I must have found this line appealing after a really bad date. It's written by beat poet, Gregory Corso. I highly recommend going to his website below and reading the full poem, “Marriage,” as well as the short poem, “Last Night I Drove a Car.”
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/corso/onlinepoems.htm
Monday, November 12, 2007
Monday Quote
"It's not that I'm incapable of love it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes."
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Legally Blind
I have really bad eyesight (I think I'm legally blind) so I have to wear glasses. But something I love doing is taking my glasses off at night and driving around. I probably shouldn't confess this to the Oregon DMV when I apply for my license here.
Things look so majestic with blurred vision. Green, red and yellow traffic lights look like glowing fuzzy cotton balls suspended in mid-air. Street signs become floating canvases of light. Headlights shoot by me like comets. I follow a black asphalt abyss because I can’t see the lines or boundaries. Everything is soft, muted, smoothed over. I don't know what the point of this entry is. Maybe it's to encourage all of us to embrace our imperfections because what we lack in some areas creates beauty in others. I think it's by distorting the obvious that you see the incredible. I also hope I don’t drive off the road in these circumstances.
Things look so majestic with blurred vision. Green, red and yellow traffic lights look like glowing fuzzy cotton balls suspended in mid-air. Street signs become floating canvases of light. Headlights shoot by me like comets. I follow a black asphalt abyss because I can’t see the lines or boundaries. Everything is soft, muted, smoothed over. I don't know what the point of this entry is. Maybe it's to encourage all of us to embrace our imperfections because what we lack in some areas creates beauty in others. I think it's by distorting the obvious that you see the incredible. I also hope I don’t drive off the road in these circumstances.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Pencil This In
As 2008 approaches, I have to buy a new daily planner. I find this particular errand stressful. Do you ever shop for a daily planner and get really overwhelmed with the realization that you're purchasing one year of your future life? Who will I meet, where will I go—this will all be revealed in the pages I’m about to buy. That's pretty amazing when you stop to think about it.
My problem is I always have morbid thoughts when I buy a daily planner. I think things like, What if I die before I use it all? Wouldn’t it be a waste of money? I also think I’m jinxing myself. Isn’t it vain of me to assume I’ll be so overwhelmed with social engagements that I’ll need to write it all down or I’ll forget? What if I’m never invited to anything? My planner will only exacerbate what an unpopular, unloved social outcast I am. I'll open up my planner in public and people will see it and think, “Aww, that girl has so many blank lines in her planner, especially during the evening and weekend spaces. Doesn't she have any friends?” Or, when I open up my planner next to a friend to compare weekend plans, hers will be packed with events—some even starred and highlighted. Meanwhile, mine will have one or two random reminders, like, “time to cut those nails.”
I put a lot of time into picking out the right planner because I'm superstitious that its cover will somehow directly affect the overall year I’m going to have. I don't know why I believe a little notebook I buy will enable that kind of power, but has it been tested? If not, it should be. For example, I don't want to get a girly planner with a kitty cat and rainbows on the cover, or my whole year could be obnoxious and stupid, filled with social outings like “stamp party” or “knit a hot pad lesson” penciled in. I don't want a daily planner that has a happy quote on every page, or I might feel bad writing something down like: go out drinking with girls tonight because I hate my life and men are dicks. If I can't be honest about my daily happenings, what's the point? On that note, you don’t want to write down really personal things incase you forget your planner at work and someone opens it up to see you’ve reminded yourself to: “price pregnancy tests online,” or “call about the results of STD test.” Ugh, it’s all so frustrating.
Does anyone else ever think this much into buying a daily planner? Probably not.
My problem is I always have morbid thoughts when I buy a daily planner. I think things like, What if I die before I use it all? Wouldn’t it be a waste of money? I also think I’m jinxing myself. Isn’t it vain of me to assume I’ll be so overwhelmed with social engagements that I’ll need to write it all down or I’ll forget? What if I’m never invited to anything? My planner will only exacerbate what an unpopular, unloved social outcast I am. I'll open up my planner in public and people will see it and think, “Aww, that girl has so many blank lines in her planner, especially during the evening and weekend spaces. Doesn't she have any friends?” Or, when I open up my planner next to a friend to compare weekend plans, hers will be packed with events—some even starred and highlighted. Meanwhile, mine will have one or two random reminders, like, “time to cut those nails.”
I put a lot of time into picking out the right planner because I'm superstitious that its cover will somehow directly affect the overall year I’m going to have. I don't know why I believe a little notebook I buy will enable that kind of power, but has it been tested? If not, it should be. For example, I don't want to get a girly planner with a kitty cat and rainbows on the cover, or my whole year could be obnoxious and stupid, filled with social outings like “stamp party” or “knit a hot pad lesson” penciled in. I don't want a daily planner that has a happy quote on every page, or I might feel bad writing something down like: go out drinking with girls tonight because I hate my life and men are dicks. If I can't be honest about my daily happenings, what's the point? On that note, you don’t want to write down really personal things incase you forget your planner at work and someone opens it up to see you’ve reminded yourself to: “price pregnancy tests online,” or “call about the results of STD test.” Ugh, it’s all so frustrating.
Does anyone else ever think this much into buying a daily planner? Probably not.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Trees Can Paint
When Adam regales me of his day, I tend to zone out because it usually sounds something like, “Today I looked at the effects of water velocity on the attachment rates of a parasitic spore to salmon…”
Yeah. Fascinating. But today, he told me about a woman he heard speak at a conference that even caught my short attention span. Nalini Nadkarni, an environmental studies professor at The Evergreen State College in Washington is combining art and science to motivate everyone to care more about the environment. More specifically: trees.
People say trees don’t move. As if by taking away movement, we dehumanize them. To make trees look less than human makes it easier to bulldoze over thousands of acres every day. To illustrate that trees are living, breathing beings, Nalini discussed her experiment of tying a paint brush, dipped in green paint, to the branch of a Douglas Fur. She let the wind move the branch around and paint brush strokes on a piece paper for a couple minutes. Then, she took measurements of those strokes, calculated the number of branches and needles and estimated that this single trees moves over 180,000 miles in a year.
This is just one of the many innovative ways she is trying to give nature a voice and make people appreciate and respect the environment. What I love about this message is that by combining science and art, she gives nature a human side. In English class we call this personification—to give human characteristics to non-living things. But the point is, trees are living things—we’ve just been taught to ignore that. If everyone followed Nalini and took their own passions to a creative level to reach a larger audience, imagine what we could accomplish. It takes people like her to make a difference. I think we should all make tree branches paint for a day and then hang those pictures in our homes and offices. How beautiful would that be?
Yeah. Fascinating. But today, he told me about a woman he heard speak at a conference that even caught my short attention span. Nalini Nadkarni, an environmental studies professor at The Evergreen State College in Washington is combining art and science to motivate everyone to care more about the environment. More specifically: trees.
People say trees don’t move. As if by taking away movement, we dehumanize them. To make trees look less than human makes it easier to bulldoze over thousands of acres every day. To illustrate that trees are living, breathing beings, Nalini discussed her experiment of tying a paint brush, dipped in green paint, to the branch of a Douglas Fur. She let the wind move the branch around and paint brush strokes on a piece paper for a couple minutes. Then, she took measurements of those strokes, calculated the number of branches and needles and estimated that this single trees moves over 180,000 miles in a year.
This is just one of the many innovative ways she is trying to give nature a voice and make people appreciate and respect the environment. What I love about this message is that by combining science and art, she gives nature a human side. In English class we call this personification—to give human characteristics to non-living things. But the point is, trees are living things—we’ve just been taught to ignore that. If everyone followed Nalini and took their own passions to a creative level to reach a larger audience, imagine what we could accomplish. It takes people like her to make a difference. I think we should all make tree branches paint for a day and then hang those pictures in our homes and offices. How beautiful would that be?
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