The other day I was introduced to the band The Wild Beasts, via a post from the Coudal Partner’s Blended Feed, regarding their recently released video for “Brave Bulging Bouyant Clairvoyants.” Brenda and I immediately remarked that these boys from Kendal seemed like “our people.”

I don’t think there is a better feeling than finding a new band that is exactly what you are looking for, and expresses your current zeitgeist perfectly. The song “The Devil’s Crayon” is that for me at the moment.

Just beautiful. A little peeved that I can’t get their album in the states yet, so for now I am making due with mp3s ripped from Youtube videos. Here’s to the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

This is old news to most people, but a couple weeks ago I got a puppy. I’d been wanting one for a long time, and this ad popped up on Craigslist for a Dachsund puppy. I emailed the poster, asked a few questions, etc etc. After the first round of emails she sent some pictures, and upon looking at them, well… my heart grew three sizes that day.

And that’s how Hexl came into my life. So I’m just saying. If you’re coming over, I hope you’re cool with dying, because he is a level 30 Dark Master of Pai Mei’s Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.

Except he does it with his LETHAL CUTENESS. It’s like mind bullets, but, like, you know. He actually killed me. I’m actually dead as I type this.

In the meantime, school has begun again and I am taking it easy: just one class, a German review. In signing up, I was a little nervous: It’s been a while, and I’d gotten pretty good at skating through classes, which has been great for my grade-point, but terrible for my actual acquisition of knowledge. Fortunately, I’ve got two things going for me: my professor is a bit of a taskmaster, and I also have people to practice with now! My neighbors are film-makers from Austria with a couple kids. My Finnish art-director at the office used to be their nanny — so we already had a connection. But then I bought their Saarinen dining room set, and we’ve been fast friends since. So hopefully this will be a great semester.

Lately I have been consuming my fair share of media as well: I’m reading Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, and Rilke’s Letters on Life. I just saw Lars and the Real Girl and Hellboy: The Golden Army, both of which I enjoyed, albeit for very different reasons. And a couple weeks ago Josh and I ran up to Salt Lake to see Broken Social Scene, which was great, if not a little odd: who knew they were such a jam band? To quote Dirk, “I mean, 9 minutes a song and they were just really feeling it.”

In conclusion: I promise this won’t become a puppy blog, but Hex is asleep on my lap as I type this and he totally has the hiccups. Pretty much a megaton payload of adorable.

I have never been super athletic. I have distinct memories of my four year-old self desperate to impress my dad’s troop of WEBELOs, sprinting as fast as I could, windmilling my arms in great circles as I did - you know, to make me go faster.

I’ve always been pretty gangly, largely uncoordinated, and painfully insecure in athletic settings. Neverthelss, and no small amount of compulsion involved, I have had the privilege of being on numerous athletic teams: community swim, community soccer, the Junior Golfer’s Association of Arizona, high school swim-team, an ill-fated foray into high school track, and a semester of college fencing.

(Two notes here, while I adjust the tape on my glasses:

1. What I lacked in compulsion that semester in collegiate fencing, I more than made up for in passionate, nerdy delusions of grandeur. And,

2. If you have had the opportunity to sit with me in an interview setting, you may have heard me use an example from my years on “The Decathlon” to illustrate my various Strengths as a Team Player™. Don’t get it twisted, sister, I am of course referring to the Academic Decathlon. Varsity State Speech Competition, 1st place, baby!)

To me, athletics in general are frustrating because of the extreme importance placed on teams: I hated always being the one holding the team back, I hated being the one always saying, “dude, chill out — it’s just PE.”

Despite this, or maybe in fact, because of it, I love - LOVE - the Olympics. In fact, our whole family does. For the 17 days of the Olympiad, I eat, sleep, and breathe the Olympics. Its the one time that I really feel like we are truly living in a global community, the one time where I really think the concept of “sport” transcends itself and becomes a lens through which to view all of human endeavor, indeed, the human experience.

I buy into all of the hype. I eat up the human interest stories. I live for the dramatic, pandering, precious tales of tragedy and triumph. I bear my extreme annoyance with Bob Costas, gritting through him all the while because suddenly, despite myself, I am very interested in what he has to say. “What’s that Bob, another cloying account of personal victory in the gymnast tent, well you can go sit on… I mean, wait Bobby! TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU KNOW.”

It is in fact, surprise! a Very Tearful Time for me (and most of my weepy, weepy family). The Nike commercials? Big emo tear. The national anthems during medal ceremonies? Musical kicks to the groin. During Athens, there was this story they were telling about some guy who ran the New York marathon to raise awareness about the situation in post-war Greece? Yeah, I not only remember it verbatim, but I cannot recount it without crying when, at the moment when the runner is about to fail, his ill-advised new shoes cutting his feet to ribbons, an expat and fellow country-man cries out from the side lines “For your country! For your People!” And he is lifted, as if on wings and comes from last place, tearing past everyone to the finish line, a come back feat that makes Lezak’s surge last night look like child’s play. It kills me.

When Paula Radcliffe succumbed to fatigue in the last stretch of her marathon, collapsing to the curb, her shoulders shaking with her sobs… I was reduced to a quivering puddle. (In fact, when I came back from Hawai’i, essentially two years of living off the grid and found out about YouTube, two of the very first things I looked up were: 1. Nike’s award winning, 2002 Olympic commercial “Move,” and 2. The footage from Paula Radcliffe’s race*.)

For the brief time the Olympics are “on,” they make such an impression. I couldn’t tell you five players name from any one major sport going on right now, but I could give you at least 15 Olympic athletes from this year’s games, the sports, their backstories; probably 10 from the last Olympiad, etc etc.

It’s about personal struggle, and it’s about personal triumph, it’s about being your very best and somehow doing it for everyone at home watching. I love the Olympics. And I apologize if this becomes an Olympic Blog for the next little bit.

*Which is here tainted forever a horrible, horrible soundtrack. Thanks, random youtube user.

I’ve just finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for the third time, this time in the form of a 32 hour read-aloud performed by Simon Prebble. I love that book. Despite having read it twice, I honestly, truly, could not remember how it ended (how is this possible?). Anyway, I had also completely forgotten this little exchange, which is more surprising still, as it always (I think) makes me cry. You can listen, and read along, if you like.

“And now, Your Majesty,” said Strange, “I think it is time we returned to the Castle. You and I, Your Majesty, are a British King, and a British magician. Though Great Britain may desert us, we have no right to desert Great Britain. She may have need of us yet.”

“True, true. I swore an oath at my coronation always to serve her!

Oh, my poor country!”

And that is nobility.

Also, I had forgotten this passage which gives me chills — Clarke has written this so well, so authentically, that my hair stands on end when I think of it. I’ve uploaded the whole exchange for you to hear, below I have transcribed the prescription from Ormskirk’s Revelations of Thirty Six other Worlds:

Place the moon at my eyes and her whiteness shall
devour the false sights the deceiver has placed there.
Place a swarm of bees at my ears, bees love truth and will destroy the deceiver’s lies.
Place salt in my mouth lest the deceiver attempt to delight me with the taste of honey or disgust me with the taste of ashes.
Nail my hand with an iron nail so that I shall not raise it to do the deceiver’s bidding.

Place my heart in a secret place so that all my desires shall be my own
and the deceiver shall find no hold there.

Chills.