Jan 24 2007

Already tired of it…

You were thinking I was going to say that I’m already tired of school, weren’t you? Well, that may also be true, but I was referencing my new eating schedule. I decided that I really need to lose some weight and inches off of the ol’ waistline, so I started regulating my food intake. I’m not ‘dieting’ per se. Rather, I’m just monitoring what I eat and how often I eat. I’m still planning on eating some of the foods that I really love, but just in smaller proportions.

Today, my schedule consisted of:

11:45 – Low-fat yogurt with fruit and granola
16:30 – Grilled smoked sausage with a baked potato and corn
19:00 – A cinnamon-raisin English muffin
20:00 – 3 lightly salted rice cakes and an orange

While I didn’t think any of those foods were bad, I am still a little bit hungry. I would imagine that as I continue eating less and less that my appetite will decrease somewhat.

|:| Zach |:|

Jan 23 2007

Venetian blinds

I’m still traversing through the pages of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice with the same awe that I had when first starting the novel. Last night as I read through chapter four, I frequently stopped to mark sentences, passages, and pages that are extraordinarily powerful. I just thought I would share a couple of the amazing lines with you:



  • Cupid truly did as mathematicians do when they show concrete images of pure forms to incompetent pupils: he made the mental visible to us by using the shape and coloration of human youths and turned them into memory’s tool by adorning them with all the luster of beauty and kindling pain and hope in us at the sight of them.


  • The lover is more divine than the beloved, because the god dwells in the former, not the latter.


  • Nothing gladdens a writer more than a thought that can become pure feeling and a feeling that can become pure thought.


  • It is surely as well that the world knows only a beautiful work itself and not its origins, the conditions under which it comes into being, for if people had knowledge of the sources from which the artist derives his inspiration they would oftentimes be confused and alarmed and thus vitiate the effects the artist had achieved.


  • There is nothing more curious or delicate than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who encounter and observe each other daily–nay, hourly–yet are constrained by convention or personal caprice to keep up the pretense of being strangers, indifferent, avoiding a nod or word.


  • Language can only praise physical beauty, not reproduce it.

Those lines were taken from the Michael Henry Heim translation (ISBN: 0-06-057605-7) on pages 82, 84, 85, 86, 92, and 95, respectively.

|:| Zach |:|

Jan 19 2007

Today a beautiful soul was taken away from us…

Today turned out to be the most difficult day of my life. Last night I rushed my Mom to the airport for an emergency flight to see her Dad. He was having severe stomach and chest pains. He had to be transported to a much larger hospital than the local one in their small town. Early this morning, my phone rang; it was Mom and she was crying. I knew right then and there, but her words solidified it. She said “we lost Grandpa about an hour ago.”

That is truly what happened–we lost one of the most wonderful men to have ever lived. A man that would never hesitate to give you everything he had and then some; a man that would magically become interested in whatever it was you were interested in, just to share in your excitement; a man that when his sister was in the hospital he said “I wish I could take your place and spare you the pain;” a man that loved his wife and family with all of his heart, yet still managed to open it up further to ensure everyone had a spot in it; a man that never forgot to take time out of his day to thank God for all the beautiful things in life; a man that, through his actions and words, showed the world what it truly is to be a man of character, integrity, and charity.

Call him Theo Malcolm; call him T.M. for short; call him Grandpa.

You are already, and will be for decades to come, dearly missed.
We all love you.

|:| Zach |:|