| (no subject) |
[Jan. 9th, 2007|10:41 pm] |
I went outside and looked at the stars tonight. When i wear my glasses, I can see them really clearly. I saw them so clearly that I could feel their scorching, unforgiving heat and love, and it burned my soul. But my body was still fucking cold.
I saw Orion. Orion is HUGE. And then I think I saw the Little Dipper (not sure, but it was a cluster of stars in the shape of a measuring cup). The Little Dipper is really tiny. Even though each of those stars is a million billion times the size of me.
I imagined myself floating in space really near to a star. I imagined that it warmed me up.
Finally, I collapsed to the ground. I got colder, because the stars were even farther away now. But I felt the same cruel celestial love.
A star loves you no matter how far away you are. |
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| Important Juror Information Enclosed |
[Dec. 8th, 2006|07:11 pm] |
Summons for Jury Service
in the
State of Illinois County of Kane
You are hereby summoned to serve as a grand juror.
Deborah Seyller, Circuit Clerk, Kane County, Illinois.
Your jury duty begins:
January 09 2007 8:00 am |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 15th, 2006|12:07 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Michael Nyman - The Heart Asks Pleasure First | ] |
I am faced with two opposing truths - No one likes someone who is perfect at everything, and To garner respect you need to be good at what you do. In my lj posts i've been very strict with grammar and punctuation, and i've avoided saying what i've felt like before because i had this idea where i wanted to present a good image of myself to the outside world and make people like and respect my journal. but at the same time i really just want a Spinach salad from Cedar's. the one with the olives and the feta cheese crumbles and the fried pita slices. I really feel like one right now, but of course i'm here and Cedars is about 40 miles east of here.
i'm on a really weird sleeping schedule right now, and for that i thank nancy. since thursday i've been going to bed later and later - yesterday i went to bed at noon, and today looks as though i'll be doing the same. well, that's all well and good, my cell phone is turned up to loud so that i'll hear it if someone calls me. (although, let me make it clear: unless you are a company that wants to interview me, you'll get an earful from me if you happen to wake me in the early hours of my slumber.) And so I shall retire without having enjoyed a Spinach salad, but like a gentleman I shall not get belligerent about it. Goodnight. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 8th, 2006|03:39 am] |
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Hello again to all of you in Internet land. Most of you reading this know me, but for the newcomers: I recently graduated from college with a liberal arts degree and I am searching for a job. Now, on to ( the gritty details. ) |
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| Motorcycle Safety Course |
[Jul. 24th, 2006|01:21 am] |
I can now ride a motorcycle.
This weekend I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundation Basic Rider Course at Waubonsee Community College. It went from 6-10 on Friday and 8-5 on Saturday and Sunday. On Friday my eleven classmates and I just sat in a classroom and the two instructors lectured and showed videos. On Saturday morning, we broke out the bikes. They were Hondas and Yamahas with engine sizes of 250cc if that means anything to you. In a section of the parking lot (the “range”), we did a series of exercises to get familiar with the bikes: we identified the controls, rode the clutch in first gear, and then got to riding. We rode around safety cones, practiced braking and swerving, and executed figure eights. (Of course, we made many mistakes.) At the end of the day we had more classroom time.
On Sunday we practiced again on the range, and after lunch the instructors evaluated our skills. Finally, we took a written evaluation. In the end, no one had fallen, but some had dropped the course.
I can now visit the DMV and have my license upgraded to motorcycle class. But I still lack road experience, and a bike. |
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| Ladies and Gentlemen of Leisure |
[Jun. 14th, 2006|02:24 am] |
Hello again dear readers. You've waited patiently for me all this time, and I write to you so infrequently. I am truly grateful to have you.
First of all, let me thank you all for your comments on previous posts. Although I have not responded to them all individually, they do not go unread. Let me take a moment now to clear up some confusion from a previous post: as for who gets to conduct CMAC, a few of us have done so. Our director, Bruce, conducts us in rehearsals, and Sam, a bass and former drum major, conducts us when we need to keep a beat. (Usually we can keep the rhythm just by listening to each other.) But on top of that, we need to be cued on some songs such as the Gregorian chants we performed at the May 19th concert, and Bruce selected Josh (another bass) and me to conduct specific chants. The chant I conducted is called Salve Regina; for a recording of the song from the concert, follow this link.
Since graduating I have returned home and have passed the days playing frisbee with my brother Alex and watching an unprecedented amount of TV. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, I am having trouble finding within myself a burning passion with which to guide my future plans. I am certain only of my love for my friends and my commitment to a healthy lifestyle. I have told everyone that I will go abroad to Japan to teach English, but I doubt even my conviction to do that. So, because I cannot find a burning desire to motivate me, I must instead create one. I must create a unique purpose for myself.
This evening my brother Elliott was playing Tetris on the couch, and he was able to score above 100,000 points before level 10. I picked up the game afterwards and worked through line-by-line until level 12, but I only reached 40,000 points. I asked him how he did it, and he replied: You have to go for the Tetrises, all the time. Pull off only the maximum combo.
Now I must decide concretely where to score my own points and how to execute my own Tetrises. Until that time, my dear readers, I remain a gentleman of leisure. |
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| YOU ARE IN PARADISE by Zadie Smith |
[May. 31st, 2006|01:43 am] |
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/040614fa_fact3
If you are brown and decide to date a British man, sooner or later he will present you with a Paul Gauguin. This may come in postcard form or as a valentine, as a framed print for your birthday or repeated many times across wrapping paper, but it will come, and it will always be a painting from Gauguin’s Tahitian period, 1891-1903. Chances are nudity will be involved, also some large spherical fruit. This has happened to me three times with three different men, but on only one occasion did the color of my skin appear to push us out into the South Seas themselves. I say my skin, but, as with any passion, this was a generalized one. M liked anything that lurked around the equator: Herman Melville, the early explorers, pirates, breadfruit (or the idea of breadfruit), and native girls of all varieties. We booked a holiday to Tonga. In normal circumstances, I would never be receptive to such an idea. I holiday in only one way: in my own house, on my balcony. (Or, at a stretch, in a hotel in Europe.) On this occasion, though, I was halfway through writing a novel. If a man with a canary had beckoned me to follow him down a mine, I would have gone. For the twenty-six hours of our flight, M sat next to me, very merry in his specially purchased straw hat, and I was merry, too, working away at the free wine, but I think that, while M knew all the time we were going to Tonga, I still somehow expected to land in lovely, temperate Antwerp. I remember stepping onto Nuku’alofa’s roiling tar runway in the face-melting heat and thinking, I have come to a country with no white tube-thingy, where you must walk along the roiling tar runway in the face-melting heat. How did this happen? Next thing I knew, we were on a boat so small that only the boatman, M and I, and one other couple could fit in it. It seemed appropriate to ask them if they came here often.
“Us? Often?” the man cried.
They were English, and a throbbing, comic-book red all over.
“Well, it’s paradise, isn’t it?” the woman said reverently, as we all looked out toward the island we were heading for in our small boat.
“It’s beyond your imagination,” the man said. “We never would have dreamt it. It’s the holiday of a lifetime. But we won the lottery, didn’t we?”
I thought he meant this figuratively, as in “life’s lottery,” as in “lucky us, going on our upscale holiday with similarly lucky people like you.” But no. They’d won the actual lottery.
“This is the first thing we bought!” the woman said. “But how can it get better than this?”
Much has been written about the horror of upscale holidays, of the strange metaphysical loneliness instilled by constantly being informed by fellow-tourists that you are in paradise, of how the pleasures offered to the tourist mix poisonously with said tourist’s personal guilt/shame regarding his or her relative wealth when compared with the indigenous people serving him or her tall cool glass after tall cool glass of Fuzzy Navel. Take all that as read. Also take as read the German-owned island, the existential misery of our Tongan waiters, the enforced “native entertainments” on a Sunday evening, and the Americans next door who had brought their own TV. What makes the whole thing stand out in my memory is my neurological reaction. I am an allergic person by nature: cats, dogs, horses, mosquitoes, and all facial products. But I have never before found myself allergic to a whole country. Allergic to its insects, its sand, its coral, its food, and—the clincher—its water. We had booked for two weeks, but five days into the holiday of a lifetime my windpipe began to close. I felt bad for M. He had his dream, and I was ruining it. He had his fale (traditional bungalow made of coconut fibre) and his hammock and his circle of beach. In the middle of this ring there was a brown girl, but Gauguin wouldn’t have painted her. Her right arm was twice its normal size, her left eye would not open, her legs were bleeding. And she wouldn’t stop whining. She refused to be excited by the fact that many Tongans can hold their breath underwater for an abnormally long time. That the men dress as women until they come of age. That the millennium would arrive here before it arrived anywhere else.
By the sixth day, M had given up on me. He made friends with a uniquely cheery Tongan waiter named Tony, who, interestingly, still wore women’s clothing. They would sit together on our deck looking out at the ocean, sometimes playing Scrabble, while I sat indoors wrapped in a cocoon fashioned from mosquito netting. If you squinted, eliding Tony’s fearsome biceps, you could imagine that M had met his Gauguin princess at last. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 20th, 2006|02:50 am] |
Woke up at noon today, no alarm. Checked email, visited some websites, had three spoonfuls of Greek yogurt. Showered, shaved, got dressed. Then biked to Pierce to have breakfast. Rhema was there, but we both read the paper.
Headed to the admin building to turn in my graduation card. Then I biked towards Ida, and bumped into Jiayi biking in the opposite direction. At Ida I asked the building manager if I could borrow their microphone equipment for CMAC's June 3rd noontime performance at Ratner. She said no. Checked the time---3:00. Scooted back home, changed into suit, caught the 171 back to campus, and at 4:18 met Luke from CMAC and Kent from Chicago Chorale at the School of Theology. Kent drove us to the Monastery of the Holy Cross at 31st and Aberdeen, where we performed for the Solemn Vespers in Honor of Our Lady, Queen of Peace. Chorale sounded beautiful. Like heavenly. CMAC was good too; I think we sounded better on Salve Regina than on Rorate Caeli. Wayne, the newest guy, was a little too bright and too flat, but I know he'll improve because he has the spirit. Bruce complimented my conducting on Salve Regina.
Elliott attended, and we met up afterwards. We checked out the sanctuary (he is a Religion minor), stopped by the bathroom, and caught the 62 to Chinatown. We had dinner at this one Vietnamese place---nothing special. Conversations with Elliott are always good. We talked about the future, how it's good to invest in real estate and how our mom wants to move to Galena after she retires. Talked about motorcycles, skateboards, high school band, hm what else did we talk about. Girls. He's always the one who breaches that subject. Apparently NU girls all want rich guys. But I bet most of those girls don't deserve my brother.
We paid with a 20% tip and headed out. On the way to the Red Line stop we bumped into Joel and Andy and their group, who were walking in the opposite direction. Arriving at the platform, we parked ourselves on a bench and Elliott struck up a conversation with a boy of twelve. He asked if he had any plans for tonight, and eventually they got to talking about how he wanted to date a certain girl but his mom wouldn't let him. Elliott sided with his mom, saying that he was too young for that and once he reached Elliott's age, he would agree. Then Elliott left on the northbound train, and the young man and I talked for a minute about our employment statuses. I told him about my job in the Language Commons and he said he's going to babysit. And if his employers let him, he's going to lay the smack down on those kids. Funny guy. We said goodbye and separated as we boarded the southbound train. Construction had the L running slowly after 47th, so I got to Garfield at 8:30. Waited for twenty more minutes and caught the 55 back home.
Met Stacey and Yui in teh lounge, where we chatted about this and that. Stacey talked about how the Talbot first years seem more troublesome than last year. Yui complained about the amount of work for the Little Red Schoolhouse. I said, "Listen... can you hear that?" There was a party going on beneath us. It sounded like it was jumping. Stacey said that frat parties have too much smoking, and Yui said they have too much drinking. Frank passed through, doing his laundry. Danielle passed through on her way out; she looked very nice. We all left at 9:30, and I returned to my room and showered. Matt from Shoreland called, and I told him to come on over.
I signed Matt in at 10:00, and we went around the dorm gathering people to play Texas hold 'em. By 10:30, we had Tony, Sibo, Pranjal, Matt, Matt Cohen, and myself; James joined later. We played in the Suite. Both Matt and I were eliminated early and we both bought back in. So that brought the pot to $45. Well, Matt was eliminated again, as were Sibo and Pranjal. As an aside, Pranjal was being himself once again, getting distracted and deciding to defrost a pie he found in the Suite freezer. He did a horrible job of it, but we all laughed a lot. So anyway I was trailing everyone and decided to try a strategy where I would go all in every few hands, even without the best cards, to intimidate the other guys into folding. I had enough money to discourage them from calling me, I thought. It worked the first two times. But on the third time I went all in after the flop and that maverick Cohen called me and beat me. So much for that idea. I returned to my room, ate some leftover Vietnamese soup, and decided to blog this day for all it's worth.
Come see CMAC perform at the Summer Breeze carnival, 12:45pm in the main quad. Hm, I wonder if anyone will see this in time? |
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| "machigai nasai" -my host father |
[May. 15th, 2006|06:55 am] |
浮世 no you na 世 de
Nan no ugoki shite mo
所在地 kawaranai
憂世 no you na 世 de
Nani wo te ni irete mo
Sugu kiete shimau
儚い kono 世 de wa
Yarigai aru mono wa nani ka?
"Sonna mono wa
Jibun de mitsukete"
Otousan ga itte kureta ne
Soshite machigaeba
"Sore mo OK, shinpai shinai
Takusan machigai nasai"
*****
In a ‘Floating World’-like world
However you try to move
Your position does not change
In a ‘Melancholy World’-like world
Whatever you try to take in hand
Soon vanishes away
In this ephemeral world
What thing is worth doing?
"Those kind of things
You have to find for yourself"
Is what my father told me
And if you make a mistake
"It's OK, don't worry
Make lots of mistakes" |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 12th, 2006|03:05 am] |
ring ring
ring
forever and ever
write write
write
lines that are clever
poetry
it's all a game
it's a game game game game game |
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| Tiny Love Bunnies Hop in my Heart |
[Apr. 12th, 2006|02:08 pm] |
Today I woke up at 6:30am, when my cell phone alarm went off, and promptly fell back to sleep. At 7:45 I awoke again, but purely by accident. I considered what I would do today: presently, try to do my homework for Computer Systems, then go to class and turn it in, then head to Ratner, then to lab. I ended up not finishing my homework, although I did learn more about how processors work. I biked to class and entered through the back door as Ms. Rogers was beginning to lecture. "On Thursday of next week, I am leaving, and I will not get back until Sunday. I am going on a much-needed trip with my husband to New York. I will not check my mail---I'll be at the movies. Mike will teach on Friday."
Having collected my returned assignments, I departed for Ratner. Earlier, I had learned from James's LJ and from the book "The Abs Diet" about the merits of circuit training---exercising a wide range of muscles and pausing for only 10-30 seconds between sets---and I gave it a try (for the third time). It really keeps your heart rate up! And it really tires you out. Among my exercises were sit ups, leg ups, push ups, squats, pull ups (haha I did like 3), pectoral presses, and bicep curls. Ahhh, that felt good. It had been five days since I hit the gym, which is bad. I need to go more often for better results.
Lunch was at Pierce. I had a caesar salad with three hard boiled eggs, a hot dog, some beef noodle stew, apple juice, and water. Wen was talking about how he wanted to have a girlfriend. Stacey S. was teasing Wen, and Rea was doing a crossword puzzle. Then Rhema came, and Robert, and Ammad, and Leo, and Stacey C., and Joel. But I stayed the longest.
Now here I am in the Maclab in Regenstein. Our lab starts in thirty minutes. Wish me luck. |
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| The Little Red Schoolhouse teaches me writing |
[Apr. 6th, 2006|04:41 pm] |
The class, it is the hilarious. Writing program at the University of Chicago, previously to be called Little Red Schoolhouse. Lecturer showing how to please the reader, cracking joke to please the audience.
Humor aside, today's lecturer, Tracy Weiner, sounded almost poetic when she was explaining the concept of "cores." A core structure consists of a subject and a verb and, ideally, shows an action. She showed us this sentence from a medical textbook:
"Extremes of otherwise unrelievable suffering can be managed through sedation to unconsciousness."
Conveniently, it disguises the main actor, the doctor, in order to make the student of medicine focus on the technique; however, most of the action in the sentence is trapped inside nouns. She then pulled out all of the actions and put them into core couplets, and in doing so she wrote something that I recognized as poetry.
patients suffer
doctors cannot relieve
doctors manage
doctors sedate
patients lose consciousness
Taking the next step, can we not say that we are our own doctors? |
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