Month: September 2002

The Friday Five:

1. What is your biggest pet peeve? Why? Hypocrisy. I much prefer people who say what they mean, even if I disagree with them. I also get genuinely irritated by some spelling mistakes, like “ridiculous” or “its” instead of “it’s”. Silly, but there you go.

2. What irritating habits do you have? I either talk too much or not at all, which I’m sure can get on some people’s nerves. If I have any truly annoying habits, I’m unaware of them. Which doesn’t mean they’re not there, just that people have been kind enough not to point them out.

3. Have you tried to change the irritating habits or just let them be? I try to talk more, or less, depending on the situation. I can get nervous pretty easily, so it’s tough.

4. What grosses you out more than anything else? Why? I have written a song called “A Pocketful of Penis” and have performed in a sketch about a practicing necrophiliac. It takes a lot to gross me out.

5. What one thing can you never see yourself doing that other people do? Well, if I can’t see myself doing it, how do I know what it is?

From The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, which I finished reading this afternoon:

There are times…when we are in the midst of life — moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness — times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all its unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to its higher truth….

When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. And when we heard your songs, we knew that you too had found a language to name and preserve such moments of truth. When we heard your songs, we knew they were a call from God, to bring us here, to know you…

I am here to learn your poetry and perhaps to teach you ours.

I’m going to bed now. What a heartbreaking and impressive book. Peaceful dreams.