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Saturday, April 30, 2011

April showers kill all the flowers & etc...


It's only the beginning of May and I'm so ready for school to be over! I can't bring myself to do homework and I find staying in bed or lounging around in the living room so much more appealing than sitting in class. It's (occasionally) too nice out to spend all my time trying not to fall asleep during lecture!

Last weekend my favorite Olympians, K. & A., came up to visit from Olympia (duh...) to see The Tallest Man on Earth play at Western and to have a little fun with their BFFs L. and I. It was great to see them as they always bring the fun and also a lot of tasty wine. Unfortunately, L. had to work all day on Saturday so it was only the 3 of us traipsing around Bellingham...but we had a great time anyway.

We spent some of Saturday at the Bellingham farmer's market, which started up a few weeks ago, and is a great one to visit if you ever get the chance! Though it's still mostly just a lot of root vegetables at this point (alas, no carrots yet) it's still fun to go and see all the awesome stuff the other non-vegetable vendors have. We also had breakfast at The Mount Bakery, which probably delivers the best breakfasts in Bellingham, and headed down to Marine Point to hang out with the seagulls for a while because it was unbelievably nice weather outside.

After another great meal with L. and her boyfriend, we parted ways and they all headed off to see Tallest Man and I went home. Western was supposed to host two concerts Easter weekend, Tallest Man AND Gogol Bordello (on Friday), but Gogol got cancelled due to a death in one of their families. Of course, I had only bought a ticket to go to Gogol and not to Tallest Man, so that sort of sucked...but....I guess it saved me some money and they'll eventually tour the West Coast again.

More recently, J. and I have been apartment hunting like crazy! We've seen so many houses and apartments in the last weeks I thought I was going to give up. But finally we decided on a nice house with two other girls in the York District, just about a ten minute walk from downtown and a 20 minute walk to campus (or we can catch the bus, of course!). It's a great old house, painted really nice colors, with 4 bedrooms and one tiny bathroom! We will see how that goes, haha, but I'm very excited. The house is just about a three minute walk from a nice little neighborhood market and cafe as well, and has a lot more charm than the boring apartments we were starting to feel resigned to. So that's all great news.

These weeks are also stressful due to midterms, which may or may not give me an aneurism, but I guess that's just the way life goes. T. will be out from Pullman next week to visit (he's already done with school for the year, SO unfair) and we are hoping to make it up to Vancouver to hang out on Granville Island and eat some delicious sticky bread from the bakeries there.

Annnnd....I guess I'll finish up this post with my newest poem, a "ballad" that I wrote for class.

Somebody Wants to Love You, Grace Slick

On evenings clouded gray with rain
he plays old Airplane hits.
The wood guitar that's slung so low,
and vowels from parted lips.

With slatted light the cars go by,
their rumbling sprays and spits;
pale fingers trace the window frame,
he contemplates her lips.

She croons to him through speakers now,
his head bowed low in bliss,
he listens close, raw syllables,
that linger long on lips.

He wonders what the sounds she keeps
enveloped in her kiss,
would taste like mixed with steel guitar
and pressed into his lips.
And then the sun is coming up,
the kettle starts to hiss.
Another night with Grace gone by,
a smile twists his lips.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Mom, why isn't my sanseveria growing tall like yours?

Such a beautiful day in Bellingham! I drove back this morning from an overcast and rainy Duvall, and though Bham was a little bit windy and cold, it was sunny and lovely. All my cactuses are growing and looking nice in the sun! Yay!





Calvin is enjoying the sun, too. He's been relocated to the plant table downstairs after the boys complained it was too hard to remember to feed him when he was out of sight (in my room) when I was gone over the weekend.

Unfortunately I had to drop my car off at the shop last night and the results of the diagnostic they ran this morning were less than wonderful. Thus, I've been stressing out about my need to find a job ASAP all afternoon....since I've been really lame about getting one so far this year. Too bad my personal mechanic had to go and move all the way to Pullman. Anyway...if anyone knows a good job in Bellingham for me, let me know!

Now, off to write an Italian Sonnet and read some more Avant Garde plays...ohhh hooray.


Monday, April 4, 2011

Anglo-Saxon Prosody Poem (Alliterative Stressed-Syllables)

New England Winter

Afternoon approaches, shadows cast by aspen in the fields.
A forsythia, its leaves fallen, feels winter.
The warbler's wailing annuls, flown south, and withered branches
break to become wreathes, their bark like
leather. Later, the little rooster's crow
resounds, his angst rarely resolved by the mother hen.
Half-bred horses with heads and necks
that know nobility now stand
slack, asleep. The solstice is black.
Their blue breaths fall, brittle clouds,
collections of condensation, carried on the wind
whistling and whining, while the first
flakes fall. The farmer warms
water from his well, wishing sleepy-time tea
would tame the tiger in his throat.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Rain, rain, go away

I walk
flowing with something
and do not
-Araki Yasusada (undated)

Well, aside from the fact that it has rained so much lately that there are literal ponds and streams appearing all over campus, "syllabus week" (although, it's been a while since I've actually had one of those) has been pretty successful. I'm already definitely excited for my poetry seminar & living writers classes...and although my Avant Garde Lit teacher whispers and speaks with a slight lisp, I guess you can never have it all your way. Maybe his apparent shortcomings as a teacher are some kind of Dadaist rejection of traditional education. Or something.

And although I'm still trying to get over the nastiest cold EVER, my horoscope seems to think I just need to stop worrying about it and enjoy my 'relative health' so I'm going to try and do just that this weekend. Prospects are good that T. will be up visiting from Carnation tomorrow, and if I'm lucky I may persuade the elusive R. (who, though hard to get a hold of, does have beautiful hair) to join her as well. Unfortunately I will probably spend Sunday attempting to be a dilligent english student...reading about 3 million pages from my Avant Garde source book and half of Doubled Flowering (which the poem above comes from). Perhaps I'll go get some of that done now, it seems like just the kind of day for a mug of tea and big thick textbook.