MUSIC | P!nk - Fuckin' Perfect

Made a wrong turn, once or twice
Dug my way out, blood and fire
Bad decisions, that's alright
Welcome to my silly life
Mistreated, misplaced, misunderstood
Miss 'No way, it's all good', it didn't slow me down
Mistaken, always second guessing, underestimated
Look, I'm still around

Pretty pretty please, don't you ever ever feel
Like you're less than f*ckin' perfect
Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel like you're nothing
You're f*ckin' perfect to me!

You're so mean, when you talk about yourself, you were wrong
Change the voices in your head, make them like you instead
So complicated, look happy, you'll make it!
Filled with so much hatred...such a tired game
It's enough! I've done all I can think of
Chased down all my demons, I've seen you do the same

Oh, pretty pretty please, don't you ever ever feel
Like you're less than f*ckin' perfect
Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel like you're nothing

You're f*ckin' perfect to me

The whole world's scared so I swallow the fear
The only thing I should be drinking is an ice cold beer
So cool in line, and we try try try, but we try too hard and it's a waste of my time
Done looking for the critics, cause they're everywhere
They dont like my jeans, they don't get my hair
Exchange ourselves, and we do it all the time
Why do we do that? Why do I do that?

Why do I do that..?

Yeah, oh, oh baby, pretty baby..!
Pretty pretty please, don't you ever ever feel
Like you're less than f*ckin' perfect
Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel
Like you're nothing, you're fucking perfect to me
You're perfect, you're perfect!
Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel like you're nothing
You're fuckin' perfect to me...

Rilke On Entering a Profession

It is good that you will soon be entering a profession that will make you independent and will put you completely on your own, in every sense. Wait patiently to see whether your innermost life feels hemmed in by the form this profession imposes. I myself consider it a very difficult and very exacting one, since it is burdened with enormous conventions and leaves very little room for a personal interpretation of its duties. But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

~ Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Carrie Brownstein has a new band!

Carrie Brownstein has a new band, Wild Flag - which is made up of Carrie Brownstein, Mary Timony, Rebecca Cole, and Janet Weiss (yes, Janet does the drums.) As she wrote on the NPR "All Songs Considered" blog:

After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise. In fact, it was writing about music for NPR — connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community — that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical. I felt an emotional tie with my readers and with the bands and songs and scenes I was writing about and sharing, but ultimately it was not the same as playing or being inside of the song.

I have no desire to play music unless I need music. And as readers of Monitor Mix might know, I have very little desire to even listen to music by players who don't seem to need it, to want it. Otherwise, what is the point? About a year ago I started to need music again, and so I called on my friends and we joined as a band.

Chemistry cannot be manufactured or forced, so WILD FLAG was not a sure thing, it was a "maybe," a "possibility." But after a handful of practice sessions, spread out over a period of months, I think we all realized that we could be greater than the sum of our parts, not four disparate puzzle pieces trying to make sense of the other, but a cohesive and dynamic whole. At least that's our hope going forward. We're playing for ourselves but, of course, we'd love it if you listened.

How Handwriting Trains the Brain

Wall Street Journal article on how handwriting can train the brain.

Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.

It's not just children who benefit. Adults studying new symbols, such as Chinese characters, might enhance recognition by writing the characters by hand, researchers say. Some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.

That Kind of Love by Alison Krauss

Who would sell their soul for love?
Or waste one tear on compromise
Should be easy enough
To know a heartache in disguise
But the heart rules the mind
And the going gets rough
Pride takes the fall
When you find that kind of love

I can't help feeling like a fool
Since I lost that place inside
Where my heart knew its way
And my soul was ever wise
Once innocence was lost
There was not faith enough
Still my heart held on
When it found that kind of love

Though beauty is rare enough
Still we trust
Somehow we'll find it there

With no guarantee
It seems to me
At least it should be fair

But if it's only tears and pain
Isn't it still worth the cost
Like some sweet saving grace
Or a river we must cross
If we don't understand
What this life is made of
We learn the truth
When we find that kind of love
Cause when innocence is lost
There is not faith enough
We learn the truth
When we find that kind of love

Hiding Behind the Screen by Roger Scruton

Essay by Roger Scruton which discusses the socialization process behind online media such as Second Life, Facebook -- and of course, blogs.

In human relations, risk avoidance means the avoidance of account ability, the refusal to stand judged in another’s eyes, the refusal to come face to face with another person, to give oneself in whatever measure to him or her, and so to run the risk of rejection. Accountability is not something we should avoid; it is something we need to learn. Without it we can never acquire either the capacity to love or the virtue of justice. Other people will remain for us merely complex devices, to be negotiated in the way that animals are negotiated, for our own advantage and without opening the possibility of mutual judgment. Justice is the ability to see the other as having a claim on you, as being a free subject just as you are, and as demanding your accountability. To acquire this virtue you must learn the habit of face-to-face encounters, in which you solicit the other’s consent and cooperation rather than imposing your will. The retreat behind the screen is a way of retaining control over the encounter, while minimizing the need to acknowledge the other’s point of view. It involves setting your will outside yourself, as a feature of virtual reality, while not risking it as it must be risked, if others are truly to be encountered. To encounter another person in his freedom is to acknowledge his sovereignty and his right: it is to recognize that the developing situation is no longer within your exclusive control, but that you are caught up by it, made real and accountable in the other’s eyes by the same considerations that make him real and accountable in yours.

Michael Ruhlman Has Something to Say

Michael Ruhlman talks a little about the ideas he learnt from this book: Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham. He talks about how learning to cook our food gave humans access to more calories, but most importantly, it forces us to cooperate to prepare cooked food. It made it harder for us to be jerks -- because jerks will find it harder to get cooked food.

Had Something to Say - Cooking from michael ruhlman on Vimeo.

MUSIC | "My Immortal" by Evanescence

I'm so tired of being here, suppressed by all my childish fears
And if you have to leave, I wish that you would just leave
Your presence still lingers here and it won't leave me alone

These wounds won't seem to heal, this pain is just too real
There's just too much that time cannot erase

When you cried, I'd wipe away all of your tears
When you'd scream, I'd fight away all of your fears
And I held your hand through all of these years
But you still have all of me

You used to captivate me by your resonating light
Now, I'm bound by the life you left behind
Your face it haunts my once pleasant dreams
Your voice it chased away all the sanity in me

These wounds won't seem to heal, this pain is just too real
There's just too much that time cannot erase

When you cried, I'd wipe away all of your tears
When you'd scream, I'd fight away all of your fears
And I held your hand through all of these years
But you still have all of me

I've tried so hard to tell myself that you're gone
But though you're still with me, I've been alone all along

When you cried, I'd wipe away all of your tears
When you'd scream, I'd fight away all of your fears
And I held your hand through all of these years
But you still have all of me, me, me

POETRY | "The Decision" by Jane Hirshfield

There is a moment before a shape
hardens, a color sets.
Before the fixative or heat of   kiln.
The letter might still be taken
from the mailbox.
The hand held back by the elbow,
the word kept between the larynx pulse
and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air.
The thorax of an ant is not as narrow.
The green coat on old copper weighs more.
Yet something slips through it —
looks around,
sets out in the new direction, for other lands.
Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed.
As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road:
it cannot be after turned back from.

POETRY | "A Brief for the Defense" by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.


~ from Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005)

POETRY | Throw Yourself Like Seed by Miguel de Unamuno

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don't turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what's alive in the furrow, what's dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.


~ Miguel de Unamuno
(from Roots and Wings, edited and translated by Robert Bly)

The Caffeine Test

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating Site

Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol

I miss you.

We'll do it all
Everything
On our own

We don't need
Anything
Or anyone

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel

Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads

I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

All that I am
All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see

I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things will never change for us at all

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

I Need Some Lightness in my Reading

I have wanted to read something by Louise Erdrich for a very long time. I finally picked up Shadow Tag from the library recently and I'm several chapters into the book -- but you know what? I'm in no mood to finish the book.

I am feeling a little sore about yet another book started but unfinished -- but I refuse to dwell on it. The premise of the story is the disintegrating marriage between an artist and his research scholar wife. One day, the wife discovers that the husband has been reading her diary. Sick to the core of her being, she begins to write deliberately things that are meant for his eyes, while keeping another diary in secret.

The subject of this book is too taxing on my psyche right now. There are just moments in your life when you need some lightness and hope in the things you take in. I find the characters in Shadow Tag self-centred, cruel and deceitful -- and I have no patience for that right now. I need some hope in my reading. Some joy and kindness, please -- before I lose hope in humanity?

Acoustic version of "Help I'm Alive", by Metric

The year I was in Dubai, I read little. Any reading I did was for work and there was little pleasure in that.

Metric's "Help I'm Alive" was one of those songs I played on a loop on my iPod nano. Something about that little plaintive voice that sang about being afraid, overwhelmed by life and the heart beating like a hammer - that resonates with me.

I tremble
They're going to eat me alive
If I stumble
They're going to eat me alive

Can you hear my heart beating like a hammer?
Beating like a hammer?
Help, I'm alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer
Hard to be soft
Tough to be tender

Come take my pulse, the pace is on a runaway train
Help, I'm alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer
Beating like a hammer

If you're still alive
My regrets are few
If my life is mine
What shouldn't I do?
I get wherever I'm going
I get whatever I need
While my blood's still flowing
And my heart still beats . . .
Beating like a hammer
Beating like a hammer

Help, I'm alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer
Hard to be soft
Tough to be tender

Come take my pulse, the pace is on a runaway train
Help, I'm alive, my heart keeps
Beating like a hammer
Beating like a hammer

If you're still alive
My regrets are few
If my life is mine
What shouldn't I do?
I get wherever I'm going
I get whatever I need
While my blood's still flowing
And my heart still beats . . .
Beating like a hammer
Beating like a hammer
Beating like a hammer
Beating like a hammer

Help, I'm alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer

Song by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Do not grieve.
Do not grieve
This pain will cease.
Friends will return
Wounds will heal

Do not grieve.
Do not grieve.
Day will dawn.
Night will end.
Clouds will burst.

Do not Grieve.
Do not grieve.
Times will change.
Birds will sing.
Spring will come.

Do not grieve.
Do not grieve.

~ Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Translated by Daud Kamal

The Stability of Ease

From Tricycle

"When we are well with ourselves, then whatever happens, it really doesn’t matter, because we have equilibrium and stability. We don’t feel any lack of confidence. If not, we’re always on edge, waiting to see how someone reacts to us, what people say to us or think about us. Our confidence hangs on what people tell us about how we are, how we look, how we behave. When we are really in touch with ourselves, we know ourselves beyond what others may tell us. So these three qualities—a good heart, stability, and spaciousness—these are really what you could call basic human virtues."

~ Sogyal Rinpoche

Falling Slowly

Sometimes you hear a song - it's beautiful, and you love it, but then you put it aside and thought nothing of it after some time. Later down the road, something happens. You listen to the song again, and suddenly this very same song is all that you're playing on your iPod day after day.

This song, according to Glen Hansard, is about trying to fix something that's broken, but you can't fix it, so you wish it well and send it on it's way.

Ever been there?

Lyrics | Glen Hansard - Falling Slowly lyrics

Off to Seattle

Off to Seattle this Wednesday to meet friends. :)

I'll be bringing the final two volumes of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy with me. It's at least an 18 hours flight, so I need something fast-paced to get my mind off the cramped space. I usually don't sleep well on the plane. This is so much agony.

Life - Time to Get One

Life has unfortunately thrown me into a tailspin lately. I suddenly find myself in a relationship.

Life as I know it - is now running on a different set of rules. :\