Last night, I dreamt that I had to help Jesus, Mary, and Joseph escape persecution in Bellevue, WA. Mary was crying, and it was raining, and her hair was wisping out from her veil and plastering itself to her face. She was worried she would look unkempt, so I kept turning back to brush her stray hair back under her veil. At one point, Joseph changed into disguise, emerging something like Brad Pitt in a period film circa the 1920s. At another point, I think I might have become Jesus, or lost him in the crowded streets of Bellevue.
Andrew says that God has visited me in a dream, and that I shall bear a child and name Him Immanuel. I just think it's a sign that Jesus and Marshawn Lynch walking into a bar is a stellar beginning to a joke.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Oh, New England, Revisited
The other afternoon, I was brushing snow off my car for what seemed like the billionth time since I have been back this January, and scraping the ice from my windshield and rear windows. The snow piles up, three, four, five, six inches--fourteen during the blizzard--and when it stops, I brush it off with a long-handled brush that sits outside my mudroom door for this express purpose. And when, five to ten minutes later, I get down to the car that is buried underneath, I find that it's so cold out that the last layer of snow is actually ice, and I have to scrape it off. And then, if the plowman hasn't come, or if I wasn't there to move my car when the plowman came, I have to shovel out my wheel-wells and around my driver's side door in order to get in. It's only then that I can slip and slide out of my driveway onto the slushy roads on my way to work, on my way to buy milk, on my way out.
And that billionth time? That time, I stopped, and I asked out loud when anyone in their god-forsaken right mind would choose to live in New Hampshire, choose to repeat this laborious process day in and day out--sometimes multiple times a day--year after year for their entire lives. I am aching for spring.
And then, yesterday, I drove northwest to a place called Stonehouse with Andrew and another fiction writer. We got out of the car, we trudged along a snow-covered road for about ten minutes, and climbed up on a rock outcropping that overlooked a clearing in the forest. And then we stepped out onto the frozen pond, and walked across it, our footsteps leaving tracks in the deep snow. Across the pond is a giant granite cliff, with ice formations on it that Andrew sometimes climbs up, and from the top of the cliff, we could see hills that were further away, although the tallest were mostly obscured by the thickly falling snow.
And then today, I drove along a highway between Durham and Portsmouth, a highway that snakes across an inlet of the Great Bay that is churning with chunks of semi-frozen ice, and through some farmland with fields that are covered in snow without footsteps.
And I realized why.
And that billionth time? That time, I stopped, and I asked out loud when anyone in their god-forsaken right mind would choose to live in New Hampshire, choose to repeat this laborious process day in and day out--sometimes multiple times a day--year after year for their entire lives. I am aching for spring.
And then, yesterday, I drove northwest to a place called Stonehouse with Andrew and another fiction writer. We got out of the car, we trudged along a snow-covered road for about ten minutes, and climbed up on a rock outcropping that overlooked a clearing in the forest. And then we stepped out onto the frozen pond, and walked across it, our footsteps leaving tracks in the deep snow. Across the pond is a giant granite cliff, with ice formations on it that Andrew sometimes climbs up, and from the top of the cliff, we could see hills that were further away, although the tallest were mostly obscured by the thickly falling snow.
And then today, I drove along a highway between Durham and Portsmouth, a highway that snakes across an inlet of the Great Bay that is churning with chunks of semi-frozen ice, and through some farmland with fields that are covered in snow without footsteps.
And I realized why.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
On Life and Death
First, I've discovered my ideal job. That is, until I can become a professor.
I've already lamented the fact that I don't have a blog that can really garner readers. The lack of niche means that strangers probably don't care about that store in Seattle, the fact that I wanted clam chowder, or that I had to write 35 pages last semester. So while I would love to tinker around on this little corner of the web and clack away to my heart's content for money, it's probably next to impossible--at least with this incarnation of my blog.
What I do think there is a market for, however, is a translator for the French women's fashion blogs that I read occasionally. It seems like most of them do their own translations to English, and with many it certainly shows. While they still do garner a significant readership in English-speaking countries, despite their lack of polished language, I think that syntactically and grammatically correct English (while still maintaining the interest of non-native speaker language) could remarkably increase their scope. I'm thinking I charge $50 an hour and find twenty or twenty five French people whose English needs some help. Now I just need to find a way to not offend the style bloggers when I tell them their English is horrendous...
Second:
When I die, I want my gravestone (even though I don't want a gravestone and I want to be cremated and scattered somewhere) to read: She was a voracious reader and a fantastic dancer.
That's what I'd like to be remembered for.
I've already lamented the fact that I don't have a blog that can really garner readers. The lack of niche means that strangers probably don't care about that store in Seattle, the fact that I wanted clam chowder, or that I had to write 35 pages last semester. So while I would love to tinker around on this little corner of the web and clack away to my heart's content for money, it's probably next to impossible--at least with this incarnation of my blog.
What I do think there is a market for, however, is a translator for the French women's fashion blogs that I read occasionally. It seems like most of them do their own translations to English, and with many it certainly shows. While they still do garner a significant readership in English-speaking countries, despite their lack of polished language, I think that syntactically and grammatically correct English (while still maintaining the interest of non-native speaker language) could remarkably increase their scope. I'm thinking I charge $50 an hour and find twenty or twenty five French people whose English needs some help. Now I just need to find a way to not offend the style bloggers when I tell them their English is horrendous...
Second:
When I die, I want my gravestone (even though I don't want a gravestone and I want to be cremated and scattered somewhere) to read: She was a voracious reader and a fantastic dancer.
That's what I'd like to be remembered for.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
A La Recherche du Temps Perdus
There was a cartoon in my office last year, and while I can't remember exactly what it said, the gist was this: Marcel Proust is sitting alone in a classroom, pen in hand, with a blank sheet of paper in front of him. The caption states something about Proust still agonizing over what to write in response to the teacher's "what I did on my summer vacation" prompt.
I guess it was in reference to his A La Recherche du Temps Perdus, his monumental seven volume work, the title of which translates to Remembrance of Things Past, or more literally In Search of Lost Time. I suppose that is all the usual September writing prompt is, really, is a remembrance of things past, a search for time that was spent---or lost, perhaps. While Deleuze might disagree (he always does. tsk tsk.), the novel is preoccupied with memory, with time past.
All of this is just to say here's what I did on my (Christmas) vacation:
After leaving Tennessee, Andrew and I drove northeastish to Virginia, through the Shenandoah Valley, toward D.C. It's beautiful country--miles of roads and hills and meadows and farmhouses dotting the landscape. When the sun set, the sky was this shade of lavender that I didn't really know could exist up there. I also saw half a bloody deer pushed off to the side of the road.
We made it to D.C. just in time to watch the final quarter of the Hawks game, eat enchiladas and fall in love with Marshawn Lynch.
Andrew's aunt and uncle have lived in D.C. for years and years now, and the two of them took us on a tour of all of the monuments so that we could see them illuminated at night. And even though it was bitter cold, shouting the quotations on the Jefferson memorial with no one around was well worth it. The acoustics in there are phenomenal!
The next day in D.C. we wandered around museums and memorials, and ate a hot dog from a stand on the side of the road. Here are some things I learned: Prehistoric whales--as in, the dinosaur era ancestors of creatures like Keiko--had BACK LEGS. The Natural History museum has several fossils of these huge huge old whale skeletons, and towards the end of their bodies they have tiny little appendages like shrunken legs. The National Gallery of Art taught me that Picasso's blue period actually was just blue, as in the color. I could have guessed, but still. Oh, and I still don't like Dutch painting, even if the perspective and lines are superhuman. Orville Wright never graduated high school, either, and the Korean and Vietnam War memorials are infinitely sad.
We left early the next day to beat D.C. traffic, and drove through Baltimore, and, after having done so, I can perhaps see more clearly why they haven't started The Wire tours like they did with Twilight tours in Forks, WA. North and further north still took us through New Jersey, where the whole state smells like Italian food. I am deadly serious. When we first drove in, through factories and industrial districts--where there were no restaurants serving lunch anywhere nearby--all we could smell was garlic bread. Later, when we stopped in Hoboken to grab a cannoli from the Cake Boss bakery, there was tomato based sauce in the air. Unfortunately, as it was only ten in the morning, I didn't get any cold cuts for lunch. And no sighting of Snookie, although we did have a beautiful view of the New York City skyline as we drove on the Jersey side of the Hudson River.
We stopped in Boston, of course, to have dinner with Scarlet before she went to work, and then made our way back to New Hampshire, where we were greeted by a blizzard a short two days later.
I suppose if Monty Python can parody A La Recherche du Temps Perdus in a mere fifteen seconds, I could try to summarize my past six days in less than six hundred words. No one ever said concision was my forte, though, and it certainly wasn't Proust's either. And he did okay.
I guess it was in reference to his A La Recherche du Temps Perdus, his monumental seven volume work, the title of which translates to Remembrance of Things Past, or more literally In Search of Lost Time. I suppose that is all the usual September writing prompt is, really, is a remembrance of things past, a search for time that was spent---or lost, perhaps. While Deleuze might disagree (he always does. tsk tsk.), the novel is preoccupied with memory, with time past.
All of this is just to say here's what I did on my (Christmas) vacation:
After leaving Tennessee, Andrew and I drove northeastish to Virginia, through the Shenandoah Valley, toward D.C. It's beautiful country--miles of roads and hills and meadows and farmhouses dotting the landscape. When the sun set, the sky was this shade of lavender that I didn't really know could exist up there. I also saw half a bloody deer pushed off to the side of the road.
We made it to D.C. just in time to watch the final quarter of the Hawks game, eat enchiladas and fall in love with Marshawn Lynch.
Andrew's aunt and uncle have lived in D.C. for years and years now, and the two of them took us on a tour of all of the monuments so that we could see them illuminated at night. And even though it was bitter cold, shouting the quotations on the Jefferson memorial with no one around was well worth it. The acoustics in there are phenomenal!
The next day in D.C. we wandered around museums and memorials, and ate a hot dog from a stand on the side of the road. Here are some things I learned: Prehistoric whales--as in, the dinosaur era ancestors of creatures like Keiko--had BACK LEGS. The Natural History museum has several fossils of these huge huge old whale skeletons, and towards the end of their bodies they have tiny little appendages like shrunken legs. The National Gallery of Art taught me that Picasso's blue period actually was just blue, as in the color. I could have guessed, but still. Oh, and I still don't like Dutch painting, even if the perspective and lines are superhuman. Orville Wright never graduated high school, either, and the Korean and Vietnam War memorials are infinitely sad.
We left early the next day to beat D.C. traffic, and drove through Baltimore, and, after having done so, I can perhaps see more clearly why they haven't started The Wire tours like they did with Twilight tours in Forks, WA. North and further north still took us through New Jersey, where the whole state smells like Italian food. I am deadly serious. When we first drove in, through factories and industrial districts--where there were no restaurants serving lunch anywhere nearby--all we could smell was garlic bread. Later, when we stopped in Hoboken to grab a cannoli from the Cake Boss bakery, there was tomato based sauce in the air. Unfortunately, as it was only ten in the morning, I didn't get any cold cuts for lunch. And no sighting of Snookie, although we did have a beautiful view of the New York City skyline as we drove on the Jersey side of the Hudson River.
We stopped in Boston, of course, to have dinner with Scarlet before she went to work, and then made our way back to New Hampshire, where we were greeted by a blizzard a short two days later.
I suppose if Monty Python can parody A La Recherche du Temps Perdus in a mere fifteen seconds, I could try to summarize my past six days in less than six hundred words. No one ever said concision was my forte, though, and it certainly wasn't Proust's either. And he did okay.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Country Roads Take Me Home
By the time I had been in The South (yes, I'm pretty certain the capitals are required) for just over twenty four hours, I had driven past Billy Graham Parkway, had grits for breakfast, eaten barbecue at an off-the-road joint that locals drive long distances to, listened to Jesus on the radio (or, rather, his followers, I suppose), driven ON the Bristol Motor Speedway (the favored track for NASCAR fans, and yes I said on it), and heard the most amazing accents ever. The people here are fabulously nice, and many of them have fabulously large hair.
Tomorrow, we are driving to Washington, D.C., where we will find a sports bar, hole up, and watch the Seahawks (lose? I hope not). Did you know that museums in D.C. are free? Paris could learn a thing or two from that city.
Tomorrow, we are driving to Washington, D.C., where we will find a sports bar, hole up, and watch the Seahawks (lose? I hope not). Did you know that museums in D.C. are free? Paris could learn a thing or two from that city.
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