Some very dear friends got engaged a few months ago and, while the wedding wont be until next August, they’ve asked me to help design their Save-the-Date card and wedding invitations.  We have a mutual friend who does letterpress so she’ll do the actual printing.  I’ve got loads of time to work on this (the bride has to finish her PhD and it’s over a year away still) but I got too excited.  She’s suggested something with Legos in it…

Thoughts on this first design?

By the way, these Lego drawings are actually from the original patent applications.  Just the sort of nerdy touch that gets me downright giddy.

“Confetti, Balloons” from Amy_b’s Flickr stream.  Licensed via the Creative Commons.

Burning the Old Year
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995.  Available online via the Poetry Foundation.

All of a sudden, my thesis is about 95% behind me.  As of about 11 AM this morning all I have yet to do is proofread, print, and submit to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  My goodness, it feels good and completly overwhelming.

I’ve put the PowerPoint presentation up above and promise I’ll share the full text once I’m done with it/edited it one last time.  Then I am going to make yogurt, tidy up our apartment, and enjoy the late spring/early summer.

To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the First Pickup of the New Year
by Philip Appleman

(the way bed is in winter, like an aproned lap,
like furry mittens,
like childhood crouching under tables)
The Ninth Day of Xmas, in the morning black
outside our window: clattering cans, the whir
of a hopper, shouts, a whistle, move on …
I see them in my warm imagination
the way I’ll see them later in the cold,
heaving the huge cans and running
(running!) to the next house on the street.

My vestiges of muscle stir
uneasily in their percale cocoon:
what moves those men out there, what
drives them running to the next house and the next?
Halfway back to dream, I speculate:
The Social Weal? “Let’s make good old
Bloomington a cleaner place
to live in—right, men? Hup, tha!”
Healthy Competition? “Come on, boys,
let’s burn up that route today and beat those dudes
on truck thirteen!”
Enlightened Self-Interest? “Another can,
another dollar—don’t slow down, Mac, I’m puttin’
three kids through Princeton?”
Or something else?
Terror?
A half hour later, dawn comes edging over
Clark Street: layers of color, laid out like
a flattened rainbow—red, then yellow, green,
and over that the black-and-blue of night
still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave
their silhouettes against the red, and through
the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk
of garbage truck, and stick-figures of men,
like windup toys, tossing little cans—
and running.

All day they’ll go like that, till dark again,
and all day, people fussing at their desks,
at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison
tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all
things that are Caesar’s.

O garbage men,
the New Year greets you like the Old;
after this first run you too may rest
in beds like great warm aproned laps
and know that people everywhere have faith:
putting from them all things of this world,
they confidently bide your second coming.

Philip Appleman, “To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the First Pickup of the New Year” from New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996. Copyright © 1996 by Phillip Appleman. via the Poetry Foundation’s website.

Although I have Feministing on my blogroll and consistently read Jezebel, I didn’t always quite self-define as a feminist.  I know, that is part of the problem and I need to get comfortable with what it means to self-identify as a Feminist and not be ashamed or whatever.  I know.  Thing is, recently I’ve started wearing that label loud and proud.

For a long time I felt like it was too tough to reconcile the part of me that makes my own granola and wants to have hippy babies in PDX if this whole grad-school thing doesn’t work out with the part of me that is super pro-choice, really into girl-power, and once supported her boyfriend for several months while he looked for a job (love you Jon).

Maybe it is the current political climate, maybe it is getting out of those liberal strong-holds of OR and CA, but suddenly I get it…  Although I wasn’t a Hillary Clinton supporter, I’m starting to understand why women who are just a smidge older than me felt obligated to vote for her.  I’m also starting to understand why people get their hackles up about Sarah Palin, media coverage, etc.

Wait, didn’t I just say that I wasn’t going to write about politics in this space?  Okay, I won’t.  This is just to say that my creative time today (er, my “me” time) was spent reading this month’s Bitch Magazine.  So, although I wasn’t actually producing anything today really, I did get inspired by women everywhere working for really amazing things.

I’m going to a Planned Parenthood conference this weekend and can’t wait!