* Didn't quite get Heartthrob finished, which was sort of my low-level weekend goal. I have just her ears left to crochet, and then mane, tail, and embellishments to do.
I've decided to simplify her cutie mark down to one winged heart from the four on the pony figure. (And now I see the animated version from G1 just had several plain hearts. Some day I need to snoop around YouTube or Amazon Prime and see if any of the G1 episodes are available; now I'd kind of like to see them because (a) when they originally aired, I was a young teen trying to be sophisticated and I sneered at them and (b) several pony collectors have commented on how they were surprisingly dark and even violent (in a fairy-tale way) and apparently it got a pass because no one looked too closely at a "show for girls.")
* I've been reading a bit in "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner." I bought the book after seeing most of the movie that was based on one of the stories in it on TCM. It's interesting stories - told from a working-class perspective in immediate postwar Britain. (So far I've read "Noah's Ark," which is actually about a trip to the fair gone a bit wrong - the Noah's Ark of the title is actually a carousel with many different animals - and most of the titular story).
It's funny, I had heard the title (and puns on it - "The loneliness of the long-distance grader" is one I remember) but had never known exactly what it linked up to (fundamentally: a boy in what we would call Juvie (they call it Borstal) who gets tapped to run cross-country because the director of the school likes the idea of one of his "cases" beating the rich kids form the posh school, but the boy decides secretly he is going to "throw" the race to disappoint the director and because he disliked the idea of being a "prize pony." And it's interesting, from a cross-class perspective, Smith - the boy in question* contemplates how he sees power as something that makes people dead inside, and how he sees the law-abiding sorts as being less free than those who break the law, even if they're caught and sent to 'the clink.'
(* He is called something else - Colin, I think - in the movie)
He also thinks about how he feels like he's either the first man on earth or the last man on earth when he's out running, and decides that feeling like the last man on earth is too awful and sad, and so he prefers to envision himself as the first man on earth...which is an interesting thought and I wonder if it has as much to do with the idea of "future hope" as the "last man on earth" does with "everyone else back there is lying dead"
* I guess it was a pretty good year for bird's nests here, even if the cardinal one I could see was not successful (something attacked and killed the babies, maybe a crow?). But recently I've seen juvenile robins hanging around the birdbath (and it must be a recent nest as they still have speckled breasts) and there is a little mob of bluejays hanging around that definitely seem juvenile, and today I saw some scruffy looking young cardinals that didn't have adult color patterns yet, and I even saw a Carolina wren that looked and acted like one fresh out of the nest.
And I learned something that I had been bugged by for years.
I had a bird book when I was a kid, and it described the plumage of young birds as the "juvenal" form, and I always wondered - was that a misprint? Did the author not know how to spell "juvenile"?
And later on, in prep school, when we did some of the classic poets and I learned of the existence of Juvenal, I was further confused.
It's not a typo so much as it's a neologism. A birder (Dwight) back in the early 20th century wanted a different term for the first full coat of feathers, and so he used "juvenal." And so, a mystery I wondered about for years is solved (and once again, by looking it up on the Internet). (In Britain, they never used it, preferring - more sensibly, I think - to just use "juvenile" for subadult birds)
And yeah, I had bird books and stuff when I was a kid. For one thing, the family pattern was "Need to learn something? Find a book" and the other was that we were all kind of big nature geeks. (My mom once mentioned when my brother asked some questions about spiders, and she realized she didn't know the answer, she went out and bought a book on spiders so she could answer his questions. I know more about entomology - I think I got a broader training than she did in general ecology - but also I've taught myself a lot, especially about bees, because I'm interested).
* And today was the Wesley Center Board Meeting. Because we're a small campus, we have only a couple Christian groups on campus - there's a Baptist Student Ministry (which makes sense, given our geographic location) and Church of Christ, and there may be some other smaller groups that meet without a formal space. Most of the traditional mainline churches band together to help with Wesley though, so I am my congregation's representative on the board.
Well, I'm now also board secretary. I don't mind that - it allows me to dodge what are for me "scarier" jobs (e.g., being involved with fund-raising or being the treasurer where you're responsible for reporting where they money has gone and filling out the paperwork for what is CALLED an annual audit but what is really an accounting so you WON'T be audited and maybe lose funding). And honestly, I'm probably well-suited to that kind of work: I have the skill of being able to write and listen at the same time, and I can take good and copious notes, and then boil them down into a set of minutes. (One of the secrets is to type the minutes within a day or two of the meeting before memory fades - though I suppose the fact that I have a good memory also helps with my minute-taking skill).
And like I said: people seem to be happy to have me take on the task, and it allows me to negotiate my way out of things that would be scarier or more time-consuming to me. I like being a group secretary because of the "executive" jobs, it is (a) the most behind-the-scenes one - so, good for introverts and (b) you have almost no power so you don't have to worry about "am I using my power in the way that's best for the group?" You just have to be good at taking notes and quick about typing up the minutes and distributing them.
I honestly prefer doing service work that's behind-the-scenes and low-power; it seems to suit my personality better than any other position.
No comments:
Post a Comment