stardust

And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart.
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we're apart.
You wander down the lane and far away
Leaving me a song that will not die.
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by.

Sometimes I wonder why I spend
The lonely nights dreaming of a song.
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration.
But that was long ago, and now my consolation
Is in the stardust of a song.

Beside the garden wall, when stars are bright
You are in my arms.
The nightingale tells his fairy tale
Of paradise where roses grew.
Though I dream in vain
In my heart you will remain
My stardust melody
The memory of love's refrain.

Silentium!

Silentium! Silence! Sei still!
Speak not! Do not open your soul's intimate abode.
What you may feel, what you may dream -
In profundi let it steam.
Safeguard it in your spirit's mine
Let it ascend and then decline,
Like silent stars on heaven's dome.
Bathe in their light and watch them roam,
Admire them, splendid or bleak,
But in silence. Do not speak.

How can a heart be braced in words?
Another fathom what is yours?
And understand what you live by?
A thought expressed becomes a lie.
Don't muddy springs, lucid and unique:
Drink from their depth, but do not speak.

Learn to live within yourself. Explore a universe
That's you. Behold between your soul's shores
All the mysterious thoughts. Know: noise
Rips the enigmatic lace, destroys
The magic chorus. Noon rays will make it weak.
Listen to its song. But do not speak.

-Fyodor Tyutchev (1830), translated by Elisabeth Konovalova

From the liner notes of Silencio.

outsourcing

Can it get any more outrageous? My country is now outsourcing torture.

Then again, my country is still barbaric enough to put criminals to death. The more distance I gain from the US, the stranger the idea of legalized (re-legalized since 1976) murder becomes. Prison sentences seem much shorter here (to positive or negative effect, I don't know; they seem too short and fines too reasonable to my American sensibilities). But even the maximum sentence for serial killer Marc Dutroux was just lifetime imprisonment. There is no harsher sentence.

just as i feared...

I'm Eponine!
Spunky, resourceful, and fearless, I don't take a lot of guff from the world, and sometimes I'm kind of freaky. Secretly, though, I just want to be loved in spite of my attitude and my goofy hat. Which Les Miserables Character Are You?

She's cool and appropriately tomboyish, but it sucks to get the short end of the stick.

identity crisis

Crikey. Thanks to Tom for this little revelation...

You Are 80% Boyish and 20% Girlish

You have a tough exterior - and usually a tough interior to match it. You're no nonsense, logical, and very assertive. Sometimes you can't understand women at all, even if you're a woman yourself. You see things rationally, and don't like to let your emotions get the best of you.

How Boyish or Girlish Are You?

seen

Still deriving endless entertainment from the Elm City Cycling listserv:

Because you demanded it...
KURTZ VS CROWDER
TO THE DEATH
"What doesn't kill me, only makes me ride my bicycle more."
"What doesn't kill him, ain't what I'm gonna do!"
Two men.
Two bicycles.
TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW AT THE DEVIL'S GEAR

footprints

Oddly enough, Klaas had similar thoughts today: SIGHTSEAING: Shocking...

NASA, stop littering!

Space Debris A Growing Problem

You can't really blame NASA, but I can't stand litterbugs on Earth. The average American (the worst of all offenders) jettisons 1,460 pounds of garbage per year. I want to leave a lasting legacy on the world, but it has tortured me throughout my short life to think that my garbage will probably be the most permanent contribution of all.

You too... eat Finnish økologiske speltflakes in the morning?


Or perhaps you too... want to throw yourself off a mountain?

I'm too dense for games. But if the world were a kinder place, perhaps you too think of something you believed in when you see beauty.

gaan of niet gaan

(Thanks to Klaas for correcting my erroneous Dutch.) Dilemma: 45 minutes late for Dutch class. Going for the second half (which is 90 minutes of the 3.5 hours) would nevertheless cost me almost 10 € roundtrip, and I'd learn almost diddly squat.

Oké, not so much of a dilemma then. Just guilt trippin. :)

Exciting news (to a nerdy cook in a foreign country): The solution to my spice name translation woes is here!

BEZERKELEY HERE WE COME!!!

INGRID GOT INTO BERKELEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can't begin to imagine what kind of trouble we'd get into there, considering that Bezerkeley is exactly our kind of trouble. I'm overjoyed that she's going where she wanted to go (against foreign student odds at a state school too). And now I have a reason to visit my favorite city in the world as often as possible, and can make myself at home as a squatter anytime. >:) Life is grand. Freakin' grand.

The heavens sent me a sign about this earlier today: I noticed for the first time that there's a business in Mechelen called "Klepto," and immediately thought of her and resolved to send her a photo.

Speaking of Berkeley, I always wanted to recreate this little gem from Cal's campus as a prank at Yale, but never got around to it:


Then again, some things can really only exist in Berkeley, California.

[ the sierra nevadas outside death valley, california ]

I dreamt of JR and me driving in his former green Subaru Outback through the magnificent craggy mountain range that winds south into Death Valley. At the road's highest point, we pulled onto a sharp outcropping of rock and knelt at its tip, admiring the plummeting brown cliffs, the cloudless blue sky, and the fresh breeze against our faces. And then I stuffed a scribbled dark pink index card into his left hand and vaulted into the abyss, embracing the sky and tumbling with it in arcs through the warm desert air. As he hollered at me, my parachute blossomed and carried me beyond sight and knowledge.

"Don't look for me," the note began. But to claim that I dreamt this would be a lie.

If I had an abyss to leap into, could I do it while turning my back on the life I've already lost?

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Explaining subversion in Hart Crane's "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge," Harold Bloom pointed out to us that in seeing God's need of a new myth, Crane offered us a modern human invention. Shocking, no? Leave it to Bloom to kick your romanticized ideas out the door and leave a poem's latent power luminous before you.

This verse has haunted me, taunting me in my want of my own myth. Has thrill-seeking been an unknowing hunt for that myth? Four solstices ago, I embraced a myth that seemed more real than any reality I had ever known, only to have it run through my fingers like water. Will I find another in the adrenaline-saturated desert air?

por una cabeza

Since I downloaded the crappy ringtone version last night while unable to sleep, that lovely overplayed Gardel tango has been spinning through my head.

It's eight minutes to 5 am now, and I'm still not asleep. I may have passed out for a couple minutes and then sprung awake at the shock of it. During the worst days of my recovery, I would sleep up to fourteen hours and remain in bed far longer, cuddling Snuggles and contemplating emptiness. Why am I now huddled at the other extreme?

For some reason, I am reminded of Wallace Stevens' "Auroras of Autumn":

He opens the door of his house
On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

concrete_fem blogged "for the past two months i've been beating myself up over the loss of one friendship, instead of loving myself harder for all that i have survived." I'd never seen myself that way before. Can I love myself like that? Do I deserve to?

"here goes the countdown: 20 hours & 18 pages to go." Brave woman. I think I've deliberately forgotten what it was like to crouch at that starting line, rocking on my heels, not really believing I'd make it to the end in time. And then the sun would rise on fifteen pages of intense elaboration on an idea plucked hastily out of the thought-heavy Yale air. The last three pages were always the hardest, written on a stale-coffee-driven fragile film of awareness... or the easiest, if the page count included the bibliography.

The candle I lit for him just went out. I hope he isn't shaking and sweating and racked by everything else that accompanies withdrawal. I don't know what nicotine addiction is like, but I know something about convulsions. Call it electrolyte withdrawal: I didn't eat for almost a week during a serious case of food poisoning, and the doctors thought I had developed epilepsy. But for your body to fight you for a substance that's harmful to it... that's frightening.

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.
The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,
A darkness gathers though it does not fall
　
And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.
The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.
He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,
　
With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps
And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.

One minute to 5 am.

420

Funny the things you learn about your own culture when trying to explain it to others. Take the use of '420,' for instance. Wikipedia offers an elucidating article with the tidbit that the California law authorizing and regulating medical uses of marijuana was Senate Bill 420. How'd they pull that off?

The law was quite successful. Medical marijuana joints outnumber McDonald's 2 to 1 in San Francisco, according to an article in The Examiner last year.

My other favorite fact: The second line of the first verse in the children's nursery rhyme 'Sing a Song of Sixpence' goes "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie."

Yale is fortunate to have probably the only carillon in the world located on High Street. Not to say that anyone has ever gotten baked on the tower... oh no...

f*ck off

Say hello to the girl that I am
You're gonna have to see through my perspective
I need to make mistakes just to learn who I am
And I don't wanna be so damn protected
There must be another way
'Cause I believe in taking chances
But who am I to say
What a girl is to do
God, I need some answers...

Thanks, Britney. Mom and dad, I apologize for being alive. I know it's a great source of concern for you.

My parents already had their heyday reading my diary in high school, because I trusted them enough to consciously not password-protect it (little fool). Now they freak out because I've started mentioning in my public blog again that I have these things people call "friends." I suppose it would be safer for me to spend New Year's Eve crutching around the drunken Brussels crowds alone rather than being with people who happen to not be female (god only knows who they'd let me associate with if they knew my orientation better) or people to whom they haven't given their stamp of approval (generally the people I tend not to associate with because they're incredibly dull).

Every week I am more and more tempted to try my right leg at kicking something in rage. It's still got a little tae kwon do training that's impatient to test itself.