January 2010
101 posts
Hugging Strangers
Walked out of the bank and in to a woman standing on the sidewalk crying. I asked her if she was ok. She said no. I offered help and she broke down and told me her husband is on his death bed with cancer. He only has a few days left to live.
I told her that I completely understand and that I’m just started my journey with a sick parent. We were meant to run in to each other tonight.
We talked about cancer treatments and the range of emotions we go through when a loved one is ill.
She seemed so alone and sad.
I asked her if she needed a hug. She stopped walking and hesitated for a second, but the moment I held out my arms, she hugged me really tight and cried a little harder. I told her that she wasn’t alone and that she will be ok, but it’s going to take a while.
We made a right on Michigan Avenue. I asked her if she wanted my number to talk if she needed to. she stared at me and asked me if I was real. I said “Miss, ‘m as real as it gets.”
You are such an awesome human being.
Underground
Ben Folds Five
I was never cool in school.
I’m sure you don’t remember me.Who the fuck are you?
Ben Fold Five, Underground.
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- Caroline Martin: i was hoping to have wonky dreams like the night before, but no luck
- Kurt Guenther: how wonky
- Caroline Martin: like, vivid
- Caroline Martin: but enjoyable
- Caroline Martin: elaborate tree houses and cute boys
- Caroline Martin: making tea for me and confessing their like to me
- Kurt Guenther: whoa whoa whoa, stop right there. I don't need to hear your sick
- Kurt Guenther: tree house fetishes
“What a stupid bunch of crap. The jump rope songs 10 year old girls make up are better than that. GA GA LALALA What is wrong with people.”
—My mom, on Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, which we all just listened to for the first time. I love my mom so much.
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I can't believe that Literature, History, Philosophy, Arts, Psychology, Sociology and the rest of that stuff are even degrees. If you're not intelligent enough to do the courses that matter, don't bother wasting your money on a candy-cane degree. These 'soft subjects' were invented just so that those on the lower end of the IQ scale could say they'd graduated university. The employers however, know that these degrees are worth nothing, and hire the more intelligent applicants that did real courses
What Bethlehems said. I have tons of engineering friends who are poor at communicating, and have an even worse sense of culture.
And coming from a former engineering student, I know that 90% of the crap they teach you is never going to be used in the real world anyways.
I’m pretty sure somebody was just trollin’, and successfully, I might add. However, I have to argue against you guys.
When you say, “shit you probably will never use again the rest of your life,” you are just as bad as this troll, except I assume you’re being serious. While us liberal arts kids probably won’t ever use calculus again, the math, science, and engineering majors are using that stuff daily. Most every course you take is important within your major on some level — and if it’s not important to you, why are you taking it and why is it your major? But that is neither here nor there.
This liberal arts vs. hard science bullshit has got to stop. There is use for everything in this world. While one thing might not be your cup of tea, it is someone else’s elixir of life. Let them live, okay?
Yeah, I know I was adding fuel to the fire. But I mean it when I say that 90% of engineering school crap is never really used in the real world; the professor I had for thermodynamics (the class that convinced me engineering is not my thing) said that the stuff he was teaching us isn’t used in that way currently anyway, and if you did need to solve some kind of thermodynamic problem, that’s what reference books are for. So why we had to take closed-book tests is (somewhat) beyond me.
I don’t have anything super against hard science, I’m a liberal arts major at a technical college, this one just got me a little.
I feel that. I actually wrote an article for RIT’s weekly mag, Reporter, about just that.
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“Take the number of people you think maybe kind of like you, have a crush on you — they do, they all do. Now take that number and multiply it by at least 4, probably 11.”
—Josh, a few months ago. RIDICULOUS but still makes me smile.
Born In The U.S.A.
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen - “Born in the U.S.A.” (Live)
I remember in high school one of my friends was looking for music recommendations and I asked him if he liked Bruce Springsteen. He responded that Springsteen was a jingoistic overly-patriotic asshole. If you weren’t familiar with his music you’d be forgiven for assuming this - in terms of things that are uniquely identified with America, there’s apple pie, baseball, and Bruce Springsteen. And the posters of the Boss leaping in front of an American flag don’t help much. But Springsteen is also a harsh critic of America, as well as a supporter of its ideals, and this is probably best exemplified in his indictment of U.S. treatment of Vietnam vets in “Born in the U.S.A.”
I’d say this song is one of the most misunderstood songs of the past 30 years or so (Ronald Reagan even tried to adopt it as a campaign song). What many people interpret as being an anthem for how great it is to be an American is actually quite the opposite. Listen to the words. He is angry. He is bitter. Nowhere is this more evident than in the version I’ve posted here, which I can only describe as white-hot rage. When he sings “I was born in the U.S.A.” he’s really singing “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I deserve better. I was promised better. This isn’t how America should be. It needs to be better.”
And songs like these are sometimes the most patriotic of all.
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run, nowhere to goslowly building a new appreciation for the Boss.
I blame my mom for giving me an aversion to his voice, but I have started to lighten up on him… especially since every time his name is mentioned, I think of my friend Hunter, who looks an awful lot like Bruce.
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Track 11
My bestest friend from middle school/high school and her boyfriend came to visit me these last couple days. Today I re-unearthed this CD that our friend had made for all of us, entitled Vivi’s Happy Hardcore Techno Mix. In 9th grade, I would have had to beg my dad to put it in the car’s CD player. Seven years later (!!) Dani and I sang along to some of the most obnoxious and ridiculous music in the world. Most of the tracks skipped constantly, though that may have actually improved some of the songs..
Here’s an oldie but a goodie from the mix CD. If you ever played DDR, you’ll know it as The Easiest Song On Heavy. For the rest of you, well, just shut up and stop stealing my lunch money, okay? I’m totally past this stage in my life.
Elenore
The Turtles
I’ve had this song stuck in my song since I saw Pirate Radio on Christmas day.
You’re my pride and joy, et cetera,
[…] get to know you bettah.
They rhyme “et cetera” with “bettah.” COME ON. How can you not love it.
3rd Planet
Modest Mouse
I held a party at my parents’ house in Maryland for New Year’s 2006/2007. The guy I was dating at the time had come to visit but spent most of the evening in the guest room upstairs, away from the party. I had fun hanging out with 20 of my best friends from high school, recounting our respective first semesters of college and playing Apples to Apples. Adam had brought a lady friend of his (a really sweet girl) to the party and he was genuinely happy the whole night sitting next to her.
I hugged him goodbye on my doorstep around 1:00am exactly three years ago and watched him walk off through my lawn with that girl. I remember I shouted something and he half-turned and smiled at me while shaking his head in his usual fashion. It feels like yesterday and a hundred years ago.
If I try hard enough, I can think of the real last time I saw him — there’s a small clump of eyeliner stuck between his lashes and a chin I haven’t ever seen clean-shaven before — but that is no longer the image that floods my brain like it did all of 2007 and 2008. Now it’s that half turn and smile, or the smirk he’s trying to hide while we all laugh and watch him as a stunningly accurate Holden Caulfield in a video from high school in the last minutes of 2006.
The Moon & Antarctica isn’t sad anymore. It’s a personal victory that I can still listen to it, and I don’t mean emotionally.
