If I go to New York with Sasha for the weekend, my week will be complete. Alas, I will not finish my Facing History paper I so desperately need to do. But there are other things in life than just school. Like black walnuts, for example. There are a lot of those lying around on the ground.
I need to play the drums. Really bad.
You cut-throat, you! ...You're lucky I don't stuff your beard down your gullet! ...But get out, viper! And take care that you don't cross my path again! Sheer off, filibuster! Outz of my sight, you gallows bird! Baboon! ...Carpet Seller! Paranoiac! Pockmark! Cannibal! Duck-billed platypus! Jellied eel! Bashi-bazouk! Anthropophagus! Ceropithecus! Psychopath!
- Captain Haddock, in the French comic Tintin: The Red Sea Sharks
licking your lips
taking in the momentary pain
as a helpful reminder that
you are still alive
biting your tongue
tasting your own blood to make sure that
it is really your own, because
you are still alive
gritting your teeth
resonating through your skeleton
ready to box with your machine
you are still alive
beating yourself
senseless on the keys on your board in
retaliation for its faults
however, it's quite obvious that
it was you who forgot to save your work
Edit: A haiku in response to yesterday's poem:
don't mind happiness
today is a different kind
i'm so fucking bored
_______
Given that there's no school tomorrow, and that it's STILL snowing now, I need to think up something to do quick, so I don't end up rotting in front of my computer. I also just tried to tag this post with "snow" fourteen times, but Blogger refused to comply. I'm not sure as to why it would ever do such a thing.
Edit: We just dug the postman out of a thick snowbank. Makes me feel alive.
__________
look at yourself;
trapped with your coffee and your biscotti and
your chocolates
sitting by the fireplace you wish you had
look at yourself;
turning the cellophane on an architecture magazine
keys on a board
watching the outside turn from blue to gray to white
look at yourself;
wrapped up in a fleece blanket in
yesterday's old sweater
have you ever been happier being trapped?
__________
I believe I've just had my first sleepover in a long time yesterday. It wasn't going to be, but by midnight last night, the roads became unnavigable and my parents declared that they were staying home. So Yuval and I stayed up until 2AM until she fell asleep on the couch watching Marie Antoinette. At three she woke up and decided that the couch was probably not the best place to spend the night so we went upstairs and woke up at 7. Amounts to...4 hours of sleep?
Upon awakening, it's a white and blustery Valentines Day in Ithaca, New York. Temperature is 20 degrees Fahrenheit, accumulation is close to 24 inches, and the world as we know it has come to a standstill.
Even the television reflects the mood today; there's cooking show after knitting show after cooking show after woodworking show, after cooking show. That's the thing about blustery winter days. Everyone wants to cook. Including me. The heat of the oven, the radiance of the stove, the comfort of biting into fresh blueberry muffins...it's what we all desire. Succumb to your appetite and you will be rewarded. It's nothing but an extension of human survival.
And yes, it is indeed Valentines Day, but I can't help but muse on how many couples are really on their fur rugs under their crystal chandeliers by their fireplaces, getting it on, on a day like this. Call me a pessimist in a loveless world, but I'm pretty sure the number of those couples right now...is coherent.
I hope you all have a wonderful Valentines Day. ♥
I have a secret pleasure. Vogue Magazine.
The full nature of this rather embarrassing pleasure presented itself last night when I was at Hollywood Video selling fruit with Sasha and Sarah. Bored and hungry, Sasha and I decided to go out to Wegmans, and grab dinner to bring back. Sarah requested a Vogue and a plastic fork.
About a quarter of an hour later, we returned with a turkey sandwich, a grapefruit, a cookie, a plastic fork, a Vogue, iced tea, and cold hands. Sarah, quite angry because we were gone for two minutes more than we said we would be, opened the Vogue and we read through. Sarah and I wrestled control for the magazine for over an hour afterwards, pausing only for fifteen minutes to simulate anal sex with Sour Patch Kids. It didn't go well for our customers.
Sarah: "Dammit, Mirko, give me the magazine!"
Mirko: "Stop it! I'm reading it!"
Sasha: "You're gay."
Sarah: "Why would you EVER want to read Vogue?!"
Mirko: "YOU'RE the one wearing a fleece sweater!"
And I shut up.
___________
In a Valentine's Day gift to the country, scientists said they are determined to remove and preserve together the remains of a couple buried 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, their arms still wrapped around each other in an enduring embrace.
Instead of removing the bones one-by-one for reassembly later, archaeologists plan to scoop up the entire section of earth where the couple was buried, they told Reuters.
The plot will then be transported for study before being put on display in an Italian museum, thereby preserving the world's longest known hug for posterity.
"We want to keep can them just as they have been all this time -- together," archaeologist Elena Menotti, who announced the discovery a week ago, told Reuters.
Their removal will be a relief for archaeologists who had to hire extra security to guard the rural site outside the northern city of Mantova after the discovery made world headlines.
© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.The love affair does not show itself above ground.
Above ground, life is normal. Above ground, the traffic will feed off its own cacophony, inherent in a giant—indeed global—anarchical system of automobiles and boulevards and traffic lights and horns and police cars. Above ground, the people will live. They will eat, sleep, fall in love, and indeed they will repeat the process until their death, which by that time, the death of one man will equal the birth of two. And above ground, there is sky, there are clouds, and there are stars that will one day exponentially expand humankind’s potential energy. Because above ground, life is normal.
The bells at Notre Dame had just begun their seven-o’clock cacophony when Isabelle’s feet skittered down the flight of stairs into the metro. A right turn into the metro system and Miss Chavanoz would not see sunlight again for half an hour.
As the walkways twisted through U-turn after U-turn, she and her hair were greeted by the cool, mechanical, and somewhat musty underground breeze that was an aspect of subway stations everywhere. They tasted differently everywhere, of course. Tokyo had wheat and no sugar. Madrid had vanilla, and lots of it. In New York, there was more vinegar, and much less salt, until you left Manhattan. In Barcelona, there was olive oil and no canola. Singapore however, was an odd, unexplainable void of sensory deprivation. Indeed, if aluminum and glass had a scent, then Singapore would have been overpowering, but alas, scent was absent in the MRT.
But here in Paris—oh yes, she would never forget the scent of Paris—there was a macabre dissonance to it. It never quite stayed the same for more than a few minutes, and if you wait, you can experience almost every scent known to mankind, from the gag-inducing squalor of the Rafflesia flower, to the comforting smell of old newspaper on a concrete bench, to the lulling and addictive Tuscan meadows captured in the perfume of the nearest bourgeoisie. If you had the misfortune of missing the subway train just as it was rolling out, you know about the full orchestra of odors that shall assault the passenger for a full three minutes—or one hundred and eighty seconds—before you are saved by the fast gust of wind that precedes the subway train and its open doors. Once inside the carriage, however, the odors are still present. If you know what you’re doing, you won’t have caught a train during rush hour, and the only scent you have to put up with is the urinal residue left over by the SDF who had found themselves locked up in the subway train all night with no way out. If you care enough about your nose, you can move away from these areas and often find your scentless refuge towards the middle of the carriage.
But some people, like Isabelle, have no choice but to travel at the heat of Parisian rush hour. In such a situation, the bodily odors inside the subway carriage will make you wish you were back out on the platform: it was as if you had just walked in on a grand orgy of nasal pollution, when suddenly the metal doors behind you cut you off from the rest of the world, and for the next one hundred and twenty seconds, you are drowning.
On her short trip between Cite and the Gare Montparnasse—a trip that shall cost you 1.40 euros—Isabelle’s subway neighbors would all be cubicle-weary warriors, regiment after regiment of black suits, white shirts and red ties. In every new city she visited, she waited for the moment they would simultaneously turn to her with their glowing red eyes, stick needles and tubes into her neck, and assimilate her.
But alas, little that occurred could match such an exciting idea. The cavern of black suits remained nothing but a cavern as solid as the rocks that comprised of it......
It's February 5, 2007.
[22:10] EarnestWinkle: do the facing history?
[22:10] inqualcanto: yea....mostly
[22:15] EarnestWinkle: what was the turkey a metaphor for
[22:16] inqualcanto: hama
[22:21] EarnestWinkle: and whatd you say for why he used such extreme violence
[22:24] EarnestWinkle: jeez man
[22:24] EarnestWinkle: no need to write an essay here
[22:24] inqualcanto: hama = tribalism + authoritarianism
tribalism = showing off + "dog eat dog"
authoritarianism = overwhelming force
thus (showing off + dog eat dog)overwhelming force = extreme violence
thus hama = extreme violence
[22:26] EarnestWinkle: how much crack did you just smoke
[22:27] inqualcanto: just a few grammes
[22:27] inqualcanto: a gramme is better than a damn
[22:27] EarnestWinkle: touche
Charming. Magnetic. Murderous.
When you're fooled into sympathizing with the bad guy, you can't help but question yourself too. When that bad guy is Idi Amin, there's something wrong with you. Except that I think there are few people who wouldn't think, "Oh, wow, this guys actually kind of cool." Until you learn about the shit going on.
I gotta say the one thing I loved best was the way the movie ended with the Entebbe hijacking and the events that led up to Gallagher's escape from Uganda. Oh, and Forest Whitaker is amazing in this film, I should add.
________
On Friday, Sasha and I went down to Juna's to grab some coffee and talk like we normally do. That day, we were joined by Lukas who had just gotten out of an internship interview with the Ithaca Journal.
So we covered the basic subjects, and then Sasha had to leave, and Lukas and I went to get some pizza from Neds, when we learned that neither of us had the three dollars we owed Neds for the the pizza.
"I have a debit card," says Lukas.
"No swipe...no swipe thing. I don't have," the rather rude pizza man says.
With no money, and no pin number for the ATM, we don't have a choice. We start looking around for people who have money, yet no one will give us any. I grab my bag and search through the deepest crevasses for loose change. In the end, we come up with $2.50 cents, a full 50 cents short. Problem is, we already ordered.
"You owe me fifty cents, next time," he tells me.
Shit, I think, what is this guy trying to do, jack me out of money later? But what choice do we have? We just spent money we didn't have. So we accept and go eat pizza while laughing about it. In the back of my mind, I know that if I come to him on Monday, he's going to ask for a dollar or two. I'm cool with that, but I'm not cool with letting him play me like that.
But my mom comes in with fifty cents and thus we are rescued.
