sonnet, take one

This is my first attempt at an English Sonnet. Note the 14 lines of iambic pentameter, complete with properly rhymed quatrains and couplet.

Glory in Waiting
And now, good gentlemen, to arms and fall
In line, in ranks, for Glory you pursue.
She poses, lingers, hoping he, of all
The combatants, the gladiators who
Have donned their helms and bare their gilded spears,
Will muster hope, keep faith and claim the crown.
Our Glory, men, in waiting hides her fears
That victor who should win her heart is flown.
Oh soldiers great and princes bold, will we
Our mistress fail? By fighting not, our pride
We spare, our virtue hoard. Surrender! She,
If chased, exacts--if scorned, cannot deride.
For what does Glory mean to broken knights,
Who dreamed to win the crown without the fight?

sick

I don't think I've thrown up in years and years, not like this, not since I was little and had no control over my stomach. Yesterday was terrible. I went to bed feeling slightly queasy and woke up without an appetite and with small jabbing pains in my stomach. I walked to school on time but arrived home an hour and a half later, crawling into bed and moaning. I didn't think people really moaned outside of the movies, but I did. I had no audience to impress, and sometimes I didn't realize I was doing it. I just hurt and I had no way to express it. A couple of times I thought that if I could just throw up I'd feel better, and I even stuck my finger down my throat in a half-hearted attempt to hurry the process along. It didn't happen, because I chickened out. It's lucky, however, that I chose to carry a towel upstairs with me and lay it out beside my bed, because when the vomiting did come, it gave no warning. I felt like a little kid, out of control, weak, scared. And it really is absolutely disgusting on top of all of that.

Nora brought me flat coke ("I stirred it!" she said as she gave it to me) and Wonderbread. But mostly I slept. I sipped coke when I woke, and leaned over the bowl next to me. By night I managed to eat three crackers. At about ten the pain went away, and I slept for ten uninterrupted hours, despite the consumption of caffeine and the six hours of napping during the day. The only time I woke during the night was when I rolled over onto my stomach--probably to ease the pressure on my hips, sore from being on the floor for nearly a day straight--and promptly realized how terribly uncomfortable that was. Overall, not an experience I want to repeat, although being unconscious for most of it probably helped. When the alarm went off at eight, I woke feeling wonderful. No nausea, no stabbing pains, not shakiness or weakness--just a feeling of being rested. I never realized how good it feels to be my usual self. And I even finally ate something about an hour ago.

bragging

In my literature class, the top grade on the recent midterm was a perfect score. However, the class average was six points below what my professor desired. So, she gave a six point curve on the test, giving the top person an A++. She didn't give us back our exams, only that information, and she said she would send us each our grade. I checked my email only to find...I got that A++!

teatime

The essayist, as has already been established by the professionals, must set aside time in which to think, to ruminate, a time in which to remember events not for themselves but for the paths down which such memories will take him. I don’t presume to classify myself as an essayist, but I do try to attach meaning retrospectively to events in my life. In doing so, my mind is pulled back again and again to teatime with my mother.

I don’t know the habits of the British tea-drinker, but I imagine that for them teatime falls at an hour in mid-afternoon. For my mother and me, teatime meant midnight. She worked two jobs to support my older sister in college, and I kept such hours as conflicted terribly with her availability. At the age of eleven, I went to bed around ten and woke near six, missing my mother by some two hours either way. Needless to say, this damaged our communication, and we began calling mid-day to establish some conversation between us. I left her notes on the dry erase board, and she scribbled lines to me on napkins; but we went a month without seeing one another. Then one night I heard the muffled clanging of someone getting a drink in the kitchen. I snuck down the stairs to find my mother just home from work making a cup of tea to help herself relax. She and I smiled through our sleepiness, and I retrieved a second mug from the cupboard.

As time wore on, I didn’t have to hear her banging. I developed sensitivity to the sounds of her car in the driveway, so that I could meet her at the kitchen as she stumbled through the door. We heated the water in the microwave and sat at the table opposite one another as the bags steeped. For the next hour we talked together, she and I, like two grown-ups, equals. Sometimes we had information to share, news about the goings-on in our little household, but often times we waxed philosophical and thought introspectively. She had many more and deeper thoughts than I—or so I believed—especially about life, which I hadn’t yet experienced. She gave me wisdom for my preteen years. At Christmas, midway through her year of pulling double duty, we cemented our ritual. I bought her a teapot and matching cups, and she gave to me a silver charm for my bracelet: a teacup.

I grew during those nights. As she listened to my thoughts, I began to take them more seriously too. I challenged my ideas and sometimes found myself content with them. I found value in the innate wisdom of youth, and I tried to test my mother’s habit-ingrained doctrine. In retrospect, I worry about my mom and how our teatime robbed her of one more hour of precious sleep. I worried about her then, about her constant fatigue, and I tried to limit the burden I placed on her. I hope she never saw teatime as a burden. For me, the nightly tryst was not about the beverage: I don’t particularly like tea, and I had to nurse mine over the whole hour with two ice cubes melting in it until it suited my lukewarm standard. I loved that hour, because I had the opportunity to talk with my mother, to appreciate her and find that I in return held value for someone else.

She and I now live in separate states, but whenever I go home, she puts the tea kettle on at the end of the evening. I have never thought of refusing her, because it would not be the tea I’d reject. Teatime is our bonding time, and looking back I can find so much more meaning to it than I recognized at the time. It became a symbol of my close relationship with my mother and a sacrifice we both made to support it. In trying to affix meaning to this memory, I also find that it is my first instance in my life of trying to find significance in my life. If I ever become an essayist, I may say that I began my musings during teatime.

cinderella ball with the roomies

random rewards

B. F. Skinner, pioneer in behavioral psychology, conducted infamous tests on rats and pigeons to discover reactions to reward. He found he could teach a mindless animal to do a very complicated task simply by breaking said task into small increments and rewarding the animal every time it incidentally completed a step. He got pigs to vacuum. He found that as soon as the reward was taken away or a punishment induced, the animal desisted from said behavior. They persisted most determinedly, however, if the reward was given at random intervals, unpredictably interspersed with punishment, on the off-chance that a reward would be given. Everyday example: a girl waits by the phone for hours despite the fact that her boyfriend rarely calls.

I was thinking about Skinner today because I was ready to give up on my dad. He hasn't really been Dad in a long time, and I am afraid of him in those times when he doesn't really register my presence and annoyed with him when he does see me and ignores me. I try, less and less frequently, to have a relationship with him. I recently invited him to a John Wayne movie and he told me that he didn't want to. He didn't even pretend to be busy. He never comes to family events and he is now talking of moving to New Mexico (don't get me started on him and his plans!) In the year I lived in Texas he never called me once. So I don't try too much anymore.

But today I was given three free tickets to the BYU basketball game. I invited my friends initially, but I was given chair seats, so I couldn't sit with the fourth if she came via and all-sports pass. So I tried to figure out whom to take. In a fit of who knows what--a last ditch effort maybe--I called my dad. Not only did he answer the phone but he also agreed with enthusiasm to come. I was speechless (which is itself a figure of speech since I usually wax gregarious). The conversation didn't last long but it left me feeling bemused. Dad's behavior, completely inconsistent, makes it impossible for me to give up. Every once in a while, sometimes after long spells of decline and disinterest, my dad surfaces for a day or an hour of a relationship. For those moments, I keep trying and probably will keep trying despite common negative results. I am no more an agent unto myself than Skinner's vacuuming pigs.

idle minds

Life is noisy. Even the mind cannot shut out the background distractions, the parts of the brain that keep tickertape on your spending and a laundry list of things to-do in case one has a spare moment (for we must avoid those devilishly idle hands). In class, professors tell us what they think and what Great Thinkers have thought before us. What do you think about those thinkers, their tests ask us, and from a more practical standpoint, what will the professor think about what we think about these thinkers? My sisters quote movies at me, and while I am responding to the situation at hand my brain is scouring my repertoire to find the right character with the right voice with the right line who matches not only what was said but what I am expected to say next. It’s like I’m in a play with a script the length of all media I’ve consumed in days past. Think, think, think. Did you get that reference? Are you on your toes?

Sometimes I just want the world inside my head to be a little less bombarded by the world outside it. I need to stop thinking what I’ll term as motor thoughts. These are the types of thoughts that get us from one place to the next, that get us through a test, a conversation, a chore. These are like motor skills, those which result in motion, the more precise the better. Thoughts can be like that: some result in motion through life, some quite task-specific and others rather more foundational. Converse to motor thoughts are latent thoughts, as related to the first as potential energy is to kinetic energy in physics. The two cannot exist at the same time. Sometimes I need latent thoughts.

Latent thoughts are always there, but they are quiet, so quiet that the rest of the mind must be absolutely still in order to hear them. They are Potential. These are personal philosophies, dreams and creative energy. We have worlds inside our heads waiting for our God-like forces to unleash them. But we never pause long enough to understand. Self-reflection is a way to listen to latent thoughts. Journal writing, poetry, art, a long walk dedicated to observing. These are ways in which we begin to listen to the little voices inside, these little voices which sound somewhat arbitrary (for they are not relevant to the external world of motor thoughts) and oftentimes deep in some silly way. It is when we are listening quite hard that new ideas begin to form and God-dropped seeds begin to ferment and grow.

I have never wondered the purpose of my existence in the same moment in which I am balancing my budget. I have never let my mind trace the edges of eternal mysteries when I’ve gone over a class syllabus. I don’t dwell on hope and love and dreams when I am watching Arrested Development. But I can do those things when I take make the conscious effort to stop thinking my motor thoughts, to leave the world of kinetics behind. Then I am free to focus on Potential.