Day 166: Summer reading officially begins at the library, and I spent the afternoon decorating the children's department to go along with the "One World, Many Stories" international theme.
Day 167: Another library project: I designed these things called "shelf talkers," little slips of paper people can fill out recommending a book (they have blanks spaces for title, author, name of person recommending, and a few words about why they liked it) that you then fold and slide under the shelf the book is on so hopefully the book kind of jumps out at people passing by. My branch manager asked me to design and print a bunch so I did.
Day 168: In addition to the original seven on my "Fictional Men of My Dreams" list on Day 149, I added the honorable mentions category you may have read at the bottom. I realized there were more characters I would have added but didn't want to take the time to do a whole long descriptive paragraph on each of them, so I did it that way instead.
Day 169: I wrote a lullaby...
Sleep away, sleep away
Till the coming of day
With eyes closed
You won’t ever know
How the shadows dance and play
Sleep and dream, sleep and dream
Till the world’s lit by sunbeams
If you’re snoring
All is boring
There’s no need for you to scream
Nothing happens when you sleep, love
The whole world shuts down and waits
There’s no ghost flitting beside you
No monsters peering through the cieling grate
And those whispers in the walls
Aren’t worth listening to at all.
So just close your eyes and sleep, love
Sleep away, sleep away.
Day 170: At the library, I helped with an event when one of my coworkers had to go unexpectedly out of town. It was a book club dealing with the Magic Tree House series, particularly the volume Vacation Under A Volcano which talks about Pompeii. I made this volcano shell (the white thing in the top is a small ceramic cup) which we would then make explode with the traditional baking-soda-and-vinegar technique...
Day 171: At the actual book club event, we also made a mosaic craft. In order to show the kids what we were doing, I made an example, a turtle. Unfortunately it never made the trip home with me.
Day 172: I worked on a 13 Days of Halloween project! This one I'm definitely using, so I won't say much, but it was inspired in part by a dream Rebekah told me she had once of us wandering through New York in search of a dwarf that's lord and master of a street corner. I've nicknamed it the "street corner story."
Day 173: I heard about the death of a sibling of some people I used to go to high school with. Even though I didn't know the person who died and hadn't seen this particular family in a long while, it still really made me think about death and loss. I still felt really bad for them. I wrote this poem-ish thing, though from the refrain you can tell I probably meant to make it into a song:
It was always the mad ones that burned at both ends till they sputtered to smoke in the middle.
It was only the mad ones you should ever bother with, because the light in their eyes shone like suns.
There are people too big for this world, so they leave it a bit quicker than we would like.
But we’re all of us the better for their having been here, though we may not understand it at the time.
You have lost something that you cannot find again
Lost something that you can’t get back
And I want there to be some words I could say to you
But no words can express what it is you now lack
It was always the brave ones, the best ones that shone out like stars in the dark — too bright to behold.
It was only these brave ones, these fierce and free ones you should ever hope to know.
There are people too great for this life, so they leave it a bit faster than we would like.
But we’re all of us the better for their having been here, though we may not understand it at the time.
Though we may be too stuck wondering why…
You have lost something that you cannot find again
Lost something that you can’t get back
And I want there to be some words I could say to you
But no words can express what it is you now lack
You have lost something that was never really yours
But the loss of it hurts all the same
And I want there to be some words I could say to you
That could somehow erase all your pain
Till nothing but the empty ache of hope remained…
Be brave and be wary, the world is so scary, but let there be trust in the song
Be bold and be mad, in the end you’ll be glad, for life isn’t terribly long.
‘Cause it’s always the mad ones, the truly alive ones that vanish like ghosts in the dawn.
And the rest of us live even after they’re gone, fierce and fragile as a seedling seeking light
We fight up through the dark, we fight on.
Day 174: I sat down at the piano and worked out chords to go with the "Pinocchio's Lament" song from Day 135. I haven't yet recorded any audio of me singing/playing it but I swear I'll get that up on the blog sometime in the days ahead!
Day 175: At the library, they asked me to design a poster for a puppet event coming up next month... so I did.
Day 176: This was a weird one. I wrote a blog post about the difference between tact and cowardice, and how I'm able to have friends of such varying political and religious beliefs without offending any or all of them. It took a while to write what I have up there right now, but I'm not completely happy with it and want to change some things. So instead of linking you to the actual post, I'll just excerpt a piece of it here:
When it comes to speaking my mind, I suck. Not exactly.... I mean, I find some way to get what I think out there. Usually it involves this blog or reams of notebook paper or the word processor on my computer. Sometimes it involves a more public forum, something like Twitter or Facebook where family or friends can see what I've written and more easily respond.
This is where it gets sticky.
I have friends who fall all along the political spectrum on all manner of issues. Guns, animal rights, taxes, abortion, creationism vs. evolution, censorship, sex education, gay marriage, the death penalty. You name the issue and I guarantee I've got very good friends as far to each extreme of it as you can go.
How does this work, exactly? I'd like to be able to say that if a serious subject did come up in conversation and tempers started to flare that we'd just back away from it, "agree to disagree." But such an idea implies that I not only have an opinion but am willing to voice it, which is... untrue. In fact, I usually do the exact opposite: I avoid these subjects at all costs.
Of course, people don't necessarily have to talk about these issues all the time. There are plenty of other things we can agree on: television shows, favorite ways to spend a rainy afternoon, best ice cream flavors, amazing books you have to read, etc. But when the subjects do come up, when the times come around when such remarks are only natural... well, I fall back on silence.
Because inevitably if you speak an opinion, someone whom you love and respect is going to disagree and will call you on it. It's awkward and uncomfortable. It often involves arguing back and forth, each trying to prove your point to the other, to get the other person to change their minds. I hate arguing. I try to avoid it at all costs. Thus: silence.
It's not just the arguing. It's that I hate disappointing people, and I feel like if I speak my mind someone will inevitably think "Oh, she's been brainwashed into that school of thinking..." When you're silent, when you're a blank page, when you're an empty vessel you can navigate throughout your sea of diverse friends and family without ever making waves or causing problems. I call it tact because I don't want to hurt anyone, and I don't want to lose anyone's respect. But I think it's really cowardice because it is rooted in a desperate, panicky kind of fear.
There are times I will speak out: I call out racist and homophobic comments, oppose people who advocate censorship, and even occasionally get the nerve to remind people who gripe about their taxes that without them we wouldn't have schools, roads, and libraries. If asked about guns, I'll tell the truth: they make me really uncomfortable, I never want to have one anywhere near my house, and I would probably have very few problems with hand guns being completely banned in the U.S. I'll often quote Gandalf in Fellowship of the Ring to explain my stance on the death penalty: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” I will gladly list the reasons that I despise Sarah Palin. I may even revisit the Gandalf quote to tentatively enter a discussion about abortion.
But sometimes there are debates that have me stumped. Maybe it's because they aren't as clear-cut to my mind as these other issues are. I can see very clearly how both sides could see their way of thinking as logical, and why both sides would be offended or disgusted by the views of the other. That's when the tact/cowardice really starts kicking in...
There's more after that, but that's the part where I start to feel like I didn't verbalize what I was actually thinking too well. So I may revisit and revise that at some later date.
Day 177: I made the video to go with the "Salamander Song" you saw on Day 141.
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