the anger muscle

I've said this before: in high school, when I was upset, I would smoke, curse, and play the piano. I wrote that in my journal when I was seventeen. Imagine my stunned recognition years later, when I read about Lucy Honeychurch, the apparently prim heroine of A Room with a View, who also deals with her choleric tendencies by losing herself at the piano.

Over the course of the story, Lucy transforms from a docile, conventional girl into a woman capable of various kinds of passion. Her anger plays an important role in this shift. During one conversation with her mother and her priggish fiancé Cecil, she moves rapidly from voicing a casual dislike of Reverend Eager to declaring: "I hate him. I've heard him lecture on Giotto. I hate him. Nothing can hide a petty nature. I HATE him." Mrs. Honeychurch responds, "My goodness gracious me, child! You'll blow my head off! Whatever is there to shout over?" For his part, dismayed by the vulgarity of Lucy's outburst, Cecil yearns to tell her "that a woman's power and charm reside in mystery, not in muscular rant." (We understand implicitly that this comment points to his unsuitability as a match for her.) Later, Cecil is taken aback when she directs her ire at him. As a joke on the local snob, he deliberately engages unsuitable tenants for a neighborhood villa in Lucy's hometown of Summer Street.  She responds like "a peevish virago," snapping at him that his little dig at Sir Harry has made her look foolish instead, and that she considers him "most disloyal." Never mind that the tenants he has found include the same young man who impetuously kissed her on a violet-strewn hillside in Fiesole during her trip to Italy. 

Happily for us readers, she doesn't attempt to curb her turbulent impulses for very long.

august photo-a-day challenge

A new month, a new set of challenges! Here is the photo-a-day list for August:

And here are my entries for the month:

that joke isn't funny anymore

Lately I've had occasion to think about what I used to sing when I didn't know from sad. When I was fifteen, one of my best friends, a girl who lived across the street, playfully tackled my boyfriend in someone's yard after a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting, and then she kissed him. The boyfriend I had already decided I didn't like anymore. Her act should have been a mercy, a convenient ending to a relationship I likely wouldn't have had the gumption to cut off myself, but instead of making up with her and thanking my lucky stars for an easy way out, I suddenly decided that I did after all want to keep him as my boyfriend. I don't think it's any coincidence that my change of heart allowed me to draw myself up to my full sanctimonious height and, wrapping myself in a shroud of wounded trust, inflate her act of treachery until it was so huge that we almost never recovered. So this is what betrayal feels like, I kept telling myself, my chin held at a proud yet mournful angle. She felt guilty for the rest of high school. In my yearbook, she wrote, "Thank you for forgiving me for something I haven't forgiven myself for yet."

july photo-a-day challenge

Here is the photo-a-day challenge for July.

What follows are my photos from this past month. For most of that time, I was staying in Knoxville at my Nana's house with her sweetheart Al and my mom, waiting with Nana as she was dying. I will have more to say about that in the next post. In the meantime, here are the pics:

june photo-a-day challenge

Yay! More photo-a-day assignments!

And here are the pics:

absolutely cuckoo

Okay, I've got some chicken lettuce wraps for you today that are crazy delicious.

But first, here is one of my favorite songs by Magnetic Fields (or here's another version, which I can't embed, but which comes with an adorable animated video someone made):

maïs, je t'aime

Which translates: "Corn, I love you." When I typed it, though, I realized that if you omitted the umlaut over the "i" in the initial word (hence altering its pronunciation slightly), you would have this sentence instead: "But, I love you." Ah, the knotty and fascinating problems of translation.

I've always studied French as my foreign language. This, I think, is a perfect example of the wide impractical streak that, à la Pepé Le Pew, runs the entire length of an otherwise fairly down-to-earth person. (Maybe it's my Pisces moon?) If I had really set out to navigate the actual linguistic terrain of the modern United States, I should have studied Chinese, and certainly way more Spanish than the bare-minimum, single semester of "Reading for Spanish Knowledge" required by my doctoral program. (We had to have "familiarity" with two foreign languages—i.e. just enough to be able to grasp the gist of an academic article or, more likely, just enough to get us into trouble abroad.)