Soul at the Hands of Confinement

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. ♥

Vicky's Birthday

Telepopmusik - Love Can Damage Your Health (Promo Video)

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That last video was Love Can Damage Your Health by Telepopmusik. It's not a spectacular plot or anything, and the premise of the scene is a little sketchy at the least, but the video itself is truly a work of art. Plus the music's kind of addicting, as is all good French electronica.

And this picture to the left is Barcelona. A juice bar on the street corner, which is a common sight in Spain, supposedly because of the ridiculously hot summers. It makes me really hate this gray, "lukewarm" Ithaca that we have to put up with these day. There's not even snow on the ground, and I was thinking of riding tomorrow with Sasha, but the temperature's dropping again.

________

You know...for someone who hasn't ice-skated in years, I was pretty proud of myself today. I used to figure skate quite a bit. I was pretty good, actually; I've always had good balance in the sports I did, and I caught on to things very quickly. It was disappointing to me to realize I didn't have the skill I used to have, but it didn't surprise me that I could stay up on the ice and only fall once at the beginning. It did surprise me, however, that I remembered how to move. I'm definitely nothing compared to Vicky when it comes to skating, of course. She's pretty damn good. But regardless, I was pretty proud. I think I should do that more often.

It felt a bit weird. Danny and Amir and I were the only guys wearing figure skates. I wonder where the "figure skates are gay" thing came from. My educated guess would be that it stems from the relationship between figure skating and dancing. Dancing can be a beautiful thing. Hey, if we've got the dignity to do it, it just means we're just very secure with our manhood, right?

And come to think about it, a lot of cool things in this world are pretty "gay." Like Myspace and scarves and cranberries in your sandwiches. Not so much the quiches.

Being on ice is an odd feeling. It's not quite the same as rollerblading on the street, yet it utilizes more or less the same motions. The primary difference here is really the sensation you get when you glide. On rollerblades, you get this rough, asphalt sensation that kind of rattles you up to your knees regardless of how much you might have paid for them. Whereas on ice, the feeling's very airy, very carefree, as if one stroke of your legs will take you for a kilometer, if you had the room. It's always colder in a rink too, and it shows. There's something enjoyable about being surrounded by white and bundled in a sweater.

So after the skating escapade, we chilled at Vicky's, which was fun. Dinner, chocolate-coconut cake, and a rather odd pirate movie all preceded the present-thing. And unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera into the rink, since I sort of forgot to take it out of my bag. (Additionally, it didn't have a battery anyway, so what good would it have been?) Speaking of which, I was without one today. I ordered mine online on Monday, so it didn't have time to ship. But I think she'll like it. She's needed it for a while now.

Rommia needs to shut up during movies. :-P So does Mikayla, but Rommia's much funner to pick on.

Happy Birthday, Vicky. <3

Solstice in a week

This weather is familiar. Hmm...it looked just like this a while back. When was it...oh yes, that's right. The school retreat. ON SEPTEMBER 12th.

Solstice is in less than a week. Can the weather keep up?

In fact, it was so nice today, that we decided to start a game of mini-soccer on the blacktop. What started as a 3 on 3 friendly match turned into an 8 on 8 brawl. It might have been because the distance between goals was around 12 meters. With all those people, logistically you had to get within a meter of the goal to score.

It makes me think of sunny spring days...

Friday

It's Friday, December 8. Hit the snooze button at 7:30, and at around 7:45. Got up and began my morning rush. I made my bed, took a shower, got dressed, had a breakfast, brushed my teeth, got in the car and drove down to the high school to catch the first shuttle bus to ACS. By 8:32, I was on the bus, settling down for fifteen minutes of rest, when I suddenly realized...

Oh shit there's SNOW on the ground! Needless to say, I certainly panicked. It frightened me. I hate winter, I hate the cold, and while I don't hate snow, I hate what it represents. If you sit on your ass the whole day and be as lazy as I usually am, you generally won't die of Ithacan summers. But winter...oh yes, winter is fatally brutal here in beautiful Ithaca, New York.

Third period was spent debating on the subject of an article that basically denied the Holocaust. Certainly the article had little evidence, but what really made me angry was the amount of people who openly said "how could someone deny the Holocaust?" or "that's bullshit, of course the Holocaust happened!" I must say, I made a pretty convincing argument stating that if we didn't listen to these kinds of points of view, the kinds that come from people that we usually shun, we're being awfully close-minded. How could anyone in that classroom say truthfully that the Holocaust did occur? Just because the entire world believes it, does it mean it has to be true?

And isn't such dangerous ignorance part of what started the Holocaust? Didn't the Aryans believe that they were so righteous and so much more inferior than everyone else that they forgot to question reality? Wasn't it the blind belief in a history, in a moral code which no one thought of for themselves, but instead was passed onto them by a totalitarian dictator? I made some people pretty upset, I must say. I'm sorry I made them upset, and that they had to feel that way. But I'm not sorry for what I said. Needless to say, I didn't believe the revisionist article myself.

After school I walked with Sasha to his house in the cold, slippery snow. Stopped by John's Convenience Store to pick up some gum. The cashier accused me of trying to steal twice, and then he warned Sasha that "you better start watch step next time you come by." I walked out with no gum, but some powdered donuts containing 40% of my daily value in saturated fat. The remainder of the walk I could feel my arteries clogging up. Got to his house, played his Gamecube for a bit, then got picked up. I returned home, sliced up some bread and poured some olive oil. Then I sat down at my computer and checked my email. Xanga - Your Subscriptions Digest.

Oh yes, Xanga, that old thing. Anyways, I opened it up, got signed on, and started to read 2-year-old posts that had been formulated out of apathy and stupidity. There was a time I said "toodles." There was a time I was so into opera that I went and saw as many as I could. There was a time I tried to phish passwords off my friends just to see if they would take the bait, then I'd shove it in their face and laugh. There was a time I thought that "zomfgroflmfao" should have been in the OED.

I realized how much I missed being a 9th grader.