Life Quiz

Thanks to Jack for posting his first...

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	7.1
Mind:	7.2
Body:	6.8
Spirit:	7.9
Friends/Family:	5
Love:	6.9
Finance:	7.7
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

It's kind of a bland quiz -- it just sort of rates how healthy each of these factors is. My life is "on a good path" -- apparently. "Your friends and family score is not bad but can be improved. Maintain your current social net, while you try to expand it. Try new things and form new friendships. You will be rewarded greatly." I think this quiz is predisposed to believe that three to five good friends is too low. I disagree. I think the people who are close to me are great at support, healthiness and dependability. So there!

Halloweeeeeee!

Hey everyone,

I had a great Halloween weekend. Steve has started accompanying me to ROCK, the kids organization I volunteer with, and so this Saturday morning was their costume celebration. I put on some tiger pants I hadn't worn in 5 years (ow, were they tight!), ears, a tail, and some tigery eye make up, and Steve dressed as a 'giants fan.' So many cute costumes -- little American Idols, Devils, Samurais, one Human Torch, some Scream masks that "dripped blood" -- Halloween is really all about kids age 6-12, so it was fun to get to be with them. Steve, by the way, is a hit with the 5th grade boys. They want to sumo wrestle him, sword fight him, beat him in basketball...it's really cute. I, on the other hand, seem to be a hit with the 4th grade girls (which was probably my happiest year at Rumsey...interesting) -- especially the ones who find themselves on the margins. It's still hard to get up early on Saturday morning, but even more fulfilling to be making lots of connections with these kids. This weekend is the last one of the season, to resume in January.

Saturday night was our friends 3rd annual halloween party, as well as Steve's best friend's 30th birthday (he got the "best depressing statement of the night award" by saying, Welcome to your Fourth Decade!). My friends had cooked up a fairie theme, Leslie was an Autumn fairie, Laura was a Winter fairie, Sarah (their new house mate and a friend of mine from Wes) was Spring, and another friend, Becca, was Summer. To fit myself into this theme with some degree of autonomy, I went as a Night fairie, or Night personified, and Steve, game as he always is, went as...you guessed it...Day. When we thought of it, it clicked like a pair of red sequin heels: night and day. I rocked a black bob wig, a black vintage eightie's dress with lots of tulle in the skirt, black wings, dark make up, false eyelashes with shimmery beads on the end, and stars and moons where ever I could draw or stick them (though they didn't stay stuck long). Steve found a flamey colored tunic, a sun mask, some flamey wings, and some orangey gold tights. He vaguely looked like a Mexican Wrestler, which led us to call him El Sol all night. He was a hit where ever we went, not just for sheer bravery points. Also, we got to use our latest word of the day -- together we formed a Nycthemeron, which is a 24 hour period. (~_-)

Email me if you must see pictures. (^_^)

And today -- the actual day of Halloween -- I re-donned the wig, threw on some dark make up and some red lips and a black dress and some black boots -- kinda going as a 1920's vamp...only to find that NO ONE IN MY OFFICE DRESSED UP.

Um...can we say, "salient"?

But if I've learned anything, it's that I can "do" goth or "go" black if I "wanted" to. Lots o' compliments, double takes, and extra visits to my desk.

It's been nice to transform 3 times in a row. I hope you all got equal opportunities for rebirths, be it cosmetic or metaphysical...Happy Dark and Scary Day!

Also -- thanks to 2Dad for the card and to Mom and Steve for the care package. Always a pleasure to receive honest-to-goodness mail. Kisses!

In neglect, the Mountains Stood in Haze

A. called me a couple days ago and reminded me of a few of my favorite poems I'd dug up in my college days. I'm grateful because I'd almost forgotten they'd existed, but I used to love them so much that so much as the first few syllables escaped his lips and I was spouting the lines with him.

Here they are:

In Neglect, by Robert Frost

They leave us so to the way we took
As two in whom they were proved mistaken,
That we sit sometimes in the wayside nook,
With mischievous, vagrant, seraphic look,
And try if we cannot feel forsaken.

An excerpt from The Mountains Stood in Haze, by Emily Dickinson

So soft upon the scene
The act of evening fell
We felt how neighborly a thing
Was the invisible.

Follow your passion...even if you want to eat your city

My friend L found this. It was too cool not to post.

http://www.lizhickok.com/assets/portfolio/pages/01city.html

Random poem, revisited

One of my favorite poetry sites is the plagiarist.com, where users type in their favorite poems, and after verification, they get posted and can be commented on, discussed, etc. They also have a feature for generating a random poem, and today's random poem was one that I not only knew, but has a line I absolutely love. Here's the poem reproduced, and with my favorite line in italics:

Autumn Daybreak
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Cold wind of autumn, blowing loud
At dawn, a fortnight overdue,
Jostling the doors, and tearing through
My bedroom to rejoin the cloud,
I know—for I can hear the hiss
And scrape of leaves along the floor—
How may boughs, lashed bare by this,
Will rake the cluttered sky once more.
Tardy, and somewhat south of east,
The sun will rise at length, made known
More by the meagre light increased
Than by a disk in splendour shown;
When, having but to turn my head,
Through the stripped maple I shall see,
Bleak and remembered, patched with red,
The hill all summer hid from me.


The whole poem has a lot to say -- that impending cold and bleakness can reveal as much as light and warmth -- but the line I italicized strikes a chord with me as a reminder that --evolution, change, the light at the end of the tunnel -- the things we strive for -- so often show up as a "meagre light increased" than as "a disk in splendour shown."

Sometimes what reveals progress most is simply the guts, not the glory.

Hesychasts

I've been hearing the phrase 'navel gazing' boundied* about for a while, and today I finally decided to see from whence it came.

Found an unexpected answer here -- it came from monks!!

*so this is obviously not a word. I didn't even notice it at first. I meant to say "bandied about" or "bounced around" and got "boundied." I stand by my completely made up word -- it's obviously divine inspiration as a direct result of hesychasm.