Tuesday, July 31, 2007

I have arrived!


What a dump Oregon is! It's been an interesting transition so far... not only does the big city have me terrified, but I still can't quite get over the drastic change in scenery. Since Ben drove, he had a chance to get used to the changing landscapes, but I was basically put in a magical flying machine and transported from flatness to mountain-world in only a few hours. In particular, the winding mountain roads have taken about 30 or 40 years off my life, since I've never known anything except a basic grid pattern where every surrounding town is visible on the horizon. The past few days could basically be summarized as, "OH MY GOD SLOW DOWN WE'RE GOING TO DIE."

We've been camping since Sunday. It's beautiful and my muscles are always confused when I try to walk up an incline because they have no idea what that feels like. I've been enjoying it, though it hasn't been without hardships -- I've named our campsite "Spider Alley," so you can probably guess some of the "hilarious" scenarios that have been happening.

Yes, thousands of water spiders live here, and unfortunately, some of them have touched me. Ew!

This is me, bathing in the Clackamas River. It's freezing, but it's also very clear and very clean.
Here's a terrible photo of our campsite. We're having so much fun, can't you tell?

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Thursday, July 12, 2007

like dinosaurs and cheap gas

RIP: Rentertainment Amanda
11/12/01 - 07/13/07

Sunday, July 01, 2007

blackberry, blackberry, blackberry

I just watched/fast forwarded my way through this movie, because apparently I've become the type of creep that will sit through a terrible film about hippies just to see 2 1/2 minutes of Robert Hass. At one point they start reading from "Praise," which inspired me to pull it out again and reminisce about all the good times I've had with this book. These poems are good friends; the first one I ever fell in love with was this one, which still continues to be one of my favorites:

Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you
and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

-Robert Hass