1. The title of this post is from this amazing podcast I've been listening to religiously of late. I always thought podcasts were for that undefinable group of fringe humorists that can only definitively be labeled as "weird." Not so. If you like philosophy and biography and physics and history and really great sound engineering, I highly recommend it.
2. The days are getting longer.
3. My grandparents took me out to lunch today. There is a silence peculiar to age which cannot be experienced with any other group. It's comfortable.
4. I discovered my mom has gotten out the scrapbooking guns again for another attempt at collaging our personal histories. I spent a good hour today looking through the old photographs that were laying out on the table. I wondered about the people in the pictures, the extended and immediate family members I see so often and have seen my entire life but it's funny that until they are frozen on the page, rendered unchangeable, I realize I hardly know them. I see things in their features I've never noticed before and I feel a bit betrayed. And I look at myself at one, three, four, twelve, sixteen, and I can't imagine these fragments spread out on a table all make up a four-dimensional Me. I found the funeral program for my great-grandfather, whom I don't even remember. Tucked inside was his obituary, three small paragraphs. I share his DNA, I thought. And yet, he's as strange to me as the spliced paragraph that remains from another article printed over the back of the page where his obituary sat. He had around 10 brothers and sisters. He grew up on a farm. I just kept saying, I never knew that about him. And I thought about the records of our lives. Three small paragraphs in a newspaper, a half-dozen photos lined up on your granddaughter's table nearly twenty years after your death. Are they our lives, in the end?
5. Speaking of, I just finished this book tonight, and it was interesting. I love how that's always what I have to say about a book when I finish it. It's interesting. Well, it is. Books that affect me but that I can't quite decide if I liked or not; well, I guess that's what that means. I still recommend it, though.
6. I'm at home this weekend. My parents are out of town. The washer is running, the fireplace is running. And I guess the refrigerator is too, if you get right down to it. It's nice. I forget how dark it gets here.
7. I got new glasses this week. The frames are large enough that I don't constantly keep running into them as they interrupt the margins of my vision, but they instead manifest their presence by creating little ghost bars and flares that appear at the very top of my sight so that I look up suddenly only to have them jump higher. It's magical but disorienting.
8. I want to see The Artist. Real bad.
9. I think almost every time I come home I do the same things. Procrastinate homework I know I need to do. Eat tortillas and black beans for at least one meal. Stay up late writing. And watch You've Got Mail. Every time.
10. And finally,
I am going to be published.
Just in BYU's literary journal Inscape. But still. Published before I'm twenty? Check that off my bucket list. Life is beautiful.
Stars -- Fun.
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