A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Happy Happenings of the Day

• EUREKA's back!!!!
• I was treated to this while studying:

  "Why do people buy expensive exercise equipment and use it as a coat hanger? I don't know." - my Human Sexuality professor, musing on why people do self destructive things.

• The knitting season has finally begun. I have already knit with normal needles, frogged that, reknit with circular needles, frogged that one as well, and finally settled on some dpns three sizes too small that make for a nice concise rib hem.
• I ate two plums, an apple, and tried out that organic instant macaroni and cheese and wasn't disapointed.
• I have a week and one day until I get to spend some quality time on this lil' thing with my grandma. Not to mention I have the great pleasure of fulfilling a lifelong dream of traveling to the Galapagos. Had I the time, my reading list would have included at least five books on island biogeography, some on Darwin's life, Origins of the Species, and three other books by E.O. Wilson just to fill things out.
• And school with all of its promises and opportunities is just around the bend.

Today was a good day.

Rigors of Translating the Indescribable

I have a love for finding words in different languages that don't have a competent English translation. I found this page tonight that was just a blog of people discussing their favorite ones. Things like this remind me why I loved Spanish once upon a time. I feel like by learning a language intimately, I will somehow know in a moment its personal history of development as thoroughly as I know mine - all of its twists and turns, deep sighs and raucous laughs, I watch it transform into something so fluid and beautiful that it can express the thoughts of Pablo Neruda, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy. Its idioms are its passions, its grammar - its quirks, and its cadence and accents are its temperament. It's the personality of a culture - it's part of everyone's personality. Languages are gregarious and rich and so alive that to never speak them again is death. When words slip from your mouth in the perfect combination, you can almost feel their texture in the roll of your tongue and shape of your lips, like they're more than just symbols for an object, but actual objects themselves, unique to every language. Above all, they are frustratingly complex and so beyond the realm of beauty because they are able to bring forth our abstract thoughts into the world. They are the mediators between emotions and communication.

Languages are a culture's adjectives. Almost. Ergh, that's redundant, isn't it? Either way I love adjectives, maybe that's why I find myself so enamored with languages and writing and describing my thoughts and opinions in general. When I was in Spain, I sorely missed the plethora of adjectives at my easy disposal. I never realized how much I valued them until all I could quickly and cogently come up with were bueno, bonita, guapo, rico, and mal. Has anyone tried looking for the Spanish equivalent for creepy? The closest I came was their word for horrifying. Or, what about trying to translate the flippancy but frustration of the phrase "never mind". Or convey to a sensitive Spanish mother the neutrality of the word fine when you're describing how you liked dinner. There's a finesse to a language that only comes with a native's experience. I suppose this isn't quite so much of a problem for people who are fine with just communicating the essentials, but for me, not being able to describe something to my liking can drive me insane.


A Small List:

Fernweh - the longing to be far away, not to be confused with (German)
Wanderlust - the longing to travel (German)
Appel du vide - "the call of the void", the urge to jump from high places (French)
Hyggelig - instantly satisfying and cozy (Danish)
Toska - "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom." (Russian)
Mokita - the truth which no one speaks
Gezellig - it refers to an ambiance that is achieved with friends, food, drink, lighting, music, etc. (Dutch)
ديوان (diiwaan) - "can mean 'account books' or 'anthology' or 'oeuvre', but one of the more difficult meanings of the term to translate is 'collective poetic or literary tradition of a people' " (Arabic)

I'm too Lazy to Elaborate

"The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on."

- Chuck Palahniuk

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become."

- Buddha

"Your smile makes me want to misbehave."

- Post Secret

“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”

-Friedrich Nietzche

Laughter Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
-Mark Twain

What Keeps Me Awake

"What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?"

- Kahil Gibran

My thoughts on a Feeling of Unrest:

The feeling of unrest creeps up on you, as it did to me tonight as I watched the night’s sky out of the car window. You’re thinking of nothing in particular, the days conversations and events float in and out of your thoughts not settling entirely. So it takes you unawares, until you notice that that feeling in the back of your throat wasn’t there a minute ago. And then it’s no longer limited to your throat, but it spreads, seeps, throughout your body, burrowing into your stomach, blurring your thoughts, suddenly making you shiver in uneasiness. You try to pinpoint its origins, but you never can. All you know is that you want to do something that makes you feel alive again. It makes you want to put on your shoes and go out into the night and run until your legs give way underneath you and your body is burning for oxygen. Or find the nearest person who can lend a sympathetic ear and closed mouth and confide in them confessions you can’t afford to impart on those such words concern. It makes you want to feel alive, feel that you have yet to be totally lost to the world at large, if just for one moment.

The feeling of unrest. It gets under your skin and makes you crazier than a full moon. It makes you reconsider the impossible, perhaps foolish, most likely unreasonable stints and then goes ahead and gives you just enough guts to go through with it. It brings you down to its level and has the audacity to dare you to take just another step down towards unforgiving freedom of care. Yet how can you resist such whispers when, in hushed caressing tones, they promise you the world? All you have to do is be brash and light that fire behind your eyes. All you have to do is forget about falling, about the crash and burn, and focus on how the exhilarating flight catches your breath and makes your heart race. Just do it, do it now before this bright burst of courage dissipates in the morning light. Do it before the drug of reality settles back down upon your mind, momentarily stifling the urge to know what it feels like to jump into the deceptively motionless black water and feel the water roll across your skin. Just do it.

But you don’t. Nine point nine times out of ten, the intoxicating blind courage offered isn’t strong enough to overcome the overwhelming sensibility of most minds. It’s been diluted once too often and you’re unsure if you even want to learn how to restore it. So a bit embarrassed, you keep these wild thoughts to yourself and give yourself a pat on the back because this time you didn’t slip. Just wait though, wait for that strong brash unwonted courage to finally overcome you and watch how it burns so brightly, protecting you in your momentary insanity. Such fire, if given enough fuel and enough time, will consume you entirely. But oh, how those flames do entrance you even as they burn you to the ground.

Contemplations

"We still think in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself… Now, I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."

- Rachel Carson

My thoughts on self control:

Self control is a continuous and tumultuous battle between desires and propriety. I want is challenged by I should, I must, I need, I'm obliged to, and I have to. Even outnumbered as it is, desires rule our everyday actions. They bubble up inside of us, filling us with a brand of possible euphoria of the idea of just giving in. They whisper in our ears our hearts desires, only to laugh at us as we fall short of all our own expectations. The less savory desires are held in check, for the most part, by our own set of morals and codes of conduct, influenced by society, by friends, by family. (Though, for the smaller, seemingly inconsequential desires, we're all shit out of luck for some saving grace, if you ask me.) These checks in behavior speak of time tried wisdoms, rationality, responsibility, and other respectable ideas that fall on the heartfelt but deaf ears of the young. Rarely are the two in harmony.

Yet in order to succeed in life, we must have self control. We must be able to sit patiently and wait for the right time to say something. We must try our hardest to be mature and keep our promises. We must learn to exercise restraint when all we feel like doing is nothing, but must do so much more than that. What we call self control is the main propler in the upkeep of society.

But do we really have as much self control as we would like to pretend? No, and those of us who boast of being 'in control' of their lives are completely delusional. Aside from the chance happenings of the universe, we are still dictated by our desires. Obtaining self control is a desire in itself. We desire to know that we can control ourselves and what we do with our bodies and minds and sometimes our hearts. Because then all those things we can't control in our lives become just a little more bearable. We clutch at whatever control we have with a death grip. But in reality, all we can hope to do is slow the inevitable change. So we play along with the rest of humanity, adhere to social scripts, follow the prescribed antidote to matters of the heart, and say polite inconsequential indifferent words to appease people whenever they feel as if their own imaginary control is being challenged by others. By doing this, we fool ourselves into thinking that we have put off some socially unacceptable scene or we have delayed some unwanted event just a little longer. (I wonder though, that in thinking it, in mentally indulging in it as it were, are we giving in to our desires to some extent? It may not be full out breaking down, but isn't fantasizing about something just a more acceptable way of giving in?)

Am I saying we should all give in to our desires or we should live a life without desires? No, that is impossible and very unrealistic. But we must live in this imaginary world full of self delusions, we must make the best of it, and we must constantly search for that balance between acknowledging what we can not control and attempting to control what we can not. We must accept this and get on with our lives, much to our constant dismay. We can't forget that we're powerless in the long run to the will of whatever we believe in, but still we must strive to put significance into what we do. A life devoid of significance is no life at all.

Eagles and Loons Make for an Interesting Combination

I'm sitting outside the parking lot of a coffee shop that closed at 5 PM. As far as we know, this is the only place around here to get internet for my classes. This does not even begin the story of my online adventures in Eagle River. Sadly enough, this is the least of my stresses. It's been cloudy ever since we arrived, on the cold side, and more than a teaspoon full of stress. Though today, it was sunny, and we got the jet skis and boat. Yet the I did not sufficiently prepare myself for staying cooped up in a house with four very 'active' children who had to be watched so they didn't eat more toothpaste (my brother Andy ate half a small tube within the first 20 minutes) or pound on the big screen plasma television while watching cartoons (again, Andy). Andy, who can be the sweetest little boy in the entire world, basically leads the hellions in parade throughout the cabin. He nearly got crushed between the boat and the dock in his attempts to jump ship. With children fueled by sugary soda and less than ideal snicky snacks, my day revolves around waring the small ones out so that by ten I can have some semblance of peace in the house.

But it's not all bad. It's not too cloudy at night, and the sky is beyond gorgeous. I sit out on the dock and willingly freeze my ass off for it, but it's worth it. And we got the boat and the jet skis today, so I can escape there as well. The jet skis offer a wonderful diversion - it's hard to do anything but laugh manically as you're going 70 over the water. And I get to hang out with my padre, which is fun. Oh, and I'm helping my little brother Bobby learn how to read. (He's got this gigantic Dick and Jane book. The first thing I said to him when we sat down to read was 'Remember these names, you'll make fun of them when you get older.' ) The cabin's gigantic, the beds are comfortable, I have books, and unlike the majority of our party, I'm allowed to go on the dock without a life preserver. Life is good.

So in all, this is pretty much another normal vacation. Screaming children, potential for untimely accidents, limited access to the internet, and an all around lessons in patience and the art of dodging social interactions by hiding in a boat with a book.

Running in the Rain

My Thoughts on Rain.

There's something medicinally grounding about the sound of rain. It eases through the stress and the constant fluttering of thoughts and reminds you that life goes on. That it pushes valiantly on when you're wrapped up in yourself and can't take a moment to realize the insignificance of the majority of your problems. Our lives, our moods, our mistakes, our loves and hates, - on an individual basis, they have no impact on life. That sounds slightly depressing, but it seems to put our endeavors into perspective for a moment. Listening quietly to the rain, it makes me feel peaceful, it makes me feel apart of something. I wish I could more eloquently express myself.

Quit Toying with my Emotions, God Damn You

So, I got this email from housing telling me that they recieved my scholarship information (.... what scholarship would this be?) and have placed me back in Threlkeld hall with our good friend Julianne and subsequently with everyone else. I'm not quite sure if this will last, considering the only scholarship I have has absolutely nothing to do with housing, or anything really. It's actually a scholarship for people without any scholarships. That was one of the requirements. However piqued my curiosity, I plan to not look any further into the matter in the hopes that they'll forget about it until it's too late. Wish me luck.

It Rained This Morning

(Not John Mayer, or 'Leslie Anne Levine', but it's Billy Joel, so you can't really compete with that. This song always, always, always reminds me of the people I know who went to Catholic school.)

Well, hello all. I just woke up from a five hour nap, induced by a restless two hours of sleep last night before waking up at 8:30 and throwing myself into three hours of attacking a wall of vines and bush honeysuckle with gardening shears. I sometimes forget how disorienting such naps can make you. I kept thinking it was Sunday. I don't really know what's going to happen tonight when I should be sleeping. I'll probably be staring at my AIM list willing someone to get on so I can talk my way into exhaustion.

Fourth of July was a bust, as it normally is. For some reason our country's Independence Day never seems to strike a note of patriotic pride in my heart. In fact, I do believe it does the opposite. I get kind of cynical of every stranger dressed in red white and blue, waving little American flags that will be forgotten by the end of the week. I look at the majority of them and think that this is just an excuse for you to grill out, get drunk, and blow up things. Way to celebrate our independence.

In other news:

I have less than week until I jet up to Swissconsin. I have this weird hope that I'll be able to relax for a bit. Though if I logically and realistically think about it, the chances of me finding relaxation in the midst of a very active family and two online courses is slim to none. This is the last time I'm taking summer courses. I'll say it, I should have just stayed home this summer, gotten a job in Bardstown, and maybe taken one online course. But oh well, I've learned. There's no point belaboring the point.

So I tried to record 'Leslie Anne Levine' by the Decemberists onto my computer and upload it onto to Youtube, but the sound quality kept popping. I'm not having any luck with my music selections this week.

I finally got around to taking some candid pictures of my bruises. I'm so proud of them.

(There's really no artistic or elegant way to take pictures of shin bruises.)

Now, tomorrow, I plan on making a quick run to the half priced book store and stocking up on some cheap vacation reads. Then, I can give myself a break between my readings in Human Sexuality and Woman in Black Literature courses. Should be a fun couple of weeks.

I must brag for a minute. My sister, the master gardener that she is, already has red tomatoes in our back stoop garden. They're heirloom tomatoes, which means you can actually use the seeds when you're done eating the tomato to make more tomato plants! I love such lovely cycles.

(I repainted my toes out of boredom then decided to place them by the lavender and oregano for a photo shoot.)

A Storm is Coming

The Terminator.

There's perhaps no rival to such a movie. It's got action, it's got grizzled scarred and unshowered soul mates, it's got possible futures, it's got heartache, it's got nuclear wars, it's got hearts being ripped out of bodies and people saying stuff like "in the few hours we had together we loved a lifetime's worth" and "the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present. Tonight..." . You just can't beat that. It is epic beyond measure. But by the end of it, you're breathlessly awaiting to know what the hell happens next. Sarah Connors, pregnant and alone but determined, drives off into the mountains to go underground and raise her son; the future savior of the world. Will she live up to her legend? How will she rally support for a future that has yet to happen? Who will believe her? Who will they send next?!

God, I love it!

Updates later on the second movie. I have all three. And I intend to watch them all tonight.

Update: 9:27

Just got done watching the second Terminator. It was Sweet. I thought I'd seen it before, but after the fifteen minutes I was in completely new territory. Just coming up for air before I watch the last one. Whoo hoo. Not having scholarly obligations is great.

Update: 11:32

Hmm. Terminator 3 is done and I'm not sure what to think. It was definitely the least active of the three. Definitely was a transitional piece. It served its purpose I suppose, it was good enough. Nothing beats the first movie though. That thing is a work of art, hah.

So I googled Terminator 4, and there's a bunch of interesting names floating around with it. Christian Bales, Bryce Dallas Howard, Anton Yelchin (who plays a young Kyle Reese, and looks the part if you ask me), this really cute guy Sam Worthington, who is rumored to be the new main character for the next movies. Yeah that's right, movies plural. I love franchises.

Other than that, here's a great picture of Arnold, wearing a male stripper's sunglasses.

Well Shit.

I woke up this morning to find that because of my less then stellar academic performance last semester, I will no longer be rooming in Threlkeld next semester. Yeah. Instead, I have my own room in Unitas.

Upsides: I don't have a roommate anymore. I get to rearrange my room however I like, I get to listen to music without my headphones in. I can dance unabashedly to said unplugged music. I can get a work out in by taking the stairs.

Downsides: I'm going to be living on the 11th floor of Unitas. I'm not even quite sure where the hell that is. The laundry room is in the basement. The kitchen is on the 9th floor, and I hear you can't get wireless access above a certain floor. Oh, not to mention everyone else is in Threlkeld.

So, I'm going to apply for housing in Threlkeld for Spring semester and see where that takes me. This is inconvenient, to say the least.