Archive for October, 2008

BOO!

October 31, 2008

I’ll tell you what’s scary. A little girl growing up. That’s what’s scary. Last year, Belle was an angelic white snow princess for Halloween. This year, she was a “goth bride.” *gulp*

Here to save the day, it appears, is Mowgli, or “regular Batman…”

…as opposed to, of course, “The Dark Knight Batman” (Dimples), who ran away from my camera for an individual shot because he was embarassed by how unbelievably cool he looked. Here are all the trick-or-treaters, including cousin “Venus.”

It was freezing cold (which is why Shortcake opted out), and we asked Venus to convince Apollo to make it warm and sunny. It didn’t work. The boys stayed warm, though, by running from door to door. They ran the entire time, and stopped only to shout “trick or treat!” and “thank you!” Or, in Mowgli’s case, to fall. Or to run back to the door to shout “thank you!” because he had forgotten. Or to run back through the lawn to the front door down the front walk to the sidewalk because he didn’t mean to run through the lawn.

The Zen of My Today

October 30, 2008
Once upon a life of perpetual laundry
neverending dishes
and infinite toys
Where the futility of sweeping cheerios off the floor
or changing a diaper
Threaten, on the worst days, to be my undoing
And on the best days, are the ebb and flow
reminders to be grateful
for clothing
food
abundance
and my fertile fertile ovaries
Came both the common cold and Halloween
And suddenly
relentless cries of “Can I have another piece of candy”
met four bottomless boogery noses
Happily ever after, etcetera, etcetera, indeed

Self-Reliance

October 28, 2008

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Self-Reliance
It is thick, heavy reading, but I have lately been looking through Emerson’s writings, some really ridiculously fabulous stuff. Maybe it’s because he gives me the justification I need to be fickle, crazy, misunderstood:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.