When in Rome...

“When in Rome” they say, I read
In a history book
"Not only do, but also as
The Romans you should look."
I had no mirror in which to gaze,
So I a photo took
Because my fear’s in a Toga,
I knew not how I’d look.

A Museuse of a word

I find my Muse amusing,
for humor I have writ.
But when my Muse makes horrid puns,
I find my Muse a twit.

The Music of the Spheres

“All nature sings
And around me rings
The music of the Spheres.”

“Space”, the dark frontier, the infinite void, unexplored, inexplorable. Man’s concept of the universe is not an infinitely large one, it is most certainly much closer to nonexistent. It is only a recent “advance” in thinking that “space” is mostly nothing with a few lifeless balls of fire and debris. Only recently, are the planets only stone, and the stars just burning gas. Not long ago, Planets moved in Spheres with the Earth as the center, not as the most important, but as the lowest. Every other direction was up. Those Spheres would make music on a cosmic scale, singing to their Creator, as the planets in their orbits would dance to their music.

Modern science cannot detect anything but electromagnetic waves coming from the stars, so they claim they are lifeless blobs on a dark background. To be sure, they can’t detect anymore from you. No, The stars sing in the Heavens! They harmonize, wheeling round in perfect obedience to their master, shining His light in the night, in an ever unfolding dance so perfectly choreographed, by The Perfect King of it all.

No, my friend, the Heavens are not void, but full of testimony of God, the Infinite Creator of us all.

Friendship

I remembered the poem! The poem God reflected, a few posts below, reminded me of this, and today at school I kept going over the rhythm of it over and over in my head, till, at a break, I remembered the words.

Here is a friendship poem:

Lord each day you make us close,
yes closer all the time.
Lord make us closer, closer still,
yes, closer still to thine.

Elks and Eels and Elephants....and Mimes.

Here's a poem that I found on my computer that I had forgotten all about. I like it.

The elks and the eels and the elephants
Sing out their sad song of silence.

The stars ceased singing the songs of the spheres
And looked down from heaven with weeping tears.

The king of the earth with ruinous words
Rejected the beasts, fish, and the birds,

Called himself the only king.
But God, true king of everything
Would not let man continue to sing.

Prelude, Chorus, verse one done.
Verse two begins with God’s own son


Here's another one I wrote for valentines day....


Since today is Valentine’s
I thought I would compose these lines.
Not for love; to woo or pine
But that you are a friend of mine.

I was looking for one specifically, but I can't seem to locate it. I'll have to find it and post it when i get the time. Till then, enjoy Mime Mortality:

It has been a long long time
I think I need to kill a Mime.
Because they will not ever cry
When forced to speak, they’d rather die.

This one I have no clue how it came to be. My Muse must have been on something at the time.

Txt

October 17, 2008
English 1110
Essay #4 Final Draft

“txt”

A hammer is designed to whack things. It is against the nature of the tool not to hit things with it. If you were to hold a hammer in your hand, it would be hard not to pound the dickens out of something. Technology, in a similar way, has a bias in how it is to be used. The quality of communication is an effect of the intrinsic limitations of technology.

The telephone, invented in 1876, is a device that allows you to talk to another person over short or vast distances. You can hear the tones and inflections in the other person’s voice that show emotion. It is, though, a far cry from talking to someone in person, as you lose gestures, facial expressions, and especially the emotion in their eyes. The gap between a face-to-face meeting and mere telephone speech is a large one, and the reduction from voice to print is even greater.

The printed word is a medium that lacks emotion. Inflection is reduced to punctuation. Even something as silly as, “I dislike your shabby poodle,” can be read as either offensive or sarcastic. The emotional ambiguity on its own gives you two options. You can say things that are unambiguous, or you can ambiguously say things with their emotion defined by context and punctuation. Cell phone text messaging is biased towards the latter. Texting cannot carry emotion. Any emotion shown is a product of context, but in texting context is stripped away. You can only send 160 characters per message, using nine keys instead of 26, and punctuation is hard to do, requiring more characters and keystrokes. You certainly cannot write a philosophical treatise over text. No, you can’t even really say anything important, as emotion, context, and length are removed. Both quality and quantity are lacking.

On the other hand, texting does positively allow us to send tiny bytes of knowledge to people without the need or bother of a phone call. You can send someone information who you know is in a meeting, or in a show. You can also use it if you need to say something when you can’t make noise. Texting is not without its uses, but the limitation of the tool defines what we can say with it. When people try to communicate something serious in a text message, it more often than not results in confusion and mixed messages. The limited capabilities of texting contribute to this negative result. When you try to say more than a medium is designed to communicate, your original meaning gets lost.

Proverbs 16:22 says, "A wise man’s heart guides his mouth." You are responsible not only for what you say but also how you say it. It is important to choose a way of communicating that is capable of expressing what you want to communicate. You must be wise in how you let the medium of communication affect your message.

L8er.

God Reflected

Infatuation is over and done with.
Folly of fools this fool hath been.
I tried to love in ways that lacked meaning;
Hurt you, hurt all, above hurting me.

God has taught me many great lessons;
My paths and choices He has directed.
Love does not envy or boast in pride;
Love in truth is God reflected.

And so as a friend I send you this message
My changed character lends that it’s true.
I do not love with foolish attraction
But as a friend, I truly love you.

Thank you dear friend for all that you mean
to me in my life; I look now and see.
I pray that as I draw closer to God,
You will be drawn closer to me.

Till death do you part

The sound of the mower's low droning was slightly less than the music playing pleasantly in my ears, expertly delivered by my matte black Ipod clipped to my belt, when my pocket started to vibrate, thrown back and forth by my use-beaten cell phone within. It's oscillations warned me right on time that it was a quarter to five. I cut for ten minutes more, then parked that powerful machine and went inside. I quickly ran up to my room and turned on my computer. I logged into the web conference. The video and audio streamed at tens of frames per second, with mere milliseconds of delay from their original source, the wedding of Liz and Luke Nieuwsma. The last of the guests were being seated as I arrived. "Oh, It's Mr. and Mrs. Wells. And little Henry!" Then the parents and grandparents were seated. "Oh, there's George! He looks so sharp in his tux! Oh, Robert! Ooh, there's Mrs. C!" With a change in the beautiful music of the organ, the bridesmaids started coming down the isle, starting the processional. The first three I didn't know. "Oh, it's Faith! She looks so happy! Oh, Kate's right behind her!" They all looked beautiful and incredibly joyful. Then Liz Callihan appeared in the doorway. Her joy, her elegant gracefulness was complemented by the wise face of her father, who was holding her arm proudly. He looked like such a big man, a stature that matched his favor with God and men. Liz's face glowed through her veil as she met her husband soon to be. The ceremony was beautiful, and was a testament to Luke and Liz, to the Callihans and Nieuwsmas, and to God. "Do you Luke, Liz...till death do you part?" "I do" "I do" "By the authority vested in me by God and the state of Idaho, I now pronounce you Man and Wife. (you may now kiss the bride.)"

:)

God bless Luke and Liz and their lives together. May they always trust in Him and may their children be a testament to their parents and their own faithfulness. God bless, and Amen.

Anticharacter

This is an essay I wrote for English. It's not the best, but it has some neat components. :-D

Anticharacter

Symbols are a way of expressing thoughts, transposing our feelings and emotions that otherwise could not be expressed in plain words. Some stories express their characters explicitly, while others only implicitly through the use of symbols. Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants is such a story that is driven mainly by its metaphoric imagery. It is by this language that we gain considerable deep insight into the characters in the story and we connect with them in meaningful ways.

Often when I read a story I find myself loving a character, whether it has noble qualities, or is wiser than most, or maybe it is just simply lovable. That feeling, that interest, draws me into the story and I feel with the character and react with its reactions. It is a rarer instance that the main character is actually un-lovable, contrastingly lacking in virtue. An author in this way is effective, not by getting me to connect with his characters, but to react against them.
Hemingway accomplishes this in his story. It is about a man and a girl in a train station near the river Ebro in Spain. Our short glimpse of them takes place over just forty minutes, before their train arrives. It is never explicitly stated, but it is implied that they are talking about the girl, Jig, getting an abortion. We get hints of this, not mainly from the dialogue, as all that’s talked about is an “operation” (pg.323, ln.42), but from the imagery surrounding it. The hills represent pregnancy, and the dictionary defines a white elephant as “a valuable possession whose upkeep is excessively expensive.” The two parallel pairs of train tracks suggest a great decision with only two, opposite alternatives. They also suggest the distance between the two character's views of the matter, that they’re walking side by side, going opposite directions.

The man, described only as “the American,” (322.1) is selfish, thinking really only of himself, although he says that he only cares for Jig. In the end, Jig is faced with two decisions, abort the living baby within her and continue her life with the man, or be left in a very Catholic Spain, facing shame and ridicule alone, very alone. We get the sense that the man fears responsibility, in fact he actively flees it. He treats the abortion as “perfectly simple” (324.93), “really not anything, just to let the air in” (323.44), saying that he cares for her, but really thinks just for his own ease and care-free lifestyle.

The train tracks symbolize a decision, a way of life. The man chose to follow his own passions and inclinations, as opposed to the harder course, but the best. In contrast to the familiar words of Robert Frost, “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference,” the man chose the oft traveled, but worse, direction.
The luggage seems to signify how the man treats Jig, it has stickers from many hotels, suggesting they’ve traveled often, and at the end, when Jig seems to give up arguing, just asking him to “please please please please please please please stop talking” (224.98), he moves the luggage to the other side of the train station, preparing to move ahead with his plan, dragging her decision along with his, powerfully, like a locomotive.

This man goes against everything I hold and live by. He is the antithesis of my character. He’s un-lovable. He’s a cad. A man should guard not only himself in a relationship, but also a woman, both emotionally and physically. If he fails to do so, as the man in this story has done, he should take responsibility for his actions in front of God. The virtuous and right response would be for him to marry Jig, and settle down with her, to think of her before himself, as a noble character would do, but he clearly has no intention of doing so. The situation was not unavoidable, and the American is not incapable of changing his situation, as Jig is at this point (although she is partly responsible for getting there.) He is morally responsible. Or should I say, immorally irresponsible?

Ernest Hemingway, by stark contrast to what I know is right, is effective in getting me to look at not only the characters he puts forth, but also to examine myself. What I despise shows all the clearer what I hold dear. The man is a negative metaphor, an opposite image of myself, a thought expertly expressed in such brilliant symbols.

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernst. “Hills Like White Elephants.” Literature and the Writing Process. Ed. Elizabeth McMahan, Susan X. Day, and Robert Funk. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice, 2007.


"white elephant." WordNet® 3.0. Princeton University. 29 Sep. 2008. .

Frost, Robert. Mountain Interval. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/119/. [1 Oct. 2008].