A Little Moon Music

The moon was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door...

~~~

Above the quiet dock in midnight,
Tangled in the tall mast's corded height
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child's balloon, forgotten after play.

~~~

It's either full moon night or darn close to it. I find it incredibly difficult getting a good photograph on my little digicam but that doesn't stop me from trying. This one reminds me of an old poem I studied many years ago and later taught. The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. The ultimate drama of an ill-fated romance between a highwayman and his sweetheart, the black-eyed Bess. Reads something like one of those old cowboy and western movies too.

Full moons also invariably remind me of T.E. Hulme's masterly Above the Dock. That's the poem in its entirety up there. Short, sharp, direct and descriptive. No hemming and hawing around. Minimalism at its superb best.

When Necessity is the Mother of Reinvention

What do you do when you have a pile of debts to pay off and you still need a new look for a new season at work? Easy, you reinvent your old stuff. That's what I've been doing lately. Like today I dug out this old bag I bought at a second-hand market a couple of years ago.

It's a lovely jute-woven type shoulder bag in a beige brown shade, very summery as well but boringly plain. It had a little flower applique when I bought it but in a horribly jarring light blue colour. Tore that off as soon as I took it home too. Well, I took a long hard look at it today and bought some sequins and floral appliques in a nicely blending shade, and voila!

Who am I anyway?

Latent tendency finally tumbling out of the closet or natural by-product of years of wielding discipline? I'm not sure why but I do know that I'm getting to be a real harridan online (yeah, yeah, I can hear a chorus of Yes, you're sooo right, J !!)

In real life, I don't have as many short-tempered flashes of impatience but in the virtual world I seem to have more expectations of people and keep coming up short time after time after time. Maybe it's because most people I deal with online are young and relative greenhorns in terms of life experiences. Maybe I expect too much from them and end up feeling shortchanged by careless, flippant attitudes. I do tend to be very intense about things in life in general, something of a worry-wart even, and in situations that might otherwise be lightened by a laugh and a step back, my natural inclination is to do the opposite and tighten up with brittle nerves and explode at the slightest provocation. Or maybe after years of handling discipline in classroom situations, I've gotten so used to being instantly obeyed I've come to expect it in outside classroom situations as well.

A good online friend from the US who I first got to know, as with most online friends, in an MIRC gameroom where we'd play trivia every evening always called me stubborn. It didn't help that he's one of the most "abrasive" (his words, not mine) persons ever who gets a kick out of provoking other people. So most evenings I'd be engaged in verbal fisticuffs with him, fighting, arguing and hassling the heck out of each other. "You stubborn woman!" he'd throw at me exasperatedly, "You dominatrix!" and that always made me laugh because I honestly felt nothing could be more way off base. As a child I'd always been the most docile, passive and submissive kind. Always did as I was told, was terribly afraid of hurting other people's feelings, never stood up for myself or my beliefs. Well, now that the worm's turned online, maybe I'm learning to be more aggressive, more assertive in real time too.

Or maybe I just need to go offline and get a life.