Thanksgiving Elegies

It's been two years since...
Two years of healing.
Two years.

Sometimes it feels as though you're still here. I expect you
(less and less now)
to walk through the door.

In the blink of an eye
it will be four years -
equal to the time we tied our lives together.
What will I do when the number of years
we are apart is greater
than the number we were together?

Does it mean they were insignificant? Does it mean they were wasted?
Or are they just four threads in the tapestry of my life
that are woven in a different pattern?

* * *

I miss the way you’d tuck your toes
under my thigh
when we bookended the couch on fall nights.

I miss the way you could dissolve
me into giggles in mere seconds
even in the blue cold of Black Friday pre-dawn.

I miss the way you laugh – like a little boy.
It reminded me that he was still in there,
beyond the cynicism and negativity, beyond the self–destruction.

I don’t miss the lies and the half-truths,
the self–doubt and the tears.
I don’t miss your excuses or that you thought
I was dumb enough to believe them.

Maybe the Thanksgiving will come
when I’m not reminded of you;
when I don’t mark time
by the number of things
you are absent from.
This year, I’m thankful for that.

Bookshelf Porn

I think I may have just discovered heaven

Here are some of my favorites:

A Necklace! For books!




Books and Art and Light




Chaise and Books




What I love best about this one is that the books are reflected in the windows, so you get DOUBLE the books!




This is what I expect the inside of my head looks like:




http://bookshelfporn.com/

Argument

With Thanksgiving a scant few weeks away, it means we're in the home stretch of the semester (Thank Goodness!) What that means for me is dreaded argument essay . I try to make the preliminaries leading up to the essay fun: we play a game called Natural Disaster where the students have the ability to save 5 from a list of 10 fictitious people, all of whom have various skills and faults and will be responsible for the future of Earth. There is no one right answer to their lists; what matters is that they develop reasoned positions for who they choose to keep or exclude. Of course, inevitably, the old people (this semester that meant anyone over 40! Yikes!) were of no use to them (for reproductions' sake).

One of the things we discuss in class though is what "the future of Earth" means to them, since how they interpret that will shape the list of people saved. It's a fun discussion because almost always they assume it translates to "repopulate." Of course that's part of it, but, as I point out to them, how would you like it if you were told you had to procreate with someone not of your own choosing.

I usually end class with this: 1) because it's just so freaking funny and 2) because it's relevant to the following class when we discuss what an argument is

Small Love

As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.

- Anne Sexton

Quote of the Day

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.
- Walter Cronkite

The Definition of Love

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its Tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixt,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant Poles have placed,
(Though Love's whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced.

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the World should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.

As lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the Mind,
And opposition of the Stars.

~ Andrew Marvell

Grammar Police

Quote of the Day

"I've read too many books to believe what I'm told"
~Suheir Hammand

Conversation With My Mom

Me: Mom, what do you do when you suck at life?
Mom: Fake it...that's what I do.
Me: WHAT?! Really, what is the point of coming to you, someone older and wiser if all you tell me do to is "fake it"? Being wiser is one of the few perks of getting older.
Mom: I've been faking it for years.
Me:And you know perfectly well I double suck at faking it; my eyes give me away. They get all darty like a panicked fish.

Meanings

...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet