SparrowSong

Sunday night, a teenager put me in a headlock while her friend tried to take my purse.  I escaped unharmed and with my purse.  The officer who interviewed me said that believe it or not, I was one of the lucky ones.  I believed him (especially with all the shootings I kept hearing about on the radio).

Monday afternoon, I got hit by a car.  The ER doctors said that I was one of the lucky ones.  Then I told him about the attempted robbery less than 24 hours earlier.  He chuckled and said the coincidence was awesome.

I'm not sure words mean what people think they mean.

Sunday night, a teenager put me in a headlock while her friend tried to take my purse.  I escaped unharmed and with my purse.  The officer who interviewed me said that believe it or not, I was one of the lucky ones.  I believed him (especially with all the shootings I kept hearing about on the radio).

Monday afternoon, I got hit by a car.  The ER doctors said that I was one of the lucky ones.  Then I told him about the attempted robbery less than 24 hours earlier.  He chuckled and said the coincidence was awesome.

I'm not sure words mean what people think they mean.

All I've wanted to write recently are sonnets.

They're all weird and/or awful.

No doubt this is indicative of some horrible disease.

I start getting cynical and then Awesome People start reappearing and reminding me why I'm still here.  

All the same, nothing changes for the better if people sit around thinking everything's peachy keen, and I'd rather the focus of dA sit primarily on lit, not on the community, which is where I see the focus as being now.  Not that community isn't important, but I'd rather the focus be on reading/writing/critiquing and have the community arise out of a shared passion and drive for knowledge instead of it being a bunch of friends who all like reading but are unable to engage critically with literature even though they all kind of know what imagery is.  That's my hope, anyway.  You can read more here: forum.deviantart.com/galleries…

Engagement is spreading among my loved ones like some horrible disease, though I remain immune.  If you'd like to get engaged, feel free to visit my page and see if you can pick some commitment germs to spread to your loved one.

I found an article about bad writing habits and cliches on dA that somehow evolved into almost fifteen pages of writing advice.  I may put sections up now and again, though not likely all at once; it's too much, and I do not have enough Writer Cred to be giving this kind of advice.

Have you ever read a blog or an article online that gave a name to a trend or pattern you'd noticed but didn't have a moniker for?  What was it?

All my journals are so impersonal and dull nowadays, so here's stuff and things from my life:

I moved into a room in a house, with all my belongings, which I have not had for five months.  I have more and fewer things than I thought.

My friend who helped me move says my house looks like an illustration from a Baum novel.

I have six roommates, four of whom are from Asia and four of whom are PhD students.  I want to get a PhD now, but I don't know what to study or where.

On Mondays, the other American and I teach English to three of our Asian housemates.

I taught a two-year-old how to walk like a monster.  Said two-year-old tried to count me as one of his family.  Said two-year-old is my favorite two-year-old.

I was approached to be in sitcom.

Instead of poetry, I am writing prose and song lyrics.  World gone mad.

I bought three pairs of shoes with a gift card, as I've worn down all my other pairs.  Two pairs of these are too beautiful to wear.  This is a first for me.  Hrm.

I commute four hours a day.

Nine Stories is fantastic.  So is Dubliners.  They remind me of pocket watches, the kind that let you open the back and see the workings.  I can see the gears turning, the construction of the story through the story, but I'm still surprised when the clock strikes twelve, which is as it should be.  I'm rusty at analysis.

Dvorak's "American" suite is crazy and amazing.  So is the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia, but less crazy and more amazing.

More fruits exist in the world than I had imagined.  Also, I now eat almonds voluntarily.

From the Wiki, this made me chuckle for several minutes:

"The club became legendary within philosophy because of a meeting on 25 October 1946 at Richard Braithwaite's rooms in King's, where Sir Karl Popper, another Viennese philosopher, had been invited as the guest speaker. Popper's paper was "Are there philosophical problems?", in which he struck up a position against Wittgenstein's, contending that problems in philosophy are real, not just linguistic puzzles as Wittgenstein argued. Accounts vary as to what happened next, but Wittgenstein was apparently infuriated and started waving a hot poker at Popper, demanding that Popper give him an example of a moral rule. Popper offered one—"Not to threaten visiting speakers with pokers"—at which point Russell had to tell Wittgenstein to put the poker down and Wittgenstein stormed out. It was the only time the philosophers, three of the most eminent in the world, were ever in the same room together. The minutes record that the meeting was 'charged to an unusual degree with a spirit of controversy.'"