In Luve with Rabbie Burns

Yesterday morning we discussed the great Scottish Plough-Poet, Robert Burns, in my Romantic Brit Lit course. We watched many great Scottish YouTube uploads of Scotland moor images with Dougie Maclean or Michael Marra singing Burns' greatest hits of folk songs. The highland Scottish blood in my veins flowed quickly and sharply when we listened to "Robert Bruce's March to Bannockburn"--I felt my teeth turn sharper, my ears more keen, my eyes more piercing, my hair more red, my biceps and thighs more thick and muscular-like.......I felt like I could jump through a window and rush at the woods even as the Rexburg sky grew colder, darker, and more sinister. I felt like a Scottish werewolf, and I did not like feeling caged.

Long story short, I've been thinking in a Scottish accent ever since (I can't speak it, but even as I'm typing these words, I'm hearing them in as close to a Scottish lilt as my imagination can create), and I've decided to spend the month of August this year in the British Isles, giving a good half of that time to bouncing around the Scottish Highlands.

I've been doing the research all morning and August seems a fine time if I can book a place to stay a few nights in Edinburgh well enough ahead that I don't find myself homeless smack in the middle of the Edinburgh Festival. I'm excited to get lost in the crowds there, and then get lost in the highland moors and get literally eaten alive by midges. I hope it rains banshees and that I only have a few select days of perfect memorable sunny green weather. I want to spend a whole day picnicking at Loch Ness, watching the lake.

I know I've posted Europe trip plans before, but this one is legit. I have a month break between July and September and I plan to use it. Zufelt, can I sleep on your floor a couple of nights in August? I will pay you more than peanuts for the hospitality.

To my Great, Great, Great Grandfather, Archibald Gardner:

I'm going to visit the land of our blood. I'm going to find the castle where your father was wrongfully imprisoned, and I'm going to leave white flowers there out of respect and humility. I'm going to walk the roads you might have walked and stare off into the same rough hills and woods you might have wandered through as you prayed to know if Joseph were a true and living prophet, and if this strange book warranted leaving your country to pursue the Western wilds of America and take on six or seven more wives.

You never returned to your home country, but perished instead after a long, hardy life of running a mill in northern Utah and hiding from the law. I am going to be listening for your ghost winds when I walk along the shores of different lochs and toe the ground looking for treasures around the ruins of old stone walls, old churches, old schoolyards. I hope your spirit walks through mine and that as I sleep on your native soil, I will dream what you dreamt and wake with your thoughts on the edges of my own.

To my ancestors on the MacGilliland side of my genes:

I promise I will do some sort of research on you all before I embark so the Gardner side of me doesn't take up all of my spirit. If you all had been Mormon, maybe you would have made better records of yourselves. Or rather, if you had been Mormon pioneers, maybe I would have been required to tell stories about your lives every year for Pioneer Day during Primary, but as it is, nobody shoved your livelihoods down my throats and I just don't know a plumb thing about you except that one of you hooked up with a Cherokee Indian somewhere down the line.

The least you MacGillilands can do is lead me to your graves or records or something when I'm in your own country. Crazier miracles have happened in the name of genealogy, right? They're in the Ensign every other month.

I'll Be Your Candle on the Water

This blog post directly coincides with my severe procrastination disorder that is keeping my stack of freshman personal essays from entering even my peripheral vision. I promised my students tomorrow. I gave them my word. And I'll do it, too. After I post about Pete's Dragon on my blog.

First, if you are my real friend, you will go to this link and listen to Marcos Valle and Patricia Alvi sing "Nao E Facil," a brilliantly poignant bossa nova version of "It's So Easy." This was the best internet find I've had in years. I've wasted twenty minutes of my office time listening to it on repeat and dancing. You are no longer my friend if you do not take two minutes out of your life and follow that link.

I didn't upload these movie images myself, some other great Pete's Dragon soulmate must have, somewhere out there in the cyberspace world. Aside from my crushes on Red Buttons as Hoagie and Mickey Rooney as Lampey, my heart will always belong with Jim Dale as Dr. Terminus. Money by the pound, indeed.

I have a feeling there will be more Pete posts in the future, but this should do for today. I think I can tackle more papers now, what with the sweet lilt of Bossa Nova dancing in my brainwaves.

He has the head of a camel. The neck of a crocodile. The ears of a cow. He's both a fish and mammal and I hope he'll never change...'cause it's not easy to share somebody's dream. It gets easy when you work as a team. You've got to tend it, fan it--that's what I plan to do.

Or....

Liiiiiiiiife is lollipops and rainbows, with the one you love. Someone you can always be with, argue and agree with.....climb the highest tree with.

What my life needs is a large cartoon dragon that only I and drunk people can see.

Last Picture: The Disney Ink and Paint Girls work on Eliot.

Tuggin' my sleeve, Chicago is.......

Chicago did not let me down. And yes, it did have all that jazz. I left on the plane with major apprehensions. I wasn't sure who would show or who I'd hang with or what exactly the panels at AWP are even like. I was scared, a bit. Ask my mom.

But that is the beauty of Friday the 13ths and holidays, especially when so many of them are packed into the same three-day weekend. It's like standing in the center of a ring of toadstools--something wicked or supernatural must happen, it's a general rule of the universe. Chicago now ranks as one of my top five cities in the nation, and last weekend ranks as one of the new best nostalgic string of moments that I'll be talking about until I finally quit this earth and move ahead. I'm pretty sure I'll still be talking about it after then, too.

So, some pictures. It was truly a Ferris Bueller Chicago experience. I went to three panels and that was it. I ditched out on everything and painted the town red with trusty old chums and brand new interests. Joe and I searched all the crannies of the Art Institute and saw mummies and Sue the T-Rex and other natural history paraphenalia (you ought to check out the room about "Our Moving Earth." There's no way you can be disappointed. At all. Really. Not disappointing. Anti-disappoint.) at the Field Museum and pressed our foreheads against the windows at the top of the Sears Tower. Sharon joined us for a Valentines' Day Massacre reenactment on Friday the 13th, and I even had a Charlie-Sheen/Jennifer-Grey moment with a charming new prospect and that's all the details you're going to get here. Except I wasn't wearing a lot of eye make-up and he didn't compare me to a whore.

Chicago from the Sears Tower:

Blade Runner as seen from the Sears Tower:

A large trough of appetizers (mushrooms, zucchini, mozzarella) that Joe and I ate about half of, triumphantly, disgustedly.

The deep dish stuffed Chicago-style pizza that did us in after the appetizers. We murdered about half of it, too. It was a superhuman effort, I don't care how little we had eaten that day up to that point.

On Friday the 13th, Joe, Sharon, and I caught a cab to Chicago's Oven Grinder, across the street from the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, when "Bugs" Moran and Al Capone's men had it out in a bloody Chicago bite of history. We saluted the ghosts that haunt that thar side street and enjoyed the best salad and pizza pot pies I think I'll ever eat. It was truly wicked and pagan.



Sharon under the Antiques sign *snicker*

This is the part where we expressed how much fun we were having in Chicago.

Later that night I was invited to a rollicking Friday the 13th game night at Grover's hotel room. I held my own. I would have won had we played cards or Mouse Trap.

This is David Grover. Sometimes he comments here. Everyone be nice to him. You can tell he is quality from the kickass Cosby sweater he is sporting.

This pic is courtesy of Joe. It's the large metallic awesome lima bean next to the ice skating rink. I believe it has magical properties and I visited it more than once during my time in Chicago.

Here it is up close.

The inside is a great concave tunnel of reflection and shimmering acid trip. It makes you walk around looking as idiotic as I do here.


On Valentines Day we walked through the many leg statues on the way to the Field Museum. The legs reminded me oddly of Pink Floyd's goosestepping hammers.....maybe?

Here's me in front of the stained glass Chagall at the Chicago Art Institute.

Oh right, that's Sloane and Bueller. Yeah, not me. The Chagalls, the Magrittes, Wood's "American Gothic"--none were on display at this time. Foiled again. Nothing has peeved me more since Jeff Koons' ceramic statue of Michael Jackson and his monkey, Bubbles, was in storage when I went to the SFMOMA. Fortunately I saw my fair share of Van Goghs, Toulouse-Latrecs, Monets, Manets, Winslow Homers, Hopper's "Nighthawks," Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon," lots of Frank Lloyd Wright chairs, and a truly inspiring shot of Peter Lorre that Joe pointed out for me.

I can't complain. I had a truly transcendent and surreal twenty minutes when I thought my calves were going to burst, I'd pumped them up with so much blood from walking around not going to any AWP panels, and I lay down on the floor of the old Chicago stock exchange room at the Art Institute, listening to one of my greatest old friends play the piano in a room of great acoustics, staring up at this:

I can't recreate it for you. Not here. There isn't the time or the space. It was a fantastic weekend. Dream Academy's "Please Let Me Get What I Want" didn't stop running through my head and neither did Frankie Sinatra. Life altering, literally. Cathartic. Irresponsible. Nostalgic. New.

Later on Valentine's Day I got to watch many Oscar-nominated animated shorts in a truly fabulous old-timey theater with some really swell kids. I ate even more pizza, laughed at even more jokes, and then I was escorted back to my hotel by a charming man with plenty of charming conversation and charming charms. Well done, Chicago. Well done.

Bonus ghost pictures:
"Sharon As Sloth Fratelli"

"Amy Sucked into a Brothers Quay Twitchy Short"

"Presidents Day Flashy Ghost avec Gilliland Chillun"

For Adrianne McBride

A friend of mine passed away in a car accident yesterday morning as she was leaving Provo. She was a friend of a friend, but we had made plans that would secure us as bosom buddies if I ever got around to visiting her in Utah. We were alike as far as how our general lives matched up--we had both dated the same man at one point (hence the friend of a friend), we were both graduated, working, single LDS women with great dreams of love and family and general life success. She was very kind to me--one of those people that smiled and laughed with me when I was feeling awkward and new in their circle of friends. Anyway, she really wanted these shoes, they'd been one of the most recent life goals she blogged about. So I guess this blog post is for you, Adrianne, to let you know I'm thinking about you and really praying that people walk around wearing these in the spirit kingdom, and not those awful silky white slippers with the tiny bows on the tops. Though, if people really are walking around in these for all eternity, I'm entrusting you to give me high heel lessons when I catch up to you. We'll miss you, and thanks again so much for your friendship, even after you were no longer obligated to be my friend. I hope you are feeling rested and happy wherever you are, and that people still tell really good jokes and you can still laugh really hard without getting into too much trouble.
We'll still get together someday, I promise.

For those who have found this blog by googling Adrianne's name, a memorial blog has been created by one of her best friends and you can link to this page here.

Top Five Reasons High Fidelity Brings Me Break-Up Catharsis

1: It sheds light on the all too fortunate reality that my former fellow and I had absolute minimum common interest in music and movies. Not quite true. Movies we bonded over a bit, but he never did pull me onto the Battlestar Galactica bandwagon and I still hate most of the cartoons on Adult Swim because they make me feel small, and not in that good humble sort of way. But music set us even further apart. Save a couple of Gary Jules tracks and Harry Chapin, our opposing taste in bands put an impatient strain on any long drives and road trips. The language and sex in his punk collections clammed me up and he complained that my music wasn't loud enough to cover the humming noise his tape deck makes, which irritated him. Though, he did like Elliott Smith and Jose Gonzalez even though he could never remember their names. He'd just say, "Oh, I like this," whenever one of their tracks came on. It became almost uncanny, how I came to count on that, "Oh, I like this." I made him a mix cd the week he first kissed me. I thought he was somebody totally different and made it all completely wrong for him.

2: High Fidelity brilliantly captures the subtle dishonesties and honesties in virtually every budding or breaking romance tale. I love when Cusack and Lisa Bonet talk all night and Cusack admits he is only acting the role he contrived as the sensitive, witty guy who has hints of melancholy beneath the surface of his recent split romance. Or the bridge scene when he gives the top five things he misses about Laura. Or when he cries at Laura crying at her dad's funeral. It's cathartic to me because I now feel less like a moron or a loon for talking to myself during my run through east Rigby on Tuesday. Telling a couple of shaggy-coated ponies on 4300 East all about the specifics of my recent heartbreak makes me more like John Cusack, who is awesome, thus making me also awesome and not crazy like I had originally pigeonholed myself.

3: The violence and the sarcasm. It might make me look like a jerk, but I love the scene when Tim Robbins confronts Cusack in the record store and Cusack fantasizes about what he'd like to do to the guy, which escalates into knocking out Robbin's teeth and slamming a cash register onto his face. I'm not saying I condone this kind of violence or that I'd ever put a comparable scene into any movie I'd ever shoot, I'm just also saying that it kind of felt good to feel an outlet for the conflicting and embarrassing emotions I have felt myself trying to bury all week. I like Cusack's anger. And Jack Black's anger makes me laugh, which feels good too.

4: Obviously the soundtrack is cathartic. I've dated enough guys who love that movie that almost every track reminds me of someone I've cried over since the film came out in 2000. While Rob Gordon is reliving his top five most humiliating breakups, I'm reliving my own top five. This can be cleansing. A smart man I know sent me the sentiment that breakups always involve your same heart falling onto the same hardwood floor, except each time your heart cracks into new patterns, different wounds. I agree. But I also think the fall can reopen old scars; I can hear echoes of past losses exhaling through the split seams I'd forgotten I'd only just sewn up the year or two or three before.

5: High Fidelity helps me fall in love with John Cusack all over again. When life takes away a lover, Hollywood provides fantasy characters for us to project all our desires for kissing and cuddling and long hand-holding walks along a pretty horizon. It hurts too badly to think back on the real-life experiences you just had because it only magnifies your inability to have that again with that same love, and it almost always gets followed up with an image of this said former lover doing all of those same things with somebody different--usually a skinny blonde with cute, clever fashion and perfect teeth. And a clean car. And no moodiness or clamming up moments. Just any perfect blonde skinny girl one can find almost anywhere along the Wasatch Front or in a singles' ward near you. But John Cusack, he'll always be there for me. I just slide in an old VHS of Say Anything and let the dreams begin. The trenchcoat, the boombox, the idea of being led around a pile of broken glass, that car in the rain. Or Better Off Dead, the mad scientist laugh in the cafeteria scene......I swoon! I swoon! And when I'm not swooning for Cusack in High Fidelity, I'm swooning for Jack Black. Black is witty, spazzy, quirky, and he makes me laugh. I would totally date him. Plus, what a voice. Seriously.

The only drawback for having High Fidelity act as a catharsis for my recent breakup is that Cusack's character ends up with Laura in the end after all. They get back together!? So I'm left feeling cleansed and jealous and almost angry that Cusack is making that perfect mixtape for the girl he wants to make happy for the rest of forever and I'm sitting on this lonely couch in this lonely house in this lonely town in the middle of nowhere, where I am an anachronism at my own school--too young to be treated like I belong with the faculty folk, too old to be let into any of the singles' institutes or social events........I'm lost in limbo, and it's cold outside.

I'm going to get a bowl of cookie dough ice cream out and watch Say Anything until someone responds to this post and then I'll read your comment and check "Be Social" off my list of appropriate human functions to accomplish on this day of February 6, 2009.

What I Learned in School Today

Today was tough. And refreshing. I had to teach my college freshmen a hard lesson. I'm quite the softie, as most of you can hopefully attest. However, my 75 freshmen students made me read over 200 pages of pure trash over the weekend. I was offended by their lack of proofreading, their absence of any original thoughts or genuine feelings, their dogmatic assertions that contained less than a lick of concrete evidence or proof to back up their Mormon clichés and catch phrases. 25 of the essays looked exactly the same. I wrote down on a 5X8 card lists of meaningless words that showed up on almost all the essays without any example or qualification accompanying them: good, bad, future, past, people, things, society, media, tools, gifts, habits, choices, goals, callings, responsibilities, passing time, modern day, blessings, trials.

I warned them I was harsh in my comments, but lenient in my grades. A B- this time would be a straight flunk next time. I told them how disappointed I was that their essays about being "leaders of this generation," about how "blessed" and "privileged" they were to be attending "God's school in the latter days," about how the "fulness of the everlasting Gospel" sets them apart from "the evil world"--these essays--were fluff. Garbage. Empty, aimless, lazy words.

They had spoken of themselves against "the world." They had spoken only to each other in smug, ethnocentric confidence. So the new rule is that their audience in my class must include people outside of our own faith. They can still share spiritual experiences, mission stories, faith-promoting anecdotes--but they must speak to the world. This shocked them. I talked about Chaim Potok and how I'm not Jewish but I spiritually connect with him and the traditions and beliefs he includes in his literature. One student yelled out Gandhi. I supported that. I would have thrown candy at her if I had had any.

I told them about the teenage girls I taught at the boarding school I came from--how many of them had been through abortions, about how they still get high when they go home for Christmas, and have sex, because they are addicted. I told how half of them had attempted suicide before and that their arms are raked with long red lines from where they cut and don't know how to stop wanting to cut. I accused my students of labeling girls like this as ignorant, evil, carnal, incapable of the spiritual epiphanies my freshmen students purportedly have just by breathing the air on this campus. Then I told them about how some of these 14, 15-year-old girls with scars on their wrists and straight Fs on their report cards had handed in essays to me that were more profound, more honest, more sincere, with stronger spiritual connections and energy than 75% of the essays I had received from these self-proclaimed chosen generation leaders.

Boy, you should have listened to me. I've never spoken so boldly to a college classroom before, not that I can remember, anyway. They were listening so hard. I loved them for that. I love them for their humility. We read three excellent examples of good essays I had received (there were only 10 A's out of the 75 students), and we looked at one of my student's rough draft and final draft and the impressive rethinking, reorganizing, and reviewing process he went through.

I just got an email from a girl whose paper I had commented harshly on. She had written in response to an Aldous Huxley article about Hitler and "herd poisoning." She discussed the Holocaust in a naive, shallow way--not because she is naive or shallow, just that it was the typical lazy freshman comp. essay. Her email is lengthy and sincere. It begins: "I have read your notes on my Essay many times over and yes you were harsh, in fact I have never had someone tell me that I had a lack of research, sight and empathy. It really did hurt, and yes I did cry, but I can never tell you how much your words, in class and on my paper, have changed what I think about writing and thinking in general." She goes on to talk about her proposed revisions, which involves a topic change. Her excitement to write a paper about something personal and important to her is evident in the length and energy of the remains of the email. It was not kissing up. It was not guilt-induced.

Instead of feeling like a conqueror, I feel weaker than ever. I asked this girl to stare herself down, look at her own crap, and admit her weaknesses. And she did it! And I feel like a selfish fool for sidestepping my own crap as often as I do. I know that by holding my students to these expectations, I am raising my own standard as an instructor and a writer. I feel like in today's victory, I am surrounded by a hundred before unseen idiotic and puny traits of myself. I guess this where I'm supposed to go out to a rock in the woods and pray. And yet, all the animal inside of me wants is a delicious sandwich from the Hogi Yogi drive-thru and to watch a crappy movie. Yeeeeeeeeargh...........and it's only Monday!

I better bring cookies to my classes on Wednesday. Cookies and love.

M

The university foreign film club was supposed to play Seven Samurai tonight, but they didn't get the copy of the movie down to Salt Lake to have it filtered to a PG rating in time (I know, I know, but at least they are showing foreign films here). Instead, we watched Fritz Lang's 1931 horror/comedy film, M. I was hooked from the opening scene with a group of small children chanting a grisly nursery rhyme (any movie that begins or ends with groups of cute small children doing something horribly creepy is bound to hit my list of favorite all-time movies--why is this?). M was one of the first talkie-movies (and way cooler than the movie-within-the-movie from Singin' in the Rain), and it's German, so we got to hear a lot of danke schoens and unts and achs.

But what really made the movie blog-worthy was Peter Lorre, who played the child abductor and murderer. I had noticed Lorre from watching Casablanca and wondered if he hadn't been the creepy bug-eyed fellow from those old Looney Tunes episodes (and weren't the super old and unethical Looney Tunes the best ones?). Peter Lorre in this film is horrifying--I'm hooked. If anyone is interested in having a Peter Lorre film festival with me, come to Idaho soon. I'll be having it the weekend after I have my Fritz Lang film festival. We can celebrate several nights of film noir....film noir nights.......naughty needed nights of numerous film noir. Peter Lorre, I'll see you in my nightmares. You and your bush baby eyes.

Quick Catharsis, General Update, Please Don't Judge Me Too Harshly For This Post

I have to finish my lesson plan on Alexander Pope tonight for my 9:00 class tomorrow. This is something I must do. I just got broken up with on the phone. It's okay, he didn't have a choice. That's the thing with long distance relationships. He didn't want to make me wait. He really is a very decent and kind man. I'm a bit heartbroken right now, kind of shaky. The thing is, really, that I'm by myself in my room and it's very, very cold outside and I guess you could say that I'm not sure how to have a decent catharsis to calm down my brain to help me focus on the work at hand.

I just read part of a book tonight about a Mormon pioneer woman who gives birth in the woods while she is looking for medicinal plants for her sick son. She had it way worse than me.

And I just saw this movie Terminal for the first time and Tom Hanks had it way worse than me.

I'm really trying not to make light of this. The truth is, I'm weeping like a dumb little kid right now. I've never been good at the breakup thing. I don't know how to let go. I feel like I've failed. Seriously, how long can a girl keep at this, you know? How many times do I have to go through this kind of pain before I find true love? I try not to be jealous of my young students and their pure, light loves and early marriages, their rings by spring. I'm really trying not to be jealous.

My heart is heavy, but I went to a talk once by Elder Holland when he came to a stake conference in Mesa, Arizona. He told us that Heavenly Father loves broken things. He said that from broken sky comes rain, from broken earth comes grain, and from broken grain comes bread. He says Heavenly Father just loves broken things and when we bring Him our broken hearts, he takes such good care of them on his altars, he is so tender with them and if we sit really patiently and let him work with our broken hearts, he sends us off with a stronger heart than the one we had before it broke.

Ah.........seriously, there is no worse feeling than this. It just echoes and mirrors all the broken places and scars from before. But it does feel a bit good to cry quite a bit. It feels cathartic, not depressing. I'm going to read Pope's poem about Eloisa and Abelard, they had it way worse than I do. Abelard got castrated for crying out loud and Eloisa became a nun.

If my ex-fella is reading this, thanks for letting me down easy. I've never had a phone breakup before, now I know that I hate them. I don't feel any kind of closure except that now I've posted it on the world wide web and maybe that helps me make it real. Darren is a good man, and he'll be great for some girl, somewhere.

And I am going to try to not feel like a failure and just breathe in the air real easy and watch for those little perfect moments, you know? When I was a missionary, I always saw butterflies when things got hard. Even then, I realized how cheesy that was. But they were heaven sent, I'm sure of it, and every time I felt low and a big black and purple butterfly did a quick circle around me and flew up to make me notice the sky, I sure felt damn good. I think all the butterflies in Rigby are dead or hibernating or flew south or whatever they do, but I'll be on the lookout for something tomorrow, and I'll let you guys know if I see anything really beautiful.

Sorry for this confessional post. I think I can finish my evening's work now.

Two mondo posts in one day.......I don't think I'll need to blog again for a week at least.

The Office Grand Tour

My office is starting to look legitimate, so I thought I'd post some pictures and give you all the grand tour. This way, those of you who still think I am sharing a custodial closet with four other one-year hires can be schooled in the ways of truth and reality. Let the rumors cease! (I kid....I know you all have better things to do than gossip about how much bigger my office is than yours.)

Okay, my first brag: Brother Samuelsauce is letting me borrow one of his watercolors for the year I am here. He let me yoink it from the halls of the English Department and I felt like Carmen Sandiego, running out of there with a huge framed artwork under my arm. The bandit mask I was wearing at the time didn't help, either. This photo doesn't do it justice. It's a columbine flower and it's beautiful. You can't see half the colors in it from this picture.

I know the sling looks stupid right there but there was a nail in the wall right there, and I had this sling, and anyway I'm just hanging it there until I find a better place. I'm proud of that sling. I refuse to drawer it. What if I need it?

I'm pleased that I can almost fill my bookshelves. I should also add that every time I go home, I'm bringing up more books. Also, I have posters coming. But I can't resist showing off that I have an actual office with actual books on actual bookshelves. Many thanks go out to Chandler and Sharon--Chan for helping me carry in my many books from my car to the my office in 10 degree below zero weather and for Sharon who stayed in my nice warm office categorizing the books and deciding who should sit by whom (she was appalled that I even thought to put Faulkner on the same shelf as Dickens).

Please note my nerdy cross-stitch in the upper left corner. You want a close-up? That's right. It's a cross-stitch about books. I made that. Are you going to judge me or are you going to pat me on the back? That's linen, man. I'm a crazy cross-stitcher. I have the seeds of a homemaker in me yet and don't anybody accuse me otherwise.

Here's a close-up of my favorite corner of my bookshelf. I'm quite proud of that antler, even though it's pretty puny compared to the antlers my wilderness therapy friends have found on the trail. The week I found it was a good week and I tied it to the top of my pack every day to carry it home with me. I was going to cut it up and make a knife handle out of it, but I'm sort of glad I never got around to doing that. The Korean bracelet was a birthday gift from Konrad a few years ago and I made that little bird dish at the primitive skills gathering in Boulder, Utah. I let it oxidize black and the small bits of coloring on its stomach and eyes are from minerals we gathered and crushed into paint. It isn't my best piece--I gave that one to my mom.

The spoons are from the trail. I made the large one from juniper and a small dark one from cottonwood bark. Price made me the red one from manzanita and he also made my remembrance pouch that you see hanging there. The arrowhead was a blanket trade I made with my fine friend and mentor, David Holladay. He had been working on it all day and offered it for a small clay pot I had made. I definitely got the better of the deal. The leather bracelet I made with a boys band once and the wooden girl was a gift from my mom. Let me also point your attention to my wicked cool copy of Lord of the Rings and my illustrated Hobbit.

I can't go anywhere without my Grover doll so he's relaxing up there on the top shelf next to my folders and my Yellow Submarine lunchbox (I have far cooler lunchboxes than that cheap hardly-retro Beatles box, but I like to leave that collection at home. I don't think people would take me seriously if I had a whole row of children's 1970s and 1980s lunchboxes filling up a shelf).

I'm going to do a lot more to this wall, but this is how it looks so far. I've clipped some articles about Anasazi and wilderness therapy programs in Utah--the debates surrounding wilderness therapy intrigue me to no end. I really could spend my life talking about the ideas, stories, and legends of the business. It's really pulled me into Native American lore and the writings of Whitman, Thoreau, Ed Abbey, et cet. I'm hoping if I fill a wall with inspiration I might be able to contribute my own writings to the conversations abounding in outdoor magazines and mental health journals about the camps. Or whatever. I don't know. I'm just a kid.

My view. It's basically an immortal gray sky, snowy ground, and a construction trailer. I'm not bashful at all about staring down construction workers walking around out there. I'm more than pleased that all the equipment I can see is Caterpillar equipment. I always feel like Grandpa Ted is somewhere up there admiring them with me. Oh, also, I'm getting blinds for my window soon (though chances are I'll never close them), but they say the blind guy is in Mexico for another week or so. They sent me an email that said just that. "The blind guy is in Mexico for another two weeks." I thought it was a riddle or something. Some riddle where the punchline goes, "Then he picked up the hammer and saw." Wasn't there a riddle from elementary school like that?

This tablecloth from Iran is a new installment. I had an Iranian student at Utah State a few years ago and he had brought it for me after going home for Spring break. I think it's beautiful. It probably doesn't mesh with everything else going on in my office, but hodge-podge has always been my general decorative theme, hasn't it? If only I could find my old Glen Campbell "Rhinestone Cowboy" blanket. That would look awesome stapled to the ceiling (I kid, Jen, I kid).

Here's my last close-up. A picture of the fam, a "BELIEVE" tin sign from my mom (I couldn't figure out if it is more a "Believe in Santa" or a "Believe in Christ" sign, but then I stared at it so long I just thought, yeah, BELIEVE! Just the vibe of believing....I really dig that), a water gourd that Matt Howard gave me, and a talking stick my good friend Melody made for me on Cherry Creek. I love that stick. She etched my trail name onto it--that seriously must have taken a whole Sunday layover. I used it in all my favorite fire circles, and it has passed through the hands of the finest youngwalkers and trailwalkers who fiddled with it while they spoke their hearts. It has magical properties to me, laugh if you will. I say it straightfaced.

Oh, and right, my desk. Here it is. It's a mess. The screensaver came with the PC....I haven't figured out how to change it and I haven't decided what I'd want to change it to anyway. Every once in a while a unicorn picture and a dolphin picture shows up on it and that makes me giggle every time. Another unicorn is found on my pencil box--on the other side it says "EMILY IS BOSS" in pink paint. One of my favorite New Haven girls made it for me. She had been hard to win over at first, and I cherish that unicorn pencil box. I also found that pack of invisible cards in a box I rummaged through at home. It has some nostalgic properties, too, and I like to mess with them when I am waiting ten minutes nervously before class (I never get nervous in class, just in the ten minutes before).

Well, hey, thanks for visiting my office. It feels cozier now that I've had old friends visit.

Clear Moon Full Night and her Vision Quest to the Past, Wintertime

I haven't unpacked my camera to take any pictures of New Old Rexburg but I'll post this one of Wind in His Hair because I just saw Dances with Wolves for the first time and enjoyed the spiritedness and hooting/hollering of Wind in His Hair. I'd like to make him my role model as I attempt to recreate myself in these northern deserts. In other words, if any of you roll into town, I'll be the one up on the cliffsides in my buckskins and war paint, shaking my weapon of choice and screaming down at you between hoots and yelps, "I am Clear Moon Full Night! Do you see that I am your friend?! Can you see that I will always be your friend?!" Then we will eat buffalo heart together after a great hunt. (Remind me to blog later about all the parts that bug me in Dances with Wolves, bless Kevin Costner's heart.)

Yeah, I don't know. I feel like I should put something new up here but my life is still a scramble. I'm living in and out of suitcases, and I can find my car in the parking lot at night because I have a roll of toilet paper in a small orange snow shovel next to the dirty leather bag I made at camp lying on the speakers behind my back window. The three-day weekend should help me finalize myself in my new/old digs at Sharon's place. I am not as sorely nostalgic as I formerly feared. Oh, you ghosts are still there, I'm not discrediting you.

I found Jen and Trevor at Fongs and I haven't dared try Mill Hollow yet. Going down the road to American Manor gave me chills but it looks so different now my chills got confused and ended halfway down my spine. I see Serena in Sharon's living room and sometimes Joe joins me when I'm driving around Rigby just for the sake of driving around Rigby. Zufelt surprised me in the Taylor--remember when we always used to run into each other between classes there? I had my cloud bag at the time and you always complimented. Jade and Garmon met me in the foyer of the Smith--Jade was scoffing at the Scroll and marking it up in red pen and Garmon was wearing flared polyester pants and a vintage pearlysnap. Jen's ghost came with me to the pink-tiled bathrooms on the 2nd floor of the Smith because it still smells like spices and Bath and Body Works and I still don't know if that's because of some unseen automatic air freshener or if it is because the air is diffused with the aroma of dozens of perfumed and lotioned LDS girls who charge the bathrooms each hour on the hour.

Three of my classes (and my office) are in the Smith and I have one class at the Clark (2nd floor with the culinary arts...it smells so good up there...torture). Since I dress in business-garb and thick churchy stockings, no one has mistaken me for a student. It is strange. I remember walking the halls of the Smith in complete intimidation of all the older boys and pretty girls and now I feel like I'm visiting my old Jr. High. The tall cocky good-looking fellows treat me like their grandma and it feels natural to me, too. I thought this would depress me, but I'm actually quite empowered by the feeling. I feel like.............Professor McGonagall. Oh man, that would be so sweet if I could turn into a cat.

Old maid. Some of them wonder if I am one. They haven't asked me but I sense it the same way you can tell if your puppy peed in the house before you see where. There's a couple more of us old maids in the Smith and one of them approached me and asked if I was okay. I said, yes, I love my students! And she pulled me aside further and said when she first came to teach here she had become depressed and that if that happens to me, I should come talk and relate with her. It wasn't weird or horrible at all that she did that. I'm not saying that. It's just.......I don't know. I keep thinking of the cartoon Old Maid from all those old card packs when we were kids, how it was so funny to point and giggle at the person who got stuck with her at the end of the game. I feel more like giggling than crying. Maybe that's because it's hard to feel like an old maid when you're still kissing hot men.

I like to think of myself more as the Queen of Spades in Hearts. All these guys with no guts are afraid of me and want me out of their hand as soon as possible. But the bold, sneaky, twinkle-eyed man who is the type to shoot the moon ("What is it you want, Mary? You want the moon?") is going to want to trap me and hold me with all the hearts in the game until everyone realizes what they've let happen and they stomp and jeer while we live happily on our pile of collected love and our substantial increase in game winnings. Okay, admittedly that was a lame analogy and I'm ready to end this post. I just wanted to nod my hat to you all and confirm that I am still alive and well in these gray, muted horizons of south-eastern Idaho.

Renovations: 2009

First and foremost, Happy New Years to you all. Allow me to gloat about my lavish and sexy (without the sex) New Years celebration from the high rollers' rooms on the top floor of the Rio's Ipanema Tower in Las Vegas. It was an adventurous few days with not a little drama--fortunately for me I was on the outer fringes of the more risque parts of the Gilliland 2009 Family Trip. I saw Chippendale dancers, I doubled my money at the Star Wars slots of Caesar's Palace, I bought a new hat, I ate at the restaurant on the top floor of the Paris and I ate ridiculously decadent room service breakfasts daily. I gained approximately 1,000 lbs.

The hotel rooms were larger than the house I grew up in. The windows took up the entire wall and the lights of Vegas would blaze in carnival glory, blocking out all but the sliver of a Cheshire Cat moon and one lone star dangling like an earring beneath it. We didn't go out on New Year's Eve but watched from above. I'm pleased to say that on that night between the years 2008 and 2009, I, at 26-years-young, received my very first New Year's kiss.

I know this picture is heinous--apologies to D.E. for posting his early morn mug on the world wide web. It's all I've got. I wish I could aptly describe the sheer girth of these hotel rooms. This picture was taken in the banquet hall. There was also a living room, a bar, two bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a strange little bench at the end of a hallway covered in art. The baths were like hot tubs. And there were no doors anywhere--you had to warn people when you were getting naked so they could avoid the vantage points that included the open shower in their periphery. I felt like Gatsby's Daisy. "Even the books are real!" And they were! We had an antique Treasure Island and a first edition Anne of Green Gables hidden on different shelves in the room. Note: The Rice Krispies on the table are for my vegan sister and her vegan friend. Even those mini-boxes were served on silver platters.

Unfortunately this next picture looks like senior Prom, only it looks like I'm a sophomore going with my teacher. A pregnant-looking sophomore. A super hot poet teacher. Darren and I bought a disposable camera (talk about retro) that cost a pretty penny at the Rio gift shop and as soon as we fill it up and develop it I'll see if there are any more worth adding. Developing pictures--this excites me as much as it would have five years ago.

I'm quite apprehensive about this upcoming year. I will be in Rexburg for the full of it. This is certain. This I have promised to do. Everything else is vague and misty. My fella will still live almost a full three hours away until May and then perhaps farther? And I still have no certain plans for 2010. 2010--what a frightening landmark for us 1980s babies. Our third decade. Those days of Square One and 3-2-1 Contact sure seem pretty far back there.

Ah, the past. I get so murked up in it. Thus, the renovations. I'm clearing out the full right side of this here blog. None of you will notice, I'm certain, but this is huge for my heart. I'm going through the first of probably many mid-life crises. I'm frightened of wasting my time (think the cobwebbed wedding cakes of the old dame in Great Expectations). And thus, in place of my dusty pictures, I am keeping that right side there to document what I do in 2009--the books I read, the goals I keep, etc. I need to start living in the NOW. Sucking up today's life marrow.

Okay, I can't get rid of ALL the pictures. I'll keep just the bare minimum. No more than ten.