Item 1: I have housing in NH for the summer - I’m going to be staying at a bed & breakfast and helping out around there in exchange for my room and board. Yay! So, no salary but no rent either. This works.

Item 2: All course work and presentations are done…except my 20 page humanities paper. Whoo.

Item 3: It’s really just time for school to be over…time to go home, however briefly. Five days to go. Five days, eight pages (see item 2), and two exams.

See you soon.

Categories: college, internships
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A Journey Begins with a Single Butterfly

Frenzy…

She had been pacing in the castle garden for a full hour, watching the butterflies wander past. There is no such thing as a hurried butterfly, but nevertheless, these creatures were imbued with a sense of purpose. Two feet southwest, around a stand of willow trees, ten feet southeast, but always south, always south. She shivered, percieving in some small degree the setting of the sun, bringing one day closer the chill of deep autumn and the inescapable advent of dark winter.

When she had been pacing for over an hour, Merlin found her. His brown robes caught the autumn wind, giving him the appearance of an overgrown butterfly, wandering south towards her with a piece of parchment in his hand. She watched him approach, still pacing. She was going nowhere, but a restless urge in her chest drove her feet to keep moving.

“You’re going to wear holes in your shoes first and those stones shortly after. Or possibly the other way around.”

She stopped and smiled at him. “You didn’t come out here to tell me that.”

“No. A messenger has come from the Pendragon.”

“What could Uther want?”

“He remembers well the incident of Vortigan and the dragons. More to the point, he remembers my role in it and thinks to have me on his side.”

“You’ve been watching him, haven’t you?”

“Crystal balls were made for this, were they not? And it is only wise to keep the powerful where you can see them.”

“Apparently Uther feels the same way.”

“Indeed. You’ve watched the butterflies long enough, my lady. Come. We too are going south.”

5/15/05

Categories: scribblings
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As I’ve been working on this twenty page humanities paper, I occaisionally find myself drifting off and unable to focus. Nothing new, this is how I achieved some ungodly tetris scores during 12th grade. Point is that it has occurred to me recently that this would be as good a place as any to share some of my scribblings. Writing them amused me, and so perhaps reading them will amuse you. Comments and criticism is always welcome, of course.

This one I wrote Saturday; there’s a similar one from yesterday that I will post in a day or so.

Destiny…

It spun before her like a soap bubble, delicatly shimmering. She held her breath while she studied it so as not to damage it or chase it away. No chart or table would ever describe this, she knew. Others had attempted to diagram destiny, but none had ever been lauded as a success. One, an old graybeard who had organized his brain through a system of binomial nomenclature, had developed a system resembling stop-motion photography, compiling diagram upon diagram as this manifestation of destiny flowed and twirled. Of course, he could no more capture the movement of his subject than a manipulated bit of clay can emulate the grace of a ballerina.

Another had written elaborate equations, Greek symbols flowing from her pen. But when the action of writing the equation better describes the subject than the equation itself, can one claim to have succeeded?

Arcane symbols had been developed and arranged in strange, meaningful patterns. Theses had been written and rewriten and some of the best minds of the land had been driven mad trying to describe the undescribable. Because destiny is not a sentence, and cannot be diagramed in the dimensions we know.

Still she sat, trying to wrap her mind around the bubble floating above her outstretched hands. Through it, she could see the open window and the last vestiges of twilight fading into darkness. The purples and blues in the sky were faintly reflected in the bubble. Are we within a larger destiny-bubble? she wondered.

“If you don’t breathe, you will suffocate,” Merlin told her. Only then did she remember that she was holding her breath. Looking over her shoulder at him, she filled her lungs. “Let destiny go,” he said. “Other matters warrant our more immediate concern.”

With two fingers, she pinched the bubble, popping it. She looked back at Merlin and noticed the shades of twilight reflected in his bright blue eyes. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said, though she hadn’t known it until she heard her own words. “Destiny is not kept within that bubbe – no bubble of any size could do that. Destiny is better defined by what is not in the bubble. By the outside world.”

The wizard frowned. “Who could possibly describe the outside world in all its chaos and infinite detail? Generations upon generations might attempt it and still barely begin.”

She smiled, a bright evening star in each eye. “So be it,” she said. “If our work has been worthwhile, their work can only be more so. For if we do not understand our world and ourselves, what are we to do?”

5/14/05

PS. At work we’ve recently (and by recently I mean since January or so…) been helping students who are using MovableType blogs for various class projects. Somehow last night this reminded me that I actually do know how to manipulate my own template. Note the sidebar.

Categories: scribblings
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I’m not sure when I was last this disgusted.

While doing research for an English project on the Stuart court in exile during the Civil War, I clicked on a link out of morbid curiosity and found this.

It’s somewhat like pornography - you know it’s out there on the internet, but you don’t realize how horrid it is until you stumble across it for yourself. What really kills me is how hard they try to make it sound legitimate and morally okay. I love the sentence under “About us” that claims, “We don’t teach nor encourage you to cheat.” Then what the hell are you doing? This is some swampy logic.

It all reminds me a bit of a character in John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, a play we read recently in this same English class. Giovanni has plenty of book smarts, but no moral context, so he can logic his way into anything he wants. Like incest. Yes, he does. Similarly, these folks have tidily ignored…
A) the fact that turning in a paper written by someone else is automatically cheating. Duh?
B) the fact that actually doing the writing would benefit the student’s communication skills, which is the purpose of assigning the essay in the first place.

May I also express my scorn for this company’s writers, who supposedly include “graduate and post-graduate degree holders”? You spend how many years working for a graduate degree and then you use it for this? I’ll live under the bridge first.

Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting.

Categories: miscellany
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Nobody broke up with anybody. And if Jen has multiple men flocking about her, Pug isn’t one of them. So ‘Ranth and I had to give that movie a miss. Probably just as well.

Whether any of us learned anything from the commenting craziness is yet to be seen. I’m not holding my breath.

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, go read yesterday’s post. And the comments. Especially the comments.

Categories: miscellany
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Yup, we still have a calendar! (Sorry - I’ve been around way too many Boy Scout “gravity checks” in my time.)

Happy 5/5/05 everybody - enjoy writing the date all day!

Quote of the day:
“Coding is like dating: the more you do it, the better you get.”
-Jen

Categories: miscellany
26 Comments »

An assortment of links that amused me this morning:

This is just cool. As you may or may not know, Dracula is written in diary form (the English major in me want to use the words “epistolary novel,” please humor me). So this fellow has had the brilliant idea of blogging the novel according to its own calendar. It happens to start on May 3rd, so check it out. I now have the urge to collect every epistolary novel I own and set up the same thing.

[Corollary: what if you had a book made up of two people writing letters to each other and you published it on two blogs by two people? Or would the timing just get too confusing? Hmmm.]

As someone who doesn’t strongly identify as either a Yankee or a Southerner, I find this quiz amusing. The higher your percentage, the more Southern you are. I come out at a fairly even 49%. Personally, I would add one more question to the quiz: “What do you put your groceries in a buggy or a cart?” That’s one southern-ism that I have never acclimated to. Kinda odd.

And this one is just silly (and yet not). Now we have an answer to that age old question, when are the Unitarians going get in on the holy war game? The answer: Unitarian Jihad. Again, so simple! Why didn’t I think of that?

[Corollary: What is your Unitarian Jihad name"? You may call me Sister Boot Knife of Sweet Reason.]

[Corollary 2: What the heck are you talking about and who are these goofy Unitarians anyway? Look here.]

Categories: miscellany
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I just got off the phone with the folks in New Hampshire. The word is a very positive “Let’s see if we can make this work!” YAY!!!! I have an internship!

Next step…housing. Anything seems possible right now.

Sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, everything that’s wonderful is sure to come your way!

Categories: internships
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