poetry

Man in Space

by Billy Collins

All you have to do is listen to the way a man

sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people

and notice how intent he is on making his point

even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

and you will know why the women in science

fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own

are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine

when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle

with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,

their breasts protected by hard metal disks.


things I enjoy when forced to do them
1. read poetry
2. reading in general
3. writing

I really like the above poem, it makes me smile, oddly.
Kate

Notes in the margins

My lists have begun infiltrating my course work now that I no longer have car rides to clear my head in... Suddenly Banned in Ireland's Preface and Introduction make me think of things I love, while notes from my Lit. class remind me of works I've begun to hate.

I Love To...
1. highlight as I read
2. write notes in school books knowing either I will reread them years from now or someone else will wonder what I meant a la Nazi girl in Antha's copy of The Importance of Being Earnest
3. sit in crowded areas and lose myself in reading, then look up and realize I was just In It, that I actually like what I'm doing for school, that I'm finally fully engaged. Even if I am doing the reading a day late.
4. take off my coats after entering a building.

Works English Classes Have Made Me Hate
1. Waiting for Godot (I'm being forced to read two plays by Beckett this semester, we'll see if I like him better the second time around or if I still think it's mostly BS.)
2. Birches, Robert Frost (Thank you, Professor Henke. I hope this one is added prematurely and having to write in the meter doesn't kill Frost for me... again.)
3. Mark Twain, any and all writing.
4. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Now I go to scourge through this and my live journal for any kind of epiphany moments for my Writing 1 exercise. Yes, I would like to write a descriptive piece. Yes, I am oozing excitement out my ears. Yes, I do hope I finish this by the time The Office comes on, because Yes, I will stop writing to watch NBC's solid hour of Thursday night comedy.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'm not sure I continue to function, but I sure am trying.

Things That Made Today Good
1. I journeyed along a tunnel to one of my classes.
2. Fruit was eaten!
3. Sequined shirts
4. Catch phrase
5. Day 2 with my silver fox of a Parisian French teacher
6. Getting to write a silly essay about an awesome bus driver

Things I Understood Better the Second Time Around
1. French
2. "Birches," by Robert Frost
3. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. the metro
5. that some things ache forever, but if you bury them it makes it better
6. poetry in general

Things That Are Perfect
1. Raspberry Iced Tea

Beauty

While I was in Chicago I made us go to the Art Institute and I geekily wrote down all of the things I liked best on my map. A selection:









































I really like museums.

Things I Have Enjoyed Recently...

...That I Didn't Think I Would
1. the driver of the Megabus that we took from Chicago to St. Louis's sweet lessons on life that basically amounted to: rent your house if you ever lose your job, pay your credit cards off as soon as you get the bill, and a nice history of Megabus
2. Walking through the intense amount of snow in Chicago
3. Frozen hair
4. Skiing
5. the Genius results for "Hot N Cold," by Katy Perry
6. "Hot N Cold," by Katy Perry
7. Korean food, Kimchi specifically. So spicy though!

I'm guilty of an addiction to pop. But not Korean Pop, because that stuff is awful and seems to give me an automatic headache.

Tomorrow I begin my classes...

1. Biomedical Ethics
2. French 2
3. Writing I
4. Literary Culture of Modern Ireland
5. Introduction to Literary Studies

I have concerns...
We Will Seeeee!

Later expect sweet snow pictures I took on Michael's camera. :)

Things I Am Anxious About:
1. how much my luggage weighs
2. my flight
3. packing
4. checking in for a non-American Airlines flight
5. things changing

Once again, I seem to have saved the best for last. I... am starting to see that my image of my life in twenty years is unlikely. And for that I am extremely sad, but for all the wrong reasons.
Oh well, that's life, I guess.

So this is the new year...

...and I have no resolution.

To Do 2009
1. get shit done.
2. stop spending all my money at urban outfitters
3. don't run out of meal points before the semester is over
4. have a meeting with my ireland teacher and talk about my writing in a legit kind of way, I need the feedbacks
5. buy a new printer that actually works
6. add to the bitchen' collage
7. smoke hookah
8. try something new and fantastic
9. fall in love with the world around me
10. notice God in the everyday

That last one is the most important, and the one I seem to be forgetting the most. I don't regret moving away, I don't regret going to a dirty hippie school, I don't regret that everyone I know is either an atheist or evangelical, but I do regret that I have not been fighting back. In a "they will know we are Christians by our love, by our love," kind of way.
I miss my accountability group meetings, even if we did talk about boys a lot.
Love,
Kate