Lyrics for Wednesday, Supergirl Finale, Black Hill Leaves

Landslide
By Stevie Nicks

I took my love, I took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
'Til the landslide brought me down

Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Well, I've been afraid of changing
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too

Oh take my love, take it down
Oh climb a mountain and you turn around
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Well, the landslide will bring it down

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 I had a pretty quiet Tuesday. The weather was magnificent, over 70 degrees and clear, so I spent as much of it walking in the neighborhood as I could when I wasn't down the basement sorting magazines. Now I have big stacks of Entertainment Weekly, National Geographic, Popular Photography, Smithsonian, Chocolatier, and various other magazines that are being picked up by a teacher tomorrow, and we will have more shelf space. We had Trader Joe's vegan meatballs for dinner, which I don't like as much as Beyond's, though they were okay. My Voyager group was missing someone tonight, so we put off watching an episode and just chatted. 

Then I watched the Supergirl series finale, which was excruciating plot-wise but had some lovely character bits. I hate what they've done with Alex -- she's a mom for five minutes in series time and she's ready to let everyone else die for a bad plan to save her? -- and Lex should not be so stupid, ever. But we get Lillian Luthor! And James and Mon-El, even Winn, suitably not getting too much screen time -- I hate when finales bring back former cast members then let them dominate the episodes. I always love the Dallas reboot cast reunion when Brenda Strong and Julie Gonzalo are both in episodes and I'm glad Lillian was finally defined by Lena more than Lex. 

But my favorite bits belong to Brainy ("Like Cinderella, without the gender inequality"), Eliza Danvers ("You'd think in another life I was a Kryptonian"), Cat Grant ("Supergirl"), and of course Lena, who comes into her full powers, saves the world with Kara, then changes Kara's life by reinforcing Cat's suggestion that she needs to come out of the closet, which has been a huge theme of this last season -- I have loved the DC growing up gay/growing up superhero parallels since Smallville -- so I'm sad we only got Supercorp friendship, since Melissa Benoist has better chemistry with Katie McGrath than Chris Wood on this show, but glad Lena and not Alex got that scene. 

And of course I'm happy about watching any show that has Pat Benatar's "We Belong" as a wedding song, sung by the two characters played by actors who came from Glee and Smash before this show -- Winn was basically only there to sing with Kara, I was so worried they were going to try to have him upstage her one more time -- and then Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" at the end, plus Mary Fahl's "Going Home" (all songs more appropriate to the ages of the show producers than most of the characters, but since they're closer to my age, that did not bother me). Here are some photos of the gorgeous leaf colors at Black Hill Regional Park last weekend: 

Poem for Wednesday, Rise, Green Spring Gardens

Ba Doi Gorge
By Hồ Xuân Hương
Translated by Linh Dinh

A gorge, a gorge, and yet, the same old gorge.
Praise to whoever has gouged out this scene:
A lurid cave with a stubby arch,
And rich green boulders covered with algae.
Now the stiff wind blows, shaking pine branches.
Dew-drops dripping from willow leaves.
You who are virtuous, or saintly, who hasn't tried,
Even with weak knees, exhausted feet, to mount it?

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Happy Pi Day! This will be a quickie as Adam has stopped by, after seeing The Fifth Element at the theater with Maddy and her friends, to pick up his new credit card and to try to repair his laptop which did not like the most recent combined updates to Ubuntu and Windows or something like that. Adam got to tour NASA Goddard's Hubble telescope facilities with other interns and to see the James Webb Space Telescope exhibits, so he was pleased. My day was relatively unexciting until dinnertime anyway besides a walk in the park, since I had a bunch of cleanup chores to do online and off. Paul made Vietnamese veggie black pepper beef and caramelized pork for dinner, which Adam ate late when he arrived while we watched the end of Black Lightning.

Adam had the misfortune of arriving in time to see the first episode (and last one I will watch) of Rise, which has all the faults of the later seasons of Glee with none of the charm of the early seasons -- basically it's the story of a white guy who's bored with his career as a high school English teacher, so he gets the assertive Hispanic woman who runs the theater program booted in favor of himself because what's important when you're a high school teacher is being self-satisfied and never telling your wife your plans in advance, whether it's working far more hours that will impact her career or bringing home a foster kid to stay with your family for a while. Here are some more photos from Green Spring Gardens, all flowers this time:

Poem for Wednesday, Canal Animals, Jeff Goldblum Movies

Dream of Heaven
By Chard deNiord

I’d smoke cigars all day and into the night
while I wrote and wrote without
any hope or slightest assurance
that anything I’d written actually mattered
or rose to a standard of literary merit.
I’d languish in the smoke that did me in
and call it the cloud of my unknowing,
so sweet in its taste, such as it was,
of Cuban soil. That would be paradise
in heaven that’s so overrated as endless
bliss it kills to imagine as a place for living
forever, no less, with nothing to do
or lips to kiss. I’d curse, therefore,
with the best of them—the legion
of Saved—as I sharpened my pencils
and smoked my Punches in the simple room
that I’d be given with a desk for writing
and bed for remembering the things
I’d forgotten. And reading too, I almost
forgot. I’d read and read since I’d be done
with sleeping, but dreaming, no, still dreaming
a lot. I’d live to live again with moments
of dying to see how “lucky” I was. I’d use
my body as an eidolon with invisible wings
that fluttered in the void as if it were air
and hummed in the dark in which I could see.

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Alice came to visit Maddy on Tuesday and we all ended up having lunch together at Bombay Bistro, which has lots of vegetarian choices and always has kheer which is awesome. After Alice went home to retrieve her son, we went to walk along the C&O Canal, which almost looked like spring -- some daffodils, some turtles, some ducks and geese, some crazy squirrels! We also discovered that Adam had never seen The Big Chill, so in honor of Jeff Goldblum, we watched it for the first time in years -- still the best soundtrack ever.















Paul made shish kebab and Mediterranean couscous for Nowruz, then we watched The Flash musical episode, which was awesome -- in addition to the two Glee stars from that and Supergirl, we got gratuitous John Barrowman and Victor Garber, a pair of gay dads, and a better ending than La La Land. Then we were going to watch The Fly but our copy was crappy, so we watched The Favour, the Watch and the Very Big Fish, in which Goldblum, Hoskins, and Richardson are hilarious and the plot is insane!

Poem for Tuesday and National Cathedral Creatures

Beauty Supply
By Lee Ann Brown

Sheaves of wheat in cement relief
Supply the beauties of Archer Ave.

Past the scaffolded brick church spire
We turn on the vacant corner lot

Through winds worthy of Hopkins (Gerard M.)
New words -- Alexus -- Everything must go

"Include everything in poetry"
Even the things you think are nothing

Like the way the new white snowflake
Decoration waves its wild tentacles
     against the high blue sky

    loop and angle
Black graffiti palimpsests the
    yellow official sign of Danger
in bus stairwell

She stares at me unsmiling
    with cold Northface
Notices me writing but says nothing
    with her eye

The corner lot I used to chart or cheat in its 'vacancies'
Configures new blown trash and walk through paths

Subjected to random search

Has grown a mouth of gravel
Constructed in a cone
Surrounded by temporary fence
    Of blue nailed board

Now on Roti Avenue
Cutlery & Wang Quai

Amalgam of chairs,
Jamaica Island Center  

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My computer and I are having a bit of a disagreement at the moment, so I will keep this post brief. My whole day was work and chores, anyway. Adam reports that he ran a 5k over the weekend to raise money for cancer research, and came in fourth despite not having run for many weeks and despite the fact that he still has a cast on, so I was very impressed with that news. Plus, huzzah Supreme Court for butting out!

We are relieved that the Nationals won, though they have to win two more to advance. Tonight we watched Gotham, which I wish I was enjoying for more than two minutes of Selena each week, and Sleepy Hollow, which justifies my love every week with things like -- tiny spoiler -- Abbie thinking Ichabod is scandalized by a gay couple holding hands in public, only to discover that it's gentlemen wearing hats indoors that troubles him, since he knew men who loved men in his own era and he has since watched the finale of Glee. Makes it easy to overlook the Dan Brownisms for things like Benedict Arnold and Judas. National Cathedral gargoyles:

Poem for Monday, Rabbits, Ranting

By Ezra Pound

Spring.......
Too long......
Gongula......

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Yes, I know Pound was an anti-Semite and arguably a misogynist but he's dead, therefore I feel that his work can be evaluated on its own merits or lack thereof. Unlike Orson Scott Card, who is very much alive and giving money to organizations that support denying gay Americans their rights and support foreign governments that support incarcerating and in some cases executing gay people. I don't care how great a work of art anyone thinks Ender's Game is or whether it can be read as a subversive plea for tolerance: if it's a box office hit, Card will get MORE money to give to more organizations that believe in punishing people for having different beliefs than Card does. When he's dead, we can talk about the merits of his work. For now, there's no way I'd see Ender's Game and I don't care what awesome actor is in it or how boundary-breaking or whatever. Er. Yes, I appear to be in rant mode still.

I am Zimmerman-ed out from Facebook (have surpassed my previous single-day total for defriendings and that was only because I didn't keep everyone I knew from Superpoke Pets after it shut down; I'd much rather have people with whom I have little in common than people who don't think it's racist to say some of the awful things I was seeing). It didn't help that the first thing I read upon booting my computer in the morning was that Cory Monteith had died, allegedly of an overdose after a much-too-brief stint in rehab earlier this year. I had a lovely lunch with Heather, Karen, Angela, Katie, Paul, and some other spouses. Afterward I stopped in AC Moore, then we went to pick up the kids and drove to retrieve Adam's bike, which was being repaired. In the evening we watched PBS's special on Secrets of Chatsworth, then Endeavour, which I am really liking. Have some neighborhood bunnies:

Poem for Saturday, College Park Scholars, Return To Grace

The Call of the Open
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Which yet joined not scent to hue,
Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun.

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I had a busy Friday, but all good. In the morning I finished a review of DS9's "Return To Grace", the second week in a row in which the writers did Kira wrong, and tried to organize all the photos I took while out of town. Paul worked from home so that in the afternoon we could go to College Park with my parents for the College Park Scholars' Academic Showcase, which was in the alumni center and featured the culminating projects of students from the past semester. Out of more than 450 projects on display at the showcase, Daniel's project on Microsoft marketing was one of seven finalists in the show, as was the project by one of the people he'll be sharing an apartment with next year.



















We went out to dinner at Plato's Diner, where half of us had breakfast food and half of us had dinner food (I had a feta cheese omelette, home fries, and veggie sausage, all very good). Then we took Daniel back to his dorm, took my parents back home with us, and chatted briefly with Adam, who is taking the SAT early tomorrow morning. Since we'd already missed Nikita, we caught up on Nashville, which has gotten awfully predictable but I still like the music and all the actors, then Smash, which makes me think I should go back to Glee because everyone acts like immature brats on both shows but at least on the latter they're actually teenagers rather than adults who should know better!

Poem for Thursday and DC Cherry Blossoms

Handfuls
By Carl Sandburg

Blossoms of babies
Blinking their stories
Come soft
On the dusk and the babble;
Little red gamblers,
Handfuls that slept in the dust.

Summers of rain,
Winters of drift,
Tell of the years;
And they go back

Who came soft-
Back to the sod,
To silence and dust;
Gray gamblers,
   Handfuls again.

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We had another day of temperatures over 80 degrees and flowers bursting out everywhere. I was so warm that I enjoyed being in the basement collecting the laundry! Most of my day involved work and unexciting things, but the cherry blossoms, magnolias, hyacinths, and early purple azaleas made it lovely every time I went out.

Orioles and Nationals both won, yay! Since I had to fold the aforementioned laundry, I watched the "Guilty Pleasures" episode of Glee, since I had been advised that there was Wham!, Manilow, and Mamma Mia involved. I did like the music, especially the mixes, but the new characters mostly bore me and the old characters are doing the same old things.

The Americans was, as usual, terrific and stressful -- I keep thinking I should be watching Nashville when it airs, since it's musical mind fluff, and put off the marital problems of Soviet spies for earlier in the evening. Some photos of the emerging cherry blossoms in DC last weekend -- they're peaking now: