things that will not serve your social life:

--staying at home during the weekend to read while your friends go to euro dance parties

--mentioning to these dancing friends that the particular book taking up all your time is Little Women

--also, discussing colonoscopies with boys (maybe i’m joking about this, but probably not)

what concerns me about this list are the first two items. getting entirely too wrapped up in fiction, so that your own life nearly falls to the wayside.

i’m guessing the wayside isn’t a pleasant place. my folks used to warn me about it when i was getting bad grades in middle school.

any big way, this is what happened to me this week. i started reading the book Little Women, at school (afte a dear friend reccommended it) and i couldn’t put it down. not for coffee. not for dancing(like i said). not even for dancing with coffee--which happens frequently at Starbucks when their yuppy drinks have a little kick.

but here’s the worst part.

somewhere around page 335, during the wee hours of Wednesday morning, in my art class, under the influence of a rainstorm, i did the thing that no avid and astute reader would even consider...or admit to.

i. skipped. ahead.

it’s just that one begins to get nervous, all twitchy like when an author starts using foreboding language and hinting to unhappy endings. sure enough, i decided i could not go on one sentence further without knowing whether or not main characters, endearing laurie and rebellious jo, got royally paired.

and what i found was tragic. they don't. and i'm not at all ashamed to tell ya that i nearly cried myself to sleep that night. after all the sky was crying and i wasn't about to be outdone.


sometimes a book is just a book until it provokes something real that lives inside you.


like the secret of sorrow: the realization that life is not always as it ought to be.



and life is not always as it ought to be.





cause everyone knows that laurie and jo should hold hands in the end.



p.s. miss Alcott, author of Little Women, was bombarded with hate mail after the release of this novel. people demanded that she write a sequel which caused this couple to end up together somehow. she refused. cause someone told her the secret.

Easter thoughts by John

My dear friend Elizabeth posted this poem. And my soul did an Amen.

Seven Stanzas at Easter
By John Updike


Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.