Thursday, June 16, 2005

on taking oneself seriously

My beloved mother, when talking about herself, uses the pronoun "one."
Most women, I think, have those distressing moments when they realize they're turning into their mothers. Well, I don't. OK, so my nose just grew three feet. Now, I was not raised to take myself too seriously. I was warned at an early age about the ugliness of self-importance. And I will not accuse my dear mother of it, especially. No, she's just mean. That's not fair either. She's really quite nice, except to golden retrievers and
my friends. OK, so what's the point here?

I will throw in another quote from Charles Simic:

"What's the point in reading a poem, many will say, if there's no point to it? For the same reason, I would answer, that it's pleasant and even poetic to take a walk to a strange city with no destination in mind and end up getting lost."

I find these words comforting; maybe there's hope for someone like me. But I did sort of have a point: I want to let my fellow bloggers know that if I had had time today, I would have felt monumentally embarrassed about
my early early am post, about the particular quotes I chose, and the rough and sentimental poem, which, to my self-critical eye, displayed a whopping scoop (I'm thinking mint chocolate chip) of self-importance.

Stacia told me not to be self-depricating, and since I can't even spell the word, I must be on the right track. No, I will toot my own horn from now on. The only problems are, a) every time I've stuck the mouthpiece of a horn in my mouth and followed directions, only the most pathetic little fart-like sound has come out of it, and b) even if I could get the horn to make a sound, I most certainly couldn't coax it into any kind of tune.

I don't always feel my poetry is lousy, Stacia. In fact sometimes I feel pretty darn elated to have written whatever it is. But this particular poem,
with its use of the word "heart" which Ernie O'Dell, president of Green River Writers, says along with "soul" should be used as often as the button which will unleash nuclear war... and with it invocation to robots, beginning with the "O" of pathos...

Well, I've climbed a tree and I'm not coming down until graduation. Or was I in a tree all along? Is the "actual nuthouse" of this blog actually a treehouse? That's a good place for nuts, actually. My favorite tree grows
Mixed Nuts. Or provides refuge for them. It even feels protective toward Brazil nuts, tough nuts to crack which seem unworthy of the effort. I have to provide protection for Brazil nuts because I am a Brazil nut.

Which by now will not be difficult for any of you to believe. Yes, this blog
has taken a somewhat bizarre turn. Remember, I like it when there's no point. I enjoy getting lost. I used to get lost in Chicago between the South Side and the North Side. Some people call it downtown. I called it a labyrinth. I was never truly lost, because I always knew where the Lake was.

So where's the Lake?

--- Harriet, who has her ECE half-done

2 Comments:

Blogger Marci Rae Johnson said...

You have your ECE half done already!! That's amazing!

9:50 AM  
Blogger HL said...

Not that anyone needs to know, what I mean by half done is, I've drafted half the MINIMUM length.
There is plenty, PLENTY, left to be done. But I continue to feel like a goof-off, spending all this time blogging, when I haven't seen any other blogs by third semester students!!!

10:39 AM  

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