Single Entity

All right, all right. I am going to weigh in on New Moon/the Twilight Saga, even though it really needs no more discussion.

Yes, I was one of those high school girls whom Twilight was made for. Yes, I read the first two or even three books eagerly, and yes, I was in love with Edward. Now, I understand that Twilight is a literary tragedy, but as a novel for teenage girls, it's really all right (except for the part about making the next generation of teenagers think it's sexy to be stalked a la Edward). But the movies -- especially New Moon -- are just painful. New Moon portrays Edward as a super-intense cool guy who in turn broods and simpers at Bella. The film doesn't at all capture the few good characterizations that are found in the book: we loved the book-Edward for his early-1900s gentlemanly style, his smooth assertiveness, and his almost-too-domineering attitude and...his sense of humor*. None of these things made it into the film (certainly not the humor). While it's a little too much to say that Edward's character in the novel is complex, it's certainly more faceted, interesting, and sexy than in the films.

And that is why I'm now on Team Jacob.

*By "we" I mean "I".

This may be a repeat post, but I don't really care. What I want to post is one of my favorite pieces of poetry, and, I recently found out, one of my Grammy's favorite pieces of poetry. I find that it has all the advice that one person could ever need, and certainly, upon rereading it today, it gave me exactly what I needed to know. It felt like my Grammy had reached out, put the poem in my hand, and led me to the words I needed. All I can say is that it was a surreal experience, and one I cherish.

For my Grandmother, R.E.G.C., 1920-2009,

The Desiderata
by Max Erhmann

Go placidly amid the noise & haste, & remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly & clearly; and listen to others, even the dull & ignorant; they too have their story. ~ Avoid loud & aggressive persons, hey are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain & bitter; for always there will be greater & lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. ~ Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. ~ Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity & disenchantment it is perennial as the grass. ~ Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue & loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. ~ You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees & the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. ~ Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors & aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. ~ With all it's sham, drudgery & broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy. ~ ~

I have a hard time explaining to people why I love dancing so much. I'm dancing almost all the time, even if you can't see it. If there's music around, I'm dancing. If there's not music, well, it's in my head.

I like to dance because it stops me from thinking, sometimes. And there are times that I want to simply stop what's in my head, and feel that glorious release of moving in exact timing with another person. Letting the music take over in my head until it's just the rhythm and my feet -- no second thoughts left.

Maybe it's the kind of release that people can find in exercise -- it is, after all, my exercise. I think, though, it's more like the goal of archery. You have to stop thinking and let your body take over, because it knows what to do, and the more you think the more possibility of error. The repetition until it just happens the way it should, without thought. Sometimes it's how I work with bowling, as well. Just do it, don't think about it.

Things that I think about late at night:

1) So, plate tectonics. They're totally awesome. (I really wanted to use the word "rad." What era slang is that?) But! That means that continents move (up to 10 cm/yr, which means the Atlantic Ocean could grow a meter every five years. A meter!). But latitude and longitude are based on the orientation of the pole around which the earth rotates, which doesn't move. (Well, the whole damn planet wobbles, but the axis stays the same). So...over time, are those coordinates no longer accurate? Because the land mass has moved? And so, should I bury my life's savings at some location, and leave the coordinates with my heirs to be opened in 1000 years, would they be able to find it? Probably -- that's only 100 meters off. But still, the concept of the thing! That the continents move underneath the arbitrary grid we laid on them! And how does it affect longitude, if Greenwich, England moves? 'Cause that one's completely arbitrary. It's crazy shit.

2) Universe expansion. So, everything is contained, right? The earth is in the solar system, the solar system is in the galaxy, the galaxy is in the universe, the universe....the universe isn't in anything! But! But it's expanding. Only, if it's expanding, doesn't it have to be expanding into something? Explain that one to me. But then! It's expanding faster in one direction than the others! So, either something out there is having some kind of gravitational pull, or something on the other side is pushing back and slowing one side down. Except conservation of mass, people! Scientists already had to create antimatter to explain what they were observing, so what about this? It's craziness! What could just be out there hauling on the universe? Is it some kind of giant black hole thing? Do we really need to care? Is that heaven? It's just wacked.

3) ...shit, there was something else. I'm working on it.... Yes! Earthquakes. Specifically, there are these really cool places on the San Andreas Fault that don't have earthquakes. Or, they have a really predicable, really minor earthquake. We're talking about the region that has city-destroying, overpass-crushing, major earthquakes due to plates sliding past each other, but on the same fault are places that just slip on past. There's clear evidence that the land is moving, it's just sliding right on by -- no trouble. Apparently, the ground there is really full of talc, that uber-slippery stone-powder-stuff. Isn't that cool?!? The theory is that the talc just lets the plates slide past each other!

yeah, those are my awesome topics of the day. woohoo!

I have a growing desire to watch or read all the tragic romantic movies and books that didn't affect me as a young girl. Though it seems somewhat ironic to write this just before my birthday, I have found that with age and experience (mostly experience) comes a connection of emotion that I never expected. As someone who almost never cried as a child, and only rarely as a teenager, it's been a shock, the things that can make me cry now, especially when I know that they wouldn't have caused me to cry only a few years ago.

I thought of this today because I was reading a pretty damn bad romance novel that involved the killing of a dog (it was chasing sheep), and I had to put it down for a while, practically in tears. This made an impression because for years and years, the only book that had made me cry was James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small, and the passing of an old and well-loved dog. I think it touched me then, and now, because I've had that experience. I held my dog as she died, and I've been there when my cats were put to sleep -- that was a pain that I understood.

What I didn't understand so much was the fear and knowledge that someday, I will say goodbye to everyone for the last time. It might not be years and years from now, but there is always a last goodbye, whether you know at the time that it is or not, and that is a painful and terrifying thing to process. I don't think I was exposed to it until high school, and I'm not sure it was real to me until I was practically in college, so that's almost 19 years of media that I may not have felt to the fullest.

It's a strange desire, because I don't particularly like to cry, and I have no desire to think about the future in the terms of last goodbyes, but I can't help but wonder what I might get out of things, what might make me cry, and what that might tell me about myself.

AUGUST 24, 2009
9:00 am : The butler rings the doorbell and brings in our breakfast, according to the order we put in last night. She wears white gloves. My grandmother and I look out over the ocean as we drink our coffee. I am hungover from the night before: Grandma and I had martinis as the ship left New York and then champagne and hors d’oeuvres in the room, and split a $60 bottle of pinot noir at dinner (where she out-drank me by quite a bit). After Grandma fell asleep, I headed down to the nightclub, where I had a rum and coke while I watched older people try to dance. I saw no one my age, but was flirted with by two middle-aged Italian brothers, Salvatore and Guiseppe, who called me “bellissima” and spoke to me in broken English.

11:30 am : Grandma and I head out to listen to Margaret Atwood give a lecture in the planetarium. High heels, hangover, and rolling waves are not a fortunate combination. The lecture is fantastic, though; Margaret Atwood is brilliant and witty. She discusses her latest book, which I haven’t yet read. It’s a series of lectures about debt from all different angles. I’ve never read any of her nonfiction, so I’ll have to give it a try. We go to get our books signed, but I step out to the bookstore to see if I can get a copy of Oryx and Crake to send to Sylvia, and when I return, Grandma has already got my copy of The Blind Assassin signed. Oh well. I’m told there will be another signing later.

1 pm: Grandma and I have lunch together and look at the shops on Deck 2. She considers buying a $300 Hermes scarf and some jewelry and ignores all signs that say “Fragile, please ask for assistance before handling”. We then return to the cabin to read for a while. Grandma takes a nap, and I end up dozing on the couch.

5 pm: I go to the gym for a bit, where immediately upon entering, I am greeted first by Guiseppe and then Salvatore, who are lifting weights. They kiss me on both cheeks.

7:00 pm: Grandma has some champagne in the room while we get ready for the formal night in the dining room, and then we head to the Queen’s Grill Lounge – reserved for those of us with Queen staterooms, of course, where I decline a drink (still feeling rather hungover) and Grandma has a martini.

7:30 pm: We go to dinner at the Queen’s Grill. One of the waiters from our team pulls out a chair for Grandma, and I quickly seat myself and put my napkin on my lap before anyone can do it for me. I can do it myself, thanks. I try frog’s legs tonight – which aren’t bad, but are quite bony. And it’s strange to think “this is a frog I’m eating”. Grandma gets a bottle of Sancerre. I tell her I think I won’t drink tonight, but I’ll try it tomorrow, but she makes me have a glass. She has half the bottle herself. I can tell she’s starting to get drunk. We chat with the people at the table next to us, a very sweet British couple. They tell me about cheap airlines in Europe when they find out I’ll be studying in Scotland and want to travel around and help Grandma give me a lecture on buying port over dessert. They and Grandma exchange stories about their RV trips. I smile politely and try to think of something to say on the subject. I guide Grandma back to the room afterwards, and realize why she needs a companion. I’m starting to dread three more weeks of this.


12:30 am, August 25: Well, now I can say I’ve tried the pub. It wasn’t bad, actually, although it was exceedingly pretentious, dominated by older gentlemen in suits and tuxedos talking to other older gentlemen, with their wives by their sides. The man next to me at the bar, probably in his thirties, wearing a polo shirt, was the most casually-dressed person there. He barely said “hi” when we made eye contact, and went back to watching the television. But there was beer. Perhaps I’ll go back tomorrow night when I’m more energetic, though. I didn’t go back to the nightclub tonight – I don’t think I could handle Guiseppe and Salvatore’s attentions, and I doubt I’d have fun. I wish someone else were here to keep me company: if Emily were here, she’d drag me out to the nightclub and at least get me out of the room. And imagine the trouble Caroline and I could get up to in sexy dresses with lots of alcohol!

I am awesome. I had: a skirt pattern. I wanted: a skirt pattern, with pockets. What I did: totally bs really nice looking (and functional!) pockets onto the pattern without pockets. Yeah, it was a really basic skirt pattern, but it WORKED!!!!

That is all.

Oh, as a post script, I hope you all are thankful for the fact that I am *not* posting every sewing project I do here. You would be overwhelmed. It it sometimes a tough battle. I think "I want to talk about sewing, and fabric!", but instead I search out a topic of more general amusement than my latest sewing project.

That is really all.

The following may be one of my new favorite poems. I'm not sure, but I keep returning to it out of interest. It's by Robert Hass, from his collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. It is the first poem in the collection, which is part of the reason I find it so interesting, along with its brevity and layers of complexity.

Iowa, January

In the long winter nights, a farmer's dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrows.

Another thing I particularly like is the title of the last poem in the collection: September, Inverness. The mirroring just makes me happy.

I wanted to ramble about sewing. Because, truthfully, right now I would really like to be sewing something for myself. In fact, I probably would be sewing now if Walmart had any decent fabric for clothes. But they don't. And I have so far managed to resist the temptation of buying fabric online. Although not very well. And I just got my bank statement, and I have about a hundred more dollars than I thought I had....so I might get some fabric to make a dress. We'll see.

This is the dress I want to make. The pattern is mine, and I have fabric at home to make it -- big purple flowers with yellow spots on a black and white ground. I would make the version on the right. I call it the "Nancy Drew Dress." And -- get this -- it has POCKETS! I also want to make one of these dresses. And...maybe these shorts. I have finished all the projects that I brought back to school with me after break, so now I can only haunt the fabric and pattern websites. And haunt I do!

Fact: I just got done reorganizing my bookshelf, and I was extremely close to giving all you readers a list of what was on said bookshelf. Be glad I didn't. There are about 15 books per shelf, six shelves.

Instead, I'm going to ramble about something that I meant to ramble about a long time ago.

On February 27th, 1949, a spark in a fireplace in the oldest building on my campus turned into an inferno, killing nine students and becoming the worst tragedy in the campus' history. Years worth of accumulated dust in an old, boarded up chimney allowed the fire to spread quickly between the ceiling of one story and the floor of the next, in a building that housed almost one-quarter of the students. It was the wee hours of a Sunday morning, after a dance; all the girls had returned to the lent rooms of faculty and other chaperones. None were reported missing, though campus legend says that there were girls illicitly in the building, who died that night, and that the college denies their existence to keep down the scandal.


The 1827 building, Old Kenyon, was truly gutted, but it was rebuilt in just over a year -- completed for the opening of the '50-'51 school year, fully modernized, of course. The original stones from the building were so thick that the contractor numbered each stone, cut it in half, and used each half to rebuild the north and south walls! (The photo above is looking at the north wall -- note the figures silhouetted against the flames at the bottom edge.)

There are reports of selfless bravery that night, of students going into the building repeatedly to find and rescue incapacitated comrades, exposing themselves to third degree burns to pull one more person out of the flames. One student on the third floor hung onto the iron fire ladder, four feet from the window, and caught fellow students as they leapt toward him, so they could then descend the ladder in safety. The president of the college himself went into the building to search for his students.

After the fire, six students were missing. Two had died leaping from the third floor, with all stairwells full of flame, and the last victim died at the local hospital from his burns. The nearby woods were combed for evidence of the six missing boys, in the hopes that they had survived the jump from the third floor. Fragments of bone were found in the rubble of the building, corresponding to where each had lived. It is believed that they died of smoke inhalation before even waking up. Most of the victims lived on the second or third floor of center section of the building, where they had the least warning and were trapped the soonest, asthe fire started in a first floor lounge of the center section. One set of parents refused to believe that the remains found belonged to their son, and refused to take them. He is now buried in the campus cemetary.

There are reports of ghosts in the building, only seen from the knees up, as the foundation was raised 18 inches during rebuilding (from the floor below you can see thier feet dangling from the ceiling). Some have reported being shaken awake, with voices yelling about a fire.

This year marked the 60th anniversary of the tragedy, which seemed to go woefully unnoticed by the student population, though the alumni bulliten and other publications commemerated it, which is why I have gathered all these reports to file here.

In Memory:
Ernest Ahwajee
Edward Hyman Brout
Albert John Lewis
Martin Elliott Mangel
Jack Boland McDonald
Marc Spencer Peck
George Leon Pincus
Stephen Mahlon Shepard
Colin Macrae Woodworth

Sources:
The Special Collections Page: there is usually a video of the fire on this page, though it seems to not be working right now.
Student Documentary: This was chilling, and touching. Be warned, the editing is occassionally heavy, and the video begins to play when the page is opened. The volume is rather variable as well. Watch it anyway.
Alumni Bulliten: A look back, after 60 years.
Alumni Bulliten: Another look back.
Ghost Stories: Scroll down about half way.
More Ghosts
Memories of the Fire
A Nurse's Tale: an account by a girl who visited for the dance that night, and served as a nurse to many of the injured, including one of the boys who died at the hospital
The Victims

Please read this blog post on the dangers of being a woman in may parts of the world, or the article he links to, about young women in Mexico brought into the drug cartel and used.

The world is not a safe place, and it is especially not that way for women. Biological facts mean that women are more at risk for rape than men, and not only from the obvious emotional, physical, and psychological trauma. For instance, if a woman were to contract an STD from the result of such an attack, the effects will be far greater than those on a man, and yet she is far less likely to have any symptoms -- many STD's are asymptomatic in up to 80% of women (I'm sorry, I no longer have the psych book with the exact statistics).

If you're still not convinced that the world is dangerous, read this NYTimes article about skateboarding in Afghanistan. The article in its entirety is quite thought-provoking, but what struck me most were these lines:

But for Hadisa, a 10-year-old girl from a conservative family, skateboarding has not been accepted. She said two older brothers beat her with wires for skating with poorer children in September. Several friends said they had seen blood flowing from her leg.

“I’m not upset with my brothers for beating me,” Hadisa whispered on a recent day when she did not skate because her oldest brother was nearby. “They have the right.”

Beaten. With wires. Please, take a moment and truly try and imagine that.

Now, as many of my female friends are planning to go abroad next year in Europe, this worries me all the more. Not so much the above notes on Afghanistan, as I don't know of anyone going to the Middle East (and if I hear that any of them happen to have such a plan, it will instigate a whole new rant), but the idea that things like this don't happen to good girls, to people in first-world countries, or even simply to you. It's not true.

I'm not saying that every girl will be raped, but truthfully, the statistics are against us. I have many good female friends. If nine of us are all hanging out together, statistics say that two or three of us will be sexually assaulted in our lifetimes.

Now, I know that most rape is acquaintance rape (aka date rape). I know that it happens, and it happens frequently, and most women never talk about it. It can be more traumatic, in fact, than stranger rape, because it is less widely accepted, and the woman in question is more likely to be told she was asking for it or that it wasn't rape. Keeping that in mind, I trust my friends to be smart, and be careful about who they hang out with, and how much alcohol they drink, and what situations they put themselves in.

But there are people out there who will attack someone they don't know, and it doesn't have to be related to sex. This article from England makes my blood run cold. If you don't want to read the whole article, here is the most important point:

When he [the rapist] was caught five days later he admitted his guilt and claimed he did it so he would end up in jail.

‘When I was on the railway station I thought I should rape this lady in order to get a place to eat and sleep and learn the English language,’ he told a psychologist.

My thoughts on this are very similar to those expressed here, namely that prison systems should be set up so as to NOT make prison a desired destination. A judge is contemplating giving this man life in prison, and yet the only time the rapist seemed particularly upset was when he was told he would departed at the end of the prison sentence -- when he was kicked out of free housing, board, and education. Now, I'm all for reform programs and education, especially for youth, but it should never, ever be enough that going to prison is a good thing. In fact, my opinion would be to castrate the man, but it is admitted that I am far less liberal than many of my friends, and perhaps many of you who may read this blog.

Okay, now that you all have sat through my rant, a few funny or interesting links to alleviate it.
- an awesome article about ballet tutus.
- a blog entry about Japanese archery.
- Yes, I've linked to this man's blog a lot in this post. It's cause he's very interesting. You should read. I mean, here's how he describes himself:

The idle musings of a former military man, former computer geek, medically retired pastor and now full-time writer. Contents guaranteed to offend the politically correct and anal-retentive from time to time. My approach to life is that it should be taken with a large helping of laughter, and sufficient firepower to keep it tamed!

- And perhaps best of all, another article out of England about letting college-age kids sleep with their boyfriend/girlfriend when visiting home. Very funny, especially for this particular gem, from the father writing the article:

I find it quite endearing, when he comes to stay and disappears at the end of the night to the spare room, although I know he’s not going to stay in there very long.

How do I know? Because I am a man, and what would I have done in the same circumstances? There’s a tacit understanding between males.

Ah yes, the male understanding. It reminds me of this Questionable Content comic. I am assured that this system is itself "far too ambiguous" and that the real thing would go down more like this. Also, for the ladies, I have first-hand accounts that the last panel of this comic is firmly grounded in truth.

(Also, thank you to Geoff for hunting down the individual panels.)