School ended the 10th of May, so why hasn't there been a post yet? Well, I just arrived home on Sunday. Marissa and I stayed in Moscow having fun with some of my friends for a couple days longer and left town halfway through the week.

A long drive and a stop by the Boise mall and In-N-Out Burger, we pulled into Farmington Thursday afternoon.

 And there we stayed for 2.5 weeks.

Wedding prep for our dear "cousin" Meg.  It was so nice to have one last Skencer weekend (though I'm pretty sure, once a Skencer, always a Skencer) with all five of us girls together: shopping and talking, baking and eating, snipping and glueing, altering and trying-on, reading and sleeping--our days were full. =) This last Saturday was the wedding.

 the Flowergirl

 and Sarah and me.

At long last, I am home. Home for another eight weeks before I head north once again (this time taking my sister with me!).

In the Burn-asement

There once were three girls, who had never met, and a dog named Katie. In August they moved into the basement, luckily made friends, and lived through an entire first year of college. Angie and Grak and Caity; they studied together and joked, they watched TV shows and looked at clothes online (if only they had the money to buy from JCrew or Anthropologie), they took distorted pictures of each other and only very rarely stocked fellow classmates. They listened to songs that Derb should never know about and reviewed lectures and were quite heretical, I’m sure. Friday nights found them in jeans and sweatshirts, kneading dough and stretching pizza crust. Friends would come over with pepperoni and cheese and sit around until it was late, talking and laughing.

The basement had it’s own special qualities. The microwave threatened to explode anytime the Start button was pushed and the washer leaked a lake, but only once in a while, and the sink…well, that faucet was persnickety—turned on low and it dribbled, flipped on full blast it was like a fire-hose. There was no in between. Even stranger was the basement’s aptitude for collecting other people’s possessions (a pair of shoes, a towel, an empty purse, a pair of kid-snowpants, and a book, to name a few). The guests never claimed them, but every now and then one of the items would disappear, I assume to find a new home.

What a year they had, had: early morning classes; cinnamon rolls and coffee, greek yogurt and chocolate chips; a broken trashcan and dim flickering lights; one mouse and just a few spiders, on the whole, the eight months they lived in the basement were not too bad. They even missed each other over the summer.

After a few months of break, only one of the three returned. Grangie, as the two inseparables were tenderly called, moved away leaving the house practically empty. The faces were different this next year and the number of words spoken per second grew to tremendous heights: this little corner of E and Howard was not the same. There were now four roommates: the Asian one, the hockey one, the tall one, and Caity; Mr. Burnett called them his sorority. It’s was not as perfectly neat-and-tidy, nor as coldly lonesome; the counter tops were perpetually cluttered with tea and coffee mugs and there were at least two curling irons plugged in at any given time. Pictures and paintings made their way onto the walls and spread to the fridge too, covered with magnets and papers and notes. Books no longer stayed in their designated spots on the shelves and pots and pans seemed to leap out of the cabinets. Evenings were spent “studying,” playing games, and crying through smiles, a commonplace book kept to record all their unfortunate quotables.

And now one more year has almost past. The constant bubbling of excited stories and retelling of school drama animated those dreary days of that sophomore year. 

texting stupor

My last post was a poem I submitted last week, and this week I had to get feedback from a classmate and revise it. Here's what I came up with:

“I was texting, so I was happy,”

         I heard her say,

Oblivious of the people she had just ignored.

Homework might not be done;

Books haven’t been opened and pages remain unwritten.

Friends interrupt—texting distractions.

Study break, she says, and tries to pretend

Finals aren’t around the corner.

Buzz: roommate has a question

Buzz: sister sharing a picture

Thumbs twitch.

Message. Reply. Answer.

Buzz: friend creating drama

Sending texts while she talks,

Under the table, as if that makes a difference.

New text—silent conversation.

Attention devoted, this is her normal;

Living in a world where only her phone matters.

I’m talking to her and she looks past me;

Checking her phone.

If I text her will she listen?

a poem over-heard

I was texting, so I was happy.

My homework might not be done;

Books haven’t been opened and pages remain unwritten.

New text message

—silent conversation.

Study break, I say, and try to pretend

Finals aren’t around the corner.

Buzz: roommate has a question

Buzz: sister sharing a picture

Thumbs twitch

Answer. Reply. Answer.

No time to waste, I don’t procrastinate.

Recitation in a couple hours,

pencil on paper.

Friends send words

—welcome distractions.

Maybe something will inspire. In the meantime,

I will be texting: that makes me happy.

the deep comedy in shakespeare

Deeper comedy, stories that end better than they begin. This is the Christian’s motif—the one that points to the hope we have that, as the story progresses, it just gets better. Greek stories, unlike those written with the concept of self-denial in order to glorify God, are always depressing. Heroes, puffed up with hubris and concerned only for their own good, strut in and out of situations, involving themselves only in what would make them look good. When they found some cause that mattered to them, then the rest of the story centered on them and their great deeds ultimately leaded to an “honorable” death. Glory was ascribed to their names and tales of their might and nobility were told for ages to come. This paradigm was set on its head when, with utmost humility and self-sacrifice, Christ slew death and triumphed in resurrected life. Now people must look to an end of more than making themselves look good. The world does not center on individuals, emphasizing their particular achievements, rather the concept of living for others, through which hardships will be turned into good, is paramount. After this deeper magic of the vicarious atonement for sin was bled, the world has explored a new genera of storytelling; one where the victorious is weak and humble, one where the story actually gets better in the end.

Shakespeare gets at the heart of this in his play Twelfth Night. Tragedy is turned comic, identities are mistaken, loves are misplaced and wrongly given, but at the end of this play Shakespeare turns what would otherwise have been yet another tragedy into a comedy. He twists the circumstances around and surprises the audience by untangling many sticky situations and weaves them into the bigger picture. It is because of Christianity that we can see the humor surrounding us in this world—it is laughable. Sadly most of the world does not see it as such, but rather, without the expectancy of a redemptive Hero the prospects are rather bleak. Their stories wrestle with dark and clumsy themes of pride and end with depressing scenes. However, in this play, relationships are restored; but this story does not end there. These circumstances are embellished, not simply repaired—identities are discovered and lovers are united. This hope of resolution and peace leads to the final chapter, where it is life, not death, which closes the story. And here Shakespeare leaves us trusting that whatever else may happen to the characters, it will all work out for good.