Just kidding!

Ok just kidding that wasn't my last blog! But this one is!
This is the script for our final presentation.
Voila.

We wrote a story with a stream of consciousness flow, pulling quotes and moments from everyone’s blogs. Doug sums the idea up:
“The idea of reconciliation: and bringing these little micro stories back around to encompass the overall pattern of the whole.” (Doug Fejes)

Lily was my best childhood friend. She lived right across the way, about two backyard spans and an alley's width away from my house. For some reason, this memory out of all my childhood memories is one that remains most clear in my head. I remember when I met her... I thought she was beautiful. She looked like a little pixie... very tiny with short, choppy bleach blonde hair and blue blue eyes. She was always smiling, always very friendly, and the most adventurous spirit I had met outside my own family. Lily was six and in kindergarten (I wasn't old enough to go), so I would wait during the week until she was out of class for our adventures to begin. (Rian Piccin)

Each family member uses different word choices to describe me as a child: my grandmother says that I had a mind of my own, my mom says I was eccentric and that she loved my oddities as long as they never went too far, my sisters say I was a freak. Until this weekend it never actually hit me that all things considered I in fact actually was a freak. I was introverted and counted my pet cats as my primary friends (I even took framed photos of them with me when we traveled). Family videos of me show me asking not to be disturbed while doing serious work in the sandbox or putting Kleenex on the seats of swings before sitting down so as not to get dirty. My family often imitates me telling my mother over and over again that the mysterious scar on my knee was a result of being bitten by a zebra in Africa long before she was born. (Abby Buzzas)

My grandparents lived in a town called Darien, CT. They had a cute, little clapboard New England-esque home, and the yard was manicured neatly. In the backyard there was a garden. Along the walkway were 'money plants,' and I don't know if that's actually what they were called, but they had these flat pods that grew on them, and inside were little disks. Imagine a bean pod if it were flattened (not crushed!). My sister and I were forced to amuse ourselves when we were in CT because my father was an only child, and we didn't have cousins to play with, so we came up with a little game. Using the 'money' that came from the money plants, a person would pay the toll to enter the raspberry patch. This patch was gorgeous. Tall hedges that were as tamed as they could be wound in an crescent shape. On one of the sides there was a beautiful wrought iron bench that we would play on. Now grandma and grandpa didn't want us to pick all of the raspberries, so they added to our little game and said that we had to have enough 'money' for the ones that we picked. It was one 'coin' for each raspberry, and if we didn't have enough then we had to give them to the grownups. (Katie Mason)

I was staying at a friend's house. We were up late watching a movie and when the movie ended it was about 3 a.m. She had a dog at the time and it was barking to be let outside. I got up opened the backdoor they had, which was a sliding glass door, and put the dog on the leash outside. Now, looking out her back window you would see her backyard and then a grove of thick trees. This particular night it was clear and there was a full moon and I remember it being very bright outside. I was watching her dog out the window waiting for it to finish its business so I could bring it back inside and go to sleep. The dog, I noticed started to bark at something in the trees. When I looked up to see what it was, I was shocked, I couldn't move, it was as if my face was paralyzed. I saw a figure, the shape of a man, and the perfect profile of a man's face. Yet, it was grey and transperant and the figure glided, not walked, through the trees. I watched the man or ghost or whatever the entire time until it left my sight. I remember thinking reapetively, "please don't look over here" because I knew if he did he would see me starring directly at him. Also, the dog that was outside, was barking at the figure the entire time, and the dog too, was following the ghosts movement. (Brianne of the Summer Breeze)

On the way out of the library everything I saw and everything I considered seemed to make sense like meaning was erupting from a hidden source. It was very cool and kind of scary. Kind of scary because I was at such a calm. It seemed like the eye of a hurricane or something where the calm can only be described as eerie. I don't have any idea where it came from or why it happened then but it was a very cool mental experience. (Adam Benson)

I was standing on the north side of the Maurikopfle (a peak in Austria) just below the summit before the final pitch of our climb. I remember my breath dancing in a white haze in front of me with each exhalation. I remember the silence interrupted only by the crunch of snow under my feet. And I remember the prickly chill that ran up my spine, skipping across each vertebrate and spreading through my limbs to the tips of my fingers and toes. The chill subsided only in my mind as if to tell me "pay attention dummy, this exact moment is very important, don't forget it." (Kevin Luby)

The goal of life is to make your death as saddening to as many people as possible. No, this isn’t true. The meaning of life is to die with a bunch of stuff. Nah, this isn’t true either. Life’s goals are subjective, defined by the ones doing the living. Hmm, close but its missing something. Life is intractable; it’s confusing; Life is a God-given shitshow. (Tai Kersten)

I was a young punk in desperate need of seasoning. Well I am still young and still in need of seasoning but I don't think that I am a young punk, though I am sure some of the older generation would disagree with that assessment! . . . .
Well this time around I am older, hopefully a little wiser though at times I do have my doubts, more patient, and more experienced at reading older texts. (Ronald Rivera-Green)

humans, on the other hand, are incredibly frail on so many levels. Mortal, emotionally chaotic, prone to ‘sinning,’ etc. Humans are terribly curious and, as Crowley (my favorite character ever) would say “They’ve got imagination… And just when you’d think they were more malignant than Hell could ever be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved.” (Gaiman and Pratchett 38). Yeah, that’s humanity in a nutshell. (Joan Goss)

I needed an excuse to leave the room at any given time to get away for a bit. I often needed a break. I took up smoking. Cigarettes never really appealed to me, though, so when a friend of mine went to the tobacconist where his brother worked, I tagged along and bought a pipe. I needed to get away quite a bit, and soon my pipe was full of yucky goo that had accumulated from smoking it. I thought about cleaning it, and I wondered how I could do that--what I might use. Then I had a kind of epiphany.
Pipe cleaners aren't just for elementary school art projects. (Craig Stephenson)

I’ve been told that I see the world as a child. It has been said in commending tones, as if something special is happening, as if “childlike” can be equated to godlike. It’s also been said in condemnation, as if children’s sacred duty is to grow up and become a real person, as if children don’t exist until we adults can look into their eyes and see some of the confusion reflected from our own. But I have a secret, cultivated carefully in the darkest corner of my mind. In this garden, the brambles and wildness of my thoughts, among the rambling strangeness that marks me, there is a corner where I once planted myself, where time obeys no earthly dictates and rests from its unyielding march forward. Here time curls up next to me and comforts me in my sleep. Here, in this garden, among the “walls and earth and trees and swinging sprays and tendrils the fair green veil of tender little leaves had crept, and in the grass under the trees and the grey urns in the alcoves and here and there and everywhere, were touches or splashes of gold and purple and white and the trees were showing pink and snow…and there were fluttering of wings and faint sweet pipes and humming and scents” (Burnett). Because it is here, in the still point of the turning world, where the dead return to life and the past’s words are spoken again with a living tongue, where I am a child-woman, where this or that have no secure foothold, and falling deeper down is half of the fun. (Taylor Moorman)

Yesterday marked the fifteen-year anniversary of my father passing away. While many were out enjoying the coming of spring, I sat alone on my couch and stared at the artwork on my walls; the first pieces of art my father had ever purchased. He was only a few years older than I when he bought them, and I wondered if my father had seen the same things in the paintings that I did now. As I gazed around my living room, I began to feel even more overwhelmed with nostalgia. I realized just how many of my parents old possessions decorated the walls and tables, and how each piece told their own unique story from the past. I found it hard to admire the art for its beauty alone, and my thoughts kept drifting to a different place in time. It seemed as though everywhere I looked, the past began to overcome me more and more, making it impossible for me to detach myself from it. Memories of the past and expectations for the future create a hindrance by not allowing a person to fully function. By compartmentalizing ones life, a person is able to place their emotions, possessions, memories and self into many different “boxes”, for without a frame, it is easy to find yourself wandering aimlessly through an endless abyss. (Erin Mortenson)

The first that I can remember is by Rembrant, one of his Lucretia series, after she stabs herself. Even though I was only 13 at the time, this is the only painting I remember from the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I can't really explain why this painting struck me, and perhaps this is the nature of true epiphanies: beyond explanation. (Amy McMahon)

I put the book down and decided to watch this poor girl. And she was really not very good, in fact I don't know how she got so far in the competition, I wouldn't know, but she sang a Miley Cyrus song. (The only Miley Cyrus song I like is a mashup with Biggie Smalls, Party and Bullshit in the USA.) As she sang, not very well, about having to move another mountain I couldn't help thinking about the Total Eclipse, and the corona, and little specs of featureless people standing atop hillsides, enduring the moments of totality. I don't remember really thinking about it, just little images in my head....and as this girl sang I teared up, and when her voice caught a little, I wailed. I was choking on my sobs and wiping tears on my scandia down blanket. I had never seen the show, had no attachment to her, but watching her devastated me. I hope this doesn't say too much about me because while Taylor is so moved by a great poem, I am shattered by American Idol......I am not worthy. (Sam Clanton)

This could be the essence of the dark epiphany; the comprehension of the enormity and darkness of the universe, or God or the gods or whatever we choose to call it--that it what the universe perhaps is, and why it is so shattering to actually perceive, because to see it is to see our own essential selves, which are finite. (Kari Bowles)

"May 22, 2009. There are always kids screaming at the park next to my house. It's so annoying, but I just realized that they are the cries of innocence and we were there at one point. Oh those innocent days. I kind of miss it...the only care in the world was if we were having PB & J AGAIN and who got the train plate." (Helena LaFave)

It's so bizarre to think that that was YOU writing down those things, you thought those thoughts, and you have morphed away from that person you once were and shifted shapes and become the person you are today. (Helena La Fave)

I was biking to school and a group of kids from a nearby elementary school were walking as a class along the trail. I had my headphones in rocking out to Lady Gaga. Some kids were dawdling, some were holding hands, and others were by themselves looking up into the sky. I took my headphones out of my ears and listened. (Sam Clanton)

We perhaps have to "forget" things, or to let them go, especially experiences that lead you to the edge of the abyss, that are terrifying and awesome and, yes, sublime. Because if you didn't let go and move on to things like fried eggs, you wouldn't be able to function. Maybe the capacity for the mind to "forget" is in some respects a cosmic gift, which we frequently let down by, but which is necessary if we are to function and not struck eternally dumb and into stone. (Kari Bowles)

I had the strangest dream last night. The kind of dream that feels vivid enough to change one’s self. I was alone at first, wandering through a forest of aspen trees. I felt scared and the hairs on the back of my neck were prickling with the sense of being watched. With every step that I took something shifted in the dark and stepped with me. Picking up my pace, I began to jog through the trees, hoping that maybe I could put a little distance between me and whatever was stocking me. The forest was illuminated by the moon in such a way that the aspen trees looked like ghost figures covered in ash. When I looked down, I nearly passed out from terror. Under my feet and all around me were human bones… And occasionally there were little glittering objects, which I soon recognized to be jewels and pieces of gold capturing the pale fire of the moon. (Robert Loomis)

It isn't so much that the fairy tale relates in some sort of perfect microcosmic way into the rest of the story; though in a sense it does: the fisherman's wife wants everything that can possibly be had, and ends up ultimately with nothing. (Kari Bowles)

And if a brick from Howard Hall falls on me tomorrow, my last thought might be completely irrelevant and the last thing I hear would be Lady Gaga singing:

“Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh
Stop telephonin’ me!
Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh
I’m busy!......." (Sam Clanton)

With one very dull, slow year of high school Spanish as my only exposure to another language, I had no idea how easily languages come to me, let alone how much I love learning them. Languages make sense to me in a way I suppose music makes sense to some people, or the way math, painting, any number of things, make sense to other people. I fell in love with the feeling of speaking words that were new and strange to me, and being understood, of experiencing conversations I would never experience if I stuck to speaking English my whole life. (Zuzu Feder)

I don't speak Spanish but I made myself understood through what I believe was her grandson (or maybe great grandson) that I was vegan. She seemed confused upon hearing about my being vegan until it clicked. Her eyes lit up, she stared at me as if looking into my soul, reached forward and kissed me on my forehead. Then she busied her self in the kitchen for 30 minutes and served me one of the most amazing meals I have ever eaten.
Food is one of the most regularly occurring epiphanies which we can experience. I think it is exceeded only by taming a feral cat and turning the feral cat into a lap cat (which is an end product to embracing that shadow of morality I mentioned above). Experiencing the daily love and affection of a formerly feral cat even beats food. But back to food. Food is how enemies sit down at a table and become friends. Food is how we seal a wedding, with the feast afterwords. Food is something we use to create the rituals in our lives which affect us on the deepest levels (think of Dr. Sexson popping out of a mask at the end of a sacred ritual and revealing an ear of corn shouting "all is now revealed!") Gravity holds our universe the way it is. Food holds our lives in the same all powerful grasp. Without it, we will not survive. (Mick Leslie)

One morning as I was eating breakfast I suddenly remembered a dream I had had that night. I dreamed that I had found my necklace. Specifically, I dreamed that I had found it between my mattress and the box spring. I remember sitting at the breakfast table dressed in this huge t-shirt that my dad had also brought back for me, and thinking to myself "what a weird dream." This day was a weekend and therefore I went outside and played with my friends after breakfast. A few hours later I had the odd impulse to just check under my mattress for my necklace just in case. I mean you never know. what if? I honestly expected to be let down, but of course it was there, weirdly enough. (Jennie Lynn Stanley)

durring christmas break. family was all around for my great aunts birthday and it was a very important time for all of us. just a few months ago my great grandfather died, and my great grandmother is still kickin' it, but this time has been very hard for her because its the first time in over 80 years since she has been without Papa Tony. and i have noticed that since his death she has been much more understanding, much more loving, and far more humble before... i guess it has taken his death to make her realize she doesnt want to miss out on anything else while she is still with her family. while we were all sitting around towards the end of the night, grandma looked at all the grand daughters that were there and said , ' Dont sit and just dream, Just LIVE'. at that moment i realized that so much of peoples time is spent THINKING about what they want to do and not actually doing it, because it SCARES people to really get out there and admit they want to try something new, move somehwere new, get out of their comfort zones. (Victoria Hale)

I must fare forward in my young travels and find a new stomping ground to explore.
I have enjoyed listening to each and every one of you present you papers (with the exception of last Friday which I am sorry I missed due to a dr. apt) your thoughts, your dreams, your imaginations, your faith in the future--as well as the past, and the connections you all have made. You all have opened my eyes to a whole new way to thinking. Seeing beyond myself and beyond the tip of my oh so cute Cindy Loo Woo nose. (JUST KIDDING!!) But honestly all that I have heard in this class has been uplifting, even the dreary parts are uplifting because I know that I have gained more from this one semester than I have my entire college career. This might be because I have actually taken time out of my personal life to focus on the material that Dr. Sexson picks out for us. If I would have just opened my eyes two years ago I might have a bit more under my belt, but I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles and I must move on to a bigger cookie a more delicious cookie, one the size of my head or rather one the size of the world! (Lisa Hiller)

I am not an aesthetic hero possessed with a spirit of transcendence but in my moments of forced make-believe, i see a world that those that never pretend, do not. (Pat Eckerson)

I actually shuddered when this next thought crossed my mind because I never thought I'd feel this way, but I may just have to place Eliot ( doing so with grace and a smile) on the shelf in my mind next to Keats whom I truly do look to and think about often. (Lisa Meyer)

When they arrived in Little Gidding, they discovered an old abandoned church that was in much need of repair. The Ferrars set to work in fixing the church, and soon transformed it into a place of prayer, worship, and shelter for sick and elderly people. (Nick San Souci)



Collective consciousness

Last blog!

The final blog for the capstone class. I can't believe that it's already the end of it all, because it really seems like just yesterday we were trudging through the snow to the first day of class, sitting in the oh-so familiar room of Wilson 120, listening to Dr. Sexson recite the opening lines from Burnt Norton. How fitting that the last week of classes it is still snowing (typical!), and we will be reciting The 4 Quartets collectively as a class. It truly embodies the notion: In my end is my beginning.

I guess all I really want to say is how much I have enjoyed this class. Together we paddled the river with rat and mole, journeyed to the lighthouse with James and Mr. Ramsay, witnessed an eclipse with Dillard, ate some petite madeleines with Proust, sat on the battlefield with Arjuna, and investigated what was rotten in the state of Denmark with Hamlet. The whole time we came to our own individual epiphanies, big and small, dark and light. I think one of the biggest things I will take away from this class is the notion of dark epiphanies. I had always thought that epiphanies were these happy, illuminating experiences that only a few lucky people got to have, but after this class I have realized that dark epiphanies exist as well. And dark epiphanies are not bad things either. On the contrary, they can be the most illuminating revelations of all.

I know I already said this in an earlier blog, but throughout the semester I struggled to connect everything we were doing. That is, until I wrote my final paper. Then I had all these flashing light bulbs going off, and everything made alot more sense. Now, at the end of the class, I am amazed at how well everything relates to each other and fits together. As a class, I feel like we are all going to Rome, and it IS where we are going. Now it's almost scary how often I find myself thinking about this class outside of it, and relating every day happenings back to it.

One last thing-this class really solidified the fact that I made the right choice to be an English major. As I wrap up my English degree at MSU, and embark on new adventures overseas, I feel confident that with the education I have been given here in Bozeman I can confidently face new roads armed with the knowledge I have.

So thank you, Dr. Sexson, for yet ANOTHER great class (third in a row! what are the chances of that! 1 in 3!), and for nurturing the minds of our class. And thanks to the class for making this experience what it was.

Presentation

So our presentation today was supposed to reflect the idea that we as a class have a collective consciousness. We put together a stream of consciousness story using snippets from everyone's blogs that we thought flowed together. (Jennie Lynn is going to e-mail the script to me and I will post it on my blog.)The story was little diamonds of epiphanies that we gleaned from everyone's blogs. The hand tree was supposed to be the yew tree, and we had everyone's hand from the class on it, with a memorable quote from them written on their hand. I thought it was suitable for it to be up on the board with all the tombstones surrounding it...just like a cemetery. How fitting, since it is the end of the class, and for many of you, the end of your college careers.
The two presentations flowed together nicely. I really enjoyed group 4's funeral of an english major. That was great. You guys did a nice job incorporating all the different texts we've read.

more connections: shamanism and eliot

Last week I had to write a research paper for my honors seminar The Art and Science of Medicine. My paper topic was shamanic healing and how it clashes with western medicine. One of the basic principles of shamanism is that everything has a spirit, so if something is bothering you in the physical sense (i.e. sickness, fatigue, etc.) it is because something is wrong with your relationship with the spirit world. The shaman's role then is to mediate between our world and the spirit world to try to figure out what is wrong. We actually had a shaman come into our class and tell us about what she does and her beliefs. The notion that everything has a spirit reminded me of the opening lines of the Dry Salvages (coincidentally my lines to memorize hahahaha), so I incorporated the lines into my paper.
“I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed, and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By dwellers in cities-ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and
waiting” (Eliot, lines 1-10).

What Eliot is saying here is that with the advancements in technology, the natural aspects are forgotten, “unhonored.” While Eliot was probably not speaking in literal terms about the river being a god (it is a metaphor), shamans really do believe that rivers, as well as other natural things such as mountains and trees, are gods and need to be honored. Thus, the shaman’s role is to acknowledge these spirits, lest they be forgotten and become enraged, bringing their wrath upon those who forget to pay them homage.

My point in this blog is to just demonstrate again connections I am making between classes. :)

rituals

The first group to present today had us go through a ritual that, viewed from the outside, may have appeared to be sacrilegious because it was communion...all complete with candles and music and people dressed in robes, not unlike monks or priests. But they did a good job of defending it, for at the end of a class like this one, at the end of our college education, it is only right that we go through some sort of ceremony, some ritual that encompasses all that we had been learning up to this point. Granted, to an outsider, it would have made absolutely no sense (cool they are eating cookies that look like sea shells...why does that guy have shaving cream slapped all over his face?)...but we all chuckled to ourselves because we knew exactly what was going on.

Rituals and ceremonies are something we do on a daily basis. (If you read Tai's paper he does a great job of touching on this in more detail with the ritual of waking up.) I'm sure each of us has our own little OCD ritual we perform out of habit when doing the most mundane of tasks. Even though we may not even realize it, we have our own particular ways of doing this, like making a PB and J. Dr. Sexson said today that even coming to class was a ritual if you want to think of it that way.
And then there is the other side of the spectrum with the sacred rituals, the high ceremonies that highlight and mark defining events in our lives: baptism, first communion, prom (come on, you get the corsage, everyone gathers at someone's house to take pics, you go out to dinner...totally a ritual), highschool graduation, college graduation (whoa that came up fast), marriage, promotion, your funeral. So on both large and small scales, we undergo these ceremonies every day to give meaning to the series of events that happen to us in the small chunk of time that is our life.

English Majors.

The other day one my best friends and I went on a run up Story Hill. We had a really good conversation about why we are studying what we are. She is a microbiology major going into public health and I am obviously English lit and French. Both of have seriously considered the whole med school option. (I know in my paper I talked about how I always thought about how I wanted to be a nurse, but I didn't go into how at the end of my freshman year of college I switched to pre-med for awhile...I had all summer to wrestle with this decision, and when I came back to school for sophomore year I had a little breakdown and ended up switching back to english. What a relief.) As we were running I turned to my best friend and said, "you know...we would both make GREAT doctors." But there is a distinction to be made between what you are good at and what you love. I know I certainly would not be happy taking all those pre-med courses (physics? o-chem? no thanks.) and who knows if i would really be happy as a doctor. It was a tough decision to make...because I had to deal with this strong idea that I should be a pediatrician, and I knew that i could be doing alot of good with it. But I kept having to convince myself that it was the right thing to do, making lists of pros and cons, both on paper and in my head. It was also frustrating to have to make this huge decision when i was at the mere age of 19. I didn't want that responsibility to make a choice that would determine literally everything in my future! But then I came to the realization that I was trying to TRICK myself that I should do it. Those mysterious mental maneuvers we can sometimes make. This was a grand epiphany that I had: if you're trying to trick yourself into doing something, it's probably not good for you.

And now three years later, I feel like my education with english has given me the understanding to comprehend the world and why and how things are they way they are. Granted, I might not know it on the chemical level, but I feel like I have a well rounded understanding of history, thoughts, people, emotions. As an english major (and especially in sexson's classes!) I have noticed the interconnectedness of everything, and I don't mean that in a hippie way. I have learned how to approach a piece of literature and analyze it and pull a lesson from it, and then place my thoughts clearly and coherently on paper. I feel like an education in english literature will prepare you for alot of things because you learn how to write and communicate well and articulate your thoughts, a crucial skill to have. It's also just really healthy, because you can channel negative emotions (anger, frustration, fear) into a journal entry or something. And the love for books is the best love to have because as someone in my lit crit class once said, "reading is a super cheap and easy way to travel to far away places."

Childhood and Journaling

Man I am so glad I RESISTED the urge to sleep in and skip class monday! All y'alls presentations were amazing. I especially loved Taylor's. Usually when someone reads something academic out loud, my mind inevitably goes elsewhere, but you had me hooked with every word. I LOVED how you brought in your journal from when you were seven and incorporated it into your paper. That was awesome. I am pretty big on journaling, and have kept a journal since I was eight, so I have a box tucked away on a dusty shelf in the basement at my parent's house, full of old journals. There must be at least eight or nine of them...all filled with my thoughts and happenings throughout my childhood and into my teenage years...some of it is super, i repeat, SUPER, boring ("tonight i ate stir fry for dinner and then practiced my piano"), some of it dramatic teenage rants about what was SO IMPORTANT to me at the time, and other stuff that i would have forgotten otherwise. All in all they are HILARIOUS to read back on. (Note: keeping a journal is a risky business though. You have to be stealthy and hide it from prying eyes of little brothers who will do anything to get their hands on it and expose you.) I really identified with everything Taylor said though, about looking back on the person she WAS in her journal. It's so funny to read back on my old journals ("what? i SAID that?" I thought that was COOL? WHO WAS I?!" are just some of the thoughts that cross my mind when I am perusing my diary form when i was 12.) It's so bizarre to think that that was YOU writing down those things, you thought those thoughts (hopefully they were memorable ahahahaha oh oral traditions), and you have morphed away from that person you once were and shifted shapes and become the person you are today.
As we grow older, we tend to distance ourselves from the realm of children and imagination and living for that moment.
in fact, I have a journal entry from about a year ago where I was reflecting about how we grow up:
"May 22, 2009. There are always kids screaming at the park next to my house. It's so annoying, but I just realized that they are the cries of innocence and we were there at one point. Oh those innocent days. I kind of miss it...the only care in the world was if we were having PB & J AGAIN and who got the train plate."

Sam-I also really enjoyed your presentation. The whole journal theme is really captivating. :) I can't wait to read the rest of your paper if you post it on your blog. And Tai-I will fo sho be there at your funeral.