Bookend Songs

Rihanna's "Where Have You Been" (2012) and "We Found Love" (2011)

• I've been everywhere, man, looking for you, babe / Searching for you, babe
  

• We found love in a hopeless place
  

 

Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time" (1998) and "Stronger" (2000)

To Waiting

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

                      —W.S. Merlin

Black Mask

I rediscovered a favorite blog, Inside a Black Apple. I love her art and the general atmosphere of her online presence: comforting, old-fashioned, fairytale-like and just a little bit mysterious. Anyway, I was looking at the prints on her Etsy shop (there are so many that I want) when I came across this one:

It seems I had that print subconsciously in mind when I took the following picture a few months ago.

I actually made the mask in grade school, years before I was a serious peruser of the Internet. I think it was meant to be a black cat mask (like the print above), but it makes me think of the Bat superheroes. Batgirl was a librarian, so I took and like this picture. It was my profile picture for a while.

Rainbow Meal

Red tomato
Orange sweet potato fries
Yellow mac & cheese
Green peas
Purple shirt
and I am blue.

The Batman of Songs

I'm a sucker for freebies, and free song downloads from iTunes are no exception. I usually download the ones I like every week (I think the free songs change every Monday). Last week I downloaded a single called "Come Back Down" by Greg Laswell featuring Sara Bareilles. It's a great pop song, catchy and rather anthemic, but it's kind of jarring when you listen to the words. The official music video handily features the lyrics, so go ahead and watch it:


The song's message can basically be summed up as, "Sack UP, ho! Get your act together! Look at your life; look at your choices." It's interesting that this song is so blunt; most pop songs feature watered down optimism and meaningless positive platitudes. I rather value this song's honesty.
So why do I call this the Batman of songs? It's awesome and popular with audiences, but it's kind of a downer when you think about it. Also, this is not the song people want, but the song they deserve.

LA Times Festival of Books 2012

Just got back from it. I had a great time! I got a free mini mocha McFrappe (McDonald's answer to the Frappuccino or however you spell that), a chocolate brownie Clif bar and fruit gummy thing, a sample of avocado-pineapple smoothie (consistency is like applesauce but it tastes like calmer, less acidic pineapple),  a pretty little copy of the Quran, some bookmarks, a purple tote bag, a plastic visor with the USC Keck Medical Center logo, and an I READ button. I wrote what I'm reading on the big canvas poster the LA Times has where you can do that (that's where I got the button), and my nerdy heart was warmed when I saw others had written DFTBA and I BELIEVE IN SHERLOCK HOLMES! :') The only thing I'm sad about is that John Green was only there on Saturday, yesterday, so I wasn't able to see/hear/meet him. I bought a bigger button with the LATFOB logo (this year's has a dinosaur) and saw Julie Andrews (!) from a ways away and heard her read from her children's book. I also went to a panel at the YA stage and heard The Fug Girls and a couple other YA authors read from their books and talk about the writing process. Then I bought Spoiled and had it signed by the Fug Girls themselves! I was so psyched to meet them; I've been reading their blog for years and feel like I know them. They were very nice and just as bubbly as I'd imagined them. Now I have to head back to school, but I'm glad I got a chance to go!

Belief

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." ~Samantha Black Crow, American Gods by Neil Gaiman

At one point I thought I wanted these things. Now it is certain that I won't get them, and I see that it's for the best. Really, the more I think about it the more I see I don't want them; they're not for me. Yet I am still sad about them.