Several things that make me happy

[philena]

I think I should post something happy to make up for the grumpiness a few days ago. First off, my parents gave me a poem-a-day type calendar for my birthday, which I just love. I've religiously kept up with it, and although about half the time the text is not a poem, but what poet X says about poet Y (or maybe a short biography of poet Z), which is very dull, some of the poems I see there are terrific. I saw Milton's poem on going blind, Stevie Smith's "Not Waving but Drowning," Langston Hughes's "Fog," all of whose existences I was already aware of (good poems, too); but I also ran across stuff I'd never heard of. My two favorites are under the cuts. I know I've ranted enough already about the dreadful poetry I have to deal with when processing the Modern Poetry collection at work, but I really do like poetry, and I particularly like discovering new poets. Billy Collins will always be my first love, but he's certainly not the only one, and I like finding other stuff to add to my arsenal of 'Read this--it's great!"

Parable

I read how Quixote in his random ride
Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose
The purity of chance, would not decide

Whither to fare, but wished his horse to choose.
For glory lay wherever he might turn.
His head was light with pride, his horse's shoes

Were heavy, and he headed for the barn.

-Richard Wilbur

Bluebeard

This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed . . . Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see . . . Look yet again--
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place

-Edna St. Vincent Millay*

Another thing that makes me happy is hearing the bells in Rockefeller Chapel. They start ringing at about 7:15 in the evening, and they play beautiful (slightly out-of-tune, due to their having housed about a century's worth of pigeons) melodies that I hear as I walk to rehearsal every night. It's a cold, long walk, and hearing the bells puts me in a good mood when I reach rehearsal, which is another thing that makes me happy. I love rehearsal, I love the music, I love the people there, and I love being part of a play. When I'm with Gilbert and Sullivan people I get to adopt a character that would be far too exhausting to maintain full-time, but it's so much fun to be for the evening the cheerful, extroverted, sharp-object-loving, pyromaniacal chorus member whom everyone likes or perhaps simply agrees to humor. And I get to wear pretty costumes and sing pretty tunes and--if not forget(I always bring work with me)--at least not worry about school.

But I like school too. I love complaining talking about classes with other people in my department. I love figuring out problems, although I'm a bit sick of a direct correlation between my semantics grade and the hour at which I complete the assignment. This is not a factor of how much time I put into the assignment--I get far worse grades when I start it over the weekend and talk with the TA during office hours than when I start it the day before it's due and stay up until 2:00 typing frantically. But aside from semantics, I enjoy my classes and doing my work, and even though I hate semantics, I'm still a valued member of the semantics-hating group, which is a sense of inclusion that I value.

I adore the nap room in the Reynold's Club. It's warm and comfy and there's almost always a fire there and I can get huge amounts of work done while drinking the best coffee on campus (Boyd's coffee, from the 2nd floor/Uncle Joe's/Hallowed Grounds coffee shop) or I can sleep there for an hour and a half, as I did today, between work and class.

And translating OCS is the bestest puzzle ever. I don't do so well in the class, but I never tire of translating the text and figuring out exactly what form everything is, and the ah-hah moment when I realize that this verb is a root aorist, not a 1st person singular, which means that the sentence actually makes sense, is far more satisfying than any successful ranking of Optimality Theory constraints I might have completed last year. Optimality Theory is so. . . well . . . theoretical that I never get any sense that a constraint ranking which gives the right results is anything more useful than a constraint ranking that gives the right results or does anything more important than satisfy some non-verifiable, theory-internal problem; but when I identify a verb form, I'm instantly rewarded with a sentence that means something, and is real and useful enough that some scribe centuries ago copied it down, because he knew that it would be real and useful to someone else!

I also really like the blue jeans I'm wearing. They're insanely comfy.

And Daniel. Of course. I can't possibly leave him out of this list.

*This lady is the authoress of the famous letter, whose original we have in Special Collections:

March 1918.

Dear Harriet Monroe,

Spring is here and I could be very happy, except that I am broke. Would you mind paying me now instead of upon publication for those so stunning verses of mine which you have? I am become very, very thin, and have taken to smoking Virginia tobacco.

Wistfully yours,
Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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[quistis218.livejournal.com]

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