Poem for Monday

Alone
By Maya Angelou

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

--------

Back to business as usual except that now I am behind on two friends lists instead of one. *g* Am hoping everyone crossposts their GreatestJournal entries here!

the comfort meme:
comfort food: If my stomach is upset, chicken soup and peanut butter toast. If my stomach is not upset, cheese popcorn and milk chocolate.
comfort drink: Sweet iced tea or lukewarm hot chocolate, depending on the season.
comfort movie: Paul Mazursky's Tempest.
comfort book: Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time.
comfort fic: L.R. Bowen's The Cardassian Mask.
comfort clothes: Oversized sweats.
comfort song: "I Will Survive," Gloria Gaynor.
comfort outing: Alone, Borders; otherwise dragging , or to lunch with me.
comfort company: , or, on the rare occasions when he is the reason that I need comfort, .

It was a little chilly for Fort McHenry, so we took the kids to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. We hadn't been in a couple of years, and they have a new, fabulous exhibit on the Hubble Telescope (and the curator was well-informed about the state of necessary repairs and the target shuttle dates). They show Cosmic Voyage, which was originally made for an IMAX theater but looks pretty good on a standard auditorium screen on DVD; in this film, Morgan Freeman narrates what we'd see in increasing powers of ten out to the edge of the known universe and looking into a drop of water down to the level of quarks, and the kids were fascinated. They were also happy because we stopped at Best Buy to get them a new cable so they could link their Game Boys, and since we were already on Route 1 I asked to visit The Crystal Fox in Laurel, one of my favorite local metaphysical stores.

Came home and watched the Golden Globes. Had one of those shameful moments of Death By Orlando Bloom that I always deny happened afterward. *g* Was amusedly happy for William Shatner, absolutely thrilled for Anjelica Huston, delighted for Jamie Foxx, ambivalent about Glenn Close because although she was my favorite actress for years and she deserved more awards than she ever won, she didn't do a thing for me in The Lion in Winter (that's Katharine Hepburn's role, dammit), pleased for Leo, reasonably pleased for Annette Bening but thought she sounded terribly overrehearsed...well, these are the awards that can be bought, as Pia Zadora proved. For instance, I like both Clive Owen and Natalie Portman, but given the people they beat -- and the clip they showed for Closer was all the two of them, no sign of Julia or Jude in the film at all -- tell me the production company didn't offer the Hollywood Foreign Press Association amazing schwag. The Robin Williams tribute was the highlight of the show; he made some sort of joke about how having Shatner, Mick Jagger, P. Diddy and Prince on the same stage was a sign of the Apocalypse, and ended with a tribute to Christopher Reeve (his Juilliard classmate I believe) quoting Hamlet. Not a bad waste of a few hours while also reading and cleaning.

Schmoopiest fannish thought for the day: Kathy Mattea's "Ready for the Storm" is such an Aubrey/Maturin song. In other fannish news, made me very happy with screen caps from The West Wing's "Opposition Research" -- go look and admire the Josh/Matt love. And went and made me all sniffly and nostalgic about it being our anniversary. So in her honor, a couple of photos from our geeky space fan trip to Goddard.

The Great LiveJournal Outage of 2005 During the outage I coded another journalling system to use for myself. What did you do? Brought to you by geek-foo

Happy Martin Luther King Day. Here's "I Have A Dream", posted last year.