Summer Time

Today is June 20th. In two months I will be Mrs. Hayes. I wonder about that. About my name.
Will I change it? Should I change it? What's in a name? ... again I ask.... alas....

I do not know. I do know that I am deeply fulfilled by the idea of the marriage to Justin. This is a wonderful time in my life to kneel down, bow to, pray and be thankful for. It's also a time to relish in and celebrate! YAY! :D This is happy Leila, be her a Hayes or Kincaid or both and AMEN!

Tomorrow is the first day of summer. I love that. I love summer when I'm on the Northwest coast and it's a cool 60 and breezy with clear skies that reveal Mount Ranier peeking across our lawn to my window here.

How disparte from this were the days, weeks, months I spent in Indiana last summer, baking in the sweltering suffocation of humid 90+ degree weather with the air conditioner on full blast. The biting mosquitos, the crazy making heat. It made me think of the main character, Meursault, in Albert Camus' seminal work, The Stranger, as he was driven to murder in the insanity driving heat of a hot Afraican summer day on a beach.

Dead man on the beach...
I'm alive. I'm dead. I'm a stranger, killing an arab.
Staring at the sea, staring at the sand, staring in the eye that reflected down the barrel...

The Cure turned that scene in the book into a song that echoes through my head when I'm too hot and feel aggrevation, intoleration from too hot weather...

And I also think of the Siouxsie and the Banshees song, 92 degrees. She sings Not 91 or 93 but 92 hot farenheit degrees. At 92 people get irritable! I love that song...

And yes, here, in Bellevue, Washington, USA, it's a cool, clear, breezy 60 and yes, I'm thankful to be here now.

Yay for Summer Solstice! I find it to be a time of tuning my awareness to all the things that have come to be and open my eyes as wide as I can while breathing in deeply through my nose. Mmmmmmm.... Fresh air! Life! Creation! :)

Summer Reading
I just finished a huge writing project that ate up tons of my time, and, thankful to have some free time now that the project is over, I bought some new books to read this summer. I added some of them to my reading list in the right nav, but here is the complete list:

• The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore


• Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand


• Catching the Big Fish, by David Lynch (yes, the moviemaker)


• Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters, by Michael Tierno (you have to read Aristotle's Poetics before this work, in order to capture the full essence)


• Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business, by David Mamet


• Notes From My Travels, by Angelina Jolie


• Another Day in Paradise: International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories, compiled and edited by Carol Bergman


• A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah


• The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God, by Joe Eszterhas


• A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of my Husband, Danny Pearl, by Marianne Pearl


• 2007 Writer's Market, Robert Lee Brewer, Writer's Digest Books

I hope you get a chance to read some of these titles.

I'm done reading a couple, am in the process of reading a few, and plan to read all of them throughout the summer.

HAPPY READING!

I'm off to do that now.

Ciao ciao :)

and the summer is easy....