We have a snow day, we have a snow day! *does a little dance*

Yes, we got about, oh, 2 inches, and so the college shut down for the day. No class, no work, no seminar (I hope), and no lesson! So here in a while, I’m gonna sit in the nice warm building and practice all my stuff, then go waste the afternoon with friends!

So, enough blogging! I got a life to enjoy!

I got my first rejection letter today:

“Dear Derek Harris,

Thank you for sending us “Illness”.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite meet the
needs of our podcast.  The pacing is a little slow.

Thanks for submitting, and best wishes for you and your work.

Sincerely,
Ben Phillips
Submissions Staff
PSEUDOPOD - The Horror Podcast Magazine
http://www.pseudopod.org“

Isn’t this wonderful! I got a letter from a magazine saying that they read my story! Ironically, when I wrote the story, I wrote it with them in mind, but hey, now I can submit it to someone who might pay me real money, instead of the measley $20 they promise.

So that’s big news for me!

In the last several days, I’ve had conversations with people about my life dreaming. About what I want to do with my life. Because of these conversations, I’ve decided I still don’t know, and I’m pretty sure I’m not doing what I want, but what someone else wants. I wish I could meet this person so I could hit them. It’s probably some deeper version of myself that I don’t let surface, or something.

Basically, I’m just not sure I want a career. Twenty years seems like a really long time. It’s about double my current life span, and that boggles me. I don’t want to dive into some super-adult, all-consuming career/lifestyle that I don’t even love all that much. I still want to teach, I just don’t know if this is what I want it to be. I think I’d rather teach at a university, but that’s very long term.

So I’ve been looking at these programs where you travel to a foreign country to teach English to the natives. These programs are expense. $5,000 for a year in Hong Kong, which you do get some back, but that’s a lot of money I don’t have right now, added to my current debt. Sheesh.

But I’m seriously thinking about it. What if I could do it? What if I could get that money together, could I do this? I really hope so, because I want to do something different than I’ve ever done, and something that will really give me something to learn from, not that I don’t have plenty here, its just…meh.

So, if anyone has any tips about how to handle the future or where to look for the motivation to enjoy the impending career, please share. I’m all ears.

Science is a wonderful thing. It gives us medicine to take away the ick. It gives us lovely food in all its wonderful combinations that is both tasty and healthy. It gives us shelter, good healthy birthing, cleaner drinking water, well-made brews and vintages, and access to itself in ways almost as numerous as its own areas of study. Science is the thing that drives our culture today, and that is good in many ways.

Think of your live without science: No car, no road, no tires. A vast reduction in the type and amount of music we all listen to. No skyscrapers, no airplanes, no cross-country weekends. No microwaves, no aspirin, no showers. No apartments or houses in the manner we think of them. No flight, no cancer therapy, no books.

If we had no sense of science, no sense of testable works that we discover through trial and error and the combining of concepts, we’d still be cavemen, hunched over an ant hill with a stick, looking for a tasty treat.

That said, how is it possible for human, the learning, thinking, developing creatures that we are, to live in a world that isn’t shaped by our minds? We affect ourselves and each other every day by the way we solve problems. This is science: we look at the problem, we speculate how to fix it, we try, we fail, we consider, we adjust, we try again. It is natural. It is nature.

So, for any doubting person, anyone with a reconstructionalist attitude, think of your life and every little thing in it, and remember that we are where we are in our world because of what we naturally are. Sure, that sucks sometimes, but when we fail, we adjust and try again.

Another glance out this morning, into the cold where I trek between my home and my employment, often in stiff silence. The air is wet and smells of dying things, of rotting tomatoes. It slides of the skin and whispers in the ear the words of late fall, “I am changing,” and leaves a muck trails across your hands as a reminder.

A fog lingers under the first rays of sun. It is thin, like the smoky haze after a fire, too thick too be scattered by the wind. A frosting on glass, a veil around the world that threatened, not to consume, but to hide. The smallest details hidden from view. The exact color of his shirt, the thing she holds in her hand.

The number on that license plate. The smell of the coffee from next door is masked. It hides the handshake from the cab driver who loads her bags into the trunk. It hides the way she says goodbye before she goes. It hides the beginnings of his smile as the car door closes.

It conceals the terse response to agitation, the feeble cry of the infant. It covers, and conquers, slowly. The thin fog surrounds, and it slides across your face, hiding your own thoughts from you, hiding your words. And it leaves a muck trail of forgetting as a reminder.

And it hides and hides. It hides.

Let me preface this with a statement:

Since I’m certain that nearly all my readers are female (which I think is indicative of the nature of blogging and reading blogs, a journaling experience that appeals to the exhibitionist needs of many many people), I want you to know I have never begrudged the use of make-up, other than when it is too liberally applied. A little color goes a long way, and appropriate dispersal of said color can make the difference between a bag lady and Gretta Garbo.

And this, now, I have discovered for myself. Yes, despite my man-parts, I am indeed becoming fond of nothing other than eye-liner. Something about a slap-dash smudge of the stuff really makes a bad day seem okay. The outward manifestation of your problems so that they don’t linger on your brain. And another form of exhibitionism, if you wanna get gritty.

I have purchased my first black, though I started with blue. I must say I feel quite pretty with it on, and find it quite therapeutic. I wouldn’t wearing around my students or anything, but by god, I’d wear it at home, or out with friends, who also border on such tendencies. Regina actually gave me an emphatic nod when I related this much to her.

So, when I was asked the other day, during a frat meeting, if I was wearing eye-liner. Yes, Woody, I was wearing eye-liner. Now shove it!

Found a fun song by Regina Spektor. Here are the lyrics: 

Walking home from work
Stop at the supermarket, condemement aisle
A jar of pickles catches the eye
Make eye contact with a solitary pickle
Bought the jar took it home

Made it up the stairs
Made it through the doorway, waded through the floor
tried to head in the general direction of the bathroom door
The truest room in the whole damn house

Singin’ love is the answer to a question
That I have forgotten
But I know I’ve been asked
And the answer has got to be love love love

Now Feeding time with TV
Then sleeping time, not sleepy
So reading time with pickle
But were the bed side lamp had been
Is now a milignant soft soft green

Has it always been this way?
is it possible all this magic went unnoticed?
Maybe things will start to change
And life will turn a better page
No more rain

Singin’ love is the answer
To a question i know I’ve been asked
And the answer has got to be love love love

Tomorrow back to work again
Run to the supermarket, running hopeful through the aisles
Haven’t been this happy in a long time
But not a single jar was smiling afterall

But pickle jars are just pickle jars
And pickles are just pickles
Ingredients : water, salt, cucumber, garlic and pickling spices

But love is the answer to a question
that I’ve forgotten
But I know I’ve been asked
And the answer has got to be love

Good song from Death Cab for Cutie. Yes, Andy, I just discovered them, leave me alone. Eric first introduced them to me, but I thought they sounded dumb, so I never listened. Mostly, that’s because I don’t trust Eric’s taste in music because he likes Sister Hazel a little too much, and he likes Nickelback and Bryan Adams and that makes me question his moral fiber (not that these are the only things that ever made me question him, but that’s for a later day).

So here we go:

the atlantic was born today and i’ll tell you how:
the clouds above opened up and let it out.

I was standing on the surface of a perforated sphere
when the water filled every hole.
and thousands upon thousands made an ocean,
making islands where no island should go.
oh no.

those people were overjoyed; they took to their boats.
I thought it less like a lake and more like a moat.
the rhythm of my footsteps crossing flood lands to your door have been silenced forever more.
the distance is quite simply much too far for me to row
it seems farther than ever before
oh no.

I need you so much closer
so come on, so come on.

This song makes me think of Dingo. It makes me think about how far he is from me, and about how much I wish he were right here, just waiting for me when I got home. Or at least that he was close enough that, if I wanted to see him, I’d just drive to his place and stay the night, and do it all again tomorrow.

The need for his physical form is growing greater, and I sometimes wonder if I’m doing the right thing by trying to stay loyal to him, and trying to stay with him until we can be together in the flesh. I know everyone who has ever done the long distance thing knows how this goes, and I know it too, cause I’m not new at this (*punch head*), but it feels like new hardness all the time.

Sometimes, I wonder if I’m actually doing the right thing at all because I figure that maybe he’s the one really being loyal and I’m just being selfish, and its all very confusing. *sigh*

One day, we, or I, will figure this out, and things will be as they are supposed to me.

As Kate over at Dating God tells us, the Universe is Yes, so we must be Yes.

Yay for a holiday.

However, the downside is that blogging will be harder because my Popa managed to snag the slowest dial-up connection of all time. Remember the days when, if you got on between 7pm to 9pm, it took 30 minutes for an image-heavy page to load, an hour if it had any sort of application on it. Welcome to 1996, its my grandfather’s computer.

So most of the blogs I’m going to have for the next four days will be prepared in advance. This is today’s blog, its boring, but hey, I don’t meta-blog that often, right?

Also, this will be a good holiday. Not only is it the only holiday I’ve had since Labor Day (on which I still had to work, but had no class), but its the first time in probably over a year that I’ve seen all my family in one place. Its a bit exciting. Plus, I should be able to get lots of homework done, lots of practicing, lots of writing and still try to get about half-way through the book I’m going to be reading over the break, Tapping the Dream Tree by Charles de Lint.

If you haven’t read his work yet, you should. Its what I would call “light fantasy.” Its modern, has some fantastical elements, but you aren’t armed with only a shortbow in the middle of the E’fidshbe’sudl85sasid forest in some forgotten land. You’re in Newford, which seems to resemble a larger city, maybe New York. I started with The Onion Girl and I absolutely love it. So here we are.

Anyway, this is your happy thanksgiving post. Enjoy the time you’re having, whether it be with friends or family or alone. Find something to be thankful for. Oh, and get fat for me.

Part One:

Last night, at promptly 5:12 am, I wake up to the sound of the gradual crescendo of thud thud thud from somewhere in my apartment. No, it wasn’t in mine. I considered there, while I laid in bed, that it could be my downstairs neighbors making monkey again. However, it was very…VERY…rhythmic. Exact. And it came and went at regular intervals. (yes, I check for that sort of thing, leave me alone.)

So I get up, listen around the bedroom, and its loudest there. The living room harbors some presence of it, but nothing like in the bedroom. Where I sleep. So I open the front door.

I can understand having a good late night. I can even understand having fun during said night and maybe inviting some friends over. And even on a Tuesday night, I could appreciate it under certain circumstances.

However, I cannot, will not, understand a party loud enough to be heard outside the apartment buildings at five fucking twelve ay em. No. Never. And I don’t care if they are international students, and don’t really speak English. Everyone one sleeps. Even you, apartment #29. Go to bed.

Two short repetitions of three fists against the living room wall, and I soon, I was cozing back to sleep in blankets and warmth. Go me.

Part two:

I finished the Ken Wilber book yesterday. One, I’m glad I finished, because it was due on Thanksgiving, and I had to get it back to the library today, because they aren’t open on Thanksgiving. Hell, they aren’t open passed twelve today.

Basic synopsis: Science likes to test things. Religion likes to believe things. So if Science can agree to not be so picky and require that everything be touchable when a lot of things are beyond that (like love, hatred, music and divinity) and realize that that doesn’t disqualify its existence, and if Religion can let its “historical facts” fall to the way said and agree to test its practices and try to create hard, workable practice for all things that it does, then everything will be hunky-dorie.

I really recommend this book if you’ve ever questioned why evolutionary biology and fast-held faith can’t seem to get along.