(no subject)

[ink_splotch]

This meme has been going around and now I've finally done it, but I've sort of gone for more realistic wishes. Sort of being the operative phrase here.

1. A ticket to England
2. Book geek icons. Alt: Jeeves & Wooster icons
3. An email. I never said I was demanding
4. Jonathan/David bibleslash.
5. Domestic or awkward!cute first time, Lavender/Parvati
6. Domestic, established relationship slash/femslash
7. Songs. Send me your favorite song over yousendit.com.
8. More icon space!
9. Poetry. Spam me in the comments with poems!
10. Books! Or, failing that, a link to the MirrorMask trailer and the D.E.B.S trailer

Rules:
Step One

- Make a post (public, friendslocked, filtered...whatever you're comfortable with) to your LJ. The post should contain your list of 10 holiday wishes. The wishes can be anything at all, from simple and fandom-related ("I'd love a Snape/Hermione icon that's just for me") to medium ("I wish for _____ on DVD") to really big ("All I want for Christmas is a new car/computer/house/TV.") The important thing is, make sure these wishes are things you really, truly want.

- If you wish for real life things (not fics or icons), make sure you include some sort of contact info in your post, whether it's your address or just your email address where Santa (or one of his elves) could get in touch with you.

- Also, make sure you post some version of these guidelines in your LJ, or link to this post (it'll be public) so that the holiday joy will spread.

Step Two

- Surf around your friendslist (or friendsfriends, or just random journals) to see who has posted their list. And now here's the important part:

- If you see a wish you can grant, and it's in your heart to do so, make someone's wish come true. Sometimes someone's trash is another's treasure, and if you have a leather jacket you don't want or a gift certificate you won't use--or even know where you could get someone's dream purebred Basset Hound for free--do it.

You needn't spend money on these wishes unless you want to. The point isn't to put people out, it's to provide everyone a chance to be someone else's holiday elf--to spread the joy. Gifts can be made anonymously or not--it's your call.

There are no rules with this project, no guarantees, and no strings attached. Just...wish, and it might come true. Give, and you might receive. And you'll have the joy of knowing you made someone's holiday special.

Comments

[saturnalia.livejournal.com]

9. Poetry. Spam me in the comments with poems!

Poetry by us, or just any poetry?

[vampirespider.livejournal.com]

Any poetry! Knock yourselves out *g*

[saturnalia.livejournal.com]

Hee, ok then!

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have manage to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."


-Billy Collins

[vampirespider.livejournal.com]

Oh. Oh. That's so beautiful! Thank you for sharing that :)

[peak-in-darien.livejournal.com]

What ho! Just noticed you friended me.
*wanders off to friend you*

Oh and also noticed that we have 10 interests in common.
And also noticed that we both have girlfriends. Which I think counts as an extra interest.
And noticed that you like Oscar Wilde and your comment buttons are a reference to that quote of his about temptation, which happens to be my email signature.
Okay. I'll stop noticing things now. And babbling. Right.

[vampirespider.livejournal.com]

No, no, babbling is always welcome!

Yes, they do count ;). Very cool!

I love Oscar Wilde. Some of my friends find it vaguely disconcerting. *g*

[peak-in-darien.livejournal.com]

Hooray for a fellow babbler. :D

Wilde disconcerting? Never! I've only read "The Picture of Dorian Gray", but I aim to read more! And I loved the movie mmmm Stephen Fry slash

[vampirespider.livejournal.com]

The movie. Oh God, the movie. *fangirls* *cough* Other recs: The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Importance of Being Ernest and De Profoundis. Those are my favorites anyway, apart for the über awesome fairytales which should be, like, obilgatory reading.

[vampirespider.livejournal.com]

Also, forgot to mention: Icon love!

[peak-in-darien.livejournal.com]

Awwww for icon love. :D

[lattara.livejournal.com]

what she was wearing

this is my suicide dress
she told him
I only wear it on days
when I'm afraid
I might kill myself
if I don't wear it

you've been wearing it
every day since we met
he said

and these are my arson gloves

so you don't set fire to something?
he asked

exactly

and this is my terrorism lipstick
my assault and battery eyeliner
my armed robbery boots

I'd like to undress you he said
but would that make me an accomplice?

and today she said I'm wearing
my infidelity underwear
so don't get any ideas

and she put on her nervous breakdown hat
and walked out the door

- Denver Butson

[lattara.livejournal.com]

"To sum up. A few great men -- mostly poets -- have found life absolutely beautiful, in all its aspects. Other great men have found it threaded, as it were, on a beautiful chain. But the average man finds that it is beautiful in parts only, and it is his attitude that is touched upon in this article. No definition of the Beauty of Life is offered, because it is "this to me and that to thee." Some people find it reflected in pictures and poems; others, going to life direct, find it in human intercourse or in scenery; while a few have even found it in the higher truths of mathematics. But everyone, except the grumbler and perhaps the coward, finds it somewhere; and if the article contains anything, it contains a few tips which may make beauty easier to find.

"Be cheerful. Be courageous. Don't bother too much about "developing the esthetic sense," as books term it, for if the heart and the brain are kept clean, the esthetic sense will develop of itself. In your spare time, never study a subject that bores you, however important other people tell you it is; but choose out of the subjects that don't bore you, the subject that seems to you most important, and study that. You may say, "Oh, yes, it's jolly easy to preach like this." But it's also jolly easy to practice. The above precepts contain nothing heroical, nothing that need disturb our daily existence or diminish our salaries. They aren't difficult, they are just a few tips that may help us to see the wonders, physical and spiritual, by which we are surrounded. Modern civilization does not lead us away from Romance, but it does try to lead us past it, and we have to keep awake. We must insist on going to look round the corner now and then, even if other people think us a little queer, for as likely as not something beautiful lies round the corner. And if we insist, we may have a reward that is even greater than we expected, and see for a moment with the eyes of a poet -- may see the universe, not merely beautiful in scraps, but beautiful everywhere and for ever."

---E.M. Forster, "The Beauty of Life".

[lattara.livejournal.com]

"The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried when you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for the want of a teller but for the want of an understanding ear."

- Stephen King

[vampirespider.livejournal.com]

Thank you x3. You're the best *smooch*

[lattara.livejournal.com]

Anytime, sweetheart.

[twisted-badger.livejournal.com]

Heya :)

7. Songs. Send me your favorite song over yousendit.com.

I was just wondering what email i should send the songs to?
Thanks :)

-Kel

[vampirespider.livejournal.com]

vampirespider@gmail.com. Yay, songs!