As I woke this morning from a dream about my small dinosaur pet named Monster, I wondered if any of the packages and letters I’ve been expecting over the last couple weeks would arrive. I’m waiting on my letter about National Intercollegiate Band. I’m waiting for a Barnes and Noble order. I’m waiting on information on Band Camp. I’m waiting and waiting.

But one thing did, in fact, arrive. Kate, over at Dating God, sent me some books. She’s in the process of/finished moving to North Carolina, and offered a lot of her books up to willing readers. There was a survey and a short stint where she attempted go guess both what books of hers I might like and my weight, and the result was the following list of titles that came tightly packed in a brown box, left leaning against my front door this morning:

Working Miracles of Love a collection of teaching by Yogi Amrit Desai
Yoga Psychology by Swami Ajaya, Ph.D.
The Secret Science by John Baines
It’s a Guy Thing by David Deida
What is Enlightenment collection edited by John White
The Tao of Muhammad Ali by Davis Miller
The Hidden Dimension by Edward T. Hall
The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
Info–Psychology by Timothy Leary
What Really Matters by Tony Schwartz
Pilgrimage of Love by Swami Shri Kripalvanandji
Messages by McKay, Davis, and Fanning
Jnaneshvari by Shri Jnaneshvar

I’m so excited to have this gift at my door. It’s better than Christmas! I’m naturally quite elated, and I can’t decide where I’m going to start! A big thanks to her for such a lovely service.

And here is where I plug some things.
Bookcrossing.com is a site with nearly 4 million books registered for a swap. At this site, people can make a list of all the books they are willing to part ways with, or leave the location of books they have released into the world to be found by way-faring strangers. Completely free.

Paperbackswap.com works much the same way, except that its direct to reader. You pay some postage, but otherwise, completely free.

Support the idea that information should be shared and sharing should be free. It was free in kindergarten, why not now?

Everyone, this is Mika. Mika, everyone. Say hello, Mika.

Mika writes music, and has been projected to be the next Freddy Mercury or Elton John. This means three things: 1) He’s gay. Duh. Whatever. 2) He’s very creative and comfortable with a popular medium, aka pop rock a la retro-70/electric. 3) He’s gonna have a blast doing it. While Freddy Mercury and Elton John, and others of their ilk, didn’t necessarily get incredibly crazy with the “rock lifestyle” (though reportedly had their moments), they certainly didn’t mind living it up a little. Okay, Elton John did the drug thing. Whatever. Not my point.

The point is, this guy is pretty cool. His music is fun, its light and airy, even when its sad, and it ignited some tastes in me that I only occasionally get in my mouth.

I’ve never seen a Bette Davis, Grace Kelly, Katherine Hepburn or Joan Collins movie, but often I’ve wanted to. Something in me wants to explore that part of the gay culture established in the blah blah blah, insert documentary on gay lifestyles as influenced by the film industry of the 1920-40’s. But it would be fun, no?

Interesting enough, he actually makes an illusion to Freddie Mercury in his song “Gracy Kelly.”

Sounds like his are popping up all over my computer. I’ve downloaded much more techno and electric pop/indie pop in the last couple days than I normally do. It’s an estatic rush, where I run full force into my p2p and download anything and everything I can get my hands on, just to toss most of it away later. Unless I find a bad like The Slip.

Over time, I though that my music tastes were pretty eclectic. However, just because I have one Mahler tune stashed away in the darker bowels of my music folders next to the one tejano track and that one hip-hop song I kinda/sorta like doesn’t make me eclectic. It just makes me frivolously interested. That is the largest part of searching for music or anything else you like: being frivolous.

Yesterday, I purchased a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita on a whim (and with a gift certificate) in hopes that soon I’ll read them and have a blast doing it and getting all smart and stuff, and then I’ll be a better writer. That’s the hope. Of course, once they get here, they may take a long rest on my shelf where they collect dust next to the three volumes on herb gardening and use, and the three World of Darkness corebooks that I can’t seem to get through. Of course, they are quite lengthy. These books in particular would probably end up as nearly 600 pages apiece if reduced to unillustrated mass market paperbacks. And they’re rulebooks for games. Go figure.

In other news, since we’re being frivolous, I managed to squeeze out a poem yesterday. It needs editing, but then it goes up.

In more other news, big things are afoot. Stay tuned.

Often I am tempted to begin these posts with words like “so” or “and” or even just a simple jumpstart phrase:
“Just so you know…”
“It all began when…”
“Except for the time…”
But I digress before I begin.

I’ve been reading Dianne Sylvan’s The Body Sacred. It’s been a whim at first, but as I got into the first chapter, I suddenly was intensely driven to take it seriously, attempt the exercises that are given within. It’s been fairly intense. I’ve already had a couple moments or realization, a couple heavy emotion times. Last night, I trapsed into the park to have a good long talk with myself, try to figure out somethings. I could have stayed out there all night, had not biology required me to come home quickly, if you get me.

I’ve sorta abandoned my path for a while. I’ve been on this path for nearly ten years. I want to get back on it. I want to do things to make progress in that part of my life. It is difficult to do this. It takes time and energy that I thought were gone from me. Hopefully, they are not. I want to rededicate myself to a path that I’ve held sacred, if only in private or in silence.

I’m gonna start writing this ritual. Wish me luck.

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

So I’m sitting here, relatively unearly on a Sunday morning, and I stop over to A Teacher’s Education, and read Mrs. Chili’s explanation about why learning is still important, and why it bothers her that her students can’t even get one assignment in, one that isn’t necessarily complicated, turned in on time. I must admit, I am too vexed.

Let’s consider a hypothetical: I go to college. I just want to get my simple little degree in environmental sciences because trapsing around the woods looking at animals sounds like fun thing. Unfortunately, there are things involved in that trapsing that include research, documentation, and probably a written report or two. Now, if I stopped taking English or grammar serious after the fifth grade when I realized that I didn’t acutally need to use vowels t gt m pnt acrss, like so many seem to do, then I’m probably not going to have a hard time being taken seriously when my sentences would look better in crayon. Okay, that’s too cynical.

It’s important to know the very basic part of grammar, which are ingrained in our heads through language. However, there are times when, if you are speaking to someone who actually cared about their classes in school, that you will not be taken seriously, which is important if you want a raise, or to keep your job, or to feel like you aren’t wasting your time slogging through papers on a daily basis. This applies to all classes I think. If you don’t pay attention to the world around you, or the information being flung at you from all directions, you’re just gonna get hit by a cultural truck along the way. It’s very interesting to note how many people in my generation can’t name two bands from the seventies when music is so pervasive in our culture. It also bothers me that people can’t name two novels they’ve ever read, or how many young people try to talk about the news, but have never even picked up a newspaper or clicked to a newsite.

And the number of people who have NEVER listened to the radio?!

Anyway, not taking things seriously, when appropriate, will only make you look stupid. Mrs. Chili pointed out that the stimulus in kids lives recently (TV, internet, various and asundry media) have really affected the way communication and thinking works. Teachers dumb down the content levels and level of expectation. It would be horribly sad if, though we can type partial words and smilies at 150 wpm, we could barely hold a conversation that didn’t have every sentence ending like a question.

(Just think about it… “So, Becky? I totally saw her at the mall. And she was buying that blue dress I liked. And I was like, ‘No, way.’”)

One would think that online communication, for the most part, has made us more intelligent on the whole, yet it has really only made us lazy.

Okay, I think I’ve wandered off the real topic here. I’m gonna call this to a close before I start eating my feet.

Appetizer
Name a sound you like to hear.
I really like to hear a deep resonant bass chord. Or even just the note. There is a note in Egdar Meyer’s “1B” that shows up and is so penetrating, its like listening to the Earth spin. *smacks lips* It’s just tasty.

Soup
What is your favorite kind of cheese?
I have a soft spot for muenster. There was this graduation party I went to after my junior year of high school (of course, not my party) where they served little sandwiches made with turkey and muenster cheese. I got nookie that day. Memories…

Salad
Do you sleep late on Saturday mornings? Why or why not?
Oh, lord do I sleep late. Usually its because I stayed up until 3am on Friday (as I plan to tonight) and I usually don’t get my typical 7 hours. It’s more likely that I’ll only get 5 because I’ll get up at 9 or 10, thinking that I have so much to do today. And then I just stay up late talking to people online.

Main Course
When was the last time you forgot something? What was it, and how long did it take to remember it?
Hmm…I suppose the honest to god last time I forgot something was this last tuesday when I went to the store and forgot to take back the video game I’d rented. I had it all mapped out in my head about how I was gonna do all this mail and get all this stuff done on the same trip so I didn’t have to drive all over town. I was psyched! I love being able to be that efficient. But then I forgot the movie, and ruined that plan. Poo.

Dessert
Fill in the blank: I notice I feel better about myself when I light a candle, do a little meditating, and go straight to bed.

I’m walking between home and work, and between my dean’s office and home, and I’m listening to This American Life, subject matter: Roadtrips. I’m thinking honestly about roadtrips, about other people’s roadtrips, about my own. I’m thinking about the position a person must be in to make a roadtrip. I’m thinking about the expectations of roadtrips. I’m thinking this thing we call a roadtrip isn’t something so simple or frivolous. In fact, it is a pilgrimage.

As they discussed on the show, when we take roadtrips, we expect to find many things: adventure, a secret love, true diversion from the norm, transformation. And each of the stories they covered revealed some person or another who was in this mild transformative state, regardless of destination or reason for travel. It was here that I began to relate deeply.

I’ve always felt that, even when taking trips to my grandmother’s house, not two hours from my home, that my family and I were entering into a new time sphere. Not time zone, though that certainly applies when you go from New Mexico to Texas. No, we were entering into a new dimension, and the world we had just left would remain as it was until we returned, and the world we were headed to hadn’t changed since the last time we’d visited. We were the catalyst of life. We were the stopwatches. The world would change when we got around to changing it.

But as life progressed, I learned, of course, that time does not stop, and that we are changing instead. I don’t remember where I heard it, but I distinctly remember someone mentioning how they felt like, when they traveled, that they didn’t really exist. They were in one place, and then they entered the plane or the car or the train or the boat, and they became nothing but particles, whizzing around in space until they coalesced magically in their presumed destination. An image that comes to mind is transportation a la Star Trek.

I feel this way. I felt, when I drove to Lexington, KY two summers ago, that I was not a person, I was not a thing, until we arrived 20 hours later. Even the jokes and the memories that came out of the car, during transit, seem whispy and unreal. They seem as though they happened standing still, apart from the travel. With the world whizzing by, how could I hold onto something unless I mentally clicked it onto brain-film. And the trip to Marshall, TX, this year was much the same. I was alone in the car, listening to music or podcasts, not really in any one place, never stationary. I was not being observed, I was free. I was particle and wave. I was nothing, yet.

My roadtrips have the expectation of great joy and hopefully no incident. I’ve had car trouble, sure, and its been a measure of my patience, sitting in a dinky town on Thanksgiving eve hoping to have radiator parts attached in some way, any way, to my vehicle so I can make the rest of my two hour jaunt to family. But hopefully, such times are rare.

When I arrive, I am new, I am fresh, and I stretch like I’m falling out of a womb for the first time, born in this new world where I will demonstrate how the process of travel has bettered me as a person. I will collect the lessons I need, and process them all the way back home, where, again, I am borne home, and ready to begin another new life.

Luckily, I get to born in Orlando this summer, where I’m gonna be performing with the National Intercollegiate Band! I’m so excited! This is the only performing group made up of only college students who audition from all parts of the country. Much like all-state band, but for adults. Yay! Go me!

So E over at Negative Forty did this meme while on Ambien, and I think he had a good time with it. Here is my more sober version.

Meme: My life in film, where you randomize your playlist and match it to the corresponding movie plot item. (Note of interest: I think this list is really about 15 moves in one.)

Rules: Only songs with titles, because I have a lot without titles. I’m a Pirate that way. No freebies.
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I just want to say how nice it is to just sit around with a friend you haven’t seen in a long time, have a margarita and talk about everything under the sun. Especially commune mentality. Thanks for the good weekend, C.

I will have everyone know that the other big highlight of this last weekend wasn’t watching all three matrix movies, back to back, no breaks. That was great fun, though.

No, it was the band banquet that I went to on Friday night. Okay, not technically the weekend, but who doesn’t start their weekend immediately after work on Friday, huh?

Said band banquet was full of free food! It was potluck, something I’m not used to for that sort of thing. When I was in high school we catered ours. However, for this school (where I was student teaching), they asked that each student bring enough food to feed themselves and four others. For some this meant bringing two trays of veggies. For others, it meant making four lasagnes. And for others still, it meant preparing nearly 200 quesadillas! 200! That’s a lot, of course.

They really let the kids make this banquet their own, which is pretty nice. They gave out a lot of awards, and each of the graduating seniors gets their own little “roast.” Granted, its not nearly as raunchy as those on TV, but the potential is there. Each senior received a gift or two. Without trying to explain the list, because the reasons are very sparse and very much full of insideness, I’ll show you a simple list of the gifts given.

Plush crayons
Balloons
Chapstick
Energy drinks
Green beans
Sprinklers
Water grenades
Mustard bottles
Bouncy balls
Hoola-hoops
Gummibears
Smiley face pillows
Traffic cones
Crazy flip flops
Fuzzy scarfs
Tiara
Disposable razors

*shakes head* High school kids…

Anyway, it was a great banquet, and I left very very full.

I want to thank whoever out there in the interweb searched for “Aaron Kennell.” I have a sneaking suspicion that it was the man himself. I see you, Kennell.

It’s nearly 2am in my present time zone. That means it is almost 3am at home. It is late. I am tired. I should probably be sleeping, or at least attempting to, not that it would be a problem this late at night. However, I must confess that it is when my brain is tired that I drift into parts of myself I do no regularly visit. Parts that I should be tired of, done with, through. I am not. These are the parts that linger and hang off me like loose threads, waiting to snag on the sharp corners that intermittently jut into my life. It is then, when these parts catch, that I slowly unravel, and reveal the things that lie beneath my skin, that lie deeper and deeper under cloth and flesh alike. It is these sorts of things that float across my mind. Let me make them relevant.
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