meaning?

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Good gracious

    we spend so much time fighting to survive and to establish ourselves as being a respectable and high-quality institution of higher learning despite the college's newness

    and then there's our one main biblical and theological studies professor going and writing things like "be justified = be righteousified" on the whiteboard

    i swear

O Romans, your righteousification is not and never will be based on your own deeds of righteousimifisilitudicatiousness, but is a gift through grace yes good amen

cogency is overemphasized, captain

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    At the end of a very long weekend, just now freshman Kiley and I were in the bathroom, I  rinsing my mouth out after brushing my teeth and she washing her face in the sink, when we had a Moment which I think spoke to the nature of dorm life as a whole.

      I raised my head and said, "Why do I smell pesto?"

     Kiley said, "and why did I just hear a flute? Playing music?"

    We were both just tired enough to be nearly crying with laughter even before we figured out that Kiley had been hearing Danielle's singing from the shower ("you were singing?" "no that was actually my shower flute" "Do it again! ....woah flute voice!") and I was smelling Kiley's foaming face wash. ("Can I smell your face? ...yeah that's what it is, some sort of isolated pesto-ish element is wafting away and that's what I smelled." "Haha, pesto-face!")

    Oh my word it's only week 2. We're all gonna die.


    Over break I was looking back over the very few posts I made over the course of last semester and thinking, wow, that does not even begin to approach adequacy as a representative journal of that time. There were so many things I did and thought, so many places I went, so many people I interacted with and ideas I engaged and papers I wrote and everything, that are completely not even hinted at because I just don't blog as much I used to. Like, there almost wasn't a point to writing at all. I can't decide whether to be discouraged from even trying or inspired to try harder, or maybe just rethink the purpose of all writing I ever do for fun. I don't even have time for creative writing, especially not now with 18 credits. I wrote some kinda funny poems for a couple open mic nights last semester, and they were well received and that was basically enough for me. (Open mic nights are way fun in a close-knit community.) Like ok that's enough nonessential writing for now, I'll hold onto the old dream of writing stories in some foggy future day when my life is a different beast but for now it's time to read history books. And meanwhile the way I look at the world and process events/thoughts is changing and I seem to be getting more reserved in some ways and less so in others and it's weird and things are weird and weird is weird and weird weird weird.

man of la rip your heart to bleeding shreds

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    ok so

    i realize i haven't posted in like two months, even before thanksgiving break let alone finals or christmas break (which i am in the last days of)

    but i really wanted to say that it is so awful when one expects a new piece of entertainment to have a certain emotional effect on one

    but then it goes and has the absolute opposite effect in every possible way it could.

    Like when one decides to watch the Man of La Mancha (1972) movie and one doesn't know anything about it except that it is a musical based on a play or something based on the novel Don Quixote by what's-his-face. Ok, musical, those are usually fun and lighthearted right and then one doesn't know anything about Don Quixote except that one thing that one's heard about him going and attacking windmills or whatever which sounds very silly he's like a silly person ok
    musical + silly windmill man = therefore movie must be silly and fun right

    Wrong, the movie is now over and one is standing in the kitchen at 3am silently sobbing one's guts out because that was not a happy movie it was a sad movie, a very sad sad movie

    Ugh I should have known that it would be sad just from the fact that it stars Peter O'Toole.

i think the man just specializes in characters who are falling apart in various ways.

    Anyway um yes what have I done lately that is interesting? Or that I can make interesting? Not much! Just on vacation right now, holed up in a snowy not-place in Idaho, puttering away and getting lots of sleep before the spring semester starts. Oh, I should say something about next semester, that's almost interesting. For classes I am taking:

• HIS 212: American Civilization: 1865 to Present (american history II),
• BTS212: New Testament Studies II: Epistles and Revelation, 
• GRK102: Beginning Greek II, 
• BTS360: Doctrine of God, 
• HIS352: American Revolution and Early Republic, and
• BTS205: Hermeneutics.

    (Hermeneutics used to be counted as a 300-level class but for some reason they changed it to 205 after restructuring the academic program this summer. Dr. S/PME has cheerily assured me, however, that he has no intention of making it any easier just because its listing changed.)
    So I guess that's really all just history and Bible classes except for Greek, which is closely linked to the Bible classes since we're learning biblical Greek/being trained to read and interpret the, uh, New Testament in its original form. So that's good. NT II and American Civ are still core-level, but I'm really starting to move more and more into the two areas of study I've actually chosen for my major. My build-a-bear, mix-and-match major.
    I've got some additional class-like stuff going on this semester but that would take too long to explain so here we go.

εἰμί, like, totally νεκρός

Dear Harriet Walter,

    hurp
    well
    that's the third Greek exam I've finished, that there one I just took just now

    think I'll go throw up until I die


    (i actually really love greek but if anyone says "relative pronoun" or "third declension" or "square of stops" or "definite article" or "master case ending paradigm" or "alpha-to-eta shift" or "personal pronoun" or "preposition" or "parsing" or "consonantal iota" to me for the rest of the week i will projectile-barf on their face and the barf will be on fire)

    (if they ask me how to tell the difference between the article and the relative pronoun or what the four rules of the vocative case are or what adjectival position a demonstrative is in when it's modifying a noun or what the seventh and eight noun rules are or how to translate the third person personal pronoun in its adjectival intensive form, I will find all of their shoes and fill those shoes with dead mice and cat poop and throw them in the lake)

     (and you may interpret that last pronoun "them" either way you like.)

    Oh my worrrrrd.

    Classes are mostly going well. Job in the academic support center going well. Social life going well. Relations with professors going well. Grades going well. Time spent asleep inadequate.

   PME/Dr. S is not only expecting me to take his Hermeneutics class and his Doctrine of God class (in addition to New Testament II and Greek II, both of which I'm already expecting to take) next semester (because one of my two concentrations is going to be Biblical and Theological Studies), he is apparently also expecting me to take second-year Greek and first-year Hebrew next year. Found out about that part yesterday when we were talking after New Testament, because in class he'd been talking about the theological implications of a particular Greek word used in the book of John so we were talking about Greek. He wasn't even like "hey, you should take Hebrew," he was like "when you take Hebrew something something something." I was like "w-...whshpufuh what wait when did we decide that I'm going to take Hebrew?" And he was like "oh, you want to take Hebrew. You do. You're a language wizard, you'll love it."
    I'm not even concentrating in Biblical Languages. He's not even my academic adviser. Gracious. That man cracks me up.
    Speaking of future classes, though, he's totally going to be teaching classes on Johannine Literature and Apocalyptic Literature sometime in my senior year. (He can only teach one or two upper-division BTS classes per semester because the college also depends on him to teach beginning and intermediate Greek and Hebrew, two simultaneous sections of core Bible, and a lot of the time supervise the BTS capstone course.) I am so looking forward to Apocalyptic Lit, I was hoping so hard that it would happen sometime during my remaining years. Plus he told me it's kind of the course where every area of biblical and theological education comes together in full play under one subject and one really needs to know one's stuff so it's perfect for my final year. I am excited.

    Ugh I love college.

I want a picture for this post so here's one by Friend Shelli of Friend Laura (left) and me.

hfwrshglblutface

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    1. A group of us school kiddos and our director of student life and Dr. Mac went to the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens today on what you can think of as a sort of college-level field trip (although it's actually quite a bit more complicated than that). It was amazing. I'm not even going to try and summarize the kinds of cool stuff that they had in the museums except to say that the European history building was devastating and the American exhibits were super awesome and also relevant to my life because I'm studying American history this year and such. I nearly cried when I got to the room with the Gutenberg Bible and the early printed works from the Renaissance and Reformation. Had barely enough time to pass through there before somebody from my group was like "Ruby you need to hurry on over to the European exhibit or you'll miss Dr. Mac talking to the group about some rad tapestries," though.

    Also oh my goodness the gardens. The gardeeeeennnnnns. The Japanese Garden. Harriet Walter. The Japanese Garden. I can't. And I barely saw the Chinese Garden and I didn't have time to see the cactus garden thing at all. Oh man I need to go back.

    2. It is my momma's birthday tomorrow! Actually today since it is after 1:00am as I write this. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOMMA I LOVE YOU BUCKETS

    also since I wrote her a bad poem for her birthday last year I feel like I should write another one this year since I'm too cheap to buy her a present and ship it to her
    (although it's not going to be a poem really just a weird piece of writing, some words and all that)
    here we go

pumpkin pacific

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Thought as of right now:

    It is so delightful being a sophomore. Seeing these freshmen babies dealing with classes and trying to figure out how to write papers for our professors and how to study for exams and how much sleep they need and who their friends are just shows me, by contrast, how much I've gotten figured out by now.

    Thought as of earlier this afternoon, sitting in a nice independent coffeeshop with Friend Shelli and Friend Laura, dressed nicely, sipping my first-ever pumpkin latte and reading a book about the influence of slavery on the creation and ratification of the American Constitution:

    I feel so grown up sometimes.

    Thought as of the other night, on our girls-only camping trip (someplace north of Malibu), standing on the beach at night-time with Friend Krista and taking in the thundery ocean and all those many many stars above, everything filling my whole vision:

    All those artistic, whirling, dizzying, enormous, beautiful, seemingly-chaotic-yet-carefully-controlled-in-set-patterns-of-conflict natural bodies and forces would actually be really painful for me if I didn't believe that there was any sort of higher power that dreamt it all up and made it happen and that keeps it going.

     Thought as of earlier that same day, standing thigh-deep in the ocean with Roommate Marissa at sunset and being smashed against by the tossy frothy waves, with the water warming our hands and rocks scraping against our feet as they were pulled into the deep:

     Wait...does the sun never set over the ocean on the East Coast? Do they only get sunrises over the ocean? That is terrible. That is the worst thing. Their beach days don't even end with sunsets over the ocean. That is awful. Oh my goodness.

    Thought as of now now:

    I love my Tiny College. The regional accreditation agency we're working with is coming to formally visit us for the last time later this month, and in February I think is going to make its final decision on whether or not to give us initial accreditation and make us a Proper Fancy Accredited College. (Becoming Proper and Fancy and Accredited would do wonderful things in the way of bringing in new students and helping our current students get into grad school after college, among other benefits.) This is really the nerve-wracking thing about going to a school that's so new. I just wish I could somehow magically show the visiting evaluation-people with my brain what an incredibly wonderful place Tiny College is and how the education they give us is so valuable, so carefully and thoughtfully constructed, so character-building and worldview-refining, so...I'm trying to think of another word for educational that would include some of how hard they work us at learning. I mean everything I just said is true, but I don't want to sound like I'm talking all about feelings and such floofy things to the point of neglecting the fact that come midterms, you have to seriously know your stuff about these here liberal arts. Blar. What am I even saying.

This is basically me today.

applied knowledge

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    A Herodian, a Pharisee, and one of the Am ha-Aretz walk into a bar and find a wealthy, politically influential Jewish denier of the resurrection who thinks that only the Pentateuch is divinely authoritative crying into his drink.

    "Why are you crying?" asks the Am ha-Aretz man, because the other two don't care about the unpopular and doctrinally questionable elite members of Jewish society (even if those elites do control the temple and the priesthood and make up a significant part of the Sanhedrin).

    "I'm so sad, you see," says the crying man.




    O my lands it's not even midterms yet and I'm already grossly sleep-deprived can you tell.

    Happy belated birthday.

goooooo materialism

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Here is a list of things that I do not have yet but will have once I become a grown-up.

• A car
• A house or apartment
• A full-time job
• Nice dishes
• A generic fluffy comforter for my bed
• A Bachelor of Arts degree, maybe a Master's as well
• Alcohol
• A cat
• Maybe a husband or whatever, don't care
• Enough money to buy a coffee and a pastry at a coffeeshop or bakery at the same time
• Freaking bookends man these freaking textbooks will not stop falling over each other it's like dominoes except more like a drunken conga line on roller skates on oil except with works of history and theology and political history/science ugh dude

switchback princess

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    My legs are telling me that the decision to hike Mt. Baldy yesterday (with a group from school) may not have been one of the most well-advised decisions I have made within the span of my life so far.
    Today, I cannot walk except after the waddling fashion of a drunk penguin. I cannot make it down stairs except sideways or with the aid of my butt. Even after 9 1/2 hours of sleep last night, I could barely sing in church this morning because my lungs and physical heart felt raw and exhausted.

    Mt. Baldy is about ten thousand feet tall, extremely steep, and generally regarded as the most difficult hike in Southern California. Or was it all of California? Also the hike's about 9.2 miles round trip and I'd never hiked anything longer than about 3 miles. Or anything steep. Or dealt with elevation. Mmmmm choices yerz mature and informed wunz oyerz.

That one. Except without the snow. (picture from Google.)

Picture that roommate Marissa took. Not at the top.

random picture from Marissa of friend Kim (right), me (center, dyed my hair brown recently) and PME (left) that I liked.

    Professor Mine Enemy, who was leading the hike, spent a couple of considerable chunks of time babysitting me. Coaching. Shepherding. Mother-henning, essentially. I was being a weak, gasping slowpoke and had to stop a lot and he'd stay with me, wait for me to catch my breath, make me get going again, give me little pep talks about conquering sections and going from strength to strength, tell me to stop apologizing, and so on. (He later did this for one of the upperclassmen who was having trouble with the descent, and I think talked with her about music most of the time. Dude is a good and faithful shepherd.) Really being just so extremely nice. It was sweet and also humiliating.

    (I feel like I should reiterate that the nickname is a complete misnomer by now and he's one of my favorite people in the world.)

     SO I CLIMBED ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP OF MOUNT BALDY AND BACK DOWN AND WENT HOME TO COLLEGE AND SHOWERED AND THEN STUDIED THE GRAMMAR OF KOINE GREEK LAST SATURDAY WHAT DID YOU DO

    When I was a kid I could never picture myself being twenty years old. It sounded so ancient and distant and impossible and I could never imagine what it would look like for me.

    Well!

gravycopter

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    What I had for dinner:

    Roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, salad, apple juice, chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup on top.

    Words that Professor Mine Enemy used in Greek class today:

    "κόσμος."
    My name, three times.
    "Megatron."
  

      What was in the sky when I took a walk after dinner, when the air was warm and humid after a hot day and a hot rain:

    A helicopter. Clouds.

sophomore on saturday

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    AWW YEEUH

    SCHOOL TIME

    It is good to be back. Being back is a good thing.

So this is most of the student body, all dressed up for convocation. When I say it is a tiny college I mean that.

    I'm so happy to be with all my friends again (including Best Friend, who is a brand-new freshman), things are going really well with my two new roommates so far, my best bro Jim finally got here today (Saturday) although move-in day was Wednesday, I've got all my books, I just got back from a quick trip to the store with bestie Laura for the supplies for our traditional shared meal of sourdough bread and potato soup (to feed ourselves tomorrow because the cafeteria isn't open on Sundays), I've got a bag of Pepperidge Farm Geneva cookies, and I have now memorized the Greek alphabet. Things is peachy.

tough luck, mr. grayson

    Dear Harriet Walter,

"Following Haly's clues, he finds a mysterious Book of Names in the circus that holds his on the last page^[14] .[He's forced to fight a rhyming demon named Acheron when his clown Jimmy Clark is attacked by an ex-fiancee using black magic^[15] .]"

 from a plot summary on the wiki page of Dick Grayson.


    Oh my gosh comics are dumb.

oh golly i can't write anymore yay yay hurray

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    hurngh blurhghkl rarr

    rarrrrrr

    ararararr

    what am I doing with my life

pretty sure Rigby isn't actually supposed to be on the couch

    what i am doing is totally failing in the attempt to become a young adult

    and also watching a lot of batman movies

    (while eating unhealthy children's breakfast cereal)

    (in my pajamas)

    Back to college in two weeks. Sophomore time! (pronounced sop-ho-mor-ay)
    'Til then, I'm still housesitting - I had a week off but came back yesterday - and misusing the ability to access the internet at all hours (which I didn't have for most of the summer) by reading through Tumblr all the time. And by watching Batman movies.

     I can't really concentrate on anything right now or I might be able to explain why Tumblr is destroying my attention span and making me (with my super mimcky writer-voice) struggle with expressing myself and articulating actual ideas (especially without images and communal reactions)

    bewaaaaaaare

master of the beasts

Dear Harriet Walter,

    Well! Apparently it has been a while, she says as she sits on top of the back of a couch, kicking away at a dog's stuffed toy because the dog wants her to play fetch but she wants to write. (Dog toy is too gross to touch with my hands without washing said hands before returning them to the laptop.)

    Today is my fourth day of housesitting. The murder mastiff isn't here, as the people I'm working for actually found a really cool boarding place that specializes in working with large, aggressive dogs who have behavioral problems and since his owners were having several kinds of trouble with him anyway, they decided that that was a happier option and might do some long-term good.

    However, I still have to take care of one largeish, energetic, nervous, and easily bored young dog named Rigby, who is some kind of short-haired, lean, coyote-like thing. She needs lots of attention.

    And I also have to take care of five cats (two downstairs and three inside or adjacent to the barnish thing, one of whom is a Persian and needs his fur brushed and his eyes cleaned often), four chickens, and the young potbellied pig.

    The pig is, of course, the pig that I previously saw in a pet shop and wanted so badly to own. This is the family and home that he went to. (You might wonder how I can be sure. The pet shop does not often have pigs, the family bought him around the time I know he was there, I recognized him when I first saw him, and I have pictures on my phone from when I saw him for sale to compare to the pig I take care of.) Yep. I get to live with and take care of the pig I yearned for, for three weeks. His name is Papa. He takes blueberries from my fingers quite delicately.




    Housesitting is a very strange job. It requires very little of what we think of as work, instead calling for one to step into a person's or a family's shoes, inhabiting a broken-off piece of their life while they're gone. Taking care of their pets, sleeping in one of their beds, raiding their pantry, washing with their soap and so on, but with none of the family interaction of their lives, very little of the driving away to go places and buy things and work, no knowledge or history of their habits and hobbies in the lives they lead at home. I feel like another person's ghost, in a functional way.

    Sometimes I feel like I'm being paid to haul the pig's large rubber water bowl to and from the house to dump, rinse, and refill it, and clean out the cat litter, and groom the cat, and feed creatures several times a day, and take the dog out to potty, and walk the dog down the gravel roads, and be lonely and isolated from other humans all day (as I'm way out in the country)...and sometimes I feel like I'm being paid to sit on my butt and watch Batman TV shows.

    Speaking of whom, life lesson learned today:

    when tasked with brushing a floofy white cat, first make sure that you are not wearing a black Batman t-shirt.

books books sugar DEATH

    Dear Harriet Walter,

•     I have literally never in my life watched as much television as regularly and extensively as I have been doing these past few days because of the USA Olympics trials. Auntlet says that this is because I'm discovering something very new to me (I've never watched any Olympic things or athletic things before) and I'm having to figure it out. This is especially true for gymnastics, I think. Limbs, Harriet Walter. Limbs everywhere.

•      I read Dracula recently. Bram Stoker and such. I was hoping it would surprise me and be way cooler and more interesting than I expected, like Frankenstein was (you'll remember that Dr. Mac made us read that this spring as an illustration of the themes and cultural reactions of Romanticism).

            Nup.

•     If you have ever lain in bed at night, sleepless and haunted by the question, "I wonder what was up with the commerce, warfare, and intercultural relations between early Dutch settlers and Munsee Native Americans in the early colonial period of America's history," suffer no more. I can highly recommend The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley by Dr. Paul Otto, mainly because the dude himself gave me a copy earlier this summer and I read it because hey why not. It is actually a pretty interesting account! 

•  Speaking of history books, look at this book Dr. Mac has assigned for Comparative World History next fall (one of the four he's assigned so far). It is about sugar and history! Two of my favorite things! Oh my lands, I almost want to order it early and read it before the semester begins.

I hope I don't look back on this in the fall and be like "olawks can't believe i was excited to read that what a wretched heap of poo."

• I have gotten a job housesitting in late July and the first half of August for a couple living out in the country. This is a slightly unusual housesitting job, as the couple has to prep me for it for several weeks before I actually begin the job, and by "prep me" I mean "have me over to their house every few days so that their Tibetan Mastiff puppy can get used to having me around and stop being an antisocial guard dog about it all." And by "antisocial" I mean that my private name for him is "the murder mastiff."

This is an example of a full-grown Tibetan Mastiff. Yeppers.

boring academic update

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    We found out a few weeks ago that Tiny College is, indeed, going to keep existing, even though it hasn't quite met its fundraising goals yet. Just a few more hundred thousand dollars to go. (snortsnorthaw I just really wanted to write that last sentence ok)

    (I should mention that they're also restructuring the academic program so that instead of different majors, all the students will be Liberal Studies majors and we'll each choose two concentrations, which will be based on our former majors with a couple of additions. Sort of like a split-screen major, or a traditional double-major with a more reasonable workload. Liberal liberal arts. Eight concentrations to choose from. I was an undeclared major last year, so now I'm having to choose two concentrations instead of a major. I actually really like this setup.)

    Yesterday I registered for classes for next semester.

    Here is what they are, provided I don't freak out in the first two weeks and drop one of them and do something easy but solely elective like American Lit to 1865 or whatever.

• American Civilization I: Early Encounters to 1865
• Man what is up with 1865. Something significant probably happened then. (This is why I need an American history course.) Anyway this is more history, like the (worldwide) civilization 'n culture survey classes I took last year except American. I will be taking the continuation of this class in the spring, as well.

• Comparative World History
•  This is HIS 331-1, my first upper division history class. (Other history class is part of the core.) I'm taking it to help me decide if I for sure want to be a History major - no, not major, what do we call this instead? A history concentrator? That sounds dumb. 

• New Testament Studies I:  Gospels and Acts
• Did I mention that it's actually really unusual that my college requires as part of the core curriculum a full year of Old Testament and a full year of New? Because it is. Most Christian colleges require one semester per testament, which is like super lame.

• American Government and Politics
• I'm taking this to fulfill my Social Science requirement. It's a three-hour once-a-week class. It is going to be difficult.

•  Beginning Greek I
• Yeah. Yeah. Um. Greek. I have to take two semesters of foreign language in college because I didn't fulfill the requirement in high school. It was either Greek or Hebrew, Tiny College is tiny. And it's not modern Greek, by the way, it's would-have-been-modern-two-thousand-years-ago Greek.

    So that's that.

    And I'll be working a job in the academic support center.

    I know it's only fifteen credits but they will be hard won.

    Best part is that I have only two professors for these five classes. I had four last fall and three in the spring. NT and Greek will be with Professor Mine Enemy because he's kind of the only faculty we have right now for both the Biblical and Theological Studies concentration (our one BTS adjunct is moving away from Cali) and the Biblical Languages concentration (the man is unreal, he's teaching six classes this fall). The rest will be with history/humanities super-fab-man Dr. Mac. This is quite all right. These are two of my favorite dudes on the planet.

from commencement last month, photo by someone who wasn't me. Dr. Mac (on right) is actually much taller than PME (who is not a tall man), but he was standing on a slope.

starry nights with the robbers

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    As you know, I am living in a shed in someone’s backyard right now (albeit a shed that has been made into a perfect, serene little bedroom/sitting room/walk-in closet). Because it is in the backyard, and because I spend many evenings in the main house with the family and have to get ready for bed in the main house in any case, every night I have to walk a few feet from the back door to the door of my shed. Without any light, because I go to bed around when my Auntlet does and she turns off all the house lights when she goes to bed, as one does.

    I was never afraid of the dark as a child. I don’t know why I’ve started being so now, in my advanced age. I step out into that little space, those few short steps between doors, and a primal fear of the unknown comes and clutches at me like some sort of strangling, clutching thing that does not respect the personal space of my emotions.

    I’ve discovered a trick to calm myself, though.

    As soon as I begin to feel afraid of the darkness, I stand up straight and whisper this phrase into the night:

    “Go away, robbers and bad men.”

    Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t explain it. I am not in particular dread of burglars right now; this is not a rich neighborhood. I whisper the command as I enter into darkness, and I instantly feel safer and more in control. I then usually pause and stare up into the night sky and look at the stars, and I am made calm and deep, reminded of the vast and beautiful contexts I exist within.

    Then I make it to the shed, hurriedly switch on the lamps while whispering, “go away!” and turn around and close the door and whisper, “go away!” to the night behind me.

    I check for robbers and bad men inside the wardrobe while I put my clothes away, of course, but I don’t think I need to check under my fairly low-set bed before sleeping in it because frankly between my vintage suitcases and my violin there is not room to fit a robber of any substance under there.

not my photo.

the hut of happiness

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Hello!

    I haven't been posting much, and may not be posting much, because for the past week and for the rest of the summer I have been and will be living without the internet.

    I forget how much I've talked about this summer, but my parents are still over in Idaho, dinking around with nice summer projects, while a long time ago I chose to spend the summer in Oregon with my Auntlet and her husband.

    In a shed.

    I flew up from SoCal on Saturday the 5th of May, but Auntlet was horrendously busy and the shed wasn't ready for me yet, so I spent the first week of vacation with Best Friend and her family, my parents drove over to Oregon to visit friends and me, parents and I stayed with Mumsy's parents down the road for a few days, we all moved in with my dad's mother in her retirement home apartment, parents left after having been in town about a week, I stayed on a few more days there, then a week ago (Monday the 28th) I moved in with my Auntlet.

    So the thing about my Auntlet is that she is the full-time caretaker for her 95-year-old mother, who is very dependent in her old age. Auntlet lives with her mother in her mother's house in a little retirement community, and her husband Unclet occupies their house (which is very very old and in a long-term state of being renovated) on the other side of town, but comes and hangs out over at Auntlet's mother's house every day.

    There is a garden shed in the small back yard of A.'s mother's house. Auntlet and Unclet have renovated this shed and made it a Tiny Home for me to live in for the summer. (I have to go into the main house for the kitchen and restroom, as well as for human contact, but that is fine.) I've lived there a week now and I'll live there another two and a half months, until late August, when I will flap my wings and fly back south to Pasadena for my sophomore year of bein' eddicated.

    Right now I am looking for work, not finding work, hanging out with Best Friend, reading books, watching old movies, and sleeping as long as I want to.

    Would you like to see pictures of the shed? I know Mumsy wants to.

The outside, before renovation.

Inside, before. Shelves were veeeerrrry taaaalllll.

More before...

...aannndd...after! With my not-yet-unpacked junk on the floor.

Things that Auntlet put on the shelves.

There are actually two large skylights on either side of the ceiling.

After unpacking junk. You don't need to see inside the wardrobe.

 
    So the shed is magnificent and I'm completely happy with it. It has electricity and insulation and excellent natural lighting, and I will just have to continue biking to the nearest coffeeshop or to Best Friend's every day to access the internet.

thoughts proceeding in the manner of skipped stones

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I am 20 years old and I have just figured out, on my own, the best way to cut boiled asparagus, having so far avoided the hundreds of potential opportunities when I might have learned this already.

    (Diagonally. Like a baguette. And you brace the asparagus against the fork on the other side while you're slicing it.)

    For years I've been cutting it straight across and it's gotten all separated and stringy and un-cut-able, like a squishy green human spine.

    Movin' up in the world yeah.

     In other news, for various reasons I now have a queen-sized hide-a-bed to sleep on for a few days. I am sprawled across it as I write this. I almost never sleep on beds this wide; I feel quite majestic, like a sleepy tyrant surveying the bloodstained districts of her warm, sleepy dominion.

   Also, my dad is in his early fifties and his hairline is immaculate. Not a hint of filamentous recession. I wish more people could be like him that way. Good job, dad.

quite the exalted legacy

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    There have been two extremely brief moments relating to massively influential 16th-century Christian theological reformer John Calvin in my life recently.

    The first was at a church's book sale that my parents decided to stop at and at which I did not initially object to stopping at. They like books and will stop for almost any garage-sale-type happening they find.

    We had just entered the building full of books for sale, which managed to look like a basement even though it was at ground level, when we were accosted by over-helpful and understimulated church people who were supposed to be selling the books.

    One of them, a man with glasses and dull brown hair, pointed out the various tables by booky subject matter and told us to ask us if we wanted help finding anything.

    "Any collected works of John Calvin?" asked my dad, brightly.

    "Um, maybe! He'd be over here if we have that," said the man, starting to lead my dad to the "Christian" table.

    "Is he, like, a crime or thriller author?" asked one of the church people, a woman seated on a black faux-leather couch.

    "No, John Calvin, the theologian," said the man.

    "Oh, that John Calvin," said the woman.

    I was not completely successful on the "not snorting audibly" front.

   

    The second moment was a sleepy revelation of my own mental failings, which I had last night as I was drifting towards sleep in my temporary cot in the middle of the living room. (Have I mentioned that I'm staying in a retirement home right now?) First, some background info.

    All semester long this spring, several of my fellow students had been carting around a pair of matched books for Professor Mine Enemy's class on pneumatology and soteriology. (Calvinism was probably more relevant to the soteriology bit, I would think, but then I don’t know anything about anything.)

    This is what those books looked like.

    And the joke hit me just last night, two weeks after the end of a semester where I'd seen them around all the time, including over spring break because friend Gabby was in Pneumatology and Soteriology and brought her books home like a good girl, and I'd heard passages from them read aloud several times by entertained students in the lounge.

    Whenever I'd seen them and mentally contrasted the covers I'd always just thought "oh look happy growing things are on the nice green positive side and sad dead flower things are on the negative grr angry bad side," and then for some reason last night - I can't even remember why I was thinking of these books, I never read them - for some reason last night it just hit me like "oh yes happy flowers and bad flowers - oh my fffffuh they're tulips i'm an idiot"

    the books on Calvinism have tulips on them

    like the acronym T.U.L.I.P. which is a famous mnemonic for the five points of Calvinism

    so the tulips on the covers are alive or dead based on the author's argument for or against the theological integrity of the major tenets of Calvinism

    I think I'll go exchange my brain for a sack full of week-old overcooked oatmeal now

    I don't even like oatmeal   

    and it would probably do me more good