Warning: This could be blasphemous

So I thought I was totally over the fact that Brett Favre retired from my Packers. I was wrong. Today I got this week's issue of TIME, and of course, the sports article is about him. It brought everything back. Yes, I'm in mourning. Titletown will rise again - we had to lose Bart Starr eventually, and Brett's no different. It's just....*sigh*. It'll never, NEVER EVER be the same. Yes, I'm genuinely sad. Keep that in mind when you mock me.

But on a happier note, TIME's 10 Questions were to none other than...*drumroll*...ANNE RICE!!!!! Nothing I didn't already know...but I thought the picture of her was pretty good. Something struck me when I saw it - to think that the mind and imagination of this little cute old lady with a greying bob haircut gave birth to the most sensual, dark, passionate, luxurious, and philosophical creatures I know. This little old woman, clutching her rosary beads, asked questions and provided few answers, dared to literarily (yes my dear readers, that's a play on 'literary' and 'literally') desecrate Catholicism only decades later to literarily (there it is again) swear off her masterpiece, the world of her Brat Prince Lestat, and consecrate her future writings to Christ. The near 30 year old cult following, composed of the gothically inclined in body, mind or spirit, was orphaned by our Queen of Vampirism. The prophet of the Savage Garden would no longer serve as both herald and scribe of the Gospel According to the Damned. As her devotees mourned the loss, we hesitantly embrace the new Canon that cannot ever be Canon, for it is the story of Christ the Lord told from His eyes.

And yet there is hope on the horizon. A spark that may die in the air before it catches. The promise of one more novel. After the story of Christ is finished. Translation: we must wait at least four years. At the VERY least. Lestat will wrestle with and likely embrace Christianity. Rice vowed never to write her vampires in the same way again. And even so, she may decide to not tell this final part of the story. The great allegory of the desperately struggling soul, searching for truth may never be completed.

But the lips of Canon whisper possibilities, they whisper fetal hope. Will the Madonna of the Vampires conceive and bear a son, a reborn Lestat?

The possibility of playoffs early in the season is unspoken of amongst Cheeseheads - to speak of it may be enough to jinx the whole season. This may be true of the Vampire Chronicles as well.

take this wine, and drink with me, let's forget our misery

I feel note-y.

I'm glad Dr. Kalas is going to be all right. Chemo sucks. Just ask my dad.

This past week has been one of the most insane ever. So intense, just, so intense. And yet I'm not even done with all the stuff I have to do.

See, it's kinda weird. It takes forever for the weeks to go by, because so much happens, so, so much. And then you blink and look around, and it's all gone, and you're staring at the end of the year, at forecasting courses for next semester. It's not even next year. They're calling it next semester, like there's no break.

I'm down with that.

I know I"m gonna blink and it'll be all over. So, I've decided. I'm diving head first into this new life. No more safety nets, no more hand holds. The only way I can find out if I'm built to fly is if I jump, free fall until the wind catches me.

"I cannot grow old in Salem's lot
So here I go is my shot.
Feet fail me not this may be the only opportunity that I got..."

I can't believe I'm not overwhelmed. I'm so happy, so so SO happy here. How is the even possible?

Screw what's supposed to happen, or knowing why. Live it. Woot.

Because the sun is shining.

Man, I'm never gonna get my work done. People keep wanting to talk to me. lol I guess that's the price of having friends. I'm more than happy to pay that. It'll just come at the price of sleep. And sleep is for the weak and the dead.

"save tonight, and fight the break of dawn, come tomorrow, tomorrow I'll be gone..."

Eh...God I'm happy.

I'm your hostage.

Announcement: The management would like to officially welcome Kayla as potentially the first human reader of this blog. Now I can't hide anything from you. Love you dear.


~*~

So, last night, staying up until 4am again of course, Derek showed me this quote from one of his friend's facebooks.

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”

It's by Neil Gaiman. He wrote Corraline, a book that I thought was actually really good and I finished in one night. Not Rice, but good stuff.

I would like to add, though, that rather than hating love, I love to hate love. Just think about the irony in that statement. JUST PONDER IT. Makes your brain explode, eh? Schweet.

Now that this is linked on my facebook, I should probably be a little more tactful with what I put on here.

Nah.

I'll just put up a thin veil of defense against people I'm pretty sure would stalk this. Ha, I should probably put up a disclaimer. Yeah, why not. :D

It's cold, but the sun shines now. I'm so excited for it. Camas probably isn't my favorite place. I'm just used to it. It's the people here I love. It's the independence. It's the...Mount. Really, it is. I think a lot of us were drawn here for a reason. A lot of my friends seemed to have fallen into coming here, somewhat like me. It kinda makes me wonder if there really is something...holy...here, something that draws people together for reasons that we can only know in hindsight.

Frankly I wouldn't be surprised.

Finding my way back to sanity

The last 24 hours have been a reminder of some of the reasons why this is entitled "The Other Side of Sanity."

I want to cry. My life is filled with happiness and confusion and revulsion and I praise God for all of it.

People have been opening up and pouring out their souls before my eyes. I think it started on the Thursday morning before break, with Derek, and then after break Lauren and Andy. You have the full spectrum with the three. I asked Derek, I didn't ask Lauren but now I welcome her with open arms, and Andy I didn't ask and I'm not sure if I want it.

I know I'm blessed. I know I have it good, and I thank God for it every day. I can't imagine the suffering my friends have gone through. I see myself as a personification of Catherine from Austen's Northanger Abbey. I have a relatively perfect up bringing. Ok, I shouldn't say perfect. It has been good. My parents are together, they have money, I have no real tragedies in my life. I have been spared. But WHY?? I want to know. And now the question grows, with people opening their souls to me. I ask why? WHY ME? I see nothing special. Is it because I am a whole person, or close to it? My life hasn't been broken by tragedy?

I honestly don't know what people see in me. Do they see that I won't break what they give me, that I'll try to keep it safe and the pieces whole? Could that be so special?

Today I didn't have class so I slept. I woke up and went and got afternoon food (they really need a term for Lunch/dinner) with Lauren and Rena. On the way back I was overcome with this feeling of intense happiness. Of Joy. It's crazy, but it almost brought me to the edge. Another mental snapshot to add to the stash of memories that will never dim. Another was on the way to BWI. I'm not entirely certain why.

Reason 1 why I love Rice and her Lestat

'The Dark Moment'

From The Vampire Lestat

Anne Rice

And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.
I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness. In fact, it came to me that my mother dying soon was meaningless and I confided in Nicolas what she had said. 'I'm perfectly horrified. I'm afraid of it.'
Well, if there had been a Golden Moment in the room it was gone now. And something different started to happen.
I should call it the Dark Moment, but it was still high-pitched and full of eerie light. We were talking rapidly, cursing this meaninglessness, and when Nicolas at last sat down and put his head in his hands, I took some glamorous and hearty swigs of wine and went to pacing and gesturing as he had done before.
I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find out the answer as to why were we ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks than in death he'll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won't be anything at all.
'But that's just it,' I said, 'we don't make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing.' I saw the universe, a vision of the sun, the planets, the stars, black night going on forever. And I began to laugh.
'Do you realise that! We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over!' I shouted at Nicolas, who was sitting back on the bed, nodding and drinking his wine out of a flagon. 'We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!'
But I had stopped laughing. I stood still and I understood perfectly what I was saying!
There was no judgement day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in which all terrible wrongs would be made right, all horrors redeemed.
The witches burnt at the stake would never be avenged.
No one was ever going to tell us anything!
No, I didn't understand it at this moment. I saw it! And I began to make the single sound: 'Oh!' I said it again 'Oh!' and then I said it louder and louder and louder, and I dropped the wine bottle on the floor. I put my hands to my head and I kept saying it, and I could see my mouth opened in that perfect circle that I had described to my mother and I kept saying, 'Oh, oh, oh!'
I said it like a great hiccuping that I couldn't stop. And Nicolas took hold of me and started shaking me, saying:
'Lestat, stop!'
I couldn't stop. I ran to the window, unlatched it and swung out the heavy little glass, and stared at the stars. I couldn't stand seeing them. I couldn't stand seeing the pure emptiness, the silence, the absoloute absence of any answer, and I started roaring as Nicolas pulled me back from the window-sill and pulled shut the glass.
'You'll be all right,' he said over and over. Someone was beating on the door. It was the innkeeper, demanding why we had to carry on like this.
'You'll feel all right in the morning,' Nicolas kept insisting. 'You just have to sleep.'
We had awakened everyone. I couldn't be quiet. I kept making the same sound over again. And I ran out of the inn with Nicolas behind me, and down the street of the village and up towards the castle with Nicolas trying to catch up with me, and through the gates and up into my room.
'Sleep, that's what you need,' he kept saying to me desperately. I was lying against the wall with my hands over my ears, and that sound kept coming. 'Oh, oh, oh.'
'In the morning,' he said, 'it will be better.'


WELL, it was not better in the morning.
And it was no better by nightfall, and in fact it got worse with the coming of the darkness.
I walked and talked and gestured like a contented human being, but I was flayed. I was shuddering. My teeth were chattering. I couldn't stop it. I was staring at everything around me in horror. The darkness terrified me. I stared at the mace and the flail I'd taken out after the wolves. I stared at the faces of my brothers. I stared at everything, seeing behind every configuration of colour and light and shadow the same thing; death. Only it wasn't just death as I'd thought of it before, it was death the way I saw it now. Real death, total death, inevitable, irreversible, and resolving nothing!
And in this unbearable state of agitation I commenced to do something I'd never done before. I turned to those around me and questioned them relentlessly.
'But do you believe in God?' I asked my brother Augustin, 'How can you live if you don't!'
'But do you really believe in anything? I demanded of my blind father, 'If you knew you were dying at this very minute, would you expect to see God or darkness! Tell me.'
'You're mad, you've always been mad! he shouted. 'Get out of this house! You'll drive us all crazy.'
He stood up, which was hard for him, being crippled and blind, and he tried to throw his goblet at me and naturally he missed.
I couldn't look at my mother. I couldn't be near her. I didn't want to make her suffer with my questions. I went down to the inn. I couldn't bear to think of the witches' place. I would not have walked to that end of the village for anything! I put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes. 'Go away!' I said at the thought of those who'd died like that without ever, ever understanding anything.
The second day, it was no better.
And it wasn't any better by the end of the week either.
I ate, drank, slept, but every waking moment was pure panic and pure pain. I went to the village priest and demanded did he really believe the Body of Christ was present on the altar at the Consecration. And after hearing his stammered answers, and seeing the fear in his eyes, I went away more desparate than before.
'But how do you live, how do you go on breathing and moving and doing things when you know there is no explanation?' I was raving finally. And then Nicolas said maybe the music would make me feel better. He would play the violin.
I was afraid of the intensity of it. But we went to the orchard and in the sunshine Nicolas played every song he knew. I sat there with my arms folded and my knees drawn up, my teeth chattering though we we were right in the hot sun, and the sun was glaring off the little polished violin, and I watched Nicolas swaying into the music as he stood before me, the raw pure sounds swelling magically to fill the orchard and the valley, though it wasn't magic, and Nicolas put his arms around me finally, and we just sat there silent, and then he said very softly, 'Lestat, believe me, this will pass.'
'Play again,' I said. 'The music is innocent.'
Nicolas smiled and nodded. Pamper the madman.
And I knew it wasn't going to pass, and nothing for the moment could make me forget, but what I felt was inexpressible gratitude for the music, that in this horror there could be something as beautiful as that.
You couldn't understand anything; and you couldn't change anything. But you could make music like that. And I felt the same gratitude when I saw the village children dancing, when I saw their arms raised and their knees bent, and their bodies turning to the rhythmn of the songs they sang. I started to cry watching them.
I wandered into the church and on my knees I leaned against the wall and I looked at the ancient statues and I felt the same gratitude looking at the finely carved fingers and the noses and the ears and the expressions on their faces and the deep folds in their garments, and I couldn't stop myself from crying.
At least we had these beautiful things, I said. Such goodness.
But nothing natural seemed beautiful to me now! The very sight of a great tree standing alone in a field could make me tremble and cry out. Fill the orchard with music.
And let me tell you a little secret. It never did pass, really.

WHAT caused it? Was it the late night drinking and talking, or did it have to do with my mother and her saying she was going to die? Did the wolves have something to do with it? Was it a spell cast upon the imagination by the witches' place?
I don't know. It had come like something visited upon me from outside. One minute it was an idea, and the next it was real. I think you can invite that sort of thing, but you can't make it come.
Of course it was to slacken. But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again. I mean the world looked different forever after, and even in moments of exquisite happiness there was the darkness lurking, the sense of our frailty and our hopelessness.


http://www.bradcolbourne.com/the_dark_moment.html
pages 65-70
The Vampire Lestat
Second Volume of The Vampire Chronicles
By Anne Rice
IBSN 0-7088-3153-2
Warner Books

woot.

Well. Here we are.

I picked up an application to Kohl's for the summer. I might stop by the old people place that just opened up. It's a great confidence boost, this job hunting and making myself seem so utterly amazing. But I don't really enjoy it.

I have to write an essay in the style of Montaigne. Fun stuff. 3-4 pages. Shouldn't be too hard. My problem is that I just have to pick a topic. I also have reading for Kalas to do.

Oh look, the sun is coming out. A little.

Wait, there it is. And it's almost sixty out. Wow, great weather. Really good weather.

Damn I love Washington. But I know I can't stay. That's ok, I'll just visit from time to time.

The breeze is divine. I wish I could bottle it.

Hmmmm...

Should I open this up to my Facebook buddies? Let them find it on their own?

Hmmm.....

For some reason I love baring my soul to the world. Good times.

Oh why the hell not. No one reads this sucker anyway.

I'll just not post my myspace blogs to here. Nope, some Facebook people probably would get hurt by a few on there. If they read the archives.

So yes. Woot. Lady Rain is getting a face. Or, the face is getting Lady Rain.

I'm getting Coldstone in an hour. That will not help me look better in a swimsuit this summer.

Not that anyone I'd be trying to impress would see me. Ah well.