. Othello
9. Romeo and Juliet
10. Titus Andronicus
11. Richard II
12. Richard III
13. Henry IV, part 1
14. Henry IV, part 2
15. Henry V

I would have thought I had read more of the comedies than the tragedies, but it appears that the reverse is true. (I suspect, really, that I read several more comedies but forgot them. There’s no way that seminar was that lopsided.) And I’ve done approximately half of the histories, which is better than I would have thought. Which means that sometime in the next 18 years I need to read:

1. Antony and Cleopatra
2. Coreolanis
3. King Lear
4. All's Well That Ends Well
5. As You Like It
6. The Comedy of Errors
7. Love's Labours Lost
8. Measure for Measure
9. The Merry Wives of Windsor
10. Much Ado About Nothing
11. Pericles, Prince of Tyre
12. Taming of the Shrew
13. Troilus and Cressida
14. Twelfth Night
15. Two Gentlemen of Verona
16. Winter's Tale
17. Henry VI, part 1
18. Henry VI, part 2
19. Henry VI, part 3
20. Henry VIII
21. King John

Posted at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Inspired by my approaching birthday and Mighty Girl’s latest lists, I’ve been thinking about life experiences I want to make sure come to pass. (These are, of course, separate from the professional goals — even the scholarly book, which I would want to write regardless of whether or not I’m a professor. Still, if I can combine goals from the two lists — say, a sabbatical semester of research on Chambers in London or the Britannica in Scotland, then all the better.)

1. Finish the PhD
2. Own our own house
3. Continue to have an awesome marriage
4. Really soak up the family time when it happens
5. Spend contiguous months in the UK
6. Set foot in all 50 states
7. Live in a place that truly suits both of us
8. Establish a scholarship
9. Grow tomatoes as good as the ones grown by my grandparents & father in law
10. Learn basic French and actually use it (alternately, re-learn basic Spanish)
11. Publish a scholarly book
12. Publish a work of nonscholarly nonfiction
13. Publish poetry
14. Have a dog and cats again
15. Keep a classic potager
16. Go snorkeling
17. Be an effective mentor
18. Spend All Saints Day in Mexico City
19. Spend Easter in Rome
20. Read all of Shakespeare’s plays
21. Show photographs in a gallery
22. Visit Iceland
23. Visit Norway
24. Brew beer
25. Bake multi-day bread. Successfully.
26. Achieve a consistent no-debt state of affairs
27. Cross the entire US in one trip, sideways
28. Travel Hwy 61 from top to bottom
29. See the Northern Lights
30. Related: visit Abisko
31. See the salmon run in Alaska
32. See the bone chapel in Prague
33. Host an annual party
34. Plant a tree
35. Martinis at the Algonquin with Gina
36. Take a hot air balloon ride
37. Make homemade sausage
38. Take a retreat at a monastery or convent
39. See a moose and bear in the wild
40. Master authentic Mexican cuisine (if that’s even possible for a white girl)
41. Tour the American West
42. Re-learn the piano and make it a part of daily life
43. Keep a spare room that people love to visit
44. Make a will
45. Finish that damned needle point
46. Become advanced at yoga
47. Make peace with my body
48. Run a very small press
49. Tour New England in the fall
50. Take book making classes

Posted at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Momo suggested we meet at Cupcake for coffee yesterday morning, and so we did. You gotta love someone who suggests a place that makes, well, cupcakes at 10 in the morning, and we had a wonderful chat. She turned out to be one of those folks who is both funny and grounded. Afterwards, I headed over to National Camera to drop off some film and print orders. It was sunny for the first time in ages, and I soaked it up through my study window once I got back home to read and prep to teach Mister Husband’s class, which I’ve been spotting while he’s out of town. And then I taught, and they were smart and funny and generally wonderful, and then I went out for pad thai with C. The temperature dropped about a million degrees on the way home, and so I went straight to bed, piling up under three blankets and finishing The Accidental Tourist.

All of it was lovely, and the outside-ness of it all makes me perfectly fine with staying in all day today, dissertating and laundering and watching the cloudiness and cold outside the windows and talking to pretty much no one.

(Don't all bakery restrooms feature muffin tins with penguins? No?)

Posted at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

qB’s already mad at me for spreading earworms on Twitter, so I might as well run with it. Right?

Posted at 7:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I get a deep sense of stillness — maybe even peace — when I wander through graveyards. The new banner might not say spring to everyone, but it makes me think of wandering in the warm sun someday soon, enjoying the fact while I might indeed be feeling very still, I’m not nearly as still as some of the other folks nearby. Yet. A bit of momento mori is never a bad thing, yes?

This lovely tilt-shift shot (faked, actually) is by Jenny Spadafora, my co-conspirator in the Monday / Thursday project. One of the things I love about Jenny’s attitude toward photography is that she’s so experimental, always fiddling around and trying new things. Her enduring sense of whimsy also certainly doesn’t hurt. In fact, I had planned on using this shot of a life-size lego sea serpent until it became apparent it just wasn’t going to work as a banner. It’s really very her.

So the tiny tombstones will be up at the top of the page until June 1, when a new artist will go up. And they’ll stand on their own, since I managed to stop myself from pretentiously slapping an ars longa, vita brevis tagline on there.

(By the way, the early archives are littered with bits of my cemetery fascination, which dates back decades. In fact, one of the things I appreciated about my first love was that he lived next to a small, working-class cemetery.)

Posted at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)