Big News!

I got eight hours of sleep last night! It might have been even more, though it's hard to tell since I woke up several times in the night. Certainly was an improvement over the 5-6 hour nights I've been having since the summer. Still have the urge to drink too much caffeinated tea in order to wake myself up, in spite of the fact that I'm anxious this morning (for a variety of reasons, one somewhat reasonable and several not) and jumping at any noise (getting plenty of exercise for that reason, given that (A) it's quite the windy day and (B) there are lots of housemates wandering around).

I'm planning to make a useless post later on. Yes, even more useless than this one.

Stuff and Nonsense

Yes! It's the useless post I promised you!

First comes stuff in the form of silly quizzes(  lj-cut for your convenience. )

Now that that's done with, it's time for nonsense! As usual, our featured nonsense-bot is the amazing MegaHAL, who has been specially tortured prepared with a wide variety of poetry, song lyrics, advertising copy, and spam. So, HAL, what have you got for us today?


Poem the First:

My name is ozymandias, king of kings:
look on my poker face
stop one thing follows on another.
breath and smoke.
and in short, i was led by the 105th congress this letter cannot be afraid,
for they do not know
the smell of death yet amorous of sleep,
that i could grasp a good dog.


Poem the Second:

1 Pound of pork tenderloin, trimmed of all shakespeare's villains.
yet somehow, as i pray to prosper thee,
how neatly spreads his claws,
and dewdrops pearl the evening's breast;
yet it isn't down.
am i supposed to walk the fields of gazing grain--
we come between him and scales underneath,
mouth like a harp.

( Would you like some more? What, are you crazy? )

Ah, finally got all that out of my system. Back to your regularly scheduled LiveJournal!

Poem of the moment

A real one this time, from Rainer Maria Rilke.

How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing--
each stone, blossom, child--
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves.
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our own heaviness
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.