Ali's Trip to Puerto Rico

this is awesome and i'm totally jealous.

Sketches, 1

I am a boy, eagerly sitting in CCD, prior to the settling in of my Irish Guilt, sharing a classroom with an elderly priest and a strange girl.

She is always wearing a purple, oversized jacket on top of a white sweater. Her hair is always nestled into a clumbsy ponytail. Her frames are out of style by at least twenty years. She is very far from being even decently attractive.

And she always is paying attention. Vividly, she sits in her chair, aside from her desk, with her elbow resting heavily on her knee. It is her hand I am focusing on - she has it turned backwards. Her chin is resting in the heel of her hand, in that groove between the end of the palm and the thumb bulge. Everyone's been in this position before, at some point. The whole thing looks awkward and uncomfortable.

I try it out. It's not as bad as I thought, the weight of your head is off your shoulders for a bit, not bad. Five minutes pass. My elbow starts to dig into my knee. I sneak another look at her.

She's still sitting like that only now she has her fingers dancing across her lip, now tapping her nails against her teeth. I am getting grossed out. I know my hands are dirty but hers? She looks like she doesn't even shower or use deodorant. No one is sitting near her. Her dancing fingers remind me of a bunch of spiders running across her face. This makes me smile a little and sort of chuckle. She looks over and sees me smirking. She smiles back, still having spiders dancing on her face. I look at the board real quick. The priest has some stupid picture of a rainbow and a pit and some fire and some other bullshit he probably considers "high art" up there.

He turns and tells a joke, one person giggles.

And that was the way class would go for an hour: he would say pathetic jokes, we would try not to fall asleep, and she smiles. And she giggles. And she sort of glows. And she has her arm twisted around the whole time.

I fucking hate her.

Every single time I am sitting like she would sit, my head in my palm, fingers over my mouth, I think of spiders. I think of CCD. I think of old glasses. I think of rainbows and a wooden crucifix and fire and smiles. And I think of Bibles and pits and off-white teeth and blue walls and the "Our Father" and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. But most of all I think of spiders.

And I change my posture.

Yesterday

Student- Isn't that a drug?
Me- What? No, 'anesthesia' is a drug. 'Anastasia' is a Russian princess.
-12 January, 2009. 10th Grade CP1 American Lit 1

I love my job.

I have loved this picture for a long time.

Pale Blue Dot
by Carl Sagan

Consider again that dot
That’s here
That’s home
That’s us

On it everyone you love,
everyone you know,
everyone you ever heard of,
every human being who ever was,
lived out their lives

The aggregate of our joy and suffering,
thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines,
every hunter and forager,
every hero and coward,
every creator and destroyer of civilization,
every king and peasant,
every young couple in love,
every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer,
every teacher of morals,
every corrupt politician,
every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’
every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there –

On a mote of dust
suspended in a sunbeam

The Earth is a very small stage
in a vast cosmic arena
Think of the rivers of blood
spilled by all those generals and emperors,
so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters
of a fraction of a dot
Think of the the endless cruelties
visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel
on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner
How frequent their misunderstandings
How eager they are to kill one another
How fervent their hatreds

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance,
the delusion we have some privileged position in the Universe,
are challenged by this point of pale light

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark
In our obscurity, in all this vastness,
there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere
to save us from ourselves

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life
There is nowhere else, at least in the near future,
to which our species could migrate
Visit, yes.
Settle, not yet.
Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world
To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another
and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot,
the only home we’ve ever known

I Tired To Do Handstands For You (Song of the Week)

Yes, it is from the iPod Nano commercial.



This is a great video concept - the thoughts that run through your mind when you first exchange phone numbers. Thank you XM Radio for listening me to this band, Low vs. Diamond.



So Ali came home from college for Thanksgiving and she got me hooked on this song, "Electric Feel" by MGMT. This band has another song, "Time to Pretend," which I'm sure I've heard somewhere else before, but I just can't place it. It is totally awesome and, best of all, it has a Rock-A-Fire Explosion version. I wanted to put up the original, but embedding has been "disabled by request," which is thumbs down. Anyway, the song rules and I seriously haven't stopped listening to it for a few days now. Posted here is the Rock-A-Fire version but if you want to know what it is like to do HARDCORE DRUGS, view the original. You will be tripping balls.

F-Stop Blues

When is it summer again? I feel the SAD kicking in...

Song of the Week

Way too late. But it's good, here are three for you. Listen to these, they're your future favorite songs.

Since the summer Pulse Parties sponsored by Nate Boyle on the Hook, I have had a special place in my heart for The Ting Tings. This song is different from their radio hit, "Shut Up and Let Me Go," but it is really a nice little melody which shows off Katie White's voice. This song is like the antipodal piece to "Shut Up," if "That's Not My Name" is the synthesis of the two. Anyway, "Traffic Light:"



I have never heard of this guy before. Maybe that's my fault, but his voice sounds much different than what he looks like. Know what I mean? This song follows much that is good with white-people-musical-standards and he's not going to revolutionize any genre, but he still is enjoyable. I'm down to give him some further listening. He feels like a cross between U2 and Dave Matthews, who I do not like. Oh well. I really don't know what I'm talking about anyway, I just like the song.




Following in the footsteps of fellow Drive Thru surf film star Donovan Frankenreiter, Tim Curran released this little gem. Telling the now-familiar story of guy who changes his life to regain a lost love, his style is average surfer-songwriter. But what the Hell, it's almost December and we all need a little summer again. Also both of these men prove that it was a terrible, terrible mistake for me to get rid of my mustache. God I miss that thing. Sigh.