Home Thoughts

I should really post something.

I've been back from university a few days now, and apart from my room exploding along a growing sense of the approach of death, I have no excuse for neglecting this little corner of my life.

I should explain. The car was so packed on the way home from dorm, I resolved to downsize on a grand scale. This resulted in a mass pouring out and pulling up the bits and pieces that had accumulated in my drawers and on my tabletops the past few years.  My room was a jungle, and since it has no door, my Mom had to look at it every time she wanted to get something from downstairs.  After many hours of toil I can see bits of the floor emerging in a rose cleanliness, and it feels fulfilling.  The explosion has been dealt with.

On the other hand, this sense of death - I had a dream the other night where a man told me that as long as I had lived, that was one year over half of the life I had been given.  I'm pretty sure I dreamed this because I've been thinking about life and death lately.  And I've had fearful moments of listening to the void that says my life has no purpose.  I don't know how atheists do it: I mean, if I didn't believe in God, my life would have no meaning and I would live in constant fear.  Death is real.  It's going to happen.  Maybe I shouldn't be thinking this at my age, but how could I not?  My comfort is that I have a Saviour who conquered Death with a capital 'D': eternity is in Him, and there is Life in Him.  That's all I need.

Home. It's a relief to have time to write again.  I'm working on a short story for a scholarship and started a song yesterday about my one track mind.  Research for my capstone next year on Dostoevsky is starting with Crime and Punishment.  I'm signed up for a slo-pitch league and still have no job.  Not worried though, I know something'll work out.  "Somehow it always does".

I have a problem.

You see, whenever I go to a library, or a bookstore, even a thrift shop, I find myself forgetting something very important.  Well, actually two things: one, time. And two, I'm a poor student.

What is it that causes this lapse in reality?  The written word.  Bound in many different shapes and colours, spines straight and prim or curved with age, names stamped on the cover and the top of each page.  I want to meet these characters, get to know them inside and out, part good friends.  Most times I find myself overwhelmed by a stack of ten or more books before I've made it through one aisle.

Like I said, I forget time.  That I won't have time to read all these, that I should be studying for the exam the next morning, that I have a stack of books at home already waiting to be read.  And that I'm a student with a tight bugdet often doesn't click in until I'm getting ready to go through the checkout.  Sometimes I manage to part with some, knowing I'll meet them in other places at other times.  But I rarely escape without at least one book in my arm.

This is my burden as an English student.  What about you? You're in your favorite kind of store: what is something you couldn't leave without?  Leave a comment!

Origins

Copper Opera. 

What is it?  An enigma. A rip-off from Brecht's Three Penny deal.  A police officer singing soprano.

Actually, it's this:

I painted it for a silent auction at my school.  It was based off a sketch I made one day in math class when I was in one of my less attentive frames of mind: it is a woman singing in the midst of bleak reality, not too far off from how I was feeling, regarding the whitewashed class room and the pale hum and flicker of the projecter.  I liked the idea of painting something grayscale, and I feel it did the mood of the painting justice.  My roommate, who now owns the painting, says it is could be the visual manifestation of Canadian literature.  Not too sure about that.

But I liked the way its name worked phonetically: cOpper OperA - so much that it is now the name of this blog and the script I'm writing for ScriptFrenzy.  I'm just starting on page ten, by the way.  And the quote in the current heading of this blog is a line the Poet character opens the play with:  "Your golden buttons are painted brass, and your most prized possession may be a copper crucifix."  Surfaces are worthless: it's what lives at the core that moves us, changes us, shapes us.