Update in a land of flowers

Hello.  My dear friends, I want you to know that we live in a wonderful world.  But we should still seek the somewhere that lies over rainbow. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNHTCglQ_Wk

Somewhere over the rainbow
bluebirds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then oh why can't I?

This song has been floating around in my head for a while now.  It is beautiful and sad.  If only it were true of its own accord.  But as with all things, you have to go out there and make it true.  Good things may come to those who wait, but even the Christians realize that "GOD helps those who help themselves."

In other news, I asked him.  It was really simple, and I did not go for it with my whole heart because I knew the answer from the start.  I just asked him if he wanted to have a sexual relationship--in a few more carefully picked words than that.  No big huge story.  He might have been weirded out for a day or two.  But it seems that we are somewhat back to normal.

I feel like it had a bigger impact on me, though.  I didn't mean to--that happens a lot with love.  But I bit the smitten-train hard.  I was despondent for a good two days.  And then I remembered that high school is going to be lonely--no exceptions.  And I got over it.  I still wish that he could embrace his innate bisexual side (I know it's in there somewhere), but some things just cannot be.  As George Michael says, "I can't make you love me, if you don't."  I'm thinking George might have had the advantage of gender, though... Oh dramatic love and love-lost songs.

We have done a lot in English lately.  We have read Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Hamlet and Othello by Shakespeare, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell, How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad, about 20 short stories, and 47 poems over the past 3 months or so.  We are now balls-deep into Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.  We hope to continue on to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Demian by Hermann Hesse, and Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  I feel like that is a little bit of an overload with Calculus, Physics, biomedical research, and college applications thrown in the mix.  But whatever.  We HAVE done it.  And will most likely continue. 

Have you all been busy lately?  I feel like everybody has been busy lately.  Life is unfair in that aspect.  It does not give us enough time for leisure--or at least, the leisure time seems unsatisfactory.

Leisure is gone—gone where the spinning–wheels are gone, and the pack–horses, and the slow waggons, and the pedlars, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam–engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion–trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post–time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit–tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of weekday services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing; liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad– backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port–wine, not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure. He fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of the irresponsible, for had he not kept up his character by going to church on the Sunday afternoons?

Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him, and judge him by our modern standard. He never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus.

I want to be like Old Leisure, but at the same time, I am tainted with the NEW.  Beware New Leisure.