count the stars
I know... so horrible of me. Here's another chain mail piece.

I just can't think of anything to write....
I'm on chapter 5 of Aunt Julia and liking Amanda's idea more and more. Sparknotes.. my old friend..

Hmm.. there was another battle of the page we can get in the football program.

Umm.. working on cleaning up my stuff and preparing for the trip.

My computer is creating lots of problems. GRRRARGH!

fire dance
Can I really expect comments? No, I guess not, since I don't really write anything.

You put us to shame Amanda :P

The last two nights.. I'm so happy... I finally remember dreaming. I haven't felt I've been dreaming in so long.. but I remember now! I can even kinda remember some clips of my dream last night!

Not much else has been going on...
We're cleaning and preparing for the trip.. We leave the 15th for two weeks.

I finished the Metamorphosis book. Now I need to finish Aunt Julia.. or work on the college journal.. something else before I go.

Hmm.. I can't think of anything else to write.. *sigh*

Chain Mail With Meaning

From Mer



TO MY CHILD

Just for this morning, I am going to step over the laundry, and pick you up and take you to the park to play.

Just for this morning, I will leave the dishes in the sink, and let you teach me how to put that puzzle of yours together.


Just for this afternoon, I will unplug the telephone and keep the computer off, and sit with you in the backyard and blow bubbles.

Just for this afternoon, I will not yell once, not even a tiny grumble when you scream and whine for the ice cream truck, and I will buy you one if he comes by.

Just for this afternoon, I won't worry about what you are going to be when you grow up, or second-guess every decision I have made where you are concerned.

Just for this afternoon, I will let you help me bake cookies, and I won't stand over you trying to fix them.

Just for this afternoon, I will take us to McDonald's and buy us both a Happy Meal so you can have both toys.


Just for this evening, I will hold you in my arms and tell you a story about how you were born and how much I love you.

Just for this evening, I will let you splash in the tub and not get angry.

Just for this evening, I will let you stay up late while we sit on the porch and count all the stars.

Just for this evening, I will snuggle beside you for hours, and miss my favorite TV shows.

Just for this evening when I run my finger through your hair as you pray, I will simply be grateful that God has given me the greatest gift even given.


I will think about the mothers and fathers who are searching for their missing children, the mothers and fathers who are visiting their children's graves instead of their bedrooms, and mothers and fathers who are in hospital rooms watching their children suffer senselessly, and screaming inside that they can't handle it anymore.

And when I kiss you good night I will hold you a little tighter, a little longer. It is then, that I will thank God for you, and ask him for nothing, except one more day.............




On a happier note.. the fireworks look beautiful tonight.

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY EVERYONE!!!

drops of water
My parent's came home Sunday. It's a lot more stressful now.. but eh, good to have them home safe. They brought me some maple candies and Katie got some 'Life is Good' shirts. Mom also bought Tom an EMT bear. She does that... yeah. It's cute...


To clear up a small amount of ambiguity, for fear of incorrect thoughts, the someones mentioned in the previous post are school kids. Yeah...


I'm at about 3891 words right now... Let's see.. need to write my conclusion and abstract. Gotta fix two accounts in my bib... and.. hmm... oh darn, gotta do those note cards. Anything else? I need to do some major revisions.. but at least I have a copy or whatever.

I really like the FAU library and this class. It was so great to hang with friends and just walk around and go at my own pace and do whatever I felt like doing whenever I felt like doing it. Wish I could've hung with other kids more though, ones that didn't have history and didn't hang in the library. :(

Today made me happy. It rained today. ^___^ Jeanna and I were crossing from Algonquin to the library.. and it starts to pour! My bag fell apart and all my [11] books fell out! It was so bad... but she helped me carry them over to the library. Wow we were in hysterics.. it was so funny! We were so soaked within 2 minutes. Once I got all of my books dried and set up, I went back out to play in the rain. Natalia, Kim, and Shelly came out too and we danced in the rain then wandered back to the computer lab to... ask some questions about MLA... *cough*walkintherain*cough*

I jumped in my first puddle!!!!!! ^________________^


I had so much fun! For some reason the rain just made me so happy today.


My paper sucks though. Majorly.


There are no more band practices for me... That's kinda not good... Though the next 3 Mondays we wouldn't have it anyway...


I haven't been very talkative to anyone really... Just don't feel like holding a conversation.
Sorry for the silence.

random ramblings
Well.. someone has been making long updates... so I guess I'll follow the trendsetter.

Badluckbadluckbadluckbadluckbadluckbadluck.

The bestest cookies are snickerdoodles. Especially Miriam's!

I've had Katie start working on building a site. Actually teaching her some html!


I forgot what else I was gonna say.... oops.

Hmm.. I'll update again when I remember!

Wishing You Were Here
Sorry.. It was funny!

Your Homicidal Rampage! by crash_and_burn
Your name:
Weapon of Choice:	Coke bottles
Your Favorite Target:	People from Florida
Your Kill Count:	1,145,180,483
Your Battle Cry:	"Yo mama!"
Years You Spend in Jail:	3
How Much Money In Damages You Cause:	$32,414,668,503,028
Your Homocidal Insanity Level:: 2%
Created with the ORIGINAL MemeGen!

"The silence of the phone didn't hurt as bad.... now that you've given me part of your heart and soul." ~NGE
Today is just an upsetting day. Just is.

I do not share in the happiness and excitement of school having ended. The end of junior year. I really don't feel either way about it.

What was one step worse then how I was already feeling... mph. I told them I didn't want my grade. Told them I didn't want to know. Should've told them again.

Failing the freaking class. I don't get it. Science is a strong subject of mine. I knew most of the stuff. But no, I have to freaking fail the exam.

I think my body just collapsed as soon as I stepped out of the room. I feel very ill. And exhausted, so tired.


This has been the theme song of my life for a month or so now: Hooray for Evanescence!

11. Whisper

catch me as i fall
say you're here and it's all over now
speaking to the atmosphere
no one's here and i fall into myself
this truth drives me into madness
i know i can stop the pain
if i will it all away

don't turn away
[don't give in to the pain]
don't try to hide
[though they're screaming your name]
don't close your eyes
[God knows what lies behind them]
don't turn out the light
[never sleep never die]

i'm frightened by what i see
but somehow i know
that there's much more to come
immobilized by my fear
and soon to be blinded by tears
i can stop the pain
if i will it all away

don't turn away
[don't give in to the pain]
don't try to hide
[though they're screaming your name]
don't close your eyes
[God knows what lies behind them]
don't turn out the light
[never sleep never die]

fallen angels at my feet
whispered voices at my ear
death before my eyes
lying next to me i fear
she beckons me shall i give in
upon my end shall i begin
forsaking all i've fallen for
i rise to meet the end


Atop all this, I return to my world online to receive this:

You have received an official warning from the Neopets Team for violating the Neopets Terms and Conditions.The Trading Post is for trades only. It is not for guild ads, shop ads, showing off presents, or for a gallery. If you continue to break the rules, your account will be permanently frozen. To see a list of Neo Rules, please visit http://www.neopets.com/chatrules.phtml. Please do not reply to this NeoMessage.

For that damn MSPP (TCG) I assume.
Lauren, sign on soon so I can lend to you and get rid of it.


Some people seem to have a problem with my desire to not talk or be with people right now, but I needed to get out of the house. I went to a movie by myself. So?

I saw Van Helsing. The death of Dracula was not the pinnacle it should have been. But it was a pretty good movie.

Mom.. had a major problem with my going out by myself. Not like it's much different with people.. they just sit with you in the theater. And there're at least 2 police men. And I swear it's like a soccer field there, can't even tell it's dark.

She... yeah.. day isn't going well.

Absolute Brilliance.
Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by In These Times
Cold Turkey
by Kurt Vonnegut

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

-------------------------

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

-------------------------

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!

I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.

Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.

During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.

Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

-------------------------

And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball.

Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:

I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.
Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.

If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.

What could be simpler?

-------------------------

My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.”

How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.

So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

© 2004 In These Times


This came from my sister. But before that it was a page you can find here.