The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

'Tis a good age we live in.

Good Times Abound

Professor Whitekettle teaches theology at nine in the morning.

I went for a walk in the snow.

Melissa puts the finishing touches on her literary masterpiece.

Out and about with the Agents in White.

Melissa has a crazy bookcase.

I visited friends in Sweden.

My Christmas present. A leather bag bought in a secondhand store. Can it get better?

I put cloves into oranges.

I decorated the Christmas tree.

We hiked into the woods.

and we found our uncle's gray house by the gray sea.

 I got stuck.

I love my sister.

We blew our breath out frosty inside the gray house by the gray sea.

I warmed myself in the car...

...and put my feet on the dashboard.

We visited my grandfather's grave.

Sofia took a bath.

I flew in a small propeller airplane from Toronto to Grand Rapids.

It snowed in Amerikat.

I wore my retainers to bed.

Erin visited. And apparently, so did Beckham.

I cleaned the kitchen

Thumbs up for John Lennon

I met John Lennon. He is a fifteen-year-old kid who lives in Grand Rapids and goes by the name Jack. He dances ballet and is learning to fly an airplane. He takes today's title for most eclectic personality.

Sundays are wonderful. Weekends, in general, are wonderful. I like knowing on Friday that I'll have a few days to do whatever I want--in this case, I baked cakes and cleaned the kitchen and watched Voyage of the Dawn Treader and sliced my thumb open--in no specific order.

Bell peppers are slippery suckers.

Sister Sofia

In other news, my sister has made it into Västerbottens-Kuriren, a local newspaper in Sweden. I am so very proud of her. The title reads, "Her guiding star is love."


(P.S. We were learning about hyphens in school the other day. Västerbottens-Kuriren is hyphenated.)

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

On this New Year's Day, I feel very much like my grandmother. I am wearing large silver earrings, a black dress that she gave me (after discovering that she didn't quite fit into it), and my mother's Taylor of London perfume, which smells exactly like the rose oil bottle my grandmother gave me a few years ago. (As sparsely as I use perfume, it it ran out a few months ago. I had every intention to buy some more, but I now I have no need to as my mother relinquished it to me, claiming it was too strong for her. The perfectly clear perfume comes in a tall, slender bottle with Taylor of London written in black lettering across the top. A simple and unpretentious design.)

I even have red hair like my grandmother. Today, as it is New Year's Day, I washed and dried it, and pinned it back on one side. My grandmother has always had shocking red hair, and even now she dyes it to keep it a vibrant colour, and she likes to keep it in a messy bun with a painted snap of some sort. She is a great collector of odds and ends. Her house is filled with leopard-printed chairs, tables, cloths, scarfs, soap dishes, and curtains; her garage is a makeshift loppis (fleamarket) which she opens every Saturday during the summer. Granted, she doesn't make much--she probably breaks even, as she so enjoys the company of people who stop to look that she will invite them in for fika--that is, coffee and a piece of cake or a cookie.) Like any Swede, she has always enjoyed traveling and has visited the customary Norway, Denmark, and Finland, but also Spain, Turkey, Greece, Singapore (thanks to our family), Indonesia, and Finland. She married her second husband in the Swedish Embassy in Thailand. She is one of the more curious and exotic members of our family.

Can I say that I am infinitely proud of my family? They are all wonderful people. My brother and sister are good-looking and well-dressed. My brother is a musical genius, picking up instruments left and right. My sister burns with a passion for the lost and needy. Social injustice pricks her soft heart. My parents have traveled all over the world. Like superheroes, they cross oceans to save souls and deliver food and clothing to the less fortunate. My uncle is an optician--you can't really argue with that now, can you?

And thus, with thoughts of my family in mind, the year has come to an end. I sit on my bed and listen to the faint booms of firecrackers. Tommy Körberg--forever fixed in my mind as Lill-Klippen in Ronja Rövardotter, but more universally known in Sweden as a famous singer--plays in the background on the television.

I wonder what this next year will bring. Many changes, I suppose. But all good ones.

Peace to all on this most fine night.

Sincerely,
Sanna

Airship Theology

Humans are quite small, mired down in pettiness of feeling, of narrow-minded thoughts, constantly backing themselves into corners or staying too long in one place. Like teabags, they steep in the hot water of their circumstances and are forever changed. And how could they possibly see the workings of the world when they are constantly pulled into quagmires by the turnings of the everyday?

I, for one, rise above such matters, mostly because I have my own dirigible to command. It helps to be able to quite literally remove yourself from the circumstances and float, far above the scrutiny of the ill-willers and evil-doers. From here, it is much easier to divide and conquer. Because, as you see, while you and yours are busy running about, following the latest trends, burying your heads in the academic sand, being engulfed by homework or politics or swallowed by the immediate emotional landscape, I plot and scheme in quiet solitude far above your heads. I rustle my maps in the peace of my study and play Risk, in anticipation of my future accomplishments.

If only you would take the time to realize--and really, I thank you that the concept has eluded you completely--that it is not the next paper or test or assignment or interview or even load of laundry that is important, but rather the big picture altogether. Time and again, you fail to realise your full potential and your ability to manipulate it accordingly.

You think that burying your head and heart and soul into a fit of passion will keep you alive and relatively well-preserved in the years to come. This is a complete fallacy. You will have a future, certainly, but a lonely one. Your plans are ultimately futile because you fail to fit your life into the bigger picture, to consider how family, friends, and the Great Master Above will be part of the extrapolation, to look at your life from a global perspective. You have failed to propel yourself to greater heights, from which you could see the great and beautiful expanse that is the world at large.

To live for yourself is to live small. And there is no future in that.

Far above you,
Captain Esmon Cloudcutter

Peter Pan's Polite Circle

At long last I write on my blog again. I am back in America, in the suburban areas of Michigan. I last wrote in Japan. And before that I had only a smattering of journal entries from all corners of the world. I don't believe I ever mentioned that while I attended the University of York St. John for four months (in York, England, of course), I also managed to travel to Cinque Terre, Italy and Scotland's Isle of Skye.

On our way back down from Scotland, my friends and I visited the Beatrix Potter's Hilltop Farm and Chatsworth House, the inspiration of Mr. Darcy's Pemberly and also home to the world's largest chicken. (Ask me sometime.) Once you have seen the house and walked the grounds of Chatsworth House, you will truly understand how rich Mr. Darcy was.

After England, I flew to Sweden, then to Japan for a month (hence the mention of daigakumo--or daigaku jagaimo, literally university potato--slices of deep-fried sweet potato dipped in honey and sprinkled with sesame seeds) and then back to Sweden and on to America. It has been a very exciting few months for me, and I have not been good at documenting.

I miss England. I miss going to coffee shops to write on my stories and walking past the York Minster every day.

Also, I miss my family. This shouldn't be such a surprise as I have grown up constantly missing people, and I find it quite an ordinary thing. It is my life to be always parted from family, friends, mentors who taught me, teachers who knew me. It's not as terrible as some people think, mind you. I have sacrificed the norms for new experiences, new faces and places and languages. I suppose a good way to explain it is Peter Pan (you will realise in the end that everything comes back to Peter Pan), in Peter and Wendy, Ch.XVI: The Return Home:

"He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred."

I, like so many internationals, have a great familiarity with things others would consider exotic--a sure shot when it comes to culture. But I am barred from more common joys, such as seeing my family more than once a year or having best friends within walking distance. There is no melodrama in this. I would not change my life for a million others. I have gained more than I have lost, even if it stings a bit.

I suppose the delight of Peter Pan lies in the tension between the choices--that gorgeous decision that still rings from the bell of childhood. Which does one choose? Can one really choose the one over the other? I am drawn between the two, suspended in this sweet residual limbo, in daring indecision in a world that does not accept hesitation.

Speaking of indecision. I am graduating next year. What am I to do with my life? I would love to write books and live off the profits. Though people tell me that is simply not done. In polite circles or otherwise.

But perhaps I am not as polite as people would like to think...