Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Why Would you Dress
Like Abe Lincoln?

Although dressing up like Abe Lincoln IS funny, you seem to have missed the point entirely. I mean, honestly, why would you dress up like Abe Lincoln on No Pants Day?

Find out which No Pants Day outfit YOU should wear!

No Pants Day is May 7th, 2004. To find out more about No Pants Day, visit

www.NoPantsDay.com


Monday, February 23, 2004

It really is the end of the world as we know it. Dammit.

Sunday, February 22, 2004

I think theres something wrong with me. I feel lazy and tired and so lethargic almost all the time. I've been sleeping alot but it doesn't feel like it. I think I'm going to take a nap.

This isn't a very interesting update, i'm sorry. Put interesting stories as comments and that would be cool!

oh yeah. i have 2 tests next week and i'm excited! thats not normal. oh, and i found a huge orange contraption in the hall where there wasn't one before. it was awesome. Huge, and had buttons and dials and stuff about buffer gas, here, and halogen gas, here, and laser operation instructions and wires and chords. it was neat. It was on a platform with wheels. I could've rolled it away and sold it on ebay. but i'm a good person so i didn't.

or MAYBE i did!

Friday, February 20, 2004

The Magnificent Earthworm (lumbricus terrestrius)

"Earthworms are crucial for the biological activity of the soil. Darwin, in a meticulous quantitative study discovered that more than 10,500 kilograms of dry soil per acre pass through earthworms and are brought to the soil annually. This activity depends on respiration in which oxygen diffuses across the cuticle and epidermal tissue to extensive capillaries where extracellular hemoglobin binds and transports the oxygen to metabolizing tissues."
-Austin F. Riggs II

So, next time you see a little earthworm, say "thanks dude!" If they weren't around, we wouldn't be around either!

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Man, I have been feeling so lyrical lately! I've been talking to myself all evening in between studying. I love JP Java now. I love the lighting and the location and the music and the quietness. It's my new hang out. It's hands down the best coffee house for studying.

The Unordinary Raindrop

It happened today, in a most unordinary way, that a raindrop fell on my head. It was as large as a cantalope, but not shaped like one. It was eventual as death and slow as a turtle and viscous like slime. As it melted over me, it lost it's rain-drop shape, slithering down my forehead, unbroken, it covered my nose, my cheeks, my ears, my mouth, my neck, and finally, my entire body was inside of the raindrop. I was scared, because ordinarily raindrops don't do that. For what seemed like an hour, the raindrop held me in. I thought about my mother. And then it broke, and I stood cold and wet for a long moment in wonder. Finally, I noticed that there were no clouds in the sky,and that my clothes were not wet. It occured to me that I must be
alive.

Doom

Once we stirred cinnamon into
our coffee,
seriously and sensuously
looking up at intervals
and looking away at intervals,
clicking our spoons against our cups,
metal against glass,
barely tickling our eardrums,
absorbing all of the tinniest details,
remembering every bit
for later analysis.

Remember the kiss?
Remember the smells and the weather?
Remember how the potential between
our fingertips rose,
precariously climbing higher and higher,
before we touched for the first time
and closed the circuit?
The flow was amazing, instantaneous
and wonderful and plummeting.
If only we'd known the consequences.

I have learned something new from all this.
We are disposable.
We are homogenous.
We are negated.
All terms cancel.
The reality is not half of a sine function
squashed to steep amplitudes of ecstasy.
It is the average of all eventual outcomes,
a line.

The battery dies because there is no longer a driving force.
The energy of the universe is a constant.

I learned to embrace doom.


Joe

His shirt has stripes and his ears
are only partly visible to me,
from here,
His jaw, up to his hairline,
which dips below his ears,
proclaims the existance of an 8 o'clock shadow
of hair
on his chin,
it's also on his wrists and forearms,
but I can only be sure about one arm,
the one that holds his face, that I can see, that
is pushing the skin on his head into wrinkles,
as he works on something
on a piece of paper,
with his other hand,
in front of a laptop
on a square table.

He looked up at me and I stopped writing.
And his eyes seem brown.
And of course I looked away.
If I had been on drugs,
I might have approached him in awe,
and touched his face,
and felt thrilled by the presence of a more connected reality.
But I am not on a drug.
And boundaries don't just fall away.
They help us deal with the uncertainties of everyday interactions,
with people we don't know who are hard to trust.
I don't think I'll ever see him again.


The Gorilla

Hold me! The woman proclaimed
to everyone in the room.
It is music to us,
this up and down motion of her vocal chords,
biological and physical and transcendent.
Gaze into the eyes of another,
and her words
become emotions
and thoughts
and hormones released
and hearts beating
and life wanting to create more life.
She sang for us.

He sang for them
the bullfrog in the pond,
desperately desireful,
because there were other bullfrogs in the pond.
Their croaking reaches a human ear
Their croaking reaches thousands of small ears,
Their croaking joins the chaotic chorus,
the rustling leaves,
the honks and exhaust-emitting mufflers,
the rumbling engines,
the grackles at dawn,
the conversations and footfalls of walkers,
the cacophony, the melancholy, the painfully visible silent suction of
space
pulling us in,
the intense joy of vibrations

How can it be?
How could we have missed the Giant Gorilla
making his way slowly through the darkened room,
his arms swinging forward, purposfully and carefully?

We were consumed by our own thoughts.
That's how!

Monday, February 16, 2004

Ode by an Orange

I am a spherical permutation
of the peaceful penetration
of empty space.

I am hard-shelled and soft-cored,
parsed by semi-permeable, edible, delectable,
membranous, cellular, translucent
sacks of orange juice!

I am bounded, I am rounded,
I am an electrical conductor,
I am multitudinous in Florida,
I am orange hear me roar!
In numbers too large to ignore,
We are strong, but not invincible.
We are fated to return,
to the mother solvent.

Once peeled, and revealed,
the choice is dead and gone.
It is chemically undo-able,
My short-lived youth unrenew-able,
Let go of hanging on.
It is futile.



link



Friday, February 13, 2004

Oh yeah, so Janet Jackson's breasts have been huge news lately. Which is ridiculous. She accidentally flashed everyone at the Super Bowl so they talked about it on all the news stations for days on end. It was sadly funny, depressing, painfully ironic and preposterous, the way our country's news reacted. They're just breasts. For gods sake.

I just want to record that I held a book in my hands yesterday that is for sale on eBay for 499 dollars. It was really thrilling. It is called Quantum Mechanics and Integrals and is by Richard Feynman himself. Here is what it looks like:



link

I want to buy that book with all my heart and soul but I'm too poor.

Also, Lia's Robby is visiting from Pennsylvania (or some place around there) and he's just like this guy:


link

So I approve!

In other news, Alex turned 20.

I am feeling better. I was sick all last week. Tuesday night I was a mess. A bigger mess than I've been in a long time. I felt hysterical and frantic, and sick and useless and weak.

Two nights ago I bought 25 pounds of pinto beans and 25 pounds of rice, so if anyone has any good pinto beans recipies, please let me know. I also bought kale. It tastes really good.

It might snow tonight! In Texas!

I'm going to try to go to Idaho over the summer.

Ok that's all. Have a good day everyone!





Tuesday, February 10, 2004

An Update!

-I like to use exclamation points in my writing, because in my speaking I exclaim alot, and a plain sentence looks too plain to me.
-I have a cold, so I've been eating lots of garlic. I smell like garlic.
-Reading about magical places with a little girl is fun.
-Physics is fun. Dr. Stanton is neat. I emailed him about this wonderful site I found, and he emailed me back saying that he was in Boulder, Colorado, at this very moment, in an office in the physics department. That's where the website was created! So I asked him to thank the website's creator for me.
-And finally, some quotes from my wise friends:

"Everyone must die" -Nida, throughout the day, every day.
"The key to happiness is low expectations" -Alex, on happiness.
"I didn't hate you, so much as the idea of you" -Trent.

Also, let it be known that Trent and me are cool now, both working to shake off the haters in our respective worlds. Ok, off to feenish homework. :)

Friday, February 06, 2004

THE World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.


By William Wordsworth