that solo's awful long, but it's a good refrain

Countdown: 12

Alternate title: you are my sweetest downfall

First, a celebration: They lowered the GPA requirement for my scholarship to 3.4! Can you say, "Mackenzie's getting some sleep after all this semester"? Wooh! I mean, seriously, party at my place. Adesso.

Working in the publications office has made me think in headlines, some comical, some absurd in their seriousness:

In perusing Relevant Magazine, Messiah student experiences WTF moment
Is everyone producing Christian movies on crack?
Pretty sure that when Kirkus Books gave The 13th Demon the review "an unsettling blend between the macabre and the evangelical," they didn't mean it as praise. Nonetheless, praise they boasted it as, putting it on their Relevant Magazine ad. Why?

Italian study-abroad experiences better equip Messiah College student to face life challenges
Student re-evaluates sources of inspiration
One thing has changed since I went to Italy: I am no longer afraid to sleep alone. Is it contradictory that after the most communal, close-knit semester of my life, I am not afraid to be by myself?

Inside the building it is always winter. I face a wall, a wall surrounded by flourescent lights. It is difficult to run when to run means either to get up at 6:30 a.m. or to miss dinner, and in consequence, I am not able to hear the notes my body rings.

Yesterday evening I sat in my room on my roommate's bed and watched the dark clouds sober as night came to hand. I'm looking for imagery here, along the rain-soaked road, in the woman dancing between puddles clasping the umbrella close on her way to the fishbowl. Since coming back to the states, I feel cut off from something, I feel a lack of awareness of my surroundings (once again a disconnect between the cerebral and what I perceive as the creative, between my body and my profession), I feel separated from earth. I'm trying to look more carefully, to understand where beauty resides here, what I can strike (lightly) that will resound into good work. There must be something vibrant here to touch.

Messiah College student experiences disorientation through Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
Welcome to the weird and wacky world of postmodernism!
The Satanic Verses is a frightening book. Not scary-frightening, but disorienting-frightening. I come out of it with a sense of confusion over what is what and what is solid and vibrant. It is an awfully long book, a protracted exercise in doubt. From one moment to the next I am never sure who will be exalted, who will be humanized by hatred (or whose halo will be gone because of love), who will suddenly lose what's important (that does seem to be the constant. What we love is not attainable, it will be taken from us, no one understands love to begin).

Lightning strikes Messiah's campus Sunday night
Tree outside Eisenhower is scarred
Dan Custer came into the office after lunch: "Have you seen the tree outside Eisenhower that got struck by lightning?"
Me: "No, where?"
Dan: "Up the hill from here, on the sidewalk outside Lottie. It's friggin' sweet!"
Me: "oooh. . ."
Upon examination, the scene of the lightning strike is, in fact, beautiful. Splinters of wood shower the ground around it. Three stripes of bark are gone, one stripe reaching all the way from the top of the tree down into the ground.
"Did I ever tell you about the time we watched that storm?" Susan Getty says. "We were on the front porch, and splinters from this lightning-struck tree flew from the back yard past us and embedded in the ground. If we'd been on the other porch we could have been seriously hurt."
But what a beautiful thing. . . driving through the rain and seeing the lightning fork down in front towards campus, later finding only fragments. I expected to see a sudden glass tree on our lawn, lightning forcing the wooden material brittle - so clear and beautiful, sap still sluggishly working its way up under the skin of the tree.

"Do you think it will die?"

Female student witnesses family conflict in Weis
Incident causes internal conflict in student

Wednesday, July 25, in the middle of a grab-some-milk-so-we-can-make-cappucino trip with Greg, I heard an exchange that made me stop.

"Don't get close to me," a man told his wife (in the middle of Weis, as his children argued), "Or I'll smack you in the middle of the floor later."

Oh,

I thought.

Oh.

And as much as I would like to think that I ached for that family, I think I actually just ached for myself (I know, not pleasant to realize how callous). I'm sure that woman didn't launch life thinking, "Someday he's going to hit me, and we'll fight in the middle of the grocery store and our kids won't even pay attention because that will be the norm, and my son will have a bad mullet."

Do you know what I'm getting at?