Julia Rietmulder-Stone's blog | ramblings about poetry, politics, & Harrisburg
I’m off to Virginia Beach for the weekend to visit family and THE OCEAN. Mmm, the ocean.
I’ll miss Gene Hosey at Poetry Thursday as a result, but if you haven’t seen Gene I highly recommend going to hear him. I’ve heard him described as a lion, and I can’t come up with a better way to put it.
Anyway, peace out, stay cool, all that.
Have you ever been somewhere you probably shouldn’t be, then seen something you probably shouldn’t see, and then need to tell everyone about it?
Well, I hate to admit it, but tonight I just had to go and check out my ex-boyfriend’s blog, and I had to get all intrigued by the quote he’d recently posted. That let me to google Andrew Boyd, which eventually led to the discovery of Skeptical Mysticism.
“I am One with a God I do not believe in.â€
The thing about blogging is that the longer I go without posting, the more substantial I feel the post that breaks the silence has to be. But I think that I need to get over that feeling, because at this point, the pressure is already so great that I’m not sure I’ll ever have something meaningful enough to say again, and no one wants that. And if you do want that, you should just stop reading right now. So there.
Anyway, at first I was AFK because I accidentally acquired a job, and then I was all busy with finals, and then when finals were over my hours at the accidental job increased, and now Summer classes have started and I’m working and I just have nothing especially interesting to say.
But the hope is that now that I’ve broken the silence, I’ll feel able to post something less than monumental in the near future.
What are you doing this Sunday? That’s what I thought.
Instead of being bored silly, come to the Forum for the CircleFest blues concert and silent auction!
I happened to be in close proximity to the last rehearsal, featuring both student musicians from The Circle School and the very talented folks from the Blues Society, and WOW! The music was amazing, the energy was through the roof, and my excitement grew exponentially. They’ve got four blues bands lined up, including Nate Myers and the Aces, one of the hottest acts in town. It’s going be quite an afternoon.
To summarize, come to the Forum from 2-6 PM on Sunday, May 1st for:
* A great blues fest featuring top area bands (and how often can you do this in a smokefree environment?), and
* great deals on all kinds of things at the silent auction while supporting the only democratic school in PA.
You can order tickets here.
Just wanted to let everyone know that I’m featured with Julia Tilley at the next Poetry Brew. Here are the details:
7:30 PM Saturday
Mar 26th, 2005
at the Market St York
Sparky and Clarks
284 W Market St York PA
Come join us for an evening of Julias!
The front of my parents’ house is pretty much all glass. My apartment in Harrisburg had a big sliding glass door in the living room and two large windows in the bedroom. My rooms here at my grandmother’s house are in what used to be the attic and have only two tiny dormer windows each; those in my bedroom face complete darkness at night.
I just went downstairs and opened the front door to find that it was snowing. Not a lot — maybe a centimeter or two of accumulation — but I had no idea it was supposed to snow, and had no clue from my warm room that it had started. What a strange combination of disconnectedness, isolation, and safety that was.
After deciding that I thought Marty’s hat was impossibly cool, I started searching eBay for a pink fedora (Marty’s isn’t pink, but I wanted mine to be). There was one real match, but I, for some unknown reason, didn’t bid on it.
Now, just over a week later, I search for the same string — pink fedora — and there are 36 matches, all touting the pink fedora as the hottest hat of the season. Did my initial search set this off? Am I *that* cool???
Now I’m glad I didn’t bid on that first one (although it was pretty damn cool). I though having a pink fedora would make me unique. Apparently it would just make me extremely trendy.
I enjoyed this interview with Desmond Tutu, but am mostly posting it because I wanted to talk about Tutu’s appearance on The Daily Show a couple months ago. Unfortunately the clip on The Daily Show’s site doesn’t include my favorite part of the interview, but I think you can get the same feeling from what they do have.
Anyway, here’s the thing: I didn’t really know anything about Tutu before I saw him on TDS, but all of a sudden, here’s this child-like 70something archbishop on my TV, laughing hysterically at Jon Stewart one second, his eyes lighting up with delight in humanity the next second. I cried, saved the episode, and watch those three minutes whenever I need a quick pick-me-up.
I’m no great fan of organized religion, but if someone this full of love and light is Catholic, well, they can’t be all bad.
I still don’t know that much about him, so if he’s actually been mired in scandal that just isn’t mentioned in the Newsweek article, please, don’t tell me about it.
The universe works in mysterious ways. Sometimes you just have to let it take you.
I hope everyone’s New Year’s celebration was as good as mine; I hope we all have a year that is even better.
Last night Johanna and I went to see The Motorcycle Diaries at Midtown Cinema. The movie is based on the book of the same name by Che Guevara and Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary by Alberto Granado, chronicling their eight-month journey through Latin America in 1951-52. I wanted to see it because I’m always up for a good travel movie; I didn’t know anything about Che Guevara, and have always had disdain for anyone wearing a t-shirt with his face on it.
The movie, of course, idealizes him. There is no mention of the racism, homophobia, or anti-Semitism apparently present in his book. It barely mentions Guevara’s later life, and makes absolutely no value judgment about it. It does, however, show the seeds of his thinking. It captures some of Latin America’s troubling aspects without being heavyhanded, or trying to tell the viewer what to think.
But this would be an enjoyable movie even if Guevara had not gone on to change the world (for better or worse). The friendship between the two men is heartwarming. The scenery is stunning. The adventures are enviable but sometimes harrowing. The whole thing is done subtly enough that it feels like a glimpse into an important time in someone’s life, and you can take from it what you will.
I was reminded that, however deeply buried, at some point, there was a glimmer of good beneath the communist revolutions. I hate being reminded of that.
Which means The Motorcycle Diaries is probably worth seeing.