Today I taught High School Music choreography to a group of 5th graders. Today I sang “Bad Day” over the loading zone microphone, not realizing the sound echoed over a good part of the Blackford campus. Today I finished up my late supervision shift by playing Beatles songs to the remaining campers. Today I learned how to tell the time in Spanish. Today I re-read a few chapters of my friend’s maybe-favorite book and realized how much closer time takes us to the asymptote of actual understanding of someone else’s words. Today I made dark-chocolate-covered strawberries with the Lang-Ree girls. Today I listened to John Mayer’s “Split-Screen Sadness” more times than you can imagine, even though I’m not in the least bit sad. 

Oh shit…another poetic journal entry. Oops. You know, it wasn’t really meant to be this long-winded, I swear. I get carried off sometimes…speaking of which…

As I was curving back along 17-towards-San Jose on Sunday, weaving in-between the patches of shadow and smoky sunset “I’m Yours” came on in my mix tape and…if you haven’t heard it, it’s that cool acoustic sound I like, a Mraz song yet unreleased on the major label stuff. A song about letting go into loving that special someone, etc. etc. So this song is playing and I’m driving and I’m thinking, when it just strikes me just how unnatural life seems sometimes. Everything about us is phenomenal. Our bodies seem almost artificial, our minds more so, our souls personalities identities–surreal, unbelievable, impossible. We are mutations, we are accidental, and yet we happened. And that’s pretty damn awesome. So it just makes sense that, when we die, we become natural. Be break up into little particles of loose matter: we become the grass, the air, the pollution, the glass face of a watch, the rubber of a tire, the eyelash of a little child. But while we are living, while we are partaking in this improbable event, we owe ourselves to the things that have helped create us. We owe ourselves to our great grandfather’s sister’s best friend’s first crush, and his dog. We owe ourselves to Shakespeare and his lovers, to Calvino, to the members of Bach’s favorite church choir, to the ashes of John Lennon’s first pair of glasses and the contact lenses he once tried to wear, unsuccessfully. We owe ourselves to the very molecules that surround us; we owe ourselves to our world and the people in it, especially the people we are bound to by that enigmatic undertone of “love,” whatever it may mean to you and me. 

And that’s when we get songs like this. I owe myself to you. Tú. And vous, that ever-plural “you”. I feel somehow closer to understanding sadness, although I may never, fully. For now, it is a word spelled with one “d”, and I am learning to live through it and not just around it. I accept the fact that people’s lives end for reasons that make no sense at all; I understand that life is in a sense a state of constant loss, but I like to think that more important are the things we gain along the way. I have learned that while not all is good, we should not try and make it so. Because what is good? This subjectivity defines our delicate world. It inspires me.

So, in short: I choose to give myself over. I want to see the good not only in, but for, others, all while remaining as chill as…as…a papaya accidentally left in the freezer overnight. And this–this cannot wait. I’m all yours.

and this guy's

A beautiful song can restore a bad day. It’s like a kiss, except you can replay it as often as you like.

If I could be anywhere else in the world right now, I’d go to Spain.

“La Celestine” is the name given in literature to a classic female character who is hired by a man to help sway the thoughts of his romantic intrigue. This happens outside of literature as well.

Viagra helps heal a certain infection that causes lung scarring, according to a pilot study at UCLA.

Know someone who is considering abortion? Send them and eCard of support or protest.

Is there such a thing as adventitious ambiguity? Do we interpret things to be equivocal because we’re afraid that the truth is something we don’t want to know?

If we arrive late and Time passes, do we need to get passes to go back in Time?