Quotes

I love quotes. And I don't believe I've ever put any up on the blog. I really, really hate it when people start sentences with "and." Or when they put final punctuation outside of quotation marks. But I digress. Here are some good quotes:

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
- H. L. Mencken

When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.
- Marquis de Lafayette

Embrace this right now life while it's dripping, while the flavors are excellently woesome. Take your bites with bravery and boldness since the learning and the growing are here in these times, these exact right nows. Capture these times. Hold and kiss them because it will soon be very different.
- Jill Scott

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.
- A. A. Milne

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
- Anais Nin

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
- William Wordsworth

From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own.
- Carl Schurz

The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.
- Edward Thomas

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
- W. H. Auden

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
- Stella Adler

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
- Maureen Dowd

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
- Ingrid Bergman

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
- E. B. White

They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.
- Janet Reno

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
- Zora Neale Hurston

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?
- M. C. Escher

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
- Mohandas Gandhi

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
- Scott Adams

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.
- Pearl S. Buck

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.
- Albert Camus

Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.
- Charles Caleb Colton

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.
- M. C. Escher

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
- Arnold J. Toynbee

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
- Galileo Galilei

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
- Italo Calvino

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
- George Bernard Shaw

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
- Erich Fromm

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
- Jonathan Swift

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
- Helen Keller

To err is human - and to blame it on a computer is even more so.
- Robert Orben

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
- Anne Lamott

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
- Aristotle

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
- Anais Nin

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
- Sigmund Freud

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
- Willa Cather

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
- John Ciardi

Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel.
- Che Guevara

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.
- M. C. Escher

Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with a maneuver, a blow with an agreement.
- Leon Trotsky

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
- Federico Fellini

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
- William Butler Yeats

Wit is educated insolence.
- Aristotle

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.
- Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The invention of IQ does a great disservice to creativity in education.
- Joel Hildebrand

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
- Marshall McLuhan

There is a limit to the application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens.
- Leon Trotsky

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.
- Andy Rooney

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.
- Anne Frank

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.
- Steve Wozniak

If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.
- Marquis de Lafayette

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
- Emiliano Zapata

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
- Aldous Huxley

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
- Mark Twain

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.
- Heinrich Heine

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
- Leon Trotsky

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
- Mark Twain

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.
- Patrick Henry

Overheard in PBC

Old woman: If you were really, really trashed, I'm sure it would be a great time.

Woman pushing stroller, talking into Bluetooth: You want endometriosis, don't you?

Little girl: Mommy, I want you to be with me.
Woman: I am with you, honey.
Little girl: Not when you get old.

Should I?

I was thinking.

First, I wondered how many people actually read my blog on a consistent (or even periodic) basis. I know of at least two - Kathleen and Cristina. I think my mom and Sharill might, but I'm not sure. So keeping this up is kind of like I'm just writing for myself. This is fine with me, but seems a bit pointless at times.

Second, I write a bit of poetry myself and was thinking about putting some of it up here. I'm not sure what purpose that would serve, but then again, does any of this serve a purpose. Maybe I'll mull over this for a bit, see if I get any feedback, and decide from there.

Grand Slam

So...despite my confusing email about the actual date, the grand slam was last Tuesday, March 21. Jamie, Misty and her friend Matt, and Desi and his friend Ian came out. There were six poets total that showed up - Cristina placed third, thereby gaining a spot on the Delray Beach team for the National Poetry Slam in Austin. In August. Oh yeah.

She did three poems in the three rounds - I've seen her slam each of them several times before, and she did them better that night than I've ever seen. So proud of her.

Apparently the weeks and months leading up to the NPS are extremely intense and excessively creative. Practice, writing, reading, slamming, practice. We don't know the dates yet, but it's a little over five months away. Plenty of time, until it becomes two weeks before and then it's no time at all.

Amazing what love feels like

So...this week (starting last Thursday) has been the week from hell in terms of sheer hours at work. I do love my job, but the project I'm working on now is killing me. Including and since last Thursday until the end of today (Wednesday), I've worked a total of 82.75 hours - and that's not counting the hours at home on Sunday.

What has made this week one of the best weeks ever for me has been the love and attention of my beautiful girlfriend. She didn't get upset or pout when I told her that I couldn't take off Monday with her to celebrate the first day of spring, she didn't complain when I had to work from home on Sunday (which is our day). I've been getting home around 9:00 or 10:00 every night, and despite the fact that this is one of the two weeks she has off before school starts back up, she hasn't made me feel one iota of guilt for not spending time with her.

Instead, she has been there to answer my calls throughout the day and talk to and encourage me for five minutes when I feel overwhelmed. She has made dinner for me every night. She has listened to me bitch about my day and tell endless anecdotes patiently. She turns the alarm off in the morning so I can sleep a bit more, but makes sure I don't sleep through it the next time. She tells me she loves me at least once a minute. And even though she could sleep in in the morning for at least another 3 hours, she gets up and makes me Cuban coffee when I'm in the shower.


[Fiona Apple]
[The First Taste]

I lie in an early bed
Thinking late thoughts
Waiting for the black
To replace my blue
I do not struggle
In your web
Because it was my
Aim to get caught
But daddy longlegs
I feel that I'm finally
Growing weary
Of waiting to be
Consumed by you

Give me the first taste
Let it begin
Heaven cannot wait forever
Darling, just start the chase
I'll let you win
But you must
Make the endeavour

Oh, your love gives
Me a heart confusion
Adagio breezes fill
My skin with sudden red
Your hungry flirt
Borders intrusion
I'm building memories on
Things we have not said

Full is not heavy as empty
Not nearly my love
Not nearly my love
Not nearly

Give me the first taste
Let it begin
Heaven cannot wait forever
Darling, just start the chase
I'll let you win
But you must
Make the endeavour

Have I given in?

OK...so in general I'm not a big shoe person, nor do I salivate over brand names. I'll see a cute pair of shoes and think "oh, I like those." Very quickly, however, I realize
a] that I will never wear them
b] that they cost the equivalent of my take home pay for a week.

Then I'm content to look at their beauty and keep my wallet somewhat intact. I really don't make non-useful purchases that often and when I do I try to think about it and budget for it prior to actually laying out the dough.

All that being said - I saw these Coach shoes in an ad and I really, really want them.

Oh, they are lovely.

Time for more lyrics

Melissa Ferrick - Anything Anywhere (from "The Other Side")

I want you
To know me
To need me
Smile when I call your name

I want you
To never
Look at
Anyone else this way

So strange
This something
We have between us
And it's not fair
If you've never
Loved this way

Anything, anywhere
I would give everything I own away
Always I will sing
Picturing you singing right back to me

I want you
To know that
I will always have you
No matter if never
Physically in my arms again
This love
Is like
Mercury
Splitting off
Endlessly
Every time I try
To nail it down

Anything, anywhere
I would give everything I own away
Always I will sing
Picturing you singing right back to me

Too bad
The best love hurts so much
But it's so good yes
The best love hurts so much

Anything, anywhere
I would give everything I own away
Always I will sing
Picturing you singing right back to me

Anything, anywhere
I would give everything I own away
Always I will sing
Picturing you singing right back to me
Sing it right back
Sing it right back
Sing it right back
Back to me
Anything...Anywhere
Anything...Anywhere
Anything...Anywhere
Anything...Anywhere

Slam

Another slam at Dada this past Tuesday. There were 10 poets including Cristina - she went next to last in the first round, first in the second round, and first in the third round. She came in first place! She was surprised; I wasn't. As the first Tuesday of the month, it was an "official" slam and won her a place to compete in the Grand Slam on the 21st. She already had a place from last month; I think that this win should give her two places and thus twice as much slam time, but she informed me that it doesn't work that way - it merely cements her right and qualification to be there. Kathleen suggested that I film it - I think I'm going to try to do so. It would be great to have it preserved for posterity. My big pondering at this point is whether I should ask permission to film the whole thing (thus opening up the opportunity to be denied) or just film her parts and then have the defense (if anyone challenges me) that I have her permission. Or take my chances and film the whole thing. Wait...maybe I should talk to her about it first. Probably a good course of action. It would also be a good idea to find a videocamera that I can borrow. That could be a difficult task.

Several people came up and complimented her at the end. They said she was genuine and they could tell that her words came from her heart. I'm so proud of her. I know I've said it before, but it bears repeating (many, many times).

There has been a new bartender there for the past few times we've gone. Apparently she has worked there for the past three years but has either just started bartending or just started working Tuesdays, I'm not sure which. Service has become less than stellar. This week, I waited 10 minutes for a beer and water while watching people who ordered mixed drinks after me get served almost instantly. Maybe I need to work on my command presence. Or maybe just order earlier. I wonder if I could call in an order while we are on our way there? Or bring my own bottle opener. That would speed things up at least 3 minutes.

Big...blue...eyes

A few nights ago, Cristina and I finally started watching the Fellowship of the Ring. Not the theatrical version mind you - the full-on, 3 hour and 10 minute extended edition. We've still got about 30 minutes left, but so far she likes it and appreciates the fact that she has her own personal Middle Earth tour guide (yours truly). I can point out all of the deleted scenes and tell where they used stunt doubles instead of real hobbits.

Once she's comfortable enough to be able to quote whole passages of dialogue, we'll move on to the cast commentaries. We had a short tutorial the other night on Numenorean bloodline, and took the briefest of tangents into Aragorn's own interpretation of his destiny and the different portrayals of his inner anguish in the book and the movie.

One of these nights we'll have Sharill as guest speaker/interpreter. Oh, the world will fill with mirth and magic - and who knows, we might even lose time within ourselves!