Stairway to Heaven
Les petits plaisirs
Things I love
Crescents
White cliffs
Headscarves
Fountain pens
Algerian French
Hummus with Challah
Old books with yellowing pages
Smells that bring back memories
Sunset on a North African desert
Dancing like no one’s watching
Running like nothing else matters
Singing when no one is listening
New ballet shoes not yet broken in
Peering down railroad tracks for no reason
Generous piece of ganache filled Belgian chocolate at two in the morning, to awaken the palates
Not giving a fuck
YOU LIVE, YOU FORGET, YOU WAKE UP NEW ….
“My dreams were but a means of forgetting, they were the branches tied to the galloping horses of our days, the emptying of the garbage so that tomorrow-assuming there would be a tomorrow-could be filled up with new life.”
- Aleksandar Hemon
Despite an entire year’s worth of dreaming and forgetting, you discover yourself at year’s end rewinding the tape, desperately looking to grasp onto some flimsy nuggets of time before the entire rock crumbles and you tumble into yet another decade. Yes, gloat over that promotion you have hence padded your resume with, cringe over the misspoken word or mollifying gesture, feel the warmth of a friend’s words, heck, feel the warmth of a friend. Feel, again and again and again, for you have denied yourself that out of fear.
Words trigger memories. This Wordle would have to make do for a blueprint of my selective remembrance of 2009.
Javier
What is time but a mere human contrivance? Arbitrary yet addicting.
Still, wish I had more of it (see, it’s addicting!)
to spend with you, burning my tongue in the Pomegranate tea you over-boiled,
daydreams and improbabilities dissolving into the steam, fogging up your spectacles as you lean closer.
But the age of vagabonds and ideals is no more, my dear,
and my world thus unstuck, not for you.
Javier chimes patiently in the background, cell phone snaps, footsteps, your frame tucked inside a Dali clock…
Oh I’m hangin’ high, oh won’t you let me down.
Yawning with Yann
An intimate look at three troop greeters as they confront the universal losses that come with aging and rediscover their reason for living.
Happy Veterans. No politics or bullshit. Peace.
You Are What You Doodle doodly doo
I was sitting with a friend over a cup of joe, doodling over a brown napkin that had already become privy to my Vaseline lip imprints.
Said friend asks, “What’re you writing?”
Me:…….(shows lame flowers haphazardly drawn)
Friend: “Oh, I thought you were writing something deep.”
Ouch.
When our minds drift into space, our pen tips bleed into seemingly nonsensical shapes, figures and squiggly lines. But could squiggly lines be more than just squiggly lines? Here’s the good ole’ Atlantic’s compilation of squiggly lines—not just any squigglies mind you, but Presidential squigglies generated during White House meetings (reassuring, I know).
There is one by John F. Kennedy during the Vietnam War, where he scribes rigid boxes around the word “Vietnam.” The Atlantic writes, “Where Hoover’s doodles are abstract and geometric and Eisenhower’s concrete and pictorial, Kennedy’s are heavily textual—reflecting his verbal, cerebral nature.”
Maybe JFK is worried about Vietnam just a tad, or wants some sense of control by drawing figurative boxes around the situation at hand. Not to say doodles are Rorschach blots for our psyches or that every insignificant inch and corner of that Intro to Ancient Pots n’ Pans notebook is brimming with meaning. In fact here is my final verdict on the meaning of my ghetto napkin flowers: it mostly reflects the fact that it’s like, the only thing I can ever draw save for the androgynous stick figures and demented phallus. Still, doodling seems to fill some sort of mental void, and is a more socially acceptable way of spacing out without staring awkwardly into space in the middle of a vibrant cafe.
Oh and just as an aside: John Keats doodled flowers in his school notebooks too, thank you very much.
We do doodly do What we must muddly must Muddly do muddly do Until we bust bodily bust.
“and tango makes three,” a children’s book about two male penguins who adopted and hatched a penguin egg, topped the American Library Association’s list of most controversial books in America, joining the ranks of Huck Finn, the Golden Compass, and Perks of Being a Wallflower.
> complete list from the Economist
