Skip to main content

Haiku

Yesterday, on the first full day of spring, we had a big snowstorm. I went for a walk and was inspired to write a haiku.

By callow brick walls,
snow falls on insouciant trees,
as timeless as I.
I was struck with the confluence in time of the snow (ancient), the trees (more recent), the buildings (even more recent), and me (most recent of all, but imbued with consciousness that gives me the illusion of being more important than all the rest - which makes me the most callow and perhaps the most insouciant as well).

Comments

  1. Why isn't the snow the most recent of all? After all, it had just been formed in the atmosphere!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was thinking of the appearance of snow, trees, and buildings in geological time. In that sense, the first snow on Earth was billions of years ago, the first trees were hundreds of millions ago, and the first buildings just tens of thousands of years ago. Then I switch to me, extant for mere tens of years. Why do I get to count myself as an individual while aging snow, trees, and buildings as entire classes? Poetic license, I guess.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can You Cross Your Toes?

Katie and I had a heated discussion the night before last. We were sitting on the couch watching Jon Stewart when she noticed a large, apparently cancerous growth sticking out of the bottom of my foot. She asked what the big lump in my sock was. "That's my toe," I responded, nonplussed. I had crossed my first and second toes, causing a lump to protrude from the bottom of my sock. Katie was quite alarmed. "You can cross your toes?" "Sure, can't you? Everyone can cross their toes!" "Of course I can't cross my toes. Who can cross their toes?" And I confirmed that Katie could not, in fact, cross her toes. Even manipulating her toes with my fingers, I could not get her toes to stay crossed. She just has very short toes. That led, of course, into a discussion of who was the freak. Were my long, crossable toes abnormal, or were her stubby, uncrossable phalanges the outliers? In case you're confused, here are some pictures. First, of my v...

Max the Model

Katie sometimes talks to Max about all the things he can grow up to be. "Will you grow up to be a scientist like Daddy, or a lawyer like Mommy?" she will query. In recent days, though, we think Max might aspire to be a model. He LOVES the camera. Point it in his direction, and he is mesmerized by the big lens, giving it a big smile. He will sit for long series of photographs, changing his expressions constantly so we'll be sure to get a good one. This is Katie's recent favorite series (mostly because she thinks he looks so cute in the outfit): This is my favorite series, based purely on the dynamic range of emotions that Max is capable of. I am especially fond of the last picture. So cute!

A Little Night Music

I've been in Boston this week at a scientific conference. I've spent nearly all of my time at the conference, but was able to get away a couple of times to see friends. One night off I went out for pizza with Ekrem and Leanne (and their adorable kids). We went to Stone Hearth Pizza , whose head chef is the brother of Bob, one of my labmates in Minneapolis. (He wasn't at the restaurant the night we went, sadly.) Ekrem and Leanne are moving to their new house in a week, and I helped them out by consuming the remainder of a bottle of scotch that they keep at their house for me. I felt very proud of myself for accomplishing this noble task. Last night I went to see Andrea perform in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music , one of my favorite musicals. Beforehand, I had dinner with fraternity friends Jan, Jeannie, David, Emily, and Ian. Dinner conversation was wonderful in that MIT-nerdy way that I greatly miss sometimes. At the end of the meal, for example, my fortune coo...