me

More about me

A big factor of who I am is my passion for music, especially playing the oboe. Check out my music page for more on this. Now that I've graduated, I don't have school ensembles to play in, but hopefully Scott and I will find an orchestra to play in soon, because we're dying of music deprivation.

Moravian stuff

At Moravian I was in Oboe Ensemble, Woodwind Trio, Wind Ens., Chamber Orch., and Choir, and I also played in Lehigh University's Philharmonic and Chamber Orchestras. Music has given me so many opportunities, like meeting tons of people, making a little money at gigs, and travelling--I performed in Germany with Moravian's Wind Ensemble and Choir in March 2001 and in China with Lehigh's Orchestra in May 2002. I was also in Delta Omicron, the international music honors fraternity, where I served as the Warden for 2 years.

There's life before college?

    I graduated from Freedom High School in 1998. During my high school years, I played oboe in the orchestra, band, wind ensemble, and woodwind quintet at Freedom and I played in a woodwind quintet and in some pit orchestras outside of school.
     In high school I also worked on the school newspaper, the Patriot Pride, becoming editor my senior year. I played field hockey all four years, as goalie, and I got to be a co-captain senior year. I wish I had time and opportunities to play these days because I miss field hockey so much!
     I was a Girl Scout for 13 years, earning the Gold Award (the Girl Scout version of the Boy Scout Eagle Award). More importantly, I had lots of fun and made some awesome friends in the troop. We definitely contradicted that cookie-selling Girl Scout stereotype.

Home Music Poems Cool Photos Family Greg Joy Parents 3 Kids
Graduation Bethlehem Friends College Friends China 1 2 Germany

This was right before the hockey team's last
home game of my senior season, 1997.

Mmmm, s'mores-- the staple of
every camping trip.

Stuff that makes me happy

1. laughing
2. sun
3. friends--the real ones who hung out with me on duty nights, who love me even though I don't call enough and who accept me even though I'm weird.
4. flowers
5. surprises
6. anticipation
7. music
8. big dogs with happy tails
9. driving fast
10. sleeping
11. being appreciated
12. making someone happy
13. hiking
14. tall men
15. randomness
16. driving with the windows rolled down
17. those songs on the top 40 that you think are written about you
18. my mom and dad!
19. puppies
20. cherries
21. being accepted for my genuine, crazy self
22. good reeds (yes I'm an oboe geek)
23. May
24. regressing to my childhood--pigtails, rolling down hills, skipping, swinging, blowing bubbles, jumping on the bed...
25. sunsets
26. stars
27. watermelon
28. dressing up
29. pajamas
30. the smell of autumn
31. scary movies
32. haunted hayrides
33. chocolate...even though it can be my worst enemy!
34. big hugs that make you feel totally cozy and loved
35. genuine smiles
36. campfires
37. hot chocolate
38. singing in the car
39. highway flirting (except for the scary old guy on 76!)
40. finding something you need on sale
41. flying
42. doing something for nothing
43. finding a yellow package slip in my school mailbox
44. sleepovers
45. nectarines
46. ginger ale
47. shirley temples
48. trying something new
49. camping
50. birthdays
51. getting photos back from processing
52. my grandma
53. high heels (for the first few minutes at least, hehe)
54. water
55. meaningful conversations
56. getting to know someone really well
57. chapstick
58. getting a real letter in the mail
59. being breathless
60. sneezing
61. fireworks
62. feeling safe
63. feeling at one with nature
64. finishing the stuff on my to-do list
65. dominoes with my family at Christmas
66. all the shades of blue
67. watching the clouds
68. snow
69. Christmas carols
70. accents
71. catching up with an old friend
72. Canon in D
73. reading a good horoscope
74. cuddling
75. balloons
76. finding your favorite movie when you're channel surfing
77. just knowing you're loved and that people care
78. getting goosebumps listening to a good performance
79. crossword puzzles
80. going home
81. acoustic guitar
82. sharing
83. harmony
84. cello
85. doing the right thing
86. identifying with someone
87. a gentle breeze on a warm day
88. not having to set an alarm when you go to bed
89. finishing a paper or other arduous task
90. getting a compliment on something I do, like my writing or performing, as opposed to my physical appearance (I want be attractive but I've realized that girls are still judged way too much for physical assets/flaws, and this really bugs me.)
91. good wine (and cheese and crackers) with good friends
92. finding the words or means to express something that you just really needed to get out
93. soft M & M cookies in the Food Court
94. feeling energized and rested when I wake up (ha, I don't know if I remember what that feels like)
95. going out to eat
96. feeling like you matter
97. crying (ironic, but it really works in the long run)
98. dinner in Clewell
99. eating healthy (mmm soy milk)
100. staying up late and bonding with friends
101. having a favorite old song come on the radio
102. good concerts/music--both when I'm playing and when I'm in the audience
103. feeling in control and knowing what to do and what is to come (at least for the next day)
104. song lyrics, poems, and other literature that just says it all
105. Mom's meals--Saturday breakfasts and Sunday lunches and dinners especially
106. exploring/getting out of Bethlehem
107. having time to play with
108. naps
109. thunder storms
110.dancing in the rain
111. Kinhaven's butterscotch brownies

"Silent Noon," by D.G. Rossetti
Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,
The finger points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eyes smiled peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
All around our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge,
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorne hedge.
'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.
Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue threat loosen'd from the sky:
So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
When twofold silence was the song of love.

"Tired," by Ursula Vaughan Williams
Sleep, and I'll be still as another sleeper
holding you in my arms,
glad that you lie so near at last.
This sheltering midnight is our meeting place,
no passion or despair
or hope divide me from your side.
I shall remember firelight on your sleeping face,
I shall remember shadows growing deeper
as the fire fell to ashes and the minutes passed.

"Love Poem," by Denise Levertov
'We are good for each other.'
--X

What you give me is

the extraordinary sun
splashing its light
into astonished trees.

A branch
of berries, swaying

under the feet of a bird.

I know
other joys--they taste
bitter, distilled as they are
from roots, yet I thirst for them.

But you--
you give me

the flash of golden daylight
in the body's
midnight,
warmth of the fall noonday
between the sheets in the dark.

"To Have without Holding"
by Marge Piercy
Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say its's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

"At a Bach Concert," by Adrienne Rich
Coming by evening through the wintry city
We said that art is out of love with life.
Here we approach a love that is not pity.

This antique discipline, tenderly severe,
Renews belief in love yet masters feeling,
Asking of us a grace in what we bear.

Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer--
The vital union of necessity
With all that we desire, all that we suffer.

A too-compassionate art is half an art.
Only such proud restraining purity
Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart.

"Delta," by Adrienne Rich
If you have taken this rubble for my past
raking through it for fragments you could sell
know that I long ago moved on
deeper into the heart of the matter

If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread

"The Beautiful Changes," by Richard Wilbur
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

"For Bet," by Denise Levertov
You danced ahead of me, I took
none of those last steps with you
when your enchainement led you
uphill to the hospital and a death sentence
or before that when language
twirled round and tripped your voice.
Dancers must learn to walk
slowly across a stage, unfaltering;
we practiced that, long ago.
You faltered, but only in the wings,
that week when timor mortis
lunged at you. And you shook off
that devouring terror, held up
your head, straightened
your back and moved in grace
(they tell me--I was not at your side
but far away,
intent on a different music)
into the light of that last stage,
a hospice garden, where you could say,
breathing th eripened fragrance of August mornings,
'yes, and evenings too are beautiful.'

I was a Resident Advisor at Moravian for three years, which I loved for the great experiences I had with my residents and staff members. I was most recently an RA at South Campus living on 2nd Main for the second year in a row. It was so much fun--I had the best residents and friends ever!

RAing

Music, music, and more music

Everything else

Besides music and RAing, I worked at the HUB desk for 3 years (the information desk at the Haupert Union Building). I was also in Phi Eta Sigma (freshman honors society) and Sigma Tau Delta (how ironic is it that an English honors society chose such a bad set of letters for their name?), but the societies require almost no time commitments, which is good because I didn't have any time left.

Levi and me at my senior prom

Some poems I love