Poem for Saturday

You Must
By Jon Andersen

You must have a hope
that will let you stomp and sing
at any cold dawn.
You must not wait
to love the student who loves you
and would like to kill you.
You must read the story again
and again to the child
who receives you with a bovine stare.
You must get up
every day to punch in
not dreaming on transcendence,
not desiring new heroes or gods,
not looking the other way,
but looking for the other way
and ready to talk to everyone on the line.
You must not wait
for official approval
nor general consensus
to rage. You must
come again to kneel
in shiny, rock-strewn soil
not to pray, but to plant.
Yes, even now
as ice caps melt and black top
goes soft in the sun
you must prepare for the harvest.

--------

Have spent lovely summer day in house with sick son and sick cat. Am going UTTERLY EFFING BONKERS. No news on either front: one vet is waiting for the other vet for a consultation about gallstones, son's pox are fading slowly but he still can't be taken to a pool or anything. Saturday we are supposed to go to the Maryland shore and if this doesn't happen there will be gnashing of teeth that can be heard as far as Chicago. I wrote an incredibly sucky review of "The Enemy Within" because I was so distracted and will undoubtedly get piles of mail this week telling me what an insipid airhead I am. Also my editor is out of town and dumped a bunch of articles on me for the weekend...I've been insane enough this week, have major family stuff going on this weekend which hopefully everyone will be well enough for, and something is going to have to give...

Yeah. Grouchy. Wanted to watch some big musical tonight but kids were playing some loud game in living room and I couldn't get at the TV. Finally folded laundry while watching Dawson's Creek just because it never fails to make me smile, and realized that Joey Potter will always be the real Katie Holmes to me, no matter what shit she is pulling now to be rich and famous. And I read somewhere that Michelle Williams and Heath Ledger are having a baby -- I like both of them and it makes me happy when celebrities I like date each other, except then I figure they'll inevitably break up like Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher did and I'll be sad about it, so maybe I am better off following the couples I can't stand; waiting patiently for the Cruise-Kidman inferno, for instance, paid off very nicely, though at that point they had kids so I couldn't even be pleased about it.

: Rec any combination of stories, vids, or meta for your fandom (for a total of 5).
I cannot rec five stories or even five collections, so I am reccing meta and entertaining things, plus an archive in which I have a vested interest that everyone probably knows about anyway.
1. Red Hen Publications
2. Veritaserum's Harry Potter Galleries
3. Nasubionna's Harry Potter Tarot Project
4. HMS Dumbledore
5. Moonshadow, the Snape/Lupin Archive

: Beddie-bye.
1. What do you wear to bed? Generally short sleeved or sleeveless cotton nightgowns.
2. What side of the bed do you sleep on? The right, always.
3. Do you sleep with a stuffed animal? Not since middle school. Also, many nights I sleep with a cat.
4. Blanket/bed hog? Blanket more than bed, but really neither unless it's very cold.
5. Do you make your bed everyday? I used to. Now there is usually at least one cat on it before I get around to it, and I often choose not to displace her/them.

: R-E-L-I-E-F
1. RE: your future. What lies ahead? A visit to the shore.
2. Listen: what can you hear? A cat snoring, my husband typing, myself typing, a gerbil scrounging for something, insects making vague noises outside, the air conditioner running, my computer's drive whirring.
3. Inner peace: Do you have it? Definitely not this week.
4. Every once in a while, someone surprises you. Who did most recently? Someone I met via a random connection, with whom I never believed I had very much in common, who has pursued a friendship with me long past the point where I ever thought she'd care, who sent me an e-mail the other day just to see what I was up to. I must remember not to take people like this for granted.
5. Friends can come and go. Who has come into your life, and who has left? Ah, this is not a question I feel like answering in a single line. In the past year I got a lesson in the difference between real friendships vs. perceived friendships based on common interests, and I shall not mistake the two again. At the same time I feel like I have cut myself off from certain people for fear of the same kind of misery, and I wonder whether I am dismissing people who could be true friends, albeit long-distance ones.

Younger son's violin teacher is going on vacation for the entire month of July, so we realized that we had better buy a chromatic tuner, as neither 's nor my sense of pitch is strong enough to tune by ear and we want him to practice during the month she's away. I should have taken violin lessons with him! I say again, no matter how many phones Russell throws, I will always be grateful to him and Jack Aubrey for my son's violin. In other good news, I found a Corey Hart CD for $3 on half.com so I can have "Never Surrender" and "Everything in My Heart" (if I ever mention either of these songs and fanfic in the same sentence please smack me), and found the one Clannad CD we don't own in the public library and now I have the theme from The Dolphin Connection. Yep...planning to have fun this weekend, one way or another. Hope everyone else is too.


One of the deer that far too often can be seen at the outskirts of our neighborhood. There is so much new construction that the deer must cross major roads to reach the waterways, so we get to see lovely sights like this on the way to the grocery store, but we also see far, far too many hit by cars.