Sunday Sundance - 3/06

*There's blood in my mouth 'cause I've been biting my tongue all week*

-Rilo Kiley

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The gateway drug. The ongoing habit. 

What happens when you find yourself, intentionally or unintentionally, in the shoes of the other Boleyn girl? What happens to your identity? What happens to your pretty little head?
And then what happens when you're--oh no, oh God, what do i? how? how do i? --on the other side of the fence.
To the backdrop of the quiet spring rain, tonight's Sundance is dedicated to that other, shared love.

Song of the night: Stay by Sugarland.  This is the song that sold me on Jennifer Nettles voice but that's not really important.  What matters is the portrait it paints of infidelity and the things it made me realize about my own ventures into that territory.

Forgive us our trespasses and lead us not into temptation, we pray.  But isn't that kind of backwards? I don't know. I don't know what order things go in. I don't know what order I and the other girl--or is it the other girl and I?--go in. The order in which the other women and I go.  The order in which the other women and I are privileged. I know it's not as simple as having or not having sex with someone else. Something tells me I have a lot more to learn.

Poetry of the night: Leda and the Swan by W.B. Yeats

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

                        

*Did she put on his knowledge with his power?*

Sunday Sundance - 2/27

The Oscars may be the focus of the film scene tonight, but there's still a sundance in this girl's corner of the world.  I got to spend the weekend with my nieces and two children of friends who are like family, so today's sundance is dedicated to them.  Abbie is 9 and Lily is 5.  Elizabeth is 10 and Donnie is 7.  I had a really nice time playing with them and, moreover, observing them play together. The personas and grown-up situations they project for themselves are at once perfectly recognizable and strangely blurred, fashioned in birthday candle opacity.  When you grow up, you can't really see what they're envisioning in their imaginations.  You can't see the thing of it. Parallax doubles your perspective.  But you can remember, participate, and encourage.  You can love.  Here to the left is a piece from FOUND Magazine, an online site that publishes random print articles that people dig up from their closets or simply just find lying around.  I love the girlish innocence that resonates from this little girl's letter to the tooth fairy.  What a privilege to witness such intimate sincerity.  What an invitation to love.  Remember being a little kid and imagining conversations with people you admired and looked up to?  What an invitation to love.

Poem of the night: An Invitation by Shel Silverstein This is the opening to the collection Where the Sidewalk Ends, a book beloved to my sister, me, and now Abbie and Lily. If you are a dreamer, come in.

 

Sunday Sundance - 2/20

*Come dance the silence down through the morning*

-The Counting Crows

Songs of the night: 
Angel of the Morning by Juice Newton
Angel of the Morning cover by Shaggy
Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash


Photo of the night>>original by yours truly


Poetry of the night:
That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
-"Gubbinal" by Wallace Stevens

 *La lune, trop rousse, de gloire éclabousse 

ton jupon plein de trous.*

Valentine's Day

*Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart.* - Goethe

So here it is, Valentine's Day.  With all my heart, with all my love. With all the tender thoughts tucked away down in my worn through shoes, I wish you all a lovely day of love.

Song and Music Video of the Day: The First Day of My Life by Bright Eyes

Poetry of the Day - "Night Drive" by Seamus Heaney. Heaney wrote this for his wife. It's so quiet and gentle and beautiful. It reminds me of the time when my friend Landis and I made waffles together at his house and after we were done eating and cleaning up, I stayed in the kitchen to wash all the extra dishes that had accumulated so his mom wouldn't have to when she got home from work.  I didn't mind doing it.  It was a labor of love. Years later, Landis said he stood there in the kitchen doorway watching me wash those dishes and thought "She's the kind of girl who will like doing those things for the rest of her life." And he was right. It's my ordinariness. He loved my ordinariness.

Seamus Heaney

Night Drive 


The smells of ordinariness 
Were new on the night drive through France: 
Rain and hay and woods on the air 
Made warm draughts in the open car. 


Signposts whitened relentlessly. 
Montreuil, Abbeville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went, 
Each place granting its name’s fulfilment. 


A combine groaning its way late
Bled seeds across its work-light. 
A forest fire smoldered out. 
One by one small cafés shut. 


I thought of you continuously
A thousand miles south where Italy 
Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere. 
Your ordinariness was renewed there.

Epic Poetry of the Day:

The Odyssey, Book 23 - When Penelope and Odysseus are reuinted.  There are several passages in this book of the poem that make me cry. In my own personal religious beliefs, I take marriage very seriously and believe it is a sacred promise that you make not only to each other but also to God.  I know Penelope and Odysseus are fictional characters but I still find the story of their marriage- in particular Penelope's great faithfulness to it-so moving.  Penelope was loyal to her marriage bed for twenty years, never knowing if her husband would ever come home from war.  When Odysseus finally does come home, she is afraid that it isn't really him or that maybe the gods are trying to trick her.  She is hesitant to embrace him and welcome him.  But when he starts talking about a secret design in the structure of their bed, which he built and only he and Penelope know about, she doubts no longer.  "And as when the land appears welcome to men who are swimming, after Poseidon has smashed their strong-built ship on the open water...and only a few escape the gray water landward by swimming...so welcome was her husband to her as she looked upon him."  All that time, twenty years, Penelope was swimming, scared and exhausted and alone until Odysseus came and she saw her shore once again.

Just Because of the Day (dedicated to Jes, Ang, & Cait): A Friend Like You by Joshua Radin

"Many times I've gone without a home, a meal, a pair of shoes...If you had three, you'd give me two. There's no other friend like you" - Joshua Radin

Memory of the Day: Valentine's Day 2007 Surprise Snow Day


Turn on your lovelight <3

Make Way For Ducklings

This is a rare glimpse into the window of my childhood between when my mother died and my father remarried.  I am feeding ducks at the summer cottage of close family friends.  If you look closely, you can see that I am wearing a belly shirt.  Not necessarily obscene for an 8 year old, but probably not what my mother would have allowed under her supervision.  My father was trying his best.  He braided my hair that day and many other days for several years.  Our relationship is not always easy to handle.  A loss of that kind of magnitude-a mother, a wife- brings families together but also creates devastating divisions.   

Valentine's Day four years ago (the big special one with the surprise snow day) fell on a Wednesday.  My dad came over to visit me at school the following Saturday, knowing that I was still sad from my recent breakup.  He brought me flowers and took me out to dinner.  Today he gave me my favorite Gerber daisies and a book of e.e. cummings poetry.  

Song of the Day: You Are My Sunshine 

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day.  Tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Like a box of positives, it's a plus love

Another fine mashup of love to love here this Saturday night...

Songs:
Can I Kick It? by a Tribe Called Quest (cuz who says love songs gotta be all about love, and also it's where I got the title for tonight's post from)
Mellow Mood by Slightly Stoopid - love love looooooove this song. if i get knocked up, i want this kind of plus love.

Clip (dedicated to Jes): scene from Almost Famous.  At the age of 24... remember that? ;)

Poetry of the night: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 2 scene 1. The exchange between Demetrius and Helena is one of my all-time favorites, especially Helena's speech below.

HELENA 

    Your virtue is my privilege: for that 
    It is not night when I do see your face, 
    Therefore I think I am not in the night; 
    Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company, 
    For you in my respect are all the world: 
    Then how can it be said I am alone, 
    When all the world is here to look on me? 


 Saturday night's all right for fighting. <3

I Like My Body When It Is With Your Body

Because sometimes, it's just exactly what you need.

Freshman Year

Senior Year

I miss college dorm sex.  In my experience at Gettysburg, you knew what you were getting into and who was getting into you.  You could pretty well count on him being a smart, relatively upstanding young man free of transmittable disease.  No one on campus was getting chlamydia. No one was getting pregnant. Sometimes you were getting drunk,  sometimes you were getting sober.  This is the perfect time and setting for fuck buddy love. I'm all grown up and graduated now and the idea of this kind of engagement in the real world just doesn't seem as plausible or even attractive.  That's ok.  It was pretty much as perfect as it gets.  I will always remember it with fondness.  I will always remember the gentle rushes rushing gentleness gentleness rushing  brought back to my nether heart. I will always be grateful that it belonged to me. I will always be glad that it was him.  If you are reading this, I am glad it was you.

It's not the sex. It's not the incredible sex. It's not the attention or the company. It's not the feeling of being held.  It's just exactly what you need.  Tuesdays at 4, every other Spring break, senior year finals week.  For once, you just know when it's right.

Poem: I Like My Body When It Is With Your Body by e.e. cummings
Song: Looking for Shelter by Good Old War
"You don't have to belong here. We'll just know when it's right." I miss college dorm sex. <3