we are QUIET we are LOUD: the best young writers and artists in america

that is the title of an amazing book i am re-reading. its an anthology of poems, essays, short stories, paintings, and photographs that won awards. and they're all by teenagers.
i know that i almost never publish reviews or recommendations, but there were a lot of essays in the book that i wanted to re-print here, and couldn't (because of copyright).
so, read the book.

i want to write this down before i forget

i want to document a feeling that children have, which i am rapidly forgetting and must not. it is the feeling of being undermined by what the grown-ups consider important-things like renovations and grocery shopping and tax returns-things that i could not comprehend and so they seemed pointless to me. i would show a grown-up a drawing that i had done, and they would gasp with totally fake admiration, which i saw right through, and then turn to the nearest adult and murmur something about verizon wireless or third cousins. it's a frustrating feeling, the feeling that your accomplishments are only minuscule acts and do not REALLY matter. what makes it even more confounding is that your parents' achievements and dilemmas and arguments seem just as unimportant and uninteresting to you. you have learned to draw a five-point star, who cares about invisible money? i am not saying that either children or adults are better, they are just very different-and forced to interact very intimately. neither really takes the other seriously, although they can love and admire each other. i am currently at an even more frustrating point where i know much of the stuff grown-ups know, and i am still not taken seriously. someday *i* will not take children seriously-and i am already beginning to. it is infuriating.

sometimes i just want to throw up my hands and yell at everyone

today is the first anniversary of al gores challenge to the united states of amewika to run on entirely clean energy in ten years. so far, we have done nothing.

wisdom of the children

i have a very young brother and (as many of you who have contact with young boys could guess) he is obsessed with violence and killing. so i asked him today, in light of my rather political past week (i went to DC), how he felt about gun control.
"do you think people having guns should be illegal?"
"yeah, yeah. i think they should take them away and put them in the museums."
and a spark of hope lit up in my eyes...

if you're a pretender, come sit by my fire.

in a previous post, i showed a kind of intense, serious attitude toward the value of creature comfort vs good deeds. my basic stance was that it doesn't matter if you yourself feel good in anyway, as long as youre doing good things to help other people, because the masses matter a lot more than just one person.
i would like to issue a retraction.
yes, it's important to be a quote-unquote "good person". but it's also important to be whimsical and magical and funny and happy and have your own unique perspective on life. otherwise, we just become robots serving one another. like my mom said- "you don't want to be a puritan" i think that perhaps this is where the concept of communism went wrong-it works great to give everyone their share, but you also need room for people to branch out and be different and independent, and to start their own things.
and, in the spirit of flight, i will include a recommendation for something enjoyable-
although it is a little childish, the book zorgamazoo , which is a fantastical fantasy written entirely in verse, is a whimsical delight and i love it.