the rose of kiev

My boyfriend likes guns. Not for hunting, so fanatics hold onto your red paint cans, but for the enjoyment he gets out of them as both a boy and and as a mechanical engineering major. The boy in him loves the "bang!", the ME major loves that it's a machine. And, as everyone knows, everything comes back to guns. Like politics? Comes back to guns. The number of times I've heard that boy lament that Democrats will get into office and guns will be all but flatly illegal... And then I heard this comment in a movie. A bad movie, but a funny line. Ben Stiller and his father are New York-natives looking for this women Stiller fell for in Oklahoma and his father cautions him, "We're in Bible belt country now, people here have guns!" Yeah, conservatives like guns, and Oklahoma is Republican to my understanding. I saw Dave for a few minutes tonight, and he tore open a package he had just gotten in the mail. I asked if it was a gun part (which is a rhetorical quest...

A comment is always a welcome surprise, especially when it leads to a good article thanks for the link, Lisa *hugs*

"Something is wrong with him. He can't cry," Carlene murmured with a sage nod with her gnarled old hands on her cane. I chewed on a banana chip, comtemplating the past couple days, wondering if something was wrong with me for not crying. Women were walking around the store either without make up or smeared mascara; Maria started crying hard into the dip of my shoulder when I hugged her; I haven't once truly teared up. One of my coworkers was killed, and I can't stop asking if something is wrong with me. I was walking to work on Friday morning. It was the clearest and coldest day we've had for weeks, and I reveled in the frigid sunshine. Walking down Arcadia, I passed East High School, and noticed two news cameras on the brick sidewalk, pointed at the school building. A tall man with glasses and a long grey overcoat came out of the school and his path intercepted mine. As I stepped around the cameramen, a young brunette reporter with a sympathetic face greeted ...

One final paper down, one to go. And what am I doing? Stringing popcorn for the first time and learning that egg nog tastes better with a splash of bacardi. What a marvelous night. After such a strange couple of weeks, I was filled with such happiness tonight. My roommates and I, we bought our Christmas tree tonight and had Decemberfest. Now the monthly 'fest is a time-honored tradition, begun in October of 2006 the month after I moved into the ministry house. Chan came tearing up to the attic of the house (the first one I lived in for three short months) screeching "OKTOBERFEST!!" at the top of her lungs. Coming cautiously downstairs after the invasion, Carrie and Chandra met everyone in the kitchen with autumn-flavored beer; it was a good night. And every month now, they try to have a 'fest, announced the same way each time. After our newest month-old roommate Claire texted us and told us that a friend of hers was able to get us a free tree, all seven of us straggle...

So it's been a weird week for me, as a writer. When I call myself a writer, I mean that in a professionally amateur sense. I have never made a dime from the thousands of pages I've written, nor have I tried to. I simply mean "writer" in the sense that it is a need, a building tension and pressure that requires daily outlet of some sort. It is my way of organizing myself, of knowing myself. If it's not written down, it's forgotten and I cannot learn from it. So I'm always writing. As a writer, it has been a weird week. I am in that awkward transition between journals, which to me is like moving to a new house. I don't know where anything is in this new journal, I left some stuff behind in the move and have to keep going back and forth, and it's not really home yet. It's going from the buzz of being mere pages from the completion to the barrier of a lot of bare pages to fill all over again. That, and my other important journal was left behind in ...

So one of the things that Dave and I do is argue about is the definition of words. Most of the time the way it'll come up is that I will try to use a big word while talking to him and he'll narrow his eyes to slits and accuse me of using it incorrectly or making it up entirely. You'd think that myself being the Journalism major and he being the Mechanical Engineering major I'd win most if not all of the time. However, I would be lying if I told you that. He kicks my ass more often than not. A while back I used the word "fastidious", and narrowing those pretty green eyes suspiciously he proclaimed that I had used it incorrectly. Affronted, I told him that I have come across it more than once in a book and the context was always used to refer to extreme cleanliness, as in "her kitchen was always fastidiously kept" referring to its extreme lack of bacteria. However, he insisted that it was a much more general term and as the argument continued we were f...

Expect me to be blogging more now that I have here, cradled in my lap, my cousin's old Apple laptop (cue angel choir). After exactly one year of independence (I moved out on September 17th 2006) with an old mutt desktop that never really got to have a prime time of life before it passed it, I now have a damn good computer. Brian, since he just bought a newer better computer, deigned to give me his old laptop. I couldn't care how old it is as long as it does what I need it to, and man does this baby get the job done and more. I don't know how to handle all this sudden access to the internet. Introductory ramble aside, let me get to the real point of this blog - to catch you up on other things far more important. For starters: Let it be known that on September the second two-thousand-and-seven on the bench on walkway number eleven-thirty-seven at Holden Beach, North Carolina David McCray told me he loved me for the first time in words. That's just the kind of thing that d...