25 things.

this is the thing to do right now, i guess.

25 random things about me:

1. i'd rather it be 20 degrees outside than 90. i hate sweating more than anything.
2. i spend an embarrassingly large amount of time watching things you youtube. i am not proud of this.
3. i was born in l.a.
4. the end of "mr. holland's opus" always makes me cry. every.single.time.
5. my first car was a white '93 honda accord. sometimes i wish i still had it.
6. i love sending packages to people. you might say it's my love language.
7. right now, my hair is the longest it's ever been. this probably means i'll chop it all off soon.
8. i'm addicted to diet coke.
9. my 2nd grade teacher only had half a fingernail on her pointer finger and it scared the crap out of me.
10. i miss eating breakfast at wolfgangs with my friends every week.
11. forever and always george clooney will be my celebrity crush.
12. i hate running. every second of it. but i do it anyway.
13. i have gone to 3 backstreet boys concerts.
14. when we were little, my best friend and i made a time capsule-threw a bunch of stuff in a shoebox so that future generations could learn about us. i'm not sure we ever buried it.
15. i love choir.
16. i just bought a bag for $300. and it's beautiful and i feel fine about it.
17. i could live on bread and cheese. but then would be obese.
18. i like white wine better than red wine. this probably means i am not as classy as some people i know.
19. i love 'the west wing'.
20. the stone wall in a field behind a manor house in london is my happy place.
21. i am not a pleasant person before 9am. Don't talk to me.
22. sometimes i talk to myself outloud in my car. i have a long commute. stop laughing.
23. i miss sitting in college classes and learning things. i had no idea how good i had it.
24. i am most comfortable in a t-shirt and jeans.
25. daily make-up essential: mascara

thread, not wax.

i got my eyebrows shaped yesterday.
wax and my skin do not get along, so i get them threaded instead.
i go to this little indian lady named dipty. she is amazing.

this is what it looks like:

i just really like billy collins.

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

Singing: The Key to a Long Life

This week's essay from "this i believe' on NPR:

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

A few years ago a friend and I realized that we both loved singing but didn't do much of it. So we started a weekly a capella group with just four members. After a year we started inviting other people to join. We didn't insist on musical experience — in fact some of our members had never sung before. Now the group has ballooned to around 15 or 20 people.

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor. A recent long-term study conducted in Scandinavia sought to discover which activities related to a healthy and happy later life. Three stood out: camping, dancing and singing.

Well, there are physiological benefits, obviously: You use your lungs in a way that you probably don't for the rest of your day, breathing deeply and openly. And there are psychological benefits, too: Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call "civilizational benefits." When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Well here's what we do in an evening: We get some drinks, some snacks, some sheets of lyrics and a strict starting time. We warm up a bit first.

The critical thing turns out to be the choice of songs. The songs that seem to work best are those based around the basic chords of blues and rock and country music. You want songs that are word-rich, but also vowel-rich because it's on the long vowels sounds of a song such as "Bring It On Home To Me" ("You know I'll alwaaaaays be your slaaaaave"), that's where your harmonies really express themselves. And when you get a lot of people singing harmony on a long note like that, it's beautiful.

But singing isn't only about harmonizing pitch like that. It has two other dimensions. The first one is rhythm. It's thrilling when you get the rhythm of something right and you all do a complicated rhythm together: "Oh, when them cotton balls get a-rotten, you can't pick very much cotton." So when 16 or 20 people get that dead right together at a fast tempo that's very impressive. But the other thing that you have to harmonize besides pitch and rhythm is tone. To be able to hit exactly the same vowel sound at a number of different pitches seems unsurprising in concept, but is beautiful when it happens.

So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.

-Brian Eno, British composer, artist, and activist

whoa. get excited.

new billy collins

Ballistics

When I came across the high-speed photograph
of a bullet that had just pierced a book-
the pages exploding with the velocity-

I forgot all about the marvels of photography
and began to wonder which book
the photographer had selected for the shot.

Many novels spring to mind
including those of Raymond Chandler
where an extra bullet would hardly be noticed.

Nonfiction offered too many choices-
a history of Scottish lighthouses,
a biograhy of Joan of Arc and so forth.

Or it could be an anthology of medieval literature,
the bullet having just beheaded Sir Gawain
and scattered the band of assorted pilgrims.

but later, as I was drifting off to sleep,
I realized that the executed book
was a recent collection of poems written
by someone of whom I was not fond
and that the bullet must have passed through
his writing with little resistance

at twenty-eight hundred feet per second,
through the poems about his childhood
and the ones about the dreary state of the world,

and then through the author’s photograph,
through the beard, the round glasses,
and that special poet’s hat he loves to wear.

"It's nothing," returned Mrs Chick. "It's merely change of weather. We must expect change."

A little Charles Dickens to welcome the cold weather. Winter is here to stay, I'm afraid.

A few things:

1. I really like the last story on this episode of 'This American Life.' It's Anne Lamott reading her story, 'Knocking on Heaven's Door.' Let it buffer for a little while and then start listening at 38:55. It'll make you laugh and it's a really touching story. I had forgotten how much I like her until I heard this.

2. I just started "The Hour I First Believed" by Wally Lamb. It's his first book in 10 years and I've been looking forward to it for a while. And it's really good. Broken people living broken lives, which is classic Wally Lamb. Not feel good books, but you get sucked in quickly.

3. This is my new hat. Maria says I look like all the high schoolers in Vancouver...but I don't care. I bought it at this little boutique a few blocks from my apartment on Sunday afternoon (right after Kate and I had brunch at 'The Golden Nugget Pancake House', which is just as classy as it sounds). I like it. And it's really warm. And I just kind of want to be a hippie.
4. My hair is disgusting and needs to be cut and colored yesterday. Hence the hat. I'll call tomorrow and make an appointment for next week when I'm in GR for Thanksgiving. If you're going to be there, we should hang out. :)

5. I want a tattoo. I don't know what or where.