Post.

Let's talk about letters. I love letters! I mean, who doesn't? Enjoyment-wise, they're right up there with puppies and gourmet chocolate. Or regular chocolate. I'm not that picky. Well, sometimes I am, but let's just go ahead and file that under "irrelevant" for now.

Opening a mailbox is like opening a wardrobe door. Most of the time, all you're going to find is the same old clothes that hang there everyday. Every once in a while, though, you find that you can step through that wardrobe, and magic comes flooding out.

Amid all the stiff, typed bills with their cellophane windows and the folded up junk mail addressed simply to "Resident," a small, white envelope with a humble, handwritten address is like a little whiff of Christmas.

Of course, that's just half the fun. I'm beginning to realize just how much I enjoy writing letters, too. I simply put my pen to paper and let go (metaphorically). It's the ultimate free write. Increasing my pleasure is the knowledge that in a few days, someone I care about will open their mailbox and find a surprise. I really love making people smile.

Like so many things, sending a letter is an act of faith. You seal it, stamp it, and send it off into the world, hoping it will make its journey safely, but never really knowing for sure until some kind of reply makes its own perilous way back across the globe, crossing continents and oceans to find you.

It's a pity email, texting, and social networking have driven good, old-fashioned correspondence to the brink of extinction. You get so much more of a sense of a person when you can hold their words in your hand and see the shape and slant of their letters and examine the weird spots where something on their table stained the paper.

Unlike the uniform font of electronics, with their flat, impersonal screens, letters convey the very vibrancy of life.

It's love in an envelope.

Listening to: Castle
Reading: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

Montage.

Egad! You blink, and suddenly a week's gone by with nary a post. Tsk, tsk, this will not do. My laxity now necessitates a highlight reel. We're actually going to have to back up past my last post. I meant to post twice last Sunday, but as you could probably tell, that didn't happen. My bad, y'all.

Friday the 16th: I went to IKEA for the first time, and my peepers were opened to the full meaning of the phrase "eyes like saucers." In the evening, Kylie the Magnificent came over, and we watched Easy A and wasted a lot of time on Etsy.

Saturday the 17th: I bought a laundry hamper and organized my dirty laundry. ASU lost to Illinois. The pain of this loss was soothed somewhat by the knowledge that our mascot could beat up their mascot. What the heck is an Illini?

Sunday: I went to church. I'm sure it was awesome.

Monday: Season premiere of Castle.

Tuesday: Sadly, one of my dad's motorcycles caught on fire as he was working on it in the driveway. I came home to what looked like the aftermath of a Vin Diesel movie. That's one way to freak a person out. Season premiere of Glee.

I'm sure Wednesday was awesome in its own special way.

Thursday: I finished the second Harry Potter book in Spanish.

Friday: I spent the afternoon at As You Wish with my most pulchritudinous Laura. Her post about it is here. Every time I work with glaze, I feel like I was born for it. I may stink at sculpting things, but I sure can spruce 'em up. This affords me no end of pleasure.

Saturday: Three loads of laundry and a victory for ma boys against USC. Bring it!

Sunday: A little girl I had never seen before in my life gave me a drawing in Sacrament Meeting. There were cake pops at family dinner.

Monday (today): I picked up my fired piece from As You Wish. Friendship dinner for FHE.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I just got my entry letter from Pottermore. I'm off to get sorted!

Listening to: "Don't Look Back" by She & Him

Reading: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters

Lufu.

I've taken a lot of linguistics courses over the past few semesters, and with every one, I fell in love and thought to myself, "I could dedicate my life to this." How could I have been so blind? I chose linguistics because Merriam and Webster had given me a taste of etymology, and I was hungry for more. This week we started discussing Old English in my history of English class.

As soon as I started reading the chapter in the textbook about the Anglo-Saxons and Northumbria and the Danelaw and Alfred the Great and Viking invasions, I fell in love all over again. It was like someone had struck a giant bell deep within my soul, and with each puissant knell, I could feel the echoes of history thrumming through my bones. The sounds and the cadence of their words just seem so familiar, like a song I heard once, long ago. I can almost feel these people, dead a thousand years or more, singing in my blood.

How could I have ever imagined specializing in anything else?

"[They] have bewitched me, body and soul."

Listening to: "Storm Warning" by Hunter Hayes
Reading: Harry Potter y la cámara secreta por J. K. Rowling

Dancing in the rain.

I had a wonderful weekend. How could it have been otherwise?

I got up early Friday morning to go to the temple with Celery. Terrible as it sounds, I don't think I'd been since I was about 15. I grew to dislike youth temple trips, and then I just didn't think about it or I was busy or I wasn't sure what to do. Life certainly has a way of sidetracking us, doesn't it? The subject of the temple has been coming up a lot lately, so I decided it was time for me to go back. Luckily for me, I asked the perfect friend to go with me. She goes every Friday. If I hadn't been with her, I never would've found the unobtrusive little door around the side that leads straight to the baptistry. It was beautiful to step out of the world for a spell. I didn't have any life-changing moments or flashes of revelation, but I felt...cleansed. All of my worry went away, and the world seemed bright and clean and peaceful.

I'd been stressing about a Latin test the night before. I'd decided that sleep was more important than studying, and after a morning at the temple, I knew I was right. What's a Latin test compared to a day made for going barefoot and a chance to sit by my favorite fountain in a flowy skirt and watch the sunlight play on the ripples?

To top off my delicious day, ASU beat Mizzou in overtime. It was tense and exciting and I loved every minute of it. I'm so glad that they finally put Brock Osweiler in as the starting quarterback. They should've done it last year. That boy is like Robin Hood with a football. His receivers don't even have to break stride. The ball just falls into their arms like a gift from heaven.

I decided yesterday was going to be a lazy day. On towards evening, a short rain/hail storm blew in. After it wandered off again, I scampered out to play in the gutters. You're never too old to frolic. I left the front door open as I went back to my letter writing, though I later switched to the back door after I slipped and fell in the entryway trying to look at the lightning. For some reason, my first thought after my brain stopped going, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" was, "Well, that's a surefire way to take the mickey out of a person." ...Whaaa? From what fiendish depths did my mind dredge that saying up?

Of course, not even wiping out in my own living room could dull my marvelous Saturday. I got Swedenmail. Nothing can ruin a day with Swedenmail. I'm convinced it can cure anything from a broken heart to the zombie virus.

I ended Saturday by staying up way, way too late to watch Beastly, which I impulsively bought when I went to buy salsa at Safeway. Hey, I'd just wiped out in the entryway. I deserved some kind of pick-me-up. I've only seen it twice, but it's already stolen my heart, and I don't think it has any intention of giving it back. It's the emotional equivalent of the brown sugar-iest of my brown sugar songs. I almost listed the title of said song, but I'm still holding out hope that some boy will like me so much that he'll take the time to figure it out on his own. I'm not about to just prance around passing out my kryptonite willy-nilly. And before this paragraph evokes any more déjà vu, I'm just going to go ahead and direct you to my original post about Beastly. All of the sentiments expressed therein still stand, only now they've been doubled. It was unquestionably money well-spent.



Listening to: "Fearless" by Taylor Swift
Reading: Harry Potter y la cámara secreta por J. K. Rowling

Discourse.

Every once in a while you meet a conversation that makes you feel like you're accomplishing something with your life. It may be about something completely inane*, like boys or flirting or the wisdom of eating partially-burnt chocolate chips (true story), but you walk away from it feeling like you've clarified one of life's great mysteries. Sure, something's bound to crop up in the future to make you question all of this new-found enlightenment, but just for a day or two you get it. You have a handle on life, and everything's gravy.

Ya feelin' me? Gravy.

*The relative inanity of such topics is completely subjective. Personally, I think they're all worth it in the way that a pint of Haagen Dazs sorbet is worth it. You can't argue with flavor like that.

Listening to: Gilmore Girls
Reading: Harry Potter y la cámara secreta por J. K. Rowling

Murphy's Law.

Yesterday, I accidentally put water on my cereal. It's been one of those weekends.

If you need me, I'll be in my room hiding under the covers.

Listening to: "Do You Believe In Magic" by The Lovin' Spoonful
Reading: Harry Potter y la cámara secreta por J. K. Rowling

Grizzly bears.

I'm fairly certain there was something I wanted to blog about the other day, but now I have no idea what it was. Oh, well.

Instead, I'm going to celebrate the little things that made me smile today.

First, they've been having a security guard watch the gate at the Institute parking structure this semester, presumably to prevent people from tailgating or borrowing access cards. She is one of the most cheerful people I've ever seen. Every morning, there she is with a big smile on her face, saying "good morning" and admonishing people to have a great day. She's living proof that smiles are contagious.

Secondly, we discussed prepositions in my grammar class. I'm such a sucker for prepositions (and three-piece suits, but that doesn't really have anything to do with anything). We talked about the other parts of speech, too, and in way more detail than most people care to fathom. When the professor asked us to write a sentence containing an adverb modifying an adverb, I cheekily put down, "Indiana Jones proceeded very cautiously." It made me giggle.

Next, I got to sit in the second floor window of the music building and read a cleverly written chapter on the Indo-European language family while munching on Chicken in a Bizkit.

That's what I was doing when Laura showed up with a cooler full of mason jars--mason jars filled with cake. Not just any cake, mind you. Rainbow cake. That girl is a marvel. After she got out of choir, there were four or five of us just sitting around eating magic out of a jar.

Latin was, well, Latin-y.

In my history of English class, we talked about nifty things like metathesis (when two sounds in a word switch places, like saying aks for ask) and cognates (words with a common ancestry). Sometimes I feel like I just get way too darn excited about odd things like sound change and parts of speech. I was fairly bouncing in my seat at times.

Thursdays are my longest days, but that was almost worth it to hear the startling boom of fireworks partway through ENG 414 that indicated the football team was running out onto the field for the first game of the season. Oh, how I do adore fireworks! And football. But mostly fireworks.

It was a mighty fine day, in my estimation.

Listening to: "You Give Love A Bad Name" by Bon Jovi
Reading: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain