Yesterday I was flying around in a plane by a thunderstorm. My favorite part about flying is not the bathrooms or the tray tables (although I am rather fond of both) it is the clouds I love shooting up through grey flat clouds and fluffy white clouds into a fantastic world that exists above them that most humans never saw until the last hundred years. And I love flying through clouds at night and watching the lightning dance around inside them. It's like an adventure in another world. I read a lot of fairy stories when I was little, things like Jack and the Beanstalk and that lovely Magic Faraway Tree series (all about little British children and creatures who often venture up the Faraway Tree and into the funny lands above the clouds), so I have this idea in my head about what's above the clouds and in the clouds and it's exciting. And for some reason flying through the clouds always reminds me of Miyazaki films. Yesterday we were flying next to this thunderstorm for a long time, trying to get around it. It looked magnificent, big dark sweeping clouds, like overhanging cliffs. Then we turned and the captain came over the intercom saying we were going in and it was going to be rough. We flew over white fluffy clouds first, one of them stood up like a pillar, reminding me of something from a greek myth, kind of a gatekeeper or a warning to sailors. Then we flew into this huge cloud tunnel, or cave rather. The dark bubbling clouds were below us and the dark, thick, smooth clouds were above us. It was a little bumpy, but for that view it was definately worth it.
I'm in Nebraska this week. I came here to see my brother graduate. I now have a new found appreciation for college. I'm even glad all of those Quest and M. Ed. people are at the Covenant graduations, anything to make it more impersonal and less emotional. Oh dear, I had forgotten about high school graduations. The only one I had even been to was my own. People kept crying. I didn't know what to do. And it kept reminding me that my own high school experience, which I was sad to leave at the time, was so silly that I don't like to remember it anymore. Now, my brother had been at the same school all four years, and it was a much better school than the one I graduated from, but still . . . all those crying people . . . Well, they made me nervous. Now my brother will come to Covenant and learn to be hard and callous like me.
Nebraska is really quite pretty at this time of year. This is spring. It lasts about three weeks. But the corn fields are just turning green with the little six-inch corn stalks and the cotton wood trees are blowing white fluff everywhere and things are green and very agricultural looking. It's just like Country magazine. I'm enjoying my time here, but I am looking forward to getting back to my lovely green mountains soon.
"I wonder why men get serious at all. They have this delicate, long thing hanging outside their bodies which goes up and down by its own will. If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself."
--Yoko Ono
My brain is too tired to do anything but contemplate the strange messages on the inside of Dove chocolate wrappers and yet I still have two more exams to take. I love one thing about finals week, though, I get candy from all over the place, student senate, the library, roommates cleaning out their drawers. Despite not being able to think I've finally gotten around to looking into graduate schools this week. Well, I've looked before, but then I decided it'd be nice to go overseas, get out of this country. So this week I've been looking at such places as the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College in Dublin. It gives me some motivation to study for these blasted exams. I finished French this morning and I am so happy never again to have to go to class at seven forty-five in the morning and face Professor Neiles demanding personal information from me in French. Now I am going to go gleefully take my accents and dialects final which involves reciting Robert Louis Stevenson's poem "My Shadow" in eight different accents in one go. Yes, I like that class. And I found a four-leaf clover today for the first time. It's good timing.
I took a fiction class this semester. One would think that all that writing would make me want to get ideas out onto my blog. For some reason, though, I haven't felt the need to share ideas with this covblogs community. I got very fed up halfway through the semester and I just haven't really visited covblogs since. But now it is almost summer, a time of new beginnings, and I feel happy because I finished my astronomy exam. I took such interesting classes this semester, Linguistics, Accents and Dialects, Fiction, Astronomy. And I actually wrote a story, a whole one, with an ending and everything. So after a semester of trying to hide from community I decided to come back and get my name back up on the covblogs . . . thing. And now I'm going to read Dune.