october photo-a-day challenge

Another month, another challenge! Here is the list for October:

And here are the photos from the month:

poof

I've always resisted the notion that things disappear. In metaphysical terms, this stubbornness manifests itself in my credulity about the existence of ghosts, angels, demons, and other paranormal residues of entities that linger just outside our ability to perceive them. Similarly, there is a part of me that responds to D's or my habitual loss of keys or important documents with the bald pragmatism of the law of conservation of matter: "Well, they can't have disappeared into the ether. They have to exist right now somewhere." In the end, I guess I just have a naïve faith in the intrinsic findability of things (though I would add that my life would be much easier if it came with a Command+F function).

For over a month, I've had an open Word document that I keep minimized on my computer's desktop. It's the beginning to a poem that I'm not sure yet how to finish. Here's what it says:

september photo-a-day challenge

Beginning my sixth month of the photo-a-day challenge! Here is the list of themes:

Click below to see the photos from the month of September!

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: