Random Interjections

2010-02-21T22:32:00.000-08:00

I was on the bus the other day - two day...s ago
a boy and his mother - she must have been west indian - talking
She kept saying "my point is" and gently critiquing his teachers
he talked confidently about his grades and homework and
spoke as she, much gusto, much sensitivity, much clarity
"I had loads and loads and loads of..." "You were bent on..."
He was probably thirteen.
They laughed and were gentle. "My point is..."
I loved them for a whole fifteen minutes.

The Truth

2010-02-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

Today I want to be an angel - to enter an idea and better it
to investigate at the speed of light
I'm honest
I'll tell
a little injection of silver bliss mercury
and little slap of life
a little push to running
a little offsetting starvation
a little push
a little tug
a little grief
a little drug
a little smile
a little rest
a little angel
To kiss whom I want to kiss
in all the best ways
sing all the best praise
and get it right
no,
I'll be heavier human,
no,
I'll be a lighter human, heavier angel
anchor to earth
when I want to float away
i'll turn my face up and say
A little heavier, God
A little heavier

I'll just link to my sister's blog - read all the comments. Great stuff!

2010-01-13T14:38:00.000-08:00

http://theapronstage.com/2010/01/10/neither-lonely-nor-discontented/#comment-11639

Tokens. We decide what to do with what we are feeling: write Harry Potter, chuck ground turkey. We decide. When we have loved ones and are happy, we speak to them, talk to them, express to them. When we don't, when we are not, we touch our keyboards and write our books which may otherwise seem obsolete. We can choose to be creative to others outside our happiness-making-sphere (usually a spouse or significant other), but we may just use our happiness to chuck turkey. (I love that ground turkey comment by Anna down towards the bottom of the comments on my sister's blog.)
Love you all!

Beautiful Little Animated Short on Love

2010-01-02T19:30:00.001-08:00

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/k5FQBHYx72isKvTbF9

Read about it on:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/animators/more-hubley-goodness.html

I love the Smiths

2009-12-06T22:44:00.000-08:00

You may be thinking I mean the band - I do love them, but I really truly love the Warren, Emily, and Diana Smith Smiths with whom I:
- had Thanksgiving dinner: curried butternut squash soup with cilantro lemon yogurt, ham, scalloped potatoes with cream and italian mushrooms, cranberry sauce, rosemary rolls and red velvet cake for dessert.
- went to the Desert museum! It was beautiful and interesting: coyotes, snakes, desert flowers, parrot varieties.
- went to an ostrich ranch and took a monster truck tour there - as well as had many little lorokeet birds nibble on our necks, drink nectar from little cups in our hands, collide and poop above us in excitement. Diana was really fearless and marshaled the deer around her in the petting zoo adjoining the ostrich farm - her little hand completely sucked in by the slobbery deer mouths, she even got bit by an ostrich a the ostrich feeding cage and bounced back in no time to continue feeding them. We "fished" for ostriches as part of the monster truck tour of the ranch with grapefruit chunks and fishing poles. We fed goats that were in this two story shed thing with little holes that they stuck only their heads through - well, one stuck a paw through too. Diana stuck her head in through one of the empty ones! I know, this place sounds surreal - it is. Tucson is another realm, truly. Tim Burton's suburbia (from Edward Scissorhands) meets Dr. Seuss horticulture. The ranch is owned by self proclaimed red necks from Oklahoma. What else?
Ostrich meat is apparently miracle meat and
Ostriches are great with their diva-long theater eyelashes and their gray gulletty necks and over-dramatized ballet dancery stances with that killer middle toe with hooked nail! They are dinosaur birds who become docile when socks are put over their heads and whose beaks turn red during mating season. (Overwhelming amounts of experience occurred to me at that Ostrich ranch on the mountain down there north of Tucson.)
- went to In n' Out down there in Arizona. Provo has a new In n' Out and it is a phenomenon.
- had carne asada from a little Mexican place!
- watched Star Trek and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Enchanted
- talked, read scriptures, read stories to Diana, played with this wonderful little girl - she is precocious and loving, sensitive, sensible, and is fearless about dancing (like Warren somehow) and sharing like Emily (and Warren). This girl is doomed - by her wonderful parents - to be always wonderful.

2009-10-29T13:43:00.001-07:00

The Gospel makes sense to me right now as I read my little missionary brother's last missionary letter talking about Conference, General Conference, its joys and brightness.
We talk about light and joy a lot.
In a world of words, these are words to
exclaim
use
show
communicate
impress indelible
these are words

September 1, 2009

2009-09-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

like a purple wing
trying (in the grass) to
reconnect
to a twig, a leaf, a body
alone snips the twiggish faggot pile
glistening in wetness
clover nose hairs smelling

come! chairs
come fabric and festivity
come, on scissors and mark
your forest
with a grid

Two Joachim Poems

2009-08-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

June 28, 2009

Grief is grey
and solid to the touch
of my mouth
and your lip
that you left with me
I'll kneel
and know that this was once
clay
and softer than a fleece
or small green leaf
leave me more
but don't feed me
that greed
I've canceled
our contract
and you are mine

May 16, 2009

Beautiful were the words
she placed in a tin jar
and uncomely
unexpected, rather
but piecemeal
to enhance their new found
virginity
I donned a kneeling fancy
and carved a heart
(in niche)
for the two quelling dalmations
cantankerous
and biting

2009-04-02T02:33:00.000-07:00

I haven't felt angry like this in a long time. In a bodily way.
"Ich hab's nicht," I whimpered.
(But, I did.)
And it was so sunny. I was going to walk. I normally do.
"Siebzig Euro."
"Ich habe nur funf und zwanzig."
Don't ever pay up front. Though, I did. This morning.
I thumbed out my March card. He did not really care that two days ago I was legally riding the subway. But neither he nor I noticed that I was legally riding the subway when I got off the escalator to meet his sour expression. I quickly payed the 25 Euro I had in my wallet, trying to bypass the embarrassing moment, while he took my information brusquely.
I had been told the Viennese were not very nice about infractions, so my default posture was complete defenseless dejection. I was severely late for class in the first place. Did I deserve this chastisement from this style of system with which I am not inscrutably always aligned?
I walked up the several rounds of walks and stairs to where our classes are, my funny body filling up waterlike with anger. I had felt to turn back from my typical walking path and take another way, instead walking down Mariahilferstrasse past the subway stop. I crossed into the metro station, under the Strasse underground as I usually do, thus to avoid waiting for the light above and to check the length of wait for the Karlplatz bound train. The blinking yellow sign read two minutes for Karlspatz. Blink. It changed to one. Perfect. One minute to get down to the platform. One minute on the subway and a quick jaunt up the several escalators and through the smoky drug deals and up into sunny blue Opernhaus freedom in the heart of town.
The first escalator up, however, led us all up through three yellow vested men and one women. I don't have my April's pass. They were supposed to have given it to us already at the Institute. I am ready for this. This might even be funny. Money means nothing to me. Let me just look through my backpack for that one weeks punch pass I bought way back in January. That might save me. It's not here.
But money does mean something to me. It means seventy dollars. I'm not thinking about gelato or bread or tithing. Instead, I think that God wanted me to take this way. I get to feel this wateryness.
I walk into class and quickly explain what happened. Joseph, your pass is still good today. I hadn't realized. I walk to the door, close it, and run back outside and down to the man who took my twenty-five hard earned Euros and wrote down my name.
Yes, sir, I will wait to talk to someone higher. My German isn't very equipped for negotiating. I'll stand right next to him. He will be aware of me. He will see me while he checks the many passes of those coming up the escalators now and he will not be brusque to those without a pass with me in the triangle.
It's like the sunny day I joyfully let my bicycle cruise down from the temple.
Visit the Nibleys.
I turned course with bright beatings in my chest and loosened my body's grip on the bike. Stadium Way. I could see their driveway curve before me as I accelerated down towards their pink bricked house, my body loose. I reached the up-curve of their driveway and turned up towards it only to find myself pressed against the pink brick of their driveway under my bike. A mini-van stopped to call out at me if I needed help. My skin was ruffled up on my pinkie in sharp blood softened pain.
I picked up, rang the doorbell. No one home. I biked home in the cold blowing wind, my new blue pants ripped and my body stinging open. I (blowing) blew down, down to my pink cinder block house to my from Hong Kong bandaging roommate Wallace in my green bathroom, and then to my dark cornered bottom bunked bed.
Joseph, turn and now I will hurt you. It won't be much, but consuming. For a moment.

A Post! A Post!

2009-03-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

So, really, this has been a perfect trip. I know. This is cliche to say, but, I never thought - in my fundamentally nit-picky way, that I would.

And here I sit, not knowing where to start.

Here's some Marissa chat:

Me:
I really loved Budapest
I think you would too, but you will have your own experience with Budapest one day, right?
It is grand and crumbly and grand
and crumbly
at the same time
it is a grand layout
but, they haven't cleaned up the World War II bullet holes
and I loved this
We stayed in a bright little hostel on the second floor of this little courtyard apartment building with old old wrought iron handrails and old cracked red paint
and tiles in the courtyard floor
Marissa:
oo, it sounds wonderful
Me:
and there were machine gun holes all across the wall of the courtyard
the house across the street was an abandoned wreck
and that whole neighborhood
with lovely little weathered people living and watering plants and walking dogs etc.
and the food was good
in a sincere way
and there still were mustaches
and really tall handsome dark men and little dark grey haired women
and punks
it had much more of an alternative groove - like a much-cooler-than-me dark earthy subculture than Vienna
When I am in Vienna, I feel like "I can do Vienna" in my cocky way:)
But, Budapest was raw
and it has some Islamic patterns and Russian this and that and the Hapsburgian stateliness

And from my chat with Mom (talking through Rebekah's account):

I am going to take my cute little Hungarian maid/cook to the opera for my birthday
She is excited.
Rebekah:
What are you going to see?
Me: Actually, we'll probably see Guys and Dolls in German at the Volksoper
I hear it is really good and I think she'll love it
Rebekah: That makes me laugh!
Me: There are some other blockbuster concerts this week
Rebekah: Have you seen other things these past few weeks?
Me: Yes!
It has been wonderful, Mom.
You would love living here in so many ways:
the Church is so wonderful here,
the Austrians do the gospel really well when they do it
People stay after Church talking and hugging for over an hour
The Musikverein is a beautiful temple of a concert house
and the Spirit has been strong there every time I've gone
And standing tickets are only 5 dollars
I can see you going often
You can usually sit down for the second half
Rebekah:
You are really imagining us there aren't you
Me:
I saw Thomas Quasthoff sing with the Berlin Baroque Ensemble
you need to Youtube him
Bach
I almost cried during one of the instrumental pieces actually
and I almost cried when Seiji Ozawa conducted Tchaikowsky's Eugene Onegin at the Staatsoper a few weeks ago
I did.

No, Budapest really was grand. There is a beautiful street modeled after the Champs Elysees, Andrassy Ut. The city swarms right up to both edges of the Danube, one side very hilly - Buda, and the other flat and totally visible to the very hilly side - Pest. Buda has beautiful views and several castles and cathedrals. The cityscape is quite lovely with the gothic snowflake Parliament building with its red dome "cap," churches, and each individual building is an old elegant (sometimes crumbly) friend.

Vienna is a music box. It is mostly white, and various shades of cream, with little shocks of ornamentation: jugendstil - Vienna's own art nouveau variety, indications of Klimt around, bright neon green new spring grass, funny raw modern art, and silly grafiti - have you seen the picture of the "paris versus vienna" graffiti statement? Silly graffiti. Other eastern European cities have a much more earthy, poorer, variety with really bright wizzing graffiti.

And yesterday was a beautiful day. Really our first. I went to the giant flea market at the Naschmarkt for the first time - just a short jog down the hill behind our house - and it truly was epic. All the antiques you'd hope to see in a center of hundreds of years of European old people: clocks and maps and music and instruments and lamps and coats and watches and harmonicas and chairs and clothes and dishes. The Naschmarkt is a must go to destination for food and at all: aisles and aisles of produce, dried foods, and pastries, and fish, as well as lovely outdoor restaurants and cafes. I snuck up the breezy Naschmarkt to the Seczession museum where I finally saw Klimt's Beethoven frieze as well as some interesting and lame modern exhibits and installations beholden to the mission of the Sezession as a venue for the neglected and avant-garde. Look up the frieze and its abouts. It was inspiring to me.

And now I must leave Dr. Vincent's and the bright comfort of his internet. I can't get the internet at the apartment where I am staying, which has been a lovely insulation to my being truly in Vienna. Did I tell you that I am staying with descendants of Hapsburg royalty?

In short, I like it here. Two more weeks, a trip to Salzburg and Italy - we're not very sad about this - and then I am home in New York. Two days later I fly to Utah for Spring Term. Phew!

Rebekah:
Jane said a funny thing today in Church. She referred to Joseph Smith's birthday being soon, then she laughted and said, oh no-I got him mixed up with Joseph Olson, another important Joseph!
Me:
That's really cute
and flattering
:)
I wish Rachel [and everyone] could be here to listen to all the music
it's not a very big city either
It has helped my music abilities so much to regularly listen to accomplished musicians
it is really inspiring
no wonder Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, so many others lived here

Inspiring.

2009-03-03T15:43:00.000-08:00

I think that I talk too much. I get very excited and tell everyone who will listen the stories that I have quickly prepared and determined exciting. Exciting. Exciting. Exciting. And then it is hard to blog about them after they have been so worked, so expended. It is an indulgence that I take - all this excitement, as it is an indulgence for those who listen to me. Thank you.
It works better in spurts and in speed. A hit. A whiff. An attack! I was here and then there, I hit a low, I looked up, sparks, and an epiphany!
And now I have processed epiphanies: hard discs of biased me-ness.
It sounds better to tell you that I am in a cafe: Phil. Not Phil's. Phil. Non-smoking. Lots of retro lamps, all for sale. Lots of new and second hand books, all for sale. And a charming internet password: clapyourhands. And nice waiters. I got an herbal tea, but waited too long. The water got cold. And the tea didn't dissolve. I know, older siblings, I could send it back to be reheated. Or I could drink luke warm distantly flavored tea while feverishly using my rare internet time.
I've been a little sick. It has been lovely. I've let myself live the zen day I really needed. A quick dart out for a loaf of really dark brown crusty bread daring me not to be able to cut it. A long sh-bath. (The water never really gets hot enough for a bath in our antique tub with its own little heating tank hanging above to the right. I need to hold the shower head relatively close to my coffined body to get any sensation of warmth, and that, only one body region at a time. It's kind of really okay with me. I do bath exercises as well, still, Dan.) Homework.
The music in Phil is great. The other night, there was a DJ here playing only lounge music from 1960s America.

From a G-chat with Marissa

2009-02-23T03:04:00.000-08:00

[About Vienna]
Ich: There are fun differences
everywhere
their default building materials here are much more colorful and interesting
pastels more often used etc
apparently japan owns a bunch of vienna
19:40
and the russians
which you can kind of tell in some places
I have a hungarian maid!
she is hunched and smiling and
repeats herself incessantly
[Her name is Eva and she is beautiful. She often tells me in Hungarian to eat, in the diminutive form we've discovered - it sounds like "hum hum." Eva stirs and bends and has a younger girl's gait. Her chocolate confections are deadly and she nursed me back to health, when I was sick last week, with soup, toasted bread, and mandarin oranges which she brought on a tray. She shows us pictures of her schoen Mann. She has fine dark eyebrows and brown hair cropped straight around the base of her neck.]
anyway
Ich:
I´m sure the Viennese don´t really like that about japan and russian- they seem to be very proud of their way of life
19:43
Marissa:
yeah, i'm sure any country would feel that way
which is partly why so many countries aren't entirely happy about us
this weekend i will meet his parents

[...]

Ich:
and water
19:50 there is this wonderful friend here that i´ve made
Joachim from Norway
he told me this dream that I´ll tell you
he´s had it several times
19:52
he is desperately choosing between bread and something else, I´ll just say a tomato
it was something good like that
and he has to choose and he is very tortured
19:53
and he wakes up and he remembers
that there was a glass of water there too
19:56
Marissa: what does he think about the dream?
19:57
Ich: isn´t it lovelz
y
the water is what he really wants
i think
I think about the dream:
i fuss and fuss between bread and tomatoes
right now i need some water
[Joachim (pronounced You - ah - keem) reminded me recently that, in order to do what God would have me do, I must be willing and ready to both act or not act in the particular way. I must be like an archer's tightened muscle ready. A pencil. Joachim has also introduced me to Koans. Common in Eastern Asia, Koans lead one to peace and enlightenment. It is best not to talk about these Koans too much I find, but to accept, explore, assume them, "sit with" them.]
19:59
Marissa: it is a beautiful dream
he sounds like a beautiful person
did you meet him at church?
Ich: at the outreach institute for the young single adults
20:00
they have a beautiful faciility here for institute and ysa activities downtown in a store front
it is old and stone and white inside with nice lighting and furnitiure and many rooms and computers
i am here right now
and a piano livign room place
and waffle night on fridazs
Marissa: oh wow
that does sound nice

A Week And Two Days

2009-02-01T09:18:00.000-08:00

Fasting grumpiness is in full force, but I will write this blog.

My Fair Lady auf Deutsch

I saw My Fair Lady at the Volksoper. All the performances there are in German without subtitles. It is a white and red clean pristine house with a fusion traditional and modern exterior with VOLKSOPER graphically inscribed in large cropped letters across the modern section of the outside. The standing tickets, stehplatz karten, are only 1.50 Euros and we were able to sit down on the benchlike standing rows - as no one was in the second row - up in the very center back of this lovely welcoming theatre. I was sitting next to this lovely Austrian lady from Graz who explained to me that the accents were all Austrian, but very diverse in their origin - I asked her about the opening scene, which of course features "poor" accents from all over England. She had seen My Fair Lady in Germany and the accents were all German, Berlin accents etc. - very interesting. I asked her if Eliza indeed sounded bad in this production, because it wasn't very obvious to me. She said: "Oh yes!" Henry Higgins was great; Eliza was good, lovely, and lithe; and the direction was traditional and pleasant. A fine Viennese orchestra brought out the European-ness of this 1950s era American Musical - and put My Fair Lady in a new more iridescent light. They "copped" out and had Eliza attack Henry Higgins with kisses at the very end of the show - not quite as subtle as the film's ending - but the audience was filled with grade school children in for the opera and so it may have worked better for them. I had to laugh, however, during this last most serious moment. She really jumped on him.

The Volksoper.

People go to the opera here! There is a fat fat program available each month at the Tourist center downtown by the Staatsoper filled with schedules for operas at the many opera houses (from grand to chamber to experimental to everyday); plays; clubs; musicals; comedy; all sorts of exhibitions; museums; cabaret; balls - that people really go to in palaces dressed up, and on and on. It really is a magical city in this way. People honor the city and thus it fills with magic. The magic fills the opera houses and concert halls that I have been to. I can sense that people here in Vienna feel a very real honor and responsibility to live up to the traditions and beauties gifted them by their predecessors. I can almost hear their souls saying one could do nothing more than live in Vienna enjoying and honoring and teaching their children to enjoy and honor these institutions and live a worthwhile life.

We went to Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera last night at the Staatsoper. Yet again, I magically found myself front and center of the stehplatz listening to world class singers (Ramon Vargas, the famous tenor was debuting the role of the King last night) and musicians - the conductor is fantastic, very sensitive and athletic at the same time.

On Thursday night we went to the Musikverein to hear the Wiener Symphoniker (there is also the Wiener Philharmoniker) play Brahm's 3rd Symphony; a Beethoven Concerto for Piano, Cello, and Violin; and a beautiful beautiful beautiful spiraling butterfly wing unfurling Passacaglia by Webern. The Musikverein is a temple. Gold busts hold up a frescoed ceiling in this romanesque box of beautiful noise.

The Musikverein.

I've walked so much. My right knee hurts, which is concerning. I've eaten pastries and pizza, cream puffs, streudels, pumpkin soup, potatoes and pork with zucchini sauce, bread, yogurt, lots of corn flakes (this seems to be the breakfast cereal of choice here), an avacado, cakes, little things, big things, and now spaghetti with the whole BYU class is waiting. I love you all.

3 Diary Excerpts

2009-01-26T11:57:00.000-08:00

"So, here I am in a very smoky cafe in Vienna - my legs hurt - I jogged all morning to see what I could see.
Mariahilferstrasse - a young lady girl woman, probably 19 - approached me clipboard in hand singing 'Help I need somebody, help not just anybody. I need you!' My first thought was: 'She knew that I'm an English speaker.' But, of course, her little Beatles rendition spilled into very German pleas for help with the World Health Organization (?) I think...or was it something to do with animals? What's the AARP? ARP? So, I said, in a deeper more gruff tone than I had expected: "Actually, I'm American. I don't speak German." (I was shy about not speaking German when expected to.) "Oh!" She laughed and smiled (she was cute), I think in recognition that her little song fell on an English speaker's ears. And now I'm trying not to inhale. It's a good thing that I took Claritin D this morning. But, this food looks so good. 1/23/09

And now I'm waiting for opera tickets. My knees would be hurting but the bar on this second aisle of the standing room line is compatibly low. Some of the obvious old timers at the front of the line - and one young asian looking girl - have stools, collapsible, - they take them to work, I'm sure - but one man has a homemade wooden stool. He is very fun so far, saying things to his Austrian brother, on his collapsible metal stool, from different languages: 'Qu'est-ce que c'est?!' And I'm pretty sure he just said "Awesome!" I'm earlier than even they said to be at the ticket booth - there is only one curl to the line so far and I'm not at the end. I think I'll make it.
And now I'm in the Staatsoper Cafe. There is this strange ritual- People with standing tickets, after buying them, line up to claim their place in the hall by tying scarves or leaving something to the lower bar of the leaning bar. All this is administered by an authoritarian little woman with white cropped hair. I left my hat and now I have fifty minutes in the cafe to drink some peppermint tea and write in my 'drawing' book. The pies and mousses are tempting. 1/23

Well, this has been an evening of confusion. Here I am at the Volkstheatre, not the Volksoper, about to watch Die Fledermaus the play, neither of which I wanted to see. What substantial is there about Die Fledermaus other than Strauss's music?
I read on Wikipedia that Vienna is more than 99/98% Austrian. At one point, it had had numbers of Hungarians and Yugoslavians up to 12% or something like that - I'm making this up now.
I thought this would be a small attendance. When I first sat down, there were very few. The theatre will be filled!
Well, I got the last standing ticket, it would have been the first, but, in a communication deficient interchange with a sales lady earlier, I had been led to believe the standing room ticket door was outside. The hour and a half of waiting by myself was when I drew the Natural History Museum at the end of the book. Naturalisch. Wait, I'm hearing a trumpet! Maybe this is Strauss's opera after all?!
So far, it's an arrangement for band instruments - cabaret style. IS that a tango version of his music? 1/24

And now I'm in my host family's house - the Bernthaler-Garzuly's of Austro-Hungarian Imperial Descent. Large portraits of noblemen and noblewomen line the halls of this tall celing antique laden home - Franz Josef's childhood rocker sits next to the front door. He was Hannah's deceased husband's great-grandfather - so, that's big. They are a ball going family and very orderly and kind." 1/25

An American in Vienna

2009-01-23T02:38:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the cheesy title, but I am in Vienna! For half a day now. Well, really a quarter day.

Vienna! Everything is placed: Billboards off the highway coming in from the airport were low and in the brush and trees. Tall tall industrial things: smokestacks and factories were married in village clusters with pastel colored tall European edifices and churches and such.

I got to the Westbanhauf station by bus and checked in to the Do Step Inn Hostel just around the corner. Alexandra, a lovely Romanian, welcomed me and spent quite a while showing me maps. In the bunk room I met a young Polish fellow dropping by Vienna on his way back to England where he works and an Australian college student backpacking around Europe during her summer break.

I felt stinky and tired so I decided to...run! I only saw one other jogger and he looked American - as I ran first to the address of the residence where I am to stay for the three months that I am here starting Sunday night. The street: Mariahilferstraße! This is like Canal Street in New York, in that it is a hip shopping district (have I told you that I don't know Manhattan that well?), with the big beautiful exception that the white ornately ornamented building in which I am to live is old and beautiful.

These two pictures came up when I googled my address for images. I think my residence was completely white, so these may not be right, but you get the idea.

Another picture of Mariahilferstraße.

This is very exciting. I ran around to the State Opera House - the Staatsoper - which is beautiful and around the corner and across the street from the school where must of my classes will be held. I returned from running to shower to enter my bunk room to four gruff looking, but jolly, Romanian men who asked me first for a cigarette and then asked me questions about where I come from and New York. I'm glad that I will be there to mitigate the fact that the sixth roommate is a helpless young Aussie girl.

The Staatsoper.

The city feels real to me. The lighting is different - I'm telling myself this to explain why I can't seem to orient myself coordinally. Much of what I ran through feels like a denser Washington D.C. maybe until I got to almost the very center with its cobblestones, churches, columns, and pubs. There is shadiness side by side with the beauty and interest and quaintness that I could see during my jog, but I can tell that the Viennese are careful and design oriented, smart and lyrical. All this from a first morning jog! And it is only noon. And I heard someone doing lip trills through her scarf and ear-muffed head as she entered the Staatsoper.

The city is more condensed than I thought, but still expansive enough to feel monumental and full. I think that I will be able to walk or jog most of the streets of downtown Vienna by the end of my stay here. Maybe I'll be able to show you my progress. Maybe I'll be boy-scoutish and mark off with a sharpie on my cool little tourist map all the streets I've explored. If I had a camera (!) I would already have uploaded pictoral details of my quarter-day adventure: my blue and yellow painted stucco hostel, my warm clean bed and shower, my Romanian bunkmates, my beautiful palacial residence starting this Sunday, the Staatsoper, and everything. I would have just kept clicking and then animated it stop-animation style. It would have been quick, because I was running.

Stephansplatz. That is Stephan's Place, not Stephan splatzes - a faux verb pronounced shpl-ah-ts. Du splatzt?

From here: I need to go exchange money, get a weeklong train pass, and then I am going to wander. I'll probably eat a mid-afternoon meal out somewhere and then try and get standing room tickets to Verdi's La Forza del Destino at the Staatsoper. Then I will come back to my little room at the Do Step Inn and sleep.

More to come!

Here I Go

2008-11-29T23:21:00.000-08:00

Writing a blog post from scratch - not copied or pasted from an email or a scratch elsewhere - is new to me tonight.
I have been practicing stream of conscious writing. Doing it. Repeatedly.
Gobble cuisine to fullest extension of my nervous innard walking style. Did y'all grapple with the gimping gourd of crumpled tether ball beef wellington. If food news is new, I'll know it and then some. To boot your father incredible backwards typing I'll dream you one more sigh up and don't come back before it's more than alright and more than airtight to be you. Call! And finalize the motion. Jennifer deserves a break for once with her terra cotta infirmities to please the almost noxious waves of plaid verbage that racked her apple pie mocha latte glass to shingling dynasties or dinosaurs of inner wreckage to please and to beckon me. Indefinitely.

I have this theory. That to continue to do this will strain my writing to a fine pulp of beautiful condensation. Distillation. Reduced. Reused. Mounted on a chalky platter sky high and wishbone dancing crooked happiness walking. Loveliness drinking to all that want their there...

3 Food-imonies

2008-11-12T20:26:00.000-08:00

I think about these stories often (and they are probably warped and folkloricly large from years of steeping in my mind not being told): An Apple Pie Story, A Brownie Story, and...there's a third...

First, The Apple Pie Story

Picture a thirty-ish year old mother of three, of supple strength and brown shoulder-length hair, and anxious over list-loads of plans, tasks, and ornate self-imposed expectations always. Three children. It is snowing outside hard.
It originated in her mind to make a pie. Two even. This is strange.
That second pie should go to ____, who we don't know so well, who lives behind our house. But, these wintry Salt Lake City blocks are big.
She bundles up her three not-so-bundly children, baby remains in one hand, pie in the other, and then she - in lieu of trekking with handcart and crew around the block, hoists herself, baby, and pie over tall white fence and lands at the back door of said neighbor-stranger woman pie recipient.
Answering the back door, ____ gives a strange face to thirty-ish year old mother with baby and pie at back door, but quickly gets over it in Mormon neighborly fashion. Mom-supple-strength says "I felt like I should bring you a pie." The pie is hot and _____ woman takes it quietly grateful and calmly quiet.
3 days.
"Julie, did you know that I had a miscarriage the morning that you brought that pie over?"
"No-"
"I had prayed for comfort from the Lord."

2nd story:

AND ONCE, my mom felt impressed to bring brownies to a sister in the branch. Not there, mom put the circle paper plate of brownies into the square mailbox. Sister X was in diabetic shock in the upstairs hallway inside above, groping down the stairs bannister holding, she felt God say "Go to the mailbox!" And stumbling reaching into the mailbox felt squishy soft brownieness to which she sucked inhaled sugary body freedom.

What is that third story? I think it has to do with pineapple. Pretty sure am I.

2008-11-07T10:03:00.001-08:00

In response to http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,705260374,00.html we must acknowledge the weighty beautiful abstraction that is language. Like bombs, profanity can abstractly do real damage. Vague cloak-like bombs intended to suffocate, pummel, and damage, stunt, and whack, and murder: I believe language to be as powerful as the intention behind it. And this is not an individual arena. We agree that swear words are these wounding things. And that is enough for now.
Oh, the wonderful work that is word definition! To assign and attribute life, experience, and transcendent color to a word is to bless it as a little tool. The holy rite of word assignation sweeps blankets across the sky in which we recognize constellations. Together we shoot darts and pluck the same flowers orderly in one universe. I climb through your ear canal to know you and the wallpaper that you lick (anybody read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?)

Chocolate Cake - Chapter I

2008-10-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

At the edge of the grave Mara peered in. "Too deep," she said. "Too deep."
Moisture had collected the length of the dirt of the grave down. Worms from miles away knew about this deep grave and were coming.
Chocolate cake was Emiline's favorite; good chocolate cake: chocolate cake which bordered on pudding in its moistness. An icing which neither boasted nor distracted from the molecules beneath it - this was her cake.
Emiline neither knew nor cared about the funeral. Her heart had been startled by different affairs that night. Wind and rain had surely penetrated her feelings of safety. Water had trespassed, had snuck beneath the coatings of light blue paint of her shutters. How had she come to be baking loaves of peanut butter this night?
Bennett was in the basement sleeping - the thrashings of his dreams looming in the dark room above him: spatulas of chocolate, dogs, and Sheila mixed like the kneadings of dessert breads being made in the kitchen above.
Emiline wielded the metallic blades of her small white mixer.
Why had the grave been dug so deep? As if a perfect machine had extracted a slice of the earth so clean that ants were envious. It was not so deep that a cross section of the entire sphere of the earth at that place would have disclosed it or that looking down it one could not see its bottom or whether it was contained. A pure white light shone up a few dozen feet at the nethermost tip of this fine geometried hole; a pure white light.
Bennett was summoned and awakened. A perfect ding had sounded and a perfect cake in Bennett's eyes was lifted steaming from a tight experienced porcelain oven. Carving cross sections, the baby was lifted to its high chair next to the occasionally rattling window. Thomas, the two year old entered, rubbing his eye with a gentle fist. Dings had sounded in all their hearts. Red-eared aproned Emiline kissed them all with her mind.
It was as if the rain could not reach the extremity of the deep hole and it did not. It was even as if something happened between the knees of the girl named Mara at the border of the edge of the hole and the body of the space in the hole that marked not a rest but an immunity to the thrashings of the storm that even the worms in the ground (especially) knew of.
And the trees knew.
Murder does not factor into our story. Murder does not factor into our death. Unless the chocolate cake be murdered. Unless the dirt that Emiline trodded upon during her preparations to cook be part of the wrinkling of the boundaries of things that signals a murder.

Why "The Life and Times of Joseph?"

2008-04-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

Originally, I wanted to post biographical sorts of things as they happened. However, I usually feel inspired only to place words carefully - a poetic sort of experience. Which is interesting, because I have been reading about Lev Vygotsky.
And also interesting because I picture myself with my chin upturned, my neck extended, and my chest out.
To accurately portray my thoughts is a great challenge and dilemma, even, to me. Why do I do it? To ordain my life with symbols possibly. I like this one. To allow others to join with me in this ordinance - excretion of syrupy...
~~I hate to censor.~~

2008-04-16T10:47:00.000-07:00

Pivot/s
I have a pivot:
a probing orb
I send it up and along the seams of my knowledge:
the little boundaries
where glued up
and reduced
a ribbon refurls to
a point

It's All Me!

2008-03-20T21:28:00.000-07:00

Something about the way he walked endeared me to him
the craning of the neck to look at the moon or
the way his knees jostled extra
like if you looked upside down from a ten-year-old's body on a slide
you would see how much he bounced

2006-10-11T20:19:00.000-07:00

Don't you want a place, a school, a center where you can be the dostoevskyan idiot that you really are? Sometimes I feel so afraid of learning, of thinking. And sometimes I think that I'm in an institution of people afraid of this too. Many of them are my teachers.

NEW

2006-09-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

I've been given a new idea, a new rubric,
standard,
principle:
Michel Gondrie and Osvaldo Golijov
and their childlikeness:
vibrant symbioticlosenesslove
children dancing

Upon Reading Wallace Stevens

2006-08-31T12:28:00.000-07:00

Working for yourself,
self employed,
your own boss--
an evidence of and
movement toward
...
Utopia?

Left Behind

2006-07-08T15:44:00.000-07:00

In the educational dialogues of our nation, there seems to be implicated a party that I am not aware of. Declarations of expectations are boldly enumerated; banners of standards waved; war cries issued; all directed to whom? There are the obvious players that I think of: students, teachers, their families, the community. In fact, these are the only players that I can think of.
The Bush administration, through No Child Left Behind, seems to be doing the best at making an attack: the schools themselves. This is a hazy opponent. "We want accountability from our schools!" From the buildings themselves? We are failing to address directly that which we need and from whom we need it.

His first year there, my cousin Anthony was regarded as one of the finest special education teachers the secondary educational institution employing him had ever seen. Now he’s working with his father-in-law contracting real estate. Some egregious secretarial error mis-sent him a pink slip? Nope. Anthony was not paid enough to comfortably support his wife and two children. He may not have been the primary casualty; Anthony left many children behind when he quit his teaching job this past year.
How could we have prevented that?

Color Theory

2006-07-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

They invited.
the dryness in my mouth, I mean,
and
the distant shifting of the sky, uneven in the east

I did not wake any others
have I the right to invite, who am not host?
The sand warm underneath,
my arms inside my shirt,
I am ready
to begin my lesson.

A fifth of the horizon
touched-
two fingers on two hands on the lip of a glass,
moving slowly apart slowly
utmost flirtation

orange
Two thirds!
Three quarters!
The dome of the observatory closes
hiding the stars slowly and cooly

mauve and pink liquid
banners of brilliant luminous white,
fanfares of red,
are soon to be exchanged
for simpler fare:
checkered blue and white
a breakfast spread

Did I forget the King?
He was there;
A Distant Traveler, upwards
Social Climber!
Too Arrogant for practice rooms,
He chose to blow his trumpet on the highest mountain,
does that subtle dance of his
an african man in white
cool jazz
aloof and unaware
that some might not care
that
he is so beautiful.

4:17-6:35am, June 24th, 2006

Welcome to my Blog!

2006-06-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

Welcome! Welcome! Welcome to my Blog!