sigh

usually about this time of year, i write a short devotional thought (about, say, joseph or simeon)and deliver it oh-so-personally to the in-boxes of my friends and loved ones. but, recently, someone told me that mass emails basically offended her, because they suggested that i don't care about people but want to appear as if i do. it's all a big performance, you see. i thought that was interesting.

so, this year, i'm not sending out the mass email. not because i don't care, but because i'm so tired of second-guessing myself and wondering what people might think.

isn't that silly?

numbers and lists are fun . . .

. . . or so i would have you believe.

this is a list of the 100 best novels of the last century, according to random house - bold means i've read a least parts of it, italics mean i really want to

1. The Collected Works of Shakespeare
2. The Bible
3. Don Quixote - Cervantes
4. Homer's Iliad/Odyssey
5. Ovid's Metamorphoses
6. Finnegans Wake - Joyce
7. Oresteia of Aeschylus
8. Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
9. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
10. Alice in Wonderland - Carroll
11. To the Lighthouse - Woolf
12. 100 Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
13. Pale Fire - Nabokov
14. Divine Comedy - Dante
15. Poems of Wallace Stevens
16. Arabian Nights
17. War and Peace - Tolstoy
18. Beloved - Morrison
19. Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges
20 Heart of Darkness - Conrad
21. Anecdotes of Destiny - Dinesen
22. Oedipus Trilogy - Sophocles
23. Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony - Calasso
24. Katasaratsagura (Oceans of Story) Somadeva
25. Chekhov's Short Stories
26. Bhagavad Gita
27. Ulysses - Joyce
28. Grimm's Fairy Tales
29. Invisible Man - Ellison
30. Absalom Absalom - Faulkner
31. Women in Love - Lawrence
32. Lolita - Nabokov
33. Plato: Dialogues
34. Remembrance of Things Past - Proust
35. The Tin Drum- Grass
36. Flannery O'Connor: Short Stories
37. Great Expectations - Dickens
38. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable - Beckett
39. Interpretation of Dreams - Freud
40. Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
41. Four Quartets - Eliot
42. Madame Bovary - Flaubert
43. Midnight's Children - Rushdie
44. Tristram Shandy - Sterne
45. Yeats: Collected Poems
46. Golden Bough - Frazer
47. Wind in the Willows - Grahame
48. Pride and Prejudice - Austen
49. The Black Prince - Murdoch
50. Manuscript found at Saragossa Jan Potaki
51. Bacchae Euripides
52. Vanity Fair - Thackery
53. Metamorphosis - Kafka
54. Aeneid - Virgil
55. Tristan & Iseult
56. Collected Poems of William Blake
57. Golden Ass of Apuleius
58. Waiting for Godot - Beckett
59. Collected Poems of Emily Dickenson
60. Moby Dick - Melville
61. Speak, Memory - Nabokov
62. Phaedre - Racine
63. Poetics of Aristotle
64. Fathers and Sons - Turgenev
65. Lysistrata - Aristophanes
66. A Doll's House - Ibsen
67. Importance of Being Earnest - Wilde
68. Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
69. Charlotte's Web - White
70. Huckleberry Finn - Twain
71. Leaves of Grass - Whitman
72. If On a Winter's Night - Calvino
73. Jane Eyre - Bronte
74. Storyteller Maria Vargos Llosa
75. Heraclitus-Fragments
76. Wuthering Heights - Bronte
77. Epic of Gilgamesh
78. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
79. Tess of the Durbervilles - Hardy
80. Tale of Genji - Murisaki
81. Montaigne's Essays
82. Walden Henry - Thoreau
83. Native Son - Wright
84. On Nature - Emerson
85. Dr. Faustus - Marlowe
86. To Kill a Mockingbird - Lee
87. Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais
88. Paradise Lost - Milton
89. Tom Jones - Fielding
90. Endgame - Beckett
91. The Art of Memory -Yates
92. Middlemarch - Eliot
93. At Play in the Fields of the Lord - Matthiessen
94. All the Pretty Horses - McCarthy
95. Candide - Voltaire
96. Genealogy of Morals - Nietzsche
97. Passage to India - Forster
98. The Sea the Sea - Murdoch
99. Tristes Tropiques - Levi-Strauss
100. Their Eyes were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

sum up!

stolen from my friend, paul:
1) was 2005 a good year for you? yes and no . . . what a non-answer. relationships blossomed and significant growth occured this year and that wasn't easy. i guess "good" is an apt word.
2) what was your favorite moment of the year? supervising the bus back from camp with the calgary kids . . . i felt like i was doing something important. (for the record, every time someone came to me for advice or prayer comes in as a close second.)
3) what was your least favorite moment of the year? experiencing disappointment with all sorts of relationships
4) where were you when 2005 began? in toronto at my parents' house
5) who were you with? my parents and sissy
6) where will you be when 2005 ends? in calgary (just barely back from mexico)
7) who will you be with when 2005 ends? janet, jeremy, jill . . . others?
8) did you keep your new year's resolution of 2005? i had an "i want this but can't do it by my own willpower" wish . . . and it did come true.
9) do you have a new years' resolution for 2006? hmm . . . maybe another wish. working on it.
10) did you make any new friends in 2005? yessir . . . so good, so good.
11) who are your favourite new friends? steve, janet, jeremy, and jill
12) what was your favourite month of 2005? may - corini came to visit and i went to kelowna.
13) did you travel outside of canada in 2005? i will on Christmas eve!
14) whch states/provinces did you travel to in 2005? back and forth between alberta & ontario, with a wee trip to kelowna, bc, in may. and i'll hit houston on Christmas eve on my way to mexico.
15) did you lose anybody close to you in 2005? my friend brandon died in may
16) did you miss anybody in the past year? aplenty
17) what was the best movie you saw in 2005? i enjoyed rewatching "love actually", "the believer" and "the apartment" . . . new movie-wise, "madagascar" was fantastic
18) what was your favourite song from 2005? it's not new, but it's new to me:"hurt"
19) what was your favorite record/cd from 2005? i don't think i bought any new albums this year . . .
20) how many concerts did you see in 2005? i can only think of three, and two of them were school-related
21) did you have a favorite concert in 2005? omara portunondo
22) did you drink a lot of alcohol in 2005? not so much
23) did you do a lot of drugs in 2005? there was that one night with the nyquil . . . i wish i were kidding
24) did you do anything you are ashamed of this year? can you imagine 365 consecutive days of not doing something shame-worth??
25) what was the worst lie someone told you in 2005? none of them were life-threatening.
26) did you treat somebody badly in 2005? i have this pattern of knowing how to be good, but ignoring that :P i can be a lousy friend at times.
27) did somebody treat you badly in 2005? yeah. i work with residents.
28) how much money did you spend in 2005? every penny the alberta government will let me use.
29) what was your proudest moment of 2005? dealing with a boundary issue in my friendship with a guy. we were both uber-mature about it, and we're better friends now! :D
30) what was your most embarrassing moment of 2005? as if.
31) what would you change if you could go back in time to any moment of 2005? i would have written my papers already
32) what are your plans for 2006? i don't love plans, but how's this: find quiet, achieve balance, be diligent, keep at that compassion thing, read for fun . . . and see my sissy graduate (before me!)

officially?

worst. student. ever.

also, disappointed to find that the old rule of blogging is true:
"interesting posts yield no comments; stupid quotes yield many."
shame, shame.

no more john.

just had my last exam. just papers left.

amanda shared this quote with the world:
"we were incompatible in a lot of ways. like for example, i was a night person, and he didn't like me." ~ wendy liebmann
i made me laugh. laughing is good.

calvin

i have a bible exam at 9am tomorrow, so i thought i'd spend a few moments discussing platonic forms. because i've been thinking about them. why else?

just before i posted about returning to who i used to be, i'd gone out for lunch with kevin and kat. at wendy's, of course. (where else?) ANYway, i was saying that when i was younger i wasn't so focused, but i was happier. coincidence? mmmm . . . maybe not! i played euphonium and did math and debating and writing and i loved it all . . . and i think i knew who i was. well, kat said, "yeah, but you aren't math and euph and debating and writing . . . those are just things you DO." they're things i participate in and they may describe me, but they're not me.

then stu - oh, stu - who was sitting at another booth, made some crack about what we choose to talk about - like love and life and why - and kev said, "it's like a socratic discourse." and then it clicked. and, man, when it clicks, it CLICKS.

forms.

what is the FORM of mara?

instead of focusing on the particulars, i should wallow in the universal. what am i about? not details, but real truths of me.

i struggle with role conflict, but i shouldn't. if divine simplicity is a reality, and i am to be Christlike, then i, too, should be more simple. not in the sense of "sell all your possessions" - although that, too - but in focusing less on having distinct attributes, and more on being a whole.

SO:

instead of thinking and planning and trying to be a good woman, a good wife, a good mother, a good friend, a good sister, a good daughter, a good residence manager, a good student, a good customer, a good neighbour, a good employee, a good Christian, a good role model, a good colleaugue, a good euphonium player, a good writer, a good debater, a good reader, a good roommate . . .

"and now you can say etc, etc" . . .

i should focus on trying to be a good human being. the rest will follow.

a. macdonald

i saw this movie with deniss on friday. it was good.

that map of narnia can get bigger by clicking here. try it. it's good.

i went to denny's on monday night for the first time in a long while. i had a super bird and great conversation with some of the people i love (namely janet, jeremy, steve, and jill). it was good.

i like conversations about philosophy and theology. especially after midnight. they are good.

i had baklava this afternoon. yeah, baklava. it was good.

life is good. and "good" is a lot. it's not just ok. it's good. like God's creation, or God Himself. it's not the be-all and end-all (as a recent late-night conversation clarified), but it's a lot.

donne

so, i'm in exams . . . and longing to get some sleep. one down, three to go. three papers left, too. clown school remains an option, but i doubt i'd do well there. which makes me sad.

proposition #1: you know you're no longer close friends when . . . . you learn about the intimate details of someone's life from his blog EVEN THOUGH YOU SEE HIM ALMOST EVERY DAY!

propostion #2: ignoring work doesn't help you get it done faster. no, no, no . . . trust me on this one.

proposition #3: "so i married an axe murderer" has an excellent soundtrack:


marry him or marry me,
i'm the one that loves you, baby, can't you see?
i ain't got no future or a family tree,
but i know what a prince and lover ought to be,
i know what a prince and lover ought to be...

said, if you want to call me baby - just go ahead, now
and if you'd like to tell me maybe - just go ahead, now
and if you wanna buy me flowers - just go ahead, now
and if you'd like to talk for hours - just go ahead, now
~spin doctors, "two princes"


i often feel like the prodigal son
take all i need, giving back none
our beauty shows in such different ways
you're like the light behind the fog
so soft
but still you burn my eyes away
~toad the wet sprocket, "brother"

i've had profound thoughts lately . . . but let's save those for later.

happy two weeks 'til Christmas!

feast of quizzes

our greek quiz got postponed. enjoy this in its absence.

feast of song

follow me down to the valley below
you know
moonlight is bleeding from out of your soul
~porcupine tree, lazarus

they will see us waving from such great heights
"come down now" they'll say
but everything looks perfect from far away
"come down now" but we'll stay
~the postal service, such great heights

i miss corini.