One of my favorite poets

My A.P. English teacher introduced my class to Billy Collins - a hilarious, sometimes sarcastic poet. He was actually U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 - 2003 and is the New York state Poet Laureate right now. This is one of my favorite poems of his:

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins

The way in which he reads his own poems makes them even more funny. I would love to go to a poetry reading of his someday! To hear some more of his poems go here. Some of my other favorites are The Lanyard, Marginalia, and Nostalgia.

My First Post!

So, this is my first official post! Hopefully I will be better at keeping up on this than I am keeping up so far in my Psychology class. One chapter containing forty pages of teeny, tiny handwriting?...Come now...(I should probably get used to that, right?). So far college life has been pretty fun and crazy and busy all rolled into one. I currently am working at the M.T.C. Bookstore which has been going really well. It's been a nice change from the temporary job during the summer of having to call strangers and try to coerce them into taking "a short political survey". Usually that didn't go over too well... So, everyday I wake up and walk to work at 7:10 in order to get there at 7:30 and work for four hours. Hopefully it's a busy day, because then it goes by a lot quicker. (I'm also able to get 20% off in the BYU Bookstore because the M.T.C. Bookstore is a part of it! Woohoo!) I've already seen multiple friends from highschool and been able to chat with them for a minute (my supervisor told me that if missionaries try to flirt with me I should say "Isn't there somewhere you need to be?"...I guess that gets the point across). But so far it's been a really fun, uplifting place to work. Then, if it's a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday I speedwalk to my next class at noon. Right now I'm taking Psychology 111 (no good...although the teacher does remind me of the main singer in Colors...Bep? Remember?), Physical Science 100 (the teacher is hilarious and basically just does experiments the entire time - it's awesome), HEPE 129 (basically a college P.E. class, and let's be honest, P.E. has never been my most favorite subject...), Music 101 (So cool! My teacher is the director of the School of Music and the class is really small. It's been really fun...so far), and Book of Mormon 121 (your average religion class). So, things are going pretty well right now. We'll see how things are when midterms come around... :)

My new room (or corner)!

My big summer project - a quilt!