Haiti, mon pays.

I was going to blog short today, but I'm so disillusioned with everything and I need to explode.
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I can't believe people.

We take too much for granted. Tonight, some 14-year-old girl with bleach blonde hair and a jonas brothers t-shirt will alternate between her english homework and facebook and her phone, her only light being the gentle comforting glow of her computer, with a bottled water on her desk, twee pop blaring. she hasn't talked to her parents all day. she's not even aware of the thousands upon thousands of Haitians who are sleeping near the crumbled remains of their houses. The thousands upon thousands who sleep tonight in a mass grave next to people they never know, and never will know. While I watch the constant coverage on ABC. well all i see when I see ABC is an alive, American human body who is there, RIGHT in the center of the disaster, idling and talking about how horrible it is instead of helping people. what the viewers won't see is the reporter going home after he's finished reporting, going home to the 14-year-old with the bleach blonde hair and the jonas brothers t-shirt.

i see people on facebook, joining groups that swear that 'for every person that joins, we'll donate a quarter to haiti!1' and '$1 TO HAITI FOR EVERYONE WHO JOINZ'. these groups are all lies, hoaxes to create gigantic facebook groups. to boost their egos and take advantage of this horrible, horrible situation. and people think that they're helping. they've helped, and they don't need to do anymore because they're sure that they have a quarter going to Haiti. I'm sure we're losing tens of thousands of dollars of aid through this.

it hit me when i was eating dinner. I had finished my rice and my roast chicken, and all I had left was my salad. It hit me. And I ran downstairs. My mom asked what was wrong, and I told her that I couldn't eat salad while millions of people were without water or food. it hit me. that it was haiti, but not just haiti. i did a project on world hunger for health class, and i know that at least 1.02 billion are hungry right at this very moment. that was just a statistic until now. now i can't eat or drink or go to the bathroom without feeling guilty.

so after it hit me, i went downstairs and i just played piano. i envisioned the moments directly after the earthquake. the silence, the suffocation under the bricks. the song on the piano started off real quiet, it came out of nowhere, complete improvisation. i imagined myself crawling out from the rubble to the chaos above. it got a little louder, but it was still quiet. disbelief. and then the realization comes, the music gets louder. and then the aftershock hits, and the song hits its climax. and then near silence again. this isn't a dramatization, this is what i saw as i played the same theme on the piano louder and louder and louder. it's going to haunt me tonight, and tomorrow, and for a long time.

ignorance is bliss is bullshit. some things we NEED to know, and what we need to know is that we need to help. Not just Haiti, but Africa, India, the thirdworld. I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday, and he told me that if every person who earned over $120,000 gave 10% of their earnings to charity, and something like $80,000-$100,000 gave something like 5%, and everyone else gave like 2%, poverty would be eliminated. i'm not entirely sure if those figures are correct, but it was something close to this that he told me. the people making $120,000 would still have $108,000, the people making $80,000 would still have $76,000. they'd still live comfortably enough. but we can not give. there's something intrinsic about human nature that prevents us from giving more than pennies to people who need it. and i feel sick.

there's an advertisement with someone screaming "THAT'S A LOW PRICE." on my TV right now. it's for staples. and the Haitian people pray quietly for help. 'Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu, aidez-nous. je vous en prie."

donate.

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Shortening, Sweetener, and to the Melting Point

i'm blogging in blue today. spicing things up a wee bit. like cilantro.

i have to be brief today because i still have a good 100 pages to read. x_X_x

essentially, i had a track meet that went on for way way way too long today (3.5 hours), and i'm extraordinarily exhausted. i didn't run well, but overall the team ran well.

and that's all i feel like saying today. i would say that i'll compensate tomorrow, but i have a math meet and a bunch of homework that will keep me occupied until like, 10. so tomorrow's gonna be short as well. friday however...

but i still love you.
unless you're a guy.
then we're just bros.

(song of the day: the most trustworthy tin cans by maps and atlases)

~-~

and a moment of silence for haiti, please.

Day 12

pages left to read by thursday: 170
songs on dumbledore's army's setlist: 25
distance i'm running at my meet tomorrow: 400m ≤ x ≤ 1200m
days until teen jeopardy test: 49
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sorry self from 8 years ago, it's time to embarrass the crap out of you.

11-30-01
Dear Diary,
I've got Emily back on my side. I'm going to Stephen's party at Jokers tomorrow... I'm going to a Kirkwood Corners [at the time, the nursing home where my mom worked] party. I have a special relationship with Henry. He's so cool! We have a dance routine called "Smoogahoogavich". Don't tell anyone I said this. I think Emily is the most wonderful person ever. We are about to enter a new month. December. Yippee! Tony Hawk is what I want for Christmas. I think I'm a martian. Because whenever I look in a mirror... my face is shaped like a martian. A.M. places like school are bombing [?]. I feel like going on strike so bad about that. I NEED NOW 8 (cd)!! I want to get baptized. I hate Sam/Cody. No interest in them at all. Brand new gel pen. You like? I gota new book light. You like?
---

Today was one of the best days I've had in recent memory, primarily because I discovered that my crappy keyboard could be kicked down an octave. which is fantastic news, because the lower register on the keyboard sounds so so so much better. I can actually play most of my own music on there if it's an octave lower, so i might not need to spend $900 on a digital piano... yet.

I also realized that since Dumbledore's Army has a show on Saturday, I might be able to play a couple songs. I have in mind a cover + one of my own songs, probably All Day Long. My friend Eliot recommended that I gig more, and this is a perfect starting point.

And I also realized that my cover of Anyone Else But You by the Moldy Peaches is at 16,000 views. not sure how that happened. someone must just go to the page and refresh it twenty times a day or something for lulz.
--
universe effuses
through a tiny little hole
where it concentrates
and concentrates
and enter's michael's soul.

la da, la da, la da.

the cat sent out letters
with a simple strangeish statement
that the kids wrote on
the walls and all the
counters and the pavement.

la da, la da, la da.

yes, lyrics are, at a glacial pace, popping into my head. these are to the middle section to that song i've been toiling over for some time now. i need some for the beginning and the end and it could very well be finished.
--

That's about it pour aujourd'hui. I need go watch TV history, potentially the last American Idol season premiere. whoohah!

~-~

Spontaneous Bachelor Rant, other crap

short blog today. *everyone rejoices*

My day: i have 220 pages to read by thursday, i found out my dog has a benign tumor, and jeopardy wasn't on due to some stupid senatorial debate. verdict: bad day, despite the fact that my dad provided me with a homemade, delicious chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich.

currently, i'm waiting for robert's new video to load and in the background i can hear some horrible cover band doing horrible covers of Chicago songs on the Bachelor. Which is a show in which thirty materialistic, rich 25 year old girls swoon over a successful 35 year old guy, pretending that they're in love so that they can get air time on TV. practice their acting skills, make it look like they're actually viciously competing. stir up some nonexistent drama, lie about their backgrounds, lie about others backgrounds. for the almighty dollar. "I've never loved anyone more than I love him. (even though I've only known him for a week.)" "My heart's been completely broken. (it hasn't.)" fake, fake, fake.

all of this while he cheats on every single one of them off-camera and gets his heart broken in the end because no one really loves each other on the show and it's all an act.

GREAT tv.


^would be a better show^
---
look up the poem 'cartoon physics part 1' by nick flynn. it's pretty awesome.

~-~

i'm not tired, i'm not tired, i just sleep.

well, today was alright. i saw the hangover for the first time, and, despite the fact that i've heard almost every single quote from it through either facebook groups or conversation, it was still quite entertaining. i ran slower in the 300m than i wanted to, but i got a brownie melt at mcdonalds and an everything bagel at the bagelry and life felt a little better. despite the fact that i couldn't find the trashcan at the bagelry and looked like a gigantic idiot, because i was essentially staring at it the whole time...

...i suffer brainfarts far too frequently.

---
while at the bagelry, brandon, kelsey, emma, and i discussed brandon not running spring track. we argued that he's been running throughout his high school career, and that he should finish with it. he argued that he'll never have another chance to be on a baseball team. despite the fact that he would just be a manager and wouldn't actually play on the team. we also argued that we wouldn't be able to hang out any more (brandon, kelsey, emma, and i have been running buds since last year's spring track season) since he drives us everywhere. he argued that he had another group of friends that he hasn't gotten to hang out with on the baseball team due to his track schedule.

i all at once understand where he's coming from and don't understand where he's coming from. running gets pretty boring and repetitive, and i can understand that he would want a change in pace. but he's making a huge sacrifice, and he would essentially be letting the whole team down by not running, since he's been running since fall, his freshman year. he's also gone through the most improvement out of any runner in the history of our school. he brought down his 5k time from over 30 minutes to just over 20 minutes. so why not finish what he's started?

it's ultimately up to him, not us, and i just realized i've written far too much about this, and most people reading this don't even know who brandon is.

---
i really want to get this goddamn song finished. i've been toiling and toiling over it and i still don't have it finished. it evolves enough, but it takes too long to evolve, and there need to be more interesting parts in it. i don't even have a name for it, ffs. maybe i'll go all post-rock and give it some long-blown name that has no relevance whatsoever to the song. like 'today is wednesday but yesterday was thursday'. or 'Pour Champagne et les autres'. or something. STUPID CHRONIC WRITER'S BLOCK.

i'm done for today. if you got to this point of today's blog, give yourself a pat on the back. i'm certainly impressed you got this far. here's a picture as your reward:

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Maps & Quesadillas & Lots of Links

Today has been immeasurably boring. The two places I've been today are at the piano and the computer. More development on a song, but that's about it. i would have liked to have seen Youth in Revolt today, but i'm not quite 17 yet and too imp to sneak into an R-rated movie. alas.

I found out that Dumbledore's Army's suddenly playing a show next Saturday. This is mildly concerning to me, since a lot of the same people are apparently attending, and it's going to be more or less the same music that we played the last time we played there. Which is still majorly Harry and the Potter covers. I don't want us to stick just to being a cover band, and I don't think any of us do. But we've been finding it relatively difficult to write songs. We have one good, full-length one penned, but that's still a long way to go before we can just play our own material at a show.

I just watched half of the documentary "Walmart: High Cost of Low Price" and it left a bad taste in my mouth. That's all I want to say about that. Here's the first part of it on YouTube, you can follow the rest of it by checking the related videos.




Luckily, there's ashens to make the day suck a little less:



And there's a new video of mine to make the day suck a little more:



Maps & Atlases 2005 EP "Trees, Swallows, Houses"

8.5

While math-rock isn't really my thing (This Town Needs Guns is essentially the extent of my listening to the genre), I picked this album up because I had a few extra bucks in my iTunes account and I had heard a few good things here and there. Little did I know I was picking up a masterpiece.

Prepare to have your head spun. "Trees, Swallows, Houses" starts off with what feels like 30,000 notes being played in the span of 2 seconds. "Everyplace is a House" is technical, dynamic, and most of all, infectious. The band leads the listener from one musical thought to the next seamlessly, all the while maintaining an immense energy that is held back at points and then unleashed at others. This is more or less the way the rest of the album passes, but it's undoubtedly a great introduction of what's to come.

The album doesn't let up its ferocity until 'The Ongoing Horrible', a simple and short song that contrasts greatly from the first two. Here, Dave Davison's (yes that's his name, don't poke fun now) vocals shine as he plays an acoustic guitar in an unusual fashion and an occasional twinkling of electric guitar fills both channels. Sonic bliss. video here:



After this brief respite, the album lunges at you again for a bit, this of course being an enjoyable, fun, intense, unpredictable, exciting lunging. The great thing about this album is how consistently in-your-face it is. The most frantic part of the album shows up with "Stories About Ourselves", and this is where the musicianship between the quartet feels the strongest. In order to play a song like this, you need to know exactly what the other members are doing, and they shine in this aspect. A sicknasty bassline that puts Flea to shame and a sweet handclap breakdown makes it a personal favorite.

At the end of "Songs for Ghosts to Haunt To" the album finishes with a hush: the band exhausted, fingers cramped from incessant tapping, hands worn out from smashing drums to pieces. The band all must be on their way to carpal tunnel syndrome.

The album works so well due to its brevity. If this album was full-length it'd feel like a little too much. The songs are very similar, and repetition would start to sink in at some point. But you never feel that on this album. Instead, the ideas still remain fresh by the end of it all, and you walk away satisfied.

If you're looking for some high-energy, fast music that's not grating on the ears, you should get this album. It gets me pumped.

---
On that note, I'm gonna go to bed early. I need to make sure I get 8 hours for my track meet tomorrow, and it's been taking me an hour and a half to fall asleep.

~-~

Activivty of the Paranormal Variety

I just saw Paranormal Activity, and I was pretty impressed. I think there could have been a little more build-up leading up to the final scene, but otherwise it was decently freaky. The alternate ending was better than the original by a long shot, it legitimately made me scream while I was kind of unphased at the original ending. Damn you, Stephen Spielberg.

I put sugar on Brandon's pizza and blamed it on Kelsey. He almost poured water on her head as retaliation. She's mad, and we're now looking for another horror movie to watch, without much success.

I still haven't managed to conjure up my video yet, and I have a mere 3.5 hours to do so. Everything's been filmed, but the editing's gonna take a little bit and I doubt that I'll have it ready by the midnight deadline. Which will mean a punishment. The problem I'm going to have with making a video every week is coming up with decent enough ideas so that they're still quasi-entertaining. That's another reason I stopped making videos: after the autumn sessions, i was completely drained of ideas. I was looking at my older videos and I noticed that the first videos were decent and then the later videos were not-so-decent. I was doing the same thing over and over and over.

We're no longer looking for a movie, now we're just kind of... sitting. It feels kind of weird blogging while I'm at someone's house, with other people, in the same room. But that's just determination, right? But since I'm at someone's house, that gives me license to cut this blog short! WOO!

I'll embed the video on this post if I think of it/I have the time. And album review tomorrow. Candidates are Wolf Parade's first album and Maps and Atlases first EP. Did I already say that? I think I did. But it's the truth. DA TWOOF.

~-~

The philosophy of trespassing

this is something i started thinking about today. i was taking a shortcut from my school to my house behind a healthcare facility and an apartment complex. and whenever i take this shortcut, i'm always worried that an employee or resident there or someone's gonna see me and tell me that i'm trespassing. so i started thinking.

trespassing is essentially saying 'you can't exist here. please exist somewhere else.' which, when you think about it, is kind of silly. if i'm not doing anything harmful, what deep-seated pain am i causing by walking behind the back of your building? i'm just innocent matter moving through space-time. i guess it boils down to people being excessively possessive of what they own, an intrinsic flaw with humanity... i wish i could dig more into this tangent, but that's where it ends for me.

in other news, i figured out today that the one thing i'm good at is parallelism. in english we did these little things. "the grumpy old man, who didn't have the heart for rollercoasters, who didn't have the legs for walking around all day, and who CERTAINLY didn't have the patience to sit on the kiddie rides with his grandchildren, looked on yearningly as his wife and offspring headed off into the theme park." and "there was something about the letter, its faint scent of perfume, its tears around the edges, its frantic handwriting."

it's getting dark and i need to play some music. *runs off*
*an hour passes*
alright, i'm back. i managed to hybridize two of my songs, but that was about all i could accomplish. because my throat problem is still very existent and still very bothersome. the worst part is that i have hyper salivary glands, so i'm swallowing spit like every 10 seconds. if anything, it feels like it's starting to worsen. it used to just kind of an irritation, but now it feels like my throat's being paralyzed every time i swallow. and last night, i got 5 hours of sleep like i have for the last 3 out of 4 nights because i've been coughing incessantly. my parents called the doctor's already, but they just said it was a cold symptom. bull. shit.

my mom just checked, there are white spots on my tonsils. so it's probably either tonsillitis or strep. woop.

in the meantime, i'm gonna do the single calc problem and the french exercises that were assigned to me, fight through the pain to eat my stuffed pepper, and then go to bed early enough so that i can manage 8 hours of sleep. AIE.

~-~

Post script: this makes absolutely no sense:

Hamster Butt Disease

^ I swear to god I overheard this being said in study hall today. ^

The majority of today was spent writing music, because that's all i can seem to do as of late. I can not write any lyrics for the life of me, and i think it's due to the fact that i'm not so... angsty as i was before. Although I have come up with some brief bits of lyrics, I'm struggling to find where they would fit in anything I'm working on right now. But in any case I'm developing a long song and several, much shorter songs right now. Two songs are done, one's an instrumental and the other's a long 3-part thing. If I work hard enough, I could probably get something out before the end of the school year at this rate.

Other than writing music, I had a pretty miserable speed workout (10 hill repeats, had to keep jogging inbetween. x_x), and I got the schedule for the AP exams. Nerves are wracked. I hadn't worried about the tests that much until now. I'm gonna study my face off over the next few months, starting in a couple weeks, which probably means that the quality of anything i post on the internet until the tests in may is going to suffer exponentially. which is poopy. yes. i said poopy SO THERE.



^three books that i should probably own. since i'm a dummy.^

i'm only gonna do album reviews on weekends from now on, i've determined. this is due to the fact that i have a decent amount of homework every night and this kind of takes up a decent chunk of time as isssss. I'm pretty sure I'll be reviewing Maps & Atlases' 'Trees, Swallows, Houses' and Wolf Parade's "Apologies to the Queen Mary".

TTFN

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gettin' down wit da sickness

now playing: lyon by pinback

*cough* i'm sick, like i seem to perpetually be. it's an odd kind of sickness, though. it hurts when i swallow, and i had a random bloody nose this morning. wah. despite this, today was a decent day. i managed to have several epiphanies during my 2-day practice AP Chem test, so I might have scored decently. and i have absolutely no homework, which might leave some space for a proper vlog today on my channel. this will be the first time since... october of 2008 sounds about right.

What's partially inspired me to get back into it is the fact that my friends at school are starting to get into it as well. I brought up 3kewldoods yesterday. Robert's video came out very well and he seemed to like doing it, and Rob expressed in his blog (robbennett34.blogspot.com) that's he also pretty amped to start doing so. He's been watching some vlogbrothers and 5awesomegirls and loves the concept of collab channels. He also blogged today about people not exactly understanding his newfound interest with the youtube-o-sphere, which is exactly how i felt when i started making videos.

I'm gonna keep it short today, because I don't really have all that much to talk about other than that. Nor do I really want to do an album review today because I exhausted myself yesterday with the Atlas Sound review. S'bye! *mexican wave, somehow*

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