eu a-mousoi

Empty

2011-03-18T16:21:00.000-04:00

If through my cracked and dusty
Dime store lips
I spoke these words out loud
Would no one hear me?

Lay your blouse across the chair
Let fall the flowers
From your hair
And kiss me
With that country mouth
So plain

Outside the rain is tapping
On the leaves
To me it sounds like
They're applauding us
The quiet love
We've made

Will it always feel this way
So empty
So estranged?

Well I looked my demons in the eyes
Lay bare my chest
Said do your best
To destroy me

I've been to hell and back
So many times
I must admit
You kinda bore me

There's a lot of things
That can kill a man
There's a lot of ways
To die
Yes, and some already did
And walk beside me

There's a lot of things
I don't understand
So many people lie
It's the hurt I hide that fuels
The fire inside me

Will I always feel this way
So empty
So estranged?

The Most Beautiful Letter

2011-03-08T10:20:00.000-05:00

There exists no characters here, simply you and me, in the hopes that you may one day remember the days of silence we shared. I don’t want life to be about forgotten moments, and I’m not talking about mine. Somewhere, walking down a narrow path or under a vast open sky lit only by what the cosmos has to offer, there are hundreds – thousands, of breathtaking moments occurring simultaneously. I want to be one of those people who incites those moments. One of those people who paints them so vividly, because the colors are so new that they will strike you, because I too have been stricken. I am reminded of a dream I had a while ago, of my grandfather. In my dream, I am walking alongside him in a field. He is working, hard as usual. I feel like he’s on some sort of mission. In my dream, he hardly acknowledges that I’m with him, he’s just so focused on his task. I can still hear him talking to himself, reciting Buddhist prayers in Thai. My grandmother is still alive, but in my dream, she had just passed away. As I watched my grandfather clear the field, I remember noticing a line of 5 trees, which were the only things he left standing. They were in a row, all the same types of tree, and they were all the same size. I remember the smell of rain. It felt like early spring or late summer when a quick storm can pass within ten minutes with the wind, but it’s only moments before the sun returns and it’s like the rain never fell, except for the droplets, which still remain as evidence. I can still sense the calm breeze and cool air I felt in my dream, and it haunts me slightly. I was also left with a thought I carried in the dream, that my grandfather was preparing heaven for my grandmother. The imagery I saw has yet to escape my memory. It’s like a photo whose color has yet to fade.

I am here and you are there and I am not exactly sure of the paths that led us into these diverse directions, seemingly gone by like the flicker of an image on a piece of film. It sometimes seems that the more aware we become of time, the quicker it slips through our fingers, unable to be grasped, like sand. It sometimes feels as though the harder you hold on, the quicker the granules escape your grasp. I guess there is something to be said for staying loose and not holding the moment so tightly that it disappears. And yet there seems to exist those figments, which you are able to possess in their entirety so that they become a part of who you are or will become. Instinct in and of itself never fails to distinguish between the sands of time and moments made of leather. Often, when something strikes me deeply, I repeat a Buddhist Japanese proverb "Kokoro no koma ni tadzuna wo yurusuna." It means, "Never let go the reins of the wild colt of the heart." Whenever I feel like I've reached an impossible moment and lose motivation, inside my mind I whisper "Ad astra per infinitum," to the stars for infinity, and I think about all the wonderful people I have had in my life and at my side, always. I realize that I am fortunate to know and love such an array of different people and have made my life comparable to a rainbow in being multifaceted, multidimensional, and special. But, things have changed, and this is no longer where I find myself.

Often, you never really know when it’s going to be the last time. The last time that you make love to someone you’ve loved with what felt like the core of your soul. To smell their breath, taste their tongue, feel the wetness of their skin upon yours. Long after that day passed I found myself lingering within that moment. Why didn’t I fight? Now I feel myself holding my breath within that moment just to hold that person close, a little longer, to have it all again.

I remember our last moment so vividly, while I was in the throws of hard silence filled only with breathing and intensity, I felt outside of myself. In my heart I already knew that our curtain was closing. The room was filled with white morning light, our bodies were swaddled in bright, freshly washed, white sheets. Our skin, colored darker by the summer sun, was a beautiful contrast to the vibrant paleness around us. I opened my eyes to watch my arms caressing your back, to see you moving. You did not notice as I looked out the window to see the haze creeping in, swallowing me. A single tear rolled down my cheek before I closed my eyes to go back into the darkness. That was two years ago. I haven’t seen you since. I will never see you again.

My life ended 6 days later. I had a strange and vivid dream that painted the events of that week as if they were memories, which had not yet happened. The morning we made love forced the memories from the dream to flood into my mind as though a damn had been lifted. When I looked out the window, I already knew what the next days held for me, for us. I said nothing. I simply lay there silently, except for that one tear, which took a meandering stroll down the contour of my face, what was in my heart, was our secret.

What would you do if you knew that your life was going to end within a matter of days? Would you try to change it? Fate is a strange and powerful beast, I found myself at its mercy, blindsided within a moment, which should have been remembered as sweet. In my mind there were no choices I could make, that wouldn’t somehow lead to the visions dancing in my head. In an odd way, I found myself fascinated with the intrinsic beauty behind the cards that had fallen before me. Unlike poker, I couldn’t ask the dealer to exchange the ones I didn’t like. All I could do was write this one simple letter…

I am not sure if you have already forgotten me. But, I was that one, on a clear crisp evening who stood out the window, silent, draped in darkness, while the breeze danced in my hair. In the chill of the empty room, I felt your curious eyes, and I simply turned to offer you the view, which you had already seen countless times before. I was standing in your window, wondering about the fall. This was the first night we both observed that something existed outside of the ordinary. In between silence we made our exchange like two species at prey, we each took turns at mild oscillations, and as predator showing little fluctuation. Once we had thoroughly devoured each other, both mind and body, through the course until dawn approached, I found that you were still sitting, and maybe, I was still nothing. In silence I was made to understand in the clearness of your eyes that in the end, invariably both "something" or "nothing" meant nothing. As I watched you walk, I simply turned back to your window to the dawn. I could feel your eyes on my legs and I could feel your hand moving within your own hair, pulling at the back, as I had done before. As I closed my eyes, I pictured myself falling. I tried to stand, to find you, but found the room was now nothing. Left in open, left in silence, I once again closed my eyes.

There were times where I felt as though I existed within the planes of openness. Surrounded by the world, I only experienced the sky above. As soothing as I would find the barrenness, I would always need to start painting again. But in these times, I gifted to myself, the gift of solitude. I would manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness...have few desires. Then, I would close my eyes only for the moment to return to me.

I can see you walking across the surface of a frozen pond searching for me, your face is pale, your lips pink. As you walk across the pond, you kick snow off the shiny, hard surface and my face is underneath, banging against the ice, reaching for you but we simply can't get to each other. And in this image, there are flashes in my mind as I watch you slowly fade away as I drift beneath the glass. I had found myself entranced and wrapped within you. I wanted to take you into my arms, enfold myself within the dulcet strokes of whispers from your mind and resonating heat from your body until things became real. I pictured myself next to you lightly tracing your smoothness, entangling my fingers within yours if only to feel your heart quiver for the briefest interlude. I wanted the touching and the words to somehow erase some of your struggles and some of your pain. I wished to be a violin in your life, something that at times provoked you to play or reflect or simply feel.

When these images of you came, I would begin to hear music in my head. In those times, I wished I knew how to play the piano instead of guessing at the notes when I would sit at the instrument. The sounds would fill my mind and take away some of the emptiness and confusion. In those moments, my life was neither bad nor good, it's always been rich and full of so many wonderful things. However, I would find myself in a space where I just wanted to be alone unless I invited someone in. Many of the people I cared for in life weren't used to such an introversive face, they're used to the loud, smiling me. I just needed to reflect on some of my choices, recharge my batteries, actually start dreaming at night again, and write more. Somehow, even in the midst of such strong imagery, the absence of flowing words felt like suffocation. It became my only way of painting the images of my mind into life and reality. Words become the only colors I knew in order to fill things again because the pale gray eventually needed to disappear from my life. No matter where I would put them, they would have a sense of permanence. Only I could make their image disappear, but I would always know their meaning. And you will have known them too.

I was never quite certain of how the silence grew. Except to know that it exists and it continues to haunt me. In your absence, I will open my eyes only to see the gray, I will only want to see the gray and feel the chill of the coming fall. I will want to feel the chill of my breath and watch it escape my body as vapors against the air around me, but it's not cold enough yet. I envision myself soon making the walk to and from my car and my eyes catching glimpses of the blades of grass, which will be stubborn in their greenness, they will make me shudder. The small piles of bright yellow leaves, which will have trickled on to the pale cement sidewalks would seem so pretty to me, but soon they will seem out of place...just like their vibrant red veiny counterparts which will persist to cling to dull brown branches which were once so full of life. I will feel as though colors don't have a place in my life. Waiting for dark, waiting for day, countless contradictions that only you or I could understand.

Now, as we sit across from each other, I can see you and you can see me. We are seated in a place where they drink and speak and smoke by candlelight and the heavy velvet of antique chairs and chaises are infused with stains of time and the concavity of fabric melted by careless burns. In the background they play music I used to listen to a long, long time ago, The Reality of my Surroundings and Nearly God and I smile because my hair has grown to a different shade and I am not that person anymore and my mind no longer meanders to those places anymore. I simply listen to you speak. This time, I am silent. You look to me as though I am a mirror, as though you seek a reflection, yet I am blank, only to provide enough for you to seek refuge through touch. My fingers begin to lightly trace your naked back from beneath your shirt.

Like cool steam after a storm on a hot summer day, there is strength in the clay that became porcelain now chipped, but capable of enduring their weight in tea. I have learned the value of keeping my secrets and keeping my heart concealed, though I have yet to close my mind or my wallet or my home. While sitting here with you, I will want to control the words, which are spoken, but they will tumble like dominos that simply went stumbling down before I could rearrange them.

Once we leave, I will begin to feel like the world has become draped in new colors for which there are no descriptions and I will be left sitting, trying to relearn everything all over again. Standing in a forest where all the leaves have fallen, wondering what happened, I will hear the echoes upon the images of your face upon my dreams. I want to be strong for you, and I will not simply place my weaknesses behind a wooden door in a damp room.

You have never known my desire to reach you. This puerile need to give and receive and to be satiated by you. I want to feel what goes through your mind, your thoughts to muse and reflect upon them as if they had once belonged to me. I want to ruminate within the improbabilities using the narrow bits of information I felt I had managed to steal and break away from you, to pretend that I was you and figure out how you would react to the lyric of a poem I had written, to the Maroon 5 song, to a stance on a political debate, to the sight of yourself in a recent photograph. I can only imagine these reactions of yours because they don't exist otherwise.

I have come to believe that you are more like me than my imagination allows me to envision. Meandering, thinking, swimming through the oceans far enough to hear the waves break but not so far that the depths would make you succumb to the water. Focusing your eyes into the sunset, far away, reaching for it, wanting it, listening to the sound of laughter mixed with sand behind you, thinking of your life and your choices. Everything seems to occur simultaneously. There seems to be no shades of grey, only a thin black and white world of decisions where rationality is supposed to win. But, beneath the surface of the waters there exist currents of perspective and shades of subtlety that dance and flicker like silvery schools of fish just out of your reach. It's what dictates the truth in your action and forces you to continue on to breathe.

Long ago in a distant moment when I gazed upon your eyes, I found myself entranced and wrapped within you. In your heart I fell into love, fought courageous battles as I tread lightly behind your facades, found truths, discovered mysteries, witnessed paradigms become enigmas. I found God, only to lose him again, and perhaps to regain my faith once more.

Through your touch I felt the dulcet stroke of a lover upon my skin as vividly as I felt the blade of the sword pierce my being to bring me to my knees. You have such power over me, so able to make me weep sweet rain born of fear, anger, hope, love. You are so able to make me believe when no reason had ever existed before. And yet you incite me, lead me through twists and turns, delving within my own depths to find a bit of my soul in you.

I could so easily hear your rhapsody and rhyme whispered gently in my ear. Upon my soul I felt you enter me, felt you within me, touching...moving. Slowly I drifted into dreams and within my minds sky I could see. Visions and paintings created so vividly, not existing in reality. And when the hour came and I found the hour had come, one last and final time... I could only feel a sense of calm and resolution embodied within bittersweet loveliness. And at times I craved more, an insatiable appetite manifested by heavenly imprints your mind left open, page by page, by page. In history or fables or truths I have known that at times there is or can be no return. Yet here I sit ever anxiously, ready to read and absorb you, your words.

Since the last time I felt you, I have noticed that the world is full of fire flies. The world in its infinite being casts a glow if you stop to see it, pause long enough to be mesmerized by it. Bioluminescence abounds in faint and overt ways. Life can be still, so long as you allow yourself to live within the moment and not around it. Life lives and breathes within and throughout us. A primal feeling of polarity streams through my veins of inner consciousness whenever I stop to think about it. Whenever I feel that fundamental need to feel that energy. Whenever I feel the need to know that inevitably we are all one with each other. Life is such an intricate circle of balances.

Although my soul may feel exponentially old, my mind and body continue to wage a battle against time and the seemingly finite space we occupy while we are here. If this is my dream world, then I will become lucid. But, for now, it is as though you are far, far away and my words do not hear you. You are like my soul, I like for you to be still. Let me come to be still in your silence. Within silence perhaps you may come to understand that being with you separates every element of my body inch, by inch and within the veins of my being, my synapses continuously fire one continuous message of adoration that arouses the observers' soul of invidia in the house of contemptuous grimaces behind lips wet and burning of absinth, which like sugar, melt away my very consciousness with every expression of overwhelming gratitude of the moment you returned.

World AIDS Day: December 1, 2010

2010-12-01T11:46:00.001-05:00

Change your profile picture to a (2015)RED; help us turn Facebook and the world (RED) today!

Well... I am not going to give a speech at a big dinner this year, nor am I planning on writing a thesis on why World AIDS day is important. Please stop for a moment and educate yourself by going to http://www.worldaidscampaign.org/en/World-AIDS-Day/.
If you aren't in the mood for education - but you are in the mood to shop, visit http://www.joinred.com/word_aids_day/index.html - where you can buy just about anything you could possible imagine to support AIDS education and healthcare.

Things to do TODAY…NOW!
You Watch (a great music video by The Killers). And Starbucks Gives. The Killers have just released “Boots,” their fifth annual Christmas song for (RED). It’s a gorgeous, nostalgic, exuberant retelling of “It’s A Wonderful Life.” You can buy it on iTunes here and proceeds go to the Global Fund, the recipient of (RED) funds. And Starbucks is making the video even more powerful. For every view on World AIDS Day, December 1, Starbucks will contribute 5 cents to the Global Fund. Check it out exclusively from Starbucks here (http://www.starbucks.com/share#/the-killers).
On World AIDS Day (December 1st), just as they did last year, Starbucks will contribute 5 cents to the Global Fund for every handcrafted beverage in their North American and UK stores (in the UK it’s 5p).

Don’t forget to pick up the new Jonathan Adler-designed (Starbucks) RED Card and you can turn all your purchases (RED) at Starbucks, all year long.

Since it's launch in 2006, (RED) has generated over $150 million for the Global Fund and over 5 million people have been impacted by HIV and AIDS programs supported by (RED) purchases.

From TIME Magazine:

From the Pope's comments on condoms to a promising new pill, this year has seen some positive steps in the battle against HIV/AIDS. But the fight is far from over.

In December 1996, TIME ran a story titled 'AIDS: Hope With an Asterisk.' Fourteen years later, that sentiment stands. Here is TIME's take on three bits of good news, asterisks included:

(Read 'David Ho, The Man Who Could Beat AIDS.')

Infection Rates A new report from UNAIDS says the epidemic has stabilized. The number of new infections is falling, as are AIDS-related deaths. Overall, 33 countries have seen their infection rate drop by more than 25% between 2001 and 2009, thanks, in part, to HIV prevention efforts. That's good news. *(But progress is uneven. Though infection rates are generally dropping in sub-Saharan Africa, they are rising elsewhere, especially in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Read 'Eve of an HIV Epidemic in Romania)
The Pope The Vatican's conservative stance on condoms has frustrated aid workers and health experts for years. But there are signs of change. The pope recently told an Italian journalist that there are some cases (he used the example of a male prostitute) in which condoms can be used to prevent the spread of of HIV. *(The Pope's pronouncement was controversial, even within the church. He may back down. Plus, the Pontiff's stance is just one of several factors (including accessibility, cost and stigma) that keep people from using condoms. Read 'Catholic AIDS Workers Debate Pope's Condom Remarks.')
The Pill Last month, a clinical trial found that a drug called Truvada (a combination of two antiretroviral drugs) reduced the odds of HIV infection in men. It is an approach called 'pre-exposure prophylaxis.' Some say it's the best news in years. *(It may, in fact, be great news, but it needs more testing. Also, the pill only works if you always take it. Studies show people are not so good at this).

David Beckham does Ellen

2010-11-01T10:46:00.000-04:00

This was probably one of the funnier things I have seen a good while...

Zumba

2010-10-28T14:56:00.000-04:00

I recently decided to take Zumba - largely because it's "free" with my gym membership, it seemed like it might be fun and also because I thought it would be another good form of cardio (but mostly I dig the "free" part). What I learned is: 1) Every woman in the metro area thinks the SAME thing; 2)Zumba does not = dance class or ANY form of instruction (think of it as pick it up as you go or stand around like an idiot); 3) This is really just an evolution of Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons...you can't find "aerobics" classes - but you will find Zumba at your local gym (well maybe you will find water aerobics - where you can move in the water like an idiot). I also learned that when you get fifty+ women in one room moving in unanticpated ways (you shak eyour ass like a cup of jello for at least the class) - they sweat oceans. I am not making this up, it was al lI could do to stay in an upright position on the wood floor - and one girl completely BIT it during "cool off." I am sticking with it - until it gets replaced by something far less "girl centric" (I am thinking indoor rock climbing).

This is what Zumba should look like (skip to the 4.15 mark to avoid the whole disaster).

This is what it looks like in reality... note the lost girl in the white tank top. I feel for her, b/c I am her (for now).

Another thought - skip Zumba and just DANCE!

It's a NEW Day...

2010-10-27T14:05:00.003-04:00

I have been woefully neglecting this blog. So, as of today, I am going to commit myself to at least one post every day. It could be my "picture of the day," some freakishly good meal I have made, or some actual thoughts on some deeper issue. Who knows - the world is our oyster and each day presents the challenge to do something else, something new. So, I thought I should touch on a few life updates that may well influence the content of what goes here:

1) I am blissfully in love (sigh - so corny, I know...but true)
2) I am back to my "modified" macrobiotic diet. Some history: I was a vegetarian from 10-24 and then went on a McDonalds rampage from 25-28 (really against everything I beleive in, but I have no excuses, for three years I lived and died for that $1 menu). Was "true" macrobiotic from 29-30. After an accident where I was hit by a car while riding my bike, well... evil McDonalds entered back into the picture, until 32. So, there you have it - at 33 (and damn proud), I am still sticking to my "modified" macrobitoic. For me this means eating seasonaly, at least 50% grain based, and the rest is fruits and veggies. With the exception of morning star and boca - I don't eat processed food (HFC and tri's - ewww). I eat organic - or as close too it as humanly possible. I do allow myself to eat chocolate (Milka - yum), sugared cereal, and drink coffee - this is my modification. I eat no commercial meat(the exception is hunter's meat - don't ask, the explanation is waaaaay too long and unless it's a red snapper caught fresh in Mexico, I eat NOTHING from the sea - again, don't ask, the explanation is waaaaay too long).
3) I might start work on a second master's degree in resource econmics (with a concentration in agriculture)
4) I am wierdly obsessed with soil and water issues - but also fashion.
5) I have gone from spending $600 on one meal to attempting to stick to a $200/month grocery and eating-out budget (that is my half, $200 is my BF's half - so $400 total - it is still really quite difficult) - the translation for this is the fact that I have become very frugal, because I want to retire between 50 and 55.
6) I like taking photos - nothing new there.

So what can you expect? I am not fat or unhealthy - but the love bug has caused me to gain a little over ten pounds. By any sane standard, I am perfectly fine - but my clothing says otherwise. So, you can expect the next few posts to feature food, and my quest to rid myself of these ten pounds. It's the standard, non magical way. Eating less, working out more (sometimes working out more and eating more too).

So - that's it for now... enjoy this first pic of the day (above) - taken during the Clarendon Festival :)

Razones - Bebe

2010-08-05T10:55:00.003-04:00

Razones (Reasons)
Te echo de menos, le digo al aire (I miss you, I tell the air)
te busco, te pienso, te siento y siento (I look for you, think of you, feel you, and feel)
que como tu no habra nadie (that there will be no one like you)
y aqui te espero, con mi cajita de la vida (And here I wait, with my little life box)
cansada, a oscuras, con miedo (tired, in darkness, with fear)
y este frio, nadie me lo quita (and this cold, no one takes it from me)
Tengo razones, para buscarte (I have reasons, to look for you)
tengo necesidad de verte, de oirte, de hablarte (I have a necessity to see you hear you, talk to you)

tengo razones, para esperarte (I have reasons, to wait for you)
porque no creo que haya en el mundo nadie mas a quien ame (Because I don’t think there is anyone else in the world who I love more)
tengo razones, razones de sobra (I have reasons, many reasons)
para pedirle al viento que vuelvas (To ask the wind for you to come back)
aunque sea como una sombra (Even if it is like a shadow)
tengo razones, para no quererte olvidar (I have reasons, for not wanting to forget you)
porque el trocito de felicidad fuiste tu quien me lo dio a probar (Because the little slices of happiness, it was you who gave it to me)

El aire huele a ti, mi casa se cae porque no estas aqui (The air smells like you, my house falls because you are not here)
mis sabanas, mi pelo, mi ropa te buscan a ti (My sheets, my hair, my clothes are looking for you)
mis pies son como de carton (My feet are like cardboard)
que voy arrastrando por cada rincon (That I drag in every corner)
mi cama se hace fria y gigante (My bed becomes cold and gigantic)
y en ella me pierdo yo (And in it I get lost)
mi casa se vuelve a caer (My house falls again)
mis flores se mueren de pena (My flowers die of sadness)
mis lagrimas son charquitos (My tears are puddles)
que caen a mis pies (That fall at my feet)
te mando besos de agua (I send you water kisses)
que hagan un hueco en tu calma (That make a hole in your soul)
te mando besos de agua (I send you water kisses)
pa que bañen tu cuerpo y tu alma (To bathe your body and soul)
te mando besos de agua (I send you water kisses)
para que curen tus heridas (So they heal your injuries)
te mando besos de agua (I send you water kisses)
de esos con los que tanto te reias (Of those you laughed so much with)

How to Write

2010-07-21T17:16:00.003-04:00

I lifted this from the Jonathan Carroll blog, who lifted the content from the LA Times... but I really found this to be thoughtful advice.

Would be writers-- here's a really good list of things to look out for from Janet Fitch, author of WHITE OLEANDER & PAINT IT BLACK from an article in the Los Angeles Times:

1. Write the sentence, not just the story
Long ago I got a rejection from the editor of the Santa Monica Review, Jim Krusoe. It said: “Good enough story, but what’s unique about your sentences?” That was the best advice I ever got. Learn to look at your sentences, play with them, make sure there’s music, lots of edges and corners to the sounds. Read your work aloud. Read poetry aloud and try to heighten in every way your sensitivity to the sound and rhythm and shape of sentences. The music of words. I like Dylan Thomas best for this–the Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait. I also like Sexton, Eliot, and Brodsky for the poets and Durrell and Les Plesko for prose. A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone’s writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.

2. Pick a better verb
Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You know the ones: Was, did, had, made, went, looked… One-size-fits-all looks like crap on anyone. Sew yourself a custom made suit. Pick a better verb. Challenge all those verbs to really lift some weight for you.

3. Kill the cliché.
When you’re writing, anything you’ve ever heard or read before is a cliché. They can be combinations of words: Cold sweat. Fire-engine red, or phrases: on the same page, level playing field, or metaphors: big as a house. So quiet you could hear a pin drop. Sometimes things themselves are cliches: fuzzy dice, pink flamingo lawn ornaments, long blonde hair. Just keep asking yourself, “Honestly, have I ever seen this before?” Even if Shakespeare wrote it, or Virginia Woolf, it’s a cliché. You’re a writer and you have to invent it from scratch, all by yourself. That’s why writing is a lot of work, and demands unflinching honesty.

4. Variety is the key.
Most people write the same sentence over and over again. The same number of words–say, 8-10, or 10-12. The same sentence structure. Try to become stretchy–if you generally write 8 words, throw a 20 word sentence in there, and a few three-word shorties. If you’re generally a 20 word writer, make sure you throw in some threes, fivers and sevens, just to keep the reader from going crosseyed.

5. Explore sentences using dependent clauses.
A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you’ve already written. Often the story you’re looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

6. Use the landscape.
Always tell us where we are. And don’t just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they’re great at this.

7. Smarten up your protagonist.
Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

8. Learn to write dialogue.
This involves more than I can discuss here, but do it. Read the writers of great prose dialogue–people like Robert Stone and Joan Didion. Compression, saying as little as possible, making everything carry much more than is actually said. Conflict. Dialogue as part of an ongoing world, not just voices in a dark room. Never say the obvious. Skip the meet and greet.

9. Write in scenes.
What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place–this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.

10. Torture your protagonist.
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

Haiti’s Landscape: Tè a fatige

2010-01-16T23:38:00.000-05:00

I really don’t think anyone can even begin to imagine the amount of desperation in Haiti. A country that was in need of aid, help, infrastructure long before a magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook Port au Prince, quite literally to the ground. Once one of the largest agricultural economies in the Caribbean, Haiti ranks 148th of 179 countries on the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Index; 76 percent of Haitians are in absolute poverty -living on less than US$2 per day and 56 percent on less than US$1 per day. If you have ever seen satellite images of Haiti and it’s island neighbor, the Dominican Republic – you would notice a rather stark difference which immediately begins at the border. One is green, the other is the color of rust.

Deforestation of Haiti’s landscape for agriculture and the manufacture of charcoal have left only 3% of the land surface forested. Charcoal, produced by cutting trees and slow burning them in mud pits, meets about 85% of energy needs as cooking fuel - because there are no alternatives when there is no infrastructure or development. The countryside is ravaged and it is tempting to blame this on Haiti’s high population density. However, what is not as apparent, is how environmental degradation stems from a legacy of colonial resource extraction, slavery, corrupt governments, foreign intervention which was horribly planned and executed, and poor choices about energy, agriculture, and industry.

Today, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with the lowest combination of lifespan, education, and standard of living of any country outside Africa. Demographic, social, and economic changes happening elsewhere in the Caribbean are not happening as rapidly in Haiti. The abject poverty in which 80% of the population exists deteriorates the country’s environmental and political conditions and constrains economic development. People are forced to choose between life in urban slums and life as poor, small-scale, subsistence farmers. More than a million Haitians have emigrated to the United States and elsewhere since 1950.

In recent decades, many Haitian farmers have abandoned agriculture in search of greater profits from supplying charcoal to large urban and rural populations. With the collapse of agricultural and industrial exports, an unemployment rate of 33%, and sliding deeper into poverty, Haitians are forced to destroy remaining forests for charcoal fuel production. Consumption of natural resources just to stay alive is contributing to degraded environmental conditions. Although Haiti’s population size is similar to the Dominican Republic’s and population density is the same as Puerto Rico’s, the loss of forests, with their capacity to prevent soil erosion, has left Haiti vulnerable during hurricanes and tropical storms: heavy rains let loose massive mudslides on deforested hillsides. This earthquake isn't the first time Haiti has suffered such a devastating loss of life. During the 2008 hurricane season, severe storms devastated more than 70 percent of Haiti’s agriculture and most of its roads, bridges and other infrastructure, creating pockets of severe malnutrition and killing 800 people. Nearly all agricultural land was flooded, resulting in the loss of the corn, bean and banana harvest, 800 people were killed and 3.3 million people were left in need of food support.

In 2008 I wrote a paper called "In Defense of Soil" and in that paper I discovered that rice makes up 20 percent of the typical Haitian's diet, and that percentage is on the rise. In 1981 Haiti imported 18,000 tons of rice. Now the country imports close to 400,000 tons annually. They grow less than a quarter domestically. "Tè a fatige," said 70 percent of Haitian farmers in a recent survey when asked about the major agricultural problems they faced. "The earth is tired." Since 1492, when Columbus first set foot on the heavily forested island of Hispaniola, the mountainous nation has shed both topsoil and blood—first to the Spanish, who planted sugar, then to the French, who cut down the forests to make room for lucrative coffee, indigo, and tobacco. Even after Haitian slaves revolted in 1804 and threw off the bondage of colonialism, France collected 93 million francs in restitution from its former colony—much of it in timber. Soon after independence, upper-class speculators and planters pushed the peasant classes out of the few fertile valleys and into the steep, forested rural areas, where their shrinking, intensively cultivated plots of maize, beans, and cassava have combined with a growing fuelwood-charcoal industry to exacerbate deforestation and soil loss. Today less than 4 percent of Haiti's forests remain, and in many places the soil has eroded right down to the bedrock. From 1991 to 2002, food production per capita actually fell 30 percent. So what do you do if you live in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and the price of the primary carbohydrate—"Miami rice" from the U.S.—doubles? You go hungry and watch your children do the same.

Haiti's problems are long standing. If there is any hope to be gleaned from the devastation of this earthquake, it is that it will turn the eyes of the world to the horror, not only of the present, but of what people in Haiti have been living with for so long. Maybe this time, those eyes and this world will not look away.

Geologist Explains Why Haiti Earthquake Was Such A Disaster
Click HERE for article

Helping Haiti

2010-01-16T16:46:00.000-05:00

Washington Post Gallery: Click HERE (warning some images may be graphic)

Want to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti?
Aid organizations need your assistance but warn that well-intentioned efforts like collecting bottled water and clothing on your own may not be the most helpful thing for a disaster-ravaged country that does not have the infrastructure to distribute them. Some tips from InterAction, a coalition of U.S.-based international non-governmental organizations:

1) Donating cash to established relief organizations is the best way to help because it allows professionals to get exactly what they need and does not use up scarce resources such as transportation, staff time or warehouse
space.

2) If you decide to donate supplies and not cash, contact an established relief organization before you collect anything. If you have already collected items, donate them to a relief organization within your community or sell them at a yard sale or charity auction and donate the proceeds.

3) People who want to volunteer should have previous disaster or international experience or technical skills and should work through a relief organization. More information is available from the Center for International Disaster Information, www.cidi.org

Here is a list of organizations accepting donations:— InterAction has a list of agencies responding and how to donate to them.
Find it here: http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/earthquake-haiti
— To donate $10 to the American Red Cross, text Haiti to 90999. The amount will be added to your next phone bill. The organization is also accepting donations through its International Response Fund, www.redcross.org
— To donate $5 to Wyclef Jean's Haitian Yele charity, text 501501. The money will be added to your next phone bill.
— To find out how to help the International Rescue Committee, visit www.theIRC.org or call toll free, 1-877-REFUGEE.
— To donate through Oxfam's emergency appeal, visit www.oxfam.org.uk

Universal Access and Human Rights - Inpi(RED)

2009-11-30T20:56:00.009-05:00

Bored at work?? Create art by clicking here http://www.starbucksloveproject.com/#/love/ - it's FREE and the fine folks of Starbucks will donate 5 cents (up to $50,000) and your artwork will be featured on the Project Love website. Every drink purchase at Starbucks will also get 5 cents to the Global AIDS fund - and every $15 dollar purchase on December 1st gets you a Project LOVE CD (free) and $1 donated. You see - drawing, coffee and shopping can help save the world :)

Need more cool ways to get involved while doing p-r-a-c-t-i-c-a-l-l-y nothing??? FIGHT AIDS FROM HOME! FightAIDS@Home is the first biomedical distributed computing project ever launched. It is run by the Olson Laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. They provide free software that you download and install. The software uses your computer's idle cycles to assist fundamental research in discovering new drugs, building on our growing knowledge of the structural biology of AIDS. In addition, this research helps them study the mechanisms of multi-drug-resistance that the "super bugs" of HIV use to escape the current anti-AIDS drugs. And this research helps them create, test, refine, and share the tools and protocols that thousands of other labs use in their research against other diseases. The best part is – you don’t need to do anything, just install software and ensure your computer is hooked up to the internet, BAM – saving lives. Click HERE for more information.

Okay, for those of you who don't know, today is Day With(out) Art and World AIDS Day. Day Without Art(DWA) began in 1989 as the national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. To make the public aware that AIDS can touch everyone, and inspire positive action, some eight hundred US art and AIDS groups participated in the first Day Without Art, shutting down museums, sending staff to volunteer at AIDS services, or sponsoring special exhibitions of work about AIDS. Since then, Day With(out) Art has grown into a collaborative project in which an estimated 8,000 museums, galleries, art centers, AIDS Service Organizations, libraries, high schools and colleges take part on both the national and international levels. For more information, please visit this site http://www.thebody.com/visualaids/dwa/dwa2006.html

Please wear a red ribbon today for World AIDS Day. When people ask you what it's for, tell them you wear it to commemorate this day. If they ask why, tell them that worldwide, and in 2008 alone, AIDS claimed 2.1 million people. That's over 5,400 people every day. But the story does not end there: over 7,000 new cases of HIV infections occur every single day. Tell them that in another ten years, an estimated 40 million children worldwide will lose their parents to AIDS. Around half of all people who become infected with HIV do so before they are 25 and are killed by AIDS before they are 35.

You can make a difference. Find out about HIV. Wear the Red Ribbon. By wearing it, you're showing your support for over 32 million people across the world who are living with a disease for which there's still no cure. For more information, please visit http://www.worldaidscampaign.org/

The history of AIDS is a short one. As recently as the 1970s, no one was aware of this deadly illness. Since then the global AIDS epidemic has become one of the greatest threats to human health and development. At the same time, much has been learned about the science of AIDS, as well as how to prevent and treat the disease. Although HIV and AIDS are found in all parts of the world, some areas are more afflicted than others. The worst affected region is sub-Saharan Africa, where in a few countries more than one in five adults is infected with HIV. The epidemic is spreading most rapidly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where the number of people living with HIV increased 150% between 2001 and 2007.

As a sexually transmitted infection, HIV particularly affects adolescents and young adults. Deaths of young adults have an especially damaging impact on their families and communities: skills are lost, workforces shrink and children are orphaned. In some African countries, life expectancies have fallen below 40 years, whereas they would have been above 60 without AIDS. There are around 15 million living children who have lost a parent to AIDS.

Yet although it is known how to prevent and treat AIDS, few people have access to the necessary services. Most rich countries – and a few middle-income nations such as Brazil and Botswana – have achieved near-universal treatment coverage. But across the developing world only 31% of people who need anti-AIDS drugs are receiving them. Access to prevention tools such as HIV education, condoms, clean needles and programs to prevent mother-to-child transmission is utterly inadequate. For example, in 2008 only 34% of pregnant women with HIV received the drugs that could stop their children becoming infected.

In recent years, efforts to fight AIDS around the world have stepped up, with much greater funding being supplied by the US, other rich nations and developing country governments. But the amount of money available is barely half what is needed for an effective response. Apart from inadequate funding, major obstacles in tackling the global AIDS epidemic include weak infrastructure and shortages of health workers in the worst affected countries. Political or cultural attitudes are also significant: for example some authorities are opposed to condom promotion, while others refuse to support needle exchanges for injecting drug users. Many are reluctant to provide young people with adequate education about sex and sexual health. Another very serious issue is stigma and discrimination. People known to be living with HIV are often shunned or abused by community members, employers and even health workers. As well as causing much personal suffering, this sort of prejudice discourages people from seeking HIV testing, treatment and care.

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(RED) is a business model created to raise awareness and money for the Global Fund by teaming up with the world's most iconic brands to produce (PRODUCT) RED branded products. A portion of profits from each (PRODUCT) RED product sold goes directly to the Global Fund to invest in African AIDS programs, with a focus on women and children. You can purchase practically ANYTHING – music, software, computers, clothing… purchase for a cause this season! Get Inspi(RED)!

So why do I care? Best to tell two short stories. First, I lost my uncle to AIDS in 1987, when no one even knew what the disease was. I have fond memories of my uncle - but because the disease has touched my life has less to do with why I care than most would think. I started fundraising for Whitman Walker Clinic when I was fifteen. I realized that those with the disease are stigmatized, I realized that politics and society are stigmatizing. I realized how easily those around me turn their heads from what is happening in the world because they feel like something isn't affecting them. At the end of the day we are all connected. We should all choose at least one thing to be passionate about and we should never be blinded to the struggles of our neighbors. We should never close our minds, close our hearts. To do so, we are closing ourselves. Doing something doesn't mean pulling put a checkbook, it simply means being aware and being informed. So I guess, that's story number one.

Story number two... one day I took the metro in to work. On the ride I noticed a shelter ad that simply said, "Yes, it's grueling. Maybe even the test of a lifetime. But, that's what it's like to live with a life threatening disease every day of your life." I agreed, thinking about family and friends I have known and lost to AIDS and Cancer and in watching my mom fight Lupus. A month after seeing the sign, I officially registered as a rider for Tour de Friends (TdF). In May 2003, I purchased my first bike since I was 15. And now…I’m an addict.

I'm a big believer in the saying that life is a journey, not a destination. I believe that it's true for everything you do in life, including this ride. When I first decided to participate, I tried really hard to find someone to ride with me and I got mixed reactions. Some people legitimately couldn't make the time, others (including myself at times) thought I was nuts and saw the 356 miles as a measurement as opposed to the journey those miles actually represented. When I realized I'd be starting the ride on my own, I was a bit intimidated but the thought of a challenge excited me too. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have brief moments where I thought about "quitting." But, whenever I had those thoughts - even during the ride, I thought about the people in my life and the lives of others who never really had that option. They simply fought, and I simply went. I still try to maintain this mentality.

So, as an aside, it's my birthday and I'm really excited about getting together with a group of friends for dinner, and lecture them about the state of the world - because I can, it's my day. I also get to tell them how special they are and how grateful I am to have such incredible, wonderful people in my life. In Zulu, there is a saying, "one is who they are through others." I am who I am, and the person I am becoming, because of you.

On a final note, last year controversy came from superheros depicted with AIDS (in previous years it was clothing brands such as Kenneth Cole and Bennetton with a depiction of a Christ-like figure). This year, it's a campaign depicting Hitler, Stalin and Sadaam Hussein. I should warn - the video below was pulled from youtube, is NSFW and not suitable for children.

AIDS is a mass murderer from FunnyCommercialsWorldCom on Vimeo.

Take Your Time

2009-11-10T20:21:00.002-05:00

I recently stumbled across my notes from Olafur Eliasson's "Take Your Time" exhibit at the SF MoMA. I thought I would share...

Sometimes when you visit art exhibitions, the reaction to a piece is just as critical as the art itself. This is certainly the case here, where Eliasson simply wants to provoke a moment or a feeling, a profound connection or experience for the viewer. I write this amongst flashing lights in an empty room with benches.

One man observes me taking notes, trying to figure out why I am taking notes. What is so significant about this room, this piece? He refers to his catalogue. Many drift in and out of this seemingly insignificant room. Some sit, the benches are simply a respite. Others try to make a desperate attempt to make a real connection with what is happening in this room, to see what the artist is portraying (some of us art junkies try for something when nothing exists - maybe it's just lights in a room, sometimes we try too hard when we simply need to enjoy the delicate simplicity).

One man makes finger puppets, as people walk in they see me in the back, crouched down amongst the light, writing, it instigates them to linger longer. "What is happening here?" My presence as a Jane Goodall now appears to have drawn a crowd, really, I don't understand the piece and am unable to make a connection. So, rather than try to connect to it or understand the piece, I have decided to attempt to understand the motivation of the presence of others in this room.

I suppose I should leave now...so that the room may clear, and the gentleman that has been scratching his head and searching his catalogue, and staring at the lights, since I began writing...may walk out too.

Take your time was the first comprehensive survey in the United States of works by Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive environments, sculptures, and photographs elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Scandinavia, while foregrounding the sensory experience of the work itself. Drawn from collections worldwide, the presentation spans over fifteen years of Eliasson’s career. His constructions, at once eccentric and highly geometric, use multicolored washes, focused projections of light, mirrors, and elements such as water, stone, and moss to shift the viewer’s perception of place and self. By transforming the gallery into a hybrid space of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intensive engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.

Hunger

2009-11-03T21:14:00.003-05:00

I have so much inside of me, I need to get it out or it will eat at me, like a cancer, until there is nothing left, not even bones no longer my soul. It is odd how you can see some things so clearly, as though they are real, as though they will happen. Certainty is becoming an oddity in a life dictated by chaos. I tell myself there is a reason behind everything. There are no accidents. A physicist would call this elegance.

My mind so often wanders. I have ghosts, we all do. But there is a particular ghost that continues to occupy this piece of fiction of my mind, which persists. I feel as though she is mine, as though she belonged to me. I feel as though she always belonged to me. And now, someone else has her. She persists in my mind, haunts my heart, haunts my soul and I question how the world appears in her eyes and I wonder how she would react to the words that are spoken, unspoken, the pull of my hand in the darkness where I am unable to let her go, waiting for her to return to a place that she never, ever laid.

I think about a morning spent watching the mountains, folded softly upon themselves, seemingly at rest. Maybe at some point at a distant point in the past, they moved hastily, but now, these huge monuments of nature seem to know no other way. As I stare at soft mist, my thoughts seem to stream along the curvature of the bones of these mountains, up and down, and I am left thinking about the dramatic interaction in all of this. And, how I feel so small, so insignificant as I simply stare into this mist. My small thoughts and sensations are the barter for one day or the large price of today. The potential to ruin and wash out and waste away from all that lies inside. My hunger for her has actually been my desire to have what is in front of me now, but the past and my own stupid fear paralyzes my heart. What manner of man have I become?

June morning spent resting on the back porch watching the morning light slide it's way around the house to find me. I am sitting on the cold earth with a cup of coffee one cigarette down, folding over the pages of a book thinking about how i need to do the times crossword. Thinking about how I need to finish these books, how I need to take a long deep breath and keep on smiling. Watching the mystery of days unfold. The mystery of what happens now, what direction does today lead me in? what way do I find lurking up behind me trying to carve out peices of my day trying to trace out in sand the bits of time I reserve for quietness... I am hungry for life, hungry for laughter.

Quietly my thoughts move away from her, what never was. Quietly my thoughts move to who I am and the life I am determined to live, the man I want to be. She is a ghost and this pain, built on the imagination of everything I thought she was. What I thought I had is standing in front of me. The universe is elegant, that's what Brian said.

Wonder

2009-10-06T21:22:00.004-04:00

It will be fall soon, already I wonder what fall brings. What once was my favorite season, somehow, the thought of it makes me shudder. Already in my mind I feel the temperature falling, see the leaves changing, falling to the ground. I wonder. Whenever the word "wonder" creeps into the fog of my mind, I think of Jonathan Carroll and his brilliant treatment of the word, and what happens when wonder creeps in. Often, as adults, wonder is really not associated with awe (like the great wonder and curiousity of a child). Wonder nags, compels us to make choices from fear. I am not enthralled by this sense of wonder, nor am I enthralled by this sense of moving time, when for the first time in my life, I feel as though my life is in a sense of stagnation. Things are changing, everything is progressing forward and I feel stuck, unable to move - like a nightmare where you want to run, but you are somehow frozen. Am I stuck in a bad dream where I am waiting for the daylight again? There are days, moments, with glimmers of goodness - but they are fleeting. Like those quick glimpses of a dragonfly in an odd place at an odd moment in late summer in the middle of the city. The goodness seems surreal, like it doesn't belong in all that surrounds you. And just as you are ready to "observe" more, it flees - the moment is gone. The moment is gone...

The fall will be here soon and I am already wondering what it will bring, this feeling is ever daunting.

I hate this part.

Chapters turning pages, wonder. I hate this part.

There is an inherent contradiction. That is the awakening. As a piece of you fights to sleep, there is another which claws and nags at your innards like an animal breaking free from a cage, to make footprints in the snow. This part of you is ready to hunt, live, capture life. Inherent contradiction is the magnificent beauty in everything.

Patience never wants Wonder to enter the house: because Wonder is a wretched guest. It uses all of you but is not careful with what is most fragile or irreplaceable. If it breaks you, it shrugs and moves on. Without asking, Wonder often brings along dubious friends: doubt, jealousy, greed. Together they take over; rearrange the furniture in every one of your rooms for their own comfort. They speak odd languages but make no attempt to translate for you. They cook strange meals in your heart that leave odd tastes and smells. When they finally go are you happy or miserable? Patience is always left holding the broom.
— Jonathan Carroll (White Apples)

I Heart the Violoncello

2009-10-05T23:11:00.002-04:00

For the last few days, barely five minutes pass where I do not hear Bach's Suite No. 1 in G major, Prelude, in my head. The melody has been sitting there, haunting me. I can't explain why. Before Bach, Erik Satie's Six Gnossiennes: No.1: Lent was on a constant loop (the Aldo Ciccolini version I should add). Keep in mind, the music is in my mind - not my iPod, although in order to bring the music to reality, I have been turning on the iPod. I do find it odd that such contrasting compositions are occupying my head space, admittedly I am happy to have moved on to Bach, but only slightly. Satie's music is very sophisticated and can throw one into a very pensive mood (as the piano often does - I call it the "brain" of the orchestra). But the cello is the heart of any composition and Bach's cello suites can easily move someone to tears if one is really, really listening. The best renderings on the planet are by Yo Yo Ma and Pablo Casals.

When I was a little kid I wanted to play the cello, my brother wanted to play the violin. My parents decided they weren't purchasing two instruments - so I was forced to play violin (or no instrument at all). I played violin for all of five years in my youth and even played in the school orchestra as well as the county youth orchestra (whereas my brother dropped the instrument after a year, go figure). Today, I can only remember how to hold the instrument (how sad). In my mind, I am convinced that if it were a cello, I would still be playing. The sound is magnificent, the instrument is held so that it is almost one with the player. The sound must be coaxed from the wood and bow, you have to ask for it, not demand of it. In my mind, while I write this, I am thinking of some of the great cello masters - Rostropovich, Emanuel Fuermann, Pablo Casals, Mischa Maisky, Yo yo Ma, Natalia Gutman, Jacqueline du Pre, Daniil Shafran, and the rising Alban Gerhardt. I also think of some of the pieces I adore like Fire Dance, Bach's Cello Suites, The Swan from "The Carnival of the animals", Elgar Cello Concerto, Prokofiev Cello Concerto... there are also works that I don't like so much (Claude Debussy comes to mind, despite it's mad brilliance).

However, to fully embrace these compositions and the talent of the musicians, one ought to watch a cellist play. The fingering technique of Alban Gerhardt is oddly similar to Mischa Maisky - although the two men "hold" the cello completely differently. Yo Yo Ma is as graceful as Rostropovich as his fingers slides down through the chords. And although Pablo Casals has the most notable recording of Bach's Cello Suites, it is Yo yo Ma's rendering that moves me to tears... every single time. Coincidentally, the two worked together before Yo yo Ma entered Harvard.

Without Casals, people everywhere would have had substantially less music to explore. Also, both he and Mr. Ma are necessary to make a point about the very transience of tastes in music.

Much debate exists as to why Bach composed these works or even when (the best scholars agree sometime between 1717-1723). I find it fascinating that the suites were so obscure as to be almost completely unknown until the turn of the century. They had not just fallen into dusty oblivion; they rested at the absolute bottom of the classical hierarchy. Back during a time when so much as installing an end piece on a cello was apostasy, Bach was falling out of current favor with performing musicians. The handful of people who even knew the suites existed viewed them as brittle exercises, deemed of slight acquisition value only because of the composer's name. The suites may likely have continued to be ignored by all, until the paper they were written on rotted into a condition not even suitable for fish-wrap and the music could have been lost forever, but for a 13-year-old young man named Pablo Casals.

Casals at the time was playing in a café in Barcelona four hours a day, for four pesetas a day, to finance his music lessons. New to the cello, he was always looking for new music. He happened upon a rare copy of the suites in a second-hand shop in 1889, was intrigued because he didn't know these even existed any where in the world, and then became ecstatic when he recognized what he had found and their worth. He then devoted a dozen years of study and practice before performing the suites in public. Casals became the first person in the world to record them (1915) and more than 20 years later (after much persuading) he recorded them in their entirety, which he did only once. Yet his ongoing passion for the works brought the music back to life. From something regarded as museum shelf paper to being revered now as a masterpiece for cello the equivalent of the Goldberg Variations, these six suites are now studied and played by nearly every master and student of the cello.

For his own pupils, Casals characterized the works by giving each piece a distinct mood. He told the young players that each suite takes its character from the prelude. According to Casals, No. 1. is "optimistic", No. 5. "tempestuous", and No. 6. "bucolic".

Yo yo Ma's execution is sometimes more like a dance out of the shadows into the filtered sunlight of a deep forest. Ma's playing is refined and elegant. His very fluidity in most passages can make his approach seem strangely stiff in others. Also, this fluency is a most individual interpretation, not as stopped or abrupt as more "authentic" players tend to read the music. You can hear his breathing, which only reminds me of how he seldom wavers from the natural breath of the music and understands the pulse. While Casals (for reasons unknown to me) preferred to play the Allemande in No. 5 straight through, Ma follows the notation for two repeated passages, prolonging the piece for several minutes longer and re-emphasizing the mood by his restatement. Though the suites may take their character from the prelude, here it seems from the prelude's very first note, which might be the single most important note when playing unaccompanied.

Though just hearing the Bach cello suites is always somehow reassuring, at this stage of the game for me, they are like old friends, although perhaps a bit more reliable. I'd encourage you to get both Casals and Yo yo Ma and start making up your own mind.

Wild Horses

2009-10-04T08:55:00.005-04:00

Fall is officially upon us. There exists a certain crispness in the air, a certain quality to the energy around us. The day grows ever shorter. There was a time when fall used to be my favorite time of year - now I am less certain. As we grow closer to winter, the image of bright yellow leaves and their contrast against tar black roads and grey sidewalks embark a sense of longing in my soul. There is a quiet beauty, but in my mind I know it harkens the reality of cold. I know soon that as I make the march to my car, I will be able to see vapors rise from my mouth as I exhale to breathe and the mornings will surprise me with the gift of crystalized water on my windshield. I suppose this too is part of the magic of the season, finding the warmth. This season brings so much mystery. We are all bundled in layer after layer, which must be pealed off like an onion once we arrive at our destination. The "true" holidays begin arriving, seemingly to take our minds off the weather and into the spirit of the season.

I digress, already, I am off subject from my original intent of writing. I jokingly mentioned to someone the other day that I am a wild horse, no one can ever tame me. To which he replied "all women say this." For whatever reason, this has stuck in my brain like a splinter working itself out. Do women and men really think and behave this way, obviously some reflection via the blog is in order...

There is a Japanese Buddhist proverb, Kokoro no koma ni tadzuna wo yurusuna, which means, Never let go the reins of the wild colt of the heart. Ever since I learned it, I keep it close to my mind and soul. For me, it simply means to be free - in my actions, in my mind, in my heart (without hurting others). And, in the context of a relationship, it very often reminded be of a quote from Erich Fromm - "In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two."

By culture, by biology, by need…yes…we ALL want to be that someone to somebody. But you should be loved for who you are, not what you could be - or what you once were - you should be loved for the human being that you are. When you find a person who is authentic and sincere and accepts you as the same, wants to play on your team - then consider yourself a lucky person and prepare yourself for a really beautiful run…the unfortunate reality is, too many people are busy interpreting ghosts.

Love is simple - you are with someone that loves you back. Any void that you think needs to be filled by someone else, is something you actually need to figure out how to fill on your own. You are the only person who has the power to complete yourself (yes, Jerry McGuire got it all wrong). That is the point to Shel Silverstein’s “The Missing Piece.” We go through life thinking we need that one thing or that one person to make us whole…and then you’re disappointed when they can’t do that for you. You just have to learn to take the power and take the control to make yourself whole. It’s like the notion of love. You can never really be loved unless you love yourself. You can’t expect someone to complete you. It’s too much to ask. It’s too selfish. Love is loving someone for who they are in your life, for the way they compliment your life…not the way they make your life function. Wine and cheese don’t taste good together because they can’t stand on their own, it’s simply a combination that works. It’s a banal analogy, but I’ve learned the hard way that "true" love really isn’t that complicated and we have more choices in this life than we truly allow ourselves.

A lot of what makes life so complicated is expectation. Expecting something from someone, expecting something from something. The problem with expectation is, it’s a crapshoot. Sometimes you get what you wanted, more often than not…you don’t. Which means that a lot of us walk through life with a suitcase full of disappointments. Nothing in your life will ever change unless you change yourself, change your life. Things don’t happen to you…you happen to them. You are the action and everything else is the reaction. Maybe if we all thought about the action necessary to get the reaction desired, we might all get a little further in life. You are entitled to nothing you haven’t worked for. When you get something unexpected, it’s random luck - so take it as motivation and not a hint of what you “deserve.” Everyone “deserves” better. How many people are looking in the mirror to instigate the changes in their lives to welcome better things? Status quo is just that - status quo. As Johann von Goethe once said, "Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow."

In the end - some things defy explanation particularly when it comes from our hearts. We experience the affection of others often like the beach experiences the ocean. We are changed by it, sometimes enhanced...sometimes eroded. At times the size and motion of the waves are inconsequential and other times the gentlest wave can bring forth the most monumental of changes. But like a beach we are simply there, unable to control the ways of the water. We exist hoping that the landscape is a beautiful one. I am one of those people who exist, hoping that in the end, the waves of life create something beautiful. I’ll just continue wandering, throwing the starfish back into the ocean.

If I could write words
Like leaves on an autumn forest floor,
What a bonfire my letters would make.
If I could speak words of water,
You would drown when I said
"I love you."
- Spike Milligan

Monitor

2009-09-04T19:00:00.004-04:00

Riding hot on the tails of music from Mali is Mexico. Volovan is a group I discovered when I saw Y Tu Mama Tambien. Below are the lyrics to one of my favorite songs by the group. It's called Monitor and I translated as best I could. Enjoy :) If anyone needs another recommendation for a great Mexican artist - Julietta Venega, Mana, and Cafe Tacuba are some greats that are constantly streaming through my iPod.

Nos hablamos pero no sabemos si será
Volcados en la ilusion
Me voy en un segundo
Hoy nesecito estar sentado desde aqui
Y los dos llegamos tarde para decirnos que

Y aunque eres invisible
Pero atra vez de ti
Y siendo intocable
Yo te siento en mis sueños
Y me lamento por no estar alla

Y hoy te miento para estar solo
Tu y yo

Y la distancia le gano al amor
Solo te veo en el monitor ouuh uooh

Esperando respuesta veo que hoy
Tu ausencia llega nada mas
Las cosas deben de seguir
Y no sabemos si se van

Hoy nesecito estar sentado desde aqui
Y los dos llegamos tarde para decirnos que

Y aunque eres invisible
Pero atra vez de ti
Y siendo intocable
Yo te siento en mis sueños

Y me lamento por no estar alla
Y hoy te miento para estar solos
Tu y yo

Y la distancia le gano al amor
Solo te veo en el monitor ouuh uooh

Y me lamento por no estar alla
Y hoy te miento para estar solo
Tu y yo

------------------------

We talk but we don't know
if we will be upset by the illusion
I will leave in a moment
Today, I need to be seated here
Although we both arrive late, and tell ourselves, what?

though you're invisible
you move back instead
being untouchable
I feel you in my dreams

I'm sorry for not being there
now I ask to you if we can be alone
just you and me

the distance to win her love
you only see on the monitor

I see that now, as I wait for a response
nothing comes except your absence
things should continue
although we don't know if they will

Today, I need to be seated here
Although we both arrive late, and tell ourselves, what?

though you're invisible
you move back instead
being untouchable
I feel you in my dreams

I'm sorry for not being there
now I ask to you if we can be alone
just you and me

the distance to win her love
you only see on the monitor

I'm sorry for not being there
now I ask to you if we can be alone
just you and me

Now

2009-08-27T19:09:00.001-04:00

Now
by Greg Watson

I told you once when we were young that
we would someday meet again.
Now, the years flown past, the letters
unwritten, I am not so certain.

It is autumn. There are toothaches hidden
in this wind, there are those determined
to bring forth winter at any cost.
I am resigned to dark blonde shadows

at stoplights, lost in the roadmaps of leaves
which point in every direction at once.
But I am wearing the shirt you stitched
two separate lifetimes ago. It is old

and falling to ash, yet every button blooms
the flowers of your design. I think of this
and I am happy, to have kissed
your mouth with the force of language,

to have spoken your name at all.

Bad Omens

2009-08-26T22:43:00.003-04:00

I stood on top of white crystalline sands and I could see clearly, although it was dark outside - it must have been past midnight, but the moon was full and bright. So bright, that it's white light cast waves through the sky so that one could see the navy glow of a cloudless sky and the details of the desert which stood before them - where I stood. From across the distance, I saw a man cast a fishing line into the sand, as if it were water. The man was dressed as any other fisherman you could imagine (I suppose). Waders, plaid shirt, hat with various bait hooks tacked across the brim. But, he was fishing in the desert. I could not notice the water - but something had latched on to the hook from beneath the sand, and I watched as the man followed the line - he walked behind the meandering trail, not letting too much of the line get ahead. Eventually, water appeared - a lake, which was as still as the sand. Once the line made it's way to the water, the man reeled his catch. The fish was quite large, the size and shape of a tuna, with the head and coloring of a white and brown seal. It's mouth grasped the hook as the fish gasped, it's gills expanding in the night. I asked the man if he was going to return the fish to the water. What could one person need such a large and extraordinary fish for - I felt as though it needed to be let go. He could not eat it all and it would spoil before he got it anywhere proper, we were in the dessert after all. The man simply said "I do not need this fish, but I want it." With that - he set the animal on the sand, hook still in it's mouth - still grasping for the water to breathe - still attached to the line, and he continued to walk, dragging the body behind him. I stood motionless, watching.

I am sure this was not a good omen.

Random Mumblings, found...

2009-08-02T19:16:00.002-04:00

Right now, it is storming outside - the rain has begun to pelt the windows and the thunder is growing loud. I love these kinds of storms, it is very similar to the one that came the night before I met you. The lightening is not as strong this time though. When I was a little girl my grandparents in Thailand had a house over water on their farm (they were very poor). In the summer time, we would go visit and it would often storm violently towards the evening. I would bring the mosquito net over myself and sit by the open door, with my legs draped down the side, dangling toward the water so the rain could hit. As my legs would sway back and forth, I would simply stare at the sky and the spectacular lightshow as thunder clapped and monkeys screeched in the background - water pouring down my calves, magnetically racing towards the pond below. Half an hour later, the show would end, and I would be left, utterly mesmerized by the power, force and beauty of nature. I love a good storm.

xo
-j

----------------------
Your face is neither infinite nor ephemeral.
You can never see your own face,
only a reflection, not the face itself.

So you sigh in front of mirrors
and cloud the surface.

It's better to keep your breath cold.
Hold it, like a diver does in the ocean.
One slight movement, the mirror-image goes.

Don't be dead or asleep or awake.
Don't be anything.

What you most want,
what you travel around wishing to find,
lose yourself as lovers lose themselves,
and you'll be that.

- Farid al-Din Attar

-----------------

in loneliness
a leaf danced
till the last moment

- e e cummings

---------------------------------

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

e e cummings

--

The BIG Eclipse

2009-07-21T17:41:00.002-04:00

So the July 2009 eclipse has been a pretty big deal to me for a realllllllly long time, and I am not in the Hanzou province in China to experience it. I had to cancel my trip. As fate dictates, there was an inevitable course of events that led me away from my ability to photograph this once in a lifetime event. As it turns out, it is raining in Shanghai and most of eastern China, so I wouldn't have been able to see anything, anyway. But...still, I digress.

"Of all the dramatic displays that nature treats us to, a total eclipse of the sun is the most awe-inspiring. It begins with a gradual darkening of the sky that progresses to an eerie gray. It’s strangely quiet, prompting people to speak just above a whisper as they watch a flat, black disk slide slowly across the sun. The moment when the last crescent of sunlight vanishes is unnerving, recalling ancient fears that an eclipse was signaling the end of the world. Then suddenly the sun’s corona bursts forth—a shimmering halo of light that seems to surround a black hole in the sky. This is the magic moment; this is why eclipse chasers are willing to travel to the ends of the earth. Then the moon moves on, uncovering a sliver of sunlight, and everyone cheers the sun’s return." - Exploratorium

The solar eclipse of July 22, 2009 will be the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, lasting at most 6 minutes, 39 seconds. It has caused tourist interest in eastern China, Nepal and India. As a matter of fact, the Marshall Islands was booked out nearly a six years ago for this event. The eclipse is part of saros series 136, like the record-setting solar eclipse of July 11, 1991. The next event from this series will be on August 2, 2027. The exceptional duration is a result of the moon being near perigee, with the apparent diameter of the moon 8% larger than the sun (magnitude 1.080). This will be the second in the series of three eclipses in a month, with the lunar eclipse on July 7 and the lunar eclipse on August 6.

I will be viewing it online, although it won't quite being the same. I was looking at pictures of folks in Japan in their tents and others in India with their telescopes - pangs of jelousy in my veins. It simply wasn't meant to be. For whatever reason. So I am here, I suppose the shorter eclipse in 2010, from South America will have to suffice :)

View the eclipse LIVE by clicking here - suggest tuning in around 10:30PM EDT, live streaming should begin around 10:35PM.

The path of totality:
At sunrise on July 22, 2009, (the evening of July 21 PDT), the moon’s umbra—the cone-shaped part of the moon’s shadow—will fall on India’s Gulf of Khambhat. The shadow will sweep across Asia and the South Pacific before leaving the earth near the Marshall Islands about 3½ hours later. The path of totality will cover a distance of approximately 9,500 miles (15,200 km). The maximum duration of totality is an exceptionally long 6 minutes and 39 seconds, which will come while the shadow is over the Pacific.

An Imaginary Day Written for D

2009-07-16T23:30:00.000-04:00

Soft morning light filters in through the blinds of the open window, it's already nine and the birds have almost completed their first symphony. Summer skin contrasts with the whiteness of freshly washed sheets that smell of lavender. On this particular morning, there will be tea. Cups at fingertips, fingers gently touching lips. Later, there might be a lot to do. There might be nearly nothing. Along the way, very little is known. A careful breeze moves between, above and around the room turning sheets like newspaper pages and leaning out the bedroom door, curious about the details, making soft sounds as it makes it's path through the house, only to fall silent. Gazing through the blinds once more, gentle whisps of white cotton clouds, it's easy to find longing in the sky.

Into the afternoon, softly leaning on sofas, noses in books, feet at bicycle pedals moving on and into the future. There is music and dancing and laughter in a little café, tucked neatly by the canal. At certain moments, the music becomes much too loud, at others, it is the laughter. Life breathes into the lttle café, seemingly tucked into a miniature forest, even though it sits in the middle of the city. In truth, it simply belongs to this moment, dancing in the afternoon, shade of trees, dragonflies milling over the water of the still canal. Life stands still to breath, listen. Sun streaks through the leaves of tall trees, creating Jacobs ladder. Two more smiles cut loose and run. Watching the sunset, so fine the sugar of the sun, leaning down with a shy grin. Escape into purple dusk.

Full moons are finer because risings come and turn your soul around. When the stars retreat we are something different. I am tossed and turned by flickering lamplit eyes. I like listening to the wind sing, echoes of late night murmurs and the sound of rain pounding against the window. I like the beat of your heart against my chest and the breeze - fresh seawater and salt, wet, light, raining all over me. Once the darkness devours me, I am stirred to life by gentle imaginings of fingertips brushing, softly treading feet marking new trails and patterns in the shifting sand of two bodies, slip below melted, warm skin in a deep dark starless sky so thick not even the motion of surf crashing upon jagged cliffs could outweigh the rise and fall of these breaths or the secret which has made itself known. Within a midsummer nights' dream.

And already I wonder if tomorrow will be an orange morning filled with lavender smells. Living in a world where everyone is looking at the same object and everyone sees the same thing. Except me. I see something different altogether. It's easy to find longing in the sky, easy to figure out which worlds are worth saving. There is some small scar in the truth, like how sunsets are better than sunrises...

Schmidt Happens

2009-07-14T21:50:00.002-04:00

"But, why does every crisis automatically fall to the United States to solve? We’ve got Iraq, Iran, North Korea—and these are people who might murder us. We’re supposed to tend to a bunch of Africans killing each other? Why? Because we’re Americans? The answer is . . . yes. Because we’re Americans. Because we’re a nation—perhaps the nation—that’s supposed to give a damn. What’s going on is an organized extermination of an entire race of people. We’re the country that’s supposed to give a damn. Miss Schmidt, Miss Colson, your claim here most likely won’t survive summary judgment. And maybe the American people don’t care about what’s happening over there, but for today, here, now—at least one federal court judge does."

Everyone needs to care about something. We all need to learn about this world, engage.

One world, one love, one peace...united.
-j

Verbal Ramblings

2009-07-02T21:15:00.003-04:00

My days are filled with mystery on a sunny afternoon. Ten thousand moments flicker by, cast like stones that weigh me down or prism light that lifts me through, to the sky. There are certain words that I like, such as vapors…counterparts…ennui...serendipity….kismit…bravura. None of the words have anything to do with each other, and I do not care because I know them. They have come to know me in their own moments, at their own time, at their own will.

"Gentle breezes” is a phrase that keeps repeating in the back of my mind. I feel the need to repeat this in a time when it seems like everything has meaning. When the world becomes manic.

Bioluminescence, it’s like the first time I saw a firefly. Life is so full of wonder. Your life is so full of wondrous treasures and beauty, you just have to be open enough to see it. And, I don’t mean “see” in the conventional sense, but in the sense of the heart…in the sense of intangibility that is quite simply felt and seen through the minds sky.

The world is full of Fire Flies. The world in it's infinite being casts a glow if you stop to see it, pause long enough to be mesmerized by it. Bioluminescence abounds in faint and overt ways. Life can be still, so long as you allow yourself to live within the moment and not around it. Life lives and breathes within and throughout us. A primal feeling of polarity streams through my veins of inner consciousness whenever I stop to think about it. Whenever I feel that fundamental need to feel that energy. Whenever I feel the need to know that inevitably we are all one with each other. Life is such an intricate circle of balances.

It doesn’t really matter how esoteric your thinking or how metaphysical you desire your world to be. The fact remains that to survive in this life, you must play the game. You must work, you must socialize, you must interact, you must suffer, experience pain, and deal with the world around you. For some people, there also exists a separate and distinct challenge, the spiritual growth of the mind. A way of viewing the world in a way that you are completely removed and life’s events become completely inconsequential except for the search for some grain of truth, a lesson, or some deeper meaning. This is what gets me through the rough times in my life. It’s what makes me feel that there is some reason for suffering. It makes me even more grateful for what’s good in my life.

Buddhists believe that all life is suffering, one lesson...the opportunity to stifle or continue growing. It is my hope that I've only continued to grow despite anything that has crossed my path. I guess perhaps I am beginning to learn that perhaps I’m not as afraid of pain as I once thought I was. Each of us have experienced deep pain, perhaps there is something to be gained in not protecting anything and simply being free. What will happen will be.

As Goethe once wrote, “Nothing is more important than this day.”

World Refugee Day

2009-06-20T12:17:00.007-04:00

Learn how to stay informed by clicking HERE. Keep informed about what's going on in the world's major forced displacement crises, and stay in touch with the progress of the UNHCR as they work to bring protection to refugees, internally displaced people and others of concern worldwide.

On this World Refugee Day, let us remember that refugees too are real people with real needs. Helping them to rebuild their lives and their communities benefits us all.

– High Commissioner António Gutteres

Real People, Real Needs
This year, with the world economic crisis threatening to slash aid budgets and amid enormous global uncertainty, we need to ensure refugees are not forgotten. That's why the theme for this year's World Refugee Day on June 20 is "Real People, Real Needs." Of the millions of people forcibly displaced by conflict, persecution and natural disasters, every one has a story to tell; they are real people, just like you and me, and they have real needs. But, despite the best efforts of UNHCR and many others, many of these basic needs are far from being met.

On June 20, the United States will join the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the international community in marking World Refugee Day. Secretary Clinton was scheduled to speak at a ceremony at National Geographic headquarters on June 18 to salute the fortitude of the world’s refugees and internally displaced persons. Unfortunately, she was unable to attend the event because of an injury. This is an abridged version of her prepared remarks. Around the world today, millions of people endure war, genocide, famine and natural disasters. Often, they are forced to flee in search of safety, seeking temporary shelter until they can return home and rebuild their lives. But for many refugees and other displaced people, the homes they loved are gone forever.

The crowded camps where refugees live are designed to be temporary, but many of the world’s displaced people become permanent residents. Children are born there; parents die there; people fall in love, marry—even divorce there. Outside the camps, the world seeks a solution to their plight, a way to send them home safely or help them find new homes in new lands. Inside the camps, the refugees wait and hope.

The 34 million refugees and internally displaced persons are some of the world’s most vulnerable people. They are also some of the world’s toughest people. On World Refugee Day, we remember not only what they have survived but the strength and spirit with which they’ve survived it. And we pledge to stand with them and help them build safe and fulfilling lives—not on the outskirts of society, but in the heart of it.

The United States is committed to supporting refugees and displaced people worldwide. We are proud to support the heroic efforts of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, the Red Cross, the International Organization of Migration, and many other non-governmental organizations that work on behalf of refugees worldwide, often in difficult and dangerous circumstances. Last year, we gave more than $1.4 billion to support this work, making us the world’s largest donor for refugee relief. And we’re honored to welcome the many refugees who have resettled in our nation; since 1975, nearly 3 million refugees have made new homes in the United States, more than any other nation in the world.

We stand with refugees because their struggle represents a humanitarian emergency. Furthermore, their fates have broad repercussions for their families, their countrymen, and all people everywhere.

The plight of refugees has an impact on regional and global security; the threats that cause people to flee their homes en masse are dangers to the world at large. Their plight impacts economic development; most refugees have no means to support their families or contribute to their nations’ prosperity. Their plight impacts health and education; disease is rampant in many camps, while educational resources for refugee children are limited. By virtually every measure of social progress, refugees are left behind—and their exclusion diminishes progress for us all.

Our support for refugees is a crucial piece of a larger foreign policy vision. We are committed to pursuing peace and prosperity in every corner—not only in the marble halls of governments, but also in the rural villages and distant cities where people strive to live, work, learn, raise families, contribute to their communities, and grow old with dignity. These are universal dreams that we seek to make a reality for more of the world’s people.

In the coming months, we will continue our efforts to end urgent refugee crises, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chad, the Central African Republic, and Darfur. We are encouraged by the progress being made to resolve long-standing refugee situations in Liberia, South Sudan, Burundi and Bhutan. And we call upon the entire global community to strengthen our efforts to ensure that refugees have access to the resources and protections they need to survive.

Supporting refugees is not only the purview of governments and NGOs. It’s a job for all of us. Last month, the Obama Administration announced more than $100 million in aid to support the waves of refugees fleeing the fighting with the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. At the same time, we created a new way for all citizens to help. By texting the word “Swat” to the number 20222 on your cell phones, you can make a $5 donation to UNHCR to support refugees. It’s an easy way to make a real difference in their lives.

On this World Refugee Day, I urge all of us to seek ways large and small to support the millions of people around the world who hold the same dreams we do—whose strength and courage are unsurpassed—but who have been dislocated by crises beyond their control and are now hoping that the world will remember them and continue to fight on their behalf for a better future.

A comprehensive assessment of the needs of refugees and other people cared for by the UN refugee agency revealed that 30 percent were unmet - a third of them in basic and essential services. Improvements in nutrition and water supplies, access to primary health care, strengthened child protection programmes, better protection for women from sexual violence and abuse, and improvements in living conditions and sanitation facilities are just some of the needs that are not being met worldwide.

This World Refugee Day we ask you to remember the millions of forcibly displaced and stateless people under our care who are struggling with their day-to-day lives. One thing connects them all: basic needs that must be met so they have a chance to rebuild their lives.

UN Goodwill Ambassador, Angelina Jolie Speaks for 2009 World Refugee Day

How you can help!!
Purchase "Transitions - an Iraqi Refugee Album." Iraqi refugees have released an album of peaceful and uplifting music for World Refugee Day. All proceeds from the sale of their music will be used to help other Iraqi refugees. I purchased this wonderful album and it is absolutely, hauntingly beautiful. Available via iTunes and Amazon.

GIMME SHELTER: Give Refugees Shelter - It's Just A Click Away
Gimme Shelter has a very simple goal - to deliver the stark message that 42 million forcibly displaced people need shelter every day, not just physical shelter, but also protection for their basic rights and the capacity to live in safety and dignity. Through Gimme Shelter the UNHCR hopes to connect and activate people worldwide to get involved and to raise funds to support their work around the world.

Ben Affleck’s short film for UNHCR’s “Gimme Shelter” campaign

Papa's Day

2009-06-20T10:01:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to wish a happy Father's Day to all the dad's out there! This morning, I thought for sure that I would be able to come up with one wonderful story about me and my father, but I couldn't - not because there aren't any, but it's hard to put so many neat memories into one cohesive little narrative. I think that is one of the superpowers that fathers have over their children, larger than life when we are children - but people we love and respect as we get older, and if we are lucky, have the ability to forge a unique friendship.

So, I can say that some of my favorite moments as a kid with dad were rollerskating in the neighborhoods of sunny CA, building my first sand castles in Santa Cruz, road trips (there were a lot of them), drive thru movies (my dad would build a fort in the back of the Rover for me and my brother) and Friday night movies in front of the fireplace - which usually turned into a family slumber party in the family room.

My dad endured all my kooky Father's Day gifts through the years (a perpetual motion clock of a golfer, a box of rocks, many ties), and curiously, like any good dad - he has a special place where he keeps all of these little oddities from his little girl (which I'll always be in his eyes).

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

The Little Couple

2009-06-01T19:38:00.003-04:00

I will start posting "real posts" and my photos again once I have (finally) replaced or repaired my external hard drive. Until then, I present the "Little Couple." I ran into this show on TLC on a rare day while I was sitting down, doing nothing - and got adventurous with the remote control ( I rarely watch television and I just got cable for the first time in my life - I am a TV luddite, I digress...) Anyway, this is likely one couple that won't be destroyed by reality television. They genuinely appear to share common interests, life experiences, and true love (I think I might envy their relationship dynamic). Then again, really hard to know anything "real" from a TV show (unless it's Discover Planet - which I also recently "discovered").

Watch a clip from TLC below...

Mullet Fever

2009-05-29T20:41:00.006-04:00

This post is dedicated to finding out WHO reinvigorated the REVERSE mullet! Below we have Chris Angel, Nikki Sixx, Adam Lambert, and Kate Gosselin. WOW, please stop the maddness.

Dedicated to Aaron, who doesn't read this - but we both happen to own the Mullet Book.

Door

2009-05-25T21:54:00.002-04:00

One by one, as life moves forward, one by one - people walk out the door. One by one, as life moves forward, watch the door to see the backs, as single file, one by one, people - things - moments, walk out like phantoms, like ghosts. Nothing is ever what it once was. Nothing is the way it was before. You move forward, you turn your gaze toward light beaming through a window pane. As ghosts have their procession, away, no longer to be with you - there is comfort in the light. So as all goes away, slowly - painfully, as you feel your heart tear, you are still able to find the light and move forward. One step, two steps - three. Find your balance and a different door. Life moves forward, there is something else, someone else, waiting for you. Waiting for you to stay and not walk out that door. You will find that place, find that space, and give all you have - to remain...forever.

Help the Wounded Soldier

2009-05-25T11:42:00.005-04:00

“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.” - Douglas MacArthur

When a soldier goes off, it is not only a personal sacrifice - but also the sacrifice of a mother, a wife, a brother, a child. They answer the call so "we" don't have to. We should remember this, always - we should not take for granted the sacrifice made by individuals, families and communities. Our soldiers are people first, people who are friends, parents, spouses, children.

The Wounded Warrior Project is a private organization formed with the purpose to "honor and empower wounded warriors" of the United States Armed Forces. Aid directed to soldiers varies quite widely from direct material aid to assistance with rehabilitation, providing services to attend to the special needs of injured veterans, building social support networks between different veterans and among their families and friends, raising public awareness of the existence of and issues related to wounded veterans, and lobbying Congress and participating in the legislative process for the benefit of veterans.

Learn how to get involved - or donate, by clicking HERE. The greatest casualty is being forgotten.

o U.S. Troop Casualties - 4,278 US troops. 54% of US casualties were under 25 years old. 72% were from the US Army
o Non-U.S. Troop Casualties - Total 316, with 179 from the UK
o US Troops Wounded - 31,215, 20% of which are serious brain or spinal injuries (total excludes psychological injuries)
o US Troops with Serious Mental Health Problems - 30% of US troops develop serious mental health problems within 3 to 4 months of returning home.

Those who aren't called to duty have the luxury of simply being able to say "we shouldn't be at war." Those who aren't called have the luxury of not being sent to a battlefield - or being without choice, because you are in the command of the military. Helping and supporting our troops isn't about a decision to support the policies of our leaders - it is a decision to support people who are out there, so you don't have to BE.

Nicanor

2009-05-20T21:32:00.006-04:00

blackness is night
it is the nicanor
of my heart
this blackness

seductive
invasive

calm smoothness
of these waters
guided only
by the harvest white moon

concupiscence
repose

gently guided
by the touch
of a strategic little
finger, traced bones, lines

starvation
temptation

tread gently
into high grasses
stand ten feet tall
falling into depths, of souls

pall
assuage

and you
to the top
of this page
start it all
again..
beginning or end

-Jangela

Toast Yourself

2009-05-17T20:29:00.011-04:00

TOAST YOURSELF BY CLICKING HERE

With the Bread Art Project you can create a personalized piece of bread art by uploading a favorite drawing or photo, or create a new one using a slice of bread as the canvas. For each piece of bread art created, the Grain Foods Foundation will donate $1 to Feeding America, up to $50,000.

One dollar provides seven meals or four bags of groceries to the 25 million people served by food banks annually. The more bread art consumers create, the more meals Feeding America can put on the table for families across the country. Consumers can also view bread art from around the country as they take a virtual tour of the online gallery of giving.

One in eight Americans is struggling with hunger and more than 36 million are at risk of hunger. Given the troubled economy, consumers across the country are facing the difficulty of providing for their families, and many have turned to relief agencies to put meals on the table. Feeding America is seeing a 30 percent increase in demand on its food banks nationwide compared to just one year ago. To alleviate the increased pressure on these important resources, the Grain Foods Foundation recently launched the Bread Art Project at gowiththegrain.org, where consumers can create a personalized piece of bread art – at no cost – by uploading a favorite drawing or photo, or designing a new one using a digital slice of bread as the canvas.

FeedingAmerica.org
GoWithTheGrain.org

In Bed With Neruda

2009-05-17T11:20:00.002-04:00

Sonnet LXXXI

And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray
wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

Pablo Neruda

Madonna reading "if you forget me" - by Pablo Neruda

If you forget me (Frozen) Madonna-Subtitulado MB en Yahoo! Video

Ghosts

2009-05-16T09:34:00.007-04:00

"Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life... someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have." - Henry Rollins

I am haunted in my dreams. Almost every night, you come to me. Often when we talk, I just have questions, the "whys." Last night was not much different, you came to me and you wore rugged, yet very well cared for boots with antique suede. And you held me tight until as one, we became the shape of a half moon. You held me as though to never let go. But I had a plane to catch and there were no answers, so I left as you stood in the empty room, once lit by the glow of our moon. You watched me and held back answers because of pride, leaving my heart half full. I asked my father why he didn't protect me. I fall from cliffs and I am consumed by water, everywhere. My thoughts drowned in the torrent, as you watch, I fall, fall, fall away.

Every tear drop cracks like thunder, with bullets racing through my heart, my heart has fallen, failed and fallen.

My sleeping has not been well and I need your ghosts to disappear. For the first time, the finality of silence has left me profoundly sad and made me feel incomplete. Part of me left with you, I saw my essence escape to stand with you in a past that lingers. I am left with memories of days in Hyde field, invoking your image, and your ghost in my sleep. In the light of day I find myself in contemplation of the loss of life and futures that never were and a past that melted from existence a long while ago. Smiles, light, tracing constellations, conversations at dawn play like film reels. Flickering at unexpected moments, my hand is grabbed, my heart becomes still and we walk away, faceless and without shape. In morning light to sounds of starlings and doves, with gentle breezes rolling in through the trees, through my window I am grabbed from the water to breathe, exhale, breathe.

I have become a storm when I like to be still, I like to be still, I like to be still. Nothing is real.

“If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.” - Henry Rollins

Nature of Things

2009-05-14T22:12:00.008-04:00

It's spring and the caterpillars are out, everywhere. Earlier this week, when I got out of my car, I saw a black and yellow striped, hairy little guy on the pavement (I'll call him Skippy). I thought the parking lot of my building was an odd place for Skippy to be - all the major catastrophes that could have happened, I could have run over him plus, poor Skippy looked to be a pretty easy target for the local birds (crows, pigeons, starlings, robins, sparrows - the list of potential avian threats are massive for such a squiggly thing so out in the open). So, yes - I paused, thought for a moment about the oddity, and kept walking towards my building. After all, it was only a fifteen foot journey to the nearest tree and patch of ground - this was the thought, the last thought I had about Skippy, before I continued my stride.

About 5 hours later, I walked back to my car to head home (I wasn't feeling so great and felt like my bed needed company, conversely I desperately needed the solace of my comfy bed). Now I know you must be thinking one of three things happened as I walked to my car. "Oh my God, she stepped on poor Skippy!" or "She saw Skippy get run over or taken by a bird (sad face)" OR, dear lord - "Skippy was just plain dead on the pavement." Well, all three are wrong - Skippy was still on the pavement, arranged in a vertical position near the front of my car, and he looked like he was still alive. I just had no idea why he was still there. I doubt he was waiting for my eminent arrival. So, I looked at him, and thought - "I might run him over, maybe I should move him." So, being the diligent bug saver - I retrieved some paper from my car to scoop the little booger up. Skippy was not cooperating, every time the paper scooted towards his hairy mess, he squigled as best he could. Clearly Skippy wanted to be left alone, but I was now on a mission to get him out of my way.

Well, I did eventually get him scooped on to a sheet of "post it" (that had L-O-V-E spelled out in red letters on the top) - but then I didn't know where to put him (all of a sudden the patch of dirt didn't seem good enough - and he seemed a bit weak. I can only imagine what anyone who looked out the window and down the lot thought I was doing - bending to the ground and scratching it with paper - then dangling the paper in front of me in deep pensiveness. So, I did the natural thing - I put Skippy in the passenger seat to take him to some greener pastures, after all -pavement isn't the appropriate and natural place for a caterpillar to have it's last moments.

So, I parked my car in front of my house - picked him up from the driver's seat, and placed him under a huge leaf. I felt satisfied that we was now in a proper place. I haven't seen Skippy, so hopefully he regained his strength, found a tree and spun a cocoon.

Today as I walked to my car, I thought about the little caterpillar in the larger context of things. Mainly because I saw another random caterpillar on the pavement by my office (maybe they were siblings) - but he had been partially squashed, I was too late. So, I simply thought to myself, you can't save everything, you can't get to everything. But hopefully what you do get to, is able to flourish and transform into something that will fly. Even those things that seem weak when you get to them.

Somewhere

2009-05-10T23:49:00.002-04:00

I walked across an empty land
I knew the pathway like the back of my hand
I felt the earth beneath my feet
Sat by the river and it made me complete

Oh simple thing where have you gone
I'm getting old and I need something to rely on
So tell me when you're gonna let me in
I'm getting tired and I need somewhere to begin

I came across a fallen tree
I felt the branches of it looking at me
Is this the place we used to love?
Is this the place that I've been dreaming of?

Oh simple thing where have you gone
I'm getting old and I need something to rely on
So tell me when you're gonna let me in
I'm getting tired and I need somewhere to begin

So if you have a minute why don't we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could be the end of everything
So why don't we go
So why don't we go

This could be the end of everything
So why don't we go
Somewhere only we know?

- Keane

Dia de las madres ;)

2009-05-10T15:39:00.006-04:00

Me and my mom...
"Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." ~Elizabeth Stone

"I don't care how poor a man is; if he has family, he's rich." ~Dan Wilcox and Thad Mumford, M*A*S*H, "Identity Crisis,"

"If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden." ~Attributed to Claudia Ghandi

"Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children." ~Charles R. Swindol

When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me a story about a huge bamboo tree and it's children. It remains one of my favorite little stories in the world. "Why children don't have tails" By: My mom!

A very, very long time ago, people used to have tails. However, during this time, when little children were out in the forest - they could jump inside the big bamboo trees when they were scared. All the families had their own bamboo tree that they relied on for protection. One day, six young children were out playing in the forest when a bamboo tree sensed danger. There was a crocodile heading there way - so the tree started waving it's leaves to bring the children in. The children ran towards the tree, as it began to open, splitting from the middle. Each child jumped into the safety of the tree, as the last, littlest brother jumped in - the bamboo tree snapped close - because the crocodile was about to jump in too. But when the tree snapped close, the littlest brother's tail was still hanging on the outside. When all was safe, the tree opened up to let the children out - but the littlest brother's no longer had his tail and from that point forward, children were never born with tails.

So - go out and give your mom a hug, a smile - a card. For those who are in remembrance of their mother, today is a great day to look at family photos with loved ones and tell stories about your childhood and your mom. Below - something for the mom's to have a laugh with - remember, no matter how bad your little one gets - at least he isn't Homer Simpson.

Evolution of Homer Simpson

Dream Junkie

2009-05-04T23:14:00.002-04:00

Figments of what I can recall from one of my dreams...

It was about a man who fell into a deep sleep, he became so enamored with the dream - or confused between reality and dreamland, that he simply remained in the dream. Eventually - all of his dream characters began telling him it was time to wake up, but he wouldn't.

There were brief moments where he would wake up, and one of his dream characters would "follow him" into real life - to ensure he stayed awake, and argue with him - that "reality" was where he belonged. In those moments, he simply crawled into another bed, in another room, and went back to sleep - like a dream junkie.

The fellow even looked all strung out, with messy hair, emaciated from not eating - except he was in striped pajamas.

Thank you for being a friend

2009-04-27T08:56:00.001-04:00

Actress, comedienne. Born Bernice Frankel on May 16, 1923, in New York City. Known for her sharp wit, Arthur first attracted notice for her performance in the off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera in 1954. She continued to find success performing on stage. She originated the role of Yente the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof in 1964. Arthur even won the 1966 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Vera Charles in Mame. She reprised the role for the 1974 film version.

A guest appearance on All the in Family, Norman Lear's groundbreaking situation comedy led to Arthur's first television series. Audiences loved her character Maude Findlay, the outspoken liberal cousin of Edith Bunker. The spin-off series Maude ran for six seasons, starting in 1972. The show began with Maude moving to Washington, D.C., to serve as a member of Congress. With its strong female lead, it was a timely program, picking up on women's rights and issues of the era. The show didn't shy away from controversial topics, including abortion. The well-regarded comedy won Arthur her first Emmy Award in 1977 for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. She had been nominated three times for Maude before her big win.

It would be seven years until Bea Arthur found another smash television series. This time she played Dorothy Sbornak, a divorced older woman living with friends and looking after her mother on Golden Girls. Set in Miami, the comedy followed the lives, loves, and misadventures of these women. The ensemble included veteran performers Betty White and Rue McClanahan—who had worked with Arthur on Maude. Estelle Getty played Arthur's mother despite the fact that the two were around the same age. The show had the distinction of being one of the few series in television history to feature a cast of actresses over the age of 40.

A hit with television audiences, the cast of Golden Girls also garnered praise from critics and peers. During its seven-year run, all four stars won Emmy Awards for their work on the series. Arthur received the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 1988. Although the show ended in 1992, it remains popular, being shown in syndication.

Since Golden Girls ended, Arthur has made a few guest appearances on television, including Malcolm in the Middle and Curb Your Enthusiasm. She also has toured with her own one-woman show, And Then There's Bea in 2001. In 2002, she appeared in Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends, which earned her a Tony Award nomination for Special Theatrical Event. She lost out to Elaine Stritch, who ironically had been up for the role of Dorothy on Golden Girls along with Arthur.

Outside of acting, Bea Arthur was a strong supporter of animal rights and an activist for AIDS-related causes. Arthur was married twice and had two sons with second husband Gene Saks. The couple was married in 1950 and divorced in 1978. Bea Arthur died at her home in Los Angeles April 25, 2009 of cancer. She was 86. This bio is courtesy of Biography.com

First AIDS Test by a Senior Citizen: In a 1990 episode of Golden Girls, another show starring the groundbreaking Bea Arthur, Rose is tested for HIV/AIDS after learning she may have been exposed through a blood transfusion. In the same episode, Blanche says she has also been tested, and that she uses — giggle — condoms with her male suitors. Highlighting senior sexuality was a Golden Girls specialty, but the episode also reminded viewers — a year before Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive — that viruses don't discriminate on the basis of sexuality, age, or anything else. Watch the start of the episode here:

Seattle PI presents more TV firsts (and shattered taboo) here. This post is dedicated to my cholita mamasita - Kim, who is the biggest GG fan on the planet and who has been hit by a double whammy of losses in less than 365 days (Estelle Getty passed in July 2008). This is also dedicated to the writer of "My Journey With Aids" who was also a big GG fan.

World Malaria Day

2009-04-25T21:16:00.001-04:00

APRIL 25TH - LEARN MORE AND ACT. OFFICIAL SITE HERE

My parents live in the woods - literally ten acres of forest, in Southern Maryland (a very scenic place called Accokeek, along the Potomac River and home to the National Colonial Farm). When they aren't there, they travel to the middle of nowhere, in Thailand. A small town called Prachinburi (where they have a house, that my Koon-yai inhabits). Prachinburi is also home to another cool spot, Khao Yai. As much as I love my parents and visiting the lands they inhabit, when the season is right, I will go outside and face the buzz and needles of the dreaded mosquito. All of a sudden my leg will start itching, or I will hear a soft bzzzzz near my ears, only to bend down and realize that I have been bitten several times. Like most people who have access to special bug lights or DEET, I am not a fan of mosquito bites. I know that these insects are part of nature but, I often have a hard time seeing the "good" in these little vampires. However, as I clumsily apply anti-itch cream to my sores, unlike so many others around the world - as soon as I receive a bite, I have no fear for my life. The itch, the swelling (or the sound of a mosquito) may be incredibly annoying, but I can confidently say that I will live from any unpleasant mosquito experience. The sad reality is that this is not true of close to half a billion people in the world every year. One mosquito bite, no matter how small could mean death for them, and not a quick death but a very slow and painful death. Mosquitos are the numero uno carrier and transmitter of Malaria. Malaria is a deadly disease especially for children under the age of five. Today is World Malaria day.

Malaria does not get the attention and press that AIDS does around the world and yet it is a disease that kills nearly a million people a year and infects close to half a billion worldwide, not just Africa but all over the world. The devastating truth about these statistics is that Malaria is still prevalent in specific parts of the world. In the 1930’s, millions of cases of Malaria were diagnosed in the U.S., specifically in the southern states. But since the Global Malaria Eradication Program that was launched in the 1950’s by the World Health Organization many countries, including the U.S. have been able to eradicate Malaria all together with the use of the insecticide DDT. After approximately a decade of use in a number of different countries, it was found that DDT was extremely harmful to some animals and because it was so cheap, farmers were using it recklessly on their crops. Though DDT is not harmful to humans, it became banned because of its effect on animals. Due to this ban and the lack of an alternative insecticide to combat Malaria, millions of people have died in the recent decades, the majority of them being children. Some of these children contract malaria multiple times a year and spend each rainy season fearing for the next outbreak of malaria. An absolutely fascinating article from National Geographic about how Malaria actually spreads from human to human via mosquitoes. It is a little bit long, but definitely worth the time it takes to read.

The following is a transcript from The American:
April 25, 2008 marked the World Health Organization’s inaugural World Malaria Day, designed “to inform the general public of the obstacles encountered and progress achieved in controlling malaria.” We can expect a fair amount of self-congratulation: malaria treatment has improved in recent years, with donors providing more funding and buying better drugs.

But problems remain, especially with artemisinin, which for the past decade has been the most effective drug against the parasite. Resistance to artemisinin has been found in Southeast Asia, where it has been used the longest and where substandard and fake drugs (which encourage resistance) are prevalent.

Combining artemisinin with other drugs in the same treatment is the best method to prevent resistance: the parasite succumbs to a multiple attack before it can evolve a defense to any single drug in the combination. Yet because artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) are more difficult and expensive to make than monotherapies and other older, less effective therapies (such as chloroquine), they have not been adopted on a broad scale.

Sub-Saharan Africa bears the highest burden of disease and death from malaria; and, as the world’s poorest region, it is least able to afford large quantities of new ACTs. Most Africans that want an anti-malaria drug are likely to buy the cheapest monotherapy available. Even when public funds exist, corruption in finance ministries means that ACTs are often not purchased.

On the production side, WHO criticism has led some companies to stop selling artemisinin monotherapies. But the WHO has only so much influence. Recent research found that at least eight companies continue to produce and sell monotherapy tablets in six African countries, including Cipla (based in India), Dafra (Belgium), ETDZS (China), Guilin (China), Kunming (China), Mepha (Switzerland), QUALIPHARnv/sa-Arenco (Belgium), and Shelys (Tanzania).

Malaria treatment has also been plagued by poor demand projections. The plant (Artemisia annua) used to produce artemisinin takes seven months to yield its crop, with subsequent processing dictating a 14-month lead time for the drug. Once manufactured, the drug has a relatively short shelf life of two years. Accurate forecasting is essential for manufacturers to produce the right amount at the right time.

Because many developing countries lack authoritative national statistics on malaria, the United Nations Children’s Fund and the WHO have stepped in to estimate disease prevalence and forecast demand. But their estimates tend to rely on “need,” a normative concept of how many people should be treated in an ideal world, rather than on demand, a positive concept of what can and will be bought in the actual world. Because WHO “need” estimates often provide the rationale for funding from donor agencies, they tend to be negotiating positions rather than realistic projections, nearly always overestimating actual demand.

WHO estimates often rely on 'need,' a normative concept of how many people should be treated, rather than on demand, a positive concept of what can and will be bought. In 2004, the WHO projected that the global need for ACTs in 2005 would be over 130 million treatments. This projection proved to be way too high; in 2005, maximum demand was only 25 million treatments. Major suppliers such as Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis relied on WHO estimates and, as a result, were forced to either destroy unused products or declare substantial losses when the anticipated demand never materialized. In December 2006, Novartis temporarily shut down its production facility in Suffern, New York, to prevent the production of too much medicine with a short shelf life; Chinese farmers had begun to complain that they had no buyers for their Artemisia annua. With an excess of supply, prices of Artemisia annua have plummeted, and now the WHO fears that farmers and artemisinin producers may withdraw from the market, reducing the overall supply of drugs and creating a risk of future shortages.

In the short run, unrealistically high demand estimates are costly for companies. In the long run, they are costly for the millions of people afflicted by malaria. If drug companies must weather too many losses as a result of misjudging malaria demand, they may decide to invest in drug development for other diseases. The WHO argues that its forecasts are better today. But to be useful to companies, they have to be provided at least 12 months in advance, and the WHO forecasts are not.

Better arrangements need to be made between international aid agencies—such as the UN Global Fund, the WHO, the President’s Malaria Initiative, and the World Bank—and the companies that produce good-quality drugs. The only official arrangement between a producer and any multilateral agency, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the WHO and Novartis, is outdated. The document stipulates that Novartis will supply its malaria drug Coartem to the WHO (acting as a procurement agent for countries buying drugs) at no profit, in a timely fashion, and in sufficient amounts to meet international forecasts. But the original price agreed to ($2.40 per adult dose) is well above the public sector price Novartis can now offer ($1.40 per adult dose). As a result, the WHO has been unable to generate sufficient demand for the product. The MOU also risks being seen as exclusionary (although producing large amounts of drugs without profit—or even at a loss—for a tiny, volatile market is not likely to offer many benefits).

Better than the current MOU would be a new agreement between agencies and all pharmaceutical companies that demonstrate the capability to supply high-quality ACTs. Companies would agree to supply a certain amount of drugs at cost plus a small profit. This price would vary as conditions changed over time. Donors would agree in advance to purchase them at an agreed price, fixed for the term of the contract. Donors would also be charged with forecasting demand.

In normal markets, corporations bear most of the responsibility for forecasting demand. But when prices are set at a level at which companies make little or no profit, as is the case with anti-malaria drugs, such a policy discourages investment.

click image to view larger map

Picture Hope

2009-04-24T20:26:00.002-04:00

Congratulations to the Shutter Sisters who were the grand prize winners in Name Your Dream Assignment. The shutter sisters will travel to five continents to create a visual catalog of hope from surprising sources while an entire community of women photographers do the same in the United States. Their dream is to tell stories that change you and me forever. This assignment takes a community of dreamers on a journey around the world where we consider the essence of hope-that elusive quality that makes it possible to believe this is not the end of your story no matter how simple your stress or profound your tragedy.

PinxitLuc didn't manage to capture the big dream - but still has plans on making the journey to China for the eclipse (albeit, not on a 9 week cultural and nature bound photographic journey). The journey isn't over - it simply takes another shape ;)

Best wishes to all the photographers who entered. We are all winners, each trying to capture and share this magnificent world - in order to translate the human experience. I encourage you to visit some of the websites put together by the judging panel (one judge documents her incredible experience with her pal - a coyote). Finally, kudos to MEDICO for their proposal - but bigger kudos to the mission they are trying to fulfill.

Remember, as Henry David Thoreau once said, "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." THANK YOU to everyone for your support in this. Keep dreaming and keep believing! When one door closes, it challenges us to open another one.

PinxitLuc.com doesn't allow downloads - but you can view current work and download pics by clicking here.

Love Your Mother

2009-04-21T20:43:00.002-04:00

I remember my first Earth Day when I was about 11. Tom Cruise spoke at the National Mall - about tuna and the fishing industry. I collected as many pamphlets as I could and those pamphlets became the wallpaper of my bedroom (to my parents dismay). Not soon after, I became a tree-hugging vegetarian, started my own neighborhood recycling program, and wrote a short story called "The Day the Sun Died" - which essentially described madre tierra getting even with the bad polluting, resource gouging species of man. I can honestly say, I never went the Greenpeace route (although I did work as a grassroots campaigner for US PIRG, yes - I was a field manager). I was a vegetarian for about ten years (but rarely eat meat now anyway). If anything I am simply conscious of my choices, vote with my pocketbook (by choosing where to shop and what to buy), and don't try to evangelize everyone to being green (although non-recycling is a pet peave - you MUST recycle and you MUST dispose of "bad" waste responsibly). If anything, my concern for our biosphere and it's inhabitants (including us) has morphed into an interest in sustainable development and teaching as a volunteer. So, you might not have a tree-hugging past, but in celebration of planet Earth, take a few moments to find ways to simply live more sustainably.

A video featuring one of my heroes - Dr. Jeffrey Sachs

You can watch the entire conference by clicking here

Earth Day 2009, April 22, will mark the beginning of The Green Generation Campaign which will also be the focus of the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day in 2010. With negotiations for a new global climate agreement coming up in December, Earth Day 2009 must be a day of action and civic participation, to defend The Green GenerationTM’s core principles:

1) A carbon-free future based on renewable energy that will end our common dependency on fossil fuels, including coal.
2) An individual’s commitment to responsible, sustainable consumption.
3) Creation of a new green economy that lifts people out of poverty by creating millions of quality green jobs and transforms the global education system into a green one.

Quick Trivia about Earth Day
Earth Day, celebrated April 22, is a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's environment. It is held annually during both spring in the northern hemisphere and autumn in the southern hemisphere. It was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in in 1970 and is celebrated in many countries every year.

The United Nations celebrates an Earth Day each year on the March equinox, a tradition which was founded by peace activist John McConnell in 1969.

Learn how to be GREEN by visiting these sites:
Ocean's Alive - a resource for responsible eating (from the deep blue sea)
The Green Guide, National Geographic's source for greening your life
Learn about sustainability at Colombia University's Earth Institute
How to go Green - Treehugger
Be an Eco-traveler! Resources can be found here
A cute site for children (and fun for "big" kids) may be found here
Got2BeGreen - Discover The Future of Green
Good To Be Green - Your Guide to Green Building Products and Professionals
Green Building Resource Guide

Back in November, the Today Show No hosts took fascinating journeys to the Ends of the Earth.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Street Lights, Growing...

2009-04-13T20:51:00.006-04:00

Let me know
Do I still got time to grow?
Things ain't always set in stone
That being known let me know
Let me

Seems like street lights glowing
Happen to be just like moments passing in front of me
So I hopped in the cab and
I paid my fares
See I know my destination
But I'm just not there

All the streetlights glowing
Happen to be
Just like moments passing
In front of me
So I hopped in the cab and
I paid my fare
See I know my destination
But I'm just not there

In the streets... In the streets
I'm just not there
In the streets
I'm just not there
Life's just not fair

Seems like street lights glowing
Happen to be just like moments passing in front of me
So I hopped in the cab and
I paid my fares
See I know my destination
But I'm just not there

All the streetlights glowing
Happen to be
Just like moments passing
In front of me
So I hopped in the cab and
I paid my fare
See I know my destination
But I'm just not there

All the streetlights glowing
Happen to be
Just like moments passing
In front of me
So I hopped in the cab and
I paid my fare
See I know my destination
But I'm just not there

In the streets... In the streets
I'm just not there
In the streets
I'm just not there
Life's just not fair

Songwriters: Englishman, J; Mcildowie, B; West, Kanye; Williams, A

Street Lights - Kanye West

Dream Assignment - GO TEAM!

2009-04-06T13:02:00.015-04:00

I WANT TO SAY THANK YOU TO EVERYONE. When I first started this, I had no idea what I was getting into - or the amount of commitment and work that would be involved. SO THANKS!!! This isn't a personal achievement, but EVERYONE'S - GO TEAM!

Some special thanks are in order:
= My brother Tony, who is the architect of Pinxit Luc
= Laurie, Amy, and Darryl in LA who campaigned and worked every day this week to host voting parties and secure an amazing number of votes.
= Ionna was my virtual campaign manager on Facebook and MySpace, and kept checking those numbers and motivating voters.
= My co-workers at the agency and fellow docents for their support and kind comments.
= Eyebar for generously allowing me to set up voting stations on Friday and Saturday nights. (I would also like to thank Christina at Shadow Room for generously offering their venue as well, the voting ended one week too soon to arrange an event).
= Josie and Ballston Animal Hospital for their votes and support.
= Andre, Kim, Scuba, Raj, Todd, Felix, Nadia, Judy - you each did little things in this process that made my heart smile (and get votes ;)

To ALL your vote and your comments have been an enabler for this ENTIRE process. I am a product of my environment, which includes YOU. So really, anything I succeed in is due to the fact that I have some pretty stellar people in my life, who stick by - cheer me on, get in the trenches, and are supportive. Although things like this start with a dream, hope is my flame - but YOU are my oxygen to keep that fire alive.

THANK YOU ALL
now, it's up to the judges ;)

Spring has Sprung

2009-04-04T19:17:00.003-04:00

The blossoms are blooming, birds are beaming and kite flyers are on the mall. It really is a magical time.

Le Printemps
par Théophile Gautier

Regardez les branches
Comme elles sont blanches,
Il neige des fleurs.

Riant de la pluie
Le soleil essuie
les saules en pleurs.

Et le ciel reflète
Dans la violette
Ses pures couleurs…

La mouche ouvre l’aile
Et la demoiselle
Aux prunelles d’or,
Au corset de guêpe
Dépliant son crêpe,
A repris l’essor.

L’eau gaiement babille,
Le goujon frétille
Un printemps encore !

==== English translation =========

Springtime
By Théophile Gautier

Look at the boughs,
How white they are,
It’s snowing flowers!

Scoffing at the rain,
The sun dries
The weepy willow.

And the sky reflects
In the violets
Its pure colors…

The fly opens its wings
And the dragonfly
With the golden pupils,
And the wasp-like corset,
Unfolding its silky wings,
Has resumed its flight.

The water happily babbles,
The tiny fish wriggles
It’s Springtime again!

What "The Dream" Means to Me

2009-04-01T14:08:00.002-04:00

Since I have been operating my voting stations, a lot of people have asked what my “Dream Assignment” means to me. So, I thought I would take the opportunity to write a few things about it.

Let’s start with The Technology:
I have well outgrown the utility of my iBook for my needs as a traveling photographer – currently I am using an external hard drive, but I don’t have the available RAM or memory for the software I want or need in order to progress. I like my iBook, but it wasn’t built for what I am using it for. The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds solves these issues and bridges the gaps I am presently encountering 1000 fold.

In fall of 2008, Lenovo released the most powerful desktop replacement ever tested - the 17-inch W700. Within a few weeks, technology reviewers got their hand on an even more powerful version with a mobile quad-core processor. The ThinkPad W700ds offer a groundbreaking new feature, a second display that extends from the lid to give mobile users a true multi-monitor experience.

Based on reviews - the ThinkPad provides an opportunity to put the entire desktop experience—full keyboard, Wacom tablet, dual screens, and all—in a bag and take it with you. Photographers and filmmakers, who are used to lugging heavy equipment with them on-location, won’t even notice the system’s size. Workers who find themselves setting up shop for weeks at a time in different cities will be able to take the W700ds with them, much more easily than the combination of a desktop, keyboard, mouse, tablet, and two monitors.

I would also plan on using a very, very small portion of the budget to upgrade to an SLR camera (finally) and some lenses.

Next – The Dream:
My brother recently told me that their was a great historical figure who also wanted to witness a total eclipse – Einstein. Apparently, he needed the experience to prove his theory of special relativity. It took three viewings to finally prove his theory. Hearing this made my heart smile, because science, like the arts, has always been very special to me. Ever since I was a child, I have wanted to view an eclipse – and this particular eclipse is going to be quite spectacular and quite unique, it will be the longest total solar eclipse that will occur in the twenty-first century, and will not be surpassed in duration until June 13, 2132. Totality will last for up to 6 minutes and 39 seconds.

Photographing regions within the path of the umbra presents the opportunity to share the “connectiveness” of our world, how we are all one. Photographs have the ability to translate history and personal experience in a way that encourages others to assume ownership of the world or inspire dreams. I still cling to the notion that we each have a fundamental stake in the world around us. It is my hope that this dream assignment only deepens this feeling and allows me to share this unique opportunity with the world, inspiring more dreams and instigating kindness, hope and change. We are all on a journey and I hope the photographs convey how connected humanity truly is in it’s experience.

The opportunity to photograph and experience this is a dream assignment, as a perpetual child at heart, as a photographer, as a person who believes that dreams can come true. I am fortunate that I can tap into the minds of the researchers and scientists within the Smithsonian Institution – and I absolutely plan on doing that should I have the once in a lifetime opportunity to be chosen for this assignment.

Beyond the eclipse and the regions within the umbra, I will have the extraordinary ability and opportunity to share these experiences with the world. I will be able to write on a blog and I will be able to test out nifty equipment and review it. Aspects of the assignment, which I find unique, challenging, and ultimately rewarding.

Finally – Photography
Quite simply, I can’t imagine a world without photographs. They allow you to touch life, be engaged or provoke the viewer in some way. Whenever I return from I trip, I feel so lucky to be able to sift through the shadow and light of the adventure. Every shoot goes well beyond the digestion of hundreds of images that were taken. As the dust settles and memories finally finish replaying like a film real in my mind's sky, the worth of each journey takes on more personal significance than the images produced. One of the satisfying endpoints for my travels is sharing the experience, so an unedited slideshow is put together for friends – and an accompanying album on smugmug.

There really is no such thing as a vacation, or stepping out with friends for me – everything feels like a destination. So although I’m certainly not a photographer by profession, it is a love and a passion. So I strongly feel that destination photography is important for photographers at virtually every level.

Why would anyone go halfway around the world to take pictures?
1) To see the world but also to experience the world - touch life, this great big place we live in
2) You will gain perspective and new appreciation for what others have, and don't have (conversely, you my gain perspective on tour own life)
3) Coordinating an international trip will challenge you, and challenges are good.
4) You will begin to see how connected we all actually are.
5) You will have the capability to share the world with others.

Mark Alberhasky once wrote the following regarding the difference between an amateur and a professional.

Ever wonder what it is that separates the professional photographer from the talented amateur? Does the amateur make images of professional quality? Absolutely. But statistically, the professional is more likely to succeed with a given subject. Why?Better equipment? Yes and no. Plenty of amateurs have equipment equal to (or better than) a given professional.
Better access? Yes and no. Anyone with a camera and the right attitude can get to where amazing shots can be made. It's their hands-on experience. Professionals do many of the same things the amateur does, but they do them over and over and over, UNTIL they see what works and what doesn't. They do so much of everything that it becomes instinct, not a choice or a decision they have to make consciously each time.

I've studied photography and I’ve been shooting for over 15 years, but I would never call myself a professional – however, I would certainly embrace the opportunity to continuously sharpen my instincts on the world stage.

Ring of Fire and Serenity

2009-03-27T09:02:00.003-04:00

For me, travel and photography opens the minds sky, allowing the viewer to experience a moment, or see things differently. Although I cannot predict how perspectives are impacted, I can only think that in the most extreme cases there is a provocation of change, which reminds me of a quote that hangs on my wall. “Change has considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better. Obviously, then, one’s character and frame of mind determine how readily he brings about change and how he reacts to change that is imposed on him.”

A solar eclipse will take place on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 and will be visible from a narrow corridor through northern India, eastern Nepal, northern Bangladesh, Bhutan, the northern tip of Myanmar, central China and the Pacific Ocean, including Ryukyu Islands, Marshall Islands and Kiribati. This solar eclipse is the longest total solar eclipse that will occur in the twenty-first century, and will not be surpassed in duration until June 13, 2132. Totality will last for up to 6 minutes and 39 seconds.

Although shortest in duration, the largest part of this dream assignment, is the ability to photograph the eclipse in China, with an additional six weeks of shooting dedicated to “the regions within the path of the Umbra” - Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, India, and Mongolia.

The people of many cultures from all parts of the globe have developed various myths and legends about eclipses. Many believe that an eclipse is an omen of some natural disaster or the death or downfall of a ruler. Another pervasive myth involves an invisible dragon or other demon that devours the Sun during an eclipse. Many cultures have also developed superstitions about how to counteract the effects of an eclipse. The Chinese would produce great noise and commotion (drumming, banging on pans, shooting arrows into the sky, and the like) to frighten away the dragon and restore daylight. In India people may immerse themselves in water up to their necks, believing this act of worship will help the Sun and Moon defend themselves against the dragon. In Japan, the custom is to cover wells during an eclipse to prevent poison from dropping into them from the darkened sky. And as recently as the last century, the Chinese Imperial Navy fired its ceremonial guns during an eclipse to scare off the invisible dragon.

While visiting these regions of the world, my challenge will be to focus on the story of the eclipse and the richness of culture, symbolism, and ceremony. As a child who had a deep love for astronomy, which never faded, I have longed believed that an eclipse is a symbol of rebirth. And this assignment brings me to parts of the world, which is steeped, in mystery while surrounded by growth. It is a region perhaps experiencing its own rebirth.

It is my goal to produce a body of work that connects a rare phenomenon, cultural experiences, and the innate raw fact that we are all human in our experience. Ultimately, my goal is to be able to translate experience and "touch" through the medium of photography.

It is not lost on me that I will shoot in China, a growing political economy, but I would also like to show the fragility that still exists. Ultimately, it is not the things we have, but the experience, the human experience, the experience of nature, and the forces of nature that are the strongest binders in our lives. It is my hope that this dream assignment and the images I produce, are able to convey that.

UNTIL APRIL 3RD 2009 (11:59 EDT), YOU CAN MAKE THIS DREAM POSSIBLE BY VOTING FOR ME!
The ONLY way I can even get in front of the panel, is if I can motivate (harass) others to get online, register, and spend 5 minutes to vote. Some people have pointed out that the "dream assignment" people have made voting a little complicated - so here's some instructions...

HOW TO VOTE
1) Go to http://www.nameyourdreamassignment.com/accounts/login
2) Create an account
3) Verify your account (via a link sent to your e-mail)
4) Login at http://www.nameyourdreamassignment.com/accounts/login
5) Enter "fire and serenity" in the search box OR type the following into the URL box
PLEASE NOTE - SEARCH DOES NOT ALWAYS BRING UP MY PROPOSAL SO YOU CAN ALWAYS ENTER THE URL BELOW AFTER LOGIN:
http://www.nameyourdreamassignment.com/the-ideas/jangelashumskas/ring-of-fire-and-serenity
6) When you see my page: "Ring of Fire and Serenity" CLICK the YELLOW "pic it" icon to the left of my proposal title (Ring of Fire and Serenity)
7) Once your vote is logged - the number box will change (to a new number and the color will change from black to light yellow)
8) If you feel like it, read my proposal - or scroll down and leave a comment like "you rock" or "you owe me a cupcake"

Go vote (please, think vanilla cupcake)

Cost of 600 vanilla cupcakes: $1,194
Cost of making my dream a reality $ PEANUTS (I mean PRICELESS)

Rainbow

2009-03-26T22:04:00.002-04:00

Dreams. I'm one of those people who are profoundly affected by their dreams. I remember dreams like some people remember past events. One of the things I have yet to do is keep a dream journal. Maybe, eventually...that's one of the things I'll begin incorporating into my diary. Over the years, I've had reoccurring dreams (more like dream themes) that eventually fade. I've found that those generally dealt with the psychology of a situation in life...or conversely, these dreams sometimes add to my fears or paranoia of certain abstract, random things. One example is a strange fear of cliffs. I'm not afraid of heights and I'll happily stand by or near a cliff without any problems. But, I've had some dreams involving me being in a car (as a passenger) driving off a cliff...several times. So, when I'm a passenger in a car driving through the mountains at night...I always get a little nervous when I can't see the road ahead because it's dipping down. Some reoccurring dreams have definitely been more frightening than others...some have actually been pleasant.

I also frequently visit the same places in my dreams. There is one apartment building that comes to mind. In one dream I stood outside of the building. In another dream, I had broken into a loft inside the building...looking for something. In another dream, I was walking around the various rooms of the loft as if I once lived there. In real life, I've never been to a building like this. I've never even stepped foot into a loft. But, my mind paints vivid details of the building and the loft as if I occupied it at some time in my life. There is also a very old, Victorian style house I used to visit often in my dreams. The house is huge, with stale air. Old antique furnishings. The house is haunted and normally when I visit, the house is empty. In every dream where I'm at the house...I discover a new "hidden" room. The attic in the house is finished. To get there, you have go to the top floor, through one bedroom (I always feel like it's a teenage boys room), then through a closet "hallway" up another series of stairs which leads past a den like room. After that, you are near the finished attic room. You have to go up another set of stairs to get there. Just thinking about that room gives me the creeps...in my dreams and in life. The one time I mustered the nerve to go up there (in my dream), the room was filled with paintings of sailing and traveling paraphernalia. There were also various photo albums and poems scattered about. I remember being told that the room belonged to a boy who died, or was missing.

There are dreams that I remember from my childhood...although not too many. Since I was a kid, there are times where I've confused dreams with reality. Times where I recall a dream so vividly...that I forget whether the event happened in "life" or just a movie in my mind. Sometimes I need to ask people whether or not something actually happened. I'll never forget the first time this happened when I was about six years old. It was something really absurd...and my family still teases me about it. In some of my older diaries from when I was little, I would write about certain dreams. I guess they've always been special and important to me. To this day, dreamless nights make for a cranky day. Bad dreams put me in thinking mode about life and the choices I'm making. Good dreams, make me happy. Vivid dreams...make me think in the metaphysical and philosophical sense.

In certain dreams, I have certain physical powers that no one has in life. One of my favorites is flying. I can actually feel the physical sensation on my body when I think about those dreams. There have been times where I've awaken, momentarily forgetting that I can only fly in my dreams...but not in "real" life. Another dream theme...people I know take on the identity of someone else. It's weird because when I wake up I always have the sense of who was who even though physical appearances weren't the same.

Depending on where I sleep...the intensity or theme of my dreams change. I've found that the more history a place has...the more intense my dream. I have favorite spots in my parents house where I like to sleep because of the types of dreams I have. "New" places don't seem to inspire me too much. I've also noticed that I have different types of dreams in different countries. Whenever I return home from a trip...I dream of some of the most spectacular imagery. The other night I dreamt someone asking me "what is your rainbow?" I remember walking around a big, beautiful white house set up like a bed and breakfast. All of a sudden a huge rainbow appeared, stretching the length of the inside of the house, going through the window outside....and stopping at a full moon...although there was daylight outside. The rainbow wasn't arched. It was straight with "connector joints." After it appeared, it became physical to the touch. I then said "here is my rainbow."

Now that I'm thinking about it...I don't think I ever experience "smells" in my dreams...and although I've seen food in my dreams, I can't recall ever eating food, which would mean I also don't experience taste. I definitely experience physical and emotional sensations. There are times when I have had lucid dreams, though lucidity normally kicks in as a defense mechanism. In those dreams, I've watched a car that I was in sink or some other catastrophe. Normally I start shouting "This is a dream. I have to wake up. This isn't real. This can't be happening. I have to wake up....this is a dream." After I've said it a few times, I wake up...feeling relieved.

One of the stranger dreams I had, I actually wrote about in my diary. There was a carnival and someone was holding my hand leading me through the crowd. He was trying to get us to a cargo train. In the train, from a distance, a cargo door (on the side) was open. There were hay bails inside with people sitting on them...it seemed like they were watching us. As we approached the train, the man counted down "okay now 5-4-3-2-1" as he said "one", my alarm went off. I woke up feeling like the man was trying to beat my alarm clock in getting me on the train. Another strange part of that dream was the fact that the man could read my thoughts. The sound in the field for some reason reminded me of the way sound "feels" in a movie theater. I remember thinking how I would like to have a theater in my house with surround sound because I enjoyed the way it "felt." After I finished the thought, the man in my dream simply said "don't worry, you will always have everything you want." The other day, I had a dream where I asked for the time and someone replied "nine-oh-four." After I heard the time, I woke up. When I looked at the clock, it read "nine-four-oh."

Some of the more freighting dreams I've had involved 9/11. In one dream, I was in the plane that smashed into the Pentagon. In another, more recent dream, I was at the top of one of the twin towers. My Dad and I were in the building. People were rushing down the stairs, elevators, and jumping out the windows. At first I felt like they were over reacting. But then I began feeling the heat and smoke. My Dad kept trying to tell me we would be safer where we were, that the others were really over reacting. I begged and pleaded for us to go down the stairs. Eventually he succumbed to my pleading. I remember going through a fireball and just barely being able to escape. When the second plane hit the other tower, my Dad just kind of looked at me. His look spoke volumes of what might have happened had we stayed at the top tower. He looked sad and happy all at the same time. I remember the feeling of never wanting to go through that again.

More recently, I've had dreams where people that have recently passed, visit me in my dreams. After Chris died, I not only dreamed about hanging out with him, I actually woke up to the physical sensation of him "hugging" my arms. I remember asking why he came, he just said it was because I'd be able to see and hear him. It was strange, even a bit freightening...but it hasn't happened since. I experience dreams in waves. Many of them have a certain feeling associated with them. Although the images are different, the "feelings" they evoke are all similar. Lately I've been experiencing richly colored, dreamy type dreams. I talk about my dreams like I talk about things I experience in "life." Sometimes I wonder if dreams are my true reality.

26 Things

2009-03-10T19:36:00.000-04:00

I was "tagged" on Facebook to write "25 Random Things About Me" so I thought it would be interesting to share it here. I turned it into "26 Random Things About Me." You are supposed to" tag" 25 others and include the sender so they can read your list as well. I ended up using the list as a writing exercise - so sorry about some of the length ;(

1. I was a vegetarian for over 10 years, and actually made the decision to do it when I was eleven. The “political” side of me started VERY early. I started eating meat again at twenty-four. A few years ago, I was macrobiotic – and it made me feel the healthiest and most energetic I have EVER felt. After I was hit by a car (while training for Pan-Mass Challenge), I stopped. I am working my way back towards a macrobiotic lifestyle.

2. I have a "life motto” that I made up in my Latin class in high school: "Ad astra per infinitum." It means "To the stars for infinity." Basically means, keep your dreams in sight, and always try to achieve them. As Immanual Kant once said, "To be is to do."

3. When I was a kid in California, I was absolutely convinced that I would either be a singer (a la Annie Lennox) or an astronaut (a la Guy Bluford). Sadly, I am neither – but my love for music and science is very much alive. I will say, I did try – that’s for a real life conversation (anyone interested in my audition stories or how frustrating calculus for scientists and engineers had gotten by sophomore year).

4. From the day I could talk, even when I had no idea what it was (even all the way on the West coast), I have loved New York City and it’s been the source of my most consistent love, affection, and creative fantasy. I flee to New York whenever I need to heal. It is my island, tropical in it's own unique splendor.

5. Art, science, and humanity bind me to this world – it is a combination that transcends any language and needs no translation, I think this is why I feel so deeply for these things.

6. I have been writing since I was eight. The inability to write – for me, would be like a slow, suffocating death. Writing is how I color and translate my world.

7. In summer 2003 I rode my bike 346 miles and rose funds to help fight AIDS. That's how endurance riding started for me. I try to ride at least once a year for charitable causes and have also ridden for: Lance Armstrong’s Tour of Hope, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society: Team in Training, Pan-Mass Challenge (Jimmy Fund), and Food & Friends. Eventually, I would like to start my own Non-Profit Organization (NPO), enabling others to raise money and raise awareness for issues that are important to them. At some point I would also like to do a cross country ride, 3000 miles in 30 days.

8. My dreams have a profound impact on my waking life, although it seems less so as I get older. Oddly, most of the characters in my dream don’t even exist “here.”

9. I really am not great at anything athletic, despite my “resume” - varsity crew in college and now, endurance cycling. I have never been the fastest or the strongest – my skill lies in perseverance and endurance. I can keep going like an energizer bunny, even if I have been injured – pain or broken bones have never stopped me (yet). My mind is strong, even when my body is not.

10. I am a foodie because of the sensual pleasure great food invokes. A wonderful meal with the “right” company will actually have me dancing in my chair, giddy with glee. Everything about dining and drinking (and cooking when I have the chance) is a completely sensory experience, and I enjoy every moment of it - the taste, the aroma, the texture, the colors, the sounds…When I get a nibble of something I really enjoy, I like to say it is dancing on my taste buds. Sometimes, I can tell you what parts of my palate are becoming excited by the dance. Anything having to do with food is pleasurable for me. Any conversation about food, review of food, story of food, picture of food, thought of food…

11. I have psoriasis. Since I was ten, and to get into the impact it has had on my life would require more than 25 statements. On a positive side, I am more humble and do not pass superficial judgment on anyone – ever, period. Making comments on bad fashion is one thing – making comments on someone’s physical (i.e. biological) appearance, that’s a big “no-no” around me.

12. Lilies are my favorite flowers – every variety.

13. I was a rave girl – used to go to the clubs in Baltimore, NYC, and Philly by myself – just to dance. Now, I pretty much dance in my house – to Madonna. Even saying that I used to be one of those chicks with a pacifier, wide jeans, and a tube top – makes me feeeeel uber old. I was also a grunge girl – but that was high school and I was a model then. Needless to say, during that time – there was much time spent “lying” to the parents to go out to concerts, the seed for tattoos had been planted, I started piercing myself – thinking I could hide it, ah and the combat boots that I was convinced were appropriate for ANY outfit. I was the “out” girl always on the “in.” What a weird time.

14. Once I love a product line, I become an unofficial spokesperson – orbit gum comes to mind (life changing gum), as does Target (the Neiman Marcus of general stores).

15. One of my favorite memories as a child was visiting my grandparents in Thailand during Monsoon season. They were farmers and had a house on stilts over water, in a small town (about 2 hour from Bangkok). I would sit at the entrance and swing my legs over the water below me – while rain poured on my skin, surrounded by the darkness of the clouds. I was completely entranced by the sound of thunder, the strong bursts of lightening, and the sounds of monkeys going wild in the naked jungle across from me. These were the most simple, beautiful times in my memory. Sleeping under a mosquito net, in candlelight – bathing (quite literally) in the jungle with water from a tho naam (I also once climbed into one and got stuck).

16. My grandfathers (both of them) are deeply entrenched in my mind as some of the strongest, most heroic men I have ever seen (my koon-tha had the most chiseled body you could imagine, even into his seventies). As a child, they seemed like characters from a Stan Lee comic book– they were the good guys, the strong guys, the great guys (both were also military men, my grand pap having fought in the "good fight" in WW II). Likely a good time to add that I grew up reading comic books - well into the college years. I still love the smell of a comic book store.

17. I am a mutt. If you were to throw continents in a blender, you still might not end up with this combo. On my father’s side – my grandmother was German (hence my middle name - Anne), my grandfather Lithuanian (hence the last name). My dad is 2nd generation American and grew up outside of Philadelphia. On my mother’s side – things get slightly more complicated. The whole family was (and is) in Thailand (hence my first name). My grandfather was half French and half Laotian (another story in itself) and my grandmother is Chinese. To make things even more confusing, I was raised both Catholic and Buddhist (my mom wanted her kids to know the religion of both parents). Because I am mixed, I sometimes don't feel like I fit in on either side of my family (visually), but I am very proud of my heritage and love my family.

18. I love fashion – the designers, the photography, the “great” models, and the art of it all. Outside of being around some fabulous queens, learning how to pose, and wearing great clothes – modeling occupies a strange, dream-like memory in my mind. Fashion for me is a means of expression, every bit as much as art on canvas or a table built of pine with love. It is in many ways a means for an individual – or a group to define themselves (or conversely not) and it encompasses more than just the clothes that we wear. Although I have an absolute love for haute couture, I could never afford it any more than I could afford to hang a Frieda Khalo in my own home, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t admire the story any less. I can also say the same for many of today’s “hot” ready-to-wear (prêt-a-porte) designers whom I absolutely adore such as Galliano (who to me is the Dali of the fashion world). Then there are the models who are able to turn themselves into 2-D so elegantly and really, really wear the creations with such delicate grace – they are the ballerinas to the Swan Lake of fashion. I will forever be a girl who loved the age of the supermodel (long live Kate, Helena and Linda - but God bless Giselle). And last but not least, there are the fashion editors (Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington, Linda Wells - LOVE HER, Alexandra White), stylists (Beat Bolliger, Anastasia Barbieri, Rachel Zoe) and photographers – I am constantly stunned and following the work of Bruce Webber, Steven Klein, Steven Miesel, and Annie Liebowitz, Mario Sorrenti, Enrique Badulescu, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin - some of my favorites whose work, in and out of the fashion, always manages to evoke a sense of magic of what light and machine and talent can do to a scene involving a person wearing what is essentially just clothes.

19. I really want to learn how to play acoustic guitar. The other day someone asked if I still sing, and I said no – not even in the shower (really). Odd thing about singing, that people don’t realize, is if you don’t practice – you lose the skill (I used to sing arias every single day). Not much different than playing piano for years, then stopping for a decade – you are never the same. There is something about guitar that makes me think I can combine my voice (maybe) with my writing and really create (something), even if it’s just for me.

20. My “dream” spot on the globe is actually Mali – for reasons, which are completely inexplicable. I have always been drawn to the music and the culture (there are certain songs, which move me to tears, every time I hear them). My third attempt at French classes begins this spring (Nadia has signed on as my tutor). There is something about western Africa that has lured me since my early teens, biophilia – maybe. I have an innate desire to be there.

21. I used to fly airplanes and search for ones that crashed (usually prop planes). That was many moons ago – one day, I’ll start flying again – probably not today. Of my “guy circle” growing up, I was the only one in the circle who didn’t complete qualifications for my solo or license. I kick myself now. Two of them went on to be fighter pilots, one jets – the other helicopters.

22. I want to “retire into” teaching – and not as a college professor. I want to work in the public school system. This is my plan within the next 15 years. Something about teaching is universally appealing to me.

23. I make “art pilgrimages.” Have traveled across the country and the globe to experience the “greats.” I paint and draw, but only as a hobby. Although I studied photography and have taken pictures my whole life, within the last four years it has become a more serious medium for me. I am up for anything creative, art is all about light and perspective - there is something truly special about that.

24. I love the art of conversation and think that it has slowly begun to die. Nothing revs me up more than philosophy, metaphysics, science, art - anything and everything outside of the minutia, outside of the bubble. In my usual "nerdiness," I have discussed starting a "circle" just to get people together and have meaningful discussions.

25. When I was a kid I was convinced I would be living a rainbow life - my brother knows all about it. Me, a "will and jack," and our adopted children from across the globe, in our brownstone in Soho. It seemed like such a perfect scenario. My mom and I used to argue about it, a lot (I was twelve, she thought it was absurd I was even thinking about these things - out loud). When I dreamt the whole thing up, there was no "Will & Grace" on TV and Brangelina wasn't casting for "It's a Small World." In retrospect, it still seems like a pretty flippin' great way to live.

26. I make a “ten” list every 2 years – this year I am hoping to cross off the longest eclipse in the last century (seeing it in China), Bhutan, Tibet, and Nepal – in one hit. I am pretty convinced that life is a series of endings and beginnings, so I “race” to close that loop – beginning things while in the midst of things that I feel are ending (or in the middle) in my life, and never sure where this loop of a roller coaster will take me. At the end of the day – outside of the minutia, the list is “predictable” and everything else is either zafa or fukú. In the end, it’s all kismet (or qismat) anyway…in the end I think I am pretty satisfied and working towards that thing called "happiness."

Breathing Moments

2009-02-23T20:19:00.000-05:00

There exists no characters here, simply you and me, in the hopes that you may one day remember the days of silence we shared. I don’t want life to be about forgotten moments, and I’m not talking about mine. Somewhere, walking down a narrow path or under a vast open sky lit only by what the cosmos has to offer, there are hundreds – thousands, of breathtaking moments occurring simultaneously. I want to be one of those people who remembers those moments. One of those people who paints them so vividly, because the colors are so new that they will strike you, because I too have been stricken. I am reminded of a dream I had a while ago, of my grandfather. In my dream, I am walking alongside him in a field. He is working, hard as usual. I feel like he’s on some sort of mission. In my dream, he hardly acknowledges that I’m with him, he’s just so focused on his task. I can still hear him talking to himself, reciting Buddhist prayers in Thai. My grandmother is still alive, but in my dream, she had just passed away. As I watched my grandfather clear the field, I remember noticing a line of 5 trees, which were the only things he left standing. They were in a row, all the same types of tree, and they were all the same size. I remember the smell of rain. It felt like early spring or late summer when a quick storm can pass within ten minutes with the wind, but it’s only moments before the sun returns and it’s like the rain never fell, except for the droplets, which still remain as evidence. I can still sense the calm breeze and cool air I felt in my dream, and it haunts me slightly. I was also left with a thought I carried in the dream, that my grandfather was preparing heaven for my grandmother. The imagery I saw has yet to escape my memory. It’s like a photo whose color has yet to fade.

I am here and you are there and I am not exactly sure of the paths that led us into these diverse directions, seemingly gone by like the flicker of an image on a piece of film. It sometimes seems that the more aware we become of time, the quicker it slips through our fingers, unable to be grasped, like sand. It sometimes feels as though the harder you hold on, the quicker the granules escape your grasp. I guess there is something to be said for staying loose and not holding the moment so tightly that it disappears. And yet there seems to exist those figments, which you are able to possess in their entirety so that they become a part of who you are or will become. Instinct in and of itself never fails to distinguish between the sands of time and moments made of leather. Often, when something strikes me deeply, I repeat a Buddhist Japanese proverb "Kokoro no koma ni tadzuna wo yurusuna." It means, "Never let go the reins of the wild colt of the heart." Whenever I feel like I've reached an impossible moment and lose motivation, inside my mind I whisper "Ad astra per infinitum," to the stars for infinity, and I think about all the wonderful people I have I have had in my life and at my side, always. I realize that I am fortunate to know and love such an array of different people and they make my life comparable to a rainbow in being multifaceted, multidimensional, and special. But, things have changed, and this is no longer where I find myself.

Often, you never really know when it’s going to be the last time. The last time that you make love to someone you’ve loved with what felt like the core of your soul. To smell their breath, taste their tongue, feel the wetness of their skin upon yours. Long after that day passed I found myself lingering within that moment. Why didn’t I fight? Now I feel myself holding my breath within that moment just to hold that person close, a little longer, to have it all again.

I remember our last moment so vividly, while I was in the throws of hard silence filled only with breathing and intensity, I felt outside of myself. In my heart I already knew that our curtain was closing. The room was filled with white morning light, our bodies were swaddled in bright, freshly washed, white sheets. Our skin, colored darker by the summer sun, was a beautiful contrast to the vibrant paleness around us. I opened my eyes to watch my arms caressing his back, to see him moving. He did not notice as I looked out the window to see the haze creeping in, swallowing me. A single tear rolled down my cheek before I closed my eyes to go back into the darkness. That was two years ago. I haven’t seen him since. I will never see him again.

My life ended 6 days later. I had a strange and vivid dream that painted the events of that week as if they were memories, which had not yet happened. The morning we made love forced the memories from the dream to flood into my mind as though a damn had been lifted. When I looked out the window, I already knew what the next days held for me, for us. I said nothing. I simply lay there silently, except for that one tear, which took a meandering stroll down the contour of my face, what was in my heart, was our secret.

What would you do if you knew that your life was going to end within a matter of days? Would you try to change it? Fate is a strange and powerful beast, I found myself at its mercy, blindsided within a moment, which should have been remembered as sweet. In my mind there were no choices I could make, that wouldn’t somehow lead to the visions dancing in my head. In an odd way, I found myself fascinated with the intrinsic beauty behind the cards that had fallen before me. Unlike poker, I couldn’t ask the dealer to exchange the ones I didn’t like. All I could do was write this one simple letter…

I am not sure if you have already forgotten me. But, I was that one, on a clear crisp evening who stood out the window, silent, draped in darkness, while the breeze danced in my hair. In the chill of the empty room, I felt your curious eyes, and I simply turned to offer you the view, which you had already seen countless times before. I was standing in your window, wondering about the fall. This was the first night we both observed that something existed outside of the ordinary. In between silence we made our exchange like two species at prey, we each took turns at mild oscillations, and as predator showing little fluctuation. Once we had thoroughly devoured each other, both mind and body, through the course until dawn approached, I found that you were still sitting, and maybe, I was still nothing. In silence I was made to understand in the clearness of your eyes that in the end, invariably both "something" or "nothing" meant nothing. As I watched you walk, I simply turned back to your window to the dawn. I could feel your eyes on my legs and I could feel your hand moving within your own hair, pulling at the back, as I had done before. As I closed my eyes, I pictured myself falling. I tried to stand, to find you, but found the room was now nothing. Left in open, left in silence, I once again closed my eyes.

There were times where I felt as though I existed within the planes of openness. Surrounded by the world, I only experienced the sky above. As soothing as I would find the barrenness, I would always need to start painting again. But in these times, I gifted to myself, the gift of solitude. I would manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness...have few desires. Then, I would close my eyes only for the moment to return to me.

I can see you walking across the surface of a frozen pond searching for me, your face is pale, your lips pink. As you walk across the pond, you kick snow off the shiny, hard surface and my face is underneath, banging against the ice, reaching for you but we simply can't get to each other. And in this image, there are flashes in my mind as I watch you slowly fade away as I drift beneath the glass. I had found myself entranced and wrapped within you. I wanted to take you into my arms, enfold myself within the dulcet strokes of whispers from your mind and resonating heat from your body until things became real. I pictured myself next to you lightly tracing your smoothness, entangling my fingers within yours if only to feel your heart quiver for the briefest interlude. I wanted the touching and the words to somehow erase some of your struggles and some of your pain. I wished to be a violin in your life, something that at times provoked you to play or reflect or simply feel.

When these images of you came, I would begin to hear music in my head. In those times, I wished I knew how to play the piano instead of guessing at the notes when I would sit at the instrument. The sounds would fill my mind and take away some of the emptiness and confusion. In those moments, my life was neither bad nor good, it's always been rich and full of so many wonderful things. However, I would find myself in a space where I just wanted to be alone unless I invited someone in. Many of the people I cared for in life weren't used to such an introversive face, they're used to the loud, smiling me. I just needed to reflect on some of my choices, recharge my batteries, actually start dreaming at night again, and write more. Somehow, even in the midst of such strong imagery, the absence of flowing words felt like suffocation. It became my only way of painting the images of my mind into life and reality. Words become the only colors I knew in order to fill things again because the pale gray eventually needed to disappear from my life. No matter where I would put them, they would have a sense of permanence. Only I could make their image disappear, but I would always know their meaning. And you will have known them too.

I was never quite certain of how the silence grew. Except to know that it exists and it continues to haunt me. In your absence, I will open my eyes only to see the gray, I will only want to see the gray and feel the chill of the coming fall. I will want to feel the chill of my breath and watch it escape my body as vapors against the air around me, but it's not cold enough yet. I envision myself soon making the walk to and from my car and my eyes catching glimpses of the blades of grass, which will be stubborn in their greenness, they will make me shudder. The small piles of bright yellow leaves, which will have trickled on to the pale cement sidewalks would seem so pretty to me, but soon they will seem out of place...just like their vibrant red veiny counterparts which will persist to cling to dull brown branches which were once so full of life. I will feel as though colors don't have a place in my life. Waiting for dark, waiting for day, countless contradictions that only you or I could understand.

Now, as we sit across from each other, I can see you and you can see me. We are seated in a place where they write and speak and smoke by candlelight and the velour of old couches are greased with dirt, old cells and imprints of fabric melted by the occasional burn. We listen to music I used to listen to a long, long time ago, The Reality of my Surroundings and Nearly God and I smile because my hair has grown to a different shade and I am not that person anymore and I don't think about those things anymore. I simply listen to you speak. This time, I am silent. You look to me as though I am a mirror, as though you seek a reflection, yet I am blank, only to provide enough for you to seek refuge through touch. My fingers begin to lightly trace your naked back from beneath your shirt.

Like cool steam after a storm on a hot summer day, there are small strengths in chipped china cups bearing their weight in tea. I have learned the value of keeping my own secrets and keeping my heart concealed, though I have yet to close my mind or my wallet or my home. While sitting here with you, I will want to control the words, which are spoken, but they will tumble like dominos that simply went stumbling down before I could rearrange them.

Once we leave, I will begin to feel like the world has become draped in new colors for which there are no descriptions and I will be left sitting, trying to relearn everything all over again. Standing in a forest where all the leaves have fallen, wondering what happened, I will hear the echoes upon the images of your face upon my dreams. I want to be strong for you, and I will not simply place my weaknesses behind a wooden door in a damp room.

You have never known my desire to reach you. This puerile need to give and receive and to be satiated by you. I want to feel what goes through your mind, your thoughts to muse and reflect upon them as if they had once belonged to me. I want to ruminate within the improbabilities using the narrow bits of information I felt I had managed to steal and break away from you, to pretend that I was you and figure out how you would react to the lyric of a poem I had written, to the Maroon 5 song, to a stance on a political debate, to the sight of yourself in a recent photograph. I can only imagine these reactions of yours because they don't exist otherwise.

I have come to believe that you are more like me than my imagination allows me to envision. Meandering, thinking, swimming through the oceans far enough to hear the waves break but not so far that the depths would make you succumb to the water. Focusing your eyes into the sunset, far away, reaching for it, wanting it, listening to the sound of laughter mixed with sand behind you, thinking of your life and your choices. Everything seems to occur simultaneously. There seems to be no shades of grey, only a thin black and white world of decisions where rationality is supposed to win. But, beneath the surface of the waters there exist currents of perspective and shades of subtlety that dance and flicker like silvery schools of fish just out of your reach. It's what dictates the truth in your action and forces you to continue on to breathe.

Long ago in a distant moment when I gazed upon your eyes, I found myself entranced and wrapped within you. In your heart I fell into love, fought courageous battles as I tread lightly behind your facades, found truths, discovered mysteries, witnessed paradigms become enigmas. I found God, only to lose him again, and perhaps to regain my faith once more.

Through your touch I felt the dulcet stroke of a lover upon my skin as vividly as I felt the blade of the sword pierce my being to bring me to my knees. You have such power over me, so able to make me weep sweet rain born of fear, anger, hope, love. You are so able to make me believe when no reason had ever existed before. And yet you incite me, lead me through twists and turns, delving within my own depths to find a bit of my soul in you.

I could so easily hear your rhapsody and rhyme whispered gently in my ear. Upon my soul I felt you enter me, felt you within me, touching...moving. Slowly I drifted into dreams and within my minds sky I could see. Visions and paintings created so vividly, not existing in reality. And when the hour came and I found the hour had come, one last and final time... I could only feel a sense of calm and resolution embodied within bittersweet loveliness. And at times I craved more, an insatiable appetite manifested by heavenly imprints your mind left open, page by page, by page. In history or fables or truths I have known that at times there is or can be no return. Yet here I sit ever anxiously, ready to read and absorb you, your words.

Since the last time I felt you, I have noticed that the world is full of fire flies. The world in its infinite being casts a glow if you stop to see it, pause long enough to be mesmerized by it. Bioluminescence abounds in faint and overt ways. Life can be still, so long as you allow yourself to live within the moment and not around it. Life lives and breathes within and throughout us. A primal feeling of polarity streams through my veins of inner consciousness whenever I stop to think about it. Whenever I feel that fundamental need to feel that energy. Whenever I feel the need to know that inevitably we are all one with each other. Life is such an intricate circle of balances.

Although my soul may feel exponentially old, my mind and body continue to wage a battle against time and the seemingly finite space we occupy while we are here. If this is my dream world, then I will become lucid. But, for now, it is as though you are far, far away and my words do not hear you. You are like my soul, I like for you to be still. Let me come to be still in your silence. Within silence perhaps you may come to understand that being with you separates every cell in my body by five centimeters and the plasma between those million entities is a siren constantly wailing one continuous message and a thousand different shades of admiration that incites envy amongst leering smiles behind lips burning of vodka that dissolve my very consciousness with every expression of the moment you returned.

Dare

2009-02-15T23:39:00.000-05:00

How do we become something when we feel like the dreams of the lives we once wanted to live have been shattered to their core? How do we grow and dare to dream when the person staring back in the mirror glares unexpectedly, features not what you thought they would be, time has woven a path and left something, someone, and you are unsure who, yet that person is looking at you for an answer.

Time is magnificent and paradoxically cruel in all the truths that are unraveled. Step back, leap forward. After darkness there is light. When the rain falls, sometimes an arc of color may be found as the sun peaks against the shadows.

How do we move on to the arc of light once we have felt darkness? Reach down, within. Close your eyes and remember the innocent energy of being a child on the swings with the wind brushing against your cheek on a cool summer day. It felt like every day could be that way. Keep reaching down, write words. Focus, breathe and open your eyes to create something new.

Obama Inauguration - HOPE

2009-01-23T15:33:00.001-05:00

There was a definite buzz of excitement in the air. I was simply awestruck by the number of people who filled the streets, filled the mall. The day for me was simply contingency play after contingency plan. The bus came late, so I took a cab to the metro (my day started at 5:30AM - and people were already at the Mall). Getting on the metro was seamless (I had purchased my Inaugural "speedpass" the day before - waited an hour in line for it). However, it took nearly an hour to exit L'enfant metro station. The crowd was directed to the empty quads until they were filled - my section was 15th and Jefferson, a comfy yet very cold section, directly in front of a JumboTron. As far as I was concerned, all my fingers and toes could freeze off just so I could be in the crowd, waving a flag for our new president. Incorporated with the transcript of the Inauguration Speech, you will see some of my favorite picture from the day.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Thank you. Thank you.

CROWD: Obama! Obama! Obama! Obama!

My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.

I thank President Bush for his service to our nation...
(APPLAUSE)

... as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.

The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.

Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many, and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable, but no less profound, is a sapping of confidence across our land; a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real, they are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: They will be met.
(APPLAUSE)

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
(APPLAUSE)

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.

It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed.

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
(APPLAUSE)

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done.

The state of our economy calls for action: bold and swift. And we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth.

We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.

We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality...
(APPLAUSE)

... and lower its costs.

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.

All this we can do. All this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.

MR. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.

And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched.

But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.

The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
(APPLAUSE)

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

Our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations.

Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

And so, to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.
(APPLAUSE)

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.

They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use. Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy, guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort, even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We'll begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard- earned peace in Afghanistan.

With old friends and former foes, we'll work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat and roll back the specter of a warming planet.

We will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.

And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that, "Our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken. You cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you."
(APPLAUSE)

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.

And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society's ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.

To those...
(APPLAUSE)

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
(APPLAUSE)

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.

And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages.

We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service: a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.

And yet, at this moment, a moment that will define a generation, it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies.

It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours.

It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old.

These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence: the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall. And why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
(APPLAUSE)

So let us mark this day in remembrance of who we are and how far we have traveled.

In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river.

The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood.

At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

"Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it."

America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words; with hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come; let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Thank you. God bless you.
(APPLAUSE)

And God bless the United States of America.
(APPLAUSE)

Glider

2009-01-11T11:11:00.001-05:00

For a long time I thought I knew you, but I was blind. For a long time I thought I knew myself, but I was asleep. Too entangled up in a dream of Sunday evening thoughts and emotions. Somewhere along the way ten-percent was a substitute for ninety-percent and the perpetuation of bullshit, smoke, mirrors and acts of omission all seemed to make sense. And yet I still somehow find myself sitting in these puddles on cold rainy days, when it ought to be shining outside. I am constantly shivering, wondering when it will be warm again. I must have been sleep walking, a ghost figure, a shadow of a human being. Because for some odd reason, I thought you knew me. I thought that after some time there might exist an ability of perception and communication without words.

Promises that were never kept. Changes that never occurred. A future that never was. A loss I feel not for you, but for myself and what wasn't.

Things are perpetually unspoken and I simply exist like that glider flung off a child's rubber band. Novel but forgotten, novel. I am just a novelty. A figment to exist in imagination but not in life. I never belonged here, never. I am so filled not with sadness, but with rage. I am angry because you betrayed me with my own emotions. I am angry because you lied. I am angry because you never were who I thought you were supposed to be. You could be happy and I won't know, but you were happy the day I watched you go.

Even this written long before committed because somehow, deep inside, I knew. My instinct was able to write what my heart and mind would rationalize away. I'm on my last day's of silence and no one stopped me from walking through that door. For the tiniest moment, it's all not true. No longer there to hold you back, take a glorious bite out of this whole world.

Happy New Year

2009-01-05T09:15:00.002-05:00

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The last few days, my co-workers and I have reflected on the journey of the last 365 days (and then some). For instance this time 10 years ago, Hannah, was in middle school (yikes) - and I was buckled down in Winston-Salem, NC (of all places), opening a new Chuck E. Cheese (I was the regional trainer, building new units). The last ten years have been quite a journey - the next ten, well the only thing I am certain of is the fact that a time capsule with my bio/pic and signed folio buried by W Aloft (long story) will be taken out (wink, wink Carla - Kelcey - and Dani), and I am hoping I have accomplished SOMETHING by then ;) I am sure Alain will be the the Dom of the night scene, Ken will be Madge's back-up dancer, Nadia will have updated the IMF's way of doing business (wink), Tom will be the cyber czar, Misook will be on the cover of fitness, Felix will be the mayor, Charis will be editor of Elle decor, Kim will publish a poetry book, Aaron will have biked from DC to LA (ha), Anthony will be a Salsa instructor on dancing with the stars...I can think of something for all the people in my life, I am up for suggestions please (they will dig that capsule up and say "who the hell?!"). I digress...

Three hundred and sixty five days, so what does this represent? Well…it represents the sum of days in a year, and for me, in retrospect, the period from one year to the present is pretty staggering. It's almost cliché to say, "Time goes by so quickly." But, time certainly passes by quickly and what you do with those seconds, days, and hours, matters – because time is irrecoverable. Do more good, make things count, just make it last. I have to say that one of the more impressionable bits of wisdom shared with me this past year is to try to experience everything as though it were the first time and savor it as though it might be the last. This, more than anything, has stuck with me, and moments actually feel better because I am more present. It has taken practice and focus, but this simple notion has brought a bit of clarity and joy with such simplicity. In 2008, there were many roller coaster moments, but I had some pretty impressive memories and moments that I never would have imagined for myself this year.

In addition to some good journeys (not nearly as much as previos years - my passport is feeling ill), I also had the opportunity to welcome some exceptional new people into my life. I have always found it odd how certain people randomly appear in our lives at unexpected times, in unexpected ways. I can only say that more than being able to see the world – I am enormously blessed to have met and come to know and continue knowing such caring and wonderful people. I know you come into and leave this life alone, but ultimately life is a journey, which is meant to be shared. The moments between those two points are what matter most.

First, I wanted to say how overwhelmingly fortunate I am to be surrounded by people from all walks of life who bless me with their presence in my life. I am often reminded of how much we all have going on - but how important it is to "reach out" every so often. Not to sound metaphysical, but everyone I have known has had a degree of impact on my life - whether it was to put a smile on my face, give me perspective, or be my anchor in the really tough times. In many ways, these messages in a bottle floating across the Internet are simply a way to tether and connect me to the people that I believe are quite special, for a variety of reasons.

As far as a good quote for the new year, Ralph Waldo Emmerson once offered words on the measure of success, but I believe these are simply great words to live by.

"To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one's self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived..."

Have a safe and wonderful new year.

Peace and much love,
J

Eyes of a Blue Dog

2008-12-15T23:21:00.000-05:00

This is one of my favorite short stories by Gabriel García Márquez. It's part Hitchcock with some Twilight Zone thrown in for good measure. After reading this for the 80 thousandth time, I'm not surprised I adore Jonathan Carroll so much. Enjoy!

Then she looked at me. I thought that she was looking at me for the first time. But then, when she turned around behind the lamp and I kept feeling her slippery and oily look in back of me, over my shoulder, I understood that it was I who was looking at her for the first time. I lit a cigarette. I took a drag on the harsh, strong smoke, before spinning in the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. After that I saw her there, as if she'd been standing beside the lamp looking at me every night. For a few brief minutes that's all we did: look at each other. I looked from the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. She stood, with a long and quiet hand on the lamp, looking at me. I saw her eyelids lighted up as on every night. It was then that I remembered the usual thing, when I said to her: "Eyes of a blue dog." Without taking her hand off the lamp she said to me: "That. We'll never forget that." She left the orbit, sighing: "Eyes of a blue dog. I've written it everywhere."

I saw her walk over to the dressing table. I watched her appear in the circular glass of the mirror looking at me now at the end of a back and forth of mathematical light. I watched her keep on looking at me with her great hot-coal eyes: looking at me while she opened the little box covered with pink mother of pearl. I saw her powder her nose. When she finished, she closed the box, stood up again, and walked over to the lamp once more, saying: "I'm afraid that someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets." And over the flame she held the same long and tremulous hand that she had been warming before sitting down at the mirror. And she said: "You don't feel the cold." And I said to her: "Sometimes." And she said to me: "You must feel it now." And then I understood why I couldn't have been alone in the seat. It was the cold that had been giving me the certainty of my solitude. "Now I feel it," I said. "And it's strange because the night is quiet. Maybe the sheet fell off." She didn't answer. Again she began to move toward the mirror and I turned again in the chair, keeping my back to her. Without seeing her, I knew what she was doing. I knew that she was sitting in front of the mirror again, seeing my back, which had had time to reach the depths of the mirror and be caught by her look, which had also had just enough time to reach the depths and return--before the hand had time to start the second turn--until her lips were anointed now with crimson, from the first turn of her hand in front of the mirror. I saw, opposite me, the smooth wall, which was like another blind mirror in which I couldn't see her-- sitting behind me--but could imagine her where she probably was as if a mirror had been hung in place of the wall. "I see you," I told her. And on the wall I saw what was as if she had raised her eyes and had seen me with my back turned toward her from the chair, in the depths of the mirror, my face turned toward the wall. Then I saw her lower he eyes again and remain with her eyes always on her brassiere, not talking. And I said to her again: "I see you." And she raised her eyes from her brassiere again. "That's impossible," she said. I asked her why. And she, with her eyes quiet and on her brassiere again: "Because your face is turned toward the wall." Then I spun the chair around. I had the cigarette clenched in my mouth. When I stayed facing the mirror she was back by the lamp. Now she had her hands open over the flame, like the two wings of a hen, toasting herself, and with her face shaded by her own fingers. "I think I'm going to catch cold," she said. "This must be a city of ice." She turned her face to profile and her skin, from copper to red, suddenly became sad. "Do something about it," she said. And she began to get undressed, item by item, starting at the top with the brassiere. I told her: "I'm going to turn back to the wall." She said: "No. In any case, you'll see me the way you did when your back was turned." And no sooner had she said it than she was almost completely undressed, with the flame licking her long copper skin. "I've always wanted to see you like that, with the skin of your belly full of deep pits, as if you'd been beaten." And before I realized that my words had become clumsy at the sight of her nakedness she became motionless, warming herself on the globe of the lamp, and she said: "Sometimes I think I'm made of metal." She was silent for an instant. The position of her hands over the flame varied slightly. I said: "Sometimes in other dreams, I've thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that's why you're cold." And she said: "Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then, when the blood beats inside me, it's as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It's like- -what do you call it--laminated metal." She drew closer to the lamp. "I would have liked to hear you," I said. And she said: "If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you'll hear me echoing. I've always wanted you to do it sometime." I heard her breathe heavily as she talked. And she said that for years she'd done nothing different. Her life had been dedicated to finding me in reality, through that identifying phrase: "Eyes of a blue dog." And she went along the street saying it aloud, as a way of telling the only person who could have understood her:

"I'm the one who comes into your dreams every night and tells you: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'" And she said that she went into restaurants and before ordering said to the waiters: "Eyes of a blue dog." But the waiters bowed reverently, without remembering ever having said that in their dreams. Then she would write on the napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables with a knife: "Eyes of a blue dog." And on the steamed-up windows of hotels, stations, all public buildings, she would write with her forefinger: "Eyes of a blue dog." She said that once she went into a drugstore and noticed the same smell that she had smelled in her room one night after having dreamed about me. "He must be near," she thought, seeing the clean, new tiles of the drugstore. Then she went over to the clerk and said to him: "I always dream about a man who says to me: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'" And she said the clerk had looked at her eyes and told her: "As a matter of fact, miss, you do have eyes like that." And she said to him: "I have to find the man who told me those very words in my dreams." And the clerk started to laugh and moved to the other end of the counter. She kept on seeing the clean tile and smelling the odor. And she opened her purse and on the tiles with her crimson lipstick, she wrote in red letters: "Eyes of a blue dog." The clerk came back from where he had been. He told her: Madam, you have dirtied the tiles." He gave her a damp cloth, saying: "Clean it up." And she said, still by the lamp, that she had spent the whole afternoon on all fours, washing the tiles and saying: "Eyes of a blue dog," until people gathered at the door and said she was crazy.

Now, when she finished speaking, I remained in the corner, sitting, rocking in the chair. "Every day I try to remember the phrase with which I am to find you," I said. "Now I don't think I'll forget it tomorrow. Still, I've always said the same thing and when I wake up I've always forgotten what the words I can find you with are." And she said: "You invented them yourself on the first day." And I said to her: "I invented them because I saw your eyes of ash. But I never remember the next morning." And she, with clenched fists, beside the lamp, breathed deeply: "If you could at least remember now what city I've been writing it in."

Her tightened teeth gleamed over the flame. "I'd like to touch you now," I said. She raised the face that had been looking at the light; she raised her look, burning, roasting, too, just like her, like her hands, and I felt that she saw me, in the corner where I was sitting, rocking in the chair. "You'd never told me that," she said. "I tell you now and it's the truth," I said. >From the other side of the lamp she asked for a cigarette. The butt had disappeared between my fingers. I'd forgotten I was smoking. She said: "I don't know why I can't remember where I wrote it." And I said to her: "For the same reason that tomorrow I won't be able to remember the words." And she said sadly: "No. It's just that sometimes I think that I've dreamed that too." I stood up and walked toward the lamp. She was a little beyond, and I kept on walking with the cigarettes and matches in my hand, which would not go beyond the lamp. I held the cigarette out to her. She squeezed it between her lips and leaned over to reach the flame before I had time to light the match. "In some city in the world, on all the walls, those words have to appear in writing: 'Eyes of a blue dog," I said. "If I remembered them tomorrow I could find you." She raised her head again and now the lighted coal was between her lips. "Eyes of a blue dog," she sighed, remembered, with the cigarette drooping over her chin and one eye half closed. The she sucked in the smoke with the cigarette between her fingers and exclaimed: "This is something else now. I'm warming up." And she said it with her voice a little lukewarm and fleeting, as if she hadn't really said it, but as if she had written it on a piece of paper and had brought the paper close to the flame while I read: "I'm warming," and she had continued with the paper between her thumb and forefinger, turning it around as it was being consumed and I had just read ". . . up," before the paper was completely consumed and dropped all wrinkled to the floor, diminished, converted into light ash dust. "That's better," I said. "Sometimes it frightens me to see you that way. Trembling beside a lamp."

We had been seeing each other for several years. Sometimes, when we were already together, somebody would drop a spoon outside and we would wake up. Little by little we'd been coming to understand that our friendship was subordinated to things, to the simplest of happenings. Our meetings always ended that way, with the fall of a spoon early in the morning.

Now, next to the lamp, she was looking at me. I remembered that she had also looked at me in that way in the past, from that remote dream where I made the chair spin on its back legs and remained facing a strange woman with ashen eyes. It was in that dream that I asked her for the first time: "Who are you?" And she said to me: "I don't remember." I said to her: "But I think we've seen each other before." And she said, indifferently: "I think I dreamed about you once, about this same room." And I told her: "That's it. I'm beginning to remember now." And she said: "How strange. It's certain that we've met in other dreams."

She took two drags on the cigarette. I was still standing, facing the lamp, when suddenly I kept looking at her. I looked her up and down and she was still copper; no longer hard and cold metal, but yellow, soft, malleable copper. "I'd like to touch you," I said again. And she said: "You'll ruin everything." I said: "It doesn't matter now. All we have to do is turn the pillow in order to meet again." And I held my hand out over the lamp. She didn't move. "You'll ruin everything," she said again before I could touch her. "Maybe, if you come around behind the lamp, we'd wake up frightened in who knows what part of the world." But I insisted: "It doesn't matter." And she said: "If we turned over the pillow, we'd meet again. But when you wake up you'll have forgotten." I began to move toward the corner. She stayed behind, warming her hands over the flame. And I still wasn't beside the chair when I heard her say behind me: "When I wake up at midnight, I keep turning in bed, with the fringe of the pillow burning my knee, and repeating until dawn: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'"

Then I remained with my face toward the wall. "It's already dawning," I said without looking at her. "When it struck two I was awake and that was a long time back." I went to the door. When I had the knob in my hand, I heard her voice again, the same, invariable. "Don't open that door," she said. "The hallway is full of difficult dreams." And I asked her: "How do you know?" And she told me: "Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart." I had the door half opened. I moved it a little and a cold, thin breeze brought me the fresh smell of vegetable earth, damp fields. She spoke again. I gave the turn, still moving the door, mounted on silent hinges, and I told her: "I don't think there's any hallway outside here. I'm getting the smell of country." And she, a little distant, told me: "I know that better than you. What's happening is that there's a woman outside dreaming about the country." She crossed her arms over the flame. She continued speaking: "It's that woman who always wanted to have a house in the country and was never able to leave the city." I remembered having seen the woman in some previous dream, but I knew, with the door ajar now, that within half an hour I would have to go down for breakfast. And I said: "In any case, I have to leave here in order to wake up."

Outside the wind fluttered for an instant, then remained quiet, and the breathing of someone sleeping who had just turned over in bed could be heard. The wind from the fields had ceased. There were no more smells. "Tomorrow I'll recognize you from that," I said. "I'll recognize you when on the street I see a woman writing 'Eyes of a blue dog' on the walls." And she, with a sad smile--which was already a smile of surrender to the impossible, the unreachable--said: "Yet you won't remember anything during the day." And she put her hands back over the lamp, her features darkened by a bitter cloud. "You're the only man who doesn't remember anything of what he's dreamed after he wakes up."

Inspi(RED) - World AIDS Day

2008-12-01T18:05:00.010-05:00

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: The epidemic is alive and well. The stigmas persist and AIDS continues to ravage disproportionate portions of population. Why? - Access to adequate healthcare, education and prophylactics is not universal. There are also issues of testing and violence against women (especially during war) in the underdeveloped world. Old stigmas and religious dogmas regarding the family still persist against the valid use of condoms in both the developed and underdeveloped world. This isn’t simply a matter of ignorance or “people should know better.” This is a matter of empowering others to live better. Learn more HERE.

The history of AIDS is a short one. As recently as the 1970s, no one was aware of this deadly illness. Since then the global AIDS epidemic has become one of the greatest threats to human health and development. At the same time, much has been learnt about the science of AIDS, as well as how to prevent and treat the disease.

Statistics for the end of 2007 indicate that around 33 million people are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Each year around 2.7 million more people become infected with HIV and 2 million die of AIDS.

Although HIV and AIDS are found in all parts of the world, some areas are more afflicted than others. The worst affected region is sub-Saharan Africa, where in a few countries more than one in five adults is infected with HIV. The epidemic is spreading most rapidly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where the number of people living with HIV increased 150% between 2001 and 2007.

AIDS is caused by HIV, a virus that can be passed from person to person through sexual fluids, blood and breast milk. Certain types of behavior carry a higher risk of HIV transmission. People particularly vulnerable to HIV include injecting drug users, sex workers and men who have sex with men. In many people’s minds, HIV and AIDS are closely linked with these groups, which can lead to even greater prejudice against people already treated as outsiders.

Yet the vast majority of HIV infections are transmitted through sex between men and women. Nearly half of all adults living with HIV are female. Many Western countries, such as the UK, have increasing rates of HIV transmission through heterosexual sex. In America, where more than a million people are living with HIV, heterosexual sex accounts for one third of new diagnoses.

As a sexually transmitted infection, HIV particularly affects adolescents and young adults. Deaths of young adults have an especially damaging impact on their families and communities: skills are lost, workforces shrink and children are orphaned. In some African countries, life expectancies have fallen below 40 years, whereas they would have been above 60 without AIDS. There are around 15 million living children who have lost a parent to AIDS.

Yet although it is known how to prevent and treat AIDS, few people have access to the necessary services. Most rich countries – and a few middle-income nations such as Brazil and Botswana – have achieved near-universal treatment coverage. But across the developing world only 31% of people who need anti-AIDS drugs are receiving them. Access to prevention tools such as HIV education, condoms, clean needles and programs to prevent mother-to-child transmission is utterly inadequate. For example, in 2007 only 33% of pregnant women with HIV received the drugs that could stop their children becoming infected.

In recent years, efforts to fight AIDS around the world have stepped up, with much greater funding being supplied by the US, other rich nations and developing country governments. But the amount of money available is barely half what is needed for an effective response.

Apart from inadequate funding, major obstacles in tackling the global AIDS epidemic include weak infrastructure and shortages of health workers in the worst affected countries. Political or cultural attitudes are also significant: for example some authorities are opposed to condom promotion, while others refuse to support needle exchanges for injecting drug users. Many are reluctant to provide young people with adequate education about sex and sexual health.

Another very serious issue is stigma and discrimination. People known to be living with HIV are often shunned or abused by community members, employers and even health workers. As well as causing much personal suffering, this sort of prejudice discourages people from seeking HIV testing, treatment and care.

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Sadness in Mumbai

2008-11-30T11:52:00.005-05:00

…A few minutes later, the gunmen started shooting at the Sea Lounge's doors. Glass shards showered the room, Roy said.

Then, she said, she noticed her foot was covered in blood.

As quickly as the gunmen came, they vanished into the upper floors of the hotel.

"Laying on our stomachs, we started getting text messages on our cellphones from senior hotel managers warning us to stay down or that gunmen were on the fifth floor," Roy said.

Inside the Taj's rooftop conference room, which faces the Arabian Sea and the Gateway of India arch, South Korean businessman Kim Dong-yer was finishing a meeting with his Indian partners at 10:30 p.m. when he heard windows being smashed and firecracker-like sounds of gunshots. "We knew something was very wrong. All 100 of us squeezed under a conference table," said Kim, who has lived in Mumbai for three months. They spent the entire night wide awake under the table. "It was a horrifying feeling of being trapped," he said.

At midnight, on the floor of the Sea Lounge, Roy heard the screams of women. Minutes later, the guests received a text message that a young girl had been shot.

Then a portion of the ceiling caved in. Apparently, a pipe had burst. Cold water and ceiling debris poured over many of the prostrated guests, who were too terrified to move. Some held hands. Roy said she heard others crying.

They lay there for five hours, some of them soaking wet. By 3 a.m., the blasts became louder and more frequent.

"Our eyes started to sting," Roy said. "My sari was soaking wet. But I remained frozen. I thought I would die. I didn't know how the hell we were all going to get out of here alive."

As dawn broke, hotel workers guided Roy and the others out of the cafe to a second-floor window, where fire crews had a ladder waiting for them. Once outside in the morning air, Roy said, she looked around and saw parts of the hotel in flames.

"There were snipers all over this hotel that I have loved since my childhood," she said.

In the back of the ornate Taj, white bedsheets tied together to make a rope dangled from the sixth-floor window of one of the rooms, a sign of a desperate escape by at least one of the hostages. Kim, the businessman, saw the flames when he escaped at dawn. "We took a chance and rushed down the stairs," he said. "We were able to sneak out, but we were lucky."

Hundreds of others remained trapped in the 565-room hotel at the start of the day Thursday. A team of Indian commandos, dressed in black body armor and toting assault rifles, began combing the structure in pursuit of the assailants. Commando Rajveer Singh, 33, said he conducted room-to-room searches starting at the sixth floor, the hotel's top floor.

"We listened at the door, then we would knock on the door, ask who was inside, then ask if anyone needed help," said Singh, recuperating at Bombay Hospital, where he was being treated for a gunshot wound to his left hand and severe burns on his face. He had reached Room 471 at the Taj and heard nothing, he recalled. He opened the door with a key card and spotted a man in a red shirt, "who didn't raise his hands when he was told to." Singh made a movement to run or grab a weapon.

Someone else in the room started shooting, he said. The room caught fire from all the fighting. Singh said he passed out.
By that time, in the hotel's main kitchen on the first floor, 10 members of the kitchen staff were dead. They had been some of the first to be attacked. One of them was the soft-spoken Vijay Rao Banja, a father of two and one of the top chefs at the Taj.

While commandos took control of the still-burning hotel, a funeral was held for Banja at the stately St. Thomas Cathedral. The hotel's cooks came dressed in chefs' smocks in honor of Banja. Hundreds of Taj employees sang "Amazing Grace." In the wide wooden pews, under spinning ceiling fans, Mumbai's Christians, Muslims and Hindus stood shoulder to shoulder, many weeping.

At the hospital, Ragsdale said she still loved India and praised the nurses tending to her wounds. But the meditation expert was having trouble relaxing after the ordeal. "Every time the hospital door bangs shut, I jump out of my skin," she said.

Full story (and more pictures) available at the Washington Post.

AIDS Scorecard Released

2008-11-29T18:03:00.000-05:00

As World AIDS Day (1 December) approaches, AIDS Accountability International is releasing the first ever Country Scorecard of national responses to the AIDS epidemic. The new scorecard evaluates data that all UN Member States agreed to provide as part of their unanimous adoption of the United Nations 2001 Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS. The analysis reveals a widespread lack of transparency and failure to report, by both rich and poor countries, that is seriously hindering the global AIDS response.

Visit AIDS Accountability by clicking HERE.

Yesterday, the United Nations urged countries to focus on the roots of the AIDS epidemic and draw on a panoply of tried-and-tested tools to help prevent HIV spreading among groups of people who most at risk. "There is no single magic bullet for HIV prevention, but we can choose wisely from the known prevention options available so that they can reinforce and complement each other," said Peter Piot, the outgoing executive director of UNAIDS.

Launching a report ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1, Piot called for understanding how the most recent HIV infections were happening and why they occurred in the first place. "Not only will this approach help prevent the next 1,000 infections in each community, but it will also make money for AIDS work more effectively and help put forward a long term and sustainable AIDS response," he said.

Unlike previous years, UNAIDS did not give any fresh figures for the number of infections and deaths ahead of World AIDS Day, saying the relevant data had not yet been amassed. Statistics published ahead of the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City in August say that around 33 million people had the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 2007, in a range of 30.3 to 36.1 million. Around 2.7 million people became infected, or on average around 7,500 people per day, while deaths were estimated at around two million.

Speaking at a press briefing, UNAIDS' director of evidence, monitoring and policy, Paul De Lay, said that so-called "combination prevention" -- which involves a behavioural, biomedical and structural approach to treatment -- was key to tackling the epidemic. A biomedical approach could include male circumcision, or using anti-retrovirals to prevent mother-to-child transmission, while behavioural approach could include encouraging condom use or reducing the number of sexual partners.

"The epidemic is constantly changing, and therefore the analyses of new infections must be undertaken at regular intervals," he said. Attention had to remain focussed on the most high-risk communities such as sex workers, injecting drug users and gay men, De Lay said. Meanwhile, two leading organizations shone the spotlight on access to antiretroviral drugs, which can turn HIV from a death sentence to a manageable disease.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on Friday announced that two million people living with HIV had now been reached with the lifeline treatment through programmes it supports, an increase of 43 percent increase over a year ago.
The Global Fund provides nearly a quarter of all international resources to fight AIDS.

In another development, the International AIDS Society (IAS), which organises the big international conferences, called on the Group of Eight (G8) to stand by their pledge, set down at their Gleneagles summit in 2005, for universal access to antiretroviral drugs by 2010. "Based on the G8's own reporting at its July 2008 meeting in Hokkaido, Japan the IAS has calculated that G8 countries have, to date, pledged approximately 22.2 billion specifically for global HIV programmes between 2008 and 2010," the IAS said.

"This amount is just 36 percent of the UNAIDS-estimated 61 billion dollars that is needed over this period." At the end of 2007, some three million people had access to antiretrovirals, marking a major upturn in previous years, but this was still two-thirds short of a goal of universal access of 2010 enshrined by the UN and supported by the G8.

Yes we did!

2008-11-05T11:20:00.001-05:00

What an amazing moment - people dancing and hugging in the streets. Hope seemingly renewed. YES WE DID! McCain also delivered a wonderful concession speech on this truly historic occasion. I am floored, words fail as I sit in awe - I finally have my RFK.

Reaction from around the globe via NPR.

Washington Post - Waiting for History

Obama Makes History - Washington Post Camera Works

Voting Day

2008-11-04T13:15:00.000-05:00

I have my parents address as my permanent address - in Accokeek, MD. Got up at 6:30 AM, hit the road at 7:30. Saw many Obama and McCain enthusiasts along Clarendon Blvd and at the Pentagon during my drive. It was pretty cool and very much set the tone that this is indeed a historic day. This is democracy at it's best - we are given a chance to let our voices be heard and we are given a chance to disagree.

I made a relatively easy drive to the Accokeek public library where I waited in line for close to 1.5 hours (compared to my 15 minutes in prior elections at my old voting grounds, the Accokeek fire house).

I was glad I had a book and glad I stopped at starbucks. I wasn't too happy about the rain, or the fact that I lacked an umbrella. But, it was worth it. A gentleman in front of me, obviously an immigrant from an African nation with his two young children was standing in front of me. Seeing him made me think of my family and how great this country really is. My mom is an immigrant, making me a first generation American. My mom also became a US citizen about 5 years ago and cast an absentee ballot from Thailand for this election. There is a bit of irony on this given Thailand's current political uncertainty.

So many people still come to this country to dream. So many people around the globe are watching this election as we participate. Last week in one of my classes, Mohammed, a classmate from Saudi said it best "we watch because something like this would not happen anywhere else in the world. Blacks and women did not have equal rights until past the middle of the last century and now they have the opportunity to lead. This would not happen anywhere else in the world."

VOTE

2008-11-03T16:43:00.000-05:00

After waiting in line for 8 hours to vote tomorrow, go down to Starbucks and wait in another line for your free tall cup of coffee! Drink that down and then skip on over to Krispy Kreme for a free star-shaped donut. Make sure you save a little of the glaze, you're going to need that later. Once you've gobbled down the donut, do the running man while making your way to Ben & Jerry's. Wash down the donut with a free scoop of ice cream.

Go congratulate yourself for doing your part as an American!

um... GO OBAMA!!! ;)

Distraction

2008-10-12T12:45:00.001-04:00

In the middle of it all is a magnificent building, aluminum, solid. Alone in its glory, set against a backdrop of pure black- but strong under a tremendous cloud of yellow.

My world consists of black nights and sage stars. My conscience is a white elephant bathing in the moonlight - it's curly trunk swirling, reaching for the midnight sky.

Lately, a band of very odd fruits have been inhabiting my house. In my backyard, a lonely minotaur kicks dirt as slowly, he expires, smiling.

Across the darkness, a string of stars flutter brightly, burning, shooting their way into the doors of my imagination.

And there are dandelions…singing in midair…whispering the end of summer in my ears.

Scented letters
Secret memories
Transient days never to return again.

Sometimes, a human touch penetrates these landscapes and I am instantly undone.

And I can be seen soaking the sun, peeking from behind cotton candied puffs of clouds.

Drizzling down again with the moonlight

Sad, Sad News... Paul Newman

2008-09-27T16:43:00.002-04:00

Legendary actor, WWII veteran, and renowned philanthropist, Paul Newman, succumbed to cancer at his home on Friday. He was 83. AP reports:

A spokeswoman for screen legend Paul Newman says the actor has died at age 83. Spokeswoman Marni Tomljanovic says Newman died Friday of cancer. No other details were immediately available. Newman was nominated for Academy Awards 10 times, winning a regular Oscar in 1987 for "The Color of Money" and two honorary ones. He was equally at home in comedies such as "The Sting" and dramas such as "Hud." He sometimes teamed with his wife, Joanne Woodward, also an Oscar winner for the 1957 film "Three Faces of Eve."

With writer A.E. Hotchner, Newman founded Newman's Own, a line of food products, in 1982. The brand started with salad dressing, and has expanded to include pasta sauce, lemonade, popcorn, salsa, and wine, among other things. Newman established a policy that all proceeds from the sale of Newman's Own products, after taxes, would be donated to charity. To date, these donations have exceeded US$250 million. He co-wrote a memoir about the subject with Hotchner, Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good (updated later to become "In Pursuit of the Common Good"). Among other awards, Newman's Own co-sponsors the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, a $25,000 reward designed to recognize those who protect the First Amendment as it applies to the written word.

One beneficiary of his philanthropy is the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a residential summer camp for seriously ill children, which is located in Ashford, Connecticut. Newman cofounded the camp in 1988; it was named after the gang in his film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Newman's college fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau, adopted "Hole in the Wall" as their "national philanthropy" in 1995. One camp has expanded to become several Hole in the Wall Camps in the U.S., Ireland, France and Israel. The camp serves 13,000 children every year, free of charge.

In June 1999 Newman donated $250,000 to Catholic Relief Services to aid refugees in Kosovo. On June 1, 2007, Kenyon College announced that Newman had donated $10 million to the school to establish a scholarship fund as part of the college's current $230 million fund-raising campaign. Newman and Woodward were honorary co-chairs of a previous campaign.

Paul Newman was one of the founders of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), a membership organization of CEOs and corporate chairpersons committed to raising the level and quality of global corporate philanthropy. Founded in 1999 by Newman and a few leading CEOs, CECP has grown to include more than 175 members and, through annual executive convenings, extensive benchmarking research, and best practice publications, leads the business community in developing sustainable and strategic community partnerships through philanthropy.

People like Paul are rare, cut from a fine silk, spun from a near extinct species. His presence will surely be missed. I'm sure the rains are falling in his rememberence. I can say in earnest that he has set the example for the type of person that I aspire to be, one small measure at a time.

Palin gets Dumber

2008-09-25T18:02:00.003-04:00

Watch and discuss. Seriously? Please go back to looking at Russia from your window...

Watch CBS Videos Online

The fact of the matter is, John McCain's sudden intervention in Washington's deliberations over the Wall Street bailout could not have been more out of sync with what was actually happening. Washington Post provided a great op-ed here.

If Palin could get off the cue card and had a clue, she would have realized what she was stepping into before she immersed herself into a puddle of poop. Putting on a pretty suit does not give you experience in policy. I cannot believe there are people in this country that actually believe she has what it takes to be second in command of this country - it frightens me. Katie Couric looked mortified throughout the entire "interview." If you could qualify Palin's responses as answers. They certainly didn't have a whole lot of substance. It's no wonder she isn't "allowed to do interviews."

After the Storm

2008-09-18T10:26:00.005-04:00

This is an op-ed by Steven Pearlstein that originally appeared in The Washington Post on 18 September 2008. To view the original - click here.

You know you're in a heap of trouble when the lender of last resort suddenly runs out of money.

Having pumped $100 billion into the banking system and lent $115 billion more to rescue Bear Stearns and AIG, the Federal Reserve was forced to ask the Treasury yesterday to borrow some extra money to replenish its coffers. If there was any good news in that, it was that investors here and abroad were eager to help out, having decided that the only safe place to put their money is in U.S. government securities. Indeed, demand was so brisk at one point yesterday that, for an investor, the effective yield on a three-month Treasury bill was driven below zero, once the broker's fee was figured in.

This is what a Category 4 financial crisis looks like. Giant blue-chip financial institutions swept away in a matter of days. Banks refusing to lend to other banks. Russia closing its stock market to stop the panicked selling. Gold soaring $70 in a single trading session. Developing countries' currencies in a free fall. Money-market funds warning they might not be able to return every dollar invested. Daily swings of three, four, five hundred points in the Dow Jones industrial average.

What we are witnessing may be the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen -- paper losses measured in the trillions of dollars. Corporate wealth. Oil wealth. Real estate wealth. Bank wealth. Private-equity wealth. Hedge fund wealth. Pension wealth. It's a painful reminder that, when you strip away all the complexity and trappings from the magnificent new global infrastructure, finance is still a confidence game -- and once the confidence goes, there's no telling when the selling will stop.

But more than psychology is involved here. What is really going on, at the most fundamental level, is that the United States is in the process of being forced by its foreign creditors to begin living within its means.

That wasn't always the case. In fact, for most of the past decade, foreigners seemed only too willing to provide U.S. households, corporations and governments all the cheap money they wanted -- and Americans were only too happy to take them up on their offer.

The cheap money was used by households to buy houses, cars and college educations, along with more health care, extra vacations and all manner of consumer goods. Governments used the cheap money to pay for services and benefits that citizens were not willing to pay for with higher taxes. And corporations and investment vehicles -- hedge funds, private-equity funds and real estate investment trusts -- used the cheap financing to buy real estate and other companies.

Two important things happened as a result of the availability of all this cheap credit.

The first was that the price of residential and commercial real estate, corporate takeover targets and the stock of technology companies began to rise. The faster they rose, the more that investors were interested in buying, driving the prices even higher and creating even stronger demand. Before long, these markets could best be characterized as classic bubbles.

At the same time, many companies in many industries expanded operations to accommodate the increased demand from households that decided that they could save less and spend more. Airlines added planes and pilots. Retail chains expanded into new malls and markets. Auto companies increased production. Developers built more homes and shopping centers.

Suddenly, in early 2007, something important happened: Foreigners began to lose their appetite for financing much of this activity -- in particular, the non-government bonds used to finance subprime mortgages, auto loans, college loans and loans used to finance big corporate takeovers. What should have happened at that point was that the interest rate on those loans should have increased, demand for that kind of borrowing should have decreased, the price of real estate and corporate stocks should have leveled off, takeover activity should have slowed and companies should have begun to cut back on expansion.

Mostly, however, that didn't happen. Instead, the Wall Street banks that originally made these loans before selling them off in pieces decided to try to keep the good times rolling -- and, significantly, keep the lucrative underwriting fees pouring in. Some used their own "AAA" credit ratings to borrow more money and keep the loans on their own balance sheets or those of "structured investment vehicles" they created to hide these new liabilities from regulators and investors. Others went back to the foreigners and offered to insure those now-unwanted takeover loans and asset-backed securities against credit losses, through the miracle of a new kind of derivative contract known as the credit-default swap.

Robert Dugger, an economist and hedge-fund partner, says the markets have only just begun to force some financial discipline on the majority of U.S. households. (By Andrew Harrer -- Bloomberg News)

As a result, when the inevitable crash finally came, it wasn't only those unsuspecting foreigners who bought those leveraged loans and asset-backed securities who wound up taking the hit. It was also their creators -- Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, AIG and others -- who made the mistake of doubling-down on their credit risk at the very moment they should have been cutting back.

We are now nearing the end of the rocky process of uncovering the full extent of the credit losses of the major Wall Street banks and hedge funds. But as Robert Dugger, an economist and partner in a leading hedge fund likes to points out, the markets have only just begun to force some financial discipline on the majority of U.S. households that relied on borrowed money to maintain their lifestyles.

With nobody willing to finance those lifestyles, there are really only two choices.

One is to turn to Uncle Sam to keep the economy and the financial system afloat. Unlike businesses, households and Wall Street firms, the Treasury can still borrow from foreign banks and investors at incredibly attractive rates. And by acting as an intermediary, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have shown a newfound willingness to use those funds to keep the housing market and the financial system from totally collapsing.

Last spring, the government borrowed $165 billion to send tax rebates to households in an effort to boost consumer spending. Now, some Democrats want to create a new agency that would use money borrowed by the Treasury to recapitalize troubled financial institutions by buying some of their unwanted loans and securities at discounted prices. The same strategy was used successfully during the Great Depression and the savings and loan crisis of the 1990s, and even some Republicans are warming to the idea.

In the end, however, there is only so much the government can borrow and so much the government can do. The only other choice is for Americans to finally put their spending in line with their incomes and their need for long-term savings. For any one household, that sounds like a good idea. But if everyone cuts back at roughly the same time, a recession is almost inevitable. That's a bitter pill in and of itself, involving lost jobs, lower incomes and a big hit to government tax revenues. But it could be serious trouble for regional and local banks that have balance sheets loaded with loans to local developers and builders who will be hard hit by an economic downturn. Think of that, says Dugger, as the inevitable second round of this financial crisis that, alas, still lies ahead.

--------------------
My 2 cents: At the end of the day, who can really be surprised by the eventual turn of events? As the saying goes, hingsight is 20/20, however if you take the most banal analogy of an individual consumer spending beyond his means - it is only a matter of time before the walls come crumbling down. If you net 40K, spend 60K, and carry an average debt of 25K per year (and live in a home which cost 365K) - there will be an eventual collapse. Now multiply this by 100 million.

The Federal Reserve can borrow from the treasury to allow the consumers to persist in the dellusion that spending will make everything right. But it won't, it's the "brainwashing" that got us into this mess in the first place. Low interets loans and a market that allowed a free for all. And borrowing money from the treasury is just causing other issues isn't it? Technically the United States Department of the Treasury isn't liquid. Ben Bernake doesn't just call Henry Paulson and say "Hey Paul, I need to borrow about 150 billion dollars." The dept sells more I.O.U.’s (treasury securities). Want to take a wild guess at who owns the majority of America's debt? Japan and China. But don't worry - while Ben is asking Henry for that loan, there is some weird loop in the sell where whatever isn't purchased by "the public" is bought by...the Federal Reserve. The newly created money floods into the economy, the purchasing power of our currency goes down, and through the hidden tax of inflation we all pay the price. Maybe I'm just making this stuff up as I go along... or maybe we can simply snap out of it.

Once a recession happens, the economy shrinks and so do tax revenues. But Uncle Sam still has to the pay interest on what he's borrowed - just like you don’t get a break on your mortgage payment when you lose your job. If we keep spending more and more on interest, the federal budget gets squeezed that much harder when the economy eventually stumbles.

“Foreigners now earn more on their U.S. investments than we do on our investments abroad,” Buffett wrote to shareholders “In effect, we’ve used up our bank account and turned to our credit card. And, like everyone who gets in hock, the U.S. will now experience ‘reverse compounding’ as we pay ever-increasing amounts of interest on interest.”

The wealth gap between the U.S. and other countries — even those with huge, rapidly growing economies like China — is still big. But no matter how rich you are, borrowing on top of borrowing is not a great long-term financial plan.

Novelty

2008-09-11T23:22:00.002-04:00

I've begun to question the novelty of it all. Buildings go ever higher, fall deeper while people wait for the rains. I type in darkness while swirls of smoke surround me, the pads of my keyboard taking on a dull speckled grey - when they ought to be white. It seems like this grand chase is the pursuit of novelty. Nothing even seems real. Typing this doesn't even seem real. Surrounded by a cacophony of noise and silence, battling for space. What wins? What are we all searching for? what is real anyway? Simply the wind through the window - or the bright light on my screen? Sink further towards the authentic, whatever that is.

Hurt

2008-08-20T22:23:00.004-04:00

Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" - You can see a live version with Trent Resnor by clicking here (embedding wasn't permitted). It is interesting to see Johnny Cash's interpretation of the song. One man's beginning is another's end...

To One in Paradise

2008-08-19T23:00:00.002-04:00

Thou wast all that to me, love,
For which my soul did pine-
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
"On! on!"- but o'er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!

For, alas! alas! me
The light of Life is o'er!
"No more- no more- no more-"
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree
Or the stricken eagle soar!

And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams-
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.

- Edgar Allan Poe

Big Day for Madge

2008-08-16T22:09:00.003-04:00

Go out and watch Desperately Seeking Susan, drink some champagne and listen to Confessions. God Bless the Queen!

Harmony

2008-08-08T20:36:00.002-04:00

I am watching the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games. Silent tears stream down my face and I am unsure why. Maybe it's because I haven't slept a full night in almost a month. But, I really think it has more to do with the raw symbolism behind everything in the production of this, the beauty, the pride. In Chinese, eight is an auspicious number (as it in Buddhism). Leading me to me leave that they ingrained the symbolism and their hopes and their beliefs not only into the displays and the performances, but the date that this is occurring - 8/8/08.

Quite simply breathtaking, amazing.

How to make a Dadaist Poem

2008-07-30T10:57:00.004-04:00

This is very simple and should make you feel infinitely creative. Write out the words, or turn into a peice of art by making a collage of your words. To make a Dadaist poem, simply follow these instructions, written by Tristan Tzara.

1) Take a newspaper.
2) Take a pair of scissors.
3) Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
4) Cut out the article.
5) Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
6) Shake it gently.
7) Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
8) Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you. And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

Dadaist literature was a style of poetry that revolted against a world that man's intelligence had failed to control. The works were very anti-intellectual, just like the artwork which was portrayed as 'anti-art.' Some famous Dadaist and Surrealist poets are: Andre Breton, Paul Elvard, Louis Arogon, Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball.

Here's one of my "Dada Poems..." created the nonconventional way here.

will will to day are
dream then the to...will moments
created mind space occupy will
created the must I contribute
I so I to something
change must things those things

Pressed Fairy

2008-07-28T11:57:00.007-04:00

It is odd how some moments can make little slivers in the fabric of space which surrounds you, causing the walls to bleed, gasp for air, reminding us how old scars formed. They have faded but the memory not forgotten. Like a fish sprung from water, we anticipate aspiration, pretend we are in the right circumstance. Air becomes rain so we can breathe. Tenderly wipe away each tear as though it were a droplet from the sky, once sunny, now filled with clouds - seemingly from nowhere. Immerse our faces into the water so no one is able to know the source of the rivers flowing down the contours of our cheeks.

Make everything silent, because that's all there is. Silence. When there are words, they become stacked into a wayward column, waiting to topple over. These words, once released, follow their own capricious, wanton, or depraved inclinations. These words are not “right,” they are inclined to produce against what is desired or expected. Now, only capable of composing a cacophony that my unstable heart seems able to hear and understand. When the walls have become red and the fish cannot breathe, silence.

Remain still while thoughts linger on empty pages, pressed with the wings of a fairy. The beautiful words that may have emerged now lay crumbled and folded and dried. Destroyed in my desire to keep them forever, the color has gone and the billowy air has taken the little life left off of the pages. Foolish to believe in fairies, foolish to hold on to my memory of what I thought I had. My pages lay empty, my wings, torn.

Reaching the end of an empty book. There never was any intent to write anything there. Lost within my own magic show of light, colors, and hope. The inkwell wrote invisibly and I thought that I could see. Life is fragile and so are we.

From whom has this illusion been sedulously fostered?

truth

2008-07-20T19:34:00.003-04:00

i am a little leaf
fluttering in the wind
i am a small
down feather
rustling
beneath the
breast of a dove
i am a speckle
of dust
glistening
with movement
beneath the sun
i am vapor
seen in the
chilly air
of a cold
december morn
i am the current
of water
constantly
on the move
i am the dance
you feel
on your cheek
when no one
else is around
i am the source
of the flame
as it sways
into the dark
i am the wisp
in the sky
that carries
cotton candied
dreams
i am the chill
in the night
that brings
fall to the
summer trees
i am the card
that lay
beneath
your curious
eyes
i am the
elixir
that you
thought would
save
your life
i am the secret
desire
that
you hold
so deep
inside
i am the riddle
of every man
who travels
on this
journey
i taunt
i make you pray
i give you hope
i am the closed
door
the open
one
your enigma
wrapped
within a shroud
of truth
that i persist
without
capital but
i am

________________________________

feel me harder, move closely
move slower
i don't want to be here anymore

breathe me deeply, touch softly
glide gently
open your eyes see the open door

moving silk with naked hand
unable to change the fate
this land

brush me, stroke me, see clearly
unable to focus
reach deeply into my core

whet yourself upon cool breath
slowly slipping
holding this hand

moving silk with naked hand
unable to change the fate
this land

Both Bush and Greens Fuel Food Shortage

2008-06-24T11:42:00.006-04:00

The following is an article by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar. He is the Consulting Editor of The Economic Times, India's largest financial daily. He writes a popular weekly column in the Times of India titled Swaminomics

George Bush and the greens, usually foes, have joined forces to create a food shortage that today threatens millions in poor countries with hunger and starvation.
Greens have long demonized the consumption of petroleum and genetically modified foods, and crusaded against carbon. To this fatal broth, Bush has added the notion of energy independence for the US, backed by enormous subsidies and mandatory targets for converting corn to alcohol. This policy aims at doubling use of corn-based alcohol in gasoline by 2008, and quintupling it by 2022. Europe has mandated 10% use of biofuels in transport by 2020.

The result is a rising diversion of agricultural land from food to fuels. This has happened just as fast economic growth has lifted the demand for meat in many developing countries, and it takes several tons of grain to produce one ton of meat. Combined with two successive droughts in Australia, this has caused a modest shortfall in food availability. But food demand is so inelastic that even a small shortfall sends prices shooting up. Other than Brazil, few countries can quickly bring additional arable land under cultivation -- all the best land has long been harnessed, and only marginal lands are uncultivated. And the green agitation against genetically modified foods, backed by many European governments, has discouraged developing countries from planting high-yielding modified varieties, for fear of economic sanctions.

Ironically, even if the US and Europe meet their biofuel targets, these will meet only 6% of their transport fuel needs. So, mandated biofuel use cannot give the West independence from Middle East oil supplies. But it can cause hunger and death for millions of poor people by raising food prices. Many green groups that claim to speak for the hungry millions have been deafeningly silent about the terrible impact of mandatory biofuel targets in the US and Europe, since the greens once led agitations for those very biofuel policies, blissfully ignorant of the consequences for the poor. Today you hear of activists appealing for more food aid, but no agitation for abolishing the insane, inhuman policy of mandatory biofuel targets.

Greens may have reasons to worry about the impact of global warming a century hence. But the law of unintended consequences plagues all lofty planning by those with golden hearts. Today’s food shortage is a classical demonstration of that.

Finally, Third World countries have themselves contributed to high food prices. Many of them have banned or curbed food exports to improve domestic availability. But this in turn has exacerbated the food shortage in the world market, hitting chronic importers like Bangladesh, the Philippines and many African countries. This has rightly been called a “starve-my-neighbour” policy by the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute.

What is the way forward? Scrap biofuel targets and subsidies immediately. That is the only policy action that can boost food production in the short run by switching global acreage substantially from fuel to food. All other policies—improving agricultural research, improving irrigation, ending scientifically nonsensical curbs on GM crops—will have much less impact, and take more time to work.
---------------------------------------------
The Washington Post has an excellent coverage on the current global food crisis, I encourage you to visit the photo galleries and articles to gain understanding by clicking here.

The New York Times has compiled an online section devoted to Food Prices and Supply, which you can explore by clicking here.

Change and Growth

2008-06-17T10:41:00.006-04:00

My life has changed so much within the past year. So, so much. Time seems to propel me through life at an ever increasing rate. I've begun to start thinking about whom I might be, where I might be next. A new chapter has begun. I've already begun to wonder when it might end. I've already begun to wonder where the story goes from here. I've begun to wonder whether or not I believe in happy endings. I think about life and how we are all put here to die and how everything else is simply the space between two points. We all travel across the same lines. I wonder where I am going; I wonder where I will be. I wonder who will be there with me. I wonder if anyone will be there with me. Of all the things I think about, I think about life the most. I've got such contradictory feelings. On the one hand I constantly question the reality of everything. Then my mind wanders to what I've read regarding special relativity. I think how every moment is already in existence. I think about how everything we experience is relative to the speed in which we travel. I wonder how fast we are really going. I wonder if things would be different if we travelled along a straight path versus a centrifugal one. I wonder if we are bound to repeat countless cycles, just as the earth. I question how long we are bound to be here. I question our individual grasps within time, within these relative dimensions. I wonder if this is all a dream. And then, there is the other me...the me that question none of these things. Lately, that's the face that has taken center stage.

This face is more concerned with the path I've chosen, the path I will choose. Concerned with the comfort of this journey, although not worried about it. Satiated with wonderful feelings, dreams, hopes and aspirations. Completely unconcerned with concrete physical realities and yet completely entranced with the possibilities behind spiritual realities. This is the face that has come to equate life with the cycle of a dragonfly. Anthropoda, Insecta, Odonata. A dragonfly begins its life as an egg deposited into a pond. When the egg hatches, a larva is born (also called a nymph or naiad). The nymph can spend over five years living in the pond using internal gills to breathe. In it's aquatic stage, the nymph will undergo a series of molts as it grows and develops.

Those that survive life in the pond during the aquatic stage as nymphs will eventually enter what is called the final larvae stage. The nymph climbs up the stem of a reed or other plant at night - exposure to air causes the nymph to begin breathing. Once it is completely out of the water, the nymph affixes itself firmly by means of its claws. After a pause, the larval casing breaks at the back of the head and, slowly and laboriously, the adult insect emerges. 'Blood' is then pumped strenuously round the body, an action that expands the body and also the wing-buds, transforming them into the beautiful lace-like wings which the insect will soon use to fly away from the water. By the time the larva leaves the water, an adult, albeit a rather uninflated one, exists inside the skin which is about to be shed. After the insect has extracted itself, a period of time, usually a couple of hours or so, elapses during which the body and wings expand and cure sufficiently to withstand flight.

Emergence is not an easy process, and the insect is incredibly vulnerable as it prepares for life in an entirely new medium. Many things can go wrong, and sometimes do. Weather changes can have disastrous results. Winds and rain can cause irreparable damage by bringing things into contact with the developing body or wings. The insects can become dislodged, falling into the water where they can drown or be eaten. Where suitable emergence sites are limited, larvae can walk over one another disrupting development. During emergence, the insect can't fly away, and hence is vulnerable to numerous predators. Emergence requires a lot of energy and some insects die trying. The necessary growth having been achieved during the larval stage, the imago can concentrate on ensuring the continued existence of its species: it is the stage of dispersal and reproduction. Immediately after emerging, young adults instinctively head away from water and fly off into the surrounding countryside. In temperate zones, dragonflies that survive the vulnerable period between commencement of emergence and successful maiden flight, have an average life expectancy of 4-6 weeks. I should note that the varied rainbow and metallic colors on the body of a dragonfly is not a pigment, but rather a part of their living tissues, and it fades away once the insect dies. This is why people don't collect dragonflies like they do butterflies.

This life cycle to me seems so metaphoric. On the more banal scale, one could equate it to children leaving the nest and becoming an adult going into the world and attempting to survive. However, in the spiritual sense, one could say that survival of life in the pond is so much like survival in life. The final stage being that final transformation where everything becomes clear (if one can even make it there). I guess the Buddhist would call this "enlightenment." Those who achieve it, live those last moments of life, capable of seeing the entire picture, life beyond a pond. Just because you have survived one chapter doesn't mean you won't be challenged in the next. Tenacity takes courage and strength, but the rewards can be remarkable, even if they are fleeting (for a dragonfly - this staged is reached in order to create new life, for a Buddhist, it is to also help others to this path). Anyway - nothing is ever the same once you've reached something sacred. A dragonfly is all eyes, seemingly in it's last moments, existing to take everything in, experience it. No longer able to walk with it's legs, it can only fly...

"We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance." - Harrison Ford.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin

"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." - John F. Kennedy

Je Suis Le Chef!

2008-06-04T14:21:00.013-04:00

I felt the need to post this fabulous little recipe for fresh linguine with sausage and cabbage. I made this for dinner last night, it's extremely simple to make, and pretty good! I made a few modifications, which I have noted. The recipe supplies half of your daily folate needs. Also, the cabbage used in this recipe is savoy cabbage (which I had been trying to cook with for a while). It is light green and has crinkly leaves, perfect for the weather - and adds great color to the dish. It also has a milder flavor than your regular green or red cabbage (I also don't like to eat either of these). I converted the original recipe instructions into steps to make things a little "easier." Bien Provecho and Bon Appétit!

Serves: 4; Total time: 18 minutes

Ingredients:

2 chicken sausages (about 5 ounces total) - or 4 Morningstar Italian Sausages
1 small red onion
14-ounce wedge savoy cabbage
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
3/4 teaspoon cornstarch
3 teaspoons olive oil, divided
1 cup reduced-sodium chicken broth - or make 1 cup of broth using Natural Vegan “Chicken” Bouillon Cubes by Edward & Sons (I used a full cube for one cup)
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 12-ounce package fresh linguine

Directions:
1) Bring a large covered pot of water to a boil over high heat. Reduce to low and simmer covered until ready to cook pasta.
2) While water is being heated, cut sausages into 1/4-inch thick diagonal pieces, slice onion to make 1/2 cup, and shred cabbage to make 3 cups. In a small bowl, mix vinegar and cornstarch. A quick NOTE - mix thoroughly, there should be no "chunks" of powder. You should re-mix before adding to the pan.
3) Heat 2 teaspoons oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat until hot but not smoking. Add sausage, reduce heat to medium, and cook 1 minute. Turn sausage and cook another minute.
4) Add remaining 1 teaspoon oil, onion and cabbage and sauté 1 minute.
5) Add broth and 1/4 cup cold water; bring to a boil over high heat. Stir in cornstarch mixture and pepper. Cook, stirring, until liquid is a little glossy, about 30 seconds. Set aside.
6) Return pasta water to a boil over high heat. Add linguine and cook uncovered according to package directions, about 2 minutes. Drain in a colander. Add drained pasta to sausage and sauce in skillet and toss gently to combine. Divide among four plates and serve immediately.

MY MODIFICATIONS
I suggest using a medium to large skillet for preparing the sausage and cabbage - you will need the space when you mix in the linguini in the final step.
Substitute 2 tablespoons red wine for the 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
Substitute garlic infused olive oil instead of regular olive oil
In STEP 2, instead of cutting the sausage, remove the meat from the casing. You can do this by gently squeezing this out of one end with your fingers. I should note that I used 2 fresh chicken cilantro sausage from Whole Foods. When you cook the sausage, you would need to break the ground meat in the same way you would for tacos - the same can be done with the Morningstar Sausages. Do not worry about any trace amounts sticking to the pan - it will deglaze when you add the savoy cabbage (from the moisture). NOTE - you may need to adjust cook time, should be slight pink in some spots when you add the red onions.
In STEP 4, after adding a smidge of oil - add the red onions first. Sautee them for ~ 30 seconds, then add the savoy cabbage. After adding the cabbage, add about 1/8 - 1/4 teaspoon salt (this will help wilt the leaves and add flavor).
In STEP 5, DO NOT ADD the 1/4 cup cold water. I found there was enough flavor and liquid (from the chicken broth) without it.

Nutrition Facts:
(2 cups): 348 calories, 7 g fat (17% of calories), 1 g saturated fat, 53 g carbs, 18 g protein, 2 g fiber, 35 mg calcium, 3 mg iron, 363 mg sodium

Cooking Tips...
I thought I would throw in a few kitchen tips:

How to cut a cabbage:
A cabbage’s outer leaves are often thin and damaged. First pull off and discard 2 or 3 layers to reveal thicker smoother leaves. Rinse the cabbage well and pat it dry.

Remove and discard the tough white cores by holding each quarter upright and slicing downward behind them at an angle.

Now you can slice the cabbage as the recipe or whim demands. Slice it into very thin long strips for slaws and salads, into thicker strips for stir-frys, braises and sautés, and into larger pieces for a longer cooking. For the recipe above - you will want relatively thin strips (~1.5 cm).

How to Dice an Onion
There are many ways to cut, chop, or dice an onion. Here is one way taught to me by a professional chef that I recommend to you.

With a long knife, cut the head in half through the core. Cut each half in half again through the core.

Using a chef's knife, cut the stem end almost off but leave a little to grab so you can start peeling. Peel all the outside skin off.
Place the onion on the cut end with the root end facing up. If there are any excess roots sticking out, pinch them off with your fingers. Now slice the onion in half long ways. By leaving the root attached, it will help keep the onion together while slicing.

Take each half of the onion and lay it down flat on your cutting board. Make multiple cuts long ways from top to bottom but not through the root at the end. Depending on the fineness you want your dice will determine how many cuts you will make. The more cuts, the finer the dice. Turn the onion 90 degrees and make multiple cuts across the onion being sure to keep your fingers curled under so you don't cut them. How many slices will again depend on how fine a dice you are looking for.

What is Deglazing?
Deglazing is using a small amount of liquid (usually enough to cover the bottom of the pan by no more than 1/4-inch) to loosen the bits of caramelized food at the bottom of a pan after it has been cooked or partially cooked. The liquid is added to the pan directly after the item being sautéed is removed from the pan. If the liquid being added is high alcohol, the pan should be removed from the heat before the liquid is poured in. A spatula or wooden spoon is used to scrape up the little attached bits. The heat should be on high, to reduce the amount of liquid and further intensify the flavors.

The caramelized food particles, called fond, are highly flavorful, since they are concentrated juices from the cooked item. As they absorb the liquid, usually, stock, wine, broth, or water, they mix with the flavors in the liquid, making a perfect compliment for the cooked item, since they have the same source.

The liquid used to deglaze should either augment the flavor or contrast it. Usually with a mildly flavored food, like chicken or fish, the deglazing liquid is a similarly flavored stock or broth. If the food has stronger flavors or is high in fat, such as duck or sausage, the liquid added will be tart or acidic, like wine or citrus juice, which will cut the fatty flavors. Either flavor will be the base of the sauce used for the dish. Any juices that pool in the bottom of the dish the food should be added back to the pan and reduced with the deglazing liquid for additional flavor.

After the fond has been scraped up, additional seasonings, such as salt and pepper or a handful of chopped herbs or spices can be added. The sauce, once reduced by at least half, can then be finished with bits of cubed cold butter, stirred in after the pan has been removed from the heat. The butter will thicken and enrich the sauce.

On a more practical level, deglazing allows the pan to be scraped, which helps cleaning it later.

Hard Candy

2008-05-05T18:34:00.005-04:00

In case anyone needed some inspiration to go out and get some hard candy... I thought I would post this. Recognize that my writing has been a bit sporadic, but life has been a bit sporadic. Enjoy! Eventually, I'll get to my reviews of Murakami and Colbert.

Just one of those things
When everything goes incredible
And all is beautiful
Can't get my head around, I need to think about it
And one of those things
That used to get you down
Now have no effect at all
Cause life is beautiful
Can't get my head around it, I need to think about it

Remembering the very first time
You caught that some ones' specials eye
And all of your care dropped
And all of the world just stopped

I hope
I want to go back to then
Got to figure out how, got to remember when
I felt it, it thrilled me
I want it, to fill me

Just one of those things
When everything goes incredible
And all is beautiful
Can't get my head around, I need to think about it
And one of those things
That used to get you down
Now have no effect at all
Cause life is beautiful
Can't get my head around it, I need to think about it

You don't know what you got 'til it's gone
And everything in life just goes wrong
Feels like nobody's listening
And something is missing

I remember when
You were the one
You were my friend
You gave me life
You were the sun
You taught me things
I didn't run
I fell to my knees
I didn't know why
I started to breathe
I wanted to cry
I need a reminder
So I can relate
I need to go back there
Before it's too late

Incredible
Let's finish what we started
Incredible
You're welcome to my party

I don't want this to end
I am missing my best friend
It was incredible
There is no reason
Sex with you is...

Incredible
Just finish what we started
Incredible
You're welcome to my party
Don't want this thing to end
I'm missing my best friend
Yes it was incredible
There's no reason to pretend
Incredible

It's time to get your body groving
It's time to get your hands up

It's incredible, unbelievable
It's incredible, unachievable
It's incredible, metaphysical
It's incredible

Other than the lyrics, and the fact that it's Madge - the beat is just so flippin' enjoyable. It's also written well, especially for a love song -it really covers all the bases. Falling in love and the happiness it brings. By contrast, there are aspects of the relationship breaking down, or the sadness of a love that has died. In typical Madonna fashion, it is also bawdy - indulging in the physical pleasure of love. Another really great track, co-written with Joe Henry, is "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You." I mention Joe Henry because he has actually been a "co" on my favorite songs from her last three albums. "Jump" from Confessions, and "Don't Tell Me" from Music. He's a well established musician in his own right (since ~1986) and he also happens to be Madge's brother in law - small world. You can check out his stuff on iTunes. I suppose I may be drawn to these tracks because lyrically, I am more drawn to artists like Joe Henry than "top 40" pop. Madge is the exception in my world, whereas folks like Amos Lee, Sia, and Brett Dennen are the rule.

I suppose I'm on a roll writing about music, so I'm going to take a left turn and mention Augustana. They recently released their latest album, and it's been playing non-stop on my iPod for the last two weeks. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the band name, you may have heard of their big hit, "Boston." On their last album, "All the Stars and Boulevards," Augustana was more of a rock band that had some pop elements. They had a mega hit, but a lot of their other material had a rough feeling to it. With the new album however, their sound has become that of slow builds and big pay offs.

Augustana are masterful song writers whether you are a fan or not. In terms of the music, tone, and mood the band has perfected the dynamic of their songs to get the emotional response desired. ‘Can’t Love, Can’t Hurt’ makes the band’s last outstanding album look like a handful of demo songs patched together. This really is an album that had the time it needed put into it and the production value it deserved.

Visit the band's site here to get their current tour info (quick note, their MySpace page seems to have more comprehensive tour info). Go to iTunes NOW to purchase the album - worth every penny!

Sweet and Low - from their latest album

Anywhere you go, anyone you meet
Remember that your eyes can be your enemies
I said hell is so close, and heavens out of reach,
But I ain't giving up quite yet,
I've got too much to lose,

Hold me down, sweet and low little girl
Hold me down, sweet and low and I will carry you home,
Hold me down, sweet and low little girl
Hold me down, and i'll carry you home,

The rain is gonna fall, the sun is gonna shine
The wind is gonna blow, the waters gonna rise
She said, when that day comes look into my eyes
But no ones giving up quite yet, we've got too much to lose,

Hold me down, sweet and low little girl
Hold me down, sweet and low and I will carry you home,
Hold me down, sweet and low little girl,
Hold me down,

And i'll carry you all the way
When you say you're fine
But you're still young and out of line,
When all I need's to turn around
To make it last, to make it count,
I ain't gonna make the same mistakes
That put my mama in her grave
I don't wanna be alone

Hold me down, sweet and low little girl
Hold me down, sweet and low and I will carry you home,
Hold me down, sweet and low little girl,
Hold me down