"Songs to not die to"

One of my dearest and oldest friends e-mailed me the other day asking how I was doing. This was just before I found out I was iron deficient. My reply was dark and foreboding. She immediately replied that she was going to send me something in the mail. It came yesterday. Two different kinds of specialty tea, an adult Arab looking comic book (haven't had a chance to really sit down with it yet) a chocolate, a copy of the movie Nacho Libre, two CD mixes, one of which she named "Songs to not die to" and a letter of encouragement with a kind of "we're not gonna take it" tone to it. That package was heaven to open and kind of reminded me of why I started this blog in the first place. In my blog description I write "The musings of a...dime a dozen human being who happens to love the view from a rooftop" and I feel like my friend sent me some fantastic rooftop views in her package. I appreciate looking at the big picture which sitting on a rooftop offers, but for me the metaphor of sitting on a rooftop also includes seeing the beauty life has to offer from a unique perspective. I'm grateful for poets and musicians, songwriters, novelists, painters, architects - people who create beauty, fun and food for thought. I have honestly been too exhausted to enjoy any rooftop views lately but since I've been taking iron for the past week or so I've been feeling more up to sight seeing. I think my friend's package came at just the right time.

Here's the first song on the CD mix "songs to not die to":

Hooray! I'm iron deficient!!

I've been so tired lately that when my Mom called me last week to say hello I just burst into tears and couldn't stop crying. Hormones make me crazy, it's true - but add debilitating fatigue on top of all that extra crazy and, well, I didn't think I was going to survive this pregnancy. Two days ago I went to see my ob and she told me I was low in iron and needed to take supplements. It is amazing to me how much our physiology affects our personality.

Seizing Up

I've had a really lame day. Overly hormonal and on the verge of tears all day with intermittent breaks in the dam - this song (which once inpired me) today enrages me as I sit here with heartburn, aching hips and a dark cloud hanging over my head. I want to seize my days but all I can manage right now is to tolerate them and I hate that. Growing a baby... maybe that should've made it into the video, perhaps it's not romantic or ambitious enough but I'd love to see a scene where a big old pregnant lady waddles around and then flops down on the couch with a frown as a toddler aggressively jumps on top of her and demands yet another glass of milk. Did I mention I've had a really lame day?

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.”

–John Milton
Paradise Lost

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

Happy New Year!!

The Nativity Story

They Gave Up Their Christmas

The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The snow was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrivedat evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.


All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
—T. S. Eliot

The Civility Experiment