This song is awfully beautiful.

I’m just a student of this life, just like my father
I am a stranger to this heart, just like my mother
Oh, and brother you should know
That this heart’s still filled with sadness and regret
But i’m learning as i go
To forgive the things that i just can’t forget
Sometimes this heart is made of glass
And i often find myself
Living only in the past
Thinking mostly of myself
But i’ll believe you when you say
That these are things that time can heal
And this beating in my heart
Says this love we have is real
All of these wishes, i once lost, are now returning
All of the demons, i have fought, are slowly turning
Oh, and brother you should know
There is no one in this world who feels no pain
And i’m learning as i go
To accept the things that i’ve no power to change
All of these streets are heading out
And this song’s no longer blue
And although nothing’s figured out
Looks like we’ve both made it through
If there were one thing i could ask
I would ask you where you’ve been
’cause i still wonder where you were
When this whole big ship sank in

- Mason Jennings

i think i’ve got a new approach to this: if i take and reference “my depression” as this irrational, attached creature, maybe he’ll be outed and shamed out of existence. if i am constantly aware of this lurking pothole in my mind, perhaps it can be avoided and i can squelch the floods before they gush. i need a little man on my shoulder to box me on the ears when he gets out of line. the monster can and will be defeated.

i think this marks the realization that it is no longer my life that needs to change but simply the way i go about it.

picture me a salmon winding through the dusty sunlit waters. heavy with salt and the specks of planktons the waters plunge down, thousands of glimmering stars falling around me. i am wandering, vaguely spinning towards the front.

i am in the guest room of my own house. i have sold my car and i’m looking for a ride. to? out there.

Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson Win Nobel in Economic Science – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.

Ostrom = baller.

personally, i think there’s something very wrong when educated, middle-class white kids claim to represent and speak for poor colored folks. if it were the 60s, i’d be a panther.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Lets get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

i’m 21 years old, inebriated, and will never celebrate another birthday like this one. i went to a bar and everyone was 10 years older than me. that’s what i have in store for me i guess.

I’m listening to a brilliant album by an especially creative rock band functioning at its peak. Such records have strong melodies, exciting chord changes, unexpected arrangements, and tricky rhythms that you want to hear over and over again. Songs. Kid A has those, too. Ten of them, all great, here, in this order, working together perfectly. For a record with so much baggage and such a reputation for density, the appeal, in the end, is pretty simple: Other records were catchier or better for dancing or more appealingly nostalgic. But no other record captured the complex feeling of the era in such an elegant and beautiful way. –Mark Richardson

via Pitchfork: Staff Lists: The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 20-1.

honestly now, i can’t tell you what to do son. you can fill your time as you like, but however you do it you’ll never be doing nothing because when you do those things which some call nothing you’re in fact training to do those things which some call nothing. but to put your foot down and push off, that’s more than vocational. to scour the terrain for leads, for footprints, broken twigs, old tin cans. you look for paths. when you run across one you turn about and see that you, too, have an origin and trajectory. you will know at that moment where and when you embarked and you will know too the direction of where others have oriented themselves. all the while these discoveries will have no bearing on what it is you search for, for though the others may have sought their own infinities, you know not what these infinities concerned and if the others had truly found what they needed. you will chase some and ignore others.and it is in the desert sifting through sand that you encounter gold: that infinity is a choice you make for gravel and diamonds — that infinity is a destination unreachable by steps but obtainable by choice– a choice you will not always be able to make, for the paths of men cannot escape their beginnings, veer and squiggle as they may.