a prediction

as everybody in our spoiled-rotten first-world country knows, we are in the middle of a huge technology boom. those who can afford these shiny new toys are doing absurd things like talking to someone in europe whom they have nothing to say to, while writing to someone in texas who they have nothing to say to, while pretending to drive a car, while driving a car, while listening to music from the seventies on a music player the size of a cracker, while *making delicious new lunches in under two minutes!*. this hilarious age of multi-tasking and tech-consumerism probably started because of the (ooh!) new millennium; everyone wanted to stop writing about legless robot maids and start making them.
however, i don't think that this stuff is going to last very long.
you see, there are two groups of people who rely on this new technology: frazzled grown-ups who are
a) oober-excited about it, and/or
b) think that it makes their already crazy lives easier.
then there is my generation-the quote unquote "txt generation", who are unimpressed but use the stuff anyway, out of boredom. i think that once the older generation (the ones who think they need this junk) die off, and the younger generation get more mature, the flashy metal wonders will be put away to collect dust. sure, we'll still have things like the internet and cell phones (because we have rapidly re-designed our lives to rely on those things), but we won't still buy the latest "smart" phone to impress our friends. at least, that's what i *hope*.

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.

born in

this is a really long ballad that is too long to reproduce here, so i will just give you a link for it:
here.

this makes me very happy.

i just got the greatest comment that i ever remember getting. it tops even "you look like someone's grandmother on acid." my brother met a little girl in the park who had a really cool name but i won't write it here. anyway, what she said was: "do you play the guitar? [no] oh, you look like someone who plays the guitar." yay!
also, she said her brother was named junior after martin luther king jr.

something my mom pointed out while we were listening to the weavers.

do you know the song "if i had a hammer"? chances are (if you have one ounce of coolness) you do. well, i was wondering the significance of the hammer and the bell, but i just found out: the hammer represents communism (hammer and sickle), and the bell represents the freedom of america (the liberty bell). so, what the weavers are really saying is-"what we really want is not the totalitarian, corrupt communism of the russians and the chinese, but the fairness of communism AND the freedom of democracy. anyway, i thought that that was pretty nifty.

aha! there she is.

in a previous post, i talked about i hate how when people say, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" they just mean your job. so, i have found exactly what i want to be when i grow up.

i was sitting on the beach, just sort of hanging out, when i caught sight of a woman. she was standing right above that downward slope where the waves start coming in. she was wearing a tie-dyed blue beach cover-up that had a slit for her leg which went all the way up to her waist. she her hair was grayish-white and so short that it clung to her skull like a knit cap. her skin was tan, but it was clear that she hadn't worked to make it that way. she was standing there, doing tai-chi with the wave blowing around her dress and imaginary hair, and i thought-"that's what i want to be when i grow up."

apple

imagine a thunderstorm. a really bad one, with wind and darkness and light and broken cable lines. you suck your teeth in annoyance-you wanted to go shopping today, and the rain is ruining it. so boring. nothing to do but lie around the house. and because of the broken cable lines, you can't even watch tv. ugh.
now go back two thousand years, and imagine that you are hiding in a cave, desperately praying that this one isn't the one that will end the world. you are only 150 moons old, you thinkscream to the god of the sky. not ready to die yet. not yet. your infant old daughter screams. shhhh, you tell her. shhhhh. it's going to be alright-but you don't know that it really is. you don't know that the golden lion will win the battle against the inky snake this time. trees are falling down. the water is moving faster than you have ever seen. it could easily be the end of the world.
weather is currently the only force of nature we have yet to control, but we are the masters of it in that we understand it. we understand the system of evaporation and precipitation, that rain is just a way of purifying water and putting it back where it came from. we understand that hail is frozen water, and not people in the sky throwing stones at us. we are no longer afraid.
what i find amazing about the story of adam and eve is how keenly predicted it is-the fall of simplicity and superstition thru knowledge. notice correct predictions from the story-right now, the thing people most fear is each other. religious leaders are in a frenzy to stir up SOME kind of faith among people, usually ending up looking crazy and violent. and also, people arguably know too much.
here's the funny thing about life-no one has made the rules beforehand, so we have to make them up as we play. the rule that hasn't yet been made up is when we know enough. the prudengnossisseco (word i just invented for the divide between knowledge and wisdom) has not yet been chalked up.
p r u d e n g n o s i s s s e c o

i like that word.