Home again!

Hello! I'm back from Germany! Just a few notes, because life is short.

1) In Germany, people don't cross when the crosswalk light is red- even if there are no cars. I suspect this is a metaphor for all of German culture, although the Germans were somewhat dismissive of the phenomena.

2)The Dom in Bamberg(?) is currently my favorite church building ever.

3)It was lovely to see Eugene people again, even for a couple days

4) Trollywood. Eisley.

5) My current plan is to find some way to make money, and to continue the War against Crickets.

6)If it is true that people are criticizing Palin for keeping her Downs baby (if its true she had a Downs baby), I think I'll vote for McCain. (my current level of political thought)(sad really. I should try to care)

That's all for now.

After not blogging all summer, I am about to go to Germany. Today, I mean. I just wanted to tell you all that I will not blog in Germany either. Just so you know. When I get back though...

Worry

I feel a need to study German very hard over the summer, fueled by sheer panic. I am going to Germany this fall, and I am really afraid of not being able to communicate over there. Not with the Germans really- but the Junior class, which is mostly who's going. I feel like I speak a different language when I talk to them in English. Seeing we're only supposed to talk German while we're there, I am rather worried.

?

How wierd is it that music as we generally experience it is disassociated from a person actually performing?

void

How dully in the mountains sound the feet
of them that bring good news
How dark are the mountains
and how wide is the void into which their words fall
how void is the heart into which they fall

They said if you spoke into the void
there would be light.
If you spoke into the void
a world would begin,
and a life would begin to unfold in the darkness.
But there is nothing here, and there is no light.

If there can be no light,
speak to the void
and make it empty
If there can be no life,
speak to the darkness,
and make it dark indeed
for you have separated the light from the darkness,
and named them each as you chose.

Shipwrecked

This is by the Gothic Archies- and it goes out to my class. ( I love you all sooo much. )
This has been a great, if often disastrous ride, and though I'm not going to try and do it AGAIN, I would not have not gone through it for the world.


I can't think of a single thing I'd rather do
Than to be cast away on an island with you
No, I can't think of anything more heavenly
Than to have you shipwrecked on a tropical island with me

Shipwrecked with you
Shipwrecked with you
I can't think of a single thing I'd rather do
Than to be cast away on an island with you

Far from distractions and matters of state
We can quit smoking and quickly lose weight
Sleeping till noon and then staying up late
At latitude zero and longitude eight

I am a gentleman; should you get hurt
I'll make a tourniquet out of my shirt
You needn't do much, just sit there and flirt
And if it looks drizzly, I'll build us a yurt

I can't think of a single thing I'd rather do
And that's why I had to get rid of the crew
So I lopped off their heads
And dropped them into the sea
Just to have you
Shipwrecked on a tropical island with me

Shipwrecked with you
Shipwrecked with you
I can't think of a single thing I'd rather do
And that's why I decapitated the crew

How could I know there's no island nearby?
If I don't eat something soon, I'll just die
I wouldn't eat you, oh, never, not I!
So let's catch a shark and I'll make us a pie

What shall we use for bait? Lend me a hand
I'll sew it back on when we get to land
But if the shark takes it, that would be grand
(Because we won't starve to death, you understand)

I can't think of a single thing I wouldn't do
To end up shipwrecked on an island with you
No, there's nobody I wouldn't kill, nobody
Just to have you
Shipwrecked on a tropical island with me

Shipwrecked with you
Shipwrecked with you
I can't think of a single thing I wouldn't do
To end up shipwrecked on an island with you
Again...

Observation worthy of note- not that the others weren't.

Katie my classmate and Katie my house mate both had birthdays today. My soccer team had a game, and Mckenz-he had a show at Jo Fed's. (I missed it. And he sang Shipwrecked too!) Also Ann had a breakfast for the graduating girls this morning- which was artful and tasteful in every way. Also I found out that another of the freshmen is engaged. Further I heard in a round about way that I had got an overdraft fee for reasons not immediately intelligible, which was a little frightening (this, fortunately, was later sorted out).

So there was much rush to and from various places today, in additions to many many things to think about. But I will tell you what I saw.

There is a bridge over the Willamette where the river opens up suddenly as you bike over it. Suddenly, where you were moving through a city, you find yourself on the brink of a smooth floor, water flat and glassy and gray as the clouds it mirrors. Its fenced in only by trees and and the guard rail, but it is fenced of from the city none the less. In the center, standing among rocks was the most immense bird. A heron.? It stared up at the bridge, and I realized that it was bothered by me. The thousands of cars that were going by it was used to. Being watched? That was another story.

Eventually, I did the polite thing and left.

unexplained blog hooky

I. Passed. my. Thesis. Defense.

With. Distinction.



!?!

All roads lead to it... I guess...

"What travels all the way around the world without leaving the corner?"

"A stamp"
"Chelsea!"
"Chelsea on a magic carpet"
"A hat rack on the equator"
"A man I knew once... it was really cool to watch"
"YOUR MIND ON DRUGS"

(from the MSC chalkboard)

I also felt retarded...

I felt fat all day. This in itself is a pretty common and not very serious malady, but I was thinking about my sister and my nickname too. When we were all young, and I was a bony teen and she was a round pre/early teen, she called me twig. Cause I was twiggy. Now, I am bordering on frou-dom, and she is a cute Skipper doll.

how did twig survive the transition? At some point in our mutual youth, I started absolutely adoring her, and wanted to be called whatever she called me. It really didn't occur to me at the time that there might be other things going into the nickname.

Folly. What folly.

It's weird how these details are. Our pasts are like the rings of a tree; the events and progress of that particular summer and fall may be over grown by years and years of other things, but they are still down there under it all. The shape of each year and each layer of bark determines how the next year is to grow, and the next by that one, and so on...

Weather

"What is stronger than God
More evil than the devil
The poor have it
The rich don't need it
And you die if you eat it?"

"Duh. Nothing"
"Chelsea!"
"Um, I'm not sure how to take that."
"You die if you eat Chelsea? WTF?"

-MSC chalk board


In other news, Eugene has become incredibly muggy, hot and sunny almost overnight. Three nights ago. Every year when this happens I find myself completely shocked that such things are possible in Oregon. Also unprepared. Once I get retroactively prepared, I think I will be very happy about it. My brain dies in heat and a little cloud of happiness fills the empty space. I vegitate in alternately shady and sunny parts of the heat, and for once am getting enough sleep to remember my dreams. Bad for school work. Good for me. Yay.

A nice evening of genocide.

http://www.gendercide.org/darfur01.htm

Outside my window is passing a slow steady stream of drunk frats.

My despair is so petty. How can the affirmations I make in the face of it possibly be anything more? How can I possibly understand what is good about the world- ignorant as I am of its evil? I feel so incredibly inadequate.

And this even leaves aside the question of actually doing anything...

God.

The face of God

When I was young, they told me that a human couldn't look on the face of God and live. Then and now, I wonder if life is worth having if you don't die from that- from having finally seen God.

(What's the only thing worse than finding a worm in your earth? Finding half a worm in your earth!)

This evening (or, should I say, morning) it's just me, my hard apple cider and the Gorillaz. This question has been bugging me for a while. Why is it that so much art is concerned with the struggle of artists with art? I mean, maybe its mostly writers, but from Harriet the Spy to JtMH to Emily of the New Moon, to Almost Anything Written By Stephen King, the plot revolves around a creative person trying to find some way to express their creativity. Is it simply narcissism- in an time where no one seems to be able to relate to anyone else, are writers left with with only themselves to write about? Or has it always been this way? Or perhaps is it just that, currently, with all other real and basic human activities like starting fires or making clothing or tilling good rich wormy earth usurped from us by machines and Chinese slave labor, art making is the only really human activity left to us, and thus the only thing left to to write about?

tire fires

ah, cursed hours, fly slowly, for you each take a piece of my soul with you...

I think that in a few years when School is paid of (if the world doesn't end, which is sort of touch and go) I want to work with homeless people for a while. Its kind of selfish, because I doubt I could really make much of a difference unless I spent my entire life at it, and I can't do that, and I simply would not be doing it for that reason, etc.

But their world seems like some other world, outside of my comprehension. Do the things I think here, hold true there? What's this stuff I've learned worth- anything? Does it have any value in what looks like the absolute bottom of the world?

I smell the smell of distant rubber meeting road... Unless of course the world ends and I get to find this all out the easy way.

(and here I figured this post would be about Cthulu!)

A Minor Resolution

The thought occurred to me today that, since I have this blog just sitting here and the internet just pooled around it at all times, I may as well get in the habit of posting. I am going to try to put one coherent thought on here, be it small or massive, every day, and see how long the fad lasts. I want to see if I can make it to Graduation.

I give it a week.

Aaand, that was my thought for the day. Cthulhu fhtagn!

Strange Late-night Obsession

Every now and then, something reminds me that Rorschach is dead and that Dr. Manhattan killed him. It's nothing personal, but I detest Dr. Manhattan for that. Would that he were not imaginary and/or immortal... !

Spencers Butte?

A couple of days ago a group from the house went hiking up Spencer's Butte. I believe that is the right name of the thing we hiked. I am now awed by the length of the thin and ghost like thing passing for existence that I've have in this town without hiking said Butte.

There were six who went altogether- Kari, the Alaskan girl, and a couple of guys she knew, Emily(a Freshman) and me, and Pavan(a guy who lives at the house). It was so warm that Kari wore shorts. I have it in my mind now that she was skipping alot, but that is probably just an impression. Most of the way Emily, Pavan, and I were together going more slowly, and Kari and the guys were ahead someplace. We went through the belly of the woods at first. The trail was a bright brown mud, and the rest of the world was dark green and pillars. Higher up, the trail was still coated with snow. Those bits were a little bit scary going up, because the snow was neither melted nor solid, and there was absolutely no traction(and it was quite steep). Pavan and I helped Emily, because she was freaking out a little. Just after that, we got above the trees, and the trail disappeared in piles of big rocks and slopes of short grass. All around was wind going through empty space. I think we went even slower then, because we kept stopping to look and/or take pictures. The horizon finally opened out- a ring of hill tops, and the white peaks of mountains jutting through here and there. As we went up, the view got wider and deeper. It was so lovely- you could see so far... At the very top was a peak of rocks, and on it a concrete triangle where the others were sitting. We all sat up there and basked in the wind and open space for a long time.

"distance has a way, of making life, understandable"

In case anyone is wondering, Noah is right, or nearly so. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, by Wilco, is one of the best albums ever. Why this is or what its about, I can't say just yet, though. I need to listen to it at least eight or nine more times, but I will get back to you.

In other news, I think I've spent too much time in my room with only music for company lately. I've been getting to the point that the lives of the people around me seem kind of far away and unreal. Then in a natural progression, I too feel like I'm living in a dream.

Yay for reality. Yay for pain.

but also Yay for waking up from dreams, when ever that happens.