I've looked at life from both sides now...

God, I love that song. I first listened to it in theatre class and was instructed to, with four other groupmates, choreograph an interpretive dance to it. That was actually more fun and less awkward than it sounds. As we performed it, it almost made me cry. It really "hit home" with me. I spend my life trying to figure myself out, analyze my actions and plan new ones for the future. Despite what people may think about how my emotionality leads to rashness, it actually is not true. I am a very calculated thinker. It sometimes scares me, the stratagems I come up with to get what I want or need. This song, however, really speaks the truth: that no matter how much I think or plan or discover, I still am just as clueless as the next person. e.e. cummings once wrote: "Love's function is to fabricate unknownness". After my brief confusion at reading this statement, I saw what e.e. meant.

Right now I am writing down favorite poems, sonnets, and (sometimes) quotations that I love. They are poems that have moved me in ways that prose cannot. I am recording them all in this beautiful book. The cover is made from the fabric of a woman's sari, the pages are all recycled material, like cotton and there are even little blue pressed flowers in the pages. It is lovely. I am almost exactly half-way done. I am still debating whether I will keep it to read when I am feeling poetic or sentimental, or if I will give it to someone. That debate will probably last until June.

I don't know what quality it is that I have that makes me so susceptible to poetry, films, and music. I guess it is compassion. Sometimes I feel like my heart is a black hole, taking in all the emotion around it. Sometimes I feel like the films I watch, and poetry I read, and the music I hear goes straight through the pores of my skin and infiltrates my very cells. Granted, this is a very poetic, romanticized way of saying, "Art moves me" but this is genuinely what I feel. In the words of Ricky Fitts:

"Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in."

I will finally leave you with a monologue that my acting teacher gave as one of nine that we could choose from. It is from Dead Poet's Society. I find it refreshing and truthful.

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse." That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"