#MicroblogMondays :: Mercifully Brief

Phew. Just left off working on a largish post about Sz. Research is taxing. Time to unwind with a little #MicroblogMondays post. Mel, The Stirrup Queen, recommends about 8 sentences max for these posts, and suggests as a topic “a passing thought.”

1. I can be quite the literalist; check me out, numbering the sentences.
2. I can also be a perfectionist; when I was teaching undergrads while pursuing an MA in Lit up at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I found that while the other TAs of Composition could grade papers while watching TV, just marking an error here and there, me, I would grunt and sweat over each and every draft, red-penning every single mistake b/c I felt that to let a slip-up go uncorrected was to do the student a disservice.
3. I can be quite opportunistic; an example of which could be taking full advantage of the semicolon and other devices (such as parentheses), in order to extend sentence length when feeling sufficiently loquacious to bridle at really very fair limits set by well-intentioned people whose only rationale in suggesting keeping it relatively brief is to make posts more palatable by keeping them within reasonable parameters of portion size.
4. I thought I might use ‘raison d’etre’ rather than ‘rationale’ in that last sentence, but come to find out, raison d’etre means essentially reason for existence; speaking of which, I am a firm believer that all being is becoming, that change is constant and inevitable, that nothing is ever actually stationary in truth (no matter how still it may appear), even the center, which – as Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming” – cannot hold, is not a fixed location, so I suppose that my own raison d’etre is metamorphosis.

Four like that is enough. lol. Thanks Mel for the opportunity to commune with other #MicroblogMondays folks. Looking forward to hopping around and seeing what the talkers are talking. That’s me for now. Take it Yeatsy…

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

P.S.