Pigsick

I've spent most of this week sick in bed. Yesterday, I finally went to the doctor. They took my temperature (103) and hooked me up to an IV drip for a few hours, and even after giving me 2 liters of fluid, they said I was still dangerously dehyrdated. I've since been able to keep a few liters of water and 7up down (ha updown) and can finally eat solid food. Jen has been taking really good care of me, she's amazing. I'm excited for my family to meet her over Christmas break.

Anyway, hopefully I'm good enough tomorrow to make it to the basketball game at Weber State. I already have my tickets. If I go, I definitely won't be screaming, just clapping, which will take more self control than anything I have done in my life. If I have typos here, please forgive me. 1) my brain is like warm jello right now and 2) I'm typing this on my iPod. Feel free to text me with sweet notes about gettig better, or just to yell at me for going to the game tomorrow an infecting all of Ogden with my swinage flu.

Elsie Revised

I put up a story earlier that I wrote. I have since rewritten the whole thing, changed the tense, the point of view, the plot. Basically everything that I could without changing the feeling of the story. If you have time, read it and let me know what you think. Especially you Jeff.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21309490/Elsie


I don't know why it took my italics and just made it bigger font. I'm sure you guys can get over it.

Been a while

Last month, I had about 200 views on my blog. This month, 20. Why? Because I am lazy. It is in my title even. Really, look up. I haven't updated my blog for a while, so there has been nothing new to read. There are two reasons for this lack of updates, really.

I got a new blog, a better blog to be honest. I am paid to blog about Utah State athletics, and basically whatever else I want to talk about. If you want to take a look, the URL is www.trueblueA.com. It is quite awesome. My second reason is this pretty girl that I've been spending a large chunk of my days with. Yes, Scott has a girlfriend. No, you can't meet her because you are all jinxes.

Anyway, the Aggies lost this weekend thanks to three men with whistles and no knowledge of the rulebook, so I will be in a bad mood all the way up to the three day weekend. I'd love to come home, Mom, but there is a home game this Saturday. Sorry. Maybe Thanksgiving.

Elsie

The assignment was to write 26 sentences, the first starting with A, the second with B, the third with C, and so on. One sentence needed to be over 100 words and one needed to be a fragment. Here is my (temporarily) finished story.

About five months ago, my husband Jack died. Back when we were dating during my junior year of college, he told me he used to write love letters to his future, unknown wife. Cleaning out the garage after Jack’s accident was too painful for me, but when my brother had finished doing the work for me and handed me a box, dusty and duct taped, I knew Jack’s letters were inside.

Despite the twinge of emotion, a yin yang of guilt and nostalgia, I allowed myself to read one letter each night before I fell asleep. Every so often I would come across a letter addressed to me, and my heart would curl into itself for protection. Four weeks had passed, however, since the last letter that began with his pet name for me, “My Dearest Wombat,” the meaning of which has since dissolved from my memory.
Golden-brown stains wilted the corners of the note I had drawn from the box tonight. His hands had obviously frequented the crease of this letter more than most, if not all, of the other letters because it opened easily in my hands- like its sole purpose was to open and close silently and without resistance- whereas the notes from before seemed to have been written, folded, and abandoned.

I stay up late thinking about you (it began), I think about your name and your hair and your face and the freckle under your eye that you have, or don't have, or used to have, and I think about our first date and our first dance and our lives in ten years if we have met by then; I wonder if you wonder about me and if you will recognize me when you meet me, or if I’ll just be some person on the street you pass, and maybe we will meet two or five or ten times before we remember we met, and when we talk about the first time we met, it will really be the second or fifth or tenth time.


Jack usually punctuated his letters perfectly (he was an English major in college), but this one seemed to be more of an unorganized poem than a normal letter. Knowing I wouldn’t make it through this without sacrificing at least one tear, or a dry sob, I continued.
Last night I had a dream about you, or I assume it was about you because the girl I dreamed of looked how I always picture you to look. Maybe you will be nothing like my dream. Nothing exciting really happened, but I feel like telling you about it anyway in hopes that it comes true.

Over my whispered voice reading Jack’s letter, I hear my daughter fussing in the room across the hall from mine. Pulling the blanket over my icy knees and making a mental note to check on her if I hear another sound, I finished the letter. Quieter, this time.

Right after we meet, we go for a walk and I ask you about yourself. “Sagebrush”, you tell me, “the rain on the sagebrush” is your favorite smell. The greens and blues of water reflecting the sky reflecting the water and the explosion of spring are your two favorite colors, but I think to myself that is more than two. Under the sign welcoming us back your street, I stop you and I say, “Elsie” (or whatever your name might be) “Elsie, I love you.”

Very carefully, I reread the last line twice in my head. “Wow,” I mouth as I swing my feet off of my bed and onto the cold, waxy wood floor. “X & Y” by Coldplay floats out of the stereo I now keep in my daughter’s room as I creak open her door; Jack used to sing it while playing his guitar to get her to sleep, but now the real thing will have to do. “You never did tell me why you liked the name so much,” I think to myself, more than to Jack, as I tiptoe towards my sleeping daughter. Zebras and hippos in pink tutus stare down from the wallpaper as I bend over, kiss Elsie on the cheek, and whisper, “Elsie, I love you.”

forgetfulness by billy collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Marginalia

I love poetry like a fat kid loves that other fat kid who sits in the back of the class, kind of next to the window, but not always, because sometimes they get there too late and that seat is taken.

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
why 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."

my last week

I made a relatively spur-of-the-moment decision and went to California last week. I stayed with my family in San Diego, and basically did what I do in Vegas all day- read about/watched sports, read books (time traveler's wife and the giver), and played golf. I am getting better at golfing, but not quick enough to make me happy. My granny bought me some sweet golf shoes though.

I also bought myself some running shoes, since my old ones were falling apart and smell.

I also got a sunburn. Where, you ask? Well. My armpits and the tops of my feet. Very painful.


I don't get tan anymore.

But no matter how long it has been, the beach always feels familiar between your toes, like it has always been there and you just did not notice it the last 4 years.