The facts are these:

1. My friends are utterly and wholly insane.
2. My friends have no shame in glorying in their complete nerdiness.
3. I have spent literally two solid hours on Facebook following the same three threads and spending brainpower on absolutely nothing else.
4. I have barely laughed this hard in weeks.

Conclusion:  I HAVE THE MOST FANTASTIC FRIENDS IN THE HISTORY OF TIME AND SPACE.

http://www.facebook.com/TheShotzky/posts/3175970952672

Moor (Or, a metaphor. which rhymes.)

I'll take you as my lover, out upon the moor;
We'll dance in the turnings of unbroken skylit grey,
Safely jacketed for now in freedom's glistening allure:
Until flushing high and golden rises fiery midday.

I'll take you as my lover, in the dusk and dawn,
When the earth is in the shadows, purring lost and low,
And everyone is absent, all knowledge foregone
Until the sun sends one above and you below.

I'll take you as my lover, the arms to be my treasure
The wuthering bleakness our bed for thought
Aside I'll toss my thoughts of you, without credence whatsoever
I come to you again when all my soul's eclipsed for naught.

I'll take you as my lover, and never see another
As long as my eyes are shut fast against the wind.
Your flame that never touches me to suffer
Wreathed in mist, darkly our days forever limned.

Now I take you as my lover, out upon the moor
With the stars locked out of sight and mind
And the changeling unblue skies our only door.
And in the summer of our love, unrefined—

I'll flee you yet, my lover, for the hundredth time:
And when you see me fairly crowned on the mountain's height
Forget that what saw me through the winter cold was fine.
Hands are the sure making of both the wrong and right.

Autumn makes you still my lover, you who pose no "why?"
Your shape never falters from its tranquil, wild arts.
And the spring is cold, my lover, between you and I
No sun can draw around us, only show our frosted hearts.

- : -

  [20 January & 11 February 2012]

Deeps

So, while I was soaking the other day, I had this experience.  I'm not sure if it was much more intensely sensory version of the "pictures" I normally get when soaking, of if I dozed and it was a dream, but either way I have the unshakeable impression that it was definitely a God-thing.

I'm diving into the ocean, the warm-and-gorgeous-eye-popping-wildlife-teeming-coral-reef kind of ocean you see in commercials for the Caribbean (or shark attack movies, or volcano disaster movies, or whatever), only it isn't water—it's honey.  Not viscous and sticky and (frankly) absolutely gross like swimming through honey would really be, but sweet and faintly amber-colored and just a little thicker than water.  It was more the impression of honey than the actual experience of honey, sort of like a painting.  (Also, it was breathable.)  So I'm swimming through this honey, diving deeper and deeper.  The light isn't coming from above like sunlight; below me there's this bright—not really a light, but a vaguely white sense of something beautiful that attracts you, like you would naturally swim towards the light if you were actually underwater.  And as I'm swimming down towards this light, immersed in this honey ocean, I just have this overwhelming sense of bliss.  It's not an emotion I can seem to recreate by will.  It's like a combination of joy, electric excitement, peace, and contentment.  I'm absolutely, gloriously elated to be here in this ocean, but I also know that if I go deeper, it will just get better.  I could stop at any point and just rest int he euphoria, but I could swim deeper and discover even more joy.  It's perfect happiness, and yet anticipation.  It's bliss, and yet adventure.  And it's a sense of adventure like I've always imagined adventure really ought to be, like I imagine people who actually go looking for adventure feel—the fairy-tale kind of adventure, that involves mortal danger and darkness and potentially unwanted yet vital personal growth, but the knowledge that there's always help when I need it and there's something better waiting at the end than I could have even imagined when I first set out.  For the first time, I felt really equipped.  Not of my own accord, because it was still just me, but just a solid recognition that (however invisible) God was right there, always aware of what I needed and ready to answer even my slightest cry for help.

This is how God sees my journey with Him—I don't know quite if I've already dived in and this is where I am, or if this is where He means me to be—but it was so beautiful.  I want to be there.

Ignition is this weekend.  I want to go into this expectant, looking for expansion, like I never have before.

{Also, I'm wondering about the symbolism (Biblical or literary?) of honey.  I might come back to this, blogwise.}

So, over the last several days, I've gotten emails notifying me that people are replying to a comment I made on a YouTube video…last summer.  And I wondered what the story was behind that influx of replies to an old comment, so I went to the video to investigate, and it turns out…I have the top rated comment on the video (which, for context, is this).  Ahahaha, I might have geeked out a bit.

Especially since the second top-rated comment?  IS IN ELVISH.

Oh man.

I am such a nerd.

:D

Et tu?

Sometimes I come up with really fantabulous titles for blog posts, and don't have anything to write under them, but I save them as drafts anyways so that I can hijack the titles later if an apt opportunity arises.  I'm pretty sure that probably ten percent of my (several dozen) unpublished drafts are exactly that.  It strikes me as a bit sad, to have titles with nothing attached, especially since I'm generally terrible at inventing creative titles for stories and essays.

Homework, I give you the honor of a swift and painless death.

Many titles exist here, none of which linger long enough to be read.

      I.
I'm not there.
This, an obvious fact, I know, is.
Yet now it seems to present within its ubiquitously clarified lines
An epiphany:
(In the form of a question:)
How can I make comparisons
As if I were?
How can the handshaped hearts
Pretend machine-manufactured sameness
Of operation?

     II.
We cannot, yet
If we did not
No one would call us human.
So we say white (or invisible,
even to us) lies,
And it makes us
Good.
Because the handshaped hearts
Beat, and have aches
And growling stomachs and growing pains,
And if they had hands, we would need
To hold them once in a while.
(Or more often.)
For an even keel.

     III.
All of us know how it goes.
[Click here for personalized translation of this stanza.]

     IV.
And it is only when we need the lies most
(In context)
That we call them out.
How defeatist, how suicidally tangled
Are our inner workings
In themselves
In the best and worst of ways.
And humanity is this –

I give up.

Tonight I don't know whether to mutate, explain, make use of, or enjoy existence.

[For every session of would-be art-creation there exists a point of exhaustion, apparently.]

So I'm going to go to sleep instead.
'Night-night.

Colored stars, spotting me for the fall.

I finally have the chance to get a full night's sleep, yet all I can do is trot along, leaving semi-artistic footprints on the ever-whirring treadmill of my cerebellum.

Manuscript

Sometimes, I don't understand how I can work up enough emotion over vicariously experiencing something I've never experienced in reality that I actually need catharsis.  I wonder what the natural endpoints of emotions are, and how many of the actions we think will be solutions truly would be solutions if we were able to try them all out.  I wonder what really constitutes love.  I wonder why the word hasn't gone out of fashion.  I wonder what plucks the chords in our hearts that make us not want to leave the moment we're in.  I wonder why sometimes our need to understand is completely subsumed by our need to wring our hearts into intellectual uselessness, into ornate literacy, into philosophical mazes (into the instinctive and mechanical scrawling of oxymorons?).  Who follows us down the paths we take in the night?  Who defines waking dreams?  When your heart is full, does the fact that you understand nothing matter?  Does stream-of-consciousness writing really exemplify as much serious thought as it weirdly, ironically seems to imply?

———

EDIT / 2:58 a.m. / And what happens when the yearning for understanding returns?  Are we more or less lost?

La chocolat, trés délicieux

HPA's Willy Wonka was quite super.  One of my bestest friends (as the nutterific Grandma Josephine—hi Emily! *waves* ) and her little bro (as a rainbow-striped Oompa-Loompa) were in it, and they were fantastic.  I love homeschoolers and theatre.  Especially because they're a good combination.  The only disappointment (which was in no way related to the production) was my post-show chocolate yen, which could not be fully sated because every single Wonka chocolate bar in Meijer was gone.  (It was incroyable.)  But the chocolate I did get was very tasty, and I am thankful for it.  (And thanks very much to Rick and surgery-bound Connie for giving me and Rachel their show tickets!)


(Random interjection of enthusiasm for parenthetical clarifications!)

(Look at this juxtaposition, oi?)

Tomorrow will be a day of no homework.  'Twill involve a physics quiz, but also much reading of novels and frying of my brain on Netflix, and getting much-needed extra sleep, and listening to my sweet new soundtracks: