[Untitled] I'm not entirely sure what this is.

(Other than three hours of lonely-like ponderous imaginings and Death Cab For Cutie.)

~

     She was standing before the window, shuttered though it was, when his knock came on her door.
     There were stars in the sky, turning their faraway faces towards them as she opened her house to the road.  His silhouette was dark as his hair, and as sleek.  He crossed her floor on heavy but light feet—soon she would call it a widow's walk, and some unspecified time after that it would be forgotten.
     Together they smelled of sand—of shifting foundations made for dancing and stumbling feet, of fragile castles soon worn away, of fanciful dreams soon washed out by high tide.  Heat still flushed visibly across them, in sunkissed streaks of ochre and thickly forested freckles.  Eyes were damp, with perspiration too warm to dissolve into the air, and perhaps with the visceral knowledge of all they must forego.
     They faced each other; they slowly grasped one another close for a long, last moment:  imbibing the scent, the feel; patterning their memories with the texture of their summer.  Breath was their song now—long and heavy, as if they lay on the verge of sleep.  It was a final closeness, and they reveled and sorrowed in it as one.
     Carefully, then, they began their work.  They sat in the near-darkness, set their hands on shoulders first.  Sometimes their own, sometime one another, perforating and folding, loosening and disencumbering.  If they exchanged words, they were so quiet as to be nearly indiscernible; they may have meant everything, or nothing at all, in this static hour of reality warped by transition.
     They stripped all memories of one another from their corporeal selves, the laughter and joyful energy slipping off of them as rain from a waterfowl's wings.  Their limbs slowed and steadied, the hot aroma of sunlight settling on them in new earthy tones, pinioning them into regularity and necessity.  It flaked off them, it peeled off them; every once in a while it would bubble and crack, and the wisps of heat would escape, unwanted, into the night.
     What else escaped with it?  They did not dare to ask, lest some unnameable beast pounce on their doubts from within.  Everything they was "they" was shivered off with fingers sometimes tearing, sometimes stroking.
     Time had followed close on their heels, as it followed in every Season.
     After an hour, they stood, dressed in burnished, tender pink, looking pale and rosy against the sloughed-off image of their yellow-red-brown summer skin.  The dim firelight cast reflections of their new incarnations, the selves they now belonged within.  Their feet set comfortably against the floor, flat-footed instead of tip-toed.
     They were always told not the anticipate the emptiness of the Autumn.  They were always cautioned not to look into the eyes of the encroaching twilight until they were on its verge—always warned that to cast a shadow over the Summer, over the noon, was agony and sacrilege.
     Why was it sacrilege to ache?  She wondered it aloud.
     He had no answer, and their new skin was too tender for him to reach for her hand.  She knew by the bent of his head that he shared her mind in part, that he might yet share it beyond this night, even if she knew nothing of it, even if he understood it not himself, even after no trace remained of "they" even in dreams.
     How long would it take until they forgot?  —It was a cycle that did not end.  Better for them to enjoy the moment while they were within its brilliant, dazzling, exhilarating embrace, and take the grief when it fell like they were human anvils.  it would be over soon enough.—   She could not even recall if there had been anyone before, if summer existed more than once in a lifetime.
     But why was it sacrilege to ache?
     —Had she ever asked this question before?—
     The light that burns at the heart of summer—it is to know, and to risk one's heart anyway.  Never mind that it chafed, never mind that the glasspaper would sear it from her eventually.  Let the smell of sand linger, even mingled with the smell of salt for a time.
    Let her feel the end coming, and love despite it.  Let her strength be for something even just for a blink of an eye:  a splash of dark, cool color burning across the ever-gold sky.
     No.  The thought to reject it, for a moment, passed through her, but it was swiftly gone, ephemeral in the hard-nosed wave of tradition and habit and the entropy of the world that already overtook them in the face of the change.
     Long minutes he and she sat in the dark, staring into eyes that had sooner been portals for the world, for the microcosm of a soul, and now were slowly draining of their intimate double edge.
     If the love lodged somewhere within them, they would not know it until the end of all things.
     At last he and she slept, and when morning came, her winter skin was firm enough that she could go about her day, and there were only tiny shavings of freckles and snippets of gold on the floor, already falling through the minute cracks in the wood grain, to show that he had ever been.

~

17 March 2012

On prophetic stuff and a little looking ahead

(I'm going to just leap into a story here.)
So, for a few weeks now, I've been wanting to get prophetic ministry at church  (for the non-New Dayers who may be reading this, that's where a team of people speak over you what they hear God saying for you and your life.  it's pretty much amazing).  I haven't done it yet because I haven't had the chance, basically, what with having my own duties at church after service.  Last week at Dwell, Seth and Sarah Gerber spoke about prophetic ministry (the history of the prophetic, giving prophetic words yourself, and also a lot about receiving and "stewarding" prophetic words).  One thing Sarah said stuck out to me—she told about this point in her life where she literally had a basket full of tapes of prophetic words she'd gotten over the last several years, and she hadn't done anything with them—hadn't pursued them, hadn't prayed about them, or anything, and she felt like she couldn't go looking for any new prophetic words of the like before she worked to "steward" the ones she had already gotten.

That got me kind of thinking—I've gotten a number of prophetic words over the last three years, almost all of which I have in some recorded form.  I've listened to them all several times, and prayed about them a little bit, but I haven't really made an effort to find out what God means by them and what he wants me to do in regards to them.  So this morning in church, as I was considering whether to go up for ministry, I decided to hold off and really think about pursuing the words I already have.  The weird thing was, I kind of expected to feel reluctant or disappointed about it, but I actually felt pretty good about this choice.

Then, tonight (or, rather, last night [Sunday], since this will post on Monday) was the Dwell Christmas party.  We did some crazy worship, had a fantastic prayer time, and opened gifts; were having yummy munchies and I was just kind of standing around when Jo Leitz (awesome lady who has definitely got a heavy-duty prophetic gift) came up to me and just said, "God's really going to start moving in you with the new year.  I really feel like He's saying you're going to experience a new outpouring of creativity, especially in your writing, and it's going to be really anointed.  God is basically going to be writing through you."

…Whoa.

Aside from that very last bit (verbatim, anyway), and without the specific time frame, this is basically the same prophetic word I have gotten at least six times from various people in the last seventeen months.  (I even got it twice in the same session, by two different people who weren't there to hear each other give the word, and they said almost verbatim the same thing.)  You would think I'd pay attention to this, as God is practically throwing it in my face, but every time I got it I was like, "Wow, that's really cool!" and then didn't really pursue it at all.  (Actually, I proceeded to pout excessively about writer's block.  In fact, in hindsight, I might have actually used it as an excuse to complain about my writer's block.  *cringe*).  But when Jo said this one today, I was kind of like, "OH!  Man!  I am totally going to take this home and tell somebody about it and pray over it and journal and by golly, it's not my responsibility to make it happen, but, by golly, am not going to just shelve this again."  So that is what I am doing.  And I am massively excited, and, yes, also kind of terrified.

Jo also told me that my poetry is especially important, and I need to not give up on that.  (This is especially interesting, because poetry is something  have been writing only very occasionally lately—I used to write several dozen poems a year, and in all of 2011 I have written exactly nine.  Most of which were depressed backlashes at the sudden falling-apart of a major part of my life.)  I wouldn't say I've given up, exactly—I can't imagine I'd ever stop writing it totally—but I think I have gotten somewhat hypercritical of my poetry, which is why I've given up on songwriting ten times over in my teen years.  I don't know what direction God will take it in, but I can't say I'd much object to His influence!

…I sort of feel like my mind ought to be blown, but it isn't quite.  I'm just like.  "WOW.  Yes, that has 'God who loves you a whole darn lot' written all over it."

Oh boy.  I am definitely going over all my recent prophetic words again.  Time for an ongoing tête-à-tête with God?  Yes.

Not to be presumptuous…

…but I am gollydarned proud of myself right about now.

50,041 words on a single piece of fiction in 30 days.
I honestly didn't think this was going to happen.
Now I just need to do some brutal editing on the 4,598 words of something akin to total rubbish that I churned out in the last two hours to make it happen.  And some less murderous editing on the rest of it, which isn't nearly as bad but still very rambling and untenable to an unbiased reader's judgment, I'm sure.
…Also, I need to finish it.
There's probably another 10,000 words in this thing, and somebody shoot me if I am not going to finish this creature I spent a month pouring a good deal of my lifeblood into.  (Ignore the preposition on the end of that sentence, please, except insofar as you need to cognitively process it for semantic intelligibility.)
(Ignore anything else I write that doesn't make sense.  I am so jacked up on words and long sentences right now that could probably invent a subspecies of incoherent English on the spot [because, you know, we don't have enough of it already].  If I lived in Britain, I could probably also give Donna Noble a run for her money for the notable position of the fastest-typing temp in Chiswick.  At least until the caffeine from my tea wears off, at which point I would just go to bed.)

I also cannot believe that was a whole month.  November has been insanity.  Really compressed insanity.  I think there are whole days that time-traveled out of themselves and passed me by without so much as a wave of greeting.  Actually, I'm rather surprised it didn't turn out like more of a train wreck in the end.

Also, speaking of writing, I have two math papers due tomorrow that I lovingly put off writing especially for this.  So I go, back to the keyboard.  (On another bright note, only three weeks left of school!  The end is in sight!  Tally-ho! [Maybe too in sight for comfort, actually…].)
But I am happy right now.  And not as sleepy as I likely ought to be.

limbo word count and some obsessiveness with new music

NaNoWriMo day four, except that it's the middle of the night, so it's sort of a limbo between days 3 and 4.  I'm currently about 230 words ahead of my day 4 quota, and dawn hasn't even risen on day 4 yet.  I am going to be a little computer monster on Friday, hunched over my laptop, dividing my brain ignobly between the passionate fit of novel-writing mania and all the mound of ever-present schoolwork that is my bulwark against social anxiety.  (Pardon me if some of my sentences don't make sense; I would offer to translate them, but I may not be any more able to than you once I've gone to bed and come back.)  Also, I listened to the indie singer-songwriter genre station on Pandora for an hour or so and discovered this and this — I wish I could remember our iTunes password.

Happy November! (Or, Na na na na na...I feel like there's an xkcd comic that matches this)

It's the first of November! Excitement. I've decided not to do NaBloPoMo (blogging every day for a month) this year, as I'm already committing to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), meaning that—one way or another—I am going to write one cohesive, comlete story of at least 50,000 words in thirty days. IT'S MADNESS. But I have a (dare I admit it?) plot outline (I'm going to do a loose retelling of this old, incidentally rather tragic Celtic legend). I think with a) a deadline and b) a flexible yet complete plot framework, I can actually do it. I'mso jazzed. I probably won't be able to make much of a start until tonight, since I'm in classes noon to seven, but it's going to happen. Jesus, bless this endeavor. Because I'm also kind of shocked at the prospect that this is even possible for me, since I have literally thousands of pages of very unfinished stories on my computer and a couple of composition books.
INSANITY!

I actually considered combining the two Na'Mo's and blogging what I'd written each day for my novel, but considering my tendency (when writing anything) to skip around and edit/re-edit with a meticulousness that is probably my habit that closest approaches clinical OCD, I thought perhaps not. I will give periodic updates, I'm sure, and anyone who may be interested in reading the draft when I'm done will be welcome to it. Oh man. I feel like I'm going skydiving. Even though I've been trying to write novels for years, this feels so gollydern massive.


Anyway, happy November! I think I might have one friend who's doing NaNoWriMo with me. Are Hannah and Emily doing NaBloPoMo this year? It would be fabulous.

{Also, the xkcd comic referenced in the title, which actually has nothing to do with this post.}

Acheron In Blue

It was a starry night, above a world filled with the rich, rolling blue of seas.  Waves capped in silver and cream, so vast they would have blotted out the sky to any human who stood on the ocean's shore, rolled up and over themselves, seeming to hang poised at their apex before crashing to their place in the tide with a deafening roar that covered the shores in abandonment.  Not a living thing for miles dwelt above the ground, but had there been someone, they might have been able to hear the lustrous, heartbreaking strains of whalesong that the waves carried with them.  The rivers in those realms ran silver, thick as the drink of Immortality, the bathwater of merfolk, the wine of the Fey.  Winter never froze its beauty; summer never baked it to sultry stillness.  Vast, spiraled towers of black and white marble and glass stood rooted, forever unmoving, except when a brittle bit of rubble, a brass roofing tile or jagged fragment of striped turret, fell from its height in the heaven to break the tide-smoothed virginity of the wet sand, always dark.  The footprints of Men were forgotten centuries ago, even by the stars, who had memories longer than the span of the earth.

Was it possible one still lived?  That under the starry dome of the world, in the vast swaths of silence unplumbed by the green and blue whorls of brinèd chaos, there might yet dwell, in the hovelish ruins of the Old Cities, a lamp-lighter who amy yet breathe, may still have eyes to behold the glories of the reborn lands?  Was it possible that it was not only the faerie children who danced in the gleaming streams, not only the treefolk who sang to the stars in the perpetuity of unpollutable nights?

Nay, and yes—for he was an Archaia, a man who had learnt the manner of living forever.  He sat alone in his tent of broken obsidian, and though he could no longer remember the art of making a fire in wood or coals, nor the manner of consuming food that was good for the body, nor the words to speak prayers to render the soul secure,he remembered the undreamable intricacies of the Knowledge.  He recalled the thoughts that one must keep forever in the forefront of one's mind, the measure with which one must count one's steps, the iron tenacity with which one must hold one's will steady.

He no longer remembered what it was to be human—

He knew only what it was like to live forever, with the same songs in one's head, with the same words on one's lips, with the undying burning of one's deepest core, the inner torment and pleasure of the lining of one's soul.  His eyes, which had once seen men's faces and women's bodies and the streets of bustling cities and the multihued flare of kings' banners and the sheen of sweat on horses' haunches and the saliva spooling from the jowls of panting dogs, now saw only the unbroken, incomprehensible mundanity of pure, beauteous nature.  He who had heard the whispers of lovers and the gruff rapport of business partners and the strident tones of a general's command and the screams of children beneath the horrific clamor of booted feet and unsheathed swords, flashing in the brightness that had once been sunlight, now heard only the tide.  There was nothing else to occupy the senses, for there was nothing else in life but the sea and the sky and the rivers.  The world had died in apocalypse itself, and been rebirthed in the ever-lusterful swaddling of desperate prophecy and deity's regrets.  The air that had once been thick with noise and dust and disease and laughter and change now hung in stillness and perfect clarity that could have no antecedent and no scion.

The love that had once given substance to the air was centuries lost; now it was so thin as to never be breathable, never intended for human consumption.  What could have been drowned in was now forgotten, buried under the eerie sheen of the meteor that hung in the air, one figure perched atop it:  a tree.  The Great Tree, the World Tree, the bearer of the memories of all that had existed before Time.  before Time and after Time—what was the difference?  There had been footprints, but they were long washed out by the tide.  There had been clouds and blood and typhonic entropy.  Now there was eternity—and even that word no longer existed, for outside of time there can be no proportion.  there can be no understanding of passage, no apprehension of movement, no clarity of gradience, no cognizance of nuance.  There can be no build and no death.  At the moment when every wave marries itself to the thick wet white grit of the seashore, there is an identical breaker rearing its curling, arching mane to the stars.

And yet the Tree, and the Man, live on.  They will not die.  They cannot die, outside of Time.  The Tree existed before Time, and saw all, and was thus outside of Time and could not be ravaged by time and its happenings.  It was the Man who discovered the true secret: to survive Time is to escape it.  To remain unfolded by the unstoppable entity that shapes universes to its will is to remain unbowed by epitomized creation and destruction itself.  To live through is to live on.  To die, to dream, to drown, is to fail.  to change is to surrender to the unrelenting ebb of Time.  But to live is to conquer for all of existence.  To survive is to exist is to die is the be immortal.
              The stars have no major qualms about the shape and history of the shadows they cast.
              And the tree is.  And the man lives on, perfectly dead.

I found my long-lost first attempt at a novel…the one I wrote when I was twelve.

It's like a 53,000-word ode to melodrama and fantasy clichés in prose form.
Complete, of course, with a partial Elvish/unicorn dictionary, complete character glossary and pronunciation guide, “A Comprehensive Guide To All the Fantastical Creatures”, six pages of prophetic poetry in ancient Elvish which has no translation, a calendar, elvish numerical system, the complete lineage of 1500 years’ worth of centaur queens (even though only one was ever referenced in the story), and an episode of American Idol.


Reading it now, it's kind of half excited nostalgia and half "I'm-going-to-go-jump-off-a-cliff-and-never-come-back."

I think I am going to write a novella this weekend, even if it's utter nonsense and too farcicial to be revealed to the eyes of any but the limited sector of humanity who are already well enough acquainted with my idiosyncratic (occasionally just idiotic) brand of insanity that I can trust them not to draw unreasonably pessimistic conclusions about it from reading said novella.  
Just thought you ought to know.

An essay on insomnia and inspiration

*The assignment for this essay was basically to ask a question/make an observation and ramble whatever came to mind about it.  No joke.  It was awesome.  (Once I got over telling myself it was awful.)*

Kiersten M. Lawrence

17 September 2010

Honors English 160 – Personal Essay

Conspiring With Insomnia

Writing has always come easily to me.  My mind loves shaping words, and being shaped by the words trapped in its nooks.  The verbal language of humanity is entity all its own.  It is a living thing, one that cannot be contained even by the most basic of human functions—such as eating (is there a person alive who hasn’t talked with their mouth full?), or sleep.

Why do many writers seem to find—often to their frustration—that their inspiration flows the most freely at night?  Is it because we are surrounded by darkness and relative silence, alone in an environment where we are practically breathing possibility?  The night is a blank slate, a void canvas.  Our medium is pure imagination:  thoughts colored by the experiences of our day, stilted by the dozy state of half-consciousness between full alertness and full oblivion, dreams already pressing at their edges.  The music playing in the background—music from our own heads, from the mp3 player lulling us into another world, from the television in our parents’ room—channels our rambles of thoughts more easily into emotion, and that firework-filled river we fjord again and again and again, until we have at our fingertips not mere unbridled thoughts and feelings, but their defined avatar:  words.

We think we can make anything out of words.  We bring things together and tear them down with words; we perforate feelings; we paint landscapes with words.  The human language is, at times, in the pens of some, almost as versatile and vivid as thought itself.  Words grip us in a vise—a vise of emotion, clever masques that can arm themselves with new meaning depending from where they flow, the taste of the air through which they travel, the pre-present emotions they brush up against when they reach our ears.  They are often too easily roused, by anger or resent-ment or even passionate adulation.  We can be too hasty in the unsheathing of our vocabulary and the memories we often unleash with it.  In these moments we do not take the time to write; our words are only clumsy instruments chiseled into ugly poisoned thorns or careless lumps of nothing, hurled at an opponent or dropped into the ears of a lover, saying everything we think we should mean but might not feel in our heart of hearts.  We can mold words into many things we crave, as well; into castles and people and twilight trysts and heroic epics and magical wonders and food to tantalize the senses of metaphor.  How many stories—real or false—come to breathe of their own accord under strokes of the pen or the clicks of a keyboard?

An imagination’s best friend is Insomnia.  Sometimes Imagination  goes so far as to summon Insomnia to its aid in the darkness, as insomnia is the greatest foe of sleep, which reduces imagination into roaming the wordless universe of Dreams.  A writer’s imagination is frequently plagued with the inability to think long-term.  Imagination, when it is bubbling over with words in the dusky half-oblivion of sleep-seeking nighttide, fails to ponder the ramifications of depri-ving its host body of sleep; it fails to understand that exhaustion only exacerbates the limits of its host’s ability to translate pictures and thoughts and emotions—however down-to-earth or however preposterous—into literary coherence.

I read a quote by James Thurber recently where he said he “never quite knows when [he’s] not writing”; that he would simply be staring off into space, or eating dinner, and his wife would scold him and tell him literally to “stop writing”.  Why is night, for me, the most fertile ground?  Is it because at night we are most alone?  In a quiet house we always feel as though we must be the only ones awake in the world.  Even in a noisy house, if we’re in bed listening to the party rambling through self-sustained zest downstairs or across the street, we always feel as if we are the only one with the presence to think real thoughts.  Emotions string themselves tighter around us in the moments when we feel we can let them out in safety, without fear of recoil.  Is it because we have just run through a busy day, dipping our bucket in and out of our cistern of words, into the top of the well where floats the shallow oil of functionality, the words we use for small talk and business and utilitarian communication, and it is not until we have the time in the dark, sleepless, to sink our bucket deep into the well where we find the shadowy, shifting depths of rhapsody and epiphany and bewilderment.  Do we not have time to think before bed?  Is it untrue that on days when our bodies are successfully busy, cycling through a frenzied schedule or engaged in intently physical activity, our mind is often subdued, busying itself with the mundane rambles of to-do-lists?  Does it not stand to just as exemplary reason that in the moments of our corporeal form’s greatest silence, our minds scream in any medium, just to fill the abyss?  Peace is so rare.  Imagination is incontinent when our bodies have been perfectly organized.  

It twists the frustrations of sleeplessness and noise-filled thunderstorms into vivid, fatigue-christened perfection.  Just as we have finished being observant, we find we must invent our own creations for the observation of others—even if those others are only wisps of abstract unreality inside that creation.  

Night feels like an eternity, a secreted vault that sponsors me with endless amorphous frag-ments which prance with excitement like a Coke commercial in my mind, begging voicelessly to be commended to paper or laptop screen, disseminated into the mold of words.  No matter how drab  or flimsy or outright nonsensical it seems upon review in the light of the following day, I am always allowed to drift off with the satisfaction of feeling accomplished.

Writers live for blinks of epiphany, especially fiction writers who can’t get all their ideas from plain hard thinking.  When I was little—even before I really considered myself a writer—I used to love going to bed, for the sole reason that it was like dreaming with my eyes open.  My fertile young mind percolated fantastic chronicles of kidnapped dinosaurs who found their life’s purpose in a circus as a joint act with a ribbon-bedecked ballerina, or a tale of two orphans and their pet tree left to resurrect the ruins of their war-torn city atop the clouds.  Even through my teens, I would devote several brief increments of time during the day to simply looking forward to (as I thought of it sometimes) sleepless dreaming.  I recall one saga about a city, carefully divided by a complex caste system, and whose citizens could never leave, that went on for nearly two years of pre-slumber meanderings in my imagination.  No matter how I tried to continue these stories in broad daylight while cleaning house, I could never invest myself quite as wholly.  Every twist or scene I incorporated during the daytime never stood the test against the contortions of my imagination when let loose in darkness.

It saddens me to realize, as I have in the process of writing that last paragraph, that I no longer value those whimsical wanderings to quite the same degree.  Stress and frustration have enthroned themselves in its place.  Insomnia has become a “bane of my existence” rather than a coconspirator of opportunity.  My self-ordained schedule forces desperation for sleep.  Sleep has become half of my reason for being awake.  I function on five or six hours when I say I’d like eight and am dreaming of ten and a half.  The ethereality of that unsleeping-yet-unwaking hypnosis comes less and less often as I force-feed my brain sleepiness with exhaustion and melatonin instead of letting it take its own path to find the welcome catatonia.  I seek to shape words, words to tell a story, by intelligence only, instead of mixing careful cognizance with bewildering inspiration, and even I can sense a faint cadaverous smell about those words, characters who know they are doomed to rot away unfinished in the depths of my hard drive, never to be brought to closure or great adventures.  Even as my writing seems ever more urgent, dreaming takes the backseat to everything else I feel I must pack into my brain as I precariously tiptoe over the cusp of adult-hood.  I’ve stopped dreaming-while-awake, and to my perpetual frustration I’ve largely ceased writing prose that I genuinely love.  The night is a friend, but it is not long enough to afford me all the time I need for both sleep and creative roaming.  Insomnia has become a vicious antagonist instead of an intriguing coconspirator.  

Am I relearning to dream?  Perhaps.  But even the process, itself a kind of twilight, a darkness, might be comparable with possibility.

Meditation on a fictional dystopia, and Cruella de Vil in punk.

Writing today.  I looked at a random panel in a Marvel graphic novel yesterday and it has inspired thirteen pages (thus far) of manic dystopia and forbidden love.  —Haha.—  My two main protagonists are either newlyweds or courting, in a society outlawing male/female interpersonal relationships.  So far it's making for some interesting dynamics.  The family in power doesn't allow the solidification of family units, but operates under forced breeding to control genetics and eliminate different ethnicities.  My dad had some good thoughts to add to my mental stew.  I'm a very detail-oriented person, and am not always that good at looking at the big picture.  Worldbuilding isn't usually my strength in writing, except where specific aspects of a culture directly influence my character interactions.  It's nice to get some wider thoughts.  (So if anyone else wants to proffer ideas—go for it, please!:)  I love it when my brain spins these elaborate premises out of one tiny, completely unrelated thing.  Unfortunately it doesn't happen as often as would be helpful.

I bought Children 18:3's new album yesterday.  (Christian punk band.  They are insane in the most awesome way conceivable.)  Christian, homeschooled siblings who write crazy fast songs.  I love that they write on a wide variety of themes—from Biblical topics (and not always the "obvious" ones, either), to the value of performance vs.the unconditional love of family, to budding boy/girl relationships, to the danger of stereotyping others, to suicide, to uncertainty about the future, to (I think) abortion, to—and this is my favorite—Cruella de Vil.  They just wrote this random song about Cruella de Vil! <—[YouTube link, there.]  One of the lines refers to "the smell of fear and two-toned hair."  How do you not love that?!  Honestly, I thought they were obnoxious when I first heard their debut album about two years ago (and the lead singer looks freaky scary on the jacket cover), but they were so unusual they intrigued me to the point where I listened to them anyway; and now I've actually come to really love their music, and respect them a lot as artists.  I would pay in a heartbeat to see them in concert.