Attempted!

I've started about 5 different posts now and thrown away each of them. Well except for this one. This week has been a bit stressful on many levels, not just academically, which is usually the case. The 4am fire alarm going off in my building resulted in me wanting to crawl back in bed, and then sitting in my place and watching out the window to see when the fire truck would show up. Roommate was smart and exited the building.

In college I did the same thing once, except that after about 5 minutes I started to smell smoke. This was when my brain told me, "maybe you should check outside, hmm?" so I did, and the entire hallway was full of smoke. By this time everyone else had left the building, so I walked out into the hall and to the main staircase. It looked like the apocalypse had struck. (well not really but in my mind it seemed like I was the only one left and the zombies had taken everyone, but not until after a bomb-filled and flame-thrown all-out war, in the dorm stairwell) There was trash and a light grey dust everywhere, and dust was in the air, mixed with a lot of smoke....

I made it outside unscathed and joined the non-zombie, non-burnt-to-a-crisp students huddling in the cold. It turned out that some students had gone off to college not knowing how to use a microwave.

Maybe my danger-dash mechanism doesn't work. It might be good to check on that. On many levels. Perhaps being distracted from everything by everything else makes it difficult to hear what God and everyone else has to say to me.

Intentionality used to be a key part of my motivation for anything that I did. There needs to be more of it though. Lots more of it. Lately it seems this is missing, perhaps from purposeful squelching to protect my own heart, or from leaving off at whatever has succeeded in distracting me because I am afraid I will miss out on something great.

Fun thoughts for the rest of your week.

I am a huge fan of street art, artsy graffiti, and urban murals, etc.

This is a short and interesting commentary on one girl's art and message in Paris.

Photo of the day: In honor of the rain we had yesterday.

Monday Poem

I will try to do this weekly, because sometimes you just can't wait for the inspiration. Sometimes it needs to be drawn out and hewn from a large block of misshapen nothing. With a sledgehammer and a chainsaw.

xx0

This is an old poem:

Odyssey

January 2004

walk through the years with me
to see the things you but glanced over
step back in time with me
and we can learn together
the things I wanted to learn all those days ago
and its not too late
to discover your greatness
when once I would have fallen
here I have not
here I have stopped and remembered
and it might have been you
who saved me

what failure becries
the fallen are beautiful
when they have learned to fly
when they have learned to cry
about and here and there
I can but mimic what I see
I can but repeat
your words
over and over in my mind
oh follow me
walk in the footsteps you showed me to find
and look at the light
you taught me to follow
know what trails I found
could take me far away

and its then
and its now
if you were to let go
if you were to let me go

heaven only knows
truly...
heaven only knows
where the wind blows.

First Post woo Save the Mmanatees!

I used to write a lot. In fact in high school I wrote a mini novel, printed, copied, and bound it and gave it to friends for Christmas one year. I wrote oodles of poetry and read all the books I could get my hands on.

Recently I realized that the past six years have been spent reading technical papers, books with titles such as "Engineering Noise Control: Theory and Practice", "Reliability: Probabilistic Models and Statistical Methods", etc., and 700 page long user manuals for technical simulation programs I have been using in my research. Climbing magazines have also entered the melee, because they contain short and easy to read articles, with lots of awesome photographs.

Additionally, most of my days are spent at my desk in a lab on a campus somewhere, with no windows, a/c cranked down to 60F, and left with little time to formulate my own thoughts and put them together coherently. And if I DO have something to say, it must be condensed to a 140 character text or a one liner witty enough to put on facebook.

Hopefully the coherence will come back as the brain activity branches out. I used to keep a blog of daily happenings and such. This avenue of emotional and intellectual outpouring will consist of less daily-ness and more daily-thoughts. Coherently. Hopefully. :) And perhaps a photo or two.

I was inspired by:
my sis
and this
and this

Currently Geeking out over:

this