This layout irritates me, too, since it's so...unfinished. But it's not black, and I do like that background image. I know the green in the text is too olive to match the green in the book, but I'm not changing anything right now. It's late, and there is snow.

Snow makes me thoughtful. There's something humbling about the beauty of it- snow falling at night is an amazing thing, something ethereal and glittering and untouchably holy. And it's always so silent- not like rain or any other kind of precipitiation. You don't find rain or hail falling up, but snow? Snow floats and flutters and drifts, heedless of gravity.

It must be nice, being snow. Because then you melt and you're...nothing. Nothing more than nothing, as they say in the parable of the sparrow- which is still hanging on my bulletin board back home.

I think it has a little to do with it suddenly being winter, and winter being the dead month, the renewing month, and the end of the year. You start to think back over everything, and that's important, because it's easy to forget when everything is pure and clean and covered in white. Snow at night is beautiful, and it turns the sky stormy violet (sometimes I wonder if I ever really see the sky any other color) and catches in the streetlights like so much diamond dust. Everything is softer at night when it snows, when the world is already blunted by darkness. But during the day everything is blinding white and painful but still soft edged with fluff. Something of a contradiction, almost.

And it just makes me thoughtful, and turns me into something of a hopeless romantic. Playing in the snow was fun, amazingly fun; living the life of a Christmas card isn't so bad, really. But it makes me sad, because snow is so...final, I guess. In a 'this is it, end of the year, end of the semester, end of the line' sort of way. No turning back now, only going forward...

Autumn and summer are dying months, really; after the summer solstice the days get shorter until winter solstice- the first day of winter marks the lengthening of the days. Dormancy, hibernation- restive sleep. Not precisely death. That's for the blazing glory of autumn and I wax poetical over the seasons far too often. Poetical isn't even properly a word, so I should stop waxing it unless I want it to get stickey.

You know my all purpose excuse: it's the weather. And it really is- I'm happy, and full of joy over the incredible beauty of everything and everyone, but...(and there's always a but, isn't there?) I can't even describe the way the snow makes everything ache. Every little loneliness and sadness is magnified beneath the ice crystals that frost the windows.

Waxing poetic. Sorry. Pensive is a good word for it. Contemplative. Filled with infinite joy and infinite despair. (Full of excessive bullshit and overused, flowery turns of phrase.) It's dramatic weather, snow. A proper snow doesn't do anything by halves, and you start to live the extremes acted out in the weather.

I'm sure the weather has been partly influencing my O Fortuna obsession (2 orchestra versions and 6 remixes and still counting). Dramatic music for dramatic weather and a decidedly melodramatic outlook on life. (My favorite is still the Therion version because it doesn't drop down to such a pianissimo that I can't hear the second verse and I'm reasonably sure it's the whole song and not just bits cut and remixed. How can you remix "O Fortuna" and not include the part where they actually sing "Ooooohhhh, Fortuuuunaaaaaa!"? I mean, really now.)

*sigh* Yay, playing in the snow. Yay, not being a monkey. Yay, Velvet Goldmine and gay sex. Yay, strangely random and vaguely intimate questions. Not so much yay with the silence and the sadness and the desire to disappear. Not feelin' that particular groove, really.

And here I was intending to go to the library tomorrow to do work. I'm not taking Seph out in this weather, hells no! ...Well, I might, but I'd have to wrap him up in a plastic bag, first. *sigh* Alas.

That sums it up fairly well: Alas.