Tasting Roads

When I'm at school I judge how much time I have in the semester not by days, but by how many meals I have left on my meal plan. For instance, at the moment I have 150 meals left. I started the semester with 200. This means I am approximately 25% into the semester. Also, I would like to add that I do use almost exactly 200 meals throughout the semester (take or leave a few). When I was staying in Moldova I estimated how many times I would have to bathe, and used that as a measurement for how much time I had left.

Some of my favorite quotes (as of recent)...

(1)

"I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
(Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself."

{Act, 1, scene 2, lines 35-38, The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare}

(2)

"An honest man is always a child."

{Socrates}

(3)
"What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all round the sun.
And when we meet on a cloud,
I'll be laughing out loud.
I'll be laughing with everyone I see.
Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all."

{In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel}

(4)
"I got two hands on the sunshine
I got one foot in the grave
I got 25¢ in my wallet
And I'm feeling mighty lucky today.

My bones are made out of ivory
And my blood is made out of ocean waves
And someone stole my wallet
But I'm feeling mighty lucky today."

{Lucky Today by Cloud Cult}

(5)

"Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth the while. "
{Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West}

(6)

"I'm a connoisseur of roads. I've been tasting roads my whole life. This road will never end. It probably goes all around the world."

{From the film My Own Private Idaho}

Special thanks to Katie for letting me borrow her copy of Miss Lonelyhearts. I let Brad borrow my copy but he hasn't returned it yet. Last time I asked him about it he said that he tried to read it but it made him so depressed that he had to stop reading. I'm sure he'll get to it eventually.

This is a quick sketch of a possible duck animation I am going to tackle once this whale is all finished. The next part of the whale I need to work on is to perfect the movement of the tail (which will be incredibly difficult). Otherwise it is almost done.

Can't stop watching this commercial...

Speak easy,
Neil

This Is A Moment In Time

Super sleepy. I am reading in preparation for my American Literature paper that is due in a week or so. It is a literature class but the last two books we read relate directly to Sociology, Anthropology and Economics. We should be reading Melville and Twain, not Economic Abundance and the American Character.

The following are a few noteworthy passages within a sea of boredom (or exerts from American Studies in a Moment of Danger by George Lipsitz)...

- (pg. 219) "Some years ago, Gamboa pioneered the concept of "No Movies," staging scenes to make city streets look like sites of gang shootings or suicides in hopes of enticing local television news crews into covering events that never happened."

- (pg. 261) "During the 1960's, artist Andy Warhol explained his silkscreen prints of hundreds of identical Coca-Cola bottles as a tribute to American democracy because the millionaire and the pauper drink the same beverage: no matter how rich you get you can't get a better Coke."

- (pg. 276) "The literary critic Mikhail Backtin tells us that there is no such things as a pure monologue, that every utterance is part of a dialogue already in progress."

- (pg. 309) "Musicians who played with [Albert King] reported that sometimes he would correct their mistakes by slapping them in the face with one hand, and firing his pistol in the air at the same time with the other hand. Band members were often not quite sure if they had been slapped or if they had been shot."


The two girls that live a few doors down from me are having a loud fight. From the sound of it, one of them watched a movie that they were supposed to watch together and then proceeded to lie about not watching it. Please, remember to pick your battles carefully. Life is too short (and so is Danny Devito).

Speak easy,
Neil