New Year

Webs of starlight stretched out for miles across the sky.

The best stargazing I’ve ever witnessed.

As I was driving home,

I asked for a shooting star,

And whether it was New Year’s luck or something else,

I don’t know,

But as I stood in my driveway,

I saw it dart across the sky.

Magic straight from space.

Magic at three a.m.

In nowheresville.

No-where-I’d-rather-be-sville,

At least in that moment it was.

Moments of quiet reflection-

Of laughter and modest pride

Of simplicity and

Delicate dreams we pray burst into existence.

Moments that sparkle and bubble over

The tops of champagne glasses.

Proseco glasses. Asti Spumanti glasses.

So here we are in 2012,

With the whole year stretched out in front of us.

A blank canvas

Just asking for a masterpiece.

Asking us to remember,

Who we are and what we want.

Asking us to forget,

About limitations of the past.

Asking us to make this

A year for the books. 

Photo Credit

What You Taught Me

"Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; 

the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds."

-Virgina Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise. 

 - Alice Walker

 

I find a fatal flaw
in the logic love
and go out of my head.

You, love, are a sinking stone
that will never elope.
Get use to the lonesome
-The Shins

Largest Living Organism!

Sequoia National Park yesterday.
what an experience!!

Can't wait to put some photos up. Theviews and trees themselves were
unreal.

Headed to LA now, though,
and cant post well from my iPod.

A quick quote from StoryPeople.com,
which sums up my trip so far:

"She said she usually cries at least once a day,

Not because she was sad,

But because the world was so beautiful

And life was so short."

Memorize This

I'm reading Moonwalking with Einstein- The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer right now, and am completely mind blown.  He discusses memory as a dying art. The current chapter I'm in describes how far we've fallen since the golden ages of the Greek. Back then, they memorized scrolls. They internalized words, and learned them. Today, we skim. We read billboards and text messages. Some of us read a book in a week, or a day. When we move this quickly, we fail to absorb the content of what we lay our eyes on.

Foer described one guy who literally compiled an entire electronic database of his life. He recorded every conversation, scanned every sticky-note, thank you letter and tax return into his hard drive so that he would have every moment easily accessible. While I think this is a bit excessive, (OK, absolutely mental) I agree that we need to take more in. Life moves too quickly. They say we forget moments at about the same rate we relive new ones. I refuse to accept that as truth. We need to adapt as a society, think before we speak, and act in ways we want others to remember. (And then make an honest effort to remember more of what we do, read, hear and experience.)

While I don't want to store every moment of my life, or  be able to remember as well as some of the characters Foer meets and describes, I do want to be better at the art. After all, the world's greatest books and documents, ancient literature, were written at a time when reading was completely different. When "reading" meant "internalizing," not taking in words on a page for the sake of brief entertainment. Memory gives meaning.

More about Moonwalking with Einstein and Joshua Foer

• Rated one of the best books of the year on Amazon
• Foer appeared on The Colbert Report back in March
• Review appeared in the New York Times
• Appeared on 99% website

Go out and read it!!

Twenty Seven Club

Kind of a morbid name, you have to admit. This post goes out to all those musical artists who died at the young age of 27. There's even a whole, official site dedicated to them. (here)

Amy Winehouse: 14 September 1983 – 23 July 2011

  

Kurt Cobain: February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994
 

Jimi Hendrix: November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970

Janis Joplin:  January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970

This post is about human connection.

        So I recently began reading The Cider House Rules by John Irving. I've found it to be pretty unique so far-- I'm only 100 or so pages in and so much has unfolded already. I've found parts innocently describing bedtime stories and sections just pages later that describe dirty prostitutes and unsafe abortions.  It's gripping and different from what I've been used to lately. Here's a bit I enjoyed today:

If you love no one, and feel that no one loves you, there's no one with the power to sting you by pointing out that you're lying. If an orphan is not adopted by the time he reaches the alarming period of adolescence, he may continue to deceive himself, and others, forever. He believes he can trick the world. He believes he is invulnerable. An adolescent who is an orphan at this phase is in danger of never growing up.

        At the end of the day, what counts is human connection. It's a bit like rock climbing, if you dare indulge. You can't start a successful climb without the proper gear, and a well-trained spotter. What matters is having someone to grab your rope, before anyone else even realizes it's slipping. We need reliable lifelines who aren't deceitful, people who can see the whole face of the cliff and let us know where to put our hands and feet when we get stuck. We need friends who will stand at the top of the cliff ready to lift us out of our pits, put blankets on our back and salve on our hands. We need people to give us slack, give us tension, and help us stay safe as we crawl our way up our massive rock face. If we don't find these spotters, we'll either be too stunted to start the climb, or end up plummeting off of it somewhere in the middle.

Morals of the story:

• Adopt orphans so they have a home
• Read John Irving
• Don't go rock climbing under-prepared.

On the improbability of changing others

You laugh until you cry,

You cry until you laugh,

Everyone must breath

Until their dying breath. ~ Regina Spektor

Oxygen to the blood, body and brain is essential to life. I could get scientific and state the reasons for this, but I passed AP Bio and would like to go down a different road right now.

            You can’t change people unless they’re willing to be changed by you. I try to fight this; I try to justify actions and analyze conversations, tendencies, and emotions. I break them down as if they are scientific notations that could be re-written in a way that can be understood. In fact, most things can be boiled down, condensed, picked apart to tidbits. But, they become indistinguishable pieces of a greater idea, and these tidbits rarely represent the person as a whole, a disintegration which renders the whole process useless.   

            I’ve attempted to change the way people are or how they act or simply how I view them. It always fails. In the end, we control our own breathing. We only have power over ourselves. My telling my mother to not eat a dozen Oreos for lunch will not deter her, but rather make her angry. Debate, as much as I love it, rarely succeeds in convincing one opponent to change his position; it only provokes argument. Thinking that the person whom your heart vacantly aches for will wake up one day and realize he’s wrong will probably leave you pretty lonely. Some parts of life aren’t worth meddling with, and so we musn’t try to get involved past the points where we’ve been welcomed. Like the human instinct to breathe, some things cannot be changed until death.  

Post inspired by this Regina Spektor song. I like it, for the most part...except for the part about November Rain, for reasons left unexplained.

Go-Fish

        You may or may not have figured out by now that we're all playing a game. The game of life. It's a common phrase, yes. In this game, we have no rule books. There's room for bluffing. The world has cheaters, and people who play by their own rules. Some people bore us constantly by using the same perpetual strategies, refusing to change things up.
        The fates, or God, or whatever power you believe in deals out unique hands; these sets of cards are equipped with our hereditary info, our characteristics, our intelligence. Some of this info should remain secret. If we share our hand with anyone else, at all, we increase our chances of losing. Our cards are sacred, a special extension of ourselves. So, make sure your friends don't have any mirrors set up behind you--especially if you have something to hide.

        Secrets are bound to spill (as in England, with the recent phone hacking scandal, or the wiki-leaks incident months ago). So make sure to hold your hand tightly close to your chest, keep it safe. When asked to reveal your cards, just say "Go-Fish," let other people keep searching around for the cards they want--don't let them get off easily with your hand. When so much of our modern world focuses on over-sharing, via Facebook or Twitter, our own personal matters are the only sacred thing left.

Stair Stepper (pt 1)

More times than not, we are convinced that we aren’t doing enough. We constantly compare ourselves to those above us, and even to those on our same social or professional tier. We wonder why Joey in the next cubicle seems to make more sales, or why Angelina stars in more lead roles. Why does Susie get more phone numbers, or Stephen more athletic awards?

We ask ourselves all of these questions in vain, because life is an escalator. We climb constantly in an attempt to reach the levels of those higher than we, forgetting that those we try to catch up with are often moving too. The climb is constant. It’s perpetual. But beyond that, it's individual. To each his own revolving staircase! We will find no metal grate to receive us at the top. Instead, we must jump when we reach the end of our belt. We have to take a leap from solid ground we’ve been climbing, and pray to God that we land safely on that next moving step. To make the process harder, we must keep running, lest we fall behind the other stair steppers, our competitors.

            We see this leap at the end of very specific periods in our lives. (Think of the coined term ‘stepping-stone.’) Take, for instance, Kindergarten. A child spends each of the 2,000 or so days leading up to the first day of school learning the basic skills of life, eating and walking and engaging in short conversation. Parents teach their kids to tie their shoes, to say please and thank you and not to slurp juice boxes. A child’s brain absorbs these tidbits and compartmentalizes them daily. But they don’t remain on the “table-manners step” for long, for more challenges wait just ahead, and the belt is running out. When a child turns 5, his parents must drop his tiny hands and watch him leap onto their next set of stairs: school and education. 

[Part 2]