Get Me Outta Here

This teeny bit of earth is definitely not big enough for the both of us. (My yearnings and me)

Veradale, WA

47°39′1″N 117°12′32″W / 47.65028°N 117.20889°W

Spokane County, State of Washington

Population: 9,387

Please.

I Just Realized How Cool I Am

Milly and I had a bit of an epiphery while driving:

" (sigh) We don't have jobs and we live with our parents."
" (sigh) And we're eating mashed potatoes at 9:30 on a Tuesday."

That's how cool I am.

Happy Belated Shalom!

Monday was the magical day when this dream

became a reality.

My mother had the letter over the phone and a stoic disposition. I was waiting to sell my internal fluids for fifteen meesly dollars. I was worried about both.

"Give me a hint? A baby hint? A wee willie winky hint?"

To which she replied,

"Shalom, babay!!!!
photo here

And so it is. The Hogwarts Express departs September first as scheduled headed for the BYU Jerusalem Center where 3 of my favorite ladies (Gracie, AmandaYockey, and Kali) and I will spend a semester of spiritual, visual, cultural, educational, and historical feasting.

love, anticipation, and plasma,

Anna

"If it's about those missing pic-a-nic baskets, I had nothing to do with it!"

-Yogi Bear

Sometimes I get phrases from my early childhood stuck in my head. It's been this one as of late.

Hm...I miss Yogi.

Okay, okay. I'm going to Jellystone park now. That's just the way it's got to be.

And have a few pic-a-nics along the way too, of course.

Love, last days in Indy, and no job yet,

Anna

Three Orders of Business

1. Happy Cinco de Mayo! Let's all catch swine flu to celebrate.
2. I'm strongly considering journalism again.

Back to Provo? OH dear...'round and 'round we go. As my wise sister quoted the Good Book, "Be ye therefore decisive."

3. "All things seem possible in May"
-Edwin Way Teale

Lady in Spain

I just applied for a passport.

Just because I'm feeling adventurous.

...almost through with the Midwest I think.

I am the lady in Spain
I'll sing a haunting refrain
I am the lady from Mars
And I can unscrew the stars
I can be
Anything I see
I can be
Anything that I, anything that I seeAnd I am in love with a boy
Manufacture to destroy
I shall unravel my love
Like an old red woolen glove
I can do anything I want to
I can do anything I want anything my heart tells me to do
Tells me to do
Tells me to do
I can do
Anything I want to
I can be
Anything that I see
I can do anything I want to
I can be anything that I see
Anything that I see
-Ingrid Michaelson

Here's to sunny Sundays and reviving old pictures I once thought myself quite artistic over:

cheers!

Banana

yesss

All you need is love.
And bicycles.
All you need is love and bicycles.

thanks for the photo

Ode to margin writers (and, of course, to Billy)

I love reading. I am a shameless book worm and I perfectly embodied the wikipedia definition of gawky nerd until I grew into my nobs a little. then again, I still do a little.
Well, I have a habit of reading with a pen in hand (and usually also a pencil behind the ear, perhaps an additional pen to sit on, given up for long lost).
I am a margin writer!! And proud of it.

this little smidge of beauty by my rhetorical lover, Billy Collins, honors me in this sense.
The last line is also the namesake of this little bloggie poo.
Thought I'd share.

Thanks, Bill. You're a real pal. You're a babe.

[thanks for the photo]

Marginalia - Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."