February 2011
49 posts
1 tag
“Things that disorient me: when they switch the juice lines. WHERE’S MY...”
– Andrew is living the college good life.
2 tags
“Now he’s bigger than me, taller than me, and he’s older than me, and...”
– Jaden Smith
2 tags
More updates from Libya: →
(23 February 2011)
“Earlier today, I spoke on the phone with Ali Ahmida, a University of New England political science professor whose work explores power, agency, and anti-colonial resistance in Libya. Here are some of his thoughts:
….On What America Should Do: First, pressure the Libyan regime through the UN to negotiate a peaceful transition and stop the killing. Second, really...
Some of the best moments of winter
are opening the oven a few inches and standing over it while the heat rushes out to float the ends of your hair around. Your hands are hot for the first time in weeks. Every breath you take is desert air, and dry, and warm. And then you reach in to collect whichever masterpiece you’ve just prepared, and no matter what it is it always tastes good.
1 tag
Where we live, kids learn to play recorder
in elementary school. I used to be, like, a recorder pro; in fourth grade my parents bought me a fancy wooden one, and I took it with me every week to lessons with the same old German lady who taught me watercolor. When we covered it in school the next year, I rocked that pipe music. Really. But I haven’t played it since, taking after trumpet and then choir instead.
So here I am as a...
1 tag
Every life is extra-ordinary. That's the point.
drinkyourjuice:
Adem - Something’s Going To...
1 tag
It's raining ice!
I wanted to make egg salad today and figured I’d boil a bunch of eggs while I was at it, so Mum brought up forty-eight eggs she found in the back of the bottom shelf of the fridge in our basement. The expiration date was mid-October, which means last year.
We joked that perhaps that’s October of the year before- but to check if the eggs were still good, before cracking one I shook it....
1 tag
Theme song for the Zombie Apocalypse?
You’re just supposed to put your music on shuffle, right, and see which comes up? Well, theoretically my apocalypse is going to happen to the tune of “Blue Ridge Mountains” by Fleet Foxes.
No screaming guitars, no dramatic organs, or choirs, or heavy drums. A fairly quiet song, even happy. But in a way I guess it’s strangely appropriate-
Let’s drive to the...
1 tag
WEIRD THINGS APPEARED
IN MY "DRAFTS" FOLDER OF MY PHONE, ALLUVASUDDEN. And the only things they have in common is that they were all sent to Ariana, they all talk about things that once worried me, they all end abruptly, and I don't remember them.
.
Can't decide if my phone remembered them secretly for a hundred days, or if they duplicated themselves in cyberspace and have just now wandered back to me. If you've got an explanation, I could use one.
.
1: I don't want to want a job. I miss Andrew. He's the only one I miss guiltlessly, actually- I should write to Dillon more often, and should call/find you more often. I'm so fucking sick of babysitting. Sometimes it's nice but then you suddenly remember why it isn't. If they were related to me it'd be okay, bu
2: What if he doesn't come back? I mean that for Kyle and for Dillon. And what if Kyle doesn't metaphorically come back? Not that Dillon was ever metaphorically here. Is it too weird that I think I could be a fine single mom? Though that's only related in the most vague sense. Maybe Jed and Livingston appear
3: Trea sprained his ankle and is at least still predictably unreliable so we postponed which is mostly for the better or I'd be very down and pensive the w
.
For the record, Ariana received the complete versions of these texts many months ago when I sent them.
Andrew is my best friend.
Dillon is one of my best friends, and a marine.
Kyle is Ariana's once-boyfriend, and a soldier.
Jed is Ariana's imaginary-perfect-fellow-archetype named for-the-sake-of-conversation.
Livingston is that also, but mine.
Trea is a boy I kind of dated for a while and don't speak to any longer.
I am confused.
Arrive home at two in the morning.
House silent, all occupants asleep upstairs. An unfamiliar freshly-baked, half-eaten cake lurking unguarded on the table.
What have you been up to while I was away? Because it tastes divine.
1 tag
We decided spontaneously to go
to Manhattan, so I’ve spent the last hour in bed with the lights off and trying to convince my body it slept, and now it is time to leave. Things are good.
South Carolina seeks its own currency →
I can’t even.
New article title:
Politician Pitts is Utter Fool and Dangerous Social Influence.
Because honestly, this article has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the state of South Carolina has apparently never been satisfied with the word “united”. Though that’s true. Neither does it have anything to do with the fact that the Republican party is so busy...
Things I never thought I'd look forward to:
picking up my sisters from school. Especially in warm seasons, when I can walk there and back. But even in the car today- after the hellos, one asks the obvious question: Where’s mom? And I say, it’s Valentine’s Day, where do you think she is? And yes, says the other, ha, she’s on a date with Dad! I confirm they’re out to lunch, and then confirm the girls can roll...
“And- though it may be madness- I will take to the grave your precious longface,...”
– Joanna Newsom, Sawdust and Diamonds
You know what's really awesome?
Plumbing.
Thanksgiving should happen in January, because I promise the first item on my list would be “modern conveniences”. Plumbing, I mean it, respect the miracle. In exciting news, though- we’ve been told to expect fifty-mile-per-hour winds tomorrow!
February 2011- "How the Internet gets inside us" →
“Blair’s and Pettegree’s work on the relation between minds and machines, and the combination of delight and despair we find in their collisions, leads you to a broader thought: at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the...
2 tags
3 tags
10 tags
CHICKEN FRIED RICE.
BEST.
1 tag
March 2008 - "Scientists are using biomaterials in... →
“Just take a look at the battery that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Angela Belcher is building with viruses that are nontoxic to humans. These viruses help molecules of gold and other chemicals bind together, catalyzing energy-producing reactions more efficiently than today’s batteries. That means a virus-based battery could be 75% smaller. ‘Biology is very...
1 tag
Things I should not be allowed to watch:
documentaries by alien conspiracists. “DID THEY LIVE UNDERWATER? DID THEY TEACH US CIVILIZATION? PLATO SAW ATLANTIS!!!”
That’s silly, says I, but WAIT maybe the Bermuda Triangle and the Dragon’s Triangle are inhabited by MERPEOPLE! Mischievous sneaky ones ecologically adapted to very specific coastal shallows east of island nations on the tropical parallel! And...
When you experience something powerfully...
what’re the physical symptoms? When anything- a song, a speech, a story, a stranger’s act of kindness, scenery, sensation, or sudden realization- makes you feel beauty through your soul into your body, what does that feel like to you? How does your body react to loveliness and transcendence?
It shocks me how many people don’t notice the signs. “My body...
Humility
Inbox: "I miss you."
Outbox: "Everyone misses me."
Outbox: "I am the party."
1 tag
While we're on the subject of my best friend,
though, let me just say I’m glad we’ve begun keeping track of internal debt in this currency of puppies, because I bet I can get half a puppy’s worth of guilt out of Andrew for him forgetting my birthday today.
Y’know, it’s possible that all of the phones and computers in New York City have been killed (Egypt-style!), or he was struck on the head and the resulting...
5 tags
kjwheeler-deactivated20120817 asked: about your recent post about seeing your best friend tomorrow: i really wanna hear what happens! i want to know how the conversation goes when you bring up everything!
1 tag
1 tag
I am nineteen years old
as of midnight, and officially in exactly five hours at 8:03am.
Just finished re-reading my
longtime favorite book- I read Ender’s Shadow for the first time in fifth grade and it’s defined much of my mindspace since- and there’s something about the story’s familiarity and core resonance which balances the genius and the wonder and the excitement of it. There’s something about the tragedy that’s both immediately striking and intimately known, something...
1 tag
My brother was sick all night
and, being seventeen, decided to skip the sleeping parents and get the night-owl sister to medicate him. So I’ve pillaged the shoebox of medicine on our fridge, and fetched him a ruined pot in case they won’t stay down, and poured him some water, and told him tough luck.
Except, instead of going back upstairs, he sat down on the floor right there, clutching his stomach in front of our...
1 tag
1 tag
Most of the time your drunk calls aren't nice.
It’s weird to me that guys will call intoxicated with “I just nearly had sex with this fat lady in a bar so my friend could hook up with hers” because how is it that the first person they think of to tell this story to is me? Weird that the thought can even exist, “I should call and tell Kathleen this story because she surely would like to hear it and then I can spend the...
1 tag
1 tag
Tonight is one of those when all the boys
I haven’t heard from decide to talk to me again. One left this poem by Koertge on my Facebook wall and said “This made me think of you.” and I’m presuming it’s because he ostensibly admires my writing but it could also be my resemblance to a book-towering child. One has just now begun texting me about sounds and Thoreau and Hey Arnold and so on, which is more than...
2 tags
“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just...
Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave your house or apartment. Go out into the world.
It’s all right to carry a notebook but a cheap one is best, with pages the color of weak tea and on the front a kitten or a space ship.
Avoid any enclosed space where more than three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks across the muffled tennis courts.
...
2 tags
1 tag
It's been a good day
and you know it when “I should probably go home” happens three and a half hours before you get in your car.
We're trying something new
where I give you this, because it is the simplest smallest poem in my current notebook. But now I want to talk about how glad I am that I get to see my best friend tomorrow.
SO GLAD.
It’s been a month now, since he left for the Pacific tropics, and I missed him. Weird things happened: without going into detail, the first half January I was very down about who-knows-what, and the second...
1 tag
You're Home
Reaching out in confidence,
knowing you are there, reaching
only to enjoy the hold.
Perfectly happy all warm,
hands on hips or ribs or shoulders,
hands in hands, or sitting with you
balanced with twisted legs twisted.
Your smell your color your texture
and everything about you is right
for me for ever. Smiling
hearing you speaking, drifting to
and forth with your breathing,...
waldeinsamkeit
-the feeling of being alone in the woods
“term that describes the pseudo-magical pull of the untamed wilderness”
Coined by Johann Ludwig Tieck, a versatile writer during the German Romantic movement, in his short novel Blond Eckbert. He considered himself a rationalist in search of the Enlightenment.
Waldeinsamkeit became theme to contemporary and later pieces, including Ralph...
1 tag
Movie trivia!
I look at the mayor and see Richard Alpert. I look at the cop and see Sirius Black. The rest of the film, I see Jack the Cowboy. Which movie am I watching?
(Hint: Jack the Cowboy is in love with the sister of Jack-known-as-Jake-the-Cowboy who was in love once with the villain in the movie I am watching who was a peasant knight in one of my brother’s favorite movies.)
“I have washed a thousand spiders down the drain: spiders’ ghosts hang...”
– Joanna Newsom, Only Skin 