inspired by The Mayfly Project
'07
Seeds
living with decisions
watching Light dissolve
Big Rock Candy Summer
Drawing Chalk Doors
a fly on Wagon's Wheel carried forward to the
beginning
I shall sincerely miss ending my dates with /07.
It is a good number, but I guess the price of having variety and change to appreciate is not having everything at once.
Here's to '08.
Also a good number.
Just,
different.
Here's to the end of a year of beginning,
Here's to a future of growth.
Social trends at this time of the year remind me of something that I thought of .. a little over a year ago (oh my, so near it seems, yet so much in between): Resolved.
It has not led to my own demise, but since reaching a state above amorphous jelly, my focus has been more to find and climb small gradients of staying alive than on chosing my preferred, drawn-out death (a hyperbole, - physically, I'm fine).
Far from noble declarations,
my image lately has been one
in which I eat truth off the ground like a stingray.
It tastes like rubble, but it is real.
I am gathering myself to try again.
Announcing:
The first annual Olivian Paragraph Month which begins today, Dec 27, 2007 and ends on Jan 27, 2008 (the day before school starts).
From the creator:
What is Olivian Paragraph Month?
It's my response to NANO. Maybe it's helpful to write 50,000 words for some people, but I think getting in the habit of writing smaller, tighter, more concise writing and editing it well is what really improves readability of writing. So, within a month, the same time it takes for some people to write a very bad novel, you are challenged to write one good, solid story of a paragraph or more.
....and begin!
-Cool Hand Luke
They always look bigger and steeper from far away.
It's not so bad once you're there, right?
It's good, even.
And, I'm going home.
(appended, 12.21.07)
And, on my way home, ~17 hours and a free 2-way ticket later,
I declare the terminal in LAX which contains gate 69B to be cursed, for it has caused me more than 24 hours of accumulated delay on 2 occasions. Curséd also: United and Continental (but we already knew that).
This is maybe my 4th batch of tie-dye, but second round of pictures.
The tie-dye itself was done sometime in September, but I'm only getting the pictures up now.
Sometimes,
I think about how there is so much future out there
and so much change and so much uncertainty
...and it gets despairingly frighteningly unknown
but I guess I should try to remember that when I was 5, there was even more of it, about which I knew even less,
and I wasn't afraid then...
it was exciting.
It's been a long time from 5 'til now, filled with many different, interesting, transient things. I just have more of it to look forward to.
"Let's wipe away all of our expectations and wander around like children."
-郝鹿路
(my paraphrase...I shall have to check for the actual quote)
Finals Week.
I nearly lived in the library. 
I took a mandatory break from book-staring-at to find some external, dynamic stimulation in the library lobby. After 10 minutes or so, I was walking back to my desk when one of my very tall friends from a nearby desk passed me going the opposite direction, grinning down at me from under his awning of dark hair. I slowed and stopped near him to imply "..What..?"
He hardly needed an invitation:
"Somebody just walked past swinging a dead duck!"
"What? a... duck?"
"A dead duck! Swinging it, like this!"
"What? ...in the library?"
"This duck falls off of the library... I didn't see it, but the people in the desk next to me saw it fall off the library past the window! And then this guy walks up and picks it up and walks off with it!"
"What? just now!"
He nods vigorously as we both enter the library lobby (I had joined his original trajectory). I'm still mentally reeling with collecting the images in some coherent conceptual basket when immediately before me at the circ desk, I see:
"Holy Cow! Is that the dead duck? How did it die? (Can I see it?)"
"Sure. My friend shot it."
My mind flashes back to someone requesting slingshots for shooting ducks off of the Steele's during freshman year. Someone is shooting ducks off the library?
"He SHOT it? With a gun?"
"Yeah, it's duck season. He just got back from Sauvie Island"
Oh. This is starting to make sense...
"How did it fall off the library?"
"Oh, well, he brought it back to give it to me on the 2nd floor, and I dropped it out my window..."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"I must cook it and eat it. I can't wait for finals to be over so I can eat this duck."
"...can I take a picture?"
"Sure."
A funny bit of trivia is that there was a guy who graduated last year that used to have loud arguments with the library circ(ulation) desk while tours were going through regarding demands for an explanation of why he couldn't take his duck into the library (he had a convincing-looking fake decoy-type duck). I told this story to the boy with the dead duck, and interestingly enough, I randomly met the boy-who-used-to-argue-about-his-fake-duck downtown and told him the story of how someone actually had an equally un-alive duck in the library.
When I went back into the bowels of the library, the talk of that row of desks was about how a dead duck had fallen off the roof and some guy had just walked up and carried it off, swinging it.
The part that's still a mystery to me is... how he managed to just drop it out of a 2nd story window...
In a High School Lit class, we read a lot of poetry and stories, including The Worn Path by Eudora Welty (for some reason, even with all of the stories we read, the phrase 'The Worn Path by Eudora Welty'' comes to mind far easier than the others).
(SPOILER ALERT! in this paragraph)
In the story as I remember it, an older negro woman named Phoenix Jackson (authors and the names they choose...) travels a difficult path through many obstacles to get to the pharmacy to buy some medication for her ailing grandson. In class, our teacher raised an ambiguity that none of us had considered: considering the type of medication and the duration of its purchase, our teacher severely suspected that the grandson had not survived his illness. Why then, did Phoenix continue to return to the pharmacy? We were a bit incredulous at the idea - if her grandson had in fact already succumbed to his illness, why would she go out of her way? ..spend her money? ..to buy an unnecessary drug? And why did they keep selling it to her?
Our teacher led us to consider her travel of the worn path as a ritual of her devotion to her grandson, and then phrased the question along the lines of - why would she continue traveling the difficult and unnecessary path when the object of her love and devotion was gone? It didn't make any sense.
We were high school students then, and silly with adolescence and inexperience. The story was kind of weird anyway.
Our teacher clarified,
Why would someone continue with such a method of demonstrating love?
we blinked at him.
Why do we partake in the ritualistic consumption of blood and flesh?
- a morbid non-sequiter for an instant,
but in a small, largely Catholic town, even the atheists know when you're talking about communion.
I don't remember how he said it, but I remember him bringing his hands and the theatrical twist of face near each other as he dramatically paced the room, every bit a professor in a high school box.
The room was silenced in the realization that the question we'd thought was nonsensical is actually applicable. The room was quiet as the thoughts drained from that concrete image to other areas of our brains.
I'm not sure that we'd answered the question, but he'd made his point.
Last week or so, my grandma, aunt, and mom sent me a fat envelope of good-ol' midwestern homemade chocolate-and-cereal-y bars with a Hello message and a newspaper clipping. The bars are cut into little squares. I shared some with my friends, because that is what one does with good things. But, I've kept the others to myself. I eat them now and then, but not when I'm hungry, because they are not just food, and not too quickly because I must ration their sustenance until I leave. They are medicine against the food of the dead. They were sent to me from far away - made in the same country I was - they are evidence of the promise that I have a home waiting to welcome me back, and that soon, I will be there myself.
In my psychological narrative,
6's are ends
7's, beginnings
8's are a ripening
This is the last month of a year of beginning.
A seed doesn't grow unless it falls and is buried, I suppose. In some metaphors, anyway.
(posted 12 18 2007)
In which I turn around to find an unexpected slip of paper on my clipboard. I turn it over to find a most welcome note:
I'm writing again
I use a pen because it lasts longer than pencil.
The only problem is that sometimes ink glides so clean and easily. I like the scratch of a pencil - the graphite grinding over subtle contours of the page - It's a friction I can feel that reminds me: I'm getting somewhere.
Even if I can't keep up,
friction means I am again moving.*
Hang in there
Thankyou, Mr. Olson.
