Thursday reminder

Today's mantra:

“People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

Works wonders when working with the great unwashed public, especially those closest to our hearts.

Isn't this enough?

Storm, a 10-minute poem/story by Tim Minchin

Home Again, if only for a minute

I'm home from my 3.5 weeks in South East Asia (see previous map) with just enough time to catch my breath before I'm off to Seattle for a week, then three days later off to Europe for a week and a half!

Batu Caves

This rushing about the globe has left me unsure of night from day, and not cooking at all. But take one look at this picture and you know it's worth it.

(We did get the best anniversary present ever- my mom cooked and delivered over a week's worth of gourmet meals, nothing better than being able to eat home cooking after nearly a month of eating out and not having to be the one doing the cooking!)

So excited that it's finally fall here at home and I get to wear all the sweaters I took out of storage before leaving for Asia; I'm also thrilled to see autumn in Europe, since I've only been in the height of summer.

I'm slowly posting pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aemalkin/sets/72157625082790046/

Between all the travel, a wedding two days before I left and one the the day after I got back, it's been sloooooow posting, but keep checking back!

a belated new year

This lunar new year, and valentine's day, I wish everyone the ability to find love that lasts a life-time; whether with another person, art, nature or the everyday astounding-ness of life.

Something I Love

I'm adverse to serials.

I usually won't watch a new television show until it's off the air--I hate having characters live in my head only to have them vanish with no conclusion; I get enough of that in life.*

I do read web-comics like people watch TV.

For just a year or so I've been reading Anders Loves Maria, it's a beautiful heart-wrenching comic that catches the frustrations and joy of love with fabulous muted art that evolves with the story--and last night the author concluded it.

It's also _really_ popular.

If you haven't already read it I highly recommend you do.

Here's a link to the archives: http://anderslovesmaria.reneengstrom.com/archives/

*with many qualifications and exceptions to any absolute

a hero

Douglas Adams is one of my heroes.

Growing up reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and all the ensuing sequels, shaped (or fit) my sense of humor and personality.

Shortly after I moved to Davis I was watching public access TV to avert the loneliness and clicked upon a lecture filmed at UCSB a week or so prior to Adams' (early, tragic) death.

He reads and retells stories from his non-fiction account of traveling the world in search of endangered species Last Chance to See. Adams and his traveling companions try to catch glimpses of animals from a New Zealand flightless parrot called the Kakapo to the now (tragically, sadly) "functionally extinct" Yangtze river blind dolphin the Baji.

Everyone should read this book. If you have read it, listening to the lecture and hearing some of the stories in Adams' own voice is wonderfully touching.

But it is the last 10 or 15 minutes of the lecture that really get me.

Adams talks about the incredible simultaneous tragedy and hope humans find themselves in, of how we've come so far to being able to rectify some of our mistakes in relation to Earth's other inhabitants, and how inevitable it seems we'll just keep going as we have been, as is in our nature to do.

You can almost hear his voice cracking.


Parrots the Universe and Everything:



The lecture is over an hour long, so you might want to switch over to youtube and watch it full-screen, or just listen.

the failing budget of California

So I hear my coworker over the cubicle wall.

"So what? There's too much government anyways, they should shut it all down."

People are entitled to be Libertarians.

But, um, she works for the government, so does her husband.

So do I, and my husband.

I do not think "Government" means what these people think it means.

an alternate universe

quote

"No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds - all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming...."

I'm so glad there's a plan.

People die.
I work in an office and my lovely husband works in an office.
Sometimes people our coworkers know die.
(Luckily no one we know has died for a few years. *knock* *knock*)
Whenever a relative of someone in the office passes away, someone else circulates a card among the staff so everyone who wants can express their condolences.

Nice, comforting, awesome.

I have a coworker who is a Jehovah's Witness.
He always writes this in the sympathy cards:*

I do not believe death is a natural thing
and
At a time like this I am comforted by the thoughts that this was never God's plan, and he plans to fix this one day Rev 21:4

I know proselytizing is part of his religion, but really?

I mean, doesn't "there's a time and a place for everything" come from the bible too?

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1

I'm not against everything in the bible, or Pete Seeger and the Byrds for that matter.
But using someone's grief to preach your beliefs, rather than sympathize or console, or even worse- to attempt a conversion (look at the consolation of religion everybody! wouldn't you like some?) really strikes the wrong chord with me.

Not to mention just being fucking ridiculous--no birth control and no death? Way to go Earth's limited resources!
Oh wait, that's right; god has magic powers, an indescribable plan and works in mysterious ways.

Great.


*yeah I'm a snoop, but it's admittedly damn hard to think what to say to someone in deep grief and looking at others' notes helps.

I am a nit-picky ass

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."

So much of a nit-picky ass that this quote makes me fume; way to teach your children accurate cosmology there folks. At least get your metaphors straight.

fashion sense

I consider myself highly WASPish
I like sedate colors; shy away from raised voices and heated emotions, I can't stand the yelling family-wide argument; I think most things are better kept to one's self.

And I'm pretty sure this is the pinnacle of stereotypical WASP male fashion:

























but you know what, it really does NOTHING for me.

really?

Instructions: The top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, asterisk the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

1984
A Clockwork Orange
A Confederacy of Dunces- just pulled this out of our old car, could not finish it, just too choppy
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Short History of Nearly Everything
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes: a Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged- my god I loved the fountainhead, but could not stomach this.
Beloved
Brave New World
Catch-22
Cloud Atlas
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Crime and Punishment- where did I put that after my last move?
Cryptonomicon
David Copperfield
Don Quixote- see crime & punishment
Dracula
Dubliners* yeah never really read any Joyce
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
Frankenstein
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Gravity’s Rainbow- but I love the crying of lot 49
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Les Misérables
Life of Pi: a novel- but it sucks ass
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha- also sucked ass
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
Neverwhere
Northanger Abbey
Oliver Twist
On the Road- I am ashamed
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Oryx and Crake
Persuasion
Pride and Prejudice
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Sense and Sensibility
Slaughterhouse-five
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Blind Assassin
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
The Confusion
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Fountainhead
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
The Historian: a novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
The Kite Runner
The Mists of Avalon
The Name of the Rose
The Odyssey
The Once and Future King
The Picture of Dorian Gray- started someone else's copy on a weekend away from home, never picked it up again
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
The Prince*
The Satanic Verses- once again, started it abroad, still need to get a copy & finish it
The Scarlet Letter
The Silmarillion
The Sound and the Fury
The Tale of Two Cities
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
Ulysses
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values

intended to serve the public interest

Trying to use Demurrage in a dirty sentence.

sarah

so a few years ago a friend of mine died, january 16th 2006 actually.

we hadn't really talked in several years, and the last interaction wasn't all peaches; her mocking goths, as i sat there fat and dyed-black haired in my sisters of mercy t-shirt.

but i was always happy to know she was alive, that she existed. i got along better w/ her last girl-friend. she went to the college of my dreams, that I wanted to attend before she knew it existed (they rejected me.)

i took it much harder than i ever thought i would. some consider me cold, heartless; i didn't think i cried except for self interest, knowing everyone's time is up - when a friend committed suicide in the 6th grade i never shed a tear. but her death was harder, when i heard i lost the ability to stand. was at work, had to go back to my desk and drink a 1/2 gallon of water just to feel my body enough to stand again.

for months afterwards i'd wake up crying, having conversations with her in my dreams.
the funny bit is, she was one of the most significant people in my development, and i never think she knew.

first time i ever did speed--with her, of course she'd done it before, old hat to the game. but i was one of those easily impressed youths.

and that was where our friendship fell apart.

last time i really saw her was after i'd been up three days, had a promise with the roommate to stay clean 'till we saw each other again. i tried to be a normal(?) teen, stay the night at a friend's house, roommate smoked, i wigged, had to go back to the den. I don't think my friend's parents even really knew what was going on, and if they did never faced my father about it.

she moved to New York, went to England, went to college. i got into a dead-end 7ry relationship.

and looking into her coffin, all i could see was the 8yr old lip-syncing to the oldies (rob orbison, marvin gay, hey mr postman) and the 15yr old i took acid with, swimming in the pool (made of jello) listening to james, listening to blur-park life, which i'm listening to right now, thing of her.

and i looked into that coffin, and saw the precarious (totally not the word i want, but my vocabulary is failing me) nature of life, saw one of the most alive people i'd even known--pale and dead--and cried harder than i knew i could.

quote of the day

for all those people I know who are so fucking special
""If you're one in a million, there are six thousand people exactly like you."

*edit: My PMS may be out of control this month, but I mean every word.

the erotic adventures of a hamster

So this is old news, even to me. But seriously, if you haven't seen
Oruchuban Ebichu
You really need to; I'm pretty sure everyone I call a friend will love this deep down in some secret part of their being, even if they wouldn't admit it.

anew

let's see if I actually do anything with this!