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Post by SpringSummers on Nov 13, 2010 8:47:32 GMT -5
morning. today I have decided to be more interesting. ... all I've done lately is read 18th century poetry and satire. the satire is mostly about shit. I wouldn't precisely call it interesting. The poetry is mostly about poets and poetry, at least once the Romantics get started. Sometimes it's about the countryside vs the city and/or pastoral vs arable but I just did an exam on that. On Thursday we studied Blake. He did all his poems as engravings and hand colored the art. There's a big debate about if the pictures have ironic symbolism or if he just wasn't very good at art. Or coloring in. We looked at a lot of different colorings in. No two of them are the same. This could be because it was boring coloring in the same stuff a lot of times or it could be a deliberate embodiment of how no two readings of a poem are the same. ... having seen the art and colors I think he just wasn't very good at art, but suspect you have to write the whole debate to get any points. He was vegetarian and a naturist. Teach told us his publisher once went round to see him and he and his wife were sitting in the garden reading Paradise Lost as Adam & Eve would have. They invited him to join them. Blake saw visions all his life. He saw trees full of angels. After his brother died he kept on dropping in for a chat. Yeah, I remember reading this about Blake. When I began living with an artist/poet who saw and heard things that were as real to him as this computer in front of me is to me (my son, who had schizophrenia), I sometimes thought of Blake, and thought, "I should read more about him." But I never did. I remember nothing about this poem except that we read it and discussed it in HS. Congrats, becca, on your determination. It takes some guts and bravery. Teenagers, much as they don't want to believe it, are still basically children, so I think your Mom's theory - that they are doing a childish thing - is a pretty good one. Glad the teacher appreciates you and gets that you are a plus for the class, and a hard worker. I'm glad she had the sense to group the hard workers together.
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Post by SpringSummers on Nov 13, 2010 8:55:50 GMT -5
Good Saturday morning, S'cubies.Going out with some friends to do a few things around town this morning, then settling in for a weekend of mostly house chores. It is a GORGEOUS day outside. I sent more of my paperwork into Children's Services. I made my appointment for the medical exam. I am working on my fire-evacuation plan and diagram. I bought a fire extinguisher, a collapsable ladder to be kept on the second floor for exit, and a new smoke alarm. So things are coming along. I get a panicky feel now and then. I mean, after you've almost drowned in the pool several times, it is hard to contemplate jumping back in. But it is starting to feel like it's worse to stand around the pool shivering. So, well, here goes nothin'.
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Post by Anne, Old S'cubie Cat on Nov 13, 2010 10:17:20 GMT -5
Spring: becca: Interesting, I didn't know that Blake hand-colored all his poems (or if I did, I'd forgotten). I have a copy of Songs sitting in my to-read pile right now. One of these days... Well, life just got even more, um, interesting. Paul's going to Maryland the week after Ritual Sacrifice With Pie. He's leaving on Monday 29 Nov and returning on 3 Dec. He's got some bright idea about driving from Maryland to Atlanta on (I think) Thursday to catch his plane there. 300 miles, by himself. Which is at least better than 300 miles with drunk obnoxious salesguy, but still, it's very nervous-making for me. So it's going to be a stressful next few weeks, what with pre-RSWP prep work (including massive cleaning and moving of furniture), the event itself, which will include my Ratbag sister (unless she decides She Just Can't Deal With It, in which case my mom will be devastated at her absence), post-event cleanup (and, please please please, Winter Sawdust on the Saturday). Then Paul's gone for five days (and I have to drive to CSUF to pick Emily up from her evening classes twice ), and the weekend after that we have to go up to Altadena and be supportive of my poor mom because the first anniversary of my dad's death is 8 Dec. It's supposed to be a birthday party for me, but I suspect it'll be more of a comfort-my-mom day. Also the APs' anniversary is right around Thanksgiving, so I'm already having to be comfort-support-person for my mom, and it's only going to get worse. Yes, I know, I should be thinking only of her, but I'm already stretched too thin as it is. What I really need is a vacation, or a day off, but I don't see that happening any time in the next century. In fact, we're due in Altadena later this morning, so I'd better get my butt moving. My mom has, as usual, a long list of important things she wants me to do which will take up the whole time we're there, after which she'll complain that I never just sit and talk to her. I guess I just can't do anything right. Always expected to be there for my parents, but never able to satisfy their needs. As opposed to Ratbag, who does nothing for anybody not herself unless forced, then makes herself so obnoxious they don't want her around, but they always complain that she isn't there, because she's perfect and wonderful. Me, I'm never good enough, no matter how hard I try. Story of my life. *cues up teeny violins*
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Post by Michelle on Nov 13, 2010 11:25:06 GMT -5
Peanut vibes on the way. Poor little doggie. Very ditto. [Diane -- hoping some day to be "lifeisreturningtonormalSue." ... Although, pretty sure "normal" is a myth. I think Buffy tried to tell us that. There will always be demons to slay whether health issues, job issues, relationship issues, family issues, house issues, education, kids, yada yada yada yada -- even if the "big bad" changes from season to season. Although I am grateful that my "demons" mostly fall into the MOTW variety and not the "Glory" or turok-han variety.] I just re-watched 'Intervention,' one my all time favorite eps. Loved Spike telling Glory that she was just the god of bad home perms. Maybe that is a lesson: mock the big bad, no matter how scary they can be.
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Post by Michelle on Nov 13, 2010 11:25:29 GMT -5
Peanut is acting like he feels a bit better, but his bloodwork is a lot worse. They took x-rays of his abdomen because doc is afraid there might be a tumor. His liver is really enlarged, but they can't tell if it's all the liver or if there's a tumor hidden somewhere in there. We're going to give him the weekend, and if his bloodwork doesn't start improving I'm taking him to a specialist to get an ultrasound of his abdomen next week. Please please please send as many good vibes as you can. I'm not ready to let him go yet. Vibing like crazy, chica.
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Post by Michelle on Nov 13, 2010 11:26:49 GMT -5
OMG, have you seen Babies? You can see a smidge of the beginning of one baby's tantrum at about the 1:40 mark in the trailer. It's hilarious! The whole movie was fascinating to me, and I don't know nuthin' about birthin' no babies. Oh, I wanted to see that one! I saw trailers for it and it looked very cool! So, you enjoyed it muchly, then, eh? I'm going to have to see if it's still playing around here. It was surprisingly entertaining! I streamed it from Netflix. If you have Netflix, you should check it out!
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Post by Michelle on Nov 13, 2010 11:27:41 GMT -5
Thursday night! Still a bit lost with no PR, but it does mean that I can watch Big Bang and Community live, so to speak, if I want. And I have followed the advice of TLo and am watching The Fashion Show on Bravo on Wednesday nights. Drama! Excess! An entire line (hell, two lines) produced each show! Iman!!! Can you ask for more than that? (Well, yes of course you can but you won't get it. ) I'm taking TLo's advice as well. Looks like a lot of fun! I have always girl-crushed on Iman.
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Post by Michelle on Nov 13, 2010 11:30:17 GMT -5
Good Saturday morning, S'cubies.Going out with some friends to do a few things around town this morning, then settling in for a weekend of mostly house chores. It is a GORGEOUS day outside. I sent more of my paperwork into Children's Services. I made my appointment for the medical exam. I am working on my fire-evacuation plan and diagram. I bought a fire extinguisher, a collapsable ladder to be kept on the second floor for exit, and a new smoke alarm. So things are coming along. I get a panicky feel now and then. I mean, after you've almost drowned in the pool several times, it is hard to contemplate jumping back in. But it is starting to feel like it's worse to stand around the pool shivering. So, well, here goes nothin'. I love that analogy. Tis better to have almost drowned, than to have never gotten wet. I flirted around with being a Big Sister, but then never went through with it. I think that in light of the fact that I ended up moving so far away, it was the best decision, but now that I'm getting settled in my new place, I need to think about dipping my toe in again.
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Post by Michelle on Nov 13, 2010 11:34:22 GMT -5
morning. today I have decided to be more interesting. ... all I've done lately is read 18th century poetry and satire. the satire is mostly about shit. I wouldn't precisely call it interesting. The poetry is mostly about poets and poetry, at least once the Romantics get started. Sometimes it's about the countryside vs the city and/or pastoral vs arable but I just did an exam on that. On Thursday we studied Blake. He did all his poems as engravings and hand colored the art. There's a big debate about if the pictures have ironic symbolism or if he just wasn't very good at art. Or coloring in. We looked at a lot of different colorings in. No two of them are the same. This could be because it was boring coloring in the same stuff a lot of times or it could be a deliberate embodiment of how no two readings of a poem are the same. ... having seen the art and colors I think he just wasn't very good at art, but suspect you have to write the whole debate to get any points. He was vegetarian and a naturist. Teach told us his publisher once went round to see him and he and his wife were sitting in the garden reading Paradise Lost as Adam & Eve would have. They invited him to join them. Blake saw visions all his life. He saw trees full of angels. After his brother died he kept on dropping in for a chat. ... Blake is Not Boring. Unfortunately his poems sort of are so far. I like the one about the tiger but most of the others not so much. We also studied Coleridge's Kubla Khan, the one that got interrupted by the person from Porlock. But our teacher reckons there was no such person because the poem is all about the impossibility of recreating paradise and reckons if it could recreate the beautiful song it dreamed that would be paradise, so the poem is about the impossibility of poems being as good on the page as they were in your head. So getting interrupted was a bit convenient to the theme. Also in class the teacher asked what is dialectic and noticed when I demonstrated in hand signals so then she made me translate into speaking out loud. (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. You can totally do that with hand gestures.) I've been determined about speaking out loud this year. I even did reading out poetry, even though the stutter tends to make rhythm impossible and gets quite irritating. I seem to have made a good impression though, Teach told off most of the class very big, but said she knows I do the reading and put in the work. For the next bit of working in groups she's set she put all the people who reliably do the work into one group. Is good, because I know they'll actually talk to me. Much of the first half of the semester was spent with her assigning people to work with me who simply ignored me, and therefor the teacher. Sometimes when I sit down someone gets up and moves away. I guess I no made such a good impression on fellow students. Mum says it's probably because they're all teenagers and I'm older though, which wouldn't be something I can do much about, and would be rather childish of them. That's my last two months, basically. It's not much about television or anything very interesting. I like your recaps! Learning is *always* interesting to me. I'm sorry some of the students are being poopheads.
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Post by beccaelizabeth on Nov 13, 2010 11:40:01 GMT -5
Spring: becca: Interesting, I didn't know that Blake hand-colored all his poems (or if I did, I'd forgotten). I have a copy of Songs sitting in my to-read pile right now. One of these days... The Lamb from Songs of Innocence and The Tyger from Songs of Experience www.blakearchive.org/ collects all the different versions and you can see them all side by side.
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Post by beccaelizabeth on Nov 13, 2010 11:42:06 GMT -5
Good Saturday morning, S'cubies.Going out with some friends to do a few things around town this morning, then settling in for a weekend of mostly house chores. #wavey# It is a GORGEOUS day outside. I sent more of my paperwork into Children's Services. I made my appointment for the medical exam. I am working on my fire-evacuation plan and diagram. I bought a fire extinguisher, a collapsable ladder to be kept on the second floor for exit, and a new smoke alarm. So things are coming along. I get a panicky feel now and then. I mean, after you've almost drowned in the pool several times, it is hard to contemplate jumping back in. But it is starting to feel like it's worse to stand around the pool shivering. So, well, here goes nothin'. #xfingers# #grouphug#
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Post by Julia, wrought iron-y on Nov 13, 2010 12:23:15 GMT -5
Today marks the 4 year anniversary that I have been smoke-free. Still can't believe I've done it. FOUR YEARS. holy shit! That means it's been more than four years for me!! Huh. May 10th. Damn. time just flies, doesn't it? This was my approximate reaction. Julia, also: when you're a child the days go by in a flash but the years last forever; when you're old, the days drag on forever but the years go by in a flash.
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Post by Julia, wrought iron-y on Nov 13, 2010 12:29:16 GMT -5
morning. today I have decided to be more interesting. ... all I've done lately is read 18th century poetry and satire. the satire is mostly about shit. I wouldn't precisely call it interesting. The poetry is mostly about poets and poetry, at least once the Romantics get started. Sometimes it's about the countryside vs the city and/or pastoral vs arable but I just did an exam on that. On Thursday we studied Blake. He did all his poems as engravings and hand colored the art. There's a big debate about if the pictures have ironic symbolism or if he just wasn't very good at art. Or coloring in. We looked at a lot of different colorings in. No two of them are the same. This could be because it was boring coloring in the same stuff a lot of times or it could be a deliberate embodiment of how no two readings of a poem are the same. ... having seen the art and colors I think he just wasn't very good at art, but suspect you have to write the whole debate to get any points. He was vegetarian and a naturist. Teach told us his publisher once went round to see him and he and his wife were sitting in the garden reading Paradise Lost as Adam & Eve would have. They invited him to join them. Blake saw visions all his life. He saw trees full of angels. After his brother died he kept on dropping in for a chat. ... Blake is Not Boring. Unfortunately his poems sort of are so far. I like the one about the tiger but most of the others not so much. We also studied Coleridge's Kubla Khan, the one that got interrupted by the person from Porlock. But our teacher reckons there was no such person because the poem is all about the impossibility of recreating paradise and reckons if it could recreate the beautiful song it dreamed that would be paradise, so the poem is about the impossibility of poems being as good on the page as they were in your head. So getting interrupted was a bit convenient to the theme. Also in class the teacher asked what is dialectic and noticed when I demonstrated in hand signals so then she made me translate into speaking out loud. (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. You can totally do that with hand gestures.) I've been determined about speaking out loud this year. I even did reading out poetry, even though the stutter tends to make rhythm impossible and gets quite irritating. I seem to have made a good impression though, Teach told off most of the class very big, but said she knows I do the reading and put in the work. For the next bit of working in groups she's set she put all the people who reliably do the work into one group. Is good, because I know they'll actually talk to me. Much of the first half of the semester was spent with her assigning people to work with me who simply ignored me, and therefor the teacher. Sometimes when I sit down someone gets up and moves away. I guess I no made such a good impression on fellow students. Mum says it's probably because they're all teenagers and I'm older though, which wouldn't be something I can do much about, and would be rather childish of them. That's my last two months, basically. It's not much about television or anything very interesting. I've never gotten into Blake; this may be because I knew too many live people who had vivid hallucinations. Coleridge, though... my sane grandmother, the one who was widowed in 1936 with eight children at home and a dairy farm to run, the one who was once state president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, used to recite Kubla Khan to me. I think Coleridge brought back the experience of opium dreams for the sober and heavy burdened to partake of. Julia, she also was heavily into Yeats, whose oevre is loaded with escapist fantasies. eta: distractable as per usual. Meant to mention that I often was driven to hand gestures and drawings in various seminar classes, once going so far as to make a three dimensional model to explain the workings of the transcendant function in Jungian theory.
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Post by Matthew on Nov 13, 2010 13:14:24 GMT -5
morning. today I have decided to be more interesting. ... all I've done lately is read 18th century poetry and satire. the satire is mostly about shit. I wouldn't precisely call it interesting. The poetry is mostly about poets and poetry, at least once the Romantics get started. Sometimes it's about the countryside vs the city and/or pastoral vs arable but I just did an exam on that. On Thursday we studied Blake. He did all his poems as engravings and hand colored the art. There's a big debate about if the pictures have ironic symbolism or if he just wasn't very good at art. Or coloring in. We looked at a lot of different colorings in. No two of them are the same. This could be because it was boring coloring in the same stuff a lot of times or it could be a deliberate embodiment of how no two readings of a poem are the same. ... having seen the art and colors I think he just wasn't very good at art, but suspect you have to write the whole debate to get any points. He was vegetarian and a naturist. Teach told us his publisher once went round to see him and he and his wife were sitting in the garden reading Paradise Lost as Adam & Eve would have. They invited him to join them. Blake saw visions all his life. He saw trees full of angels. After his brother died he kept on dropping in for a chat. ... Blake is Not Boring. Unfortunately his poems sort of are so far. I like the one about the tiger but most of the others not so much. We also studied Coleridge's Kubla Khan, the one that got interrupted by the person from Porlock. But our teacher reckons there was no such person because the poem is all about the impossibility of recreating paradise and reckons if it could recreate the beautiful song it dreamed that would be paradise, so the poem is about the impossibility of poems being as good on the page as they were in your head. So getting interrupted was a bit convenient to the theme. Also in class the teacher asked what is dialectic and noticed when I demonstrated in hand signals so then she made me translate into speaking out loud. (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. You can totally do that with hand gestures.) I've been determined about speaking out loud this year. I even did reading out poetry, even though the stutter tends to make rhythm impossible and gets quite irritating. I seem to have made a good impression though, Teach told off most of the class very big, but said she knows I do the reading and put in the work. For the next bit of working in groups she's set she put all the people who reliably do the work into one group. Is good, because I know they'll actually talk to me. Much of the first half of the semester was spent with her assigning people to work with me who simply ignored me, and therefor the teacher. Sometimes when I sit down someone gets up and moves away. I guess I no made such a good impression on fellow students. Mum says it's probably because they're all teenagers and I'm older though, which wouldn't be something I can do much about, and would be rather childish of them. That's my last two months, basically. It's not much about television or anything very interesting. Some of Blake's painting is breathtaking. There are at least four versions of The Great Red Dragon, and they all show him to be a moderately talented painter in the 18th century Romantic school. And reading the paired poems between his Songs of Innocence from when he was more idealistic, and his Songs of Experience from when he was five years older, more jaded but still idealistc man, may show more of what he was trying to do. The paired poem for "The Tyger" is "The Lamb." Then again, this is Blake, who was so awesomely batshit that it's not certain even he knew what he was trying to do. And you're right, reading about him is often more compelling than what he's writing. EDIT: I've read everything Blake has written, and it blew my mind: but he was a hell of a tough row to hoe at times. The linguistic shifts combined with the fact that he wrote in an avant-garde fashion for the time makes it doubly difficult. And Coleridge.. Kubla Khan makes me think of what it's like whenever I try to put one of my own more vivid dreams to words. Also, regarding your classmates? They're idiots. It's the nature of the young: most of them will grow out of it, but the hell with them for the time being, anyways.
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Post by Matthew on Nov 13, 2010 13:18:58 GMT -5
holy shit! That means it's been more than four years for me!! Huh. May 10th. Damn. time just flies, doesn't it? Congrats to you, too, Matthew. Thanks, Spring! Wasn't fishing, and didn't mean to hijack Mon's post or squee: I'm damned proud of her (Hey, Monnie? I'm damned proud of you) for having done it.
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