Random Musing
I just bought the new iPod Touch to replace my iPod Video. I'd had the iPod Video for about four and a half years - I got it for my 16th birthday - and it did serve me really well for a pretty long time. In the end, the decision to buy a new iPod had to do with just one thing: battery life. (Well, that and the fact that I prefer iPods to other mp3 players.)

But yeah, battery life was really the big thing. After so many years, the battery on the iPod Video ran down considerably. I could get maybe 6-7 hours if I refused to ever hit skip or even change the volume (when it was new you could listen to 14 hours of music - even while hitting "next"). If I did decide to use it like a normal mp3 it would only last for around 1-3 hours, which became irritating very quickly. So I finally decided, after too many instances where I fully charged it only to have it die on me in no time, that it was time to buy a replacement.

So after doing research on various iPods and mp3 players - and post going into the Apple Store and discovering (to my shock actually) that I did like the whole touch screen thing - I decided on the new iPod Touch. I only got it in the mail today, and after hours of messing around, it's now fully synced with my iTunes and my apartment's wireless and is basically set up how I want it. I'm pretty excited about it. A normal reaction given that it is shiny and new and pretty - like all Apple products.

I do still need to find a case or some sort of protection for it, but minus that little worry blip I'm just excited to be able to go for long walks and not have to worry about my iPod dying any minute. It's a relief. And yes, the purchase has relieved my bank account a bit (sue me - I like puns), but I can live with that since this really is a purchase that will be useful in the long term. The last iPod lasted almost five years. And I think that stat bodes well for the new one. Fingers crossed.

Quotation
"What if we were muons?
Would you still love me?
You wouldn't have to for very long.
It's all relative." -Sarah Barton, "Muons"

Random Musing
The above poem is what happens when English majors have to take physics classes. If you're confused, wiki/google "muons" - it should make more sense.

I should mention that I took the liberty of titling the poem "Muons" since the author didn't deign to bestow a title on it. Not that she ever does give her poems titles actually.

Quotations
"'Listen to the trees talking in their sleep,' she whispered, as he lifted her to the ground. 'What nice dreams they must have!'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

"But the little path was shadowy and narrow. Trees crowded over it, and trees are never quite as friendly to human beings after nightfall as they are in daylight. They wrap themselves away from us. They whisper and plot furtively. If they reach out a hand to us it has a hostile, tentative touch. People walking amid the trees after night always draw closer together instinctively and involuntarily, making an alliance, physical and mental, against certain alien powers around them." -L.M. Montgomery, Rainbow Valley

"'This afternoon I sat at my window and alternately wrote at my new serial and watched a couple of dear, amusing, youngish maple-trees at the foot of the garden. They whispered secrets to each other all the afternoon. They would bend together and talk earnestly for a few moments, then spring back and look at each other, throwing up their hands comically in horror and amazement over their mutual revelations. I wonder what new scandal is afoot in Treeland.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

Rory: I have to tell you, this tree is perfect.
Lorelai: All girls think their tree is perfect.
-Gilmore Girls (Episode 4.06: An Affair to Remember)

Random Musing
I love how incredibly whimsical L.M. Montgomery's quote about Treeland is. I wish I could write anything as charming as that. But alas, the dark and dreary are more along my lines than the enchanting.

In entirely unrelated news, Happy Birthday to my sisters Namira and Nishat! They turned 23 and 19 respectively. (And yes, it is rather strange that they have the exact same birthday when they're four years apart.)

Random Musing
I'm sure that some news of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive has reached you by this point. It's going to happen in Washington D.C. on October 30th - so it's a little over a month away - and I think that you should go. Yes, whoever is reading this, "you" really does mean you. I say this because I'm going. That's right, I'm abandoning Ann Arbor Halloween weekend and making my way to D.C. It should be a good time - 10 hour drive and all.

Check out the site for more information on the whole thing, keep watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and make the incredibly-smart decision to be in D.C. October 30th. Maybe I'll see you there!

(Well, probably not to be entirely honest. It's a big city and there are going to be a lot of people there. The odds are very slim that I'll run into you. Whoever "you" are. But I figured I'd end the post on a more optimistic note. Which I'm entirely doing away with here. It's just more in character.)

Painting
Untitled

Random Musing
I just discovered that it is possible to find green ink cartridges for my fountain pen. Green ink. I'm totally going to feel like Harry Potter writing in green ink with a fountain pen. Sure it's not exactly a quill pen, but it's as close as we're going to get in the real world (aka: The Not-Nearly-As-Exciting-As-Harry Potter World). In case you couldn't tell from that statement: I'm very excited about this green ink. Yes - I'm just going to go ahead and say it - my life is that small.

I still have many many blue/black ink cartridges left, so the green's not going to be forthcoming for a while, but eventually those blue/black cartridges will run out and I will be buying green ink. I know what you're thinking. I could just go ahead and buy the cartridges now. Who cares if I still have blue/black ones left? True. I could. Well, except not really cause that just seems sort of wasteful. I know that with green ink in hand I'll probably ignore my blue/black ink. Forever. Even when I run out of green ink. I'll just buy more green and the blue/black cartridges will gather dust. See, wasteful. So I will just bide my time and look forward to the day that my world becomes more aligned with Harry Potter's. As is the hope and dream of every sane person on the planet.

Quotation
"'Listen. You know those days when you've got the mean reds?'
'Same as the blues?'
'No,' she said slowly. 'No, the blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is.'" -Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

Random Musing
I've always wondered what to call the mean reds once that "something bad" actually does happen and you know what it is. The mean reds would have evolved into something else by that point; horrible uncertainty and anticipation is such a huge part of them. And as awful as the mean reds are I think that new manifestation of them would probably be worse.

Horrible things are often even more horrible than you were expecting them to be. It's kind of like how the anticipation of looking forward to something is so often more fun than that "something" itself. Breakfast at Tiffany's introduces us to the mean reds, but I'm personally looking to avoid what inevitably follows them. The "Evil Blacks" or "Sad Greys" maybe? Lame suggestions I'm afraid.

Quotation
"'All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow – no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life – for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to see among phrases and fragments something unbroken – I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.'" -Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Painting
Untitled

Random Musing
September is drawing near which means so is the start of fall semester. Classes don't actually start until September 7th, but already I need to worry about one of my (potential) classes: English 424, aka: Advanced Poetry Writing.

I don't get to take this class unless the portfolio I submit as a sort of audition passes muster. Now I've written a lot of poems. Most not very good, some passable, and a few I'm kind of happy with. Nothing really spectacular. But now I have to compile a portfolio of ten poems before September 1st, and I am at somewhat of a loss as to which poems I should choose.

So, I'm asking for some help from you loyal blog followers. If anyone reading this can think of any poems that I've posted which struck them as particularly/any good whatsoever, let me know. The suggestions will be helpful in pulling together a portfolio.

Thanks in advance!

Quotation
"Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words; an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship's more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments." -Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

Random Musing
Here are a couple of songs I've been listening to a lot lately:

1. "I'm Waking Up to Us"

2. "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead"

I've recently become enamored with Belle & Sebastian - Push Barman to Open Old Wounds is my favorite of their CDs thus far - and I previously recommended another Star's song, "Dead Hearts." If you're looking for new music, the above links could be a good starting point. Hope you enjoy!

Quotation
"'Keep your dream, little Marigold, as long as you can. A dream is an immortal thing. Time cannot kill it or age wither it. You may tire of reality but never of dreams.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Magic for Marigold

Random Musing
"Do you ever get so caught up in the previews that you forget what movie you're watching? Well that's my life."

That's not an actual quote. Well, not one that I read or heard or anything. It just popped into my head while I was watching Breakfast at Tiffany's. Elizabethtown was one of the previews on the DVD so I suppose Cameron Crowe rubbed off on me and made the above come to mind. It's not a horrible line exactly. I don't have anything to follow it up with though. I don't know if anything good could even come from trying to follow it up. As of right now I'm not going to try. I'm just going to throw that one line into the "blogosphere" and let it go.

Quotation
Emily: All right, fine. Sweetie's father was a very poor man, so poor that Sweetie and her four siblings all had to sleep in a hollowed-out tree trunk because the house was only big enough for their parents. One winter, there was no food, so Sweetie crawled out of her trunk, wrapped her feet in newspaper, and walked forty miles in the snow to the nearest town, where she stumbled into a candy store. The owner took pity on her and gave her bags of candy, a dill pickle, and drove her back to her family. He promptly offered a job to her father, who gladly accepted and eventually owned that store and turned it into one of the most important candy emporiums in the world. And that is how she got the name Sweetie. There, how was that?
Lorelai: Now, that was a pretty good story.
-Gilmore Girls (Episode 4.16: The Reigning Lorelai)

Quotation
"'I do suspect that he is not really necessary to my happiness.  So much the better.  I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do.  I am quite enough in love.  I should be sorry to be more.'" -Jane Austen, Emma

Quotation
"How could any one in the world be happy when we were so unhappy?" -L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl

Quotation
"'He has the face of a dreamer, but of a dreamer who's dreaming at great speed.  A dreamer whose dreams are far out ahead of our dreams.  And that scares me.  Do you understand?'" -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

Quotation
"Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep - while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?" -Edgar Allan Poe, "A Dream Within a Dream"

Quotation
"'If I gave you my life, you would drop it.  Wouldn't you?'
I didn't say anything." -Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient