May 2010
3 posts
in a move to make my life cleaner:
www.sayacate.wordpress.com
sorry, though, to clutter up yours! this is the last shift, I promise. tumblr has been good to me, really—I’m not one for technology, but wordpress is just this fantastically good use of web space. my father and elisabeth both use it, too, so maybe I just subconsciously feel the family peer pressure (yes: we all blog).
...
the next day
I believe in touch; Sarah Morris says that in order to feel loved you must be touched five times a day, and ever since she said that I find myself unconsciously counting—one, two, three—four—five—and it is true, that these small touches are significant. I know and recognize them, filing them into categories in my mind: my mother’s soft lotion touch, my sister’s backrub, the way Lily curls her baby...
there is great need for change in this world, and indeed, it is broken. even in this urban, sheltered world of chapel hill—where term papers, late nights studying for exams and the carolina heat are our easiest provokers—it is not easy to forget this. we are confronted by it when we read the senate bill 1070 and are gripped with the privileged life we lead or look at pictures of the...
April 2010
8 posts
saturday
my church has a ministry of repairing widow’s homes in the community; today was another work day. I biked down to miss f’s house this morning and we sat on her grandson’s porch as people painted and cleaned and hammered on the roof beside. she instructed, I listened and we laughed a lot and talked about pies and plants and dr. oz from the oprah show, whom we both really like.
...
I woke up this afternoon with my heart pounding, literally jumping away from my diaphagram. this is what x amount of coffee refills will do to you; when the caffeine swirls past your head and decides to take refuge in jittery hands and even more jittery heart palpitations.
I woke up this morning and the first thing I saw was that elisabeth had blogged for the first time in three months, and...
only because this has got to be the most glorious something I’ve seen all day.
artist alberto seveso
here is a profound problem:
on the course registration system—not the world’s most seamless system—I am currently up to 55 credit hours of classes that I’ve listed as wanting to take next semester. this is, of course, not counting Spanish 203, which I will definitely be taking, or a Science with a Lab, which I will also be taking, despite my most deep and ardent desire not to.
after much thought, the...
thursday blues
there is something slightly undignifed about having a blog. blogs are usually portioned to middle-aged men who want to be professors and mothers who save coupons and seventh-grade girls who bare their souls through the medium of water photos and passive-agressive blog entries. it’s okay: sometimes I judge myself for having one, so you can, too. but by now it’s a habit.
spring in...
I’m riding out on the apathy-colored wave of having shut myself in the library for the past three days; I am at Open Eye but this means nothing as far as productivity goes. Rainy nights at coffee shops are bad. Thunderstorms are one of the things that gets me most jazzed about being alive; but you pair that with a coffee shop and a three-hour night that involved not one, but two cups of...
seventeen things I will always love passionately...
some weekends, you have to sit down and reevaluate who you are. this may seem like a daunting task, but, in condensed form it can be done by listing seventeen things. these seventeen are things that make you wildly, shamelessly happy. here is my very brief list, very not-comprehensive, but still true list:
1. rollerskating. anywhere, anytime, on anything, with anyone…maybe not the last...
I started to preface this post by saying that it wouldn’t make sense to anybody who hasn’t read The Long Winter, The Witch of Blackbird Pond or Little Women. But then I realized that what I’m writing about applies to anyone who has ever read a good book or fallen in love or been eleven; which is a scope that pretty much covers everyone.
Elisabeth and I made an annotated list...
March 2010
11 posts
short letters: long edition
dear boy in my english class, the one who smokes and reads steinbeck for fun—you don’t ever talk—but when you do, it’s wonderful. don’t sell yourself short.
dear housing: today was probably not your shining moment.
dear old man: you! the one with a white beard like ernest hemingway and a bulky green sweater the color of magnolia leaves: I bet you have stories.
...
“she’s a lot smarter than her cousins in Beula,” said Virgil. “and especially edna earle, that never did get to be what you’d call a heavy thinker. edna earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the ‘c’ got through the ‘l’ in a coca-cola sign.”
“but there, curved over the roof, was something he had never seen...
I’m sitting in Davis facing the big windows; the sun comes in rushing slants that illuminate the pit, and then steal the light, and then illuminate it again. side night: when facing the window, there is nothing, nothing, nothing hotter than a boy who hops off his fixed-gear bike off to one side of the window and then comes to the other window, pausing by it to browse the used book sale.
...
good things:
she and him, volume two. preview on npr.
mumford and sons, awake my soul.
also, carly simon. all the time.
it is sunny here, warm enough to wrap my denim shirt around my waist, but cold enough that I come away with only a faint trace of a spring-break tan. this is the afternoon where I’ve planted pansies and read wendell berry; dirt is under my fingernails and soon I’ll walk to the neighbor’s to babysit. and all this is enough.
I started the morning at the summit, which is the way...
“she lacked a woman’s sense of doom. she did what she wanted—like who else on earth? all her life she found dignity overrated. she rolled down dunes.”
--annie dillard, the maytrees
I’ll be twenty in exactly six months.
this terrifies me.
but I like this line; “she lacked a woman’s sense of doom.”
goodwill hunting
plain and simple: coming home means coming to goodwill. this is what I did this afternoon, when grant applications and transcribing nearly ended in tears. when you’re frustrated, go to goodwill. when you need clothes, go to goodwill. when you don’t need clothes, go to goodwill.
I couldn’t find a parking spot, which made me feel a little bit better about people, since apparently...
natural light
mornings-frank o'hara
I've got to tell you how I love you always I think of it on grey mornings with death in my mouth the tea is never hot enough then and the cigarette dry the maroon robe chills me I need you and look out the window at the noiseless snow At night on the dock the buses glow like clouds and I am lonely thinking of flutes I miss you always when I go to the beach the sand is wet with tears that seem...
at davis library, I’m pittering with work, but I’m not in the same kind of zone that everyone else in here is, because I’m free, home free, going home today free. being somewhat detached from the davis atmosphere (and listening to janis joplin) gives me greater leisure to observe the human geography here. I’ll tell you which kind I find most fascinating: the letter-crested...
once, my best friend and I pulled off on the side of the road and explored an abandoned house. we left the car unlocked and wandered into the virginia woods and, all things considered, it wasn’t a paticularly wise adventure—but in the moment, it was perfect. the house was red, the sky was blue, and there were curtains with tiny flowers blowing in the open window; a tiny, lost garden...
February 2010
24 posts
a young annie dillard
my american authors professor is about sixty-five, but he looms and, sitting at my desk, he appears a veritable literary giant, a bearded tree with a bowtie and a cracked smile. he gave me a B on my english midterm, but I still love him. he gestures broadly when he reads aloud, he bursts out laughing at melville’s short-stories (possibly the only person that ever has or ever will), he...
I had plans tonight; plans that involved cleaning my room and planning my life and doing the things that really ought to be done. Instead, I ate pitas and hummus with Jessica and Evangeline, went to the bookstore, bought a book for my mother, bought a prarie dress, climbed a ladder on an academic building leading nowhere certain; listened to my friend’s play the violin like a...
I know he was controversial (probably for good reason), but I’m drawn again and again to David Hamilton’s photography. It suits the place I’m in. My parents always told me that clothes come in cycles; that one day I’d be drawn back to the pleated denim skirts and jumpers and pale white keds; the victorian blouses and the braids. I said I wouldn’t. I was wrong.
...
listening to ben solleee, grateful for the possibilities of a new tommorrrow.
and for growing things; for prayer and people who smile back and spring.
{source}
spring cleaning
"to be awake is to be alive." --thoreau
yesterday the sunshine came, a resurrection and a gift. I’m praying that it will come back tommorow; that tuesday will not feel the need to ascribe to the traditional wet apparel of the past few weeks.
picture from a few days ago.
I’ve only had a few moments in my life that I knew were moments I’d never forget. inane as it might have seemed, standing in the lenior kitchen, I...
eat crackers, hug everyone
my best friend grace and I write letters to eachother; one a week, with a challenge for the other person (and a picture of assorted wildlife taped to the back, naturally). concluding paragraph from the latest letter-installment:
“Here’s a funny little something from Silas Marner: “they would be obliged to ‘run away’—a course as dark and dubious as a balloon...
there are so many events in my childhood that didn’t seem signifigant at the time but to which I’m continually drawn back to. those three weeks and the grand tetons, for one, and taco john’s and that one time the church youth group’s tent blew clear out of space; that one mountain filled almost completely with flowers. today I want to uproot myself and go back there, or,...
There’s a boy in one of my classes that wears a fish backpack—not a backpack with fishes on it but a crayola-primary-colored backpack in the shape of a fish. Today, during our discussion on mountain-top removal, I saw him slip a copy of Out of the Silent Planet inside our textbook. You badass, I wanted to say, reading all that C.S Lewis during class discussions.
For what it’s...
lillian grace
sometimes, I get homesick.
i carry your heart
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows...
frida
I was frida kahlo for halloween. I know she was crazy; people usually are when their life and art become confused.
Secretly, though, I think she was fabulous.
PS: best text I recieved this week said “oh, by the way, I’m dating the produce-section boy”
good intentions paving company
I kind of like this picture; the vulnerability of the upturned page and the over-exposed blue ink; the fuzziness of huckleberry finn.
not the evening I hoped for: the weight of this week has been heavy and I anticipated great rest in the talking with my parents, the bread-baking, the sleeping in my own bed, the inevitiable salad and baby-holding. still! lizzie’s house tonight;...
home, home is wherever i'm with you
the morning began with a lost wallet and a missed class; filing paperwork at the admissions office and then an interview which I all but flubbed. I wanted to crawl out of the room when my twenty minutes were finished, paralyzed as I was with the knowledge that I knew I had come across about as dynamic and enaging as a derivation. somehow, the chemistry just wasn’t present in this paticular...
for my lovely grace:
the other Julia sent this to us through the Rwanda listserv from here; I think it’s lovely and a good reminder during weeks like this; where it’s impossible to tell the beginning from the end and I begin to melt into a formless shape of rushing, moving, searching. on eating shwarma, or eating anything, or walking to class, or looking at the sky, or taking the recycling out to the curb...
I like this picture of Asia-Mo, she looks cheerfully reluctant and has granola and a book; two items that well describe our lives. Today, we talked about Georgia O’Keefe and Frisbee while listening to Sarah’s laugh two tables down.
I completely failed last week at keeping up with a-picture-a-day, but this is a new week, so here’s to flickr again!
Two of my very favorite...
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY BEST FRIEND! Adrianna Grace, you make the world a more beautiful and inspiring place. Now go buy a pack of cigarettes (ps: kidding).
After writing an impulsive, impassioned post about the New York Times article, I went back and concluded that, even though it portrays UNC women as slightly pathetic, it wasn’t entirely unfair…just sad.
After entirely failing to...
lately, I've been working in the grocery
listening to princeton now. I love their beach boys-esque, preppy style.
sadie, all you do is pass me by, we haven’t spoken for a long time,
but I still think of you.
lately I’ve been working in the grocery
stocking the milk and eggs and all the herbal tea.
I saw them last fall when they opened for Ra Ra Riot—somehow, whenever I go to the cats cradle, I feel sick, so...
I’M GOING TO RWANDA THIS SUMMER!
crazy, crazy, crazy, but true.
I’ve never wanted anything more than I want to go to Rwanda this summer.
That statement reeks of a vulnerability uncomftorable and foreign to me; but it’s what I’ve let myself feel. I like to keep a comftorable distance from the things I desire—telling myself that I didn’t want to go to Oberlin anyways, or work there or be friends with that person—but I want...
02/01
this is sarah, my main squeeze. we go to the library just about every night; this is our favorite spot. sarah thinks that girls can do anything, which is good, since her biochem test is tommorrow (she’ll rock it).
goal for february: take a picture every day, grace/abby style, in an attempt to document this whole college thing. you can find them here.
(other february goals: send in ALL...
dust and the ngc 7771 group
nasa’s picture of the day is my homepage and the way I placate my inner astronomy-geek. this image from january 21st is one of my favorites yet. joy!
today, mary jett and I studied at the looking glass and I was lucky enough to exhange headphones with her for a good three hours. favorite song she introduced me to: yeasayer, ambling alp.
January 2010
27 posts
when it snows like this, there are no sidewalks: boundaries disappear and white, unbroken spaces appear. even the roads become ambiguous entities. perhaps it is something about this, something about the temporary disappearance of well-paved rhythms, that provokes so much introspection and this longing for otherness that we suddenly have. we long for community, but we also long for solitude....
dear blue watterbottle that is more or less a part of my soul:
come back. I miss you
dear granola campus ministry family that lives it ruf in the snow:
I love and am inspired by every single one of you
dear nine-month old golden retriever on franklin street:
I feel the exact same way about the snow.
dear teacher whose class I dropped:
it wasn’t the workload, it was the fact that you...
tina fey is going to grace the march vogue cover! she’s as smart and sassy as they come. girl crush. there is a distinct possibility I may name my first child after her (fey, or maybe just straight-up tinafey as her first name).
meanwhile, a rare north carolina snowfall. eight hours since I first looked out the union window and saw that it was snowing—a boy walking past waved his...