over the cliff

I had a mini scare the other day while I was talking with my Aunt Mindy over lunch. I was telling her about Katie’s scholarship, how she’s travelling the world studying Zoo Architecture because she’s a Watson Fellow (and a bit of an overachiever). I was listing the places she’s going and said ‘Indonesia’. Then I paused. Indonesia. Oh fuck.

So when I got home I looked up her website that is chronicling her adventure and Indonesia was NOT on the list. Thank god. Right now she should be in South Africa.

I just hope that she didn’t decide to go to Sri Lanka or Thailand for Christmas. She better have not.

And then there’s this other story of a couple who was SCUBA diving during the Tsunami. What I find incredibly amazing is not that they survived the Tsunami (though that is pretty amazing) but that they and their divemaster were able to stay together. They say they were ’sucked down’ and that they tried to inflate their BCs to get to the surface. I’m wondering if they were sucked down and were somehow pinned to the wreck itself. Oh well. William said that maybe we should talk about that in Open Water Classes. ‘How to survive a Tsunami’. I doubt there’s that much you can do other than hold onto something. At least you have a steady air supply.

Mindy and I were talking about diving rescue and I thought it’d be a neat idea to teach a Rescue Diver Theory course. There isn’t a good way to teach the practical aspect in NC. There’s Radio Island, so beach rescues aren’t much of a problem… it’s the boat rescue that’s difficult to practice. Anyway, the theory course would first do the standard Rescue Diver lectures, but would have the added benefit of me going into rants about the illogic of those lectures.

“If you come across an Unconcious diver and there is water in the mask, be sure to take the mask off the face because the pressure differential as you take the diver to the surface will force the water through the nose and the person will drown.” Whatever.

Then there’s the Nitrox diver dilemma. If you come across an unconcious diver with a Nitrox cylinder and there is pressure in the cylinder, chances are the diver has seized and passed out from Oxygen toxicity. Which means you have about a 15 minute window to get them to the surface.

Anyway, there are a lot of situations that can be discussed. And maybe the students would have some ideas about Tsunamis.

When I was a little girl we used to drive back and forth from New Orleans, LA and New Bern, NC a lot. That’s a long drive. And for a little kid, 16 hours in the back of a station wagon isn’t exactly the ideal way to spend the day. Eventually I would have the sequence of Jimmy Buffett songs memorized and I was forced to find other ways to entertain myself.

So I made up games with God.

“If I don’t see a telephone pole within the next 30 seconds, I won’t believe in you anymore.”

That’s the only condition I can remember making, but I’m sure there were more. If God exists, and she has a sense of humor, I imagine that when I arrive at the Pearly Gates it’ll be a maze of telephone poles.

Over the years we didn’t go to Church often. I used to fuss and scream about going. Not because of the hour and half long service, but because of Sunday school. I was painfully shy and didn’t like periodically being put in a classroom with a bunch of strangers. My brother and I did the choir thing, I was an acolyte, I went to Christmas Eve Mass with my grandmother a few years, and I went to an Episcopalian school.

The best thing I can say about religion is I’m baptized Catholic, confirmed Episcopalian, which makes me an Episcolic. If I convert to Judaism, I can be Episcolicewish. Say it, it’s fun.

I don’t even remember when I stopped believing in God. I do know that I never stopped hoping that she exists. I suppose I still cling to that hope because of my fascination with Catholicism. The rosaries, the cathedrals, the fact that they used to conduct services in Latin. I also adore old Episcopalian church music. Maginuncs, In Paradisums, Ave Marias, love them. My school’s choir went to England and we sang Evensongs in numerous places all around the country. St. Alban’s was my favorite. Barry Rose was the conductor, he was also the conductor at Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding. And he got so excited that he knocked over one of the lamps they have lining the pews for the choir.

I think I started writing this because I wanted to figure out how I became Agnostic. I suppose that’s the way. I ambled.

Faith just doesn’t do it for me anymore. Faith isn’t proof. It’s a delusion bolstered by other delusions. They work themselves into a barricade against reason and logic, trigger chemical reactions in the brain to make you see signs where there aren’t signs.

So I discount faith. What does that leave me? I’m not a scientist. I could’ve been one. I loved Physics and Chemistry. I actually also loved Math but I wasn’t very good at it in college. Actually that’s not true. When I actually worked at it, I was good. I was just too lazy to work at it. If it didn’t come easy, I didn’t want to mess with it.

So I have to rely on what other people say, use their proof. No one has proved God exists. No one has proved God doesn’t exist. Everything’s a theory.

I also don’t like coincidence. I love seeing signs, I love serendipity. To give up my hope in mysticism, that’d be awful. I won’t be a sheep in a pew, swallowing the words of someone who’s encouraging cannibalism (the blood and body of Christ? Ewww… and shouldn’t the son of God taste a bit better?) but I also won’t give up hope for something bigger than the universe.

If you believe in telephone poles clap your hands.

In the past week I have: redone the layout for Cuimhne including fleshing out the pages with links to favorite poems and stories, added a blog, added WikiCuimhne, and written 2 poems which have been submitted to Strange Horizons and Dreams and Nightmares. I feel strangely productive. I think it’s because Oliver hasn’t been online nor enough members of the DM to make a chat. Oh and William has been letting me use his new Vaio laptop. It’s purrrrrrrrrrrrrrtty.

Speaking of submissions though, I still haven’t heard from Dreams and Nightmares about 2 other poems… and Strange Horizons didn’t add new material this week! I cannot tell you how much this saddens me. Well, not that much but I was looking forward to reading a new spec fic poem.

In other news I have decided I want a digital camera. Every time I drive to Greenville I see this fabulous old tobacco barn that’s falling down. I want to take a picture of it, a dozen pictures of it. Along with all the other barns and houses that are falling down. They’re just… neat looking. Oh and it’d also be nice to have a digital camera for when we go to South Africa in May. I’ve been playing with William’s. A Panasonic something or other. He’s been practicing his up close and personal wildlife shots on the cat. I don’t think she’s enjoying it.

My brother is here for the next month. That means I can drag him around to go to movies I want to see. I’m excited.

Christmas was hard. My Aunt Rozanne gave my cousin Ellen and me a picture of us with Mema at Leah’s wedding. I stared at it for a few minutes and then looked up at Rozanne. We were both crying. Then we hugged. And I look awful in the picture. It really sucks when you gain weight. I barely even consider my body my own right now. It’s just this shell in which my old self is hidden. But enough about that.

We were supposed to get snow for Christmas. But we didn’t. I’m annoyed. It’s not Christmas without snow. It should either be snowing, or it should be 70 degrees outside. There is no inbetween.

I have filled out the online application for a non-degree student to ECU. As soon as I’m accepted, I can register for classes so I have something to do next semester. My applications for MFA programs are all filled out, my recommendation forms are all with my recommender people. The deadlines are February 1. Have I mentioned how much I really, really, really, really, REALLY want to go to UNC Wilmington? Or UNC Greensboro. Wilmington is the program I really like, but Greensboro is where OSC is and I can bug him every couple of months with short stories. Heeheehee. Not really. But I would like to be in NC. SIU Carbondale was recommended to me by Denise Duhamel, and I do have family in Carbondale… which would be great. But it’s so cooooooooold in Illinois. I don’t like cold. Then there’s VCU. IF Mary and Meredith are still living there, it’d be BEYOND fabulous to go there. Adrienne is still there, working at St. Catherine’s… ooooh… I could teach SCUBA Diving at St. C during Minimester. God… I just want to get in somewhere. Any of those schools would have fabulous advantages. MEPH. I don’t know which one I want to get into! How about all of them, and then I’ll go to the cheapest for my parents. Or flip coins, or something.

Speaking of coins… my father got my mother and me one of those 50,000,000 Lira coins… the gold ones with the diamond in the eye of the eagle. And he gave me my grandmother’s gold nugget bracelet. Which, according to him, would be about $500 worth of gold.

So I promptly put it back in the box, where it will stay except on special occasions.

Yay, I have a new blog. And I didn’t want to get overwhelmed with the idea of having to start all over again, so I simply imported all of my old blog entries from Livejournal to here. Woohoo. Currently they’re all marked public, that will change if Adam ever finds this place.

So no one tell him.

I imagine if I met Beethoven he would slap me. For continuing to play 'Moonlight Sonata' on a piano so painfully out of tune. I imagine now that if I were ever to play again on a real piano, one whose keys when pressed did not resemble shrieking cats, I would be woefully unprepared for hearing the true sound of the song that I would assume I was playing it incorrectly. I have been playing songs out of tune for so long that now I can even distinguish the gradiations of 'wrongess' for each note. There are chords in 'All I Ask of You' that would sound discordant even when played correctly, on an in tune piano, so now my mind is rankled with so much caucophony that I have come to enjoy it. Or perhaps it was my obsession with perfection that caused the fates to torment me so. When I was younger I would play games in which I would play certain pieces over and over again, starting from the beginning each time I faltered. If my piano could talk it would complain vigorously of the numerous times I would bang my fists on its keys in frustration. Perhaps I should have banged on my fists instead. For it was not the white nor black which tripped my fingertips into playing a sharp or a flat out of place, to reach for a note a half step too high, a full step too low. Now to mock me my piano grates against my nerves for even when I play each note precisely in order, it is sickeningly short of the perfect piece I long to hear.

Yet still I trudge to the bench time after time. Hoping that my memory of a piece will sail above the racket my hands produce. It never does, but I hope.