Tale as Old as Time

So this might sound a little sappy or whatever, but oh well. Maybe it's not as sappy as I'm thinking, since I generally put an unnecessary amount of effort into avoiding being sappy. I suppose a bit of over-sentimentality (or "spoony-ness" to use Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day from yesterday) isn't so bad every once in a while, if that's what this is. Ordinary sentimentality definitely isn't a bad thing in moderation. Now I'll stop rambling and get to the point so I can get back to work on less enjoyable things.

As my readers know, Ben's sermon this week was about God's omnitemporality. This morning during the sermon, the song "Tale as Old as Time" from Beauty and the Beast popped into my head. I thought about the song for a second and scoffed at the idea that the story of Beauty and the Beast was a "tale as old as time." But upon further reflection, I realized that the general idea of the story was in fact older than time. It was outside of time, even. God has chosen to love something decidedly unlovely: humanity (as we read in Romans 5:8). When I continued to think, I made yet another connection (well, actually I remembered a passage from Orthodoxy): not only has God chosen to love an unlovely thing, but because he loves it he's decided to make it into something lovely (as we read in Philippians 1:6). I can't help but thank God for all this. I've made my actual point in a few sentences, and yet these few facts are mind-boggling. I could (and should) spend quite a bit of time, or more appropriately all of my time, with these amazing, comforting truths in mind.

In Which The Man Tries to Prevent Me from Being True to Mine Ownself

I have a particularly low voice for a girl. My friend Mike has a particularly high voice for a guy. We've agreed that he'd do quite well as a first alto, and I'd do quite well as a first tenor, so we decided to switch voice parts for the senior ensemble song. He chickened out, but I still learned the tenor part and have been singing as a tenor for the past few weeks (and blending far more easily into the tenor section than the alto section).

On Friday, our conductor finally figured out that I've been singing with the guys. He had an issue with that, and told me to go back to the alto part. So now our formation is thrown off, I need to relearn the song (I know both parts, but I keep on finding myself singing an alto-tenor hybrid part), and I stick out. The alto part for the song is in the break in my range, which means I have to sing loudly to get a decent tone, and there are some notes on which I can't change my tone much to match my section or I'll lose the pitch (or they could just sing darker like they're supposed to).

I'm considering sticking it to the man and singing the tenor part anyway. He didn't even notice I had switched parts from listening - he noticed when I filled a tenor slot in the formation. I blend so well as a tenor that it's nearly impossible to tell by ear that there's a girl singing with them. I don't see why he's so adamantly against me being a tenor for just one song. I'll have to talk with him about it. If he's still against it, I'll just be an alto. I see no reason to pick a fight with my conductor just to prove I can.

Cheerful Childhood Delusions Dissolved

Once upon a time in a little place in southwestern Ohio, there lived a five-year-old girl. She and her family went on a vacation to Washington, DC, and she brought her baby doll along. It's name was Ria Baby. While in Washington, DC, Ria Baby was lost on the subway. The little girl was absolutely devastated. She got a cat (whom she named Ria Kitty and who would one day become her closest animal friend), but her excitement about her new companion could not efface her grief over the loss of Ria Baby.

Several months later, a package came in the mail for the little girl. Inside was her Ria Baby! Oh, the joy! Her mother told her that someone must have found it in Washington, DC, and known to send it back to her. The girl believed this wholeheartedly.

For years, the girl believed what her mother had told her. As she grew older, she began to wonder how on earth it could possibly have happened, but she retained a shred of her belief in the old story until one day when she was seventeen. On that fateful day, the conversation somehow turned to Ria Baby. The girl's mother was shocked to find that her daughter had not gotten to the bottom of the fantastic story. In reality, the mother had written to one of her cousins and asked them to send a Ria Baby. Ria Baby had merely been a McDonald's Happy Meal toy and had been replaced by an impostor for years.

Just Because

Once upon a time, there lived a woman named Julia Grover and a man named Rupert Follehomme. Julia was a computer scientist who had been raised by her loving grandparents after her parents died in a tragic incident involving a trumpeter swan and a jet-ski. Rupert was a madman who had once controlled an evil society. Through a chaotic and confusing series of events, Julia and Rupert met. They knew from the moment that they set eyes on one another that they were soul mates. Julia even forgave Rupert for murdering her grandfather.

Many years later...

Julia and Rupert have had a son. His name is Eugene. He is now eighteen.* Eugene is driving drunk and hits his parents as they frolic down the street hand in hand. Julia dies, and Rupert joins MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). He convinces Rick Astley to join MADD as well.

Then a meteor hits the earth and the dinosaurs return. Humans die by dino or meteor, go to live with Hitler in the center of the earth, or join Eugene in trying to repopulate the world. Eugene realizes the futility of his goal and instead plots to overthrow Hitler. Just in time, the Brigators show up from the past and help him defeat Hitler. After his victory, Eugene sets up a new order in the center of the earth, and everyone lives happily ever after, including the small clan of civilized sasquatches that they allow to take up residence in their subterranean world.


*Everything after this point is verbatim what I originally wrote down from our ramblings except for the fact that Julia and Rupert now have names.

Adventures in Rural Indiana

Once upon a time (by which I mean more than a month ago by now), four brave adventurers set out on what was destined to become a memorable journey filled with curious sights and experiences...

Here's what I remember about the Indiana trip that Anna/Betsy, Seth, Josh, and I took a few weeks ago. The events within each paragraph are probably not in the proper order, but all the events in one paragraph followed those in the preceding paragraph and came before the ones in the next.

This particular telling of the tales of that day will start with my brief exploration of the UC campus led by Josh. Among other things, I got to see the office of Mr. Man (I'm wanting to say his name was Man D. Kwon, but I don't know if I'm remembering that correctly), some telescopes atop the astronomy and physics buildings, interesting architecture, and the unnatural community of dorms in which my guide lives. The trees were unnaturally straight (even the redbud!) and still had an unusual percentage of their leaves, and the grass was eerily green. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit the wizard's tower.

After we picked up Seth and Anna/Betsy, we left UC and got on the highway. The grass beside one of the earlier highways was strewn with garbage galore. It was depressing. I avoided looking at it. We passed one of those houses with horrible kitschy lawn ornaments covering the front yard. At one point, Seth spotted what appeared to be a real monkey sitting on a picnic table. Throughout the trip we played roadkill bingo. Or at least I did. I saw (and circled in red pen, incidentally) a squirrel, a rabbit, a tire, a groundhog, a dog, a raccoon, a cat, and several mysterious masses of mangled flesh in addition to smelling a dead skunk.

Once we got to downtown Anderson, the real adventures started. Downtown Anderson was a very shady place. It even has a Shadyside Memorial Park, which I will get to in a moment. The GPS led us astray, and told us to turn onto this ultra shady back street. It was mildly frightening. When we tried to get off of that street, we nearly had a nasty run-in with a huge pick-up truck. Apparently he didn't have a stop sign. We decided to stop to ask for directions, so we pulled into Shadyside Memorial Park. At the entrance there were these horrid little stone pillar things. They tried to look nice, but they failed miserably. It made me sad to look at them, so I turned away. Nobody was in the park... except for some guy sitting in his car in the parking lot near the playground. Drug dealer? Pedophile? Who knows. All I know is that he fit very well into the general mood of downtown Anderson. We were supposed to be going north, but evidently we were going south. I didn't know that. Normally, the GPS shows the car driving towards to top of the screen. At the top of the screen was North Anderson, so I assumed that we were going north. However, if I had looked at the little car, I would have realized that it was driving towards the bottom of the screen, meaning that we were going south. It took me a while to notice that, so I kept objecting every time Josh tried to turn around. I'm not sure how much time my confusion added to the trip. We didn't reset the GPS with the new directions, so it kept on telling us to make a u-turn.

The return trip provided even more excitement. We became lost again. The GPS's directions had us driving in the middle of nowhere for quite some time. Maybe it wanted revenge for all the times we refused to make a u-turn, despite its protests. Most of the time, we were on hilly roads barely wide enough for two cars to pass abreast. As we crested each hill, we feared that we would find another car about to collide with us. Fortunately, there were no accidents. In fact, we rarely saw any signs of real civilization whatsoever. It was kind of creepy. Due to excessive exhaustion combined with the most caffeine I've ever consumed in a day, I was slap-happy the entire time. It made the drive even more interesting for me. At one point, I burst out laughing and finally managed to communicate that I was amused by the fact that we hadn't driven on a lined road in a long time. Normally, that wouldn't have been that funny, but caffeine + fatigue = all sorts of interesting thoughts. Throughout the landscape dotted with lonely buildings and grotesque, leafless trees were little cement monoliths of mystery. They were all over the place, and we couldn't figure out what on earth they might be. There was also an old, mostly destroyed tower-ish structure. I don't remember what it was, or if we found out what it was at all. For part of the countryside ride, we listened to Captain Beefheart. I tried brainstorming for an essay while it was playing. That didn't go as well as it could have. Thank goodness Josh stopped it somewhere near track 13. I can only take so much Beefheart. We stopped for a bathroom break as soon as we saw signs of civilization. Raleigh, IN, was hardly civilization, but it was something. The greasy diner place we stopped at was interesting. They sold cans of beans. They sold other things too, but I only remember the cans of beans. There was a layer of grease on the countertop. Betsy/Anna was the only one brave enough to use the bathroom hidden away in the furnace room. As we left, we heard the locals chuckling. They were probably laughing at us city folk, and I don't blame them. We stopped again later in Metamora at the Hav-A-Bite, and that was a much nicer experience. Well, maybe not for Seth, but he said he felt much better after throwing up. Next to the bathrooms was a poster of the "little houses of Metamora." The distinguishing feature of the town was Mt. Metamora. Mt. Metamora was a large hill with a small building of mystery perching atop it. The building had a cross on the side, so maybe it was a church or a monastery of some sort. The hill was covered in dead grass with a few gnarled trees. Someone suggested that it may have been a landfill at one point. Relatively close to the time we finally made it back to the highway, there was a railroad along the road and a canal next to that. It made me smile. We were driving alongside the evolution of technology. After a while, we got on the highway. At some point during the trip back home, we saw a yard with live llamas in it. I have no idea where this fits in with the chronology of events. That's all.