Month: July 2011

On Moving Again

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Except I don’t know what to say.

I’m basically moving around the corner, but I’ve lived at this apartment for a proper year and a half, and in the college world, that’s a very long time.

But, it’s also a very long time.

Two semesters left, and sometimes I panic. Sometimes I’m giddy.

I’ll miss my bedroom window view of the mountains. I hope whoever lives in this room after me enjoys it just as much.

I return yet again to Patty Griffin. “Useless Desires” makes me think and feel a million different things at once. And this happens whenever I move. Even with this move, when I had an entire year and a half to form close friendships with people in my apartment complex, but it seems I went out of my way to make friends with people who don’t live here. There are nice people. Lots. It’s been hard to find people to relate to, to click with. Things are just different, which is okay, and I’d rather be continuing to transition somewhere else for the next ten months. Because it’s time.

Just around the corner, but it’s still a move, and my soul’s a-swirl.

Useless Desires (ctrl+click)

Say goodbye to the old street
That never cared much for you anyway
And the different coloured doorways
You thought would let you in one day
Goodbye to the old bus stop
Frozen and waiting
The Weekend Edition
Has this town way overrated

You walk across the baseball green
The grass has turned to straw
A flock of birds tries to fly
Away from where you are
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, old friend
I can’t make you stay
I can’t spend another ten years
Wishing you would anyway

How the sky turns to fire
Against a telephone wire
And even I’m getting tired
Of useless desires

Every day I take a bitter pill
It gets me on my way
For the little aches and pains
The ones I have from day to day
To help me think a little less
About the things I miss
To help me not to wonder how
I ended up like this

I walk down to the railroad track
And ride a rusty train
With a million other faces
I shoot through the city veins
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, old friend
You wanted to be free
Somewhere beyond the bitter end
Is where I want to be

How the sky turns to fire
Against a telephone wire
And even I’m getting tired
Of useless desires

Say goodbye to the old building
That never tried to know your name
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, old friend
You won’t be seeing me again
Goodbye to all the windowpanes
Shining in the sun
Like diamonds on a winter day
Goodbye, goodbye to everyone

How the sky turns to fire
Against a telephone wire
It burns the last of the day down
And I’m the last one hanging around
Waiting on a train track
And the train never comes back
And even I’m getting tired
Of useless desires

Not A Big Deal

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dictionary.com:

font

–noun

1. a receptacle, usually of stone, as in a baptistery or church, containing the water used in baptism.
2. a receptacle for holy water; stoup.
3. a productive source: The book is a font of useful tips for travelers.
—–

font1(font)

noun

  • 1 a receptacle in a church for the water used in baptism, typically a freestanding stone structure.
  •  another term for stoup
  • a reservoir for oil in an oil lamp.
  • 2 a fount:they dip down into the font of wisdom

Derivatives

fontal

Pronunciation:/ˈfäntl/

adjective

Origin:

late Old English: from Latin fons, font- ‘spring, fountain’, occurring in the ecclesiastical Latin phrase fons or fontes baptismi ‘baptismal water(s)’

—–

1font

noun \ˈfänt\

Definition:
1a : a receptacle for baptismal water b : a receptacle for holy water c : a receptacle for various liquids
2: source, fountain <a font of information>
— font·al adjective
Origin:
Middle English, from Old English, from Late Latin font-, fons,from Latin, fountain

First Known Use: before 12th century
—–
However, the Mormon Tabernacle Choirs sings “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”

So, I understand what the guy was saying. And the message itself was powerful, because he used the story of the woman at the well and related that Christ told her if she partook of the water then life would spring forth from her, that she, too would be a source of life, because she drank of the living water of Christ. She, too, could become a font. Or fount.

Are they different to you?

It was just a little weird that he approached the talk by focusing on the differences between font and fount, instead of considering that they could actually be variants of the same word. And then implying that those who sing “Come thou font” are singing it wrong.

When I sing it that way, I always think of a fountain, a wellspring, an eternal source.

When I sing it the other way, my thoughts do not change.

*****
I co-taught a lesson today for the Relief Society and Priesthood combined meeting.
I was sort of a sweaty mess.
Hardly anything original came out of my mouth.
But I asked questions.
And people commented. Lots of people. They discussed.
Totally my kind of class.
They were incredible.
And I kept asking questions to guide the discussion and people kept commenting until it was the other teacher’s turn.
And he did a marvelous job. Really, he’s fantastic.
That class strengthened my faith in a lot of things.
And then people came up to me after class were very nice.
And I did what I always do:
“Thanks. And so what are you doing at your benefit concert next week?”
“Thanks. Your comments were really great.”
“Thanks. I was really impressed with the class discussion.”

I often forget that I’m hard-wired for this kind of thing. But then somewhere along the way of each teaching moment you remember that it’s not about you, and it becomes clearer than anything that the class is learning something, and you really feel you can’t take credit for teaching anything at all.

And that’s when the blessings really spring forth.

I Am Wearing A Snuggie

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I am also about to watch another episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Sometimes I’m weird.

On Wednesday, I had a work bowling party. Nine of us came to the BYU Games Center, and I only knew one other person. We divided ourselves into two lanes, and I ended up going third out of the five people on the right lane.

So, at first, whenever it wasn’t my turn, I talked to the one person I knew, but as the game progressed, I loosened up a little and started at least commenting on other people’s games.

Also, I’m really good at being excited for people. I will cheer for you and cheer for you, and I will feel bad for you if I know that you really wanted that strike, or if the gutter was particularly merciless.

Anyway, all that outwardness didn’t stop me from winning. By 50 points over the 2nd-place person. Of course I wasn’t boasty (of course?), and I especially don’t like attention from people I don’t know, so I made sure to deflect attention and accept compliments and the quickly shoot compliments back. The outwardness didn’t help the awkwardness.

It’s sometimes really hard for me to accept compliments, but I do practice at saying “thank you” and actually feeling grateful.

Then later on in the week I admitted to someone that I can be anal retentive.

I spent most of this morning packing up my room before going on a bike ride with some friends. When we got back, I popped some popcorn and we relaxed a bit before moving my stuff to my new place. We laughed a lot about some things, and I laughed until I cried about a thing that I can’t talk about here just in case somebody’s somebody happens to come upon this blog. It’s just hilarious to me.

So, we packed up my friends’ van and moved a lot of things over to the new place.

Then we returned to the old place and saw that I left my NYC subway map on the wall. I removed the pushpins and took down the map and began folding it while my friends were telling a story or texting their family or something. When they finished, I asked them, “Do you know what makes me so happy?” And, they let me answer: “When I can fold a map, and it isn’t wonky and it can lie perfectly smooth when it’s nicely folded.” And they were like, “Uh, sure.”

Then we went out for sushi, because my friends are the best for helping me move, plus one of my friends received a text coupon for a buy-one-roll-get-one-free deal, so we had to take advantage of it. The food was great, and I might have eaten too much, because the rice in my stomach is staging a coup. Too crowded. Overpopulated. Not equal benefits for everyone.

After dinner, we stopped by the new place again to drop off a few other things. We looked at my bed, which was on cinder blocks so that I could store things beneath it. The bed isn’t pushed up against the wall, but a few inches from it, and I expressed a small fear that the bed might not be stable enough. I shook the bed, and the cinder blocks rocked a little. A friend asked if I was going to rock the bed like that, and I said that I wasn’t going to tell her. Personal stuff, you know?

Anyway, I ended up saying that I didn’t want to push the bed against the wall yet because I needed to make the bed, that I really like making beds, that once I make the bed and get all the hospital corners right then I’ll push the bed against the wall and it will be safer. I said that I make my bed every day, that sometimes I’ll completely strip my bed just so that I can make the whole thing over. I said that it is soothing and that it helps me clear my mind.

The same thing goes for most housework.

I can’t believe I’ve dedicated 700 words to how weird I am. Maybe I should scratch that and include the last eight years of blogging. Which is even harder to believe. Maybe not as hard if you’re not me, but maybe you should be grateful that isn’t the case.

Whatever. It’s time for Buffy.

Not Yet

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Because I’d rather explain how I came across the song in the last post because I’m feeling worlds of nostalgic right now and I let that song lull me to sleep last night/this morning so I’ve always loved classical music as most of you know I refer to Yo-Yo Ma as my uncle but maybe it was in the year 2000 I found out about a violinist named Hilary Hahn and a friend loaned me her first album where she plays solo Bach and it was amazing so then I decided to follow her career because she’s only three years  younger than I and seemed to be a really good role model which is what I was looking for at that point in my life because I was returning to a proper course after having careened into some prodigal years and so there’s that and I respected Hilary’s patience with her career and her seeming deliberateness with choices she was making for her life in addition to her writing online and in her album jacket notes, and after buying her Bach album I found her Beethoven/Bernstein and then the Barber/Meyer CD came out and I read in the jacket notes that a double-bassist/composer named Edgar Meyer commissioned Hilary for that concerto and so I wondered who Edgar Meyer is and I started looking up things about him because after listening to the concerto I was more or less blown away. Double basses are flippin huge. I also found out about a collaborative album (in the course of researching chamber music with Richard Stoltzman or Sabine Meyer, Emmanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma because I was also trying to improve my clarinet playing by listening to awesome clarinet music) called Appalachian Journey that involves Mr. Ma, Edgar Meyer, and violinist/fiddler Mark O’Connor, which features vocalists like James Taylor and Alison Krauss and the idea of hybridizing bluegrass and chamber music fascinated me because I really truly appreciate talent no matter where it is and I also adore James Taylor and Alison Krauss because they can both respectively guitar and fiddle as well as stir nostalgia through their voices and this album does not disappoint because nostalgia crept up on me last night and made me look for that Stephen Foster to share with you and it was hard to let myself fall asleep to that song because I enjoyed watching the performance, the communication between the musicians, the eye contact and other cues to let different instruments stand out whenever Alison wasn’t singing, the way Alison looks at the instrumentalists through the final chord and her smile when it ends, and then the perfect stillness between the last note and applause just makes me so happy and so maybe I watched the video three or maybe four times before I lay down and closed my eyes while the song played again and this morning, although my eyes are really dry and I can’t quite remember (much less explain) all of a dream I had where I was crowd-surfing in my high school bleachers in a sports bra and underwear and then there was my marching band self watching very nervously my nearly-naked self hoping that nobody else was watching her, I feel pretty good.

Hey, Kids

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Do I EVER have a blog post for you. But not tonight.

When I get rested and showered and when my homework is back under control, and when the level of inadvertent THC in my body has returned to zero from off-the-charts, then I can think about writing you a lovely post about lovely things.

Because I love you.

But first, attempts to sleep.

Good night, my darlings.

I Played in the Rain Just Now

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Homework calls, and I continue to ignore it.

I wish I could describe the downpour with as much majesty and wonder the way your mom or Shakespeare or Melville or Crane recreates nature’s power from mere words. WORDS!

But I can’t, so instead I will show you photos of my soaked self. Neighbors who live across from me and I splashed in the parking lot, which in some places was 3 inches deep. We kicked and jumped and giggled as the cool drops from the sky plinked our heads.

That is all.

What you don't see is my drenched pants dripping onto the recently cleaned carpet. Storms like these never last long, and there was even lightning and thunder, but I was the shortest among the group of us playing, so I wasn't worried.
So, I mussed my hair a bit for the photo, but how am I supposed to convince you otherwise that I went puddle jumping? And why is my room so bright? And, yes. I made the pictures small and unclickable because THEY'RE NOT FLATTERING. But I wanted everyone to know that I loved playing in the rain. And I wish YOU and YOU and YOU could have joined me. Yes, YOU. Right?

I guess it’s time to do homework now, unless any of you would like to keep distracting me. You’d be doing a good deed. I WOULD NOT TURN YOU AWAY.

So Some Friends Told Me A Story

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It was about a certain stake and ward in Utah County. Not in Provo, but that town just north of Provo. It was one of those Young Single Adult Wards, which I have always thought are wonderful and have never harbored any complaints against. I love them so much.

These friends get ready to attend this ward. They might have been running a smidge late, but when they arrived, the congregation was singing the opening hymn. It wasn’t a crisis, by any means.

But the chapel was practically full, except for maybe the very front row of pews and the choir loft up on the podium. So my friends decided to hang out in the foyer instead of walking in front of everyone and disrupting the meeting.

Then came time for passing the sacrament. Bread and water. Symbols of the body and blood and Christ’s atonement.

Usually, one of the priesthood members comes out into the foyer to pass the sacrament to those who may have arrived late or had to leave the chapel for whatever reason.

No one came out.

My friends weren’t the only ones in the foyers.

After they passed the bread, they did the same with the water.

And the same thing happened with the water: the foyer people didn’t get any.

Which were maybe 20-30? I tend to want to exaggerate this number, but really, it was a sizable crowd.

Then after the sacrament was passed, a member of the bishopric asked if anyone didn’t get to partake of the sacrament.

I guess no one in the chapel raised their hands.

Then the bishop invited everyone sitting in the foyers to find a seat in the chapel.

He supervised the priesthood as they stayed inside the chapel, which means he saw them not passing the sacrament to the foyer people.

He knew that the foyer people didn’t receive the sacrament.

So, when people confronted the bishop after the meeting, he said that he was acting under the stake president’s directions.

It was important for the bishop to literally see the elders passing the sacrament.

But he also must have saw them not passing it to the crowd outside.

People were incredulous and sort of really angry.

Some people stormed off, declaring inactivity.

And the bishop said it was their choice.

So, what I’m trying to understand:

Does he mean to punish latecomers by depriving them of the sacrament?

How does he intend to fellowship and reactivate when he splits hairs with THE reason people come to sacrament meeting? How are people supposed to get married?

How can one be denied the sacrament? If someone in the congregation is sick and can’t physically make it to church, the priesthood can bring the sacrament to that person’s home.

Everyone should have that opportunity.

If someone can help me see benefits to the other side of this discussion, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Here Goes Today

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I spent the day reading King Lear and listening to the Indigo Girls. Most of it at the same time. By the time I finished the Shakespeare, I thought I was going to die of a catharsis overdose.

Some versions have Edgar performing the last lines; others use Albany. There is significance in either character, but I like it better when Edgar speaks last; I feel a stronger sense of justice. I mean, there has to be something after nearly everyone dies. (NOT A SPOILER; IT’S A SHAKESPEARE TRAGEDY, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.) Here are the lines:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most. We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

And, the Indigo Girls. I’ve been listening to their self-titled album from 1989, and I can’t get enough of their songwriting. All the time. While I like all songs from this album, “Love’s Recovery” stands out today. In my mind, King Lear and this song connect, but I can’t quite explain how, other than I decided to experience them together today. Plus, I just spent three hours at Borders looking at books, and it didn’t even feel like I was there for that long. It was great.

Indigo Girls – Love’s Recovery (ctrl + click to open in another window)

During the time of which I speak it was hard to turn the other cheek
To the blows of insecurity
Feeding the cancer of my intellect the blood of love soon neglected
Lay dying in the strength of its impurity
Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
They’ve all gone and left each other in search of fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
To the slim chance of love’s recovery.
There I am in younger days, star gazing,
Painting picture perfect maps of how my life and love would be
Not counting the unmarked paths of misdirection
My compass, faith in love’s perfection
I missed ten million miles of road I should have seen
Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
Left each other one by one in search of fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
To the slim chance of love’s recovery.
Rain soaked and voice choked like silent screaming in a dream
I search for our absolute distinction
Not content to bow and bent
To the whims of culture that swoop like vultures
Eating us away, eating us away
Eating us away to our extinction
Oh how I wish I were a trinity, so if I lost a part of me
I’d still have two of the same to live
But nobody gets a lifetime rehearsal, as specks of dust we’re universal
To let this love survive would be the greatest gift we could give
Tell all the friends who think they’re so together
That these are ghosts and mirages, these thoughts of fairer weather
Though it’s storming out I feel safe within the arms of love’s discovery

I Took A Nap This Weekend, and I Called It Sunday

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I’m looking out my bedroom window, and a mountain is looking back at me. It’s green and rugged and I’m in a valley, and I’m not very green anymore, though maybe I’m still a bit rugged. I’d hardly call myself refined.

So, there were pioneers. Many of my friends have ancestors who crossed the plains in crazy weather conditions and under the order of God’s prophet, in addition to being run out of the Midwest by state governments.

And they settled in Utah.

This is the place.

Apparently some of my dad’s relatives came on that trek, I think. I would need for him to retell the story. He was born in Salt Lake City. His parents were LDS, and he has a stepmother who’s a member of the Reorganized LDS church.

My mother was born and raised Catholic, in the Philippines.

I was born in the Philippines, and my birth certificate says I have a Catholic mother from the Philippines and a Mormon father from Salt Lake City.

I talked aloud to one person today, my roommate. I told her I wouldn’t be going to church, so she didn’t have to worry about giving me a ride. Then I read and slept. And read and slept.

There are people in Africa who populate remote areas of continent. Why do they roam, where do they wander, and how do they decide to settle in certain areas?

And, why are other people stuck? Is it a matter of pride? Survival? Circumstance?

What are frontiers, anyway? What goes unexplored in realms physical and metaphysical?

Now, I’m thinking about Norway.

How do we understand what and where people are trying to explore?

Who are the pioneers, anyway? Do we always agree with or understand what they discover?