Some of the worst songs get righted on three chords

I think I am addicted. I think I am addicted to music. I carry my tunes in a thin box mp3 player and it is always calling to me from the depths of my pocket. I'm still trying to figure out if this addiction is a good thing or a bad one. It sharpens my reality, it heightens my awareness. When I'm alone, I'll just put on some music. I'll sing if there are words, if I know them, if I want to. I feel my blood being calmed or boiled by the melodies. I walk differently, I think differently. With music, I can wipe away a bad day, or I can cleanse myself in sorrow. It can be the music I carry in my pocket, or the music I carry in my head. I've always listened close to the lyrics, always wondered how it was formed. Unless I've written it. I am besotted with music, we might even say.

I mean really, all my titles are song lyrics! Sometimes I think in them. My folders at school are covered in words, lyrics that flow from my pen, because if I did not let them out, they would bounce around in my head all day. Ear worms, I call them. Those songs that get stuck in your head and you can't possibly get them out? I write them on my folders, and then they're free again. I want to get plain white canvas shoes or a backpack and just write lyrics all over them, so I could walk around wearing songs. Whenever I have the chance, I listen to music.

On the bus, walking someplace, sitting at home--I listen listen listen. ANd the days I forget to bring my mp3 player with me, I feel like I've lost something very dear, I miss it all the time.

Is this normal? Are you addicted? Because I certainly am.

Title Quote: Beth Orton, Love Like Laughter

A suspended ring or the mode of laughing Pebbles drawn from a heap

Last night for dinner, I had an amazing meal. We made beet salad with shredded beets, carrots, and apple with a vinaigrette dressing, which was the most beautiful red imagined.

Then, we made quinoa (pronounced keen-wa, it is a grass grain that is very high in protein.) with corn and scallions. It was sweet and crunchy from the corn, chewy and grainy from the quinoa, and fresh and green and slightly savory from the scallions.

Lastly, we had a cucumber pomegranate salad. Thin slices of cucumber on a bed of lettuce sprinkled with pomegranate seeds and crumbled feta cheese, drizzled with a dressing that is smoky and thick and sweet from pomegranate molasses. 

It was light and cool and fresh and filling and just perfect for spring/summer. And then for dessert I had an apricot. I love apricots, I love how they are tiny, I love that beautiful creamy orange milk color on the outside, and the light fuzz that textures its skin. And I love biting in, pulling out the pit, and tasting the slight tang of the outside mix with the sweetness of the inside. Everyone says it's always the first bite that's the best, but I like all of the bites best.

Oh, I'm sorry. Did I make you hungry? How about you tell me what you had for dinner last night in the comments. I'd love to know.

Hungrily yours,

Lola

Title Quote: Suzanne Vega, Predictions

Photo Credit: My father, who loves to take pictures of everything, especially food, took the pictures last night.

And I've got a song to sing

We went on a walk about New York today. Here are three images that stood out to me that I encountered on the walk:

(1) A couple, sitting on a bench outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, holding hands. But they were not kissing, nor were they staring lovingly at each-other's faces. They were both staring out, forwards, their eyes both focused on something out there, in the world. And you could tell that they were both seeing the same thing, sharing their vision, that's how close they were. And I thought, excuse my inexperience, but that I thought, now that was real intimacy. More so than sitting there, making out on the park bench in front of everyone. (which, by the way if you don't live here, is a very normal thing in NY. You see, oh, I don't know, about 1 couple every few benches making out if you're walking in the park or even just some place with benches. Or one per car on the subways.) And so, maybe I was overdramatizing, but that resonated with me, that idea of stronger bonds through what you were seeing, for that you felt as well.

(2)A tree, standing (or sitting, whichever) in it's little square of dirt on one of the many streets I walked down, encompassed by a fence. Those fences are probably there to keep kids and dogs out, but this tree, this tree must have thought that fence was a personal insult, that it was trying to keep it from getting out. So guess what that tree had done? It had swallowed that fence whole, just grown over it, until there were only a few black bars showing, just the tips of each fence post poking out from bark. As if to say, You think you can keep nature from doing what it wants? Hah! Just try! And it made me laugh inside, this tree getting its victory, eating up that fence, showing that it could be free, even if people think the only thing trees can do is stand around and grow. Trees, like all other things, can have victory!

(3) An old store, on the second floor of a building, advertising itself to be a fixer of clocks. And a fixer it was. Through the windows, you could see enormous clock faces, just sitting up there, gathering dust. The old kind of clock, with the big yellowing face and the embellished black numbers. and the really interesting bit was, some of the clocks didn't have hands anymore. They were being repaired, still. And it was interesting, because those clocks, they still had time, but they could no longer tell it. For them, they held all the time, they watched as it alternately sped or crawled by, but though they watched, though it was moving for them, whoever looked at them could see nothing. Time was unmoving on those clocks for them. Not only was it unmoving, it just wasn't there. It wasn't even wrongly told, it just wasn't told at all, for there were no hands to point the way. And I thought, what a sad fate for a clock to end in.

L

Title Quote: If I had a Hammer, Pete Seeger

Photo Credits: The first and last are from an unidentified source from flickr, the middle one (tree) is by kbda.com, (Kim Baer Design Company) by Kim's friend, Keith.

Live and learn from fools and from sages

Linkssss!

First off, we have this amazing project from a few years back: Haverhill 2000.  The photographer Chris Darley-Brown, spent many many hours photographing the people of Haverhill, a town in England. Chris took pictures of resident of Haverhill and morphed them together to form faces, from say, all women ages 15-25. He also did one for all residents, male female, young, old. The photographs are startlingly beautiful, flawless, and make you think. So I suggest you head over to check out the people.

Second off, I will introduce the artist Evelien Lohbeck. She has made these amazing films from paper and animation, the most amazing one being her film, "notebook", which shows her going on the computer, searching youtube and watching her videos--but it's all just paper and drawings. I'd say it's worth a few minutes of your time, to just go over there and be amazed.

And then, lastly, is a podcast. And an amazing one at that. Called the Memory Palace, it is just that--a virtual palace full of memories. The host, Nate Dimeo, talks about all sorts of things, from Ben Franklin's death ray, to passenger pigeons, to the international brotherhood of mothers. I assure you, you'll be very fascinated by what he has to say. I just love this sort of thing, because it provides me with so much useless information I couldn't have gone on without. I also have a widget on my igoogle page that tells me random useless facts. There are a lot out there, because not once have they been repeated. It tells me today that Albert Eintein never learned to drive a car. Now thank Buddha I know that; what if I were to have a test on it??? But anyways, back to the Memory Palace. Believe me, it's good. Go see for yourself.

Ok, I've got to get running off now,

Toodles

Lola

Title Quote: Aerosmith, Dream On

Well if . . . you want to have great love, you got to have great anger

WORD OF THE DAY TIME!!!

(get it, snickers+"see" equals snickersee? haha..)

snickersee-a large knife.

just imagine, warning someone: "Don't push me, I've got a snickersee and I know how to use it!!!"

people would just laugh, and hen look what would happen! Their heads would be rolling at your feet.

Title Quote: Letter to Eve, Pete Seeger

And suppose I never met you

Alright, so we meet again, huh?

Well, here we go, I want to present to you some characters seen while at Punta Cana...

(all are real, none are figment of my imagination. Ha! fig...)

Today, I want to talk about Maya.

Dominican, 20-something-ish, she's hard to describe. Words can't really capture her, she's that sort of person. Long brown hair that on anyone else would be described as a mousy color, with streaks of orange blonde bleached by the sun. Her hair falls to just below her shoulder blades in cascades of uneven waves, and every time we have glimpsed her walking on the beach there is a straw cowboy hat atop her head. She always wears a slim white polo shirt with sleeves that end just below the muscles of her upper arms and hug them close. Her shorts are always shirt but not buttcrack short, like most of the other girls at the beach. They end halfway to her knees, the perfect length. No matter what she is wearing, she always has a big black digital camera hanging around her neck, which my father tells me is called a DSLR. This is her normal dress, her uniform. It changes a little from day to day, but the fundamentals stay the same. For instance, when I first saw her she was wearing denim cutoffs, and around her waist was slung a flat hemp belt with a pouch on each side, extra pockets, and I think you all know by now how much I value pockets. I have since fallen in love with the ingenuity of this particular invention, and want one of my own. Another day she wore greenish twill shorts and a beautiful fire colored tasseled scarf that hung from her shoulders and talked in the breeze.  She was such an intriguing figure, slim, short, her tanned limbs weaving through the air. With a slight accent, she was decidedly foreign, yet when she turned her back to me I was reminded of someone I knew, though I could not remember who. 

Maya worked for the resort we were at, photographing whatever tourist would pay for it, posing them on the sand, occasionally flinging her hat haphazardly on their heads, laughing at their bad jokes. She was ever so interesting, I believe I envied her and her natural sauveness, her beauty that seemed to not even be there, as it is with a tree. And I thought that I would try to put her here in words, because maybe you know someone like her, maybe you would benefit from her image, whatever she looks like to you. Anyway, I just wanted to say,

Goodbye, Maya.

Live well.

Title Quote: Regina Spektor, Fidelity

Nothing’s measured by what it needs

Today, Lola was challenged to speak in the third person. For the whole day. And so she accepted, which is why she is now writing her blog post in the third person. Lola learned a lot today. She is one who fairly often opens her mouth and regrets not thinking through her words first. Well, speaking in the third person got rid of that. She had to think so much about what she was going to say and how before she said it that she wasn't half as compulsive. The slightly irksome thing about speaking in the third person though, was that she continually had this feeling that she was just saying facebook updates (i.e. "Lola thinks that she will go out and get some pizza now." "Lola thinks Joe Biden would be crazy if he acted like a 7th grade girl." etc.). But she got over that, and found out some pretty cool stuff. She realized that this was the most she had really ever said her own name, because, think about, most people don't use their own name often. She found that it was an amazing brain exercise, that she had to think that much harder in order to say things, instead of just blurting them out. And that no matter how hard she tried, she could not get her own mind to think in the third person. She wondered if possibly, there was some language that spoke of everyone in the third person,t hat they would think in the third person. She thought that if there wasn't one, there should be, for that would be interesting. So she thought about animals, and now she is wondering if animals have grammar in their languages, and she assumes they must, which is very very interesting. She now thinks back to a book she read, long long ago, for younger children,but still good, called music of the dolphins, by Karen Hesse, she believes. It was about a girl who had been raised by dolphins, and "rescued" and taught to speak and all. And Lola wondered, did she still think in dolphin? Could she translate, perhaps? I wonder, because that would be incredibly useful to have someone who can speak in an animal's language and a human's so they could translate. Wouldn't that be interesting? There are always fairy tales like that. Lola wonders what we would find out... She bets that they find that dolphins or porpoises are smarter than humans, hah, then the joke would be on them...

Anyways, that's all Lola has for today, she has to go update HoneyFuggler, and she's sorry because she was meaning to post some other parts of her vacation, which, yes, she knows was weeks ago, but she hopes this will interest you for now, instead.

Goodbye,

Lola

Title Quote: Already Dead, Beck

We're burning a new sunrise into Yesterday's skies

So this is my idea. I have so many fantasies of the amazing things I could do for the world, making little gems of places and things that would brighten someone's day, change someone's life. If you can't change the whole world, how about starting with just one person? One of the things I would love to do, if I had the money and time for it, would be to start a shop. And I can't really do that, because I'm still in middle school, and obviously, I also don't really have the money for that. But maybe if I write this down, either someone else with the money and time can get inspiration from this and do it, or I can look back on it when I have the money and time and remember to do it. Now this shop, it would not just be any shop. It would sell all sorts of little handmade trinkets, each one different and unique. 

They would be by local artists, and you didn't have to be famous, all you had to do was come to the store and see if we liked it. Along with the stuff from local artists, there would also be all sorts of exotic things from places around the world, made by locals there, which we would send an employed scout around the world to find. Glass beads from Italy, sherpa flags from Tibet, woodcarvings from Oaxaca. And you wouldn't need money to buy any of it. As long as you had something to trade for it, something we wanted. Perhaps some art we think is beautiful, maybe some old subway tokens made into earrings. 

And there would be a clothes section too, one part for new clothes, for sale or trade, and another that is secondhand, for free. Whatever anyone needs, but only if you need it, there would be a section for it. People who had no need for that old fleece coat, or those corduroy jeans, would drop it in that section for someone who did. Actually, the clothes thing itself is another one of my ideas, where I would have a boutique of only the most cool and un-mainstream clothes you could get, in all sizes and for all ages, something you could wear and be sure no one else would be wearing too. And the cool thing about my store would be that it would only sell it in something, like for example I would have a store that sold only things with stripes, or only things with pockets. What I especially want to do is have a store that only had one color, say, for 3 or 4 months, and then they had a new one with the next shipment of clothes. So you go in one day and all the store carries are blue clothes, every shade imaginable, and you walk in a few months later and it only sells things bright yellow. I think that would be amazing, because it would keep bringing people back.

But back to the other store. I think we would have a blog online, and publish a zine once a month, an idea from the wizardress. And in the summer, we would have a little table outside, and we would do what a grown-up friend of mine who used to live in New York would do every summer in Central Park: Give out Free Advice. Essentially, any volunteers would sit at the table and listen to people's problems and give out free advice. And perhaps we would have free hugs, as well. I can just imagine such a store, with great music always playing, and cool people always hanging around, the best graphic novels and the most interesting books stocking our shelves (We would have one shelf where you could just bring in a book you finished that you want to share with the world and pick up another that someone has dropped off, so that we could save the terrible fates of all those books left out for the garbage man), we would have all the most fantastic baubles to wear and keep and show and the most vibrant fabrics to twirl around it.  

And there would be one last amazing thing: I have sworn that when I master the art of sewing, the first thing I will make is a beautiful patchwork dress, made completely of pockets, so you will enough to pick up stones on the beach, a nickel on the street, a four-leaf clover, so that you can put colored strings away for later, a cookie, and all the amazing other things the pockets will just be waiting to carry. And when I master making that dress, I will make a million, each one with different patches, so everyone can have beautiful, amazing pockets, and they will all hang in my beautiful, amazing store. 

So who's up for it?

--Lola 

Title Quote: Daybreaker, Beth Orton

Photo Credit: Katherine Mann

I guess, half a dozen cases doesn't last that long Come tomorrow morning it will be all gone

"These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters who had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place." 

Disorder in the American Courts

here is one, and click the link above to see others!

ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to? 

---

WITNESS: Oral.

omb it left me laughing so hard...

 AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT 

the Fish n' Flush! ('nuff said)

and just cuz this sandwich is like a fluffernutter without the fluff (i think you all know what I'm talking about) I will just have to dollop a big load of fluff into here in the for of pics and quotes yay!!!!

Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time.
  - Norman Ford

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

  - Doug Larson

I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.
  - A. Whitney Brown

Title Quote: Beer Run, Garth Brooks

A band of angels coming after me, coming for to carry me home

Butterflies into the skies. And each one is different. People say we would look like ants if there was a giant looking at us, but I would say we are more like pigeons, that we squawk and scatter and pick at things. But we are not industrious like ants; oh no, we laze around and scheme of ways to get things with minimal effort on our part. We do not work as one, we fight. And perhaps that is better, for if we did what the queen commanded, and worked and did not care for our own lives, we would not be unique, and that is one of the most important qualities to me. I wonder how those poor ants get on. 

Title Quote: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Oh I can see you brought some herb for me

New stuffs found lingering on the interwebs:
Make something cool everyday.

it is what it sounds like. Here is what the artist, Brock Davis, has done so far. Simply interesting. Here are my two favorites:

sugar stacks

this site has taken pictures of food and the number of sugar cubes they have in them. Check it out, it's slightly freaky.

surprisingly there's that much sugar in watermelons. My grandparents love to put salt on theirs... xp

If you check on the site, it shows that there's no difference in sugar for the ice cream or the frozen yogurt, if only that the froyo is a bit more sugary.

title quote: Black Uhuru, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner