Room to Think

Fun Fact: The ancient Greeks used to have spoken word poetry a sport in their Olympic games. As an English major, I never took the chance to really study spoken word poetry...sometimes known as slam poetry, or performance poetry. But even that's not quite right. Spoken word poetry really means that you're breathing life into the words on a page. I always appreciated spoken word--I loved watching poetry slams. But since I never considered myself "good at poetry", I tended to steer away from the classes I had a hunch I wouldn't do well in. That means I missed out on some pretty badass classes. Those poets know how to express themselves. They know how to connect.  They know how to make their listeners feel. "If I should have a daughter, instead of "Mom", she's gonna call me "Point B." Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I'm going to paint the solar system on...

OH GOD. Chipp Kidd is HI-lay-ri-ous. Click the video to watch him wiggle. This was the first video I clicked on in my explorations today, and I think it has just jumped to the top of my "Favorite talks of all time" list. Mr. Chipp started off his talk telling me that he is a book designer for...wait for it... ALFRED A. KNOPF. That's where my love of this man and his talk began. I said before that I'm taking Kate Trueblood's Editing and Publishing class this quarter, and she's kicking my butt with all kinds of overwhelming information about all the steps necessary to publish a book.  It's as if the second she steps into the classroom, she brings with her a history and alternate reality that is the publishing sphere. 5 weeks ago I was a creative writing senior with only a few ideas of the kinds of jobs I could secure with my English degree.  I had a general statement prepared for those who asked me what I was going to do with my creative ...

exactly.   It's 1am, and I ought to be sleeping, but for some odd reason my brain is going a million miles an hour.  Maybe that's the remnants of my coffee this morning, and my chai tea in the afternoon.  I bet it's the chai. It doesn't keep much caffeine to keep me going.  Since I typically only drink water--very rarely will I drink juice, even...the once-a-month chai concoction is enough to keep me WIDE awake at night. Anyhoooo.  Hoo!  >.<   or rather: O_O Let me stress that it is late.  But I wanted to show you all how Easter went! I had a whirlwind weekend that started off with me dropping off my boss in Lynwood on Saturday(egad, 1.5 hrs in a car with my boss!) and then, based on a text from my mom en route, continued my southern migration from there for an Easter weekend at home. Here are the results! Easter Chick, Ninja Turtle 'stache, Hipster egg, Panicked egg, Dead egg, Volleyball, Blue eyes, Bunny, Naruto nin...

Good morning! Today's TEDtalk Tuesday is by that hipster man up there, Joe Sabia.  He's known for things like videos like " Tupac in Kazakhastan " and " A History of Lyrics that Aren't Lyrics ". He's a technological storyteller...which means that he tells a story about the evolution of stories in under 4 minutes . And, he uses his iPad. So I'll keep my summary short so you can actually watch the video. He begins with the book. "The book was the king of storytelling. It was venerable. It was ubiquitous. But it was a little bit boring...In its 400 years of existence, storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device."  (about 10 secs in) Then he shows how a man named Lothar Meggendorfer   started the revolution that led to the evolution of how we tell a story. "But the way that humans tell a story has always evolved with pure, consistent, novelty." (3:15) And that's what I'm going to ...

A week ago (practically), I suggested you all watch Shawn Achor's TEDtalk on Changing the way we achieve happiness .  I also said I was going to put up a Part 2. Due to an etiquette dinner, a volleyball game, a career fair, a group project, two days of dressing up professionally, and an incredible amount of lazy time laying in bed, I could not effectively finish this post until now.  I sincerely apologize for having a life.  =) But upon refreshing my memory on my last post, it occurred to me that I didn't really do his talk much justice.  Here's a better summary, written at a more sensible hour: Shawn Achor is CEO of Good Think, Inc. where he researches and teaches about positive psychology.  Shawn's work concerning positive psychology questions why there are those positive outliers in his psychological research. For Shawn, that dot off in the upper left-hand corner of your graph is an above-average person, not a measurement error.   ...

I'm blogging from a classroom today ( A classroom, not the classroom), in response to this post that my professor, Brenda, put up on the class blog. The class itself is "Online Writing as Literature", which is how I ought to refer to the course, instead of saying "oh yeah, I've got a class on blogging"  in that drawling sort of voice that implies an eye-roll, or lifting my eyebrows expectantly, as if to say, "you jealous ?" With this class, we're attempting to establish the importance of blogging in a "literature" sense, and I'm not exactly sure what that entails.  Let's see what wiki says .  (That's right, I'm calling up wikipedia during a midterm...you jelly ?) Wiki says: Literature is the art of written works , and is not bound to published sources.   The word "literature" literally means "acquaintance with letters" . The two major classifications are poetry and prose . It is u...

You know, I really seem to be on a happiness binge with these TEDtalks--or maybe that's just TED. Either way, here is your TEDtalk for today (I started this at 11pm on Tuesday, it still counts!) This guy's name is Shawn Achor, and he "accidentally" broke his sister's arm when she was five in order to save her from being in the path of an imaginary sniper bullet. He still has yet to be thanked.  =) He also applied to Harvard on a dare...and he got in.  O_O In all seriousness though (kinda?), he has some hugely important messages to share with all of us: "...if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average."--on research it's possible to be a male medical student at Yale named Bobo who has leprosy AND menopause.  (5:54) and most importantly: The formula for success is wrong. (9:11) "If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier....

I'll just leave this here. Yep.  Right in the middle of the Red Square fountain.  Honestly, do snowmen have NO decency? I had planned a longer post for today, but I'm too excited from the snow I can see falling beneath the streetlights outside my window to write much (and much too far behind in homework). So...just know that my weekend ROCKED (despite having my pants freeze to my legs), and the snow just topped things off. I'll leave you with this tidbit of trippyness my friend Cirque mentioned to me: Go outside when it's dark and snowing, and try to focus on one or two snowflakes at a time. It's trippy, and you're likely to end up on your butt in the snow if you do it while you're walking. Enjoy the view. Happy snow day!  =)

"It was more as if she had brought them up—perhaps through indifference or through laziness or even through some kind of possessive cruelty—with an imperfect sense of right and wrong . It was as if they could never know when they were being good or when they were being bad." -on a young Sir Gawaine and his brothers  in T.H.White's The Once and Future King, pg 214  This quote comes from one of my favorite pieces of literature--one of the few books on the "classics" list that I've picked up and really, really enjoyed reading.  I'm more of a reader of contemporary young adult novels of the fantasy/sci-fi realm ( The Hunger Games , The Ender Universe, His Dark Materials , The Lost Years of Merlin ...and, Twilight , unfortunately.  But it was a necessary part of growing up.)  So The Once and Future King sorta fits that fantasy/coming of age novel feel, minus the "contemporary" bit.   I read this book when I was a freshman in high school...