A Girl With a Sword

no resolution

I've decided to not to make any resolutions for the coming year. I did really well with my resolution this year and I don't want to screw that up. This year I resolved to start drinking my coffee black. I figured what with my SIP coming up and the difficulty of getting half and half in the psych commons, this was a truly practical, achievable resolution. And I was so right. Plus it makes me feel cooler. Now there is no way I could match that resolution this year so I'm not even going to try. This was so much better than 2004 when I resolved to stop using the word "relationship." I think drinking my coffee black has helped me to not use the word "relationship," or maybe it's just being away from Covenant.

This last day of the year really seems like the cold, dark, dry end of something in our house. It was supposed to snow today but the clouds just hung down farther and farther and nothing came out of them. The heat isn't working. We think we're out of oil in the furnace. Now it's dark outside. I like the last day of the year, though. It gives me a sense of completion. Another year successfully finished, cross that off my list.

I wish I had a Sylvia Plath

"Did you ever think that maybe Sylvia Plath wasn't crazy, maybe she was just cold?"--Hope to me as we stood in front of the open oven door trying to warm up.

Back in Boston. A little advice, my friends, never, never try to get public transportation from Providence Airport to Boston. It took me five hours to get home last night after I got off the plane in Providence. The Providence railway station is a cool place, though. Just a room with a circle of wooden benches and a stone tile floor. It was a good background for all sorts of people coming through, the businessman trying to get home as fast as possible, teenagers just hanging out, students on their way back to school, single parents, old men trying to smoke their cigarettes and being chewed out by the janitorial staff.

They played Sufjan Stevens' "Chicago" in O'Hare Airport. And by "they" I mean CNN. But it was still appropriate. I love the little appropriate things in life.

I also decided I don't really care for Starbucks' White Hot Chocolate. Tastes like plastic.

mormon snacks

Why I love Wikipedia:

Jello Belt

Jesus in the sugar bowl

I love Christmas Eve, getting everything set up for Christmas. I made it home last night after some heroic shenanigans on the Mass Pike and stops at several airports that did not have Starbuckses so I could not get my beautiful White Hot Chocolate.

Watched Scrooged last night and found a new favorite movie character--the ghost of Christmas present. Oh yeah.

This morning I got up and made the traditional mince pies, watched the traditional Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (Christmas isn't Christmas unless you hear Bert and Ernie sing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"), and finished setting up the presepe. Mary and Joseph aren't there yet, though, and Jesus is still hidden in the sugar bowl until tomorrow morning. Tonight we go out for Chinese food, as usual, then go to church for the candlelight service. I love the little candles they pass out, usually already used and waxy and as you hold them through the service they get soft and kind of droopy, then when you light then you can secretly drip hot wax on your younger brothers . . . happy christmas.

"I had forgotten what ya'll were like"

said Evan, after we had harrassed him for about an hour about being "naked" in the livingroom.

Also, Hope and I have a new obsession--Monarch of the Glen. We spent the whole evening, while Laura and Keri went out to a party, watching episode after episode and drinking lots of tea.

just in time for winter

my autumn mix--

1. Yo La Tengo--Autumn Sweater
2. Stars--Set Yourself On Fire
3. Ryan Adams--Love Is Hell
4. Pedro the Lion--Of Minor Prophets and Their Prostitute Wives
5. The Magnetic Fields--Busby Berkley Dreams
6. Nico--Somewhere There's a Feather
7. Bob Dylan--Simple Twist of Fate
8. The Beatles--Fool on the Hill
9. The Shins--Past and Pending
10. Iron & Wine--Each Coming Night
11. Bright Eyes--Nothing Gets Crossed Out
12. Arcade Fire--Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)
13. Brodsky Quartet (with Elvis Costello)--I Almost Had a Weakness
14. Colin Meloy--Sister I'm a Poet
15. Crooked Fingers--Dignity and Shame
16. Jake Armerding--Unsaveable
17. Ryan Adams--Harder Now That It's Over
18. The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellars--Lisa
19. Iron & Wine and Calexico--16, Maybe Less
20. The Mountain Goats--Old College Try

and if I ever get my music from my iPod onto my new computer I will actually be able to burn this mix.

bostoning

Tonight we went ice skating on the frog pond in Boston Common:

Imagine this with a lot more people, especially ten-year-olds zipping around heedlessly and teenage girls clinging to their hockey boyfriends' arms while slipping every which way.

Afterwards we went out with an English friend to a "pub" and had some chowder and some beer. We argued about who won the Boston Massacre.

always winter, always winter and never christmas

Well, I see Laura has beaten me to the it-snowed-and-we-went-to-see-Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe news, but I guess CNN beat me to the "it snowed" news anyway. Yesterday was amazing. It was snowing big fat flakes as I waited for the bus and I watched them collect on my gloves and admired the patterns. All day at work we kept an eye on the windows and the announcements of library closings. (No hope for us, they said the last time our library closed was in The Blizzard of '78.) At one point two squirrels crawled in between the window and the grate outside and huddled together for warmth. This was very distracting to the kind-hearted librarians. The snow fell until after three o'clock, even managing a white-out at one point. After work I learned that snow isn't quite so jolly when you're running/wading through foot-deep drifts trying to catch a bus, or running/sliding across busy streets in the dark.

All of the snow-angst of the day informed and intensified our Narnia experience of the evening, although the children didn't really seem to feel the cold the way I did. And poor, bare-chested Mr. Tumnus, I just wanted to put a coat on him. Incidentally, Hope and I observed that when Mr. Tumnus is mildly good-looking it makes it a lot stranger that Mr. Tumnus is not wearing any clothes.

I think I liked the movie. It was kind of a shock.--I want my childhood dreams back, you bastards!--I mean . . . I remember when the old movie first came out on the BBC. It was the most anticipated event of my early life. I was five and I cried for happiness when I first saw the credits come on, over the map of Narnia, and heard those beautiful cellos and oboes playing the music. Richard Dempsey's Peter Pevensie was probably my first love and everything about the old movie was a perfect interpretation of the book for me. Damn cynicism, why did I lose my childhood suspension of disbelief? So this new movie was a realization for me that I'm grown up now. If I was still five and this movie came out I'm sure I would have been charmed beyond belief. The wardrobe, and the dryads, and the centaur women were all the fulfillment of a five-year-old girl's dreams, but my dreams were made with the old movie and it's getting harder to find them as I look back now and see the typically poor lighting and sound quality of the BBC, the children who are far younger than I am, the cartoon animals hovering (although I still love those cartoon animals. I missed them.) This new movie was beautiful, but I'm not a child anymore, and I'm not sure I can still go back to Narnia. Or at least . . . oh dear that sounds so sad. But it is different, and I'm not sure what I can do about that.

I have never loved steel guitar so much

We went to the Iron & Wine and Calexico concert last night. Sam Beam was great, Calexico was great, the Mexican man they brought with them, Salvidor Duran, was very enthusiastic in his singing about "love," "crazy," and "always" (the only Spanish words I recognized in his songs). And Calexico's steel guitarist, I tell you. I never thought that I would get into steel guitar. It's not really my thing. But this was amazing.

We actually passed Sam Beam on our way to the concert. We were wandering around Fenway Park trying to find Landsdowne St and he was heading the opposite way we were on Van Ness. I kind of thought it looked like him, but I didn't realize it was until he got up to sing. I try not to jump to conclusions about these kind of things. He looked miserably cold, poor Florida boy. He played a lot of songs from Woman King. The version of "Jezebel" was faster and beautiful, "can you hear the dogs come running" almost made me cry. I love that song so much. And he played "Woman King," my SIP theme song (everyone needs a SIP theme song) and "Evening on the Ground" which I love because it's about Lilith, and because it's a great song. I listened to Woman King over and over and over again last spring while I was writing my SIP (on Britomart, the lady-hero of The Faerie Queene for those who are a bit behind). It was such a fulfilling event to listen to Sam Beam play those songs last night.

I got my new computer on Tuesday. I decided to go for the 12-inch iBook that I've wanted for years and years. I think the main reason I wanted an iBook is because it reminds me of that really cool electronic book that Penny had in Inspector Gadget. I always wanted that book, and now I feel like I have it.

the causes of headaches

After a week of hard work on this grad school stuff my brain is stuck, or lazy, and I can't decide what to say to the next school to convince them that I am who they want me to be. But I love writing, even this kind of stuff. So that's reassuring. I'm readingThe Time Traveler's Wife and loving it so far. I love time-travel stories and the different ways time-travel is handled. My favorite idea is from the Christopher Reeve movie Somewhere in Time. Basically it goes that time-travel involves a kind of self-hypnosis and if you just convince yourself that you are in another time then you will, in fact, be there. I also checked out The Three Incestuous Sisters from the library today, a picture book by the same author as Time Traveler's Wife. Strangely enough, there is no incest, although Bettine is tormented and Clothilde and her nephew commune late at night. It's amazing. Everyone, go out and find it and read it to your children, especially those yet to be born.

Tonight our house, well, Hope, Keri, and Laura took the little Jung/Myers Briggs test that Evan linked to and we discovered that Hope is Mark Twain, Keri is Lorelai Gilmore and Laura is Puddleglum. I'm not sure how accurate that test is. But as long as I still get to be Peter Jennings I'm happy.

"Clothilde knows that the cause of headache is birds using pieces of her hair to build their nests. Therefore, she saves all her hair in jars hidden in her closet. Despite this, she continues to suffer."