an end of the year post

In less than 50 words, here was my year:

• graduated from college
• started graduate school
• moved to PA
• began work at Starbucks
• dropped out of graduate school
• quit dating deanna
• wrote a lot
• read a lot
• painted some
• still a pacifist
• met some great people and made some new friends

Best books I read this year:

• Dandelion Wine
• For the Time Being
• An American Childhood
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
• Watership Down
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma
• Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community

Favorite Music Albums:

• Tennessee Pusher, Old Crow Medicine Show
• Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
• Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Assortment of Eggs, Andrew Bird
• A Ghost is Born, Wilco
• Drunkard’s Prayer, Over the Rhine

Most haunting quote of the year that I will take with me into 09:

Cry the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear.  Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire.  Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley.  For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

I hope two-thousand and nine is a year of:

• writing
• painting
• quiet

I’m definitely starting graduate school.  I graduate with my BA May 17th, and less than three weeks later I will begin working on my MA in Urban Studies.  I’m pretty darn excited, so excited its making concentrating on my current classes a bit more difficult.  Nothing to kill your motivation like being accepted into grad school, eh?   I’m so tempted to just throw in the towel, but I seem to be temperamentally incapable of quite rolling over and dying.  My first residency and classes will be June 4-11.  I’ll be taking the following:

1. Foundations for Arts in Transformation
2. Arts, Creativity, and Human Development
3. Arts and Spiritual Development
4. Arts in Education
5. Organization for Community Arts

I’m sure there will be lots of fuel there for future pontifications.

I’m really nor sure where I’m going to be working so if you know any place that is hiring English Majors, besides Wendy’s, then feel free to pass along some information.  I was listening to The Prairie Home Companion the other day and they told me that, “An English Major’s prize, is a job selling fries, or making lattes nice and hot…”  I’m afraid that might end up being my lot, at least for the next couple of years.  I do have an interview next week with Americorps for a possible literacy position in Pittsburgh.

On April 1, 2008 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr’s latest work, Armageddon in Retrospect, was published.  I received it in the mail on the 9th, and was done with it by the 12th.  I really do love old KVJ (not to be confused with KJV).  He really did respect Jesus, I’m a little disappointed he never really became a full, outright, follower of him.  Anyway, Armageddon is a series of short stories and essays about war and peace.  KVJ served during WW2, and even though he was not in combat for very long he saw some gruesome pictures of humanity.  His accounts of his German captivity in Dresden is haunting.  His depictions of Americans as just like their German enemies, as well as the Russians, helps remind us that we are no better than our enemies most of the time.  The allies firebombed Dresden into rubble.  Dresden that was a civilian city filled with hospitals, schools, the arts, and churches.  Over 100,000 lost their lives overnight, many of them women and children.  Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners spent weeks digging out bodies from the rubble.  One corpse he found was of a young boy with his dog still leashed to him.

Anyone who likes KVJ will like this book.  It is much more reserved than some of his other books.  It has an older feel to it.  Anyone interested in some creative arguments against war should pick it up too.  Fiction is capable of making the truth digestible, even if not desirable.

graduate school?

Alright, so in my last post I mentioned I was planning on joining a CPT delegation to Israel.  Those plans might be shifting just a touch.  I found out Friday morning that I’ve been accepted into graduate school at Eastern University.  I’d be working on a Master of Arts in Urban Studies, concentrating on Arts in Transformation.  It is a fascinating program, and a privilege to be accepted into it.  I’ll be deciding in the upcoming days/weeks whether or not to attend.  More updates to follow…