Time is a great teacher... Unfortunately it kills all its students!!

quote: Hector Berlioz

What if you got old prematurely? No, no, just wait! Hear me out! I mean, what if you were young, like in your late teens or twenties or even in your thirties, and you woke up one morning with the body of an eighty year old?

What would you do?

First thing first? PANIC!! After that, try to find a cure. Of course, its infinitely likely that there is no cure. You're doomed to be old until you waste away from the illness (oy, if you're young and you suddenly become old, I'm willing to call that an illness).

Okay, so you're now old until you die, which will presumably be sooner then you may originally have expected, now that you're old and all.

Will your loved ones recognize you? Will they believe you? Even if you know the deep secrets that they only entrusted to you, do you really have faith that they will know you? They'll probably send you to a crazy house, or a group home.

Then not only will you be out of your element because you were young and suddenly you're old, but now you'll be surrounded by peers who grew up two or three generations before you did! You'll be an outcast in the nursing home!! Old men will hit on you (or old ladies, to be gender sensitive) and little old lady cliques will gossip about you in corners, assuming that you cannot adjust the volume level on your hearing aid and suddenly have super sonic hearing that allows you to hear through walls and across great distances!

Ooh, now that I think about it, I think I'd raise hell in a place like that! I'd be the rebellious little old lady! It'd be all kinds of fun! If no one believes I'm me, then whats to stop me from getting away with murder? (figuratively. Maybe.) I'd hijack electric wheelchairs and rob the other old folks blind by cheating at poker!

I think I'd definitely play at some serious online dating! BWa ha ha! Imagine some poor hot young fella meeting me for the first time and finding that his hot date is an eighty year old! (naturally I'd be fishing for men in their prime, so that'd make their horrified realization all the more delightful)

I'd be the bane of every assisted living home.



And you know what? I'd say SCREW YOU, CREDIT!! I'M DYING SOON ANYWAY!! And run up the charge on every credit card I could get my wrinkly old hands on. TAKE THAT, RECESSION!




Post of the day! I SO want to do stuff like this in my hometown. It's like an ART ATTACK!!!
http://www.xmarkjenkinsx.com/outside.html

To sleep, to dream, to do nothing

Failure.

The term that any one human heart might hate most in all of this world. I suppose it's defined as trying and not succeeding. But I have a fear that it is worse than that. Much worse.

I fear that failure is when you don't do something that you can do and want to do. When you tried your best, you can hardly call it failing. You tried. You gave it all you had. But when you are completely capable of doing something, and you don't, now that's failure.

The fat man that claims he tries and still stuffs his face.

The would be author that excuses her lack of hard work for a lack of inspiration.

The student who just didn't feel like doing her homework.

How many more of those stupid little phrases can you come up with that apply to yourself? I should make a list of all mine. Except... Well, what for? Does it seem to you, as it seems to me, that it makes no difference that we admit to these? We still continue to fail.

You have failed to do what matters. And the worst part is, it's always something that we want. I want to finish my books. He wants to be an accomplished artist. She wants to be skinny.

How do we bear to be seen in public when we have failed to do the simple things that would give us personal satisfaction?

I hate it. I so hate it. And I fear it. There is nothing more terrifying.

There were five great fears in the world, for me, before I feared failure, and they are listed thus:

• One was my irrational fear of roaches.

• Another the only natural fear of the dark, paired with an imagination like my own, which always made for me terrors in the night.

• A third was the obligatory fear of fear itself (for I often frighten myself with my own imaginings and dreamings of fearful things).

• A fourth and rather ridiculous fear was that of zombies. Suffice to say I watched a scary movie.

• A fifth was the absolutely not ridiculous at all fear of The Thing. You know, that eerie alien that kills somebody and then takes their shape, just until it infects its next victim? I was far too young to see that movie when I did.

But my horrible new fear blows all the other ones away.

I fear failure by inaction. Why won't I do something!?





Link of the Day! http://david-mcmahon.blogspot.com/
I've always enjoyed Davids posts and you can find all kinds of neat new blogs through his Post of the Day posts. Enjoy!

The sudden cessation of stupidity

"I was writing a paper about creativity, or the lack there of in
school systems... and was dealt a heavy serving of irony"
- A Harried College Student (and a friend of mine)

It's true, you know. Creativity really does seem to be going down the drain. People don't have time or motivation or the resources. Or the desire.

Why? What's so wrong with the clever, creative things?

I suppose they're expensive. AND you'll never make it in the field... Is that it? Despair? Is that our problem? The lack of hope is slowly killing us. Yes, it can kill us, this lack of creativity in the world. No, not physically. But I suspect physical death is a mercy in comparison to death of the heart and soul.

Is it worth a physical life if all that once justified that life is gone?

Picasso once said that "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up".

Maybe that's what's happening to the world. We're growing up, and growing out of the artistic era. I suppose many people take up art again once they've retired, but if the world is only just growing up, then how long before we start cashing in on the social security?




Link of the day: http://www.clublaugh.com/es-items/712.swf
woah. Trippy.

Tooth and Claw: an artistic red-eye special

For those who don't get it, the three-liners are haiku. Some form of Asian poetry. The only rule is that the first and last line must have five syllables, and the second must have seven. That also might tell you why they're so cryptic. It's okay, I've given you translations after each verse.

I got my nails done
Fancy black nails with white tips
Glittery between

(I got my nails done at a salon today! first time evAR! The nails are black and the tips are white. On the border between black and white there's a little line of silver glitter! Uber pretty.)

Long nails pained digits
I write in terms of typos
So awkward at first

(My fingers HURT! Getting fancy nails is NOT a painless ritual. There's sanding and burning chemicals involved. I keep making stupid little typos because I'm not quite used to typing with long nails yet.)

Home now inspired
I go now to my paper
Embrace with sharpie

(When I got home I was suddenly all inspirey! I really need an outline for my book so I'm not writing blind. So I pulled out the world's largest type-writer roll- it's a huge roll of 4 1/2 foot wide white paper. I just rolled out about ten feet and started making a GIANT story web with a big fat sharpie.)

My dreams are homesick
I beg them return to me
That I might nurture

(I've pushed my writing and art aside for some time now because of school. Now I'm trying to get back to them, make them a priority. I want to finish what I've begun.)

Tadaaaa! I hope you enjoyed it! I wrote it at 4 am, hence the title red-eye special.

So long, and good morning!




How about a link of the day? http://fmylife.com
Somehow hours pass as I read about all the miserable stuff that happens to other people.
Should I feel bad about that?

Fantasy is a fantastic thing, if you've got the imagination for it.

The Ancient Mayan Culture absolutely fascinates me. Who were these geniuses that rose to such a formidable peak of civilization so much faster than anyone else? What mysteries lie behind this people! Honestly, if I only had one chance to travel back in time (clearly unrealistic, seeing as no one travels back in time, so far as I know), it would be then, and there!

WAIT! I've got it! If Doctor Who were to come and pick me up in his Tardis (a time and space traveling phone booth), I could ask HIM to take me to visit the Mayans! Naturally the Tardis would bridge any language barriers (yeah, it does that too). I’d meet them, talk to them, see their temples, discuss their fascinating calendar with them. As long as they weren’t the "kill first, socialize later" types. Being as Doctor Who is very clever, I’m sure he’d find a way to convince them not to sacrifice us to their god(s) right off the bat.

Then again, I doubt that they would try to sacrifice us, strange foreigners, to their god(s). They are thought to have preferred children, because they were considered more pure. If adult Mayans were not pure enough for human sacrifice (which involved the tearing out of the heart: yeeAUGhhhhh....) then me and the Doctor would certainly not qualify. They had a bit more respect for their god(s) than that.

The reason I say ‘god(s)’ (rather than ‘gods’) is that they had many gods that kind of blended into one. They were all sort of bondable to the other gods. Like tinker toys. The center of their collection of gods, sort of the main god, or the brain of the pieced together god tinker toy tower of deities, was the maize god (for all you normal folks out there, maize is corn)

Now the Mayan calendar? The Doctor would probably know what was up with that, and he might even know if the world really does end in December, 2012. But I can’t make sense of it even now, with wikipedia to guide me.

Perhaps my visit would help me to better understand the Mayan calendar, as well as the Mayan people. A people shrouded in that much mystery have GOT to be interesting to have dinner with (seeing as Doctor Who often gets to have dinner with famous folks like Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, I see no reason why we would not end up at a Mayan dinner table).

Ah, it’s such a shame that I have to maintain such geeky gall as to wait for a timelord to drop by in his Tardis and invite me to join him on a time traveling adventure before I can see the Mayans in first person.