I like other blogs. They're cool.

I've been digging wordboner lately. I only recently found it, but I appreciate it's ability to make words into art. I'm learning about oral cultures in my Theory of Religion class and we discussed the book Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong where he talks about how words become objects in written culture. In oral culture words are an event, a moment, they are necessarily transient and only purposeful for communication. Once written down, once recorded, words themselves become objects and not just the means of communication. Wordboner appeals to this idea in me about words becoming objects. Anything like script or artistic depictions of words (think: Arabic script in mosques and illuminated texts).

Except that where illuminated texts and the script in mosques are the divine words of revelation to an entire religious community and wordboners tend to be a play on words that evokes less than religiously-inspired behavior. Like this one.

Also on this same note of books-words-religion, I would desperately love love love to go here someday. A church for books, helllllo, just what I've always wanted.

I like this band that's so indie they haven't even heard of themselves

I have been perpetually wrong lately. My answers in class? Totally off-base. My social conduct? Awkward and annoying. My table-dancing skills? Masterful.

Normally this would get me down and depressed and I'd go get a pint of Ben and Jerry's and have a delightful date with the most loyal men in my life. I'd have to reach out to someone and talk about how the universe is clearly against me. But I'm rolling with it. It's not a huge deal. At least I'm speaking up in class, at least I have friends I can be annoying to who don't discard me at a moment's notice. I think this means I've grown as a person. I'd like to think that's what it means.

Of late I like this and this. Liking Banksy and Andy Warhol makes me feel mature and counter-cultural and Pomo and all that stuff. I like to think that this is also growth that I have taste and I know what I like and it's not just the stuff all the cool kids like. I don't think college has cool kids, at least not mine. Actually, when I visited and had dinner at a local restaurant, my waiter, a W&M student told me that it's full of kids who weren't cool in high school who think they're cool not that they're in college but actually aren't. I don't know what he was trying to say, exactly. Isn't thinking that you're cool what makes it true? Or something like that. I just watched "17 Again" and the fleeting vision of what popularity is in high school is escaping me.

I'm gonna go listen to The Kooks and Cat Power and Rilo Kiley and whatever else I have in my iTunes that you haven't heard of that makes me cool....

Believe, Achieve, Succeed

I don't know about you, but the Soviet Russia meme (is it a meme? I'm not absolutely certain) is definitely one of my favorites. It is best expressed in this delightful poem:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

In Soviet Russia,

POEM writes YOU!!!!

So of course, this just made me unbelievably happy.

Anyway. A girl down the hall has the word "believe" in a magnet on her door. I think there's another word as well, but it struck me that it just says "believe." Not "believe in something," "believe in yourself," "believe in God," "believe in the power of your dreams;" just "believe." It made me think of this poster in my high school foyer: "Believe...Achieve...Succeed." What does that even mean? It's like they just took three very positive-sounding words and put them together. I don't think I ever felt inspired by that poster in the foyer. It never meant anything to me. Like those motivational posters about teamwork and climbing the mountain. A teacher of mine had one of syncronized sky-divers making patterns in the sky. And I want to say I remember one with pictures of hot-air balloons. I prefer these. Particularly this one. I'd rather look at a poster and be amused than look at a poster to get motivated.

On my wall I have Raphael's School of Athens and Van Gogh's Almond Branches in Bloom. And Matisse's Goldfish. What does this say about me? I think it says, "I've taken Art History classes and I might be a snob about it." I have, and sometimes I am. I actually wanted to major in Art History, but as much as I love going to a museum and being all, "I totally know what this painting is and can tell you off the top of my head who painted it, when they painted it and with what!" Which I love doing, but I haaaaaatttteeee the process of memorizing slides for exams (even though when I took my last Art History class [19th Century European Art] I had a most excellent method for memorizing images that involved pretending they were all hanging on the walls of my dorm....long process, but very effective). I also KICKED ASS on my Art History final my freshman year and OWNED the slide identifications (and by owned I mean I got a perfect on that portion of the exam-BOOO-YAH).

Anyway. I think writing inspiration words on the wall is kind of stupid. There are things of this nature that can be effective; someone once suggested to write down all the stuff I like about myself and put it on the wall of my closet to remember how AWESOME I am. I haven't done it, but I think it might work.

Ohhhh I know this isnt' going anywhere. I'm going to post it anyway, because I need to work on a speech for tomorrow.

I'mma let you finish...

So I feel like the Kanye Interrupting meme may die rather soon, but the history major within me is just so very amused by this one. And my vague tendencies not to take religion as seriously as I should think this one is freaking hilarious. The VMAs were this past Sunday and already by Monday there was a website dedicated to the whole endeavor of pointing out what a huge douche Kanye was to Taylor Swift. I don't particularly like Taylor Swift, I don't particularly like Kanye (though I actually have some Kanye in my iTunes while I definitely don't have any Taylor Swift), but I think Barack Obama was certainly justified in calling the man a jackass.

What I ultimately find fascinating is the rate at which something like this becomes a part of internet culture, how quickly it's just another thing to laugh at, another enormous in-joke that would take quite a long time to explain to my mother. I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to explain lolcats to her once, but I couldn't get past the point of, "Why do they spell things incorrectly?" Once you become acquainted with a meme and start appreciating it, it's like joining an enormous club that everyone can be a member of but that parts of the population will never understand. And like any good inside joke, those on the inside laugh whole-heartedly while those outside shake their heads and furrow their brows.

I don't know that I'm going anywhere with this, but at least I wrote for the day :)

"It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write"

but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't."*

I don't think I can write, I know that I can. In the most obvious sense that loooook here, I'm writing sentences. But seriously, I want to write like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tolstoy and Thomas Hardy and I want to make people feel things and think about things. I hope I can. I was at a party this weekend and some fairly drunk chick charmed a defintely drunk guy by quoting from The Great Gatsby to him (if you've never heard of William and Mary, this is very typical W&M). She only got out a couple of lines and I haven't read The Great Gatsby since high school but I heard the few sentences she could remember, it was just, "Damn. That man can write." To the drunk guy's credit, his immediate response was "Will you be in a relationship with me?"

So. I'm not going to write here to convince you of things, I'm just going to write to make myself write regularly and keep it somewhere. It may be that no one ever reads this thing and that's actually quite fine. I will also post things that I think are freaking cool if only because the amount of time I spent on a computer at work this summer made me very well acquainted with Google Reader and the joys it can bring. It's actually to the point that I have sacrificed valuable afternoon nap time in order to keep up with the new things popping up on my Reader. If you know how much I like sleep or how much any normal college student likes sleep, that should definitely tell you something.

Actually, in some way, I'm going to use this to synthesize all the sweet internet-ish things I find all day long but don't share on facebook because I don't want to be all obnoxious and flooding everyone's newsfeed.

So anyway. I have to get back to doing homework. Josephus isn't going to read himself. I've got Judaica to study. (I really like the word "Judaica," I think it just sounds realllly cool.)

*title from I Will Not Read Your Fucking Manuscript by Josh Olsen.