Empty Places

I’ve been mesmerized by birds lately.

Each day on my way home from work I sit at the same stoplight, a busy intersection near a train track. Lately, between 5:15 and 5:30, there have been hundreds of birds there. I have no idea where they all come from. I sit in my car, listening to the click click click of my turn signal, and stare at them. Small, dark colored birds, I don’t know what kind, flying in swarms, flitting back and forth and up and down and close together and far apart and back and forth again in a pulsating motion, suspended in mid-air not unlike schools of fish in the ocean. They dance in groups, directed by some invisible choreographer, rising and falling as if on cue. They seem to know exactly how to move in order to keep from running into any of the other eight hundred flapping dancers.

Because of the recent time change, the sun is already starting to set during my drive home. The shimmering disc floats just above the horizon, casting a warm glow on the clouds, turning them into puffs of strawberry cotton candy strewn across the sky. The telephone lines reflect the fall sun as bright orange strings where the birds gather to rest. For one brief moment they all clamor to balance on the phone lines. They squeeze in, fill in the gaps, chattering noisily like a crowd. I start to wonder what it’s like to be a bird. What do they do all day? Is their entire life comprised of dancing and resting on telephone wires? What did they do before telephone wires? What must it have been like to be out for a walk, and come across a tree, full of birds that were chirping and hopping from branch to branch, buzzing with life like a beehive? The verse comes to mind about God caring enough to keep every bird fed, and how much more important we are to God than birds. I wonder if He has named each and every one of them.

Then, at some unseen signal, in one swift rippling motion they all lift up, fly away, disperse, filling the sky with small dark dots. The golden lines are suddenly vacant. I am no longer thinking of them as wires, but as empty places were birds used to rest. I wonder if they will all return, if ten minutes from now someone else will be sitting at the light and notice the birds all sitting there anxiously waiting for takeoff.

But then the light turns green and the car in front of me moves. I forget about the birds and focus on the traffic. I drive away, my turn signal silencing itself, leaving the road behind me, an empty place were I used to rest.

Melissa McCarthy, Fashionista

Melissa McCarthy is awesome.


I've been a fan of hers since her days on Gilmore Girls, playing the affable Sooki alongside Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel. I once told someone I wanted to be Sooki and they responded with, "You tried out for a part on Gilmore Girls??" Um, no, crazy person, I just thought her character was awesome and wanted to be like her. She wears cool chef jackets and headbands, once tries to redecorate her house with deer heads and things to make it feel more "manly" when she starts living with Jackson, not to mention the awesome episode where they discover weed growing in one of Jackson's fields and refer to it with the code word "pickles" for the entire storyline. Fantastic.

It's been awesome seeing her continuing work on Mike & Molly and, of course, Bridesmaids, where she quickly became my favorite part of the film. I read that as inspiration for her character, she studied Guy Fieri and walked around set with sunglasses on the back of her head like him until they made her stop. That's hilarious. When my friend recently got married and we decided to recreate the movie poster, I called dibs on her character Megan and made jokes about puppies the entire weekend. It was perfect (and I can't wait to see the picture!).

So I came across this photo of her, and learned that she is in the process of designing her own plus-sized clothing line. How great is that? Here's her reasoning behind it:

“Trying to find stuff that’s still fashion-forward in my size is damn near impossible. It’s either for like a 98-year-old woman or a 14-year-old hooker, and there is nothing in the middle.”

Seeing as Melissa has worn some great fashions in her time, I'm pretty excited about this. She's one of the few actresses that does great work while happening to be plus-sized, rather than being the go-to "chubby" character, and I love that about her. We need more women in the media who are happy with their size rather than turning into Hollywood Barbie.

Some of Melissa's past fashions:

Main photo from here. Others from around the internet, including Just Jared and Exposay.

Best Thing: The Cat's Meow

I was searching for vintage fabric for a project I'm working on and came across this Etsy page dedicated to vintage eyewear. So fabulous! Put this on my Christmas list:

I would totally rock cat's eye frames. Just saying.

Sunrise

We're getting close to the time change, which means that it's getting darker and darker each week as I drive to work. On Mondays I commute from my parents' house to Columbus and have a nice hour of highway to listen to the radio and think.

Today was an especially beautiful morning. At 6:30 a.m. when I left it was cool, still, and a little overcast, with the sun just starting to peek over the horizon. As I traveled the back roads towards the highway I could see that the sunrise was bright red ("red sky in morning, sailors take warning") through the trees. I was hoping to get a good glimpse of it - it would have been a spectacular photograph - but no matter which way I turned it was behind something. Trees, houses, cornfields, they all blocked my view.

Once I got on the highway, which has an elevated vantage point of the valley my town is in, I could finally see the sunrise - but only in my left mirror. While it was gorgeous backwards and closer than it may appear, it wasn't the same as seeing it straight on. And despite how much I wanted to see it, I had to drive in the opposite direction.

As time passes the sun rises higher and I can see in my mirror that the sunrise is getting even more beautiful. By a quarter to seven it's gotten much lighter and I notice that some of the clouds I can see through my front windows are slightly pink. The clouds blush deeper and deeper as I drive, and by 7:10 when I reach the exit I use as a landmark to make sure I'm on time, almost all of them look like strawberry cotton candy. I felt like the sunrise had been chasing me, and finally had caught up to where I was and engulfed me so that everywhere I looked was sunrise. It was awesome.

I started thinking that this is how God works sometimes. We see Him in the distance, and think about how cool it would be to be near Him, but go our own direction anyway. We keep going the way we think we should go, and see Him in our rearview mirror - keeping an eye on where He is - but don't turn around. And the best part? Even when we don't turn around, He still follows us and envelops us right when we need it.

I had a Christian radio station playing, and one of them played the song "Light Up the Sky" by The Afters, which felt monumentally appropriate for my morning commute:

"You light, light, light up the sky
You light up the sky to show me
That You are with me

So I run straight to Your arms
You're the bright and morning Sun
To show Your love
There's nothing You won't do"

In the Eye of the Beholder

One of the many things I love about college is the constant flow of things to stimulate your mind. I'm in a class on Aesthetics right now, and it is making me think about things like what makes things beautiful, how do you define art, and what it means to be truly alive. We've been reading a lot of different essays, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hume to L'Engle (of A Wrinkle in Time fame). Needless to say these have brought up more questions than they have answered. Can you create a formula to define art? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or are there some who have better opinions than others? Are things only beautiful because we have decided they are beautiful or would they be beautiful if there was no one to look at them?

In Aesthetics last week our professor had us watch the movie My Dinner with Andre. It's a fascinatingly simple movie, with two men sitting down to dinner discussing what they've been doing with their lives since they last saw one another. They talk of how it sometimes feels as if they are living in a dreamworld, nothing more than zombies, in a world that is nothing more than a play. The question comes when Andre argues that there must be more. Wally, on the other hand, believes that the simple things are all you need. He is happy with an electric blanket and a cup of coffee in the morning, while Andre wants to dive into the world and find everything it has to offer. I suggest watching it, not because it has great cinematography (it doesn't) but because its lack of visual interest will force you to think.

"Comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility."

Andre says this at one point, and I think it's true. I have experienced it first hand. We all have. You get into the routing of something, and the next thing you know, three months have flown by and you have no idea where they have gone. You are so comfortable in your ways that nothing matters anymore. It's like the narrator at the beginning of Fight Club. I freaking love that movie. I'm getting ready to read the book, which I have been told is even better. But I digress. At the beginning of the film, Edward Norton's character has gotten to the point that he can't even sleep at night, he is so discontented. He tries to fill his life with Ikea furniture and support groups but even that doesn't seem to fill the void. He realizes that his life is passing him by and uses Tyler to try and fill it. To some extent each of us have a Tyler.

So I am hearing about beauty and love and art from all different directions right now. The speaker in Chapel on Monday spoke on "the presence and possibility of beauty in our lives" and how being close to Jesus and letting his beauty into our lives can transform us from ugly to beautiful. The Lecture Artist Series on campus included guest speaker Dr. Walter Brueggemann, who was here on Tuesday March 4th. The series this year is on Imagination and the Kingdom of God, and Dr. Brueggemann spoke about the fact that believing in Jesus takes a lot of imagination, among other things. Some other lines of his that I wrote down:

"The kingdom of God is ultimate, and all else is penultimate."

"The real stuff by which we are human comes in elusive artistic form."

"It is hard for us to embrace God's kingdom because we like to think we can do better."

and finally, my favorite line,

"Our society does not need anymore educated conformists."

I love that. A big frustration of mine is conformity. I do not think it is worth it to pretend to be just like everyone else just to be liked by others. And I see that happening around me all the time, especially with girls here on our campus. It is sad how many of them come here not to get an education but find a husband. I actually know young women who are majoring in Family and Consumer Sciences just to learn how to be a wife and mother. That really bothers me. If you meet someone in college that you fall in love with and marry, that's all fine and well, but college is not a $20,ooo a year dating service. Personally, individuality is a big thing for me. I get really annoyed when a girl changes her entire character just to impress a guy. A friend of mine started dating a guy a few months ago and since then has changed her wardrobe, her sense of humor, her whole outlook on life. We, her friends, are frustrated because wanting the admiration of this one guy has completely changed her.

I don't know where I am going with all this, or what conformity has to do with beauty. Maybe nothing, maybe everything. It doesn't matter. I've rambled on long enough.