Odd things happen. One of the latest bemusements in my life is that a very high percentage of Quotidian Light's visitors from search engines come here evidently looking for the theme song lyrics to The Winx Club cartoon series.
If I were so inclined to ponder this, I would no doubt find it disturbing.
However, in good cheer and because I do so hate to disappoint anyone, I have here, for all you searching readers' musical animation satiation, the official Winx Club lyrics!
Close your eyes and open your heart
Believe in yourself, that's how it starts.
Dreams will come true, just wait and see,
'Cause the magic's in you, and the magic's in me!
Chorus:
We are the Winx! We are the Winx!
Come join the club!We are the Winx!
We are the Winx! We are the Winx!
Come join the club. We are the Winx.
Magical flowers, digital powers,
Rhythms and tunes, the sun and the moon.
Keep on searching far and wide
for that fire burning deep inside!
We've got the style and we've got the flair.
Look all you want, just don't touch the hair!
Repeat chorus
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Playing Catch Up
Here is where the girls and I spent weekend before last. Actually, we stayed in a hotel in Jacksonville, but the Air Force base is the reason we were there. My brother was there for a class, and my parents invited us to go with them for the weekend to visit him. Jacksonville, Arkansas is a whole lot closer than Tucson, Nevada. We went. We saw. I miss him.
This is what's going on in our neck of the woods at the moment. Great Scott teaches journalism and a few other English classes here. His classroom sits right on the commons area the gym could fall into if it collapses. It (the now-off-limits classroom) is full of the Macs and internet connections the kids need to do their classwork for their pub classes. Great Scott is not happy.
Have been mowing the grass a lot lately, although my husband assures me there's no big hurry. "When it heads out, Hon," he told me this morning, "it isn't going to get much taller."
This is what's going on in our neck of the woods at the moment. Great Scott teaches journalism and a few other English classes here. His classroom sits right on the commons area the gym could fall into if it collapses. It (the now-off-limits classroom) is full of the Macs and internet connections the kids need to do their classwork for their pub classes. Great Scott is not happy.
Have been mowing the grass a lot lately, although my husband assures me there's no big hurry. "When it heads out, Hon," he told me this morning, "it isn't going to get much taller."
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Interview Questions for Michael
I apologise to Michael for being so tardy about getting these questions up. Not a chance that I'd miss the opportunity, though. Stick Poet Super Hero is a blog I read regularly (although not quite regularly enough, or I'd have known about the Snodgrass reading in Spfld. more than two hours before it started---grrrrr).
So, Michael,
1. How did you "discover" poetry? At what age did the lightbulb come on for you, and what poem/poet flipped the switch?
2. Which poet and/or poem (or collection of poems) most accurately (or accutely) hits you where you live now and why?
3. What is your biggest struggle with your writing?
4. What is your favorite factor about the same?
5. If you could have a conversation with any poet living or dead, who would it be, list three questions you'd ask them, and then tell us why that poet and those questions.
Many thanks for volunteering! I very much look forward to reading your answers.
So, Michael,
1. How did you "discover" poetry? At what age did the lightbulb come on for you, and what poem/poet flipped the switch?
2. Which poet and/or poem (or collection of poems) most accurately (or accutely) hits you where you live now and why?
3. What is your biggest struggle with your writing?
4. What is your favorite factor about the same?
5. If you could have a conversation with any poet living or dead, who would it be, list three questions you'd ask them, and then tell us why that poet and those questions.
Many thanks for volunteering! I very much look forward to reading your answers.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Perfectionism
Perfectionism is a killer. It kills fun. It kills joy. It kills anticipation. I cannot remember a time when it wasn't looking over my shoulder, nudging me and saying, "Not like that! Do it this way! Do it right!" Sometimes it used the voice of a teacher or a parent, sometimes a friend or a mentor. Eventually, horridly, it's come to use my own inner voice (or one of them) against me, pushing, prodding, demanding, always having a better idea, a better way of doing that to which I'm currently setting my hand. I hate it. I despise it. I would like to strip it naked and abandon it in a blizzard somewhere in a wilderness so bleak and barren there are not even wolves around to shorten its dying agonies.
The problem with attacking anything that has wormed its way into becoming a part of us (or our perceived and/or operational identities), is that we can't do it without taking a bloody hunk out of ourselves. Every withering word we chuck in the direction of that snobby little shoulder critic cuts a curve like a boomerang and whacks us in the back of the head, usually wounding some more vulnerable self-aspect that didn't deserve it at all while the perfectist snickers, "That's what you get, you bumbling fool."
There is a way of unmanning the little bugger, though.
Cindy: (Rolling out biscuit dough for the girls' breakfast)
Perfectionism: You should be feeding them bacon and eggs. This is little more than paste with lard in it.
Cindy: They don't eat eggs; bacon takes too long.
Perfectionism: You're rolling that dough too thin.
Cindy: (Humming, picks up biscuit cutter, pauses thoughtfully, then poises it over the middle of the dough and begins to lower it.)
Perfectionism: Wait a minute! You should start at the outside edges!
Cindy: (Smiling, continues to lower biscuit cutter.)
Perfectionism: No! You'll waste dough that way! You're doing it all wrong! The edges! The edges!
Cindy: (Widens smile, very deliberately presses cutter into center of dough.)
Perfectionism: (Near hysteria) What are you doing?!?!? You're doing it on purpose!!!!
Cindy: (Gleefully and enthusiastically cuts biscuits totally at random.)
Perfectionism: Arrrrgh!!! (Runs screaming from room.)
A most satisfactory way to start the morning, I assure you.
The problem with attacking anything that has wormed its way into becoming a part of us (or our perceived and/or operational identities), is that we can't do it without taking a bloody hunk out of ourselves. Every withering word we chuck in the direction of that snobby little shoulder critic cuts a curve like a boomerang and whacks us in the back of the head, usually wounding some more vulnerable self-aspect that didn't deserve it at all while the perfectist snickers, "That's what you get, you bumbling fool."
There is a way of unmanning the little bugger, though.
Cindy: (Rolling out biscuit dough for the girls' breakfast)
Perfectionism: You should be feeding them bacon and eggs. This is little more than paste with lard in it.
Cindy: They don't eat eggs; bacon takes too long.
Perfectionism: You're rolling that dough too thin.
Cindy: (Humming, picks up biscuit cutter, pauses thoughtfully, then poises it over the middle of the dough and begins to lower it.)
Perfectionism: Wait a minute! You should start at the outside edges!
Cindy: (Smiling, continues to lower biscuit cutter.)
Perfectionism: No! You'll waste dough that way! You're doing it all wrong! The edges! The edges!
Cindy: (Widens smile, very deliberately presses cutter into center of dough.)
Perfectionism: (Near hysteria) What are you doing?!?!? You're doing it on purpose!!!!
Cindy: (Gleefully and enthusiastically cuts biscuits totally at random.)
Perfectionism: Arrrrgh!!! (Runs screaming from room.)
A most satisfactory way to start the morning, I assure you.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
New Blog--Inscapes
Inscapes is a new blog that I would find worth a daily reading for the literary quotes alone (Gerard Manley Hopkins is the best!), but given the fact that the author(ess) has been sharing particularly good insights about the church and depression, as well as other matters, well...I just don't miss it. We don't agree on everything, granted, but any friend of Hopkins is a friend of mine--even if she hadn't already been a real life heart-friend for the past seventeen years.
Check it out.
Check it out.
So That's Why!
This quote from Kay Redfield Jamison's book, Exuberance, made me laugh right out loud. Startled the cat.
"An individual in a positive mood tends to see the forest and the pattern among the trees; an individual who is in neither a positive nor a depressed mood picks out the trees. Someone who is depressed focuses in on the bark (and then notes, as well, where it is peeling)."
Some trees I can identify by the bark in winter when they have no leaves. I'm not joking. (But I am still laughing.)
"An individual in a positive mood tends to see the forest and the pattern among the trees; an individual who is in neither a positive nor a depressed mood picks out the trees. Someone who is depressed focuses in on the bark (and then notes, as well, where it is peeling)."
Some trees I can identify by the bark in winter when they have no leaves. I'm not joking. (But I am still laughing.)
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Book Review--The Jordan Tracks
I will be honest. When I hear the term “Christian fiction”, I cringe. In my experience, most fiction selling in Christian bookstores amounts to little more than (as Great Scott so eloquently puts it) sanctified bodice rippers (whose protagonists--usually lonely women--find all their problems solved most satisfactorily by walking an inviational aisle and perhaps marrying the preacher) or eschatological thrillers with characters about as deep as an episode of Fear Factor. Blessedly, Christian fiction writer Steven W. Wise’s The Jordan Tracks fits neither of these categories.
Set in small town mid-Missouri in 1968, The Jordan Tracks chronicles the spiritual crisis of Ernie Bates and the friends and family closest to him when his son, an only child, falls victim to a sniper’s chance shot in Vietnam. Thankfully, Wise doesn’t use The Jordan Tracks to tell his readers that Christianity makes everything instantly spiffy, hunky-dory, and if a believing character tends to become a bit didactic once or twice in the attempt to reconcile the story’s unbelievers with the God in whom they doubt, it is at least done in lingo that wouldn't sound strange in the mouth of a rural Missourian. (I swear I know these people first-hand; they’re pure gold, through and through.) The Jordan Tracks is not a literary masterpiece in terms of academic crafting, perhaps; we are sometimes told more than we’re shown about the characters and their motivations. Nevertheless, Wise demonstrates especially keen eyes and ears for the subtleties of detail in which relationships are revealed and nurtured. From the social interactions of backyard barbeques (“pig pickin’s”) to the work line of a small town turkey processing plant to the county fairgrounds, Wise knows his people, their storytelling, their friendly baiting, their companionable or respectful silences, the extremes to which they may be driven in grief, and how slowly and carefully hope must be breathed into existence if it is ever to kindle into steady flame within a broken human spirit.
Set in small town mid-Missouri in 1968, The Jordan Tracks chronicles the spiritual crisis of Ernie Bates and the friends and family closest to him when his son, an only child, falls victim to a sniper’s chance shot in Vietnam. Thankfully, Wise doesn’t use The Jordan Tracks to tell his readers that Christianity makes everything instantly spiffy, hunky-dory, and if a believing character tends to become a bit didactic once or twice in the attempt to reconcile the story’s unbelievers with the God in whom they doubt, it is at least done in lingo that wouldn't sound strange in the mouth of a rural Missourian. (I swear I know these people first-hand; they’re pure gold, through and through.) The Jordan Tracks is not a literary masterpiece in terms of academic crafting, perhaps; we are sometimes told more than we’re shown about the characters and their motivations. Nevertheless, Wise demonstrates especially keen eyes and ears for the subtleties of detail in which relationships are revealed and nurtured. From the social interactions of backyard barbeques (“pig pickin’s”) to the work line of a small town turkey processing plant to the county fairgrounds, Wise knows his people, their storytelling, their friendly baiting, their companionable or respectful silences, the extremes to which they may be driven in grief, and how slowly and carefully hope must be breathed into existence if it is ever to kindle into steady flame within a broken human spirit.
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