Statistical impossibility!

News Flash! 83% of all statistics are made up on the spot!

posted by Holly @ 7:05 PM 0 comments

Old poem

Outside
fat, bursting bubbles of rain are pouring down
each drop heavier than the one before
till everything is drowned
utterly
by the dull weight of rain.

Displeased,
the cat sits on the window sill
glaring through the glass
at all the damp destruction.
Tail flicking, angrily, back and forth

Slap, slap, slap

against the wall.
She eyes the rain carefully
and seems to say, “if I
were running things, by God,
I’d teach the rain a thing or two.
But that will have to wait –
just now it’s cold and wet outside.”

I’m smiling as I turn the page
of that book I’d meant to read for six whole months.
A subdued fire crackles in the fireplace
warm and merry inside where it’s dry.
This moment – nothing special
completely ordinary –
is something, still.
6 billion other people share
this planet with me. Yesterday,
Tomorrow and
Today –
they belong to all of us,
But
this moment –
this is mine.

That's from two years ago, at an Amnesty International coffee house. Whenever I have a lot of time to kill, and nothing in particular to do, I go through my old stories and poems. I suppose that's somewhat egotistical, but I always think it's amusing and often intriguing to go back over what I was thinking. Similar to rereading a diary....

Labels: writing

posted by Holly @ 5:10 PM 0 comments

Roll down your windows!

Early Application essays are due on Wednesday, and I am glad I didn't do Early. I was pretty set on applying Early to Swarthmore, mainly because I wanted to get into a college early on and not worry about anything for the rest of the year, but then I fell in love with St Andrews..... it doesn't offer an Early application option, so for St Andrews alone I've pushed all my applications back to Regular. And it feels great! Of course, I'll be fairly miserable on December 20th, when I have to get all my supplements in the mail, but I'm working on all the essays already, or at least pondering them every moment of every day, so I think I will be on top of that.

My classes ended at 11:30 today. How sweet is that? I lolled around campus for about fifteen minutes, and was home by 12:15. You know what I've started to notice recently? People in their cars are so detached from reality. I see zero other windows rolled down - everyone is inside their air-conditioned bubble, with their radio or iPod playing, set on their destination. Isn't that one of the ideas that Crash presents, that people don't actually interact with each other till they crash into each other, and have to get out to exchange information? (I haven't seen it yet). Well, that's kind of sadly true. But the weather is so perfect right now! There's no place better to roll your windows down than here in Los Angeles, and play your music just loud enough that it's not obnoxious, but so you can hear it over the hum of the engine, which you can't hear with windows up.... the air is right at that spot between warm and cool, where it's perfectly comfortable, and you get such an amazing breeze. Roll down your windows, people!

In On the Road, Jack Kerouac says that Los Angeles is a cruel and impersonal city. I thought that was interesting and somewhat ironic, as he lived in New York, which is the city that has the New York minute, to emphasize how fast-paced and stressed New Yorkers are. That's not to say we're not stressed in Los Angeles, but I think we're more laid back and chill, not to mention we've got sun all year round and long, warm days. It's the perfect place for people to be happy. Sure, Los Angeles may be big, but it's big and sprawling and lazy; New York is tall and abrupt and overwhelming. But for all that I disagree with Kerouac's statement that Los Angeles is an unfriendly place next to New York, I was surprised to realize that there's more than just a grain of truth when he says that it's an impersonal city. It is definitely impersonal. Friendly, but still impersonal. I don't think New York is necessarily any less impersonal, but still. Los Angeles is a big city, and too many people drive around with their windows rolled up, totally detached from how wonderful and beautiful their city is.

posted by Holly @ 4:27 PM 0 comments

Virtual stress relief

Thank you, whoever made this wonderful, wonderful page.

I'll write a longer post later this week. Right now I'm just feeling drained and somewhat nonexistent. I spent about 9 out of the last 24 hours writing a paper for AP US History (on Kesey and Kerouac and how they were the emblems of their eras), 8 hours at school trying to get from class to class and just survive, and about an hour and a half on transportation and laughing. Not to mention 20 minutes of daydreaming, and an hour of Law and Order, SVU. Now my brain is clamoring for a long, restful night, and it looks like a promise to myself I might be able to keep.

A day-brightening picture:

It's the beach at Selinunte in Sicily, last February. Endless and overgrown and beautiful, it might almost be undiscovered were it not for a dozen ancient temples, covered in weeds and flowers and now completely one with the surrounding Sicilian oceanside.

Labels: Italy

posted by Holly @ 6:55 PM 0 comments

RSS Feed

You can now subscribe to the RSS feed on my site; the link is on the right hand side if you scroll down a bit.

posted by Holly @ 6:06 PM 0 comments

Little known facts

Dolphins have bigger brains than humans, and (next to humans) the second largest brain-to-body ratio of all known animals. Barnacles have the largest penis-to-body ratio of all known animals.

posted by Holly @ 5:25 PM 0 comments

Why bother pretending?

Whenever we have an interesting discussion in class, or I hear someone say something puzzling, I make a note of it in my journal so that I'll have something to write about if I blog that day.

Today's topic: why pretend to be monogamous, even if we aren't? Not just in an angsty, drama-ridden soap opera way, but biologically. We talked about it today in Bio, and it was fascinating. We're not the only species that sneaks around behind its mate - apparently a few scientists recently did some paternity tests both in a preschool and in a community of songbirds. Sad to say, but 30% of the tested children and baby birds were not their father's offspring. Yet the mother remains with the father, and the father thinks the baby is his. In the case of the songbird, the father leaves if he finds his mate cheating.

So if animals are so prone to cheat, why think of ourselves as monogamous? In the case of humans, it's because we want the support and stability of a relationship, we develop emotional bonds with our partner, we need help raising the child(ren).... how much different can it be for songbirds? It's difficult to prove if they have emotional attachments, but definitely the mother bird will need help raising the baby birds - it's got to be hard work to build a nest and feed four or five hungry baby birds without a mate. So they pretend that their mate is the father, and it's all good (of course, the male is off mating with as many females as he can, too).

Looking at it with respect to genetics, the male is cheating to make sure his genes stay in the gene pool; meanwhile the female may get a wandering eye because she sees other males whose genes may make for stronger, better offspring. Rather than lose her mate by openly being polygamous, she secretly mates with the other bird, and remains in an apparent monogamous relationship.

The thing is, I think that we associate relationships and cheating with humans alone - when we look at an animal that's not as big-brained as us, it's surprising to think that they have the same dramas as we do. But it's all genes, the same genes that are telling a bird to find a better mate without leaving its partner are also attracting people in relationships to someone else. Yet we'll keep on insisting that we're monogamous, as will the songbirds. That's what we've evolved to do best.

posted by Holly @ 6:40 PM 0 comments

Three important Nevers

Last week I received some marriage advice from a big, burly taxi driver, who also advised me to shop only at Walmart, and I found myself listening carefully, although when he asked if I was married I answered with an over-emphatic "NO!"

1. First, never argue about money
   
2. Never say "what if" - just go ahead and do it, or else don't think about it at all.
   
3. Never go to bed angry - after a fight, talk it out.

He seemed so proud of his wife and of their 30-year marriage. "She's the one with brains, and I'm the one with muscle," he said with reference to her PhD; he himself hadn't gone to college. Somehow they ended up together, and according to him, they've been living by these three guidelines for all 30 years, through ups and downs. He said a gypsy had told him, but I imagine that's a little far-fetched. However that makes it rather exciting and wonderful: an old, withered woman gives him this advice, which has helped him to hold onto a woman who he's sure is far above him.

I wrote down the advice as soon as I got back to my hotel, before I forgot anything. It seemed like one of those rare, great pieces of wisdom you find in unexpected places. And who would I be to ignore morsels of wisdom presented to me?

posted by Holly @ 8:48 PM 0 comments

(Brief) Photo journal of the last week

Labels: travel

posted by Holly @ 10:52 AM 0 comments

UNCREATIVITY!!!

Aah! I'm uncreative. That's the problem right now, is that I keep having bursts of bloginess, usually when I'm far away from pen and paper, and I think out a witty paragraph or two, or sketch out a blog article in my head, as I watch the countryside go by (can we talk about how in the last week I've spent about 3/4 of my waking hours in a car?), and by the time I sit down to blog, I've lost interest in whatever I was going to write about. That's the problem with working ideas over. They get tired of being stuck in my head for more than an hour, and just wander off.

Ho hum.

WHAT IS A BEACH WITHOUT SAND?? Think about it. That's why you should vote.

Random. I was thinking about my dad and his work - political science. He used to say that it didn't matter if a person didn't vote. That person is one grain of sand in a beach. But think. What's a beach without sand?

Hours in a car. It's frying my brain.

The fall colors are absolutely spectacular. People up here say that they've hardly changed color; they're only beginning, still mostly green. But it's the very first time I've seen them, and I'm in love. I could live here. I could definitely live here.

Colleges I've visited, in order of preference: Middlebury, Swarthmore, Bard, Reed, Sarah Lawrence, Goucher, Hampshire, Bennington, Haverford..... I think that's it. And to add to that list, colleges I won't visit before I apply: Macalester and St Andrews.

afl;ekmadms,dk...... more or less my thought process right now.

posted by Holly @ 8:46 PM 0 comments

I still exist!

So much for posting every day..... but in my defense: COLLEGE SEARCHING. Today I went to Sarah Lawrence and Bard, both stunning, both artsy and sciency and charming and whimsical and close to New York but surrounded by the beauty of the countryside..... tomorrow is Bennington, the day after Middlebury, then Hampshire, and then Wellesley (which I still can never spell on the first try), but I'm mainly checking that out to see a great friend from Italy.

I'll post some pics of the campuses in a week when I'm back home. They're gorgeous, and if I were deciding on appearance alone the decision would impossible. I liked Bard the teeniest bit more, so it may be that I actually end up replacing Sarah Lawrence with Bard, whereas if I hadn't seen the campuses I would have applied just to Sarah Lawrence. Despite a two-hour (NEVER ENDING) campus tour at Bard. Actually, I snuck away before the tour was even over, because I was so tired of campus-inspecting for the day.

Seriously, we've been getting lost at every turn. It's not that I'm a bad map-reader, per se, it's just that the roads are confusing and when you're on them for the first time when you're on a tight schedule, it makes for something of a stressful drive. But beautiful nonetheless, in this rolling, lush countryside. Very unlike the rolling golden hills in California, with granite and lava deposits sticking out of the hills at all angles. I'm not sure which I like better. It seems like it would be easier to declare that New England countryside is prettier, because it's greener and has its dramatic seasons (the trees are just turning red!); but California has such a distinctive beauty as well, and it's that dry, wilder kind. Very much part of the west, away from the lush New England lawns. An impossible decision, honestly. They're both so uniquely stunning.

But countryside is vastly eclipsed by academics, of course, which will be the ultimate decider. So far: Reed, Macalester, Swarthmore, St Andrews, Sarah Lawrence, Bard. And yet I'm far too exhausted to think about which to go to any more tonight. That shall be saved for next April, when I have to decide which college to accept. So in the meantime, goodnight.

I'll try and at least write twice a week. That'll be my secondary goal, and on less hectic weeks I'll still aim for a post a day. Cheers!

Labels: college

posted by Holly @ 5:15 PM 0 comments