Our Lady of the Lakes: Alice's birthday celebration.

Monday, October 15, 2007

Alice's birthday celebration.

Tonight we celebrated Alice's birthday with a small gathering at Leopold's. Actually, I drove down from Pinckney and met her for dinner first, and I drove us both over after. I had my first meal at Argerio's, which was so decidedly mediocre, I almost wish it had remained a pleasant thought. Alice's bruschette more closely resembled english muffin pizzas than any bruschetta I'd seen before. Ah, well. Ann Arbor.

If I didn't have plans to meet Jess for a martini at Cafe Felix tomorrow, I'd probably meet up with Alice and the crew again for a real birthday dinner (since tomorrow is the real day). But this is the first time I'll ever meet Jess to visit, so I'm excited and don't want to try to reschedule, which inevitably turns into "Let's meet for a coffee sometime" in the lives of grad students, it seems. At least this one, anyway. My failure to meet Jenay and Katie despite a handful of emails back and forth is a fine case in point. We're just too damned busy.

This whole blogging thing feels a bit unnatural. It's one thing if it's a really specific thing, like a food blog or a political blog or a travel blog. But just an everyday chat about being a graduate student blog? We'll see how it goes.

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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) (Walden or Life in the Woods)

Listener up there! Here, you! What have you to confide to me?
Look in my face, while I snuff the sidle of evening;
Talk honestly—no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh—I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? Who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;
It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself