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lauranienna
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Name: Laura
Birthday: 7/11/1986
Gender: Female
Interests: very interested in mitochondria and farandolai, frolicking with my pet unicorn, sliding down the green stripes of rainbows, conversing with my fellow entwives, and thinking about how to get my wings back.
Expertise: being an eccentric tante; acting as a connoisseur of awkwardness; appealing trinity parking tickets; bubble-blowing
Occupation: Student
Industry: Editing
Message: message meEmail: email me
Yahoo:  lauranienna@yahoo.ca
Member Since:
5/12/2005
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| So the snow-in definately made the Van Dyke's pull out the Dick Van Dyke Show tonight: 
If any of my readers have not yet discovered the giddy delights of these pre-colour episodes, do let me convince you to have a look. From the man who not only brought us Bert dancing with the penguins but also the immortal bathing-scene from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Dick Van Dyke Show achieves some pretty classic moments of pure gold. 
His wife, played by Mary Tyler Moore, was ironically enough named Laura. You see the connection? Basically this show was made for me. #47 on my to-do list is to supplant Dick as the top result for a google search on "Van Dyke." You may well ask whether I have delusions of grandeur - and I may well reply, well how interesting, someone diagnosed me with that just last week. Erm ... kidding? (but really, I'm guessing no one else's #47 is any more inspiring) When I google Laura-phobia, incidentally - clearly moving on from delusions of grandeur simply to delusions of disturbia - I find this: | _______________ | | "lauraphobia is the irrational fear of cheese and milk, often covered up by victims as lactose intolerance. Lauraphobia is a very hard to trace illness as few people have it. If someone with lauraphobia says they are allegic to cheese or milk they are lying and should be shouted at or excluded from the group, untill such time that they have recovered and realize cheese isn't scary. A conversation with a lauraphobic might go like this:
lauraphobic: I can't have this, I can't eat cheese
normal person: why not?
lauraphobic: b/c I'm allergic to it.
normal person: you've got lauraphobia you freak!
[at this point rational conversation with the victim is unatainable as they refuse to admit their fear of cheese and milk.]
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I'm reading a lot of Gothic Literature over break for my upcoming - yes - Gothic Literature course. What this does to my psyche must solicit your understanding for the above. I'm enjoying it, though I keep struggling to suppress this thought: that, after all, the collective "Carolyn Keene" is probably a better writer than Ann Radcliffe and the other eighteenth century pulp fiction authoresses. I'm pretty sure some of those Nancy Drew plots were a lot cleverer than some of these, anyways. Maybe I have a future in producing serialized detective fiction paperbacks - that might get me ahead of Dick. Taking suggestions for pseudomons now - seriously :) | | |
| Today is CS Lewis' 45th Death-Day - in honour of that, some quotations I think. These are each from Early-Lewis, the Lewis many of us often don't read as much as Later-Lewis, but who nevertheless had some pretty insightful things to say too, as you can clearly see below:
_________________ "I find this cold weather desperately trying to the bladder" [the p.s. to a letter, 1931]
_________________ "The accounts of the universe are probably very well kept: everything finds its place in the long run" [1930]
_________________ ". . . Then you are good enough to ask me why I don't kill myself. Because - as I have said to you before - in spite of occasional fits of depression I am very well pleased with life and have a very happy time on the whole" [letter to friend Arthur 1916]
_________________ "There is no doubt, ami, that the Irish are the only people: with all their faults I would not gladly live or die among other folk" [ibid.]
_________________ | | |
| I'm working on a few papers at the moment, several of which include different author's perspectives on/approaches to death. (yes, I have a cheerful life :) George MacDonald in particular is very well-known for being absorbed with both suffering and death, what Lewis called "good death." In one of his loveliest fairy tales, "The Golden Key," he describes it like so: "You have tasted of death now," said the Old Man. "Is it good?"
"It is good," said Mossy. "It is better than life."
"No," said the Old Man: "it is only more life." MacDonald wasn't stupid, or naive - he watched more than one of his own children die - but he held on remarkably firmly to this kind of optimism. It's always been one of the most unsettling things about his fiction for me, this often one-sided celebration of death. As Thomas Merton writes in the refrain to one of his poems, "And God did not make death." This is the tension between seeing death as a doorway, and/or as an enemy. I was thinking about this yeserday after reading through Bonhoeffer's Ethics, where he makes a distinction between "ultimate" and "penultimate" things - what I guess other people have called the difference between things in the realm of time and eternity, or immnence and transcendence, etc. Bonhoeffer's feeling is that though of course penultimate things don't matter as much as the ultimate from God's perspective, because we live in the realm of time rather than in eternity the penultimate has to take precedence sometimes, like when we encounter death. He gives the example that in order to comfort a friend griving for the loss of a loved-one, it is often innapropriate to invade the penultimate realm with the perspective of the ultimate - in other words, to by-pass the legitimate process of despair/lament/rage/pain of the grieving person. I think this gets at something pretty important, connected to the question of how we ought to live in true here-ness. Life is supposed to be a balance of perspectives - at one moment we might stand and look at human life from the perspective of eternity, at another moment from the "liberating confines" of time. I know we all intuitively know this, and do this, but what I at least have difficulty with is discerning when what response is most appropriate. | | |
| I've spent most of my Remembrance Day holiday musing on what memory means for us versus for the elves and looking nostalgically through old pictures. My favorites of summer might be:
the life-jacketed nephews at the lake, working on the group pose. Ohhh these little guys are something else. 
Carl (the middle-neffie above) with Cleo. They are best of friends, which makes Aunt Laura most happy. 
and coffees at crescent beach, during which often there were skies like this to talk beneath. 
When it rains in november - on holidays! - it's pretty hard not to be nostalgic for summer, isn't it? | | |
| All right, so I'm considering the possibility of creating a more permanent-like home in blogspot. Thought I'm loathe to be disloyal to xanga and not much bucked about the idea of moving over, not going to pretend otherwise ...
What I'm wondering is: how many of you are on blogspot? If you are, will you be friends with me there? | | |
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