7/4/2008 - Brave One

Brave One

Her wings fell limply at her side

her eyes gleam up with deep pleading

but nothing will stop the bleeding

Ivory tears she tries hard to hide

soon begin to turn crimson

and it has only just begun

She tried to fight against the tide

now she shivers in the cold

disbelieving she was bold

Crushing is the pain held inside

as she tries to shake free her chains

left to the mercy of the rains

Alone with no one to confide

a broken soul forsaken

because she was so mistaken.

7/4/2008 - Quote of the Week

It is because of men that women dislike one another--Jean de La Bruyere

Runners up:

Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo--Gerorger Bernard Shaw

A true friend is one who likes you despite your acomplishments--Arnold Bennett

7/3/2008 - Bit By Bit

Bit By Bit

7/2/2008 - International Liteature - Update

A while back I posted a list of books called My Personal Reading List, which was a collection of books gathered from the recomendations of others on Non-American/English liteature. So I thought I would post ratings and prehaps breif reviews about each of the books I have read from that list.

Anna Karnine ~ Tolstoy

Rating: * * * *

I found this to be a rather charming, though not nessciarly happy, and interesting book upon love and relationships, it is the story that looks at several different relationships, and how each individual previces there loves, and thier ideas about relationships, from the devoted faithful young couple struggling through marraige, to the adultress, and a devoted loving wife, with the womanizing husband. This book is very passionate and moving, but it also gives a rather realistic glimpse into life and love.

Madame Bovary ~ Flaubert

Rating: * * *

It starts out a bit slow and kind of dry, in the begining I did not find that the main characters really grabbed my attention. But the second part of the book it does begin to get intersting and the story picks up more. You are introduced to a new set of characters that I find to be all rather entertaining in someways even comical. It is a tragic love story of a young woman Emma who is discontent with her husband, a not very ambitious doctor who is content where he is, and spends most his time away working leaving his wife alone to day dream of a more exciting life.

The Metamorphosis ~ Kafka

Rating: * * * *

This is a bazzar story that is touched by both humur and sadness. It starts out in a rather comical fashion but as the story progresses it becomes more emotional, and yet still a thread of comody prevades throughout. The story is about a pool family who is being supported by thier son, Gregor. When one day Gregor wakes up to discover he had over night metamorphed into a giant insect. Not knowing what to do about him his family at first keeps him locked within his room and with his condition they begin to gradullay decline.

Books in Progress:

Death in Venice

7/1/2008 - Sun Child

Sun Child

She was raised in the sun

a sun with heavy lided eyes

that never did wink;

stretched across the sky languidly

Crowned in golden light,

she liked to dance among the flowers,

flowers of yellow that never slept

And above in the sky

the bright fire-orange eye

watched with a steady gaze

that grazed upon the skin

She never dreamed

for she never closed her eyes,

but she danced in fields of amber

in the light of day;

a day that is never vanquished

A child cradled in warmth and radiance,

her eyes seemed to shine

in illuminated innocence

born by the shield from darkness and shadows

Yet only a half-lived life

beneath the watch of a sun

that never smiled

without a purpose.

7/1/2008 - Sheep Need Not Apply

6/30/2008 - The Short Story

I was bored so I decided to put together a list of short stories I have read, and than becasue I have nothing better to do at the moment, I decided to post it up here.

Edgar Allan Poe

The Black Cat

A Tell-tale Heart

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Gold-Bug

Ligeia

A Decent into the Maelstrom

The Purloined Letter

MS. Found in a Bottle

William Wilson

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Cask Amontillado

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Masque of the Red Death

The Premature Burial

The Imp of the Perverse

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

Hop-Frog

The Angel of the Odd

The Devil in the Belfy

Loss of Breath

Chekhov Anton

Sleepy

The Black Monk

Gooseberries

The Man in the Case

About Love

The Student

Rothchild’s Fiddle

D.H. Lawrence

Sun

The Man Who Loved Islands

Two Bluebirds

The Shadow in the Rose Garden

The Blind Man

Witch A la Mode

The Old Adam

Stephen Crane

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

The Blue Hotel

Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

The Open Boat

The Monster

Henry James

The Altar of the Dead

The Beast of the Jungle

The Jolly Corner

An International Episode

Daisy Miller

The Turn of the Screw

The Aspern Papers

Herman Melville

Bartleby

The Piazza

The Encantadas

The Bell-Tower

Benito Cereno

The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids

Billy Budd

6/30/2008 - Earth Day Surprise

I'm the guest blogger. I know I might have told you this and I know school's out and that Earth Day was a while back but here it goes:

I asked the science teacher a question and went to my desk. (We were doing a project about Earth Day.) On the way , that boy my friend likes followed me back to my desk. Usually when people do that to me, they insult me. So I said " He's harassing me!" Later I realized he might not have been doing that... or was he? Well,I never figured out why he followed me. So I read a book. And he came back and said "Stop harassing me!" Okay first of all, I said "He's harassing me" not "Stop harassing me". Second, he was trying to get back at me and I just happened to be reading. But from the teacher point of view, he was bothering me while I was reading. So he got in trouble.

                                 I just love happy endings... but not with soy sauce, it tastes terrible with soy sauce.

6/30/2008 - Girl in the Mirror

6/30/2008 - Atheletes of Wannabe Model

I flipped on the TV to find that a tennis match was on instead of the show I usually watch. Now I do not watch tennis and I have no real interest in tennis, and yet tennis is evil. In that whenever I happen to find it on I always get sucked into watching it, even as I am sitting there thinking that I do not want to watch and have no real interest in what is going on, I cannot look away, at least for the first few minitues before I come back to my senses.

But anway, it was a womans tennis match, and one of the players was wearing earing on the court while she was playing, and they were these like fancy tear drop earings not just like a stud. But dangling earings. And it just lookesd stupid. What was she thinking, presumbly when she got up in the morning she knew ahead of time that she was going to have a tennis match today and so when she dressed it was with that in mind. So what in the world made her decide, you know, what I really need is to where these earings to spend the majority of my day running around back and forth upon the court.

6/27/2008 - More On Finances

So, here we are in the present. A few weeks  before the blowup, my father mentioned that my neice was going to college in Colorado. I was really surprised. I hadn't heard anything. Her brother is studying 'sports journalism' in a neighboring state school that is really recognized at being great for this field. I mentioned in an e-mail to my sister that I heard her daughter was going to Colorado. She didn't comment on that. As a side light, my sister has the most amazing e-mail. It mysteriously stops working when it's convenient for her, and --how did you know? It starts working equally mysteriously when she wants it. Sign me up! We tried to speculate what someone would go halfway across the country to an out-of-state school in Co., that they couldn't study here. Snow boarding instructor was all I could come up with. Finally, I asked my sister and to my utter astonishment she tells me that she hasn't decided yet---she's going to study liberal arts. Enough said. We hope she stays away from Gary Barnett and his womanizing football players.

6/27/2008 - Love

Love

Love:

a soft cascading caress

feathery touches

with sweet rising tenderness

Love:

seen deeply within a lovers eyes

felt suddenly through my body

my heart stuttering

with stolen breath

Love:

glistening upon the sea

dancing twilight of the stars reflection

whispers carried in the breeze

all felt like a dream

Love:

an unveiled mystery

like the mist dissipating

just before the fingers touch

yet cool tender kisses

tantalize the skin

Love:

awakened from deep within

undeniable feeling

that captivates even as it frees

the comfort in the darkness

is love.

6/27/2008 - Verse 30

Santo leaned back against the velvet red cushions of the couch. It was framed in fine dark wood carved with lion’s feet and was very straight backed. The noise of the hotel lobby seemed to blend together around him. The hotel was very posh. Not of his own choosing, but it is where she instructed to meet him. Perhaps out of old habit, but he would have preferred something a bit more subtle. Peter stood rapt before him. Not swaying a word keeping his dark eyes fixed forward, in the proper stance of inattention, as if though standing right there he was oblivious to all being said. Yet still ready to leap at first command and obey in an instant. Why had he brought the boy? Santo wondered to himself, here of all places, for such an ungodly task. He could not say, yet something had compelled him. Some old sentimentality? Now he was dressed in a fine well made and hand cut suit of gray, the white collar still adorning his neck. Quite the spectacle they must have made, and yet, perhaps thankfully so, none seemed to pay them the slightest heed. “What you are proposing is unthinkable.” He said in a slow drawn voice. His pale eyes upon the figure of the woman before him. “To break the house? After so many years? I am out of it now, trying to find some comfort in my dwindling years. I am too old to be dragged back into this sort again. Why have you contacted me? You know there is nothing to be done. It is the way it has always been, and not without reason mind you. You know that as well as I do.”

            “If you believed half of what you said you would not be here” She said crisply. They were the perfect opposites of each other. While his body was languid against the couch, his face betrayed much strain and anxiety, but she said, alert, erect, attentive, but her face was as serene as ever. How she had managed it he will never know, but she had kept her looks almost as pristine as the day they met. Her gloved hands rested just upon the top of her knee as one leg was crossed gracefully over the other. The black dress she wore fell smoothly over her body, betraying not a wrinkle inspire of her posture. Her face earnestly upturned to his though particularly obscured by the hat she wore. Which looked like something of a throwback, to a lost and dead age of glamour, and yet she pulled it off beautifully.

            “Why now of all times? After all these years, what has made you suddenly come forward? What has changed?” Santo could not take his eyes from her. Even knowing of the life he once had before, he felt a rising shame that he could not completely release. What would people think? A man of the cloth sitting here, starting at a woman like that? Inwardly he chuckled to himself, was he really growing so soft?

            “Lives are going to be broken” He could detect the almost desperation in her voice, something that was so far removed from her usual hauteur it made him stir in his seat. “Have you forgotten what we once shared? What was stolen from us” Her voice began to rise like a tide with anger, that it had drawn a few glances of the stranger passing by, of course they could not begin to imagine what was discussed but still. Why had she persisted they meet in public? He let out a drawn sigh speaking in a firm gradual tone. “That was a long time ago, and you know, doing this is not going to change our past or our future. What are you not telling me?” Yes he was sure there was something else, she was always a romantic, but he had never known her to be given to such wild heroic whims as this, not on so selfless a motive as she proclaimed.

            She sat speechless a moment yet she knew it would come to this. Slowly she came to lift her purse into her lap as she snapped it open and reached inside; carefully her fingers drew the photograph out before she tossed it lightly upon the table between them. She said nothing at first as she watched him. Santo leaned forward as he took the picture up and looked down to it a moment. His gaze turned back up to her. There was something, something familiar about that photo. Yet he was sure he had never seen the girl within it. Soon his unvoiced questions would be answered. “She is our daughter. And the whelp of the man who broke my heart, who destroyed our lives and tore us apart is going to claim her as his own.”

            Santo was stunned. The picture forgotten was still balanced between his fingertips yet he no longer saw it, he saw nothing. This must be some joke, some dream, he thought. At any moment he would wake up, and yet he could not deny the realty the moved around him. Her words continued, it was a struggle for him to try and grasp just what she was saying.

            “I am sorry I never told you, but I was afraid, afraid of what might happen to her, what they might do to her. I had to protect her, it would have been too risky if you knew. And if you had known, you would have talked me into doing something impossible. I took great pains to conceal the pregnancy and the child after she was born. But it seems now that has backfired. HE is going to take her if we do not do something.” Her eyes burned into his soul as the realization began to hit him. Thundered through his body and jolted him back into consciousness and yet, still nothing was truly answered. The task she proposed as all but impossible and yet…his eyes were drawn back to the photo. His daughter, his flesh and blood, being sacrificed by the offspring of the man who ruined his own life?

            “What can we do?” He said with some resignation. Perhaps he had learned too well from the past, but no more could he be the same man who he once was that would leap into a pit of vipers trusting only some blind emotion.

6/27/2008 - Quote of the Week

6/26/2008 - A Tale of Two Sisters

In which I discuss finances and how things got to be the way they are. I can't explain why, but I can tell how, so I will.
I don't remember the details of the brief exchange that preceded the comment, but I caught my son's eye and said, "You know, Aunt Pacific Princess* got much better grades than I did. I do, however, remember the way he stopped in his tracks and did a double take. I honestly didn't expect that strong of a reaction. I must have been telling him that doing well in school doesn't necessarily seal your fate. I would think it would. Today I told my kids that great grades are wonderful, but you have to have some ambition beyond high school. My sister had it all, all throughout school. She had better looks than I did. She was very popular and her teachers loved her. She actually opened many doors for me just by having the last name as mine. Although I finally figured out how to get great grades by the end of high school, I wasn't in the National Honor Society. Come to think of it, I'm not really sure how much math/science my sister took beyond the requirements, but still, she always did great.

I've been waiting for her to throw this back at me. I got to go to nursing school, but she did not get to go to college. Nursing school is very practical;one can always find a job and everybody knows that. My sister wanted to study acting and my parents said, "no way". She was going to go to a secretarial school, but she took a test at my mother's old employer, the old Amoco Oil. She was one of the very few who passed the test right out of high school, so she skipped secretarial school (Robert Morris). You know that back then, secretaries could advance to some pretty good  positions and that she did. She was unhappy there, although she did have some really good friends. Boy oh boy could she sneak out of there like nobody's business. She waited until she was vested at ten years and then quit. It's probably a good thing because everybody knows that oil companies in the u.s. are practically bankrupt. HaHa.

During her time working in downtown Chicago, she was very generous to me. She would often bring me a box of Godiva chocolate. The thing is, that Godiva chocolates are incredibly, incredibly expensive. Sometimes if I would no do or feel the way she wanted me to, she would hold it over my head that she gave me things. Later on, when she had kids, she got a job as a teaching assistant at their school. Then because she hung around a gym and is fitness obsessed, someone told her that she should study to become a personal trainer. She is still doing that. Awhile ago, my mother, who was coherent at the time, told me that she had quit because she got into a fight with her boss. Don't know if this is the same place or not. When she got married, the trips continued. Her husband is a type of cameraman who worked for a small firm before the owner pulled the plug. Now I think he works freelance. She was always going with him to a shoot somewhere. When she was pregnant, she asked to borrow some of my clothes for a trip to Florida because she was gaining so much weight. I was 5'2", 107 lbs for goodness sakes. Her kids were on planes  before they could walk. I went to California when I was inbetween jobs in 1988. My company sent me to San Antonio and Denver, and St. Louis. We honeymooned in Arizona. The next year we went to Disney World because Joe had a convention there. We went to Galena, IL (same state) and stayed in a cabin for a week two years in a row. I've gone to a neighboring state with my son to attend a bell-ringing ceremony for the last two years. That is it for my whole adult life.  She also traveled to Boston more than once to run the marathon, and Las Vegas because it's an easy qualifier for Boston.

Speaking of Boston, her daughter developed a heart arrhythmia several years ago. She says she owes in the double digits of medical bills. All those cruises? If she is so tight with her church, why didn't they have a benefit dinner? Also, Children's Memorial, the University of Chicago, etc. were not good enough for her. She had to take her to Boston. Even now, she said they had to go back for a re-check. For conduction disturbances, can't she at least follow-up with someone here or transport a tracing electronically? They have remote checks for rural people all the time. Also, even when the girl was allegedly (remember my sister exaggerates) so critical, it seemed like she was still playing softball, etc. Why would you take a chance of  her getting hit? Also, to give you a better view of my sister's personality, she insists on calling doctors by their first names. I, on the other hand, have trouble calling doctors by their first name even if they are friends/colleagues. Sure, there are plenty of quacks, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for most of them.

*I'll call her Pacific Princess because she simply  had to go on that thing all the time because she liked watching The Love Boat, don't you know.

6/26/2008 - The Old Ones

The Old Ones

We have lived for over a million years
we know what has begun
we have witnessed the downfall
felt a quiver of rains tears
but now we feel the end is near.

So alas we may finally rest
too long we have lingered
decaying bit by bit
sorrow the burden we carry
for much that has been lost.

We will just fade away into the night
a night that will last for eternity
in the dark we can close our eyes
and never think again of what we compromised.

Once when we had the strength
we stood by and watched motionless
never believing it could come to this
arrogant in our own immortality.

But the earth is no longer ours
and now powerless we watch it taken
at last they will destroy themselves
and release us from our bonds
to the soul that once was ours.

Soon we will embrace sweet oblivion
that will come at the end of our existence
maybe there we can forget
the pain and regret for what we have allowed.

Now we just want to disappear
cling to some remaining visions
of what once the world was
before the last remnants evaporate

and we have only nightmares
with no dreams for our slumber.

6/26/2008 - Strengthen Your Relationship

6/26/2008 - Peony of Luck and Happiness

6/25/2008 - Camhead

6/25/2008 - A new toy I acutally want