Cozy Rain

The best kind of rain, of course, is a cozy rain. This is the kind the anonymous medieval poet makes me remember, the rain that falls on a day when you'd just as soon stay in bed a little longer, write letters or read a good book by the fire, take early tea with hot scones and jam and look out the streaked window with complacency.
~Susan Allen Toth, England For All Seasons


Here's hoping you get some cozy rain soon.
Naps all around!
-M

Hey, bologna rocks.

Here's to all of the students who get by on the sheer force of creativity and imagination. 'Cause, hey, if you can't draw a straight line to it, it's best to distract them with circles. Cheers!















How I pass Theory of Knowledge
I watched them paint their bodies
And thrash with pagan, rhythmic dancing
They gave me a mother
Who carried me in her womb
And there she whispered her secrets to me
I let a brother die,
I loved the man they stoned,
I killed the woman he wanted,
I abandoned her weeping child
I fell from the violent warmth that she carried me in
And they tagged me
Swathed in cotton and sterility
They herded me into a box
And sliced lines into my chest
I was measured and divided
They swore that they would find me
"I am here! I am here," I shouted
And then, "I am clean"
I wept for my mother
I curled into a box
I danced, painted and pagan
I drew lines
I fell to their floor shouting!
I fell to their floor spinning!
"I am here! I am here," I shouted
And then, "What am I? What am I?"
I fell to their floor

10 points for anyone who can relate this to knowing!
Oh, good old bologna, you serve me so well...
-M

What Women Want

“I once hand made a girlfriend a 50 page leather bound book. It was an illustrated fairy tale about a princess and an eccentric magician. The magician had his heart broken so badly in the past that instead of keeping it in his chest where it could easily get hurt again, he kept it locked up in a rusty trunk under his bed, where it had withered into a shriveled apricot. A lot happens that can’t really be summed up in one paragraph, but at the end, his apricot heart swells to the size of a house and they end up living happily ever after inside of it. It took me about a month to make, it was all rhyming, hand painted… something I was pretty gosh darn proud of. I really poured a lot into it, and I think it’s filled with some of my best paintings yet. Sadly in real life the story didn’t end as happy as it did in the book. Let’s just say I’m living alone in that giant apricot heart at the moment.”
-Matthew Gray Gubler

Really, guys. All we girls need is a 50-page hand-painted leather-bound fairy tale to make us happy.

Happy Valentines Day!
-M

What connects us can be beautiful.

Connectedness, of ideas, lives, neurons and brain hemispheres, has always amazed me. That everything I say, do or think has been said, done or thought before is beautiful to me. This network of man, repeated across generations, centuries, time itself, in the most intricate and delicate patterns, is a comfort to me. I am not alone. I am not the first to fear death, or wonder what universal hand guides me. I am not lost in a sea of faceless, senseless entities, rather, I am strung together in a web of humanity so vast and consuming that I can scarcely construe its depth. I am apart of something significant.

Take poetry, for instance. How many love poems have ever been written? How many bitter sonnets, or symbolic haiku, or provoking free-verses? They are innumerable. And they speak, essentially, of the same thoughts over and over again. Yet they never fail to captivate us. Does it matter that they are repetitions of an idea? Not really. What matters is that these poets, like Whitman, Yeats, Cummings, left themselves behind for us, to connect us with them across time, so they may live again in our hearts and we may live with them as they were. What matters is that I have felt just as Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats and E.E. Cummings and they have felt just as I feel. And isn't that magical?

I am enchanted by this idea, and it is because of this that I am perplexed at the resentment of this connectedness. Ayn Rand, the great woman who spearheaded the individualist and objectivist movement, was no doubt an insightful novelist with provocative ideas. However, we pass her torch of individualism with such fervor and constitution that we begin to desperately separate ourselves to preserve the idea. Think of the myriad ways in which we separate ourselves: race, ethnicity, sex, religion, socioeconomic class, even time itself. And so, to prove ourselves as individuals, we end up splitting the network into even smaller, but still basically collectivist groups. We revere the individual, but hate the strange. This is the paradox that drives our society.

And why? The individual can be just as beautiful within the network, perhaps even more so. For the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and each of us, as small as we are compared to our world, play a significant role in the network of society, time, humanity. We should not fear or resent what connects us, for with it, we are brought together. We are united. We are no longer alone. We become whole.

Then again, what do I know? =)
-M

Nurturing Creativity

There comes a time for each of us to create. And with this creativity there is always the sense of fear, of inadequacy, of the lack of fulfillment. However, all of this can be cured by trusting your creativity to your magic-fairy-genius. Nifty, eh?

Still confused? Here's the wonderful talk given by Elizabeth Gilbert (you might have heard of her) that explains it all. So go! Unlock your house-elf genius!



OLE, geniuses!
-M

Have you ever thought about the future?

I've always been a lover of science fiction, partly because of the insane gadgetry and the awesome action sequences, but mostly because of the futures this genre creates. I wonder if we really will have hover cars and jet packs, a host of alien creatures living along side with us, and hotels in different galaxies in our future.






Will our future be post-apocalyptic and survivalist like The Road, Mad Max, The Stand?

Or will it be techno-junkie galactic industrial like Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Total Recall?

Or, perhaps, will our future be the same? Will we remain stagnant and unchanging?

And all of this wondering about our future made me wonder about the futures of past generations. Is this, now, what they had planned for their futures? Do we disappoint with our lack of hover cars and alien friends? Or were they able to come to grips with a pragmatic evolution of their society rather than an idealistic one?

Interestingly enough, here's an illustration of what past generations thought the 50's would look like:

Four levels of city? That sounds pretty awesome to me, but, as we all know, it never happened. It still hasn't happened. So what does this mean? Clearly, our foresight needs some work, right? The truth is that society evolves gradually, slowly towards the future. We may never have a hover car in my generation, or the one following, or the generation after that, or so on and so forth. But that shouldn't stop the science fiction future, or even invalidate it. Because maybe we will be eating McDonald's in outer space with our giant alien friends one day. Who knows? That's the great thing about the future. No one has the ability to predict what's going to happen, and that gives us the greatest creative freedom. Time gives us the luxury to construct glorious futures, exciting, other-worldly futures.

And these what-if futures might just be the best thing about our future.

Who knows, really?

-M

The New Trend in Fruit Protection

Have you ever packed a banana for lunch, only to open up your bag four hours later and find a bruised, squishy mess? I know I have. It's sad, because I really do love bananas.

Well no longer! They've now patented and mass produced the....BANANA GUARD!



That's right. Your bananas are locked and loaded.

Oh, and if you happen to be looking for other guards for fruits of various sizes they've got those too. They even have a sandwich guard made of environmentally-friendly plastic!

You can pick up all of this and more at BananaGuard.com


Seriously, who comes up with this stuff?
I'd like to meet them.
-M