We never thought this day would come. We prayed for it's quick delivery, crossed days off our calendars, counted hours, minutes and seconds, and now that it's here, I'm sorry it is because it means leaving friends who inspire me and teachers who have been my mentors - so many people who have shaped my life and my fellow students' lives impermeably and forever.
Those words come from Rory Gilmore's speech at her high school graduation. I know I reference Gilmore Girls a lot, but these words were too perfect here in the early morning hours of my college graduation day. So, to my fellow graduates: congratulations! There were certainly moments for many of us when we thought we would never live to see this day, but here we are nonetheless. And I am sorry to say that we have. There are still things I wish I had time to do at King's. There are people I was only starting to get to know that I would like to continue to get to know. There are dear friends who I will miss. There are professors who have guided and encouraged me academically and personally, and who have been sympathetic and understanding when I needed it most. I know that graduation ought to be exciting, but in reality it is mostly just making me sad. I would rather skip it all together. I know that's just my hatred of goodbyes talking though and I would regret it if I didn't go. So, this afternoon I shall wear an unflattering gown and a funny hat and try to focus on the happy accomplishment part and not the sad ending part of graduation.
This is Skeezix. She is one of my parents' cats. Technically, she is my brother's (which explains the name: he was 8 when he named her) and the other cat is mine (Za Za, I was 11 and had just read a book in which there were 26 kids, each with a name starting with a different letter of the alphabet and the last one was named Zsa Zsa, but being 11, I thought it was pronounced Za Za...), but in reality they are my parents' cats. They are the ones who feed them and clean up after them and now that neither my brother nor I lives at home for most of the year they really are just my parents'. Anyway, I miss the kitties when I'm at school. Although, I have to say that I never miss having fur on all of my clothing all the time.
Skeezix is great. Whenever I am feeling sick or sad she somehow knows and will come cuddle with me at night. Since finishing school I've definitely been sick and I've had my moments of sadness, so I've deeply appreciated having a warm kitty to cuddle up with while I sleep.
Okay, so this isn't an Easter Lily. But I actually don't like Easter Lilies that much, so here is a white lily. Technically any white lily is a symbol of the resurrection, so I think I'm still good.
I hope everyone had a lovely day. I'm still battling my post-exam illness (which has turned into a really awful cough, making speaking difficult) and I had to work tonight, but at least the sun was out and it was a beautiful day.
Aftermath
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
And gather in the aftermath.
Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowan mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom.
Welcome to the aftermath of exams. I have been walloped by my annual end-of-the-school-year sickness. It happens every year; I run on adrenalin mixed with stress and add in a dash of sleeplessness for about a month and so as soon as exams are over and I relax for a second my body succumbs to some illness or another. Last year it was the flu, this year it seems to be a deadly cold. Of course, I also have to work all weekend/most of next week, I need to move out of the apartment on Tuesday, I have an interview to go to on Thursday and grad is in a week. So, in short, a rather inconvenient week to be sick. As long as I have meds in my system I can do a convincing impression of someone who is not dying. It's a tricky balance for me though. If you know me, you know that my stomach and I have a bit of a testy relationship. Well, one of the things that does not generally go well is medication of any kind. I seem to have found a balance that works. At least, it has worked for one day. We will see how long I can make it last.
We read this poem in the second half of intro English in my first year of university. That was the class that made me fall in love with poetry. Every time I hear the word "aftermath" I think of this poem now. It is so beautiful.
I am officially finished my undergrad degree.
It's weird. I'm so excited to be done. And I'm proud that I made it through. And I'm just tired because I've been pushing so hard for the last month or so. But the reality is starting to hit me now. Sitting in my room at my parents' house typing this I am beginning to realize just how final this is. Yes, there is still grad, but not everyone goes to grad. I have friends that I likely will never see again. I feel like this last year at school I finally found a community that I really loved. And having that ripped away is a bit painful.
There I go again, turning something that should just be plain old exciting into something deeply melancholy. Not one of my more attractive qualities.
This is the sunset from a couple of days ago. Shot through my window at an exceptional distance, hence the haziness. But I really love the colours. It was almost as if the sky was on fire. It seemed appropriate for this moment in my life. Both beautiful and a little bit scary.
I hate finals.
I realize that no one really loves finals. I have yet to hear, in all my years of schooling, someone say "Yay finals! This is my favourite time of the year!" or anything of a similar ilk. However, I really hate finals. I would rather write a paper. And if I have to write an exam then I would rather it be a take home than an in class. Exams just stress me out way more than papers. I think part of it has to do with the fact that studying isn't a finite task. I never really feel like I am done studying. It is more that I just run out of time and have to go write the exam. Papers I can feel like I am done. Studying just goes on and on and on...
I hate studying. And I am not good at it on the best of days. Today, however, it is exceptionally bad. See, I have one final exam left in my undergraduate career. One. It's tomorrow afternoon. By three o'clock Thursday afternoon I will be free. This alone would be enough to make studying a difficult task. To top it off though it is in a class that I just don't care about at all. It was a topic I wasn't particularly interested in to begin with, we had a horrible prof, and overall I feel like I learned very little. My notes are pathetic. And not in the this-prof-is-so-deep-I-don't-know-what-to-write way, but in the we-actually-didn't-discuss-this-in-any-sort-of-detail way. It's awful. Consequently I have very little motivation to study.
I'll still be panicking tomorrow though. Darn perfectionism.
An explanation for my recent hiatus: a term paper ate my life and then I jumped on a plane and headed to Calgary for two incredible days with my best friend, Audrey.
I got to spend some time in one of my favourite places in the world this weekend: the airport. I adore airports. And airplanes. There is something about the atmosphere in airports that is full of hope and promise and excitement. And I love the feeling of being on a plane, of motion. It had been far to long since I had gotten to experience this beloved location.
This the view out the plane window on my way down. It was a disgusting day on the ground, but once you got up in the air it was downright lovely.
Apartment Story
The National
Be still for a second while I try and try to pin your flowers on.
Can you carry my drink? I have everything else.
I can tie my tie all by myself.
I'm getting tied, I'm forgetting why.
Oh we're so disarming darling.
Everything we did believe
Is diving diving diving diving
Off the balcony.
Tired and wired we ruin too easy.
Sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave.
Hold ourselves together with our arms around the stereo for hours.
When it sings to itself, or whatever it does,
When it sings to itself of its long lost loves
I'm getting tied, I'm forgetting why.
Tired and wired we ruin too easy.
Sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave.
But I'll be with you behind the couch when they come
On a different day just like this one.
We'll stay inside till somebody finds us,
Do whatever the TV tells us,
Stay inside our rosy-minded fuzz for days.
We'll stay inside till somebody finds us,
Do whatever the TV tells us,
Stay inside our rosy-minded fuzz.
So worry not.
All things are well.
We'll be all right.
We have our looks and perfume.
Stay inside till somebody finds us,
Do whatever the TV tells us,
Stay inside our rosy-minded fuzz.
So worry not.
All things are well.
We'll be all right.
We have our looks and perfume.
I am exhausted, but I still have a paper to finish. The National has been the band getting me through this last stretch of insanity. This song seemed appropriate tonight as I slammed into the wall of exhaustion and had my end-of-semester meltdown. The lines "Tired and wired we ruin too easy / Sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave" are a perfect expression of this time of year. I'm tired and stressed so I fall apart easily. I have been tempted on more than one occasion to just collapse into bed fully clothed. I am impatiently waiting for winter to leave (sadly, it is supposed to snow the next couple of days).
Just something pretty for you. And me. I'm trying to inject some loveliness into this time of year for me. Also, my brain has no room for anything aside from paper writing right now so I'm having a hard time coming up with anything to post here.
Signs you are having a bad week:
1. Your can of shaving cream explodes in your face while you are showering resulting in shaving cream in your eyes and all over the ceiling. Consequently, at 8 in the morning you find yourself mopping the bathroom ceiling while you are wearing a towel.
2. At midnight while you are doing your laundry the washing machine figures that it's a good idea to quit mid-cycle. You are left with half-washed clothes that are sopping wet and soapy. Consequently, at 12:30 at night you are hand washing your jeans.
3. You do a load of white laundry specifically because you have no clean white tank tops only to discover that somehow the dryer (not even the washer, where you would expect such a thing to happen) turned all of your formerly white clothing light blue. Consequently, you now no longer own any white tank tops.
Yes, all of these things happened to me in the last 5 days (not even a whole week!). Because apparently normal end-of-term insanity just isn't enough.
I love light. That has been well established on this blog. Sadly, now that the sun has emerged on a more regular basis and the days have gotten longer I have had to hole myself up in windowless rooms to do work. But there was a moment at work today when the golden light of the cusp of sunset came in the window next to my desk and wrapped me in its embrace. And for those precious few moments all the stress and worry drained away.
This picture is from the walk my roommates and I took through the river valley in the fall. It is probably my favourite shot from that evening. The gorgeous golden-hued light just makes this lovely plant all the lovelier.
Sonnet: to Spring
Sylvia Plath
you deceive us with the crinkled green
of juvenile stars, and you beguile us with
a bland vanilla moon of maple cream:
again you tame us with your april myth.
last year you tricked us by the childish jingle
of your tinsel rains; again you try,
and find us credulous once more. A single
diabolic shower, and we cry
to see the honey flavored morning tilt
clear light across the watergilded lawn.
although another of our years is spilt
on avaricious earth, you lure us on:
Again we are deluded and infer
That somehow we are younger than we were.
Sylvia Plath wrote this poem in her journal in August 1951. She was eighteen at the time and finishing up a summer post as a governess of sorts. It was never published, but I still like it. Spring and I have a complicated relationship. I like spring in theory. I am the first to admit that the change in weather has a profound effect on my mood. I always find it amazing how as soon as the sun comes out and the snow starts melting everyone just comes alive. I've really been struck by that wandering through the school the past week or so. It's the most stressful time of the semester, but the emergence of the sun has brought people to life. However, living in Edmonton means that spring can also be downright cruel. There is no guarantee that we won't see snow again before summer. And the mess created by the melting snow and the sand and gravel that has been put on the roads all winter long is just plain disgusting. Plus seasonal changes mean exciting things like my knees swell (I know, I sound like an old woman). So Spring and I have a complicated relationship. I feel like Plath's poem gets at that sense of knowing I am being deluded and yet falling for it every year.
It's the end of semester rush. Everyone is running around writing papers, giving presentations and beginning to stress about impending exams. This point in the semester unfortunately also coincides with the long-awaited emergence of spring. It is still tenuous since we live in Edmonton and the possibility of snow looms until just about July, but it has been lovely lately. Sadly, I spend my days sitting in a windowless office and windowless classrooms. Although it's productive it is not exactly what I would like to be doing. I come back to the apartment at lunch and find our living room bathed in sunlight. All I want to do is curl up in the sunshine and sleep, as if I was a cat. Alas, I must tear myself away and return to the windowless land of academia.
Chasing Cars
Snow Patrol
We'll do it all
Everything
On our own.
We don't need
Anything
Or anyone.
If I lie here,
If I just lie here,
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world?
I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel.
Those three words
Are said too much.
They're not enough.
If I lie here,
If I just lie here,
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world?
Forget what we're told
Before we get too old.
Show me a garden
That's bursting into life.
Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads.
I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own.
If I lie here,
If I just lie here,
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world?
Forget what we're told
Before we get too old.
Show me a garden
That's bursting into life.
All that I am,
All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes.
They're all I can see.
I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things
Will never change for us at all.
If I lie here,
If I just lie here,
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world?
I have this song to thank for introducing me to Snow Patrol years ago. So good. And so sweet in a weird way that somehow aligns perfectly with me.
It's more interesting to have just a picture of a small detail - then you can dream all the rest around it. Because when you see the whole thing, what is there to imagine? -- Dries Van Noten
One of the blogs I read daily is Crystal Gentilello's Plush Palate. Today she posted a lovely bit about the "moments" of a home. It is truly wonderful (I am a particular fan of the second picture. I want that dress). I agree with the idea that the small things in a room are the most fascinating. The little vignettes that reveal the owner's personality. Some of the loveliest moments in the home are these things. When I have my own place next year I hope to have lots of these moments.
Marginalia
Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page -
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil -
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet -
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
[Billy Collins writes incredible poetry.]
I'm feeling a bit fragile right now.
I had an encounter tonight that painfully and achingly reminded me that as much as I would like to be strong and independent, something I even manage to achieve occasionally, I'm still pretty fragile. Last year took a heavy toll on me physically, mentally and emotionally. I forget that I have to be kind and gentle with myself still. The wounds are fresher than I would like to admit.
- This morning I am at low ebb. I did not sleep well last night, waking, tossing, and dreaming sordid, incoherent little dreams. I awoke, my head heavy, feeling as if I had just emerged from a swim in a pool of warm polluted water. My skin was greasy, my hair stiff, oily, and my hands as if I had touched something slimy and unclean. The thick August air does not help. I sit here lumpishly, an ache at the back of my neck. I feel that even if I washed myself all day in cold clear water, I could not rinse the sticky, untidy film away; nor could I rid my mouth of the furry unpleasant taste of unbrushed teeth. -
(from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
This morning was one of those mornings. One of the ones where you haven't slept well the night before and you wake up feeling absolutely disgusting, certain that the day will be horrible and you will feel like a creature that has crawled out of a mucky bog all day long no matter whether you shower or put on your nicest clothes. Fortunately the day turned around significantly and I ended up feeling pretty good.
I am a huge fan of Sylvia Plath (as discussed here, here and here). I kid you not. One of my most treasured books is a copy of Sylvia Plath: The Complete Poems, which I hunted high and low for and finally found in Victoria. I can recite several of her poems from memory and often quote them (for example, the title of yesterday's post is a line from a Plath poem). I wrote a paper on her poem "Daddy" and last year and ended up using it as my writing sample to submit to grad schools. The Bell Jar probably makes it onto my top-ten list of books and I may own a The Bell Jar tshirt from Out of Print clothing. I really loved the movie Sylvia. I am not exactly sure what this says about me as a person, but I try not to worry about it. Anyway, for a while now I have been wanting a copy of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath and the other week I had to renew my irewards membership so while I was doing that I decided to treat myself to a copy. It just arrived in the mail yesterday and it is all I can do to keep myself from reading it and only it. He writing is so raw, so powerful, so emotional. She was so in touch with the intensity of life. Her every sentence pulses with power and emotion. It's amazing.
