stream of consciousness

My grandmother loved Whitman. She would often look at the bookshelf and request her copy of Leaves of Grass. I hadn't read any Whitman myself until assigned it last week...

I'm having tea; it's 5 p.m. and from my bedroom window, I see that for the first time in two days, the sky is not gray.

Instead of reading Leaves of Grass, I'm thinking about my grandmother, who taught me how to play dominoes, and let me win, though she never let my mother win.

I'm listening to NPR; a man explores his lobotomy...His step-mother hated him, it seems. He talks to his father about it for the first time. He attains a sense of peace upon realizing that his lobotomy did not damage his soul. He seems incredibly forgiving, and I wonder why...That lobotomy may have left his soul intact, but there must be something wrong with somebody who is not consumed by warping anger and a furious sense of justice?

Perhaps this unbidden question points toward the cynicism that most people have about faith. It just doesn't make sense unless you have it, since, though logical to a point, the phenomenon inherently involves the not knowable. My favorite definition of faith: "Faith is being sure of what you hope for" (Heb. 11:1).


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I'm making a new mix. Today, my old mixes are old.
Can I get from "By the Way" (Red Hot Chili Peppers) to Madeleine Peyroux's "Don't Cry Baby" in 9 songs...I selected the songs on intuition, apparently based on my perception of the mood of the piece, ignoring specific lyrics, which I don't tend to remember very well anyway.
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the Petrarchan conventions:
devotion by the lover
rejection by the beloved
acceptance of the pain of rejection
ambivalence to desire
hyperbole
trials at the lady's hand
love as spiritual
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