Eliot was wrong.
April is not the cruellest month. It is February. But I will spare you the whining about how much I disklike midterms, lab, group projects, and cold. I have so much to be thankful for that complaining is ridiculous.

Over the past few weeks I have started to pay more attention to what is going on in the rest of the world, not just the petty corrupt sniveling of US scandals. I was inspired by the successful student campaign to get Yale to divest from companies that do business with Sudan. The cartoon controversy has gone from absurd to heartbreaking, and Iraq, the cradle of civilization, is being rent asunder. Then of course there are the Olympics to remind you that Georgia is a country, not just a state, and the little Tibetan prayer flags that came in the mail asking for a donation for the pursuit of religious freedom. These prayer flags are now on my wall, and when I think of them I feel the sorrow and the hope of the whole world.

I've been going to church a lot and have been a part of a new campus small group ministry that began last month. The girl who started it is a senior Anthro major (woot woot!) who is planning to become a UU minister. This all has rekindled old ideas for me. Sometimes I see a little glimmer of an alternate reality for me. I saw it before when I was burnt out on archaeology and school, as I am right now, but I have also felt it in a positive setting, like when I met Laura and learned she was applying to Starr King, or when last week's sermon at USNH almost made me cry.

In my meditation after yoga last night I tried to reconcile the conflicting desires and callings within myself and delve beneath the stress of the day to see what I really was feeling. I didn't find an answer, other than "You can always be free; don't put trust in plans; let yourself shine," which, like a cheap fortune cookie, could mean anything.

I want to dance my life wildly and purely and, in some small way, make the world better. There is so much time, and yet so little.

Winter Haiku 2
Holy freaking crap.
There is a mouse in my room.
Holy freaking crap.

The World Has Gone Insane!!!
Absurdity reigns.

First of all, people are dying because of cartoons.

In case you haven't heard, the Vice President shot someone. Of course it was an accident, but a pretty serious one, made humorous only by the fact that it was Cheney. Why is this such a big deal? The Vice President has effectively killed thousands of people in Iraq, and that was on purpose.

Less absurd is the fact that Jack Abramoff has ties to Karl Rove. Who still hasn't gotten indicted. Figures.

Most absurd of all, the Democrats are still so helpless that they have turned to George Lucas to help them. What is going on???????

Also, God has sent Australia a plague of toads.

A Winter Haiku
Nighttime snow creeps in
Through the window cracks, and melts
All over my books.

...


Santa Barbara's looking pretty good right now.

Tidings of great joy
My brother was accepted at Pomona College!

And I switched browsers to Firefox. I had to Force Quit stupid Safari today three times before I realized it was a fossil. The whole computer feels lighter!

And we're having a blizzard. Gotta love February.

Daughter of Elysium
Now Playing: Awe. Just echoes of awe.
Just. Heard. Beethoven's 9th. Live.

What a thing that was. Goosebumps in waves. Seeing Beethoven's last symphony performed was a bit like watching Return of the King for the first time. It's big, loud, and has at least one too many climaxes, but damn that stufff makes you cry. You know exactly what's coming, and yet when it does come it floors you. It was one of those moments when you realize why cliches have become cliches. And to think that Beethoven was deaf when he wrote that.

This was the Yale Symphony Orchestra, the Yale Glee Club, and four very talented professional vocalists. It cost five dollars. Five dollars for a little glimmer of heaven!

I can't imagine what the very first performance of this must have been like. I mean, this was the first time the human voice had been used like the other instruments in a symphony. And it was crazy! And long! And staggering. The first three movements, while containing their own experimental components, must have done little to prepare that first audience for the emotional explosion of the fourth. Beethoven (and Mozart as well) to me is proof that there is something in this cosmos that is simply beyond our grasp except in the rarest of moments. It's just plain magical.

(Fact: In order that listeners could enjoy the entire work in one sitting, the 74-minute 9th Symphony was used to set the standard capacity for a compact disc.)

My friend was waxing poetic about this: "It's like, when you think about the human mind and the ability to write music, and on top of that the ability to build these beautiful instruments, and the fact that all people can and do make this sublime thing called music...you wonder how people can ever hate one another."

"All people become brothers where your gentle wing alights."

If only.

I think I've redeemed myself from the fact that last night I witnessed the U.S. debut of Gunther and the Sunshine Girls. I feel like I've experienced the entire course of human evolution in 24 hours. And so to bed.

So about that optimism thing...
I didn't watch the State of the Union speech, but I read it and laughed out loud. Here's what I learned from the noble words of our cheerleader-in-chief:

1. "Hindsight alone is not wisdom, and second-guessing is not a strategy." Damn, that was almost profound. Except that it wasn't.

2. We're going to war with Iran.

"If this country were to become isolationist and withdraw and say we don't care about conditions of life elsewhere, we're not only ceding the ground to terrorists, we're not doing our duty as a compassionate nation." So we're blowing people up out of compassion. It all makes sense now.

"...and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons. America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats." Rah, rah, sis-boom-bah, blow those guys to Fal-lu-jah! Um, which world is it we've been rallying? Britain and Poland?

3. We're addicted to oil! I had no idea.

"the Advanced Energy Initiative — a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy..." 22%? Sounds really advanced.

"...we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy." Mm, those tasty coal-fired plants. Tastes great with that wood-fired corn which we use to make "ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips, stalks, or switch grass." Clearing all that brush at the ranch has really enhanced his enthusiasm for clean energy.

3. Next on the Liberal Agenda: Centuars!!
"Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research — human cloning in all its forms ... creating or implanting embryos for experiments ... creating human-animal hybrids..."
What is this guy talking about??

4. "Before history is written down in books, it is written in courage." Now that is just bad poetry.

Other news: Alito is in. RIP Coretta Scott King. Yay for the Academy for nominating thoughtful, liberal films. The Peru/Yale controversy made the NYT. And the world turns.

"They cannot conquer forever."
-Frodo, LOTR IV.6

Good news.

Americans — by a 16-point margin, 51 to 35 percent — now say the country should go in the direction in which the Democrats want to lead, rather than follow Bush. That's a 10-point drop for the president from a year ago, and the Democrats' first head-to-head majority of his presidency.

The Republican Party is feeling the pinch as well. The Democrats lead them by 14 points, 51 to 37 percent, in trust to handle the nation's main problems, the first Democratic majority on this question since 1992. And the Democrats hold a 16-point lead in 2006 congressional election preferences, 54 to 38 percent among registered voters, their best since 1984.

Independents — quintessential swing voters — prefer the Democrats' direction over Bush's by 51 to 27 percent, and favor the Democrat over the Republican in congressional races by 54 to 31 percent (the latter result is among independents who're registered to vote.).


Think this GOP fatigue can hold out til November?

If we don't get attacked, maybe.

:)

Not totally irrelevant...
Llamas live in Peru.

Am I crazy if I find this incredibly funny?

The king of procrastination tools, facebook.com, has a new feature called Pulse, which compares the most commonly listed preferences at your school to those of the rest of the facebook community. As a consumer and sometime mocker of popular culture as well as an anthropologist and (let's face it) a Yale snob, I was fascinated by this.

Music:
How mainstream Yale am I? The Beatles topped the Eli list, which also contained my listed favorites Radiohead, Dylan, U2 and the Shins. Also, I like all the other bands on the list. While I was actually suprised how much overlap there was with the pooled schools list - where are the rappers? - the differences still spoke volumes. Incubus, Green Day and Sublime...are we in 1998? And who's Fall Out Boy?

Movies:
Once again, I am so Yale. LOTR took the top spot, only making 8th on the combined list. These lists had fairly little in common. Most notable was the absence of raunchy or dumb comedy on the Yale list: Zoolander may be stupider than Wedding Crashers, Old School,Anchorman, and Napoleon Dynamite, but it's Yale's only preferred laugh-fest other than Office Space, which made both lists and should not be grouped with the aforementioned films. What makes Zoolander so appealing to Yalies? Is it the mockery of stupid, beautiful people? Hmm.

T.V.:
Woah! Suddenly the playing field is equalized. And of course, not owning a TV or watching it that much when I did own one, I'm a little left out in this category. I'm shocked that The Daily Show only came in 8th on Yale's list, but not that it didn't register in mainstream America. Why do we all watch the same TV but not the same movies?

Books:
Ah, literature - Yale's chance to demonstrate our intellectual tastes by selecting, um, Harry Potter as our favorite read. These lists differ surprisingly little, with the notable exceptions of The Bible as No. 3 on the collective list, and Yale's slight bent towards classics (Austen, Heller, Dostoyevsky) at the expense of light fare like Angels and Demons and The Notebook. Interestingly, Tolkien shows up on the masses list but not Yale's, despite the former's enthusiasm for the movies.

Clubs and Organizations:
This is not really a category in which valid comparisons can be made, since most college groups go by school-specific acronyms. But the lists are telling nonetheless, especially the national one. Frighteningly, College Republicans ranks eight spots higher than College Democrats. And at the top of the list is the job "Lifeguard." Who knew?


Hometowns:
Finally, I understand. The Yale list couldn't have surprised me less. But to think that Houston is number one on the whole facebook and L.A. is only number 10...now I see where all those Will Ferrell fans are coming from.

Eye-opening. My tastes in general ran so similarly to the rest of the Yale student body that I couldn't conceive of any other world. Certainly not a world where The Bible, The Notebook, and the lifeguard rule the school, and Bob Dylan and Jon Stewart are obscurities. I feel bad for them. But I feel worse for the country.