The Talent Lives in Her Hands

So, Kelley drew this picture and put it in her blog! I am so amazed by it :D

A drawing of me.

Leave her great comments! She deserves them!

He Said "Rebuttals!"

As spinning planets will tell you, my face tends to be more rational on a Tuesday quite nearly following election day, for that is the main reason of gravitational and rotational inertia, as is seen in the sad, sad atmosphere of Venus, with its clouds of sulfuric acid and anti-democratic embolisms. Please do not hold your responses in comparison to this, for none can be afforded which can even justify the reasons that this has been said, and as such are a waste of all resources that are required, including the finger energy, temporal allocations, and oxygenation to the phalangical and cognitive musculature necessary to create provocative and well-analyzed rebuttals.

Not all the Time, Just Forever.

When forever occurs, I'll be there. Through my life I'll be always striving, never reaching forever. But one day when I grow old, I'll come closer, and then at the moment of my death, everything will slow down, until time is passing at an infinitely slow rate. It will be like what happens to light as it enters a black hole. Forever fading but never reaching complete darkness. That way I'll never be dead, never be gone. At least that is what it will seem like, since a person's parallax is relative. I will never realize my own death, therefore I will always think I am alive. Other people will see me, grieve, and move on, but I cannot grieve for myself. I know I will meet forever.

Power Hour: Try It Once

With the music ringing in my ears, I have no hope of hearing the televisions which are strewn about the bar. As friends exhibit their determination to be heard, voices elevate until no one can hold a conversation. Yet people are still on cell phones. People sit at tables and chat. The bartenders still hear drink orders and can concentrate enough to produce correct change.

This is not my cup of tea. I am touched by many, but felt by none. Fellow students push their way toward the bathroom, or toward the exit. Ambidextrous girls somehow manage to carry four mixed drinks at a time to their friends, spilling very little along the way. A hand on my shoulder tells me to move forward, please.

Somehow I expected this place to smell like cigarettes, the unwelcome scent still lingering from years ago when people could still kill themselves slowly, with two methods at once. When the talented older men could puff a cigar in one corner of their mouth while sipping Jack with the other.

The strawberry lemonade, although girly, is good. I can't always taste the vodka, which is a plus. And making it taste even sweeter is the cost. Fifty cents for a mixed drink. I try a friend's drink, and it's also good. I like it better than mine, but I'm still satisfied.

No one is dancing. It's way too crowded here for that. But it doesn't matter to me, I'm not a dancer anyway. I never figured out how to get the right movements, when to lift my arms, when to bow and sway. There are no rules to modern dancing. Give me salsa, tango, something with a set pattern of steps. The lack of dancing does not contribute to stillness in this bar, the viscous masses of people constantly writhing, changing, trading positions, not giving your eyes enough time to focus.

Thank you power hour.

Her hair fell to her shoulders.

Her legs crossed with much propriety, she sits alone. Her face betrays not her conscious mind, but what is below it: a deep somber fear of the days ahead. Now she ponders her decision, but that is past, and unchanging. Her truth has not yet been revealed. She stands up, and is gone.

Left You Hanging

As I helped him with the simple math problems, I felt my status lowering. I knew she would see it, and wouldn't ignore the situation, and I'm not so naive as to think that popularity is proportional to intelligence. Soon enough she would talk to me, and it wouldn't be to invite me to a party, or out for coffee. It would be for help. Not that I mind helping; I love to help people, especially if they smell good. I didn't notice if she smelled good though, probably a bad sign.

But yes, my status was lowering. In their eyes I was becoming smarter and smarter. (If I dive further into this metaphor, God must be the ultimately unpopular kid, which is probably why so few young people go to church.) Soon their words would be laced with poison as they complain about their inability to understand things. They will resent me. They will feel like I am smug and snobbish, even if that's not the case.

Still I want to see them do well, and I want to do well, so I do the best that I can do.

I raised 2 to the -2 power. 0.25. The teacher says "Perfect!" in her all too excited voice. Too many simple feats are deemed Perfect by her, and it makes it seem like everything here is trivial. If she is so excited about this simple math, how much more excited could she get when it comes to the really interesting core of the course? This should be blasé, as it is for me.

I should be in a different group. Or I should be in this one. She wants me in this one, she sorted us by GPA. Some crazy psychoanalytical experiment she is performing on us while we are forced to perform menial tasks which aren't so menial to so many others.

I have been trying to get to a point, to some logical conclusion with a moral and a hint of understanding, but I can't find it.

Virginia Woolf

Hi. I didn't write this, Virginia Woolf did. But I read it in class today and it was quite amazing, and it reminds me of how I write, so I thought you all would enjoy it. I hope to write as well as her someday. :)

THE DEATH OF THE MOTH

Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy–blossom which the commonest yellow–underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species. Nevertheless the present specimen, with his narrow hay–coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of the same colour, seemed to be content with life. It was a pleasant morning, mid–September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months. The plough was already scoring the field opposite the window, and where the share had been, the earth was pressed flat and gleamed with moisture. Such vigour came rolling in from the fields and the down beyond that it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book. The rooks too were keeping one of their annual festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air; which, after a few moments sank slowly down upon the trees until every twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it. Then, suddenly, the net would be thrown into the air again in a wider circle this time, with the utmost clamour and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the air and settle slowly down upon the tree tops were a tremendously exciting experience.
The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare–backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the window–pane. One could not help watching him. One was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far–off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life.
Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvellous as well as pathetic about him. It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zig–zagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it. One is apt to forget all about life, seeing it humped and bossed and garnished and cumbered so that it has to move with the greatest circumspection and dignity. Again, the thought of all that life might have been had he been born in any other shape caused one to view his simple activities with a kind of pity.
After a time, tired by his dancing apparently, he settled on the window ledge in the sun, and, the queer spectacle being at an end, I forgot about him. Then, looking up, my eye was caught by him. He was trying to resume his dancing, but seemed either so stiff or so awkward that he could only flutter to the bottom of the window–pane; and when he tried to fly across it he failed. Being intent on other matters I watched these futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his flight, as one waits for a machine, that has stopped momentarily, to start again without considering the reason of its failure. After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, on to his back on the window sill. The helplessness of his attitude roused me. It flashed upon me that he was in difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly. But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.
The legs agitated themselves once more. I looked as if for the enemy against which he struggled. I looked out of doors. What had happened there? Presumably it was midday, and work in the fields had stopped. Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it was opposed to the little hay–coloured moth. It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death. Nevertheless after a pause of exhaustion the legs fluttered again. It was superb this last protest, and so frantic that he succeeded at last in righting himself. One’s sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. Also, when there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely. Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange. The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.