Random mode

1. Finally read Amy Bloom's Love Invents Us, which I liked despite the bad reviews. (How can you not love that title? Hehe.) Bloom's depiction of passion---often inconvenient and unacceptable---simmering in the precocious Elizabeth Taube sometimes reminded me of the audaciousness of Sharon Olds, tempered by the wisdom of Marguerite Duras. I liked it so much Peachy gave it to me, in exchange for my old copy of Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride.

2. My favorite songs of the past 2 weeks:

• "Chicago" by Sufjan Stevens -- the ultimate I-want-to-embrace-the-world road trip song, with refrains you can shout out from a car window
• "Nothing Like You and I" by The Perishers -- quiet and (admittedly) mushy, the kind of song you can play in the morning while someone you love rests his head on your pillow
• "Calendar Girl" by Stars -- from the "Manila-Toronto Express" mixed CD Jeline gave me a while ago. I love this so much! I can imagine feeling depressed during winter (winter! oh lord, what is snow like?) and listening to this
• "Chocolate" by Snow Patrol -- yet another good find from Romy's music folders... "With a name I'd never chosen/ I can make my first steps/ As a child of 25"
• "For the Driver" by Ron Sexsmith -- a beautiful, compassionate ballad from the guy who sang another lovely song entitled Dandelion Wine!

3. I think I fall in love with groups as much as I do with individual people. While drinking at Stir Crazy last night, I realized I love my Design People friends -- the way I also loved the faux-kajologan of my Totaleclipse barkada, the intellectual playfulness of my English department buddies, and the swagger, poetry and abandon of the Monday Club. I love how they're all creative and hardworking and, for lack of a better term, grounded, rooted to the world, unlike some friends I've made in the writing world

4. What poetic form would you be? Larry compared himself to a villanelle. I said I'd probably be a sestina, with recurring key words and variations of issues, unrhymed and seemingly unrestricted, but with a complicated inner structure. He said one of my key words should be yes. Yes? Yes!

5. Finally received the acceptance letter and registration procedures from Toronto -- which now terrifies and baffles, more than it excites. Ask me why elsewhere.

6. A poem by William Stafford:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot--air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there.