What I Can Tell You About Seattle by TAO LIN

There is this article in The Stranger right now by some crazy poet about what he thinks of Seattle. You should seriously read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

• But it makes me think that Seattle is from the future, because I feel like in the future people will strive for existential despair, for more fulfilling and purer kinds of existential despair, in the same way people in Brooklyn strive for an apartment closer to the L train. This makes sense because existential despair is usually talked about in books and people in Seattle read books more than people in other places.

• People in New York City eat at Taco Bell a lot; people in Seattle are knowledgeable about not mixing food groups.

• When I make myself think concretely about Seattle, I get an image of a 12-year-old Native American boy reading a Sherman Alexie story collection in a Starbucks and it's raining outside, then I seriously think, "The harsh reality of growing up in Seattle. Seems bad. Hard."

• I feel that if I moved to Seattle, I would stop writing completely, not use the internet, and do something "insane" like dedicate my life to looking at barnacles very closely but without microscopes or any other magnifying device.

• I feel like most people in Seattle have "given up on life" due to a comprehensive knowledge about existentialism but in a "good" way that doesn't feel bad at all.

• When I think about Seattle, I think about people who are very professional and clean and intelligent going home to apartments where everything is in Helvetica font. When they take off their pants, they have choads.

Body of War

I've been a little behind in my podcast watching, so it was just this morning that I saw Bill Moyers interview the people who made a documentary called Body of War about a guy named Thomas Young who was shot while fighting in Iraq and is now severely paralyzed. They showed some clips from the movie during the interview and there was this one part that really got to me where mothers who had lost their sons in Iraq were touching Thomas' face and telling him they were so glad he he was alive and Thomas' own mother was crying and talking about how overwhelmed she was and I started crying on the bus. It wasn't the first time I've cried on the bus and it probably won't be the last, but still. I don't think about the war enough.

Grin and her boyfriend are a band

Have you seen this: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=360628804

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Let's Hear It for the Libes

I think it's National Library Week this week. Or maybe it was last week. I'm not sure, because it's kind of ridiculous to have a National Library Week. I mean, I try to live every week like it's library week, right?

Anyway, I subscribe to some library blogs and they've been listing all these crazy facts about libraries in celebration of NLW. Some of them are kind of interesting; like, did you know there are more libraries in the United States than McDonald's restaurants? WOW!

But some of the facts must be randomly generated from some old-ass list, because here's one I saw today:

"If the cost of gas had risen as fast as the cost of academic library periodicals since 1990, it would cost $3.00 a gallon to put fuel in your car."

Yeah. I'm pretty sure the average price of gas around here is like $3.60. Not quite as strong an argument as your McDonald's fact. Get with the times, ALA.

A designated celebratory time period I can get behind is National Poetry Month, which is this month.

In honor of NPM, here's one of my favorite poems:

Psalm

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down --
That they are there!

    Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass

    The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

    Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

    The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

--George Oppen (1965)

I Got Pooped On

Nothing makes you ponder the chaos/order of life like being pooped on by a passing bird. If I'd left the house seconds later or earlier, the poop would've missed me. But no, I left the house when I did and I got pooped on. Does this happen to everyone at some point in their lives? It does, right? I mean, at least most people, right? It's so random, but it feels personal.

My Review of the Glow in the Dark Tour

Kanye West's ego is out of control.

My Review of Superman: The Musical!

I have seen every single show Darrell's done at Encumclaw (or, really, every show since college, I think). Superman: The Musical! was not my favorite, but it did have the Best Performance by a Male Actor. The kid who played Superman (who had a funny name, but I don't remember it now) was fantastic! Just amazing.

One funny thing about the plot: The show was written in the 50s or 60s so it had a lot of anti-communist stuff in it, which got changed in Enumclaw's version to anti-Canadian stuff. It didn't make a whole lot of sense, but definitely added to the wackiness.

One reason you wish you'd been there: They had a raffle and gave away the telephone booth where Superman changes.

And one more thing: It got really hot in the theatre and I had to take my sweater off.