mallorydarling's Xanga

it's been a while, xanga

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 17:51:52 GMT

I'm at work. So I'm bored. So I'm writing on my LJ, and I keep forgetting things that I wanted to say to myself with an audience. And I bet my LJ friends will look at their friends page and be like "WTF? Mallory posted like six times today!" and they won't be able to stop scrolling through all my entries.

I'm hungry to read over break.

I think I shall read:

Something about Scotland. I'm interested again. Pyretically. I have a fever.
The Once and Future King.
Maybe Lord of the Rings again.
The Icelandic Sagas. First I have to buy this book because I'm certain our library won't have it. But I read some in Keith's room, and I think it's probably the most delicious mythology I've read in a while.

Obviously, I need what is at once intricate and bare, rich and stark, what both dances delicately on my skin and spears me deeply.

Obviously, I will not have time to read these. I would have to do a tome a week. Plus I'm reading The Fountainhead on the train ride home.

Trains! How quaint!

That's what you think until you're on one for 30 hours.

I wonder why it is that my preferred aesthetic is the abovementioned rich starkness. I find it in almost everything that I love: Homer, the Decemberists, Radiohead and Neutral Milk Hotel, my mountain, British Romantic poetry, Euclid, the Greek language.

I wonder if I'll have time to finish my Practica Musica AND take a shower during lunch. Practica Musica is the worst thing to happen to St. John's. It's a dumb computer program that doesn't teach you anything. I have one activity left, but it's due at like, one today or I supposedly fail Chorus and must take it over next year. Whatev. I doubt it. Plus I think the frustrated five minutes that I spent on it might have counted as working on that activity. It's pass/fail. I know music anyway.

I wonder why I can recognise Pedro the Lion after about a measure, even if I haven't heard the song. What is that? There's a certain careful laziness to everything he does that makes me think he's probably the most mellow but at once meticulous man alive. He just makes me want to walk very slowly, speak very cautiously, and look at everything very closely, living deeply and thoughtfully. He makes me want to listen to everyone, and look them in the eyes until it creeps them out.

I feel extremely and discontentedly alive today.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 17:31:44 GMT

[last paper of semester is done]

[no tutorials next week]

[san fransisco for thanksgiving on wednesday]

[three weeks of actually getting to concentrate on plato, fun school and festive atmosphere]

[no finals at this school]

[it's beautiful outside every day]

[jon is coming]

[dallas for a week]

[home for christmas]

[being around grass that nobody smokes]

[the shins]

[and neutral milk]

[are awesome]

[and i'm so happy right now]

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 03:16:00 GMT

I watched so much TV today, and got so little work done. None actually. And I only had one class. In which I doodled. But I am going to get a heckuva lot of work done tomorrow, I tell you what.

I wish Kali were coming here.

This makes me almost wish that I were staying at home this summer. I want to be with Reed and Kali and Chase again, plus Amy, and I miss the Lucases, but I'm not going to work a shitty C'ville job. So it's Dallas or Spain or staying in Santa Fe for me.

Or should I stay with Amy? That way I could make money (workin' at *$) AND see my friends and family while maintaining a certain amount of independence which I think would be hindered at home.

By the way, Chris bought me a plane ticket to go to San Fransisco with him for Thanksgiving.

Well-wishers have speculated as to what that means.

[... mewithoutyou is pretty great.

(wait! what the hell is this ska riff?) ...]

oh doubters let's go down, let's go down, come on down, oh doubters let's go down, down to the river to pray

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 21:59:21 GMT

I just spent three hours here at work, completely entranced in and absorbed by V For Vendetta instead of working on the two papers that are due next week over the Math and Lab material I skimmed over while writing my seminar paper.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 23:22:22 GMT

Orals are coming up. Math and Lab papers are due in the next two weeks about things that I ignored because I was writing my Seminar Paper. Don Rags after that, and Greek is getting hairier than ever with participles and third declension nouns.

I've eaten too much candy (candy corn for breakfast over the last three days) and I am totally out of it.

Now I have to memorize four props and read Book VII of the Republic, but no way can I slack off for this one because it's The Cave.

I'm listening to Lifehouse and recalling how powerful I thought that terribly simple music was when I was in seventh-tenth grade. But then again, Christian music was all I listened to for a while, and we all thought that "What if the color that YOU think is blue isn't what *I* think is blue?" was really profound. Guess I'm just over distorted guitar. They're still okay but I'm going to listen to Keane now.

My musical tastes have changed entirely in the last year. My favorite bands are now Beck and Sufjan Stevens as opposed to Five Iron Frenzy. It's kind of a reflection of how I myself have changed in personality. (Of course... almost anything [except maybe Blink 182] could signify a maturation from Five Iron Frenzy... God love 'em.) I'm so much more mellow than I used to be.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 01:17:35 GMT

Monet refuses the operation

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 01:13:16 GMT

Doctor, you say there are no halos

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

to edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

--Lisel Mueller

Doctor fired for 'anal massage' technique

Sat, 28 Oct 2006 20:46:48 GMT

What the billy-o?

Published: 4th April 2006 10:57 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=3467

A Swedish doctor who has previously been cautioned in Sweden for using a controversial 'anal massage' technique to cure various kinds of pain has been fired from his job in Norway - for the second time.

A council in the Nord-Tröndelag area dismissed the doctor after only two weeks, when they realised that he was the same man who hit the headlines last year when another local authority fired him.

The man, who also runs a private clinic in Gothenburg, described his dismissal as part of a witch-hunt against him, and said that his technique is successful.

Several years ago, the man was warned by Sweden's Medical Responsibility Board (HSAN) on at least three occasions, after treating an elderly woman's headaches and back pain with his method. At the time he was working in the Stockholm area.

The Norwegian counterpart to HSAN has already had cause to warn the man after he delivered a load of Swedish jokes to a group of Norwegians who were mourning a death.

The man considers himself misunderstood.

"I have a personality disorder, or rather a syndrome, a form of Aspergers. Just like Bill Gates or Einstein, for example," said the man in a recent interview with Aftonbladet.

"I have made it impossible for myself within the healthcare sector because I behave childishly sometimes. I am different, but cleverer."

HSAN examined the research literature which the doctor used to support his use of his anal massage technique, but found that his treatment contradicted "scientific, tried and tested experience".

The Halloweeny party is tonight! Yay!

Once again I'm at work trying to put off the ol' Seminar paper. It's really and truly almost finished now. I have one more conclusion to flesh out and then I'll be done. I'm just kind of stuck on it. But it's okay... I'm working tomorrow. Mac and Phil stopped by to play racquetball, and Mac was trying to reassure me that I do well enough in Seminar that nothing is really riding on my paper. I wasn't worried at all until he started talking about it. I don't want my tutors to think "Gee, she can talk big in Seminar but in the end she doesn't have her shit together! Very little deep thought shown here! Quite unsatisfactory!" I can just see Mr. Nee in my oral, with his hands folded, wearing another lawyer power suit, saying "Well I still don't know how to live my life!"

I'm really not happy with this paper. It's just not a good paper. I never stress out about stuff like this but I am today. I feel like I don't deserve to stress out, when everyone else has been putting days of work into this, and it's not difficult for me at all, but maybe that's WHY I should stress out...

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 23:03:59 GMT

I'm procrastinating about writing my Seminar paper. It's almost finished as far as length goes, but the thoughts are not complete yet. It's due on Monday, and so I have plenty of time.

I am having a lot of trouble with writing as well as I did in high school, at least for Seminar, because papers here are so different. Theses are frowned upon. It's a matter of asking questions without having to prove things. I like that kind of writing but it's difficult for me to reconcile that with a professional and scholarly voice. I just wrote an email to a friend from home, and it took me maybe 5 minutes. Then I looked at it and realised that if I printed it out, it would be at least a page long. I wrote that alarmingly quickly. But I didn't have to find examples from The Eumenides for every statement that I made, and I could talk about how I felt.

Between Greek and Plato, I'm starting to feel shackled by English. I'm starting to agree that a picture really is worth a thousand words, when that picture is a Greek word which immediately conjures a larger concept than the correspondent English word. Even Math perpetuates this for me. We have to talk for so long to lay out what we mean when we say "multitude" or "magnitude" when the Greek word would make it immediately apparent to the Greek mind. I guess I can never really get that Greek mind, since because of the literary approach to learning Greek I will never think in it like I thought in Spanish. But getting a peek into it is something beautiful that makes me wistful for a time when I think I could have expressed my very visual thoughts more easily than I can with our pragmatic language.

It snowed last night. It was kalos. It didn't stick on the ground on campus but it is on the mountains. I wish I could find my camera and show you the view outside of my window. The mountains are so close, and the clouds are so low. Or I guess I'm high. The air is clear, the sky is bright, the air is cold, and the colours are sharp. I know that this school is very far from "real life," as far as most people would define it. I think that the spiritual life and the life of the mind are often dismissed as being unreal, just because they are not corporeal, but I think they're more real than anything in the physical world. In that respect, I feel like I'm in on something more true, in addition to the heightened sharpness of the physical world here.

Ack! I can't see the sunset from my desk at the gym, but I can see every leaf outside the window in stark relief.

THE DEATH OF AUTUMN

When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,
And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind
Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned
Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,
Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak,
Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,--
Then leans on me the weight of the year, and crushes
My heart. I know that Beauty must ail and die,
And will be born again,--but ah, to see
Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!
Oh, Autumn! Autumn!--What is the Spring to me?

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

Some people are utterly oblivious.

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 18:11:19 GMT

I sense there's something in the wind
That feels like tragedy's at hand
And though I'd like to stand by him
Can't shake this feeling that I have
The worst is just around the bend

And does he notice my feelings for him?
And will he see how much he means to me?
I think it's not to be

What will become of my dear friend?
Where will his actions lead us then?
Although I'd like to join the crowd
In their enthusiastic cloud
Try as I may, it doesn't last

And will we ever end up together?
no, I think not, it's never to become
For I am not the one

Utterly oblivious. And I thought you were so terribly emotionally intelligent.

We tried to sleep out on the mountain tonight in our super duper 0 degree sleeping bags. But I was kind of afraid of the bears (which have been sighted on campus!!!) and Phil was a wuss and "had to get at least five hours of sleep." But it's okay.

I haven't taken a shower since Wednesday. My hair looks awesome, let me tell you. Now I really have to get down to brass tacks and write my seminar paper.