Poem for Saturday

The Snow Man
By Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

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A poem in honor of the weekend weather forecast. Okay, so it will be the February sun; we didn't have the junipers shagged with ice in January. Anything I need to do that involves driving on Saturday has to be completed by noon, it sounds like!

Friday I had to write a review of "I, Mudd", an episode I love. Why was trying to review it like pulling teeth? I mean, it's funny! It's not offensive in the way that "Mudd's Women" is. It has some totally classic Kirk lines about Mudd's criminal history, the scene with Chekov and Uhura dancing while Scotty and McCoy fake playing musical instruments, the fake explosion, Spock saying "I love you; however, I hate you" to a pair of twin androids, and genuinely BITCHY Kirk snarking, "I am not programmed to respond in that area" to an android begging for his help. There's no real sci-fi, but that isn't a rarity for Star Trek. I could only squeeze out five mediocre paragraphs. My brain just would not come online.

I blame Cinnamon, who decided to breep in my ear at five a.m. and I never properly fell back asleep since I had to get up early anyway. I spent most of the day at home, except for a long walk in the neighborhood in the gorgeous high-30s late morning, and dinner at my parents' with my uncle (mother's brother) who is visiting from New York and is the only member of my family who knows about this journal (not counting my husband and my kids, the latter of whom can't see flocked stuff). In between I did lots of tagging on and had a great time. And it was rather plotty gen, which is something I almost never write!

At night we all watched the Olympic opening ceremonies, with varying degrees of distraction -- took all the scrolling snow emergency warnings to heart and ran out to the food store to make sure we didn't run out of milk or toilet paper, younger son read aloud to me from this book about penguins which he had gotten out of the library -- it has lots of illustrations and I would have quite enjoyed it had I not been trying to listen to the disco hits being played during the parade of nations. The host country definitely won the coolest coats contest and I loved both the design of the torch and the lighting ceremony, as well as the trapeze artists and the wall-climbers who made the dove pattern. Not too sure about the people dancing with the cows. *g* But they got Pavarotti to sing "Nessun Dorma" and while I don't think Peter Gabriel's will ever be the definitive "Imagine," I loved the choral arrangements.


Pigeons sit on a rope near sunset on the USS Torsk at the Baltimore Maritime Museum.

Can't South Dakota secede from the freakin' Union? It can take the national parks. Yes, I'm kidding, but only just barely. I'm very, very angry. And I'm so glad I did house-cleaning and pissed off the anti-choice bigots on my list last year so I don't have to read what they're saying now. If anyone has recently friended me, be warned that I have zero tolerance for the bloody lie that calls itself "pro-life," and simpering about how you're a nice, loving person while you're trying to shove your private convictions into the laws of the United States will only make me gag at your hypocrisy. Women die when we fail to support one another's legal reproductive choices, whether they're the choices we'd make personally or not. And I am really sick of having my religious beliefs spat upon by those who are certain that their beliefs are better.