Hallways - Hallways

Sora was mad at Tumblr being down, too.

While I was rummaging under my bed, I found my old writing journal from the third grade. The teacher would give us prompts, and we would write a sentence or two on the topic. For the topic CELEBRATION!, I wrote:

"A good day to celebrate would be 1) my birthday, 2) the day Mt. St. Helens blew up."

Apparently no one told tiny-me that Mt. St. Helens actually killed some people after it awesomely and excitingly blew up.

Old Home Town, by Rose Wilder Lane

It was a fortunate coincidence that I picked this up in the middle of my L.M. Montgomery read-through, because this book is essentially Chronicles of Avonlea without the rose-colored glasses. It's been critically compared to Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, but I love it a lot more than Winesburg (which I liked) because I'm enchanted by Lane's voice. It feels very contemporary, very modern, and she really doesn't pull her punches when it comes to describing people, situations, and the destructive effects of rigid morality.

The book is a series of stories about various people in a small rural town, told from the perspective of a teenage girl named Ernestine. It's not hard to read Ernestine as Lane herself, since Ernestine follows essentially the same life path as Lane. It's also not hard to see the harsh, temperamental, but ethically sound mother as Laura Ingalls Wilder herself. She's not sentimental, not sweetly loving, and not even very nice, but she recognizes injustice and fights against it within the limited framework offered women of the time period. While Ernestine is constantly rebelling against her mother, she also admires her for taking principled stances against the vindictive gossips who treasure the letter of the law over the spirit.

When I read Lane's biography, I couldn't understand why she treasured the libertarian ideal of a man's absolute freedom, when it meant that his wife and children were left to prosper or perish based on his actions. But it's clear here that she knew too well how precarious a woman's place in the world is. I guess my next step is to read her more philosophical non-fiction works to see how she reconciled the two.

Before Darren Criss was the Handsomest Boy Alive on Glee, he was the Handsomest Wizard Alive in A Very Potter Musical. Seriously, every time I say "oh I'll just watch the first ten minutes of this," I end up watching the whole three hours. It's that amazing.

It's midnight and I have a sore throat, so I'm watching Fruits Basket and eating leftover rotini out of a big ceramic serving dish because we haven't done dishes in a few days and we're out of bowls.

I feel at peace with the world.