Tangents

pandoro

2025-01-03T04:01:42Z

My first accidental project of the year: pandoro - literally "bread of gold," festively Veronese Christmas cake, and absolutely not what I'd planned to spend the first day of the year on, but having volunteered on New Year's Eve to bring a dessert to dinner on New Year's Day, I wanted to try something new, and its mention in Nigella Lawson's recipe for "Easy Holiday Trifle" (in Feast) caught my eye.

Fortunately, I am at this point experienced enough that I picked up a box of cake mix when I hit the store, and I did indeed end up assembling the trifle with backup cake rather than the pandoro, which was slow to rise and ultimately would have been too dense for a dessert that depends in part on syrup and time melding together stewed fruit and spongy carbs. I will confess to being inordinately pleased with how the pandoro turned out, though -- it smelled fantastic while it was baking, it tastes great, and rolling all the layers into it was a heck of a workout.

The trifle (apricots stewed in cardamom syrup) before the toppings (whipped cream, bourbon honey, pistachios and almonds) were added:

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/186697.html.

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reading: "Insult to Injury"

2024-12-31T05:27:34Z

This poem appears in George Bilgere's 2024 chapbook, Cheap Motels of My Youth, and also online at Rattle.com. The narrator, a man in his sixties, comes across the air gun he used to shoot at cans when he was a teen, and tries it out on "a volume of poetry, slim,/ but not slim enough,/ by a poet I never liked":

The pellet, as it happens,
made it farther than I ever did,
stopping on page sixty-two

... at which point I cackled at the savagery and decided to post about it here. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/186484.html.

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new poems in Tabula Rasa

2024-09-20T04:58:08Z

One fueled by rage over COVID ("Apostate"); the other, AIDS ("A Brief History of 歌 [gē]").

The issue (2024) can be read or downloaded for free at the Tabula Rasa site. (The 2022 issue remains available at that page, and has three earlier poems by me.) This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/186245.html.

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a 3 x 3 summing up of my summer

2024-09-03T00:13:19Z

3 happy things
1. Autumn Sky Poetry Daily featured my sonnet "Paean to the Pommel Horse Guys" on August 15.
2. I successfully auditioned for the Nashville Symphony Chorus. I'll finally get to sing Beethoven's 9th! (And also some Vivaldi, Ravel, Mahler, and Handel, among other things.) This has been on my bucket list since I was a teenager, and the timing has never worked out before now.
3. Several visits from my honorary big sister, her partner, and their menagerie.

3 vexations
1. I tested positive for COVID for the very first time on July 13. Odds are high that I caught it from the dancers at New London Assembly, as I masked for virtually everything at the festival -- including when singing in performance -- except for meals, and I had lunch with that crew right before five tested positive that afternoon.
2. It's a month and a half later and I'm still coughing violently several times a day. This is not a surprise (this is why I was so bloody vigilant for literal years). I'm on all my usual meds and hopeful that it will be gone by the time I go onstage for the Vivaldi, but it is literally tiresome.
3. Pilea mollis (Moon Valley) is structurally significantly different from Pilea peperomioides (money plant). I did not know this before dividing my formerly healthy Moon Valley plant, purchased a year and a month ago in Philadelphia. It was not an expensive starter, and screwing up is part of the learning curve, but still. *sniffle*

July 2023, in my Muehlenberg College dorm room

The same plant in August 2024, after a year in my sunroom

3 topics I plan to post more about later
1. The 2024 San Francisco Early Music Society Baroque Workshop
2. The 2024 Amherst Early Music Festival Spring Break Workshop and Summer Festival (week 2)
3. The other pilea, which also holds sentimental value (it was a farewell gift from a museum colleague). This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/185906.html.

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more joy over the water

2024-05-23T03:19:49Z

Joanne moved back to Nova Scotia a few weeks ago. For the send-off, I picked a couple of lines from her work to put on cakes:

It was a fun gathering. A bunch of us ended up in an impromptu knitting/crocheting half-circle at one end of the patio, discussing con-running, costuming goth weddings, and other past and future mayhem. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/185746.html.

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sonnets and cake

2024-02-04T16:36:58Z

I don't hop on my personal Twitter accounts regularly anymore (professionally ScienceTwitter is still a thing, but the students are more visible on Instagram, and I'm working out systems to post more frequently on and direct more traffic to the department website), but I peeked in this morning, when Paisley Rekdal posted on what makes a sonnet a sonnet. Tl;dr: it's the volta...

The discussion naturally brought forward other sonnets, among them Sam Cha's Motherfuckers talking shit about American sonnets.

( story a-sprawling / cake baked and frosted )

ETA: today's rabbit hole - discovering how the pinyin for "u" with the third tone will appear with the caron to the right of the u regardless of copy-pasting versions of it with the caron directly over the u, typing in unicodes, etc. Ah, typesetting/coding. And it's good to be reminded that the u+haček in Baltic/Slavic languages is a different critter. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/185494.html.

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a fist in the air

2024-02-01T04:16:02Z

Erica Reid's "The Raft" is a banger. Two excerpts:

....we are all drowning these days, are we not? Don't you wake up
feeling you've reached your limit, that the worst must be past,
only to discover you're at the top of a spiritual Guggenheim,
a cool, white spiral of descent still awaiting you?

... No matter who you are, your very life
is rebellion, your love is a fist in the air.

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/185160.html.

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Komm, Jesu, komm

2024-01-28T20:03:32Z

The most recent project I sang in:

[audio only for the first 7 1/2 minutes, then video-mosaic for the closing chorale] This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/185002.html.

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"It's plush pandemonium in Hershey!"

2024-01-15T01:08:04Z

"Let the sweet cuddly mayhem commence!"

(Total bears flying: 74,599) This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/184591.html.

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out there

2023-12-19T03:59:20Z

https://bsky.app/profile/ellenkushner.bsky.social/post/3kehy67jkd42l

(Ellen Kushner quoting Sean Thomas Dougherty's "Why Bother?" on BlueSky; h/t vinia) This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/184437.html.

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recent-ish reading (poetry)

2023-12-10T17:07:02Z

Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees, Giraffes Can't Dance (Orchard, 1999). A rhyming picture book about Gerald, a giraffe who's mocked mercilessly for poor dancing, but finds the right music with the help of a kind cricket. (This hits a very personal note for me, as someone who was made fun of in junior high for not knowing how to dance. Which, as noted elsewhere, is no longer the case.)

Arthur Russell, At the Car Wash (Rattle, 2023). A chapbook by a New Jersey attorney and landlord, about his youth and family in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. The poems that stood out to me were "New Year's Eve," about his mother ("'You guys' was an actual color of light in her eyes"); "The Heavier Stone," which begins with "My dad died eight years ago. / Our relationship has improved a lot since then"; and "Unencumbered," a long poem about what we carry:

... I've learned that emotion conducts
some memories to the left and others to the right;
that feelings brand events for keeps
and segregate archival stuff from what
is only "by the way." The more that you remember,
the more there is of life, the more of time there is;
but time gathers in the past and drags you
back by the belt;
and when I think of how much trouble
I have had with emotion, I remind myself
of a stop sign in a hurricane...

Coincidentally, Russell wrote today's "Poets Respond" feature - "Gravity in Jerusalem."

(Coincident because I'm typing this while waiting for my phone to finish recharging so I can venture out to Novelette and the book shop in hopes of wrapping up [so to speak] this year's Christmas shopping. That was the plan yesterday, but tornado sirens woke me from my nap, so.)

In Rattle's Fall 2023 issue, José A. Alcántara's "To a Friend Who Does Not Believe in God" bears witness both to unbelief and faith. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/184293.html.

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The WORLD KEEPS... / QUEEN OF PHYSICS / INK

2023-11-09T04:19:28Z

A poem punched me in the face earlier tonight. I stopped by Novelette in search of a birthday gift for a friend. On opening Franny Choi's The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), these lines in "I Have Bad News and Bad News, Which Do You Want First" hit me:

One week ago, my mother had two COVID patients.
Now, she has thirty. What? I say. When did that happen?
though when's not the question I mean.

COVID has been around long enough to show up in printed books of poetry distributed by mainstream publishers. Goddamn.

The library is about to reclaim its copy of Queen of Physics: How Wu Chien Shiung Helped Unlock the Secrets of the Atom (Union Square, 2019), a picture book with text by Teresa Robeson and illustrations by Rebecca Huang. Robeson is Chinese-Canadian-American and a mentee of Jane Yolen, none of which I knew while reading the book. I had encountered Wu's face and name via the 2021 Forever stamp in her honor, but hadn't remembered anything else about her before now. The book is well done.

The back pain and foot injury are still significantly (and literally) cramping my style, but I did venture out, masked, to a dance presentation last Saturday that included an in-progress version of Ink, choreographed by Jen-Jen Lin. I spent much of the evening pondering how I might draw the dance -- cobalt blue and yellow light stands, dancers in black and red on a black surface, the swooping white ribbon of Jen-Jen's solo -- and while I have not put pencil or marker to paper since leaving the studio, dwelling on the lines did engrave them a shade deeper in my memory. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/183892.html.

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Richard Brautigan, ROMMEL DRIVES ON DEEP INTO EGYPT

2023-11-02T09:30:38Z

This book was published in 1970 by Delacorte (Seymour Lawrence imprint). The woman on the cover reminds me of tennis player Kim Clijsters, and the photo is my favorite part of the book.

Poems I bookmarked while getting ready to return the book, in their entirety:

Critical Can Opener

There is something wrong
with this poem. Can you
find it?

Lions Are Growing like Yellow Roses on the Wind

Lions are growing like yellow roses on the wind
and we turn gracefully in the medieval garden
of their roaring blossoms.
Oh, I want to turn.
Oh, I am turning.
Oh, I have turned.
Thank you.

April 7, 1969

I feel so bad today
that I want to write a poem.
I don't care: any poem, this
poem.

All Secrets of Past Tense Have Just Come My Way

All secrets of past tense have just come my way,
but I still don't know what I'm going to do
next. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/183586.html.

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a current brainworm

2023-06-05T04:00:12Z

Different takes on the tarantella del Gargano:

With dancers:

With zest:

I dig this band:

On a sofa:

With castanets:

The late Owain Phyfe (our Renfaire and caroling gigs coincided for a few seasons):

Lyrics This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/183493.html.

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2 recent videos I'm in

2023-02-17T23:12:03Z

New London Assembly, in two demos, plus the close of "Halfe-Hannekin":

(There's a longer clip of us practicing "Elspeth" on Flickr.)

Stay at Home Choir Polyphony Project (singing soprano throughout, on-screen very briefly):

Between deadlines, back issues being a literal pain in the gluteus medius, and feeling utterly fed up with people acting like COVID's no big deal, I am more my own society, my own fever and pain, etc., these days. Will this help tame the ever-burgeoning TBR pile? To be continued ... This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/183157.html.

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meandering to Mastodon and other mayhem

2022-11-13T19:24:28Z

While I'm keeping "zirconium" at Twitter for the foreseeable future, I've set up http://mastodon.sdf.org/@zirconium (AKA "zirconium@mastodon.sdf.org") to get familiar with the landscape in case #ScienceTwitter and other key circles head on over. As with this blog, updates will be irregular and I don't -- can't -- read every item in my feeds, but establishing and keeping open lines of access is part of the battle.

I actually spent the bulk of my morning on handwritten correspondence, including this season's first holiday card, which is going to a Scandosotan friend I was reminded of when another friend (based in Stockholm) recommended Sallyswag, describing them as "the queer folk soul brass dancehall hip hop band":

(Yes, it's rather early to be sending December holiday cards, but this one is an Advent calendar, and given reports from other friends about letters taking scenic routes to, say, North Carolina, I am not sanguine about this one even arriving before Trinity term. Now that I've said it, watch it arrive before the GOTV postcards I put in yesterday's mail to Georgia...)

In the Department of Plus Ça Change, still feeling crummy but functional. Full-blown respiratory woe has sidelined me from work gatherings and choral commitments (and heavy-duty cough syrups now give me splitting headaches, great). But my sunroom remains a gorgeous sanctuary, I have lamb and Taiwanese spinach stew on my stove, Aaron Tveit is covering "Take Me Home Tonight" on the YouTube jukebox, and being home means other things get tended to, including the sorting of tomatoes (this year's harvest was entirely from volunteer plants, descended from seedlings Miel gave out last year). I'm planning on making green tomato-cheddar hand pies later today or tomorrow.

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/182908.html.

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extended expiration dates for kits

2022-10-29T19:06:02Z

It took some digging, but I've ascertained that our COVID-19 testing kits (two via the university, two via the government) have extended expiration dates. Because they come from different manufacturers and lots, the ones originally good through mid-August now expire in February, and the ones with a June 2022 date now expire at the end of March.

Potentially helpful links:
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and-medical-devices/home-otc-covid-19-diagnostic-tests

https://diagnostics.roche.com/us/en/products/params/sars-cov-2-pilot-covid-19-at-home-test.html#expiration

https://accessbio.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/CareStart-COVID-19-Ag-Home-Test_Exp-Date-Extension-Notification_05_15M_V2.pdf

(The second and third links reflect the further digging required because neither lot number showed up on the FDA round-up.)

I am feeling a bit crummy at the moment, so I'm extra glad about holding firm on not signing up for things for a while.

In other news, the Poppea deal mentioned in the previous post turned out to be too good to be true -- what I received was not a score, but a small book of French essays and the libretto. But the vendor promptly gave me a refund, and IMSLP has a Russian edition, from which I've put Acts 1 and 2 on an iPad. My first playing-from-a-tablet! All sorts of milestones this year, I tell you.

And on that note, so to speak, it's back to the last batch of GOTV postcards. I've been listening to a lot of Merula, Handel, and Purcell while I work and write, and while this arrangement of "Would You Gain the Tender Creature" wouldn't be an audio-only favorite with me, I love how expressive the fellas are -- even with masks on, they're a joy to watch:

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/182534.html.

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our heart's joy reclineth

2022-10-12T13:22:22Z

The budget-minding gods have smiled on me lately. A pair of eight-pound hand weights at a yard sale for $2. The Bärenreiter score of L'incoronazione di Poppea for $4.50.

And, a playable-enough harpsichord for $500:

This has been good fortune in several respects: I had planned a trip to Virginia in November to attend a ball and try out two other instruments (if they were still available by then), but the timing hadn't been ideal and got borked entirely by some other obligations. I am way less jittery about learning how to maintain and repair an "entry-level" instrument than I would be with something costing thousands of dollars. Collecting it made for a lovely road trip with the BYM, who was a very good sport about all the driving and hauling and has been both entertainingly curious and notably entertained (so to speak) by our new acquisition (Why is this piece in 6/2? What you just played isn't on the page, what the heck? [Adventures in figured bass!]). And Frank Hubbard's Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making is quite entertaining. I read the beginning of Ralph Kirkpatrick's foreword aloud to the BYM; he's a motorcycle mechanic, and it definitely resonated with him:

At some time in the late 1940s, on the occasion of a concert in Cambridge, I was told of two graduate students in English at Harvard who had built what I believe was a clavichord. Such reports usually arrive with an invitation to inspect a cherished and totally unplayable instrument. Having contrived politely to dodge the invitation, I never found out what the qualities of this instrument might have been.

In other news, three of my poems appear in the new issue of Tabula Rasa, with "Learning Curve" as an Editor's Choice. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/182491.html.

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conversation

2022-08-27T02:52:43Z

The BYM: Are those murder peppers?

Me: Some are habaneros and some are the ones we grow every year.

The BYM: So yes. Murder peppers.

Me: They're pretty!

The BYM: Yes! But murderous!

Me: Oh, like me?

The BYM: Yes. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/182037.html.

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warm, real, and keen

2022-07-08T09:48:09Z

[The subject line's from Thomas Hardy's "The Phantom Horsewoman."]

Shuffling to my study at 2:30 am to get a poem out of my head hasn't happened in a good long while. I'm not thrilled about the timing, but I should be able to sneak in a disco nap before I have to drive anywhere, and there are worse fates than communing with Thomas Hardy (while looking up rondeaux and triolets) and the indoor rose over a mug of valerian-camomile tea.

I do not need a Maestro Wu knife, but I am glad to know about it. (Via Grub Street's profile of Yun Hai Taiwanese Pantry, in Brooklyn. The blades are "forged from scrap metal and bombshells that mainland China fired on Taiwan.")

A new word to me, via Joelle Taylor: lemniscate. She highlights it as one of the six words that summarise her.

Dwelling on this a bit: the first six words that come to mind for myself form a portrait of whom I want to be, not an accurate resume of me as I am. So I shall make myself another mug of tea and then snatch some sleep, with an eye towards the former. (Not that I'm inclined to write specifically about me in my poems these days, but amused, buff, calm, dangerous, elegant, glorious lend themselves to better arrangements of words, and sleep is a means...

In peering at the news: I am laughing immoderately at Russ Jones's characterisation of Jacob Rees-Mogg as "the harrowing outcome of a bout of hate-sex between a Dalek and a bassoon" (and, predictably, someone in the replies has already protested that that's unfair to bassoons; h/t aunty_marion).

I have not been paying attention to Wimbledon. I do miss some of the craic, but my current headspace would rather dwell on transplanting tomato and pepper seedlings and spreading pine straw, so that's what's happening between coding, corresponding, and tumbling into lakes. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/181801.html.

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say now, Tennessee

2022-07-02T23:46:00Z

[The subject line's from Prince's "Alphabet City," which also has "Put the right letters together and make a bettеr day"...]

Look, even Spanish Duolingo's nudging me to find my pobiz (or at least po-blog) groove again:

My big brother and bro-in-law participated in #LexPoMo last month. You can see their pieces at these links:

https://lexpomo.com/poet/2022/eric-willis-lexpomo-2022/
(I especially love the start of TWW #2)

https://lexpomo.com/poet/2022/steve-meadows-2022/
("Summer Job Resume" FTW)

Tabula Rasa's publishing three of my poems soon-ish.

Going to write and read tonight after I get through garden chores and service prep (and probably some jamming with Monteverdi and Josquin). On my table: Joelle Taylor's C+nto & Othered Poems and Andrea Gibson's Take Me With You This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/181711.html.

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sic transit gloria

2022-05-06T13:42:39Z

This won't be news to most readers, but in my corner of the world, one can simultaneously rejoice in how well the roses are doing whilst slogging through a slough of despond and frustration over one's mistakes, the malice of others, etc.

Perspective helps. A few years ago, I picked up a battered copy of Loren Eiseley's The Star Thrower at a library bag sale. The chap was a much-honored anthropologist and writer in his day, with an endowed chair at Penn. Auden wrote the intro to this book. There are more than two dozen honorary degrees listed in an appendix . . .

. . . and I skimmed the book here and there, and decided it was not for me, and not even to put in the mail to another friend. Into one of the neighborhood's Little Free Library boxes it will go. A couple of lines just caught my eye -- "the thin blue bones / Of a hare picked clean by ants. A man can attach / Meanings enough to the wind when his luck is out" -- but the full poem ("Winter Sign") isn't tight enough for my taste (even though I agree with the overall sentiment), and that sums up the book as a whole for me: there are so many more poems and essays waiting for me that will hit me harder, closer, thrilling-er, and life is so damned short as it is.

And full (although going to bed before 1 a.m. instead of trying to power through an assignment was definitely the right call). The weekend includes paddleboarding and a wedding and a birthday dinner, along with a story to beta and music to practice and clutter to dispel, etc. Onward!

The kids are all right: this show of irises at a local Methodist church included handmade signs in support of LGBTQ rights. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/181420.html.

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the crooked and the sweet

2022-04-24T18:21:12Z

Over the past 2+ years, the wires in some of my masks broke outright, from all the fiddling, washing, etc. I'd held off extracting the ones that had become uncomfortable but were still intact, but two days ago finally reached for the ripper. (Is this perhaps a metaphor for other things I should be getting on with? Yes. Might I have a tendency to view my life through a Free Will Astrology filter? Yes.)

Contending with the ever-swarming legions of private brain weasels and public sphere / pundit weasels has been tiresome, to say the least. But there have also been compliments from colleagues and clients, lively chats with friends, and some sublime dancing:

In the yard, the hyacinths are waning, and the overcup white oak looks dead as the proverbial doornail (but apparently it's a really late bloomer), but there are swathes of violets and patches of star of bethlehem, and I have been harvesting wild chives and snacking on fresh mint. Also in bloom: buttercups, ferns (tiny purple flowerets), tomatoes. The six rosebushes all survived the winter, and I planted two white azalea bushes (a farewell gift from a museum colleague) last week. Indoors, the flower show includes cacti, white roses, shamrocks, and cyclamen.

Last night's cooking experiment wound up as phyllo-almond-walnut "cake." It started out as an attempt at Tunisian almond cigars but the phyllo sheets had been languishing in my fridge too long. So the stale bits went into the compost bowl, and the rest were layered with the filling, and I'm happy with the result.

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/181126.html.

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from deep despair and perished things

2022-03-15T00:32:12Z

[Subject line's from A Promise through the Ages Rings]

I have been bloody-minded today, you could say: there are old dark brown spots on a comforter defying soap and enzyme, and the Kentucky rosebush scratched and stabbed at me as I weeded around it. But at least I wasn't the babysitter across the street yelling "Tomato! It's a good sweater! Don't eat it!" at her black dog.

I'm feeling good about spreading the last of a pine straw bale around the bush, along with the remains of the Christmas fir wreath. I also untrunked another comforter and blanket, so they will be aired out by the time my houseguest arrives.

Today's messages included a poetry rejection, so I'm still batting .000 for the year. I'm okay about it. There's much to do, and I'll write more compelling work someday. (And my track record's solid enough for that to be a declaration of fact rather than wishfulness.)

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/180841.html.

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Hey, I'm still alive

2022-02-28T19:56:08Z

*looks around*
God, what an unholy mess.
*redacts rest of commentary*

The subject line's from "Monday," by The Regrettes. An upside to having a dental appointment this morning was catching mid-morning tunes at WNXP, ranging from ELO's "Showdown" and Prince doing "When You Were Mine" to Rex Orange County's "Keep It Up" and some bangers not on the playlist.

Recent reading included the 2021 Rattle Young Poets Anthology. I particularly liked Natalia Chepel's "Semantics," and her bio.

A friend sent me Alexander McCall Smith's What W.H. Auden Can Do for You a few eons ago, and this passage stood out to me a few weeks ago:

I find Auden's life absorbing because it is very unlike the life of those poets who appear to have done nothing but frequent academia. How can one write convincingly of life if one has seen only so small a slice of it? Hemingway asked that question and went off to preclude its application to him by hunting and deep-sea fishing, all fueled by copious quantities of whisky. Auden spoke in his earlier poems of the truly strong man but well understood that one did not become truly strong by doing the sort of things recommended by Hemingway. Rather, he traveled; first to Berlin, where he spent a great deal of time catching up on sexual opportunities harder to encounter in the more prudish climate of England. Berlin was all about sexual freedom, but it was also about politicization, and by the time he returned to England, his previously proclaimed views on the separation of poetry and politics had changed. Then there was the trip to Iceland he did with Louis MacNeice, the trip to Spain during the Civil War, and the journey to China to investigate the conflict with Japan. These were not the actions of a man who intended to live his life in a literary ivory tower; these were the actions of a man who was struggling with a central moral question that most of us face: to what extent should we seek private peace or follow public duty? The world is a vale of tears and always has been. We may withdraw from it and cultivate a private garden of civility and the arts--a temptation that is often strong; or we may face up to uncomfortable realities and work to bring about justice in society. Auden's life and example illustrates the struggle between these two options; significantly, it offers comfort for us whichever way our choice may lead us.

Another thing I liked about this morning's outing was being behind a car with a microscope decal and the plate "GUTGIRL." This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/180481.html.

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