Cassiopeia

As I was walking home in the wee hours this morning, I noticed quite a few stars out. Turned around, trying to pinpoint a location, and managed to make out Cassiopeia. Yeah, yeah, big whoop, Cassiopeia. Only, I haven't seen this particular constellation since Oregon, from my window or the balcony, and it just made me smile to see it. Oh, some planet too. Probably Jupiter. You can always bloody see Jupiter. Although apparently Venus, Neptune, and Mars are visible now as well. Whatever the planet, it was directly across from Cassiopeia, and looked slightly doubled, which would make sense since Jupiter's basically on top of Neptune right now. Not that I consult astronomy charts or anything.

Thunderstorms!

I thoroughly enjoyed that sudden thunderstorm: two seconds tops between the thunder and lightning, sun still shining, trees a-whirling furiously. Not to mention the CONSTANT lightning. I'm pretty sure I was in the eye of it. The sky is gorgeous right now. All pink and pillowy. Wish I could get onto the roof somehow for a better photo.

It is a little bit much though, this incessant rain for the last two-three weeks, with about 10 thunderstorms in between. My neighbor commented that I must have taken Oregon with me. Only, we get maybe 5 thunderstorms a year out there (though they are fantastical, especially with the wide open skies), and never really a downpour. It's all baby rain out there.

Rolls off the tongue

Atlatl is fun to say.
ɑːtˈlɑːtɫ̩

aht-laht-l

/ˈɑtˌlɑt l/

Though the narrator pronounces it thusly (which rolls much more nicely):
Aht-uhl-lah-tuhl.

I'm not watching a documentary on prehistoric times. No siree, not in the least.

Crop Circles Explained!

Wallabies: Hopping through the Poppies (and hopped up on them, too!)

Excerpt:

Wallabies are getting stoned on poppies and are making their own crop circles as they lose all sense of balance and direction.

The extraordinary scenes are being played out in officially-operated poppy fields in Tasmania, the large island state south of the Australian continent and which is the world's largest producer of legally-grown opium for the pharmaceutical market.

Tasmania's Attorney-General, Lara Giddings, said the wallabies were getting so stoned after hopping into the poppy fields and chewing the heads of plants that they ended up hopping around in circles.

'While doing this, they squash the poppies and create circles in the fields.'

She reported the bizarre scenes to a State's Budget Estimates hearing.

'They get as high as a kite and go around in circles and then they crash, ' she said.

'We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.'

Mr Rick Rockliff, a manager of one of the fields said the problem extended beyond wallabies - wildlife and livestock which ate the poppies were also known to 'act weird', including deer and sheep.

Something about "hopping through the poppies" brings me back to this:

Tiptoe through the window
By the window, that is where I'll be
Come tiptoe through the tulips with me

Oh, tiptoe from the garden
By the garden of the willow tree
And tiptoe through the tulips with me

Knee deep in flowers we'll stray
We'll keep the showers away
And if I kiss you in the garden, in the moonlight
Will you pardon me?
And tiptoe through the tulips with me

I kinda wish this shmuck on the right would let Tiny Tim have one bloody frame to himself though.

Over Ibuprofen? Seriously?

http://tinyurl.com/ltezqq

Excerpts:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a school's strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.

In an 8-1 ruling, the justices said school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding in the rural eastern Arizona town of Safford.

Redding, who now attends college, was 13 when officials at Safford Middle School ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear because they were looking for pills — the equivalent of two Advils. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the school was acting on a tip from another student.

"What was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear," Justice David Souter wrote in the majority opinion. "We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable."

In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas found the search legal and said the court previously had given school officials "considerable leeway" under the Fourth Amendment in school settings.

Officials had searched the girl's backpack and found nothing, Thomas said. "It was eminently reasonable to conclude the backpack was empty because Redding was secreting the pills in a place should thought no one would look," Thomas said.

Thomas warned that the majority's decision could backfire. "Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments," he said. "Nor will she be the last after today's decision, which announces the safest place to secrete contraband in school."

Way to go Clarence, schools should, by all rights, be allowed to do whatever they so wish to their students, even if it includes peaking in their underwear for a headache pill. Clarence, of course, rightly upset as his own secret hiding place of various contraband could be discovered with the announcement of the ruling in the young hoodlum's favor.

Forever in a Day

This is heavy shit.

Next!

ça fait 8 ans...

J'ai redécouvert le 'garçon morbide.'

(Mon dieu! Comme il est maigre! C'est triste, ça!)

Logo Designs

Take one small object and one large object that relate to one another (or come from one another). Flip their sizes. Make a logo. 

i.e.  windmill in a bulb

Ice cream: cow head on a cone

Dog brush: brush looks like a dog

a few ideas in my sketchbook:

apple juice (apple glass, really)

sun glasses (glasses made of suns)

wheat beer (beer with a wheat straw)

beer wheat (wheat with beer bottle grains)

Some not very creative, and don't really switch big and small. I didn't really spend much more than a subway ride scribbling on a lose piece of paper with these. I'm leaning towards the sun glasses or beer wheat. Nikki's doing the cow cream. I LOVE it. 

Excessive Rain

Now, I know that I've been missing Oregon something fierce, but that did not mean that I wanted its weather to follow me to Brooklyn (why couldn't it have been the volcanos?). A little drizzle every now and then sure, gets me nostalgic, but this is just unending ridiculousness here! Maybe patches of sun every now and then, but for the last two weeks it's been nothing but thunderstorms here, torrents of rain there, and at least three of those thunderstorms happened in a row at 3 in the bloody morning. Not that I mind. I love thunderstorms. And I love rain. I just love the sunshine, too. 

Rainy Distractedness

The pianos distracted me. The pianos! Playing concertos! Yes, I expected jazz, but was no less entertained. The jazz came after. 

Then the rain! Torrents and torrents, and my umbrella could do no good to shield it. Ducked inside for a drink (one beer please, "you're beautiful," no margarita - thanks for the offer, and now I've somewhere else to be). 

The rain came again, I said enough is enough, and so off to Angelika. It was packed. I got cake. The familiar white font on black back danced across the screen, Groucho Marx singing "Hello I Must Be Going" playing in our ears. I don't care what the reviews bloody well say, I thoroughly enjoyed myself watching the new Woody Allen. Yes, okay, I'm a sucker for Henry Cavill, but truthfully that had absolutely nothing to do with said enjoyment (well...but as eye candy only). I found his character highly fictitious. Gorgeous, romantic, British men don't live in New York wooing girls off their feet with their genuine honesty, persistence, and truthful talk of love at first sight. That's for fairytales, folks, and Jane Austen (and apparently Woody Allen). All in all the movie was laugh out loud funny, dripping with sarcasm, an eau de Allen, and sweet & heartwarming no matter Boris' tirade at the beginning about it not being a feel good movie. I left feeling good, and there you have it.  

Poetry Reading + Jazz = Happiness

jazz in the cafe, and jazz in the streets, six grand pianos are hard to beat!

Off to the Cornelia Street Cafe!

Solo Bar

Going local can yield very good things, and excellent times to be had. The "new" bar on Cortelyou is, as I felt before, a pretty good venue. The pink brick building pulls you in with musical beats you can hear from a blocks away, luring you towards its happy sounds, and once inside you're greeted with a throng of people dancing - dancing on the floor and dancing in the seats. Goodness gracious, there's just something about "What'd I Say" that gets me goin', want to shake and shimmy down, twistin' the night away.  

Anywho, I say "new" because back in the day it used to be a sketchy sports bar that would be open all hours of the day, and whenever I'd walk by I'd just see these sad lonely middle-aged men with dirty shirts hangin' around (at least that's what my memory is of the place at age 14). Not the case now, and that's how I felt months ago when it first reopened too. I'm pretty sure the saxophonist played at the last gig I saw there, made me nostalgic to see him suckin' on a reed (where's my clarinet at?!). 

Ran into Jacob, who incidentally was the singer of the band ("Jake G and Friends", which last night sounded like "Jake G and the Solos"), Bree from Bushwick, Cameron from Philly, Matt (or Mark?), and fellow Portlandian, Joshua. I just wanted to jot those names down lest I forget, like I did my phone last night. 

Religulous Giggles

"It's like the lotto, you can't get saved if you don't play!"

-Maher

Maher asks (re: historical "evidence" of Jesus in the bible from "eye witnesses" decades later):

"Would that stand up in a laboratory as absolute fool-proof evidence that something happened?"

"You are setting up a standard for proof that I think it would really be an almost impossible standard to meet."

-Dr. Francis Collins

Head of Human Genome Research Project

"They're not happy."

"They're called gay!"

(Guess which one was Maher).

"Hollywood loves something it's never seen before: a virgin."

-Maher

you move too fast

Slow down, caterpillar!

(stop, look, and listen!)

summertime II

So the rest of the summer is formulating itself. Numerous (countless) trips are in the works or at least to be planned shortly. Oregon, Chicago, DC, Amsterdam, France, maybe even Germany (not in that order per se). Not to mention my Dutch "cousin" visiting in July (the daughter of my "uncle," who is really just one of my father's best friends from childhood that masquerade under the guise of "uncle such-and-so" i.e. Roland, Robert, Adrian, Satinder, etc.). V excited to see her, we always get along well, and it's an opportunity to play tour guide while I show her and her beau the city. Too bad Mandana isn't around, I think it would be ridiculous if we all got together and chatted Dads (though really, I have only to go to Holland to accomplish that). Anywho, this summer is quickly becoming full, which is just lovely.

Hungrypants

Hunger McHungrypants went to the kitchen.

Sleepy McSleepypants went to the zoo.

(Smelly McSmellypants went to the park,

and Scaredy McScaredypants slept in the dark.)

Now Scratchy McScratchypants couldn't stop itchin'

And told us all that we would be bitchin'

If we'd been a buffet for a thousand mosquitos

And didn't have lotion to stop all the kvetchin'

Nothing

Make yourself at home, 'cause I'm going out
Across the street to get us some water
'cause this water's brown, and I'm so embarrassed
To have you here but I want you around

Usually I'd sing, or play you my guitar
But I know it won't get very far with you
'cause you like music that makes you move
And mine has a groove, but it's nothing I can prove

Please know what I mean
When I say, nothing

When I say, nothing

When I say, nothing

When I say

Things that I buy and things that I think
Haven't made this a better place to be
Drugs that I try and drinks that I drink
Haven't made this a better place to be

It's still just a room with the drums in the middle
A couch along the wall that works as my bed
I still have a phone that rings all day
I still have things I wish I woulda said

Please know what I mean
When I say, nothing

When I say, nothing

When I say, nothing
When I say

This whole thing's been hard on me
It breaks my heart, do you know what that means

My new place seems strange to me
It breaks my heart, do you know what that means
It means nothing

So make yourself at home, 'cause I'm going out
Across the street to get us some water
'cause this water's brown, and I'm so embarrassed
To have you here but I want you around

Usually I'd sing, or play you my guitar
But I know it won't get very far with you
'cause you like music that makes you move
And mine has a groove, but it's nothing I can prove

Please know what I mean
When I say, nothing

When I say, nothing

When I say, nothing

When I say

This whole thing's been hard on me
It breaks my heart, do you know what that means

My new place seems strange to me
It breaks my heart, do you know what that means
It means nothing

week so far

Most recently: I need to work on not being such a bloody open book and prattling on about myself. And not speaking before thinking. If I thought just a second more before I said some of the things I said I wouldn't be worrying about it now.

This week: introductions aside, the classes are great. Etta's wonderful as always, and a bunch of the students from the previous course are in both my classes, which of course makes it a lot nicer. In Etta's class there were five of us, all in a corner, and she greeted us with a beaming smile. As Mary, Anna, and I walked with her from the paper place with handfuls of binders, an Oberlin sweatshirt approached us from across the street and Etta and I smiled heartily. She told me of the days before they built what is now the con, when there once was a building much more like Peters, with winding stairs, turrets, organs, and during the holidays they'd line the winding staircase and sing christmas carols, that it gave her chills. It sounds magical. 

summertime

I'm still debating what to do with my summer. Half of it is full, and half of it is empty (this ain't no glass, I'm not being pessimistic). Not that the second half is even empty, just when compared to my busy busy schedule for June and July it's vacant. My first class of the summer term starts today, I never like the first days, mostly because I hate those silly introductions we have to do: 

Hi, I'm Hilary, I'm a freelance web designer here to finish a certificate in digital/graphic design. I went to college in Ohio. I grew up in Brooklyn and Oregon, and am what could be called bi-coastal. You might not always recognize me because I don't always wear glasses and I dye my hair when it suits my fancy.

Classes end sometime mid-July, and then what? I was thinking Oregon for the rest of the summer, but not if people I've been wanting to see will no longer be there and people I'd like to see would be here. Oregon might just have to wait. Maybe, maybe, maybe I won't yearn for it soon.

never said this before

Not to be redundant or anything, but I'm still craving those Oregon skies. Looking at the small sliver of sky I can see through my window in Brooklyn shortens my breath and tightens my chest. I close my eyes and imagine I'm looking out over our balcony in Oregon and I just relax and loosen up as the image dances across my eyelids. I need an expanse of sky. I know! The beach. Perfect. Nothing beats the smell of salt and sand and the sight of unending distance.