Poem for Thursday

Snowman
By Gu Cheng

I built a snowman
At your front door
To stand in my stead, waiting there
In all its stupidity

Then you buried your lollipop
Deep into its snowy heart
Saying this little sweetness
Would perk it up

The snowman did not smile
Did not make a sound
And then the bright spring sun
Melted him away...

Where is he now?
Where is that candied heart?
A bee buzzes
Beside the small puddle of tears

--------

Yeahhhh. Not too exciting this week. Spent lots of time on the phone with who is also recovering from doooooom, finished The Historian which had quite a satisfying ending in terms of Dracula though not quite so much in terms of the main characters but is still way, way high on my list of novels I have enjoyed -- the descriptions of churches in Perpignan, Istanbul, Budapest and various places in Bulgaria alone would make it worth the price of admission, and knowing very little about medieval Wallachia and regions east and south (as I suspect is true of most Americans, my history classes focused further west) I went very happily along for the ride through those parts. In the evening while folding the first real laundry I have tried to do since being sick (that is, involving all my kids' clothing, which double as napkins, paper towels, etc. as far as they're concerned), we watched Minority Report since I was in a dystopian-future-DC mood...okay, and also a Colin Farrell mood and hadn't watched that one in a long time and it's one of very few movies I actually can stand Tom Cruise in these days. I guess I should at least rent War of the Worlds, huh? Someone say "Spielberg" to me please.

Oh, and ! Our alma mater has ongoing stupidity regarding the sensitivity training they had stupidity with when I was a student! How in the world is it suspension-worthy sexual harrassment to take a photo of people having sex in a wide open window? Is it not arguably sexual harrassment of one's neighbors to have sex in a wide open window in a high rise community where you are so very visible in the first place? Yeah, it looks bad for the school when such a photo gets posted on the internet, but blaming the guy with the camera seems beside the point to me. I remember on the local news, there was a couple having sex in the hotel that's adjunct to one of the domed stadiums during a game, and the sportscaster ran the clip for weeks where they followed the fly ball up and up and there were the happy shaggers. No one accused him of sexual harrassment but the police were trying to figure out who the couple was to charge them with indecent exposure. Which is taking it to a ridiculous extreme, since you had to have a pretty big lens to see what they were doing, but if I glanced out my window and my neighbors were going at it for anyone including my kids to see, I'd take a photo and e-mail it to them just to discourage further activity. Though with my luck they'd turn out to be such exhibitionists that this would only encourage them.

Yeaaaah, and now I am going to bed. Thanks the the people who helped me with the thing I asked some people for help with, to for her patience and to for saying she would read something that might make her squick. Tomorrow I have my usual Ridiculously Early Thursday. We'll see if I can manage a normal schedule!


My kids descending Sugarloaf Mountain...


...while a professional climbing group prepares to take the hard way to the summit.


We did it this way, though as you can see, my son decided at one point that he'd had enough.