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"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." ~ Bill Watterson

Thinking about the Truth

This is the Noh mask for Raiden or Ikazuchi, the personification of Thunder.


I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please. ~ Mother Jones

I was musing in my car as I was driving home today about what would happen if we all simply told each other what we were really thinking most of the time. Would anybody still talk to anybody else? And if we're thinking these things, why aren't we acting on them?

There is a certain type of person who is forever asking me, "What are you thinking?" They then proceed to sit and stare at me like I am some sort of divine guru out of whose mouth jewels of wisdom are about to fall. It's creepy as all get out. I feel like a sideshow performer. It's sort of like, "Hey, give the monkey a banana and see if she'll do another trick." I don't know why these people seem to get such a huge charge out of this, exactly. It seems that I don't quite see things the way everybody else does, maybe, and that's amusing to some. Maybe it's a bit like paying your fifty cents and going inside a funhouse or something. Who really knows?

What I usually do is get sort of flustered, find a way to turn the conversation down a side alley, and do either the verbal version or the physical version of running away. After all, my thoughts are my own very private universe, and it's not really any of their damn business, is it? There are very few people I know well enough to open my truest self up to; most people get the equivalent of a Japanese Noh mask. Is that a dishonesty? It's not "not-me" that they see; it's just perhaps just not the fullest version of me. Everybody is this way, I'm sure... Right?

What I want to do when I'm asked that question lately, though, is smile my most dangerous smile and take off the gloves, the mask, and just answer them. "What are you thinking right now?" Hmm...well, let me just tell you. I'm thinking about how hard it is not to reach up and slap you. I'm thinking about how much I'd like to be at home on my couch reading a good book instead of trapped here in this conversation with you. Conversely, it might be something more pleasant: I'm thinking about what his lips might taste like, feel like pressed to mine during a first kiss or what the view looks like right now from the dancing balcony at Kyomizuydera. It could be really nothing at all, in fact. I'm thinking I have to go to Wal-Mart and get cat food or I'm going to have really angry animals at home tonight. I'm thinking the air has gone out of that stupid back tire again. So rarely is the truth provocative or even mildly interesting....

There are times, though, when telling the truth about what one is thinking is critical. I spent too many years holding back my true feelings about things, thinking for some reason that I was not entitled to express those feelings, that I didn't have the right to those emotions, particularly the ones related to being angry about things or upset. If something made me mad, I tucked it away. It was my fault. I did it. If somebody hurt my feelings, I turned it inward. It took me a long time to learn that everybody has a right to tell the truth sometimes, and that truth may involve being legitimately, righteously hacked off about something. It took me a long time to see that telling that truth was a better way of dealing with something that trying to shove it all in a box inside me and ignore it.

I try to live my life by the quote at the top of this entry now. I don't run around bashing people over the head with "The Truth" like a club, but if you ask me, I'm pretty much going to tell you, yes, even if the answer is about that kiss or the cat food I need from Wal-Mart if I know you well enough. If not, you may have to settle for the Noh mask smile. That is another kind of truth, and while you may not find it satisfying, I guess sometimes you should probably just consider yourself lucky and move on.

Migraine Attack

Yesterday I was sitting at my desk trying to get some work done before the end of the week when it felt like someone struck me across the back of the head. I was talking to one of my teacher friends at the time, so luckily I wasn't alone, but it was horrible.

Almost immediately, the Topamax kicked in and so instead of screaming in pain, I was floating outside my body. I don't know which is worse. As always with my headaches, I lost words and started sounding like a three-year old trying to string sentences together. All light became my enemy and my room was way too hot. All I wanted to do was lie down on the tile floor and die.

I managed to get to the drawer where I keep my Maxalt and take one of them, and even though I hate the way they taste and the completely disconnected way I feel after I have to take one, I will say this for them: if I get to them fast enough, they work. I stopped feeling as if the back of my head was being pounded out and started just feeling numb.

I couldn't drive at all, so I was basically trapped at school. Even as impaired as I was, I aware that I shouldn't try to drive. I've done it before, mind you, but as bad as that was yesterday, I couldn't have made sense of the traffic around me or of the basic machinery of running the vehicle. I hate that. I hate the stupification of the headaches. They make me so dependent on others, something I almost never am, something I loathe being.

I called my mother and fortunately she was still in town even though she gets off work earlier than I do. She was able to come and get me, and so I toddled downstairs from my classroom to the waiting minivan with all my stuff like a good little preschool child. I hate these headaches. They take everything from me, my words, my independence.

I came home and got in the bed. Cats, of course, spotted a prone figure and piled up with me, warm and comforting, and since I was inexplicably cold, it was nice. I slept about three hours, got up for awhile to read and eat a comforting bowl of grits, the only thing that didn't sound nasty, then I went back to bed.

Now, after a long night's sleep, everything seems to be reset. Maybe the system is ready for another month of pain-free operation.

My greatest wish for these headaches is that I could find a medicine that wasn't almost as bad as the disease. The Topamax makes me so forgetful, makes me forget names of people and things, and the Maxalt, when I have to take it, shuts me down almost completely. I guess this is all to keep me humble, to remind me that I'm not Wonder Woman after all, and I should just bear it with patience. That's hard for me, though. I'm not known for my patience. Maybe this is my chance to improve.

Seven Hundred Posts

This is my seven hundredth post as a blogger. I suppose I should commemorate this auspicious event in some way, hang a sign, post a banner, put up an interesting picture or something. Maybe.

To tell the truth, until I got ready to post, I didn't even know this one was number 700. I can't believe I've had seven hundred things to say. That's kind of hard to believe.

This little space has been good to me, though. It's been a helpful outlet, and as I look back over the past few years with it, I can see several changes in myself since I first started writing. It's always good to see that kind of thing if nothing else.

As my blog turns 700, I am glad I kept writing it when I considered shutting it down two years ago. I think I really would have missed it. (And Heavens only know what all those poor people constantly searching my blog for Beowulf's Boast would do...)

Used Up

Today I feel used up, like a crumpled piece of notebook paper left under a desk after the last bell, like an empty box of Kleenex waiting to be discarded, hollowed out, useless, everything that was good in me taken, consumed, only the shell left. I know it's a phase that will cycle, but while I'm in it, it's a horrible place to be.

Indifference and apathy are like big heavy boots crushing my spirit, and I don't have the requisite reserves right now to spring back from it. I know better than to focus on it, know better than to let the few distract me from the many, and yet.... I need to recharge somehow; I just don't know how. It's so hard to keep pulling rabbits out of hats sometimes.

I'm just tired. Maybe sleep is the answer. Maybe a night of rest will fix all that's wrong.

Gwendolyn Brooks Poem

This is by Gwendolyn Brooks, and as with many of her wonderful poems, it fills me with that ice-cold fever and admiring longing that makes me wish I'd come up with it myself.


To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.
You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door-
Is not there_
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.
You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.
You remember and covet his mouth
To touch, to whisper on.
Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!
Oh when to apprize
Is to mesmerize,
To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.

I Love Lucy -- Charm School

I'm watching an I Love Lucy marathon, and currently there's an episode I've never seen, The Charm School. While I don't like every episode of Lucy, this one is making me laugh non-stop. Lucy and Ethel are trying to become classy and upper-class women by going to a school to learn "charm." You can just imagine...

I can't take Lucy all the time, but sometimes I'm just in the mood for it. I have my DVR set to keep five episodes recorded at all times so when I do feel like it, I have it ready. Tonight it's perfect for relaxing, for unwinding my tired brain. Maybe it will help me fight the effects of the full moon so I can sleep instead of staring at the ceiling, or, if I do sleep, maybe this gentle slapstick will keep me from having such bizarre and disturbing dreams.

This Is a Test, This Is Only a Test

I’m trying the Windows Live Writer software just now, so there’s no telling, really, how this post will turn out.  I am deeply skeptical of all things Windows makes.  However, if this works, it might be useful in certain situations where I don’t have internet access but would still like to blog.  Of course, I guess I could just cut and paste from a word processing document like a normal person, but hey, here’s a gadget and you know how I am about those.  Anyway, I do have other things to do tonight, and I know when I push the post button and this doesn’t go, I’m going to be frustrated and distracted, so I think it’s about time to end here.  Get ready for the “big scream”…..

Keeping Life in Perspective

Humor is a reminder that no matter how high the throne one sits on, one sits on one's bottom. ~Taki

The Postman Always Rings Twice

There's no thief like a bad movie. ~Sam Ewing

I'm watching the noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice. I have never seen all of it because the only time I tried to watch it on TCM, my satellite dish was still in its old location and a heavy rainstorm came in causing my reception to disappear right at the end. In my foraging in Sam's yesterday, I found a four movie collection with The Maltese Falcon, Dial M for Murder, The Big Sleep, and this in it.

TCM has been putting these collections out periodically for awhile now, and this is the second one like it I've bought. I LOVE them. The other one has Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby as two of the four movies on it. How great is that? They are so affordable. For what one movie usually costs on DVD, I can get four, and all four are always gold-standard films. I guess they're not "new theatrical releases," but really, who cares about that? Give me Bogart and Bacall or Hepburn and Tracey any day of the week over Saw VI. Really.

This time the weather won't stop me from seeing the end. I understand that it's a real doozy. When I'm done, I may put in Philadelphia Story. I haven't watched it in a while, and just talking about it makes me want to see it again. It's a good night for a mini-movie festival in the old living room.

Conflicting Desires

I need be writing. I have a work waiting to be finished and people who are waiting to read it.

There is a full moon outside, though, an October moon, and I want to be dancing, playing, throwing all my obligations to the stars above, letting them fall wherever they will on the dewy grass.

If you were to come and find my hidden house tonight, you would be able to hear the stereo long before you actually saw the building. It's one of those nights. I'm cranking through a new playlist on iTunes called "Bouncy." I think that pretty much says all that needs to be said. God bless the Brothers Gibb and all the derivations that the iTunes Genius and my own machinations can make from them.

Maybe reading is what I need to do. I've got a good new book. I can go sit in my library in the moonlight by the open window and watch the deer play in the pasture and read with the stereo going in the living room. This, of course, is the very lovely thing about living out in the middle of nowhere; you can play your music as loud as you like and nobody will call the cops....

As for the writing...well...it will get done. Just not tonight. I have no taste for it just now, and if I do it now, all will end badly. Better to wait instead of do it when I don't want to. Those who are waiting can just think of it as a patience-building exercise, I guess.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

I was at Sam's this afternoon buying the huge bag of dog treats needed to placate my savage beasts and all the little niceties of life I can only seem to find there when I stumbled across a digitally-remastered copy of the Charlie Brown Halloween special with the Great Pumpkin in it. It made me smile, and I threw it in the cart along with the enormous ream of colored paper and the little containers of ruby-red grapefruit I was also purchasing.

It's been years since I watched this one, but I remember it being a part of my annual Halloween rituals when I was a child. Like Linus himself (who I always identified with for some reason), I too waited on the Great Pumpkin, except of course, mine was on network TV. I don't know if it even still comes on, but I hope that it does. I like to think that kids today aren't growing up deprived of that sweet special and its message about hoping and dreaming even when your dreams don't make sense to anybody but yourself.

Today that message was especially poignant for reasons I won't go into here, so I was really glad to see that bright orange DVD box. I think I'm going to throw a Halloween party for my grown-up friends, something silly and informal, and we can all crash here in the living room and watch Linus wait for the impossible to somehow work itself out.

Throwing It Down and Walking Away

Things I enjoy have become a chore, so I'm throwing them down and walking away from them for a little while. Some of my writing, something I've been loving lately, has become a source of pressure instead of pleasure, and I can tell that in the quality of it, so I'm going to just take a break from it. I have been turning out huge chunks of stuff lately, and until the last week, it has felt good to do it. Last week, though, it started to feel like a chore, something I had to come home and do. I think I'd rather take a long vacation and come back to it with fresh eyes. Maybe it will become a joy again.

In the meanwhile, I went shopping at my favorite office store this afternoon, got Mexican takeout, and ordered a new book on my Kindle. I've been writing instead of reading lately. I am looking forward to consuming instead of producing. It will be a nice change.

The First Cool Day

I woke up this morning and it was only about 59 degrees. Tasty weather. I love autumn. It's my favorite season, and it's all too often one that we lose here in the Deep South. I love the cool mornings and evenings when I can open my windows and air out the house, listen to the crickets and frogs singing. It's wonderful. I feel energized, long to be outdoors, even willing to do yardwork.

I came home early this afternoon just so I could open up all the windows and enjoy the air. Even driving home, before I got on the interstate, I was riding with my car windows down, too. It was great. I hope we will actually have a long and wonderful fall before the wet cold of winter sets in. It would be nice for a change.

More Stuff I'm Using My iPod For

Two more apps that are making me very, very happy...

Maneki Neko Lite -- Yeah, somebody out there programmed an animated maneki neko. Love it. It gives you a fortune every day. It makes me laugh. Other than this, it is totally and utterly useless, but I now have a neko on my phone. Classic.

iBird Explorer South -- This is a field guide for bird watchers, and it is seven kinds of good. It has drawings, calls, and photos in it. I used it today while my parents and I were having lunch to settle a long-running argument we've had about whether or not a bird they've been seeing was a golden eagle, one of the ones recently released at a wildlife sanctuary nearby. Apparently it was. I also drove their dog insane with the crow call. It was a good day....

One more I'll mention, even though I only said two at the top -- I got iLava. I know that makes me even geekier than I was before, but *sigh* you know...

Banjo Sunday

I tried the banjo for the first time tonight. What a complex instrument. They always show it in the hands of backwoods idiots in stereotypical portrayals, but I am here to tell you that the instrument is not for the faint-of-heart.

I think I might love it.

I have always liked the way it sounds. There's something about the register of it that I find lovely in the right hands, Bela Fleck, Noam Pikelny, Gregory List, and those who truly love it, innovate with it. I don't know if I can teach myself to play it, or even learn it without a teacher. There are a bunch of bluegrass guys at my church, and I might get myself an inexpensive banjo, a starter banjo if you will, and go hang out with them.

It's been years since I played a stringed instrument, and they always feel so foreign in my hands. The banjo, I have to say, feels less so than any I've held. It almost feels...right. The guitar never has. I have always felt like I was fighting with it, trying to get it cradled on my body correctly, wishing that the calluses weren't necessary, and absolutely loathing the sound of them being tuned, that horrible bending of notes and pitches caused by turning the tuning keys. I love to hear guitar played, but I don't like being the one doing it. Maybe the banjo is my stringed instrument.

I feel a little funny taking up a whole new instrument here at thirty-three. I don't know why. The age thing shouldn't matter at all. I guess there is never any better time to start something new than right now, also. Maybe if I can figure out those darn finger rolls, I can at least learn to play with the guys at church and gain a new appreciation for Bela, Pickles, and the rest of those amazing artists I already enjoy.

Gun Philosophy

I believe everybody in the world should have guns. Citizens should have bazookas and rocket launchers too. I believe that all citizens should have their weapons of choice. However, I also believe that only I should have the ammunition. Because frankly, I wouldn't trust the rest of the goobers with anything more dangerous than string. ~Scott Adams

Ernst Stadler's "The Saying"

"The Saying"

In an old book
I stumbled across a saying.
It was like a stranger
punching me in the face,

it won’t stop
gnawing at me.
When I walk around at night,
looking for a beautiful girl,

when a lie or a description
of life or somebody’s fake
way of being with people
occurs instead of reality,

when I betray myself with
an easy explanation
as if what’s dark is clear,
as if life doesn’t have thousands

of locked, burning gates,
when I use words without really
having known their strict openness
and put my hands around things

that don’t excite me,
when a dream hides my face with soft hands
and the day avoids me,
cut off from the world,

cut off from who I am deeply,
I freeze where I am
and see hanging in the air in front of me
STOP BEING A GHOST!

–Ernst Stadler (paraphrase by Stephen Berg)
from The Steel Cricket: Versions 1958-1997 also found in Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch

This poem moves me. It reminds me that all too often we find ourselves just going through the motions instead of chasing the bliss, accepting the surface explanations instead of clawing our way to the true heart. Another more literal translation of the last line from the original German is "Man, become substantial" according to Hirsch. I think I like this even better. The idea of becoming substantial, becoming someone who is aware, someone who matters, someone able to stand for something.

I wish I had time and an opportunity to learn German (as, I suppose, I wish I had time to learn all the languages) so I could read this poem in its original. I have a feeling that every line is a powerful as this one, and I hate that I'm shut out of that by the linguistic barrier. Maybe I can find a way to do that on my own, with a book or something. That would be a great way to work on being substantial, I think, to start appreciating the world on a deeper level.

Ah Well, It Isn't Moonlight and Roses, But....

Staffordshire Hoard

I am teaching Beowulf again right now, and this news article was posted to an electronic teacher group of which I'm a part. A guy with a metal detector found a cache of Anglo-Saxon gold that is actually larger than the 1939 Sutton Hoo treasure. It's amazing. There's even a folded gold strip with writing on it, a Bible verse. That's the thing you see in the picture at the top of my blog tonight. The archaeologists, of course, are about to come completely unglued with it since it's one of the first major finds since Sutton Hoo for the Anglo-Saxons. I can't wait to see what it teaches them, how it will inform what we know about Beowulf and the culture that surrounds it. What a neat time to be alive! If you'd like to see more of it, then click here.