rainy days ~

oh, what a day. 7 hours in the analytical chem lab and rain outside.

and i broke a mercury thermometer.

and now i have to dress up to go to the writer's read tonight...



blech.

2 poems

here are two poems

the first I wrote for 80 works:


A Fall Reflection on Ash Wednesday

the grasses are dry
as are the leaves of trees,
the air, the sky, the soul.
the whole earth is thirsty

and moving towards an ending.
there is a quiet taste of blood, warm
and red like aged wine; of cruel wind,
the fury of winter storms.

crickets sing on these
september days and the sound is
a sour-sweet lament, a remembrance
of abundance before emptiness.

the wakeful knowledge of death
is a hard weight to carry, and untidy,
causing multitudes of grasses to throw
their progeny to the wind,

at the mercy of exposure, drought,
the ploughman. what martyrdom causes
these dully realized deaths – and is it
strange they are seen reverently –

oh lord in this hour of weakness
teach me. hold up a mirror,
remind me of mortality
and ashes on bald foreheads;

these living breathing speaking
bags of dirt. amen. show me the knifewound
of my frailty; the grass is dying.
i am dry, some candled flame blown out.




the second is a poem from a turkish poet named Nazim Hikmet. He served 13 years as a political prisoner in turkey and spent the last 13 years of his life in exile.
disclaimer: I didn't find this on my own; Meg read it to me one day when we were sitting on the grass outside.
disclaimer 2: The formatting isn't exactly right - not all the lines start up against the left margin in the real poem but I can't get it right on my blog. In any case, it's still beautiful.

I

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example -
I mean, without looking for something beyond and above living.
I mean living must be your whole life.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it so seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a labroatory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people -
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees -
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Lets say we're seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast...
Let's say we're at the front -
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind -
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet -
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
- you have to feel this sorrow now -
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived" ...

February 1948

and a word list

here is a list of some words that i've found interesting - some are words that i didn't know at all and have had to look up, and others are words that i don't see used often and, while i either knew them from my bookwormy life or could guess meaning from context, had to look up to make sure i understood the whole definition.

all of them come from textbooks i've used either this semester or the spring semester from last year (yes, i make lists of words from textbooks. i embrace my nerdiness.)

subjugated
quixotic
intransigent
intractable
iconoclastic
seminal
mendacity
ossified
exigency
nascent
appropriated
magisterial
ecclesiasticism
salacious
tabula rasa
vicissitudes
hydrology
alacrity
koan
tautological
post hoc
quintessence
pneumatic
antiphonal
epiphytic
reticulate
metaphysical
ontologically
prolegomena
paucity
melioristic
gravimetric
adsorption
invagination
endosymbiont
oncogenes
autophagy
endocytosis
caspases
prototroph
auxotroph
sarcoma
cyclins
trillium
undulant


beautiful, aren't they?
makes me want to go read a dictionary.

lessons from the first 3 weeks

so far this semester i have learned that i am limited.

this may seem like an obvious truth but it is not one that i have really, honestly run up against until now. this semester i have University Physics 1, Advanced Cell Biology, Analytical Chemistry, 80 works, and Honors. its a lot of work, and lots of new thoughts - i now have, for the first time, 5 classes that i can't skip, 5 textbooks that i have to read and take notes from, 5 courses to juggle and not let *any* drop. until now i have always been able to slide my through at least one class because i knew most of the information already.

no more!

its the third week and after tomorrow afternoon i will already have utilized professors' office hours 3 times, which is about how many times i took advantage of that in the whole of last year.

it is sort of startling to realize i need help too. hah. i guess i'll be getting used to it, now -

what we do at college

so its past midnight on a saturday and i just got skyped by people from camp. i left my room to talk to them and when i got back i started to notice some strange things around the room...
basically thia is the BEST ROOMMATE EVER. :D

my personal favorite:

and lastly:

I'm lacking the force to do any work.

yeah.

slow start

so i've had a bit of a slow start to my blog this school year...

its not for lack of trying; more like lack of energy. every time i remember my blog i just can't even fathom getting up enough energy to try to write something in it. and my stupid perfectionist side won't let me write just a little, no, i always feel like i have to make some epic post with a profound thought or a great quote or a snippet of a poem or the summary of my last week (or month, depending on how long its been). sort of self-defeating, because the longer i wait to write, the harder it feels to actually start a post.

all that to say, here is a baby-step in which i am letting you all know that
a.) this school year is awesome
b.) but its super busy
c.) i'm learning lots of stuff
d.) its good to see my friends again
e.) i love the early church! :)

example of poetry from 80 Works

this is a lipogram that i wrote on thursday
a lipogram is a poem that can use no "e."


abundant living is all I want.
full with
knowing many humans,
manifold failings,
abounding in faith.

a myriad of thoughts
a thousand births
sharp pinpricks
God to talk with,
child to mama.
journals brim-full with sprawling ink
swarming flying fish, and
unnatural ways of growing in this world

I want motion. a vivacious
spirit, full of turmoil.
dynamic, vigorous, and
truly conscious.

living past limits.
in margins, in doorways
liminal, luminous
past functionality

I want to finish this
day hour infinity
far from normal.

dreaming of ice

i'm getting excited about the semester, but it has been hard to get too excited - too much of anything, really. the reason is that it's been sooo hot! i feel like a slug, a sloth, a ... well, you get the picture. i have no energy. and i feel like i can't even sleep. its almost like a never ending fever. i don't even think camp was this bad. blech.

but in the interests of filling in my readers at home, i will go over a little of what has happened this last week.

Honors Colloquium: "Is this natural? Place, fit, and balance."
talking about invasive species; invasive cultures; what is natural? what do we mean by unnatural; what is synthetic vs natural in chemisty?
its going to be super cool, i think, for many reasons. not least of which is the fact that it is taught by one of my favorite professors, matt siderhurst. (he's the chemistry prof i talked about who has dreds and does research on invasive insects in hawaii).


Physics
blech. blech. i need to review calculus - i should have taken physics last year when calc was fresh in my mind.

Advanced Cell Biology
scariest class - tiny and in-depth and hard and self-directed and ... eeee.

Analytical Chemistry
i am going to love this! new thoughts, new ideas. again, a class that needs lots of internal drive. learning how analytical chemists think, learning how to solve problems; yeah, learning how to think. mmm.


Poetry
Yay! so awesome. the alternate name for the class is "80 works," as in I need to write 80 works of poetry by the time the class is over. and these are not lame kiddy works, but sonnets, anglo-saxon alliterative verse, lipograms, and other specific types of poetry. the teacher for this class is SO good. she is snarky and sarcastic and has such a strong voice in the things she writes. i am going to learn how to write better, to have more control over my writing, to learn how to condense my language and use specific, lovely, luminious words.


finally, i will write about my first weekend here.
it is cooler than it was during the week. there is a breeze outside and the sky is beautiful and blue. today i wanted to go to the early church, but my bike is messed up and i didn't realize until 10 minutes before church started. so instead of biking to church thia and i walked behind the science center and met meg and sat under a willow tree. we prayed and read the bible and wrote a psalm and loved God and i decided that i am very glad to be among friends who long to know God and to be still in the deathless truth of his presence.