the place where your soul had died

today's title? bixby canyon bridge by death cab for cutie. yes, that death cab for cutie. wait? that's just a picture of ben gibbard and zooey deschanel? oh well. they're both ah-dorable and ah-mazing and incredibly talented. oh, and we love their music. mona would like you all to know that she is amazingly cool. in case the mona-mention hadn't tipped you off, i'm writing this post from the library.

i know, i know. marvel at my dedication. or don't, since i didn't blog at all over the weekend. here, i'll make it up to you:

Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldeboran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;

stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are
nor as Orion's sapphires, luminous;

yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.

isn't that a pretty poem? it's by h. d., aka hilda doolittle. she was pretty awesome. i'd go on a bit more about poetry, but mona's currently describing the homemade sponge cake she's bringing to school tomorrow, so i'm mostly just salivating over that. i'm serious - hearing her descriptions of dessert has reduced me to a drooling, gibbering wreck of a person who has no other purpose in life beyond the googling of chocolate-filled images. see? proof:

...hypothetically speaking, the prospect of future desserts might intensify my natural tendency to hyperbolize. might.

true story: i just tried to type "might" as "mgmt". freudian slip much? in other words, i've had mgmt's new album on my brain. it's so different from oracular spectacular that when i first heard it i was kind of like:

but then it started to grow on me. it's strange - i initially hated every song in my 100! playlist (in case it wasn't obvious, that's the smart playlist that houses my 100 top-played songs), while the songs i find most earwormy and hummable are among my least favorites. like this weekend - during our lovely friday off, i went to dsw to hang with jenibean and was exposed to her strange collection of car music for the second time. among them was a song whose lyrics seemed to be nothing but the phrase "she's a sexy chick" and three or four songs which sounded exactly like and whose subject matter dealed with "rumpy pumpy" as my lit teacher calls it. the only saving grace to any of them was that they had pretty awesome beats and bad mixing so you could never really tell what the singer was saying. in other words, they were all the perfect earworms. do you think i'm going to be sullying ophelia the ipod with any of those songs?

if you answered anything other than "no" to that question, i will refer you to the following gif. in this scenario, pretend that ophelia the ipod is jim and Crappy Music is dwight. now watch:

there, does that clear things up for you? i thought it'd help. the office can explain anything. so can family guy, actually.

wow, early release is almost over. i've got to go to buzzer club in, like, ten minutes, so i'm going to wrap this up. oh, and in case you didn't notice, i copied gina's idea and added a currently reading tab over on the right side of the page.

oh, but the fire went wild

if you don't know the song today's title came from...well, shame on you. go fetch your ipods right now and start listening to ring of fire by johnny cash, who is awesome and deserves to be remembered by our generation for something other than that joaquin pheonix biopic and his cover of hurt (which, okay, was still pretty amazing).

i spent today in an ecstasy of hermitatude. which is another self-invented word, it's true, but there previously existed no word in the english language which could accurately convey the levels of hermitness to which i had sunk and so i was forced to invent one. also i've consumed indecent levels of sugar and caffeine today and really can't be held responsible for anything i type.

basically all i've done today is read and snack and listen to music. also i spent a lot of time playing with the internet and youtubing silly things and interviews with pretty boys serious musicians and actors. oh, and i replenished my stockpile of gifs. they mostly all feature this wonderful person:

anyway, i'm almost done rereading the return of sherlock holmes. i stopped reading towards the end of the adventure of the six napoleons mostly because i was overcome with a most undignified urge to giggle at watson and inspector lestrade spontaneously standing and applauding at holmes's explanation of the mystery.

i thought i'd let holmes robert downey jr. illustrate my expression during that story for you. phase one: the initial and proper hilarity. phase two was a little more complicated and mostly consisted of feeling guilty at sir arthur's tendencies toward theatrics and purple prose. not included in the gif is phase three, which was when i remembered that clearly arthur conan doyle had no dignity to speak of. proof? the lost world. it was a book about surprise dinosaur adventures. trust me - i reread it today and had heaps of fun with it. i mean, it is a book about surprise dinosaur adventures, but at least they're entertaining surprise dinosaur adventures and not, say, jurassic park which was an utter bastardization and if sir arthur conan doyle had some shortcomings as a writer he at least was better than that idiot film made him out to be i'm sure he rolled over in his grave when it came out and screamed british swear words at the filmmakers.

in keeping with the general boring trend of this blog, i spent the rest of my day enjoying the spoils of the momster's grocery shopping raids trips. among them: java chip and mocha starbucks ice cream. i have a horrible presentiment that i'll come out of spring break bearing a strong resemblance to a hobbit, though hopefully without hairy toes.

i'm pretty sure i've blogged about both of these songs before (and if i haven't, i've just been a horrible Rachel and will have to change my name to something awful like Lola or Afghanistan until such time as my actions have returned to a proper state of Rachelism) but i love them to itty bitty pieces i've been playing them both all day so i thought i'd share them anyway:

and:

la lala la

did you know that barbara kingsolver researched for twenty years before finishing the poisonwood bible? that's a pretty daunting number. so is 433. as in 4 minutes, 33 seconds of silence. this was a buzzer club question a few weeks ago - none of us knew the answer. it popped up on a blog i follow today and i thought i'd share the link with you.

(heartless (kanye west cover) - the fray)

yesterday was fun. it probably shouldn't have been since now i have a ton of homework to finish before tomorrow, but i don't really regret it. i should probably get over this whole procrastinating thing before college.

speaking of college, what's with all of the tiny schools no one's ever heard of still sending application emails? deadlines have passed and i'm clearly not interested. i still don't know how exactly they all got my email (i never checked that box on the sat that says it's okay for collegeboard to send out your information) but it's really annoying. i hate that i can't check my email without deleting thirty billion college emails first.

(stateline - butch walker)

this poem has been on my mind lately. i've always been a big dylan thomas fan, but i always stayed closer to refusal to mourn the death of a child by fire in london and things of that sort than poems like this. i suppose it's because when i first started reading his poetry i thought this was more literal than the others. and, like all little teenies making their first forays unaccompanied into the wide world of poetry, i was in search of something a little more ephemeral. it's always more gratifying to one's own ego to try and wrestle with the 'big' topics and forget that, to quote l. m. montgomery (again), 'all things great are wound up with all things little'.

(the little things - colbie caillat)

i've managed to work out some this weekend, but i'm thinking the bulk of getting back into shape is going to have to wait until after midterms. sadly, i can only study (or read, for that matter) when i'm munching on something. let's face it - i'm a grazer. and it is horrifyingly easy to go through an entire pint of ice cream while reviewing econ. at least the shape of the output and total revenue curves of a firm in the short-term will always be grouped together with the taste of half-baked ice cream. i just hope my stomach doesn't pull that embarrassing grr-argh-i-am-godzilla-feed-me routine during the exam. those things are long and we can't even eat in that classroom because of some stupid kid with peanut allergies. in other words, i won't even be able to have breakfast/graze during the two hour long economics exam.

if i had a kid who has one of those obnoxious food-in-class-preventing allergies, i'd at least have the decency to home school it so the other kids didn't have to suffer. geez (oh man).

(typical - mutemath)

anyway, here's your poisonwood quote of the day. i've been picking these by random - letting the book fall open and typing whatever i highlighted in round one, which was the fun stuff, not the colonialism or adah-related quotes. today's quote could kind of fall under any of those topics, though, so i guess you lucked out:

i have applied to college

well, the ones due on january 1, anyway. including william & mary!

here's how i'm rewarding myself:

jeni's music on the side reinspired my love of ingrid michaelson. am listening to winter song by sarah bareilles and ingrid!

ok, time to go back to apping.