A skittery, erratic attempt at a weblog. Rambles will be indulged and depths will be plumbed. Who knows what I'll come up with?
|
|
| Fragments A skittery, erratic attempt at a weblog. Rambles will be indulged and depths will be plumbed. Who knows what I'll come up with? |
|
|
|
Sunday, April 25, 2004 Weather: Cold. Rainy. Gross. Listening to Bruce Cockburn, Lovers in a Dangerous Time Not doing:Cell bio questions...grr, I hate studying. Birthday "Ah, 21" Zdenka, a talkative Eastern European lady who joined our church about 5 years ago, smiled as she shook my hand in greeting. "You know, I think 21 was the best year of my life. I was in love...I remember it was unusually warm...and it was 1968, there was so much hope in Czechoslovakia that year, hope and optimism. We all thought communism was on its way out...it was Prague Spring and no one had any idea what was on its way. And of course I was 21 -- I thought I knew everything." Here's to 21. posted by susan | 10:55 PM Friday, April 23, 2004 Punked off Tiffany I want everyone who reads this to ask me 3 questions, no more no less. Ask me anything you want and i'll try to be as honest as I can be. Then I want you to go to your journal, copy and paste this message allowing your friends (including myself) to ask you anything. ANYONE can ask me stuff...just use your username or anonymous, whatever you want. Post in comments. iiiinteresting take on the survey thing...any takers? ~SQ posted by susan | 9:30 PM Wednesday, April 21, 2004 Weather: very sunny Listening to: the radio...I think it might be Finger 11 Not doing: cover letters Quizlet If any of my HTML geniuses can find a way to get this picture and description into the actual body of a blog post, I'd be grateful, but I don't know how to do it...so in the meantime, go to that link to find my results, if you can be bothered. It's actually a pretty entertaining, creative quiz -- reminiscent of the best of old E-mode quizzes. ~SQ posted by susan | 9:34 AM Monday, April 19, 2004 Weather: looks like another lovely day... Listening to: Placebo, "Running Up That Hill" Not doing: Anatomy studying Power trip Next time you feel like people don't listen to you, give this guy a chance to make you feel powerful. Pretty good with simple commands -- the only thing that I tried that stumped him was "vacuum". (And NO, I didn't try anything dirty.) The link to the Burger King website disturbs me just a wee bit, but oh well. ~SQ posted by susan | 8:53 AM Wednesday, April 14, 2004 Weather:pretty Listening to: Kate Bush, "This Women's Work" Not doing: anatomy studying...but oh well Another real poem... ...and then I promise I'll stop: A Supermarket in California What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! -- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? -Allen Ginsberg, 1956 posted by susan | 2:13 PM Tuesday, April 13, 2004 Weather: it rains. Listening to: the rain. Not doing: english studying (although I am). Real poetry Coast to Coast There are days when housework seems the only outlet old funnel I've poured cauldrons through old servitude In grief and fury bending to the accustomed tasks the vacuum cleaner plowing realms of dust the mirror scoured grey webs behind framed photographs brushed away the grey-seamed sky enormous in the west snow gathering in corners of the north Seeing through the prism you who gave it me You, bearing ceaselessly yourself the witness Rainbow dissolves the Hudson This chary, stinting skin of late winter ice forming and breaking up The unprotected seeing it through with their ordinary valor Rainbow composed of ordinary light February-flat grey-white of a cheap enamelled pan breaking into veridian, azure, violet You write: Three and a half weeks lost from writing.... I think of the word protection who it is we try to protect and why Seeing through the prism Your face, fog-hollwed burning cold of eucalyptus hung with butterflies lavender of rockbloom O and your anger uttered in silence word and stammer shattering the fog lances of sun piercing the grey Pacific unanswerable tide carving itself in clefts and fissures of the rock Beauty of your breasts your hands turning a stone a shell a week a prism in coastal light traveller and witness the passion of the speechless driving your speech protectless If you can read and understand this poem send something back: a burning strand of hair a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood a shell thickened from being battered year on year send something back. -Adrienne Rich, 1981 posted by susan | 2:05 PM Monday, April 12, 2004 Since I made it out of orgo alive, to my surprise... ...I decided to take Sparknotes.com's Death Test: I can expect to die on Friday, March 24th 2051 at the tender age of 67 years old. On that date, I will most likely die from: Cancer (13%) Alcoholism (6%) Alien Abduction (5%) Drowning (3%) It's nice to have that cleared up, I guess. ~SQ posted by susan | 7:57 PM Weather: Looks like a nice enough day on which to perish Listening to: Something resembling a funerial march Not doing: anything else. What's the point? Existential thoughts 1 hour 15 minutes before the Organic Chemistry final Chemical Burn: A mock poem You polymers, you fragments of allyls, you electron-withdrawing groups, you beta-ketoesters, you fall to the dust and the silence without so much as an echo to show for all your resonance forms in this minute of complete stillness where all molecular motion stops as I realize that there is nothing more I can do to make you make sense. What is your reason? You trade electrons as if it is going out of style. Double-bonds and cations are nothing to you. You laugh in their formation, or cry -- as the will seems to take you. You aldehydes, you ketones, you derivatives of acids both carbonyl and hydroxyl in form you mock me as I sit and ponder the encroaching event of death by chemistry. ~SQ posted by susan | 12:53 PM Thursday, April 08, 2004 Weather: I think it's nice. I wouldn't know. Listening to: edge 102.1 Not doing: damn you organic chemistry, just 4 more days.... If I fail orgo... ...I blame it on people who post distracting things. 1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, and find line 4. Write down what it says. There are 2 equidistant books: '...The functional group of both aldehydes and ketones is the C=O (carbonyl) group...' '...again. And it's all about me, me...' 2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first? My TV remote. 3: What is the last thing you watched on TV? The last minute of Jeopardy. 4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what time it is: 8:15 5: Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?: 8:23 6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?: Random rock song I've never heard before. 7: When did you last step outside? What were you doing? Oh god. Tuesday night, coming back from Mac. That is so depressing. 8: Before you came to this website, what did you look at? A new blog of an old friend. 9: What are you wearing? Dark red fleecy pants and a grey sweatshirt. Pure study-mode grunge. 10: Did you dream last night? Probably. 11: When did you last laugh? That's a really good question. Probably sometime before I made it my evening's mission to understand the use of acetals as protecting groups. 12: What is on the walls of the room you are in?: Really ugly wood panelling I've been lobbying to change since I could talk. 13: Seen anything weird lately?: Have you ever held a female pelvis in cross-section? Actually, that's not as weird as half the stuff in the anatomy lab...but theoretically I'm not supposed to talk about that on pain of expulsion and legal sanction, so let's just forget I mentioned it. 14: What do you think of this quiz?: Nice and iconoclastic. 15: What is the last film you saw?: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 16: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?: DVD sets of X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the DVD player to play them on. 17: Tell me something about you that I don't know: The first MP3 in my collection is "311 -- Amber" and the last is "Zwan -- Honestly". The first MP3 I ever downloaded was "Greenday -- When I Come Around" and the most recent was "Placebo -- Pure Morning". 18: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?: I think I like Ava's "Make people much less stupid" answer. Myself included. 19: Do you like to dance?: Yes. Most of the time. 20: George Bush: is he a power-crazy nutcase or some one who is finally doing something that has needed to be done for years?: Actually, I wish both sides would get the hell down off their soapboxes and actually try to figure out the truth about that, because God knows I certainly can't do it from the news/media/popular opinions floating around. 21a: Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?: Lily. 21b: Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?: Ian. 22: Would you ever consider living abroad?: Yes. Riveting, non? In other news, this is apparently the 10th anniversary of discovering Kurt Cobain dead in his home in Washington. It's funny, I had no idea that Nirvana was as recent as it was, or as big a deal to as big a generation. I've been listening off and on to The Edge today, and it really seems like his music and his passing affected many people on a very deep level. I'm really not a fan, but I respect that he changed a lot about the music scene -- now, here's my question: what artist, in our music scene today, would garner 'the big reaction' to his/her death? Who's our Cobain/Lennon/Elvis/Buddy Holly? Is there anyone that has a fan base like that? U2, maybe? Or is that kind of thing of a bygone era? I don't know...any thoughts? Oh, Johnny wishes he was famous spends his time alone in the basement with Lennon and Cobain and a guitar and a stereo... ~SQ posted by susan | 8:54 PM Sunday, April 04, 2004 Weather:surprisingly chilly Listening to:Tori Amos, "Merman" Not doing:blurbs for cell bio Corruption on a starry, starry night New Dundee is a little suburb of Kitchener set in the middle of fields, silos, and rolling hills. The houses here seem to have been dropped from above -- all quite new, all looking a little bit like movie sets or pressboard new-development real-estate offices. My second cousin (Craig), his wife (Diana), and their two (adorable) children recently moved into a house in this area, and invited us up for dinner tonight. My cousins are all older than I am, due to my extremely late budding from my family tree. Diana's mother is 46 -- at this point in my mother's life, I was two, the age of Diana's younger son. She married my cousin at the age of 19. Tonight I saw the picture of a young, happy, wholesome domestic existence -- solid marriage, seamless parenting, swing set in the backyard, dreams for the unfinished basement. Good jobs -- Craig is an electrical engineer and Diana does bookkeeping for her father's business. Good faith -- their church is almost directly across the street, and I know that both of them embrace Christianity on a daily basis and are bringing up their sons in the same tradition. Their family is rounded out by Diana's parents, two doors down; a whole other batch of cousins in Kitchener; Craig's parents who drive out from Missisauga regularly to visit. Here's what I remember about Craig and his sister, Heather: I remember being up at our cottage with them, playing music and dancing around the dining room table. I remember learning card games and string games from them. I remember being walked down to the park and back by them after church, feeling like the most special little girl in the whole wide world. I remember being his older son's age and wanting nothing in the world more than their attention. I remember the sting of being too little to be friends with them, too little to be friends with any of my cousins. I remember not understanding when they didn't come to church anymore -- because they had moved away, gone to university, grown up. Found new churches. And now here I am, already older than Diana was when Craig married her. Somehow it still comes as a shock to me that I'm not in sync with them. I was too little to be included before, but now I'm just too different. I had no real, vital model for that kind of purity and goodness, and so I'm not a good person. Not the way they are. The 'crowd' I run with are smart as hell, sarcastic and cynical, believe in nothing. I would survive for two seconds, now, in an environment as wholesome as that one. I have thoughts and ways of thinking and patterns of understanding that don't even have names there. I am family by name and by blood only. One girl's corruption may be another's education. But looking up at the pure, white New Dundee stars, I have to admit I wondered. I wish I even knew what I wanted to say. ~SQ posted by susan | 12:55 AM |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
