Author: Jana

  • Some Friend-ly Sabbath links


    —An excerpt from some thoughts on Quaker silence:

    By and large Quakers tend to be busy people, and you rarely find them wondering how to occupy their time. They would, however, be the first to recognize how essential it is for them to have periods of disinvolvement, even from the activities which express their continuing concern to care for people …. In our disinvolvement two elements will be present. First is a kind of detachment that while standing back, accepts all experience in the hope of transcending it- seeing beyond it creatively. Secondly a cessation from all mental activity so that the body and mind are as still and quiet as possible.

    —A Quaker Pioneer: Ann Preston, early woman doctor

    —A method for silent worship.

    —Ways of Worship from JohnW’s grandma. An excerpt:

    I think of myself like the tree planted by the “rivers of water” in Psalm 1, sucking up God’s gift of life and being restored.

    —A Quaker Home Blessing: (Someday this may be framed and hanging in my front doorway)

    LET the guest sojourning here know that in this home our life is simple. What we cannot afford we do not offer, but what good cheer we can give…we give gladly.

    We make no strife for appearance sake.

    Know also, friend, that we live a life of labour, therefore, if at times we separate ourselves from thee, do ye occupy thyself accordingly to thine heart’s desire.

    We will not defer to thee in opinion or ask thee to defer to us. What thou thinketh ye shall say, if ye wish, without giving offense. What we think, we also say, believing that truth hath many aspects, and that love is large enough to encompass them all.

    So, while ye tarry here with us we would have thee enjoy the blessing of a home, health, love and freedom, and we pray that mayst find the final blessing of life. PEACE

  • She’s baaaack!


    IMG_1203
    Originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

    CatGirl just returned from her class’ three-day outing to Catalina Island. Where she snorkeled, frolicked, and grew about 3 inches taller.

    Welcome Home!

  • Because today we must all raise our glasses to Virginia

    From a must-listen podcast, The Writer’s Almanac (5 min of daily literary pleasure):

    It’s the birthday of the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, born Virginia Stephen in London (1882). She never went to school, but her father chose books for her to read from his own library. Her brothers all went to the best universities, and she wrote letters to them about her reading. She was only allowed to move out of her family home after her father’s death, when she was 22. She moved into a house with her brothers and sister, and instead of writing letters about what she’d been reading, she began to write literary criticism for the Times Literary Supplement, and she became one of the most accomplished literary critics of the era.

    Woolf believed that the problem with 19th-century literature was that novelists had focused entirely on the clothing people wore and the food they ate and the things they did. She believed that the most mysterious and essential aspects of human beings were not their possessions or their habits, but their interior emotions and thoughts.

    She considered her first few novels failures, but then in 1922, she began to read the work of Marcel Proust, who had just died that year. She wrote to a friend, “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!” Later that summer, she wrote in her diary, “There’s no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

    Woolf’s next book was her first masterpiece: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) about all the thoughts that pass through the mind of a middle-aged woman on the day she gives a party. Woolf went on to write many more novels, including To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), but she was also one of the greatest essayists of her generation. In her long essay about women and literature, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she wrote: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”

  • To the rats

    Dear rats:
    I know it’s been very cold lately–downright frigid, even. And I’m sorry that it’s difficult to find a warm place to sleep outside, especially since the recent construction has eliminated all the steamy mulch piles along California Ave. But good news is ahead–the days are getting warmer so you won’t be as desperate for a cozy space in the near future.

    So small-talk aside, let me just say that it’s not in your best interests to continue seeking shelter and warmth under my car hood. And if you do so, your days may well be numbered (yes, that IS A THREAT). Because today, when I was writing that $700 check to the car dealer for the repairs made to my engine for rat damage, let me tell you that I was feeling rather ungenerous at that moment. Especially when I realized that that much dough could’ve bought you and your posse a pretty nice trip to some warm Caribbean island, where you could be sipping pina coladas and working on your tan lines, watching the rat babes in their trendy brazilian-cut bikinis and whistling at a lot of nice tail. But instead you were frolicking around under my hood, sucking oil out of frayed hoses, sharpening your incisors on electrical cords of various sizes–including those that allow the engine to revv up and get all warm and cozy to begin with. And can I just tell you that imbibing petroleum products is NOT GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH! You could get cancer that way, you know.

    And I’ll have you know that this wasn’t just any car that you were tampering with, but is a vintage model station wagon, the likes of which are impossible to find on resale lots. So DO NOT MESS WITH THE CAR or you might be finding yourself with a new set of cement shoes. Capice?
    Sincerely,
    pilgrimgirl

  • another post about sex…

    My friend Chris Bigelow and some of his buddies published an LDS humor column, “The Sugar Beet” (like The Onion for Mormons) for several years and have combined the best of their work into The Mormon Tabernacle Enquirer.

    I’ve reprinted a bit of one of their funnier articles here, some positions from the Mormon Kama Sutra:

    Retention and Reactivation
    The Stripling Warrior
    Urim and Thummim
    The PPI
    Hold to the Rod
    The Secret Combination
    Come, Thou Font of Every Blessing
    Hie to Kolob
    The Rameumptom

    To this list I would add:
    The Bishop’s Daughter
    The RM

    So I’ve been trying to come up with some similarly funny positions using Quaker terminology and I haven’t come up with much–perhaps I don’t know the lingo well enough yet. Perhaps ya’ll can chime in with some of your own ideas?

  • on sex and calendars and blackberries


    Okay, a question for all of those tech-savvy readers out there:

    So if one shares a google calendar with one’s spouse, and the calendar is starting to fill up quickly (meaning, very few nights at home together in the next few weeks), is it appropriate to ‘calendar’ sex? And if so, does one make it a one-time appointment or a repeating event?


    [So I was going to include an image of a blackberry (aka handheld organizer thingy) with this post, but the only image that appealed to me, was this one…]

  • John in white jeans



    This was one of the candid pictures from our engagement photo shoot.
    What makes this photo even more interesting is that John is wearing my white jeans (because he didn’t have his own pair)

  • Bibliophilia


    My book-loving friends:

    I have a proposal for a pilgrim book group*, where we (meaning all of you interested pilgrimgirl readers out there) could select a text and have a book chat together. Similar to the Mindonfire book group, our discussion would include meetings online, in person, and via webcam.

    I would like to propose that we begin our group with two readings from Ursula LeGuin:
    1) her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
    2) her novel The Dispossessed.

    I chose these particular works because both grapple with utopian communities and the limitations of such.

    Ok, so I know it wasn’t very democratic of me to choose the first readings myself, but I hope y’all won’t hold that against me. So please chime in if you’re interested in joining in the discussion and then we’ll make some more concrete plans for structuring our analysis of LeGuin’s stories.

    *Thanks go to RyanH for being the catalyst for this group

  • if this is you…

    If you spent six hours in the community garden this morning, working alongside your neighbors to clear out empty plots, to trim large trees, and filling a semi-truck-sized dumpster within 2 hours. Then you took some time to just sit and talk with your garden–feeling sad that the frost did much damage, seeing how much work needs to be done before spring planting, realizing that momotaro (peach tree #2) didn’t make it. And then you got slightly sunburned (such a sunny day!) and you returned home with leaves in your hair, burrs in your socks, and mud on your pants.

    So if this is you, you should pick a bouquet of lavender and put it on your nightstand–filling your bedroom with its relaxing scent, then take a warm shower and wash the organic matter out of your hair, put on your new favorite wool sweater and curl up on the bed with Ellycat (who can’t resist cuddling with a wool sweater) and take a short nap.

  • violent tendencies

    [Warning: this is not one of my typically upbeat posts. Some of the quoted material from this book might even give offense to my gentler readers]

    So my friend RyanH suggested that I read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. We were talking about my fondness for HBO’s Deadwood (an awful-ly violent show, but wickedly well-written) and my penchant for all things 19th-century and West-ish. As I was looking for some good reading material over the holiday break, I picked up a copy of BM from the library and started reading.

    This book is not for the faint at heart. McCarthy’s writing is cruelly compelling. Nearly every sentence is savage. Plowing through this text was sadistic and nightmarish. I put it down several times, realizing that it was just TOO intense. An example of the way gore oozes from every page:

    They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come. (44-45)

    So what to make of this book? The setting is the Southwest around 1850, when bounties were awarded for killing Indians. The story follows a group of ragtag men who go on a scalping mission, traveling throughout the dismal borderlands region in search of victims. The plotline is a loosely connected series of encounters between the bounty hunters and various groups of renegades and natives.

    This is definitely a man’s tale; women are rarely mentioned or are figured as props, as with this woman:

    In the square two of the Delawares and the outrider Webster were squatting in the dust with a weathered old woman the color of pipeclay. Dry old crone, half naked, her paps like wrinkled aubergines from under the shawl she wore. (97).

    All in all, I’m not sure of the value of this text. There is no joy, no redemption, no catharsis. Just the weary weight of so much suffering.

  • Make me smile…(#2)

    -playing Ticket to Ride with some pretty smart friends at Elise’s Bday party. Winning by such a landslide that no one was even willing to tally points. I RULED from Winnipeg to Santa Fe and throughout the West. Wow, it feels pretty darn good to be a railroad magnate.
    -Kristen’s cute little baby bulldog that took a liking to my robotic leg, and gave my titanium ankle lots of slobbery loving.
    -getting a new battery in my watch and they even fixed the little date thingamajig to the right date for me. Amazing. All this time I’ve never even used the date function!
    -buying something for John’s birthday (reminder: Feb 3rd). Knowing that even if he doesn’t LOVE this particular item, I WILL! [Note: I’ve also bought him some things that I know he will like, but I just couldn’t resist the pull of this one particular item that’s really more for me than for him]
    :)

  • make me smile…

    -“Studying” at the Gypsy Den after Meeting: speaking of death, of school, of pursuing one’s dreams.
    -A free ticket to the PSO. Lucky me that I keep running into people with spare tickets. The absolute bliss of a seat so close to the orchestra that I could reach out and catch the sweat as it dripped off of violinist Cho-Liang Lin‘s brow. Absolutely amazing, breathtaking, heart-stopping, and gorgeous. As Carl St. Clair explained so eloquently just before the concert, this Brahms concerto was rich and full-bodied like good chocolate. And he was oh-so-right.
    -Focusing on school. Again. Intensely reading in coffeeshops, the grad reading room, my office. Remembering why it is that I am pursuing this crazy dream of a PhD.
    -Riding my bike home from school last night. So cold that my eyes were tearing, my whole body shaking. Walking in the house and expressing gratitude for a warm hearth.
    -a new box of mikan oranges in the mail from my mother-in-law.
    -finding this site and giggling at the misfortune of cats who look like hitler (click on the ‘best kitlers’ tab on the left to see those with the closest resemblance).
    :)