So, Joel’s been wrecking down the dam by the bridge this week. Mom is convinced the muskrats built it, but they’ve lived on the lake for years now, and the dam is a thing of the last few years. Beavers or muskrats, though, the rodents responsible for the dam are very determined beasts indeed, and every time we’ve opened the channel again, they’ve stopped it with a little extra wood and muck. Some family friends told us that putting holey pipes through the channel confuses the rodents, thus another attempt by Joel to—as Kathy would say—outsmart the rodents.

All of this to introduce the background to Joel coming into our room and telling me that he sat on the bridge for a few minutes after work and watched the water run past his feet. He said it was all muddy for a while, and he was waiting for it to clear so he could watch the individual bits of leave and stick drift by, when he went from watching under the water to watching the reflection of the sky, the trees, the thousands of leaves, the willow trunk reaching horizontally across the water. He said—jokingly, I think—that he would’ve drawn a spiritual application, except that it would be too reminiscent of mom’s reflection post. He said he wanted to remember it and maybe post about it, but he thought he’d probably forget.

I didn’t.

Dream Journal

During last semester, I started scribbling down my dreams in a notepad I kept on my bed head. I got out of the habit with the start of summer, but I’m thinking about getting back to it.

It seemed like a good way of keeping track of my issues. The night I spent dueling Lord Voldemort with Dan and Steve points to either ego or identity problems, I’m not sure. My prejudice against skateboarders ended up with one getting run over by a Disney bus…although the skateboarder wasn’t fazed, apparently. Too many video games and action movies led to a dream where my family and I were running cross country with a boy and girl we were trying to keep away from a terrorist group; and, yes, calling the police was not an option.

Anyway, last night, after a short dream where I was training in Germany with sister, her bf, and some annotations on Jane Austen’s literary genius, I found myself in Grand Rapids, watching my best friend’s brother fold his laundry. Said best friend’s brother had recently got back from military duty in Kuwait, and he had ousted and moved into his little sister’s room (never mind that Eliza doesn’t have her own room…and the walls aren’t neon pink). Well, he left the neon pink paint, left the doll table, and left the white carpet which somehow left pink sunspots on my vision whenever I looked at it.  Hanging on the neon pink walls, though, were two statues of scorpions, one of which was accompanied/morphing into Buddha. He said he liked my sense of vision.

Not even sure what that means.

I have to wonder about myself when out of the 1,090 songs on my iTunes, I choose to listen to Traditions of Christmas by Mannheim Steamroller on July 7th.

Colorado 2008

Besides the usual comments about having a great trip and seeing lots of pretty landscapes and eating lots of good food and meeting lots of cool relatives and being really, really happy to be home, I thought I actually had two vaguely interesting asides. I seem to be only able to remember one of them, so here we go.

I have often wondered about this perception I have that adults can enjoy looking at something beautiful for a long period of time. Take the Rocky Mountains. While driving up and down the twisting roads of the national park (and hoping that dad didn’t, you know, drive off a cliff), I certainly enjoyed the view of the mountains, the lakes, the elk, but it didn’t take too long before I got…something. Bored is close to the word I want, but not quite right. It’s more like bored mixed with guilt about being bored mixed with a confusion about what I’m supposed to do once I’ve seen the beauty.

Leaning back in the minivan toward Michael and Grace, I asked them if they got the same sort of feeling from beauty: a sort of empty “that’s great. But now what?”

To the widening of my ideas about beauty, Grace suggested that perhaps beauty was not mainly about active response but a passive receiving. Beauty certainly makes more sense that way, but I was still left wondering, “OK, now I’ve received. But, then what? I just drop it?”

The most satisfying answer knocked around was that after the receiving, we make art. And that seems kind of dead on. I wanted to start writing stories with mountains; Grace wanted her paints.

Yeah. So, now I’ve written down my thought and it sounds pretty obvious. Really, though, it did seem insightful at the time.

My other thought still hasn’t returned to me, although perhaps I can substitute another–just the odd fact that my oldest cousins are around the ages of my academic adviser and some of my favorite teachers at CU. Don’t really know if it means something, it’s just odd.

Nice to be home.

So, Now What?

Well, I see by the comment that practically no one read—let alone enjoyed—my post. Perhaps I will have to take a less neurotic tack. But which tack to take?

Despite Kathryn’s good hopes for my blog [see comment on last post], I have found an overlooked blogging technique at my disposal: Whining about my summer.

It’s not that I mean to feel like I’m getting nothing done this summer. Of course, It didn’t help that I went on vacation and then had siblings home for a week. In my defense, though, I’ve read a bunch of books and, you know, am now working on this music video for the family vacation.

Yeah. So this music video. This is my second week at it, and spirits are getting low. But, the thing that really gets me is that Fig spent all day writing. Happily.

This quasi-formed plot came to him in a rush over the past two days, and between last night and today he’s twenty-five plus pages into the thick of it. I’ve written the same amount—since May 1, that is.

Last summer, I had a draft of a book done by mid-June, and here I am with one short story first-drafted and one in the editing phase. When I showed my serious short story to my sister, she said some nice things about it, but, yeah, my finely tuned mental capacities detected the implicit message of, “Your character interaction and believability = the worst.”

I foresee the music video getting the short shrift.

[Insert Something Profound]

So, my sister finally made a WordPress for me. I’ve been resisting for some time, hiding behind the excuse that I didn’t want to read the terms of service. Really, it’s because of pressure. Suddenly, I have a blog, and I feel that I should now write profound, blogish things.

The concept of a blog neither fits my personality or comfort, which I suppose is the point. I don’t usually like talking to people about myself or my doings; the exceptions are people I’m very close to, or complete strangers whom I know I’ll never meet again, so who cares (I guess?). This blog, though, will connect me to people who know me enough to want to read this but are not close enough to talk in person, on the phone, etc.

As the above two paragraphs have shown, I enjoy analysis and self-study. It is a way of distancing from myself, and therefore distancing you (my reader) from me as well. If you don’t enjoy the disconnected or the analytical, either you should move on or hope that I learn to be comfortable on WordPress.

By the comments, I will be able to tell who enjoys reading this sort of drivel.