When the hurly-burly’s done

Ms. Simpson posts some common-sense blogging guidelines and rules.  They all apply to your blogging for my class.

Read them here.

Enough said.

I never thought I’d be able to connect Nancy (the comic from which this panel is pulled, completely devoid of context) and Thornton Wilder, but I think this fits:

“All Nature strives to bring every detail to its truest expression of its function. All Nature is working for you. Rise above immediate things and feel that—get a-holt of that. Float in the teleological tide.”

There’s a little Thoreau in there, too, but I’ll stop now.

Some of the comments on the panel are great, too.

Dr. Seuss’s career started as a creator of propaganda cartoons during World War II. See some of them here.

I wonder if we’ve ever lost a planet before today?

A couple of nights ago, I got back from a long trip to upstate NY, Montreal, and Quebec. Travel tends to stress me out–my mother tells a story that when I was about 8 or 9, I freaked out in the parking lot of the Ocean Spray factory museum, screaming about how I wanted to travel alone, or at least without the rest of the family–and this trip was no different. It marked the first time for several things, including my being in charge of planning and executing a trip with hotels and fanciness and everything.

See, my usual idea of travel involves getting in a car, driving to Boston, Philthydelpha, or DC, and crashing on a friend’s couch (or futon, if it’s a high-class friend) for a weekend. One time, I went with a couple of friends to Ireland for a couple of weeks, but we stayed in hostels and were totally laissez-faire about the whole enterprise. So it wasn’t without a little bit of nervousness that I booked rooms in two nice hotels. It was definitely more money than I’d spent on any room (except for a completely unappreciated suite in VA for a friend’s wedding) but I figured it was time to be a grown-up.

And I learned something: the best times travelling come when they are the least expected. My favorite moment in Quebec, for example, came on our last day in the city, when none of my party were speaking to one another (too much time in a highly claustrophobic tourist district will do that). We were walking back to the Old City to scrounge up some dinner. This walk involved an absolutely nightmarish (especially for me, with my at-that-point-undiagnosed tendonitis) set of stairs that scaled the massive rock on which Quebec was originally built. About halfway up, I turned around to see where we’d been and how far we still had to go. And I realized that everything would be okay once I slept and decompressed. 

I don’t know if I’m ever going to travel like that again. I suspect I will eventually, but not for a while. In the meantime, I’m getting ready to go to a wedding in Baltimore this October. Anyone have a couch I can sleep on?

I spent the weekend camping, relaxing, and roller-coasting in the middle of Pennsylvania, about 15 miles from Centralia. Although I’d never been to that particular part of the state before, having spent five years in the relatively rural area of Lancaster (relatively rural, I guess, compared to Fairfield County) made it not entirely unfamiliar. The towns we passed through–Catawissa, Shamokin, Elysburg–were tiny and almost hopeless-seeming. The Woody Guthrie fan in me wanted to ascribe to them some sort of romantic determination, to see some optimism in growing up in the shadow of strip mines and under the threat of flooding. The Woody Guthrie fan in me then wanted to run around, telling the coal miners to organize, to demand better wages that’d let them live in houses that didn’t seem on the verge of collapse, to demand health insurance that would let them fix their kids’ teeth, stop the environmental devastation of strip mining.

Instead, I ate a lot of food, enjoyed a couple of hot showers, and spent the weekend alternating between sitting around and paying for the privilege of being thrown down some tracks. And you know what? It was great.

Three days ’til the Quebec trip.