Kindness is magic.

Said to me about one of the top five people I love who I'm not related to:

She is so fucking awesome.  I feel if she had a care dog with her, they would be an unstoppable force of support for other people!

Would that I could live a life that could be so accurately described as such.

Call me sappy, but

this performance of "O Holy Night" by Mariah Carey is beautiful. I really like the lines

Long lay the earth in sin and error pining
Till he appear'd and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!

Now, the question is, and I'm talking to you, Amy and Kasey, is this song about Jesus or Obama?

I'm still a hardass, but

I'm with my Mom on this one. I think this music video for Boyzone's new single "Better" is just lovely, and I don't care who knows it.



I also think the song's catchy and likable. Let me reiterate, though, I am not sappy.

overheard

As I was walking across the quad towards home last night, enjoying the gorgeousness that was going on up in there, I overheard two women sitting on a bench underneath a tree by the Foreign Languages Building. They work for Facilities & Services, and seemed to be relishing a break from cleaning up after us rats. One said to the other, "When we were young, we used to climb trees..."

I've been exploring spoken-word poetry with my students this week, and I was struck by how much the scene sounded like poetry.

Sappy, I know. Shut the F up.

"Well, it's been building up inside of me for, oh, I don't know hooow long!"

Maybe it's because over break my mom (Third Mom shout-out this week? Oh yes.) made fun of me and Moe for the inane smiles on our faces as we sat on the couch one morning watching the end of Love Actually, but lately I've been hyper-aware of the faces I make when I'm watching TV. Like today I checked out the end of Never Been Kissed as I was eating dinner, and I caught myself with that same pathetic, shit-eating grin. I mean, I think that movie is dumb as hell, so what's the deal?

It's quite possible that I'm just a sucker for make-out scenes enhanced by The Beach Boys.

resonance

Isn't it weird when you're listening to a song and all of a sudden it feels as though the songwriter has read your mind or something and is voicing your thoughts/emotions exactly? Does that happen to you? My iTunes was on shuffle the other day, and when a certain song that I haven't heard in a while came on, I immediately wanted to say, "Yeah! That's exactly what I want to say!" or "Right on!" or something equivalently dorky.

Maybe it's just because it's a song about something that happens to lots of people and so there's a sort of generally-accepted way of feeling or reacting when that happens and this particular artist happened to articulate well that cliche reaction.

(I'm not comfortable revealing the song or the artist because I feel like it's too personal. It's as if you knowing what song it was would allow you to know exactly how I secretly feel. Isn't that weird?)

This is not an original experience I'm having, this recognizing myself in someone else's art. James Baldwin wrote, "It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or who had ever been alive."

Most commonly, at least most commonly noticed by me, this phenomenon gets manifested in people's away messages on AIM, or "Favorite "Quote" sections in Facebook. Things can get pretty emo in those two contexts. I'm not talking about people quoting universal-truthism kinds of things, but more like this-is-how-I-feel-right-now type things.

I'm listening to the song in question again right now, and I have to say, it's pretty intense. How interesting...

consciousness

I've had to spend a lot of time at the doctor's office in the past few days because I need to get an extensive physical done as part of my application to the Peace Corps.

I really love my doctor.

I've been finding it really interesting to think so directly about my body and the way it works. Since I typically spend my time thinking about what I do with my body (teaching, writing, reading, talking, hanging out), but usually take for granted that I have a body that has all kinds of automatic and voluntary processes going on, it's been really fun to raise my awareness of what's going on with me in the physical sense.

I do realize how ridiculous I'm sounding right now. But I also realize that I have a heart rate, an immune system, a blood pressure, and all kinds of other cool things like that.

nicknames

If anyone but my brothers called me "Nellie" or "sweetie" or "princess," I would not be okay with that. I'm just not the princess type, you know? Ew. But when they do it, I don't just tolerate it, I like it. Weird.

sappy

As I was walking down the street at dusk this evening, I could see into someone's kitchen where two people were hugging like they've never hugged before. Nothing sexual. No funny business. Just a good solid hug. It was lovely.

"re...stupid"

One of the things that my friends do that I appreciate most is correct themselves when they use the word retarded as a synonym for bad, uncool, shitty, whatever. I try not to be annoying about it, but it really grates on my nerves when people use it. So when I hear my friends correcting themselves when they're about to say it, it means a lot.

sap fest

One popular complaint among the interns about our survey is that it, or any survey, is a completely inadequate way of getting a snapshot of a person. How much can you really gather about a person based on their multiple-choice answers? By far the coolest part about administering the survey for me has been all of the interaction with the kids. Even then though, we only see most kids one time over the course of the summer, usually for an hour and a half, max. But sometimes, you just have a moment with one of them. It's probably stupid to attach a lot of sentimental value to one conversation, or one glance, or one joke with a kid. I'm not saying that any connecting moment should be used as some cheesy symbol for what it's like to work with these kids; because, really that's not much different from thinking that their completed surveys are accurate depictions of who they are.





"Do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend right now? Or are you talking to someone, or a couple of people, but you don't have a girlfriend or boyfriend right now?"

She filled in the bubble next to the latter before I could read the other options. I told her that she could mark "A. I don't have a boyfriend or girlfriend" for the rest of the page, flip it, and mark the same for the whole next page.

"I had a boyfriend yesterday..." She mumbles more as she's bubbling down the page.

"Oh yea?" I thought I heard something about getting rid of him. "Did you break up with him?

"Yes ma'am."

"Yea? Why?" She looked at me. I am thinking that I shouldn't have asked that.

"He was talking to other girls on the phone." No big deal.

"Ahh... And you didn't like that?" I say, smiling.

She smiles, "No." Still bubbling.

"How long were you two together?"

"Eleven months."

I say, "Woww" mindlessly, but she's already on the next page, pointing to the next question and asking me, "What do they mean here?"


So I finished the survey with her and went outside for Arianne to pick me up. I didn't have my phone with me, but I knew it wouldn't be long until she was back.

The girl sees me out on the curb, and comes out of the house. "You can wait inside until your ride gets here!" she offers.

I figure she's just being polite. Inside, she kept calling me "Ma'am" until I said, "Hey, I'm not that much older than you. You don't have to call me that." I tell her not to worry about it and that it won't be long at all. I start doodling on the manila envelope that her survey is in, but I feel like I'm being watched.

She's standing on the porch. "I'm just gonna wait until your friend gets here." She's protecting me.

"Oh don't worry about it. I'm great here... Do you want me to knock when she gets here?"

"Yea." She goes back inside.

A few cars go by on the street in front of me. From one of them, I hear a male voice, "Hey girl!" Instinctively, I look up. I'm sort of asking for it, sitting on the curb at 10:45 in the morning with a clipboard and a name tag and my fair skin and blonde hair. I probably look completely out of place.

The car stops and reverses. "What are you doing, girl?"

"Oh I'm just working," I say, thinking how I look like the last thing I'm doing right now is working.

"Survey?"

Relief. "Yea, survey." He smiles and drives off.

I turn around just in time to see her retreating back into the house, quickly so that I can't see that she's still watching out for me. She's thirteen years old.