Irritz.

you know those people?

those people that bug you for no reason. really nnoooo reason. but they bug.  this you know. they bug.

my polynesian friends have one word to say when this happens.  IRRITZ. (as in irritating).  the common usage of this term:

"oh ben?"

"yeah that kid is irritz.  all up in your business and asking questions all the time that don't make sense. irritz."

it's a good word.  gooooood way to express that person that niggles at your soul for whatever reason and makes you want to cringe.

irritz.

i should be kinder.  but sometimes the only relief is to cringe.

Down to it . . .

When it comes right down to it . . .

I miss the comfort of my bedroom at home.  I miss the angled ceilings, the smell of it on hot summer days.  My full sized bed.


When it comes right down to it . . .

I miss dancing, and running through halls and giggling and wishing.  I miss my friends from my old neighborhood and I miss rollerblade basketball and hours of being outside and coming home with grass-stains and bruises and gritty palms.


When it comes right down to it . . .

I don't want to grow up.  I don't want to miss these things.  I don't want to miss people, I just want them to be around forever and constantly within my reach.


When it comes right down to it . . .

I don't know a lot, and what I do know seems to be shrinking in proportion and percentage.

Bagels

So ever since I was about oh, 5, I've had this thing for bagels.  To put it simply: I love bagels.

I think this love for the chewy, starchy food started with hotel continental breakfasts.  If you haven't noticed there's always bagels, cream cheese and jam involved in those. My dad-- a bagel connoisseur-- would toast a bagel, spread on a thick schmear of cream cheese and then top it off with one of those little plastic packets of jam.  Absolutely delicious.  

My favorite combo is a cinnamon sugar bagel with honey almond cream cheese from Einstein Bros.

Speaking of which, there's an Einstein Bros. being put in where the old Hogi Yogi used to be on Bulldog Blvd.  I'm very excited!

Today's breakfast: Everything bagel with veggie cream cheese.

Onward.

and e. e. too

i'm a little . . . shall we say, overwhelmed.

there's too much to do.

too much to start.

too much to complete.

too little time.

too many people to think about.

too many thing i haven't done.

too

too

too

my escape from all this "too" has been into a small collection of e. e. cummings poetry.  why?

well because he uses punctuation and grammar in no way i've ever seen, his language is beautiful and soothing because his cadence is fabulously simple.

And mostly, because he uses the word "love" a lot.

i don't know of any other poet that uses the word so pointedly, or so many times and yet it never feel overdone . . . it's never too much.

"and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly"

or

"love's function is to fabricate unknownness"

or

"let all go--the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things-- let all go
dear
       so comes love"


so comes love.


and now, i will dive back into too much.

Kony 2012: The Great Human Experiment

Have you ever wanted to change something? Stand up for something?

Here's your chance: here's OUR chance.

Watch this video.  I promise you'll feel inspired and empowered.

I now feel like ninja, a legitimate ninja, and that's a cool feeling.

Do you think we can do it?

Now, there's always criticism for things like this: questions on legitimacy, on accuracy, on accountability etc.  There's always criticism, no doubt, and probably some of it can be substantiated.  But, maybe push that aside for a brief moment and think about what this movie has done in the last couple of days.  

It caught fire.  

It went VIRAL.

It raised awareness.

If this works, why can't it work for other things?  Like people dying from hunger and lack of clean water: It's an experiment, a human experiment and all experiments have risks and unknowns.  

Live, breathe, lyric

I live for New Music Tuesdays on iTunes.  I've spent, literally, thousands of dollars on music over the years.  I turn it way up in my little toyota, crank it and belt the words to myself.  I love that moment when you hear a line in a song and you're hooked: you know what that line means, you know how that line feels, or it's just clever and, man, with that beat it's perfect.

My favorite lines out of all of my thousands of songs? No competition, it's the lines from Summer Skin,  Death Cab for Cutie.

On the night you left I came over
And we peeled the freckles from our shoulders
Our brand new coats so flushed and pink
And I knew your heart I couldn't win
Cause the seasons change was a conduit
And we left our love in our summer skin

Everyday at 11:11

Alright. Here's something.  Hows about the Universe?

Nah. That's too much.  Too big.  Too much thinking.

Hows about wishes?

Much easier.  Wishes on pennies, shooting stars, on numbers, on clocks on flocks of birds and three-in-a-rows.  I make a lot of wishes everyday.  Maybe they're really prayers? Prayers, wishes?

Who knows? Sometimes they're one in the same, at least for me.

Did you ever make an impossible wish?  Or, at least a wish you thought was impossible and then, one days as you plod along, your impossible wish falls right into your lap . . but then you're not so sure if it's a good or a bad thing, because a lot of one-in-a-thousands had to happen for the impossible wish to breathe reality.  That's a lot of almost-too-good-to-be-true.

Elephants.

A little known fact on humans (not really): we grieve.  We humans react to the death of our own species; we are concerned about our dead, we show respect and reverence towards our dead.  Unless you're a psychopath or have that crazy personality disorder where you feel no empathy or emotion, all humans are affected by the death of our own.  

Little known fact on Elephants: Besides humans, african elephants are the only mammals that react to the remains of their own species. 

According to one study, "African elephants are reported not only to exhibit unusual behaviours on encountering the bodies of dead con-specifics, becoming highly agitated and investigating them with the trunk and feet, but also to pay considerable attention to the skulls, ivory and associated bones of elephants that are long dead" (McComb). 

Two summers ago I had one of those vividly beautiful dreams that make you want to sleep forever.  I won't go into the details, they're not really pertinent.  But, I woke with my dream still fresh and tangible but there was an added element of elephants that felt like it was critically related to the events and emotions that had occurred in my dream, despite the fact that there was not a single elephant to be found within the contents of the actual dream.  

After this dream I began seeing elephants.  I don't mean I hallucinate elephants, although that could be interesting and probably entertaining, but since then, elephants pop up all over the place: in conversation, books, pictures, posters, jewelry, t-shirts, TV, movies, stuffed animals. . . and the weirdest part is that all these elephants show up in totally random situations in places where I least expect them.  

Now back to my little known fact. Elephants react to the remains of their own species.  

My sister told me this little fact the other day while I was printing off a paper in my dad's office about adolescent development.  It was a random insertion that had nothing to do with what we had previously been chatting about.  

There's something tender about that.  Something human, something emotional.  Something in that statement that mirrors the feeling I had after that dream.  Something about elephants.

Gravity

Good or bad, it keeps you here.

Hello HeadCold

I don't understand sinuses.  I really don't.  Someone who has taken anatomy please tell me, what on earth are sinuses good for?

I was sick at the beginning of the semester with what my mother calls the "Barking-Seal-Cough."  It's the kind of cough that's deep in your chest that keeps you up at night because the mucous in your bronchial tubes is collecting and, I imagine, dripping to the back of your lungs.  Gross.

I thought I was good and over my sickness last week, ready to freshen up and get back on the healthy track.

False.

Sunday I found that my sinuses were a little sore and I was having to blow my nose an absurd amount of times.  Monday it felt like my Sinuses had been injected with lead . . . or  . . . snot, really.  Which is nothing like lead.  But just as painful I would think.

Today is Tuesday and I'm loosely congested, which means I can still breathe out of my nose, but my head hurts and every time I sniff my nose makes this sort of squeaky moan as my sinuses try to adjust to the pressure.

HeadCold: I hate you.

Oh, and I'm out of Sudafed.

Old Soup

In my fridge, there is mason jar 3/4 full of pea soup.  It's floated around the bottom shelf for the last 6 months.  I can't bring myself to throw it away.  Partly, I don't really know the best way to go about throwing it away.  Do I dump the soup down the sink and hope that my garbage disposal has the stomach for August-made soup? Do I chuck the whole thing in the dumpster behind my building? What if the glass breaks?  Then they're will be pea soup all over the dumpster . . . and yes, I realize it's essentially a garbage can and is allowed to stink, but still, I don't like the idea of the Jar bleeding pea soup in a dumpster.  

But that's only part of it.  I didn't make the pea soup that rests inside of Jar.  Jar and it's contents were given to me on a good-day, and a particularly limited edition brand of good-day at that. That's mostly what it is.