she's back.
yesterday morning i received the greatest phone message in the history of phone messages. it was a message from my fabulous friend, diana, telling me she was back in the states after spending one million years in italy as an opera singer. actually, all she said was, "IIIII"m baaaaaaaaaaaaack!" and she was merely gone for a month or so...it only felt like one million years.
i returned her call immediately and was surprised to discover a giant wave of emotion flooding over me. i had no idea that her absense had affected me that profoundly. i wanted to shout "don't ever leave me again" but (thankfully) realized that this was completely unreasonable and ridiculous seeing as we live in different states and see each other no more than twice a year. if we're lucky.
but we chat on a nearly daily basis. even though i was not entirely conscious of it at the time, it nearly killed me to not be able to talk to her whenever anything happened in my life. it's good to have her back. now i can call her seventeen times a day and demand that my calls be prioritized over everything else. just like the good ol' days.
jackarooney
jack loves his uncle david.
he also loves me.
little girl
little bridget is no longer
baby bridget. she is a real live little girl. i love to be around her. she likes to look for ant hills and she shrieks with delight whenever she spots an ant or two. she yells "ants! ants! ants!" she likes to play the piano and try on shoes.
she also really likes jewelry. the other day she was running around only a diaper and a necklace. i snapped a quick shot with a camera.
we found a turtle in the yard a few days ago. the turtle was trying to get away as fast as possible...but, being a turtle, moved at a pace that allowed bridget to stoop down and talk to it. she used her super-high baby voice and said "hi! hi! tur! hullo!" the she squealed and clapped her hands.
there is never a dull moment.
well, what do you know.
ok. so my last post was about bad cover art. andie's comment indicated that she looked for a madeleine l'engle book but was too turned off by the covers to choose any.
ironically, the book i loaned to my friend a while back was a madeleine l'engle book.
truth be told, the only books i was really thinking about while writing the previous post were books by l'engle. i kid you not. the covers on most-if-not-all of her books are painfully and horrifically bad. just bad. "bad" as in "cheesy teenage angst story with characters who wear unflattering clothing and live in the unrealistic world of trashy romance novel drama".
and don't try to read the back of her books either. it's too misleading. the plots in her novels are usually secondary to character development. problem is, if you just read the back, you only get a poorly written summary of a plot that isn't the main point anyway.
here's my advice: read books by madeleine l'engle, but try your hardest to know as little as possible about them ahead of time. don't look at the cover, don't look at the back, don't read the title. in fact, do yourself a favor: take a box of l'engle books, put on a blindfold and make a random selection. then tear off the front and back covers. then remove the blindfold.
you might find yourself to be deliciously surprised. she's one of my favorite authors. seriously, folks. i've had to grit my teeth and force myself to look beyond the cover art. for whatever reason, l'engle book covers are particularly heinous. it's as though the publishers went out of their way to choose the absolute worst illustrators of all time.
sigh.
it's tragic, really. many people miss out because her books
look too stupid.
but how else can we choose except to look at the picture and read the back cover? i honestly don't know. i suppose we could just trust a recommendation...
and that's too risky. books can be so...so
personal. if YOU pick out a book and it proves to be sub-par, then you have wasted your own time. if someone ELSE picks it out, you run the risk of having your time wasted for you.
with that being said, if you are interested in reading works by madeleine l'engle, try reading more than one. if you end up feeling like it was a big fat drag, then the only thing really lost is my recommending reputation. and your time.
either way, enjoy your summer and
read! i'm off to draw up a list...but i promise i won't draw cover art.
judging books by their covers...
there are
loads of books with terrible cover art. my fourth grade reading teacher actually removed the front cover from every paperback in the classroom to encourage us to use our imaginations.
what a fantastic idea.
several months ago i loaned a book to a friend. i asked him please, for the love of all that is good, kindly disregard the shoddy cover image passing itself off as "art".
apparently, this was asking the impossible. he never read the book.
it just goes to show how impressionable we all are. sigh. the book was a good one, too.
the storm is passing over, hallelujah.
let me tell you about the plague. a week ago, my niece began to get sick. On wednesday i started to feel a little strange. by the time thursday night came around i had a full blown fever that lasted through most of friday. my little nephew had the fever on saturday. everyone in my house has a stuffy nose. we empty the trash on a daily basis due to the overflow of used tissues.
in other news, i think i hit a milestone yesterday. it began with some small conversations about music blah blah blah and moved into some real brainstorming. it was nice to feel alive. i've felt a slight discomfort over the past several weeks while trying to determine what-precisely-i-should-be-doing in MA. the thing is, i left a great city and a great community where i was really happy and moved to a small (albeit beautiful) new england town where everything appears to shut down around 9:00pm (even some gas stations) and where my best friend is a book. i was worried about the move because i had serious doubts that i would find people i could "relate" to easily. in order to prevent this, i brilliantly set about doing absolutely nothing. silly, yes? it's as though i enter a bizarre la-la land where i imagine that meaningful relationships will mystically come out of the woodwork and materialize before my eyes if i sit around and talk to no one. ironically (and embarrassingly), several people
have almost literally fallen into my lap. things are starting to take shape, and i have had nothing to do with it. there are people who have visions for change, people who are stretching my thinking, people who are not willing to settle. and strangely enough, they are
everywhere...and they are interested in things i have to offer.
i think god interacts with people in different ways. with me, he's quietly dramatic. changes in my life are often huge, but i barely notice the change while it's actually going on. hind-sight's 20/20, and it reminds me that i am not in control. good thing, too. otherwise, i'd still be sitting around with no plans.
so it would seem that i am in recovery from two sicknesses: 1) sickness of body. a minor thing; an inconvenience--the common cold (with fever). 2) sickness of heart. this is much bigger. i could feel things shifting yesterday, and small shafts of light broke through the cracks.
i few months ago, i was convinced that moving to Ipswich was the right thing to do, i just had no idea why. now, the picture is no longer black. it became a fuzzy gray when i wasn't looking. so. i'm waiting for the fuzz to clear--in my sinuses; in my heart.
