on 9/11

"... what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. No one in [this] crew would ever be so nauseous as to try to get everybody to pray aloud or form a prayer circle, but you can still tell what they're all doing.
Make no mistake, this is mostly a good thing. It forces you to think and do things you most likely wouldn't alone, like for instance while watching the address and eyes to pray, silently and fervently, that you're wrong about the president, that your view of him is maybe distorted and he's actually far smarter and more substantial than you believe, not just some soulless golem or nexus of corporate interests dressed up in a suit but a statesman of courage and probity and ... and it's good, this is good to pray this way. It's just a bit lonely to have to. Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around ... part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America ... than it was these [people's]."
--David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster

math teachers with an agenda

Calculus Problem Hits Too Close To Home

April 26, 2006 | Issue 42•17

PULLMAN, WA–The analysis of formulae derived from the fundamental theorem of calculus had a profound and seemingly personal impact on Washington State University freshman Barry Feldman on Monday, teaching assistants in Feldman's differential calculus section reported. "There was something about having to consider multiple rates of change and their effect on one another that really struck a nerve with Barry. I've never seen a student flinch so violently at terms like 'increasingly negative curves' or 'derivatives,'" TA Melanie Peppers said. "As uneasy as the unresolved equation seemed to make Barry feel, the prospect of eventually arriving at a solution for it actually appeared to upset him more." Feldman was recently the subject of gossip among the faculty after he interrupted a lecture on increasing-tensor calculus by screaming that "enough is enough" and asking if the professor would "please just change the subject."
--The Onion, April 6, 2006

i hope

Congrats to Ether Hour on a great night at Zoe. I would come to their shows and keep them on the iPod even if they weren't my friends. The more I hear "I Hope," the more I love it.
---------------------------------------
I Hope
By: Jeffrey Anderson

My curiosity has earned me a chance to learn the hard way
Life can be so giving in that way
You there standing with your eyes closed (arms out) expecting all you wanted
You never thought about if you never got it
But now you’re getting older
Now you fear your window is closing on your fingers
And the lock is clicking
And the shades are drawn before your eyes

I should have had you walk out there on your own
I should have had you go out there away all alone

Damn my mind for feeling empty
Why couldn’t I be happy working with my hands or selling something
Keep me entertained with small talk and doing nothin’ fancy
A common occupation, and I’m satisfied
But not me. That’s never gonna stop me
Push me to my limits, expand like I’m elastic
But I’ve got no examples, so open up your eyes

I should have had you walk out there on your own
I should have had you go out there away all alone
Now I’ve got to take some steps out there on my own
Now I’m gonna follow some plan that I designed at home

the first!

Ether Hour releases their first album. Check them out at myspace or their website.

what should i read next?

http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/

#$*%P@! motor homes

"Boy, do I hate motor homes! ... they clog the streets and block the views -- and all so that some guy and his dumpy wife can eat lunch and empty their bladders without stopping."
--Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

the swell of clear water

"I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to the feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that."
--Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

grief

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death ... Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself."
--Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

estrangement

"There is this place deep inside where I feel I am connected to everything, not just trees and grass and dogs but buildings and stairways, rocks and sidewalks. It's a deathly quiet place that I guess I've never shared with anyone and probably shouldn't, a place that is cold sober when my body is stumbling drunk, another consciousness that sits still like an antenna in tune with some other part of the galaxy. It was this part of me that I wanted to bring to our wedding, a centered space from which I could send out my oaths. I imagined that this secret antenna was my connection to whatever eternity might be and was the part of me that Christy alone perceived and loved. It was that same magic timeless part of her that I wanted to marry. But in the dark of the motel room, I realized that whether I was married or not, no one would ever know all of me; my truest self would always be estranged and alone. I was incapable of expressing my limited screwball faith and I knew that, even if I could, I'd box it in so dramatically it would be trivialized. I began to feel the familiar swell of numbing anger."
--Ethan Hawke, Ash Wednesday

glass

"I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish."
----
"I hate it when people talk about twists of fate ... when it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be."
--Julia Glass, Three Junes

just enjoy

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time."
--Edith Wharton

accordian of time

"Time plays like an accordian in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note."
--Julia Glass, Three Junes

black and white for a penny

"They know all about it ... they've got it in black and white; they bought it for a penny at the church door. You can get anything there for a penny, in black and white, and nobody to see that you pay ... Put a penny in the box or not, just as you like; take your tract. There you've got it, in black and white."
--Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

girls and dopey guys

"I was way early when I got there, so I just sat down on one of those leather couches right near the clock in the lobby and watched the girls. A lot of schools were home for vacation already, and there were about a million girls sitting and standing around waiting for their dates to show up. Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they'd be bitches if you knew them. It was really nice sightseeing, if you know what I mean. In a way, it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would happen to all of them. When they got out of school and college, I mean. You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring."
--J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

open minders

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices."
--Edward R. Murrow

what i'm reading now

The Pleasure of My Company, Steve Martin
Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler
Maybe Baby, Lori Leibovich

broken heart mountain

"There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it."
--Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain

the mailman ran over my head

"If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation."
--Brady Udall, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

what i'm reading now

Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book, Bill Richardson
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome

It's good when there's nothing to watch on TV!

butt out

"There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions -- a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude."
-- Geoffrey Fisher