Poem: The Spider

I found this poem while looking through some archived files from my old old computer. I wrote it back when I was in college at Sewanee.

photo illustration by S. King

The Spider

The other day I paused as I was walking down the hall;
I spied a tiny spider that was hanging from the wall.
Its silken thread shone slightly, its translucent body pale,
And it swung a little in the breeze I made when I exhaled.
I held my fingers out so that the spider hovered near.
It acquiesced to climb upon them without any fear.
From fingertip to fingertip, to knuckle, thumb, and nail
The spider spun its little web, and made my hand a veil.
I stood transfixed as I admired this fragile work of art,
This tapestry of gossamer of which I was a part,
When suddenly I felt the sting of brazen insect teeth;
I smashed my hand against the wall, the spider underneath.
It was a pity, but I feel no taint upon my virtue
For a thing of beauty is a joy until it tries to hurt you.

TBT: Odes to the Dallas Airport

Created from a photo by Grant Wickes

Flipping through an old notebook to find some songs I wrote long ago, I came across a page of doggerel titled "Odes to the Dallas Airport (or should I say 'odors'?)". These would have been written some time in 1991, probably during my first trip to Sewanee as a prospective student.

Thankfully, DFW has improved a lot since then. But the memory of what it once was has been immortalized in verse.

I Will Wait

To the tune of "Let It Snow"
Oh, the bathrooms are quite disgusting
And the toilet seats are rusting
But since I've heard my plane is late
I will wait, I will wait, I will wait
The women are all smokin' ciggies
And have hairdos like Miss Piggy
They just changed my departure gate
I will wait, I will wait, I will wait

To Fly or Not to Fly

To fly or not to fly?
That is the question,
Whether 'tis nobler to stay in my seat,
Or to take precautions against the ladies' restroom,
And by holding my breath not smell anything;
To sit in a smoke-filled stall,
To pee,
To pee perchance to actually have to touch the toilet seat.
Ay, there's the rub.

Limericks

From gate 20A I'll depart

This gate's not for the faint at heart

The one place left to sit

Is covered with spit

And contains a malodorous fart

Flying is just as much fun

As being shot with a large gun

The seats are so tiny

They don't fit my hiney

I have to sit on just one bun

My First Blog

Nina Bargiel of The Slack Daily reposts her first-ever blog post, from 1997. Reading this made me wonder what I said in my first-ever blog post, so I dug into the superflippy.net archives to see.

It turns out that even though superflippy.net itself was created some time around 1997 or so I didn't create my first blog until 2001. When I updated the content on my original site, I just deleted whatever had been there before, so there was no time-based organization to it.

In 2001, I started a blog using the Blogger platform. It was called "Day by Day" and it was my own commentary on the Bible readings from Forward Day by Day. I kept that blog up until 2005. I never intended to quit, I just took a break and never got back to it. The format evolved from simple commentary to drawings with commentary.

You can see the list of archived Day by Day posts here. I don't think the first few are very interesting, but it gets a lot better in April 2002 when I decide to start adding drawings to my posts.

But it's not until May 2004, only a year before I stopped blogging, that I settled into the format that I think of as Day by Day's mainstay: a hand-drawn doodle coupled with a pithy reflection on the day's selected passages.

It's funny how I remember my first blog as years of nearly uninterrupted posts with the format perfect from the start. By looking back, I can see that there was a lot of trial and error, a lot of gaps and false starts.

I'm glad to discover it took me 3 years to develop that blog. It makes me wonder what Free Ideas could become next year or the year after. It makes me hopeful about the future.

Margin Doodles No. 25

This was written on the same page as last week's doodles:

I can't believe my handwriting ever looked this nice.

I wouldn't normally post that, but it's part of the context of the doodle on the next page:

Dig the jams & Espadrilles. Catch a wave, dude!

Yeah. OK, whatever.

A Tribute to Mrs. Grossman

I went to my stash of old notebooks to look for more margin doodles. I hit pay dirt with two notebooks from my freshman year of high school, but before I post any of the material inside the notebooks, I want to show you the covers. (Click to see full-size images.)

Like many girls in the 80's, I collected stickers. And no stickers were as highly prized as Mrs. Grossman's. Like any good sticker collector, I displayed my stickers in a photo album still on their backing. 

But by the time I reached high school, that fad was over. I decided it was OK to actually use my precious hoard for its intended purpose. So here's what I made with my favorite Mrs. Grossman stickers. Looking at these brings back all kinds of happy memories. (I'm sure I never thought I'd say that about my high school Latin and Geometry notebooks!)

Notes on Worship Music

While cleaning out the living room, I found an old notepad. It looks like I used the top page to take notes, probably at a seminar on using contemporary music in traditional liturgical churches that I went to about a decade or so ago. That was back when I lived in Columbia and we were first setting up a contemporary music group at St. John's.

The notes are sparse, but they contain some good information. I'm transcribing them here so that their ephemeral wisdom will live on.

Kierkegaard: in worship, God is the audience

liturgy = work of the people

Lewis Lyle: "A Theology of Music"  (rec'd book)

Aim for music that's God-centered, not self-centered

Leading worship, not giving a performance

Chicken Doodles

In the back of my old Pre-Calculus notebook, I found the mother lode. Here is an entire page of chicken doodles I drew for my little brother. Some of these made me, him, and our sister laugh until we couldn't breathe. Good times. (Click on the image to see it full size.)

And here's a bonus surfer chicken. The speech bubble coming out of his mouth isn't my handwriting; it seems one of my friends thought he looked more duck-like. And, really, it does make more sense for a duck to be surfing than a chicken, doesn't it?

The Guppy from Philadelphia

The last time I visited my parents, I went through a stack of my old notebooks from high school. I found all kinds of amusing and interesting doodles, poems, and ephemera, so I asked my mom to please mail the notebooks to me.

Some of the doodles will be appearing here in the future, but for Valentine's day I thought this poem (written in my pre-calculus notebook during my junior year at York) seemed appropriate. I am amused by the effort I obviously put into finding rhymes for "Philadelphia."

I was sitting with a gnome drinking tea from a cup
When this squirmy little brown thing came swimming up.
Said, “I’d like to have a drink with the elf and ya,
“I’m a guppy from Philadelphia!

“Now there’s something that you ought to know about me.
“I’m not at all romantic but I do love tea.
“If I drink all yours I’ll only blame myself, uh huh.”
Said the guppy from Philadelphia.

So he drank all our tea and he ate all our chicken.
This made the gnome mad and he started to kick him.
Then he started to beat him with an umbrella.
Poor guppy from Philadelphia!

Well, he knew he was beat so he slithered away
And we’ve all been more romantic since that day.
Each time I drink tea I think of that fella,
That guppy from Philadelphia.

Here's a nifty audio version I made (set to reggae loops via Magic Garage Band) so you can hear the tortured meter: The Guppy from Philadelphia

I'm guessing that this was probably written in the spring of 1990, long enough after my first serious boyfriend and I had broken up that I was again interested in finding romance. Here's more information about my inspiration for this weirdness: Agape, Eros, and Philia: Greek words for love.