If you love it, let it go.

Six weeks without meat was never a big deal to me, and I'd say that it's actually become easier since I started observing the external requirements of the fast. But cream in my coffee and tea becomes ever dearer. The more obediently I turn away from it during the prescribed times, the more precious it is to me on the blessed day of its return, and the more I dread giving it up again. At this point, I think I probably won't drink coffee or black tea at all during Lent this year. I won't refrain as a rule, but simply because without cream... what's the point?

In cream, tea and coffee simply blossom.

I don't talk to my best friend from college often enough, but when I do it usually goes something like this:

Mole: Ah well, the future is uncertain, but I'll just make kombucha wherever we land.
Ratty: Oh, that sounds so nice. Wait, what did you say?
Mole: I said I'll make kombucha wherever we land.
Ratty: Oh, I thought you said "I'll make a home."
Mole: Well that's what I meant, after all. I suppose that's metonymy, isn't it?
Ratty: I incorrectly heard one metonym and substituted the other.
Together: Oh, hahaha.

the liquefaction of her clothes

Slightly obnoxious but perhaps wonderful:

I have been spending all evening looking for black and white photographs to render in charcoal with my students. I started out searching for "black and white photography still life" and kept finding images of beautiful women among all the pepper and pottery pictures.

Hmph! A portrait of a beautiful woman is not a still life! Let's restrict it to "vegetables" and "fruit"! More beautiful women! They are not even holding "vegetables" and "fruit!"

"Gourds!" Okay, that was obvious. Don't do "jugs."
"Coffee cups!" Sigh.
"Animals!" Check.
"Trees!" Check.
"Architectural elements?" ...........check.
"Natural!" No makeup, I get that.
"Nature!" Still sexy ladies, and.... Jon Voigt?
"LEAVES!!!!" Try again.


 So what gives? It's likely that the culprits are just indiscriminate taggers, who make the internet as exasperating a "place" as a library where a bunch of monkeys have learned the rudiments of shelving. But although I was annoyed at searching for one thing and finding another, a bit of charm shone through the frustration. There are simply a lot of pictures of people, especially women, because they are so magnificent. Sometimes the weird tags are slapped on there to generate more hits, but I wonder if sometimes a fistful of seemingly unrelated words is an attempt to capture and share the shimmering, burbling beauty of a moment with another human being. "Coffee cups," not so much, but you never know. I suppose coffee is involved in lots of my burbling moments.

I did end up finding lots of promising pictures, and it's good to know that our admiration for the human form is so irrepressible that eyes and chins and elbows and napes and earlobes and breasts and shoulders show up, even when you explicitly asked for eggplants.

Peeve and praise

Happy St. Valentine's day.

I started to say "I have a pet peeve that I want to briefly flash to the world, but I'll try not to harsh your mellow, or mine own mellow either." And then I wrote about it for a while, and found that it was indeed harshing my mellow. But this much I was able to write without spoiling my enjoyment of the tea made for me by my Valentine.

The gist of the peeve is that I find the expression "That's not okay," when wielded indiscriminately by the indignant, extremely annoying and meaningless. Why don't they just say "That's wrong" or "That's dangerous" or "That's not fair to her" or "That annoys me" or "That doesn't conform to the truth taught to me by my religion" or "That's an unreasonable statement" or "That's a dereliction of your duty" or "That is illegal" or "That isn't illegal but I think it should be," etc.? The first answer I thought of is: because it's difficult to be careful or precise when you are indignant and offended. The ultimate answer is probably: because people, myself included, aren't really ruled by reason but by self-love. If we were, we would either bite our tongues or speak more persuasively. 

"That's not okay" just means "I don't like that," but it pretends to appeal to some undefined standard of decent behavior. Where is that standard to be found? How can I know what IS okay? For "That's not okay" to have any meaning, we would have to keep a list of the things that each sassy young person thinks to be not okay. Who has the time?

Here are some good things, which I don't have to explain.

1. I love the color of tea with cream in it. "Antique Lace," the paint swab would probably say.
2. The clear, sunny day gave way to a lovely delicate sunset, even here in the hood.
3. We are going to eat pizza, drink beer, and finish Henry V tonight, in honor of St. Valentine and not wanting to cook.
4. No school on Monday. Shouldn't we have a liturgy for the Three Presidents?
5. I'm looking forward to a refreshing weekend in Kentucky.
6. A flirtatious three year old hollered "Hi Valentine" to me from his porch swing as I dropped his sister off from school.

Anon!

I'm going through my blog and trying to make it as anonymous as possible. Not for you people currently reading it; there's no fooling you! But it occurred to me that in the next few years I might want to apply to grad school or other teaching jobs, and it'd be nice to be able to write about it without worrying that a search for my name will turn up something mean that I said about the department or whatever. The solution is to never say anything mean, I know, but... I'm mean sometimes.

This won't reach too many people, but FYI the faculty of my school (including yours truly and yours truly's husband) is going to the Climacus conference, and I think it would be cool to see lots of friends there.

This year the theme is The Poetics of Existence.

It's insanely affordable! $45 for two days of speaking, dinner, snacks, wine, coffee, etc.

http://www.climacusconference.org/

And not contented with ideas derived only from words of the advantages which are bound up with the defense of your country, though these would furnish a valuable text to a speaker even before an audience so alive to them as the present, you must yourselves realize the power of Athens, and feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills your hearts; and then when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valor, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer.