New Education Standards Aim for "Apocalypse-Ready"

In the face of multiple scientific reports released within the past decade predicting the end of Earth as a viable life-sustaining planet unless drastic environmental measures are taken, a small group of educators have formed a coalition to rework the Common Core State Standards to ensure that upon high school graduation, all students have the knowledge, skills, and mindsets to be "apocalypse-ready".

"At this point, the current emphasis of the CCSS on nonfiction literacy, evidence-based argumentation, and mathematical communication will only prepare American graduates to succeed in the real world for another 50 years at best," Joreen Crandall, head of the coalition, was quoted as saying. "Once our continued consumption of non renewable resources and other economic activities push Earth past its ecological equilibrium, our students will be faced with an entirely different set of challenges from what k-12 schooling is currently preparing them for." Instead, the coalition is focusing efforts to compile and standardize skills and content such as makeshift weaponry, in-group/out-group psychology, and prolonged cannibalism as rigorously as possible. "As our ozone layer nears complete depletion, I feel confident that these reformed standards will ensure that American children survive the devastating onslaught of solar flares at 3, 4, maybe 5 times the rate of Japanese and Finnish children." Crandall added, "We hope to outsource the corresponding standardized assessments to Pearson Education."

To set a timetable for the completion of the new standards to be on par with the rate of environmental decline, the coalition has been monitoring reports released by various Earth Systems scientists. Most recently, researchers published findings showing that four of nine natural planetary boundaries for sustaining human life have already been surpassed. As of press time, the report's national online site had received under 200 pageviews. The EPA could not be reached for comment.

Multiverse

This journal entry dated
fourteen years back
doesn't sound like me,
but I remember writing it.
The sloppy half-script arises
from wavering dedication
to the subject;
my sarcasm was so blunt.

Dog-eared by pretty,
the journal with a red floral border
and a white decanter on each cover
is a coffin of sorts.
Once, 11-17-97 was
the javelin tip of
my blood, flesh, and breath.
Today, it's but a scale among scales,
a measure among measures,
curled up as tightly as its brethren
nestling in perpetuity.

I can't quite put my finger on
this relation to a past self -
the present is so seamless,
while history's iterations
unfold like paper dolls
linked side-by-side.
The devil on my shoulder wants
to ask do we know her?
Sure, we shared some memories
but - that's not who
we are anymore. After all,
Descartes wasn't
because he thought.

But the angel pipes up
he was no amnesiac either.

I think
I must be an illusion.
Truth is, I don't know
if pulling on the thread
will just unravel this
whole damn pattern.

Liminal

What microbial thoughts
reside in the seams of each day,
overlooked and fertile,
driven by a force more primal than will?
As a child, my mother taught me
how to crack open the bones
that lent her hearty soups flavor.
The smooth, gray, curving armor of each rib
split easily from end to end,
its splintered edges offering up
the soft marrow residing within,
the medulla ossium ruba,
an interstitial secret
bringing warmth to our daily needs.
The same warmth pulses
within the recesses of the darkest nadir,
the deep of the Mariana.
Her fissures are the conduit,
umbilical cord to our molten Heart that sustains
and attests, "Revelation comes in not a flood,
but a trickle."
Wednesday afternoon -
these days are preset, each hour
molded by the heavy hand of intent.
Interwoven are the minutes,
mere and precious, between purposes,
between points, undefined,
when suddenly
I am in the primordial state myself,
thoughts teeming and subliming,
luxuriating in the richness of free-form,
until the rift
closes up again.

Season Poems

Season Poem 1: Fall

Some days in autumn,
the season is tugged along by
strong gusts whose fingers catch in the foliage,
and loosen leaves that have ripened to a rich red,
or yellow like the soft peel of an apple,
speckled like an egg

on tempestuous afternoons,
clouds roam across the celestial plain,
the herd kicking up a soft flurry that touches down
on our faces, heavier than mist

morning arrives in the gritty leftovers of a storm.
With the rhythmic cadence
of a cat's tongue against milk,
wandering sandals
slap the ground's grainy detritus
onto dry soles
in search of a daily coffee

the slate of the sky reflects each
slick slab of asphalt that
daily collects another layer of the shedding season,
a tessellation
of the reds,
apple peel yellows,
and the specked eggs
that march on until November.

Season Poem 2: Fracture

There is a time of stripping away,
when we get to see
the structure underneath.

In spring,
the spine of each leaf
lengthens
and bisects, lengthens
a bit more,
and continues to split
and elongate at a snail's pace
until it is broad like an open palm
and ridged like a coastline.

In fall,
the retreating crawl
of lush coverage
reveals the spidery lattice from which
life sprang,
months ago -
knobby fingers are hardy as
veins in an infinite cycle,
begetting capillaries,
always birthed from arteries,
thicker than water swirling
in a subtly numbered,
dedicated loop.

I can't say
it doesn't bring me to tears
to see nature's ellipsis camouflaged
against the cloak of each season,
as summer beats slow,
lub-dub shuffle drags long,
like tree branch shadows
at noon in winter.

Identity in a New Land

Hot on the heels of the busiest three months I've had in a while, I'm finally taking a huge - HUGE - breather and escaping to the Pacific Northwest with the hubby. YES, two months after tying the knot, we are finally going on our honeymoon!! For the first time in a long while, we are really getting a chance to spend some together outside of the shroud of familiarity in which we've wrapped ourselves...no kitties (sorry, Grundton & Nicholas), no Philly students, no stifling summer sweat of the east coast - hell, even the beer is different up here.

Actually, lots of things are different. There is an undefined, unsettled quality about experiencing a city like Seattle when you've just come from a place as stereotyped and easily labeled in the collective American mind as Philadelphia. My subjective, uninformed impression of Seattle is limited to a few key facts - rainy, near Canada, setting of Frasier, and birthplace of Starbucks and grunge - that are limited in their connotative reach, paling in comparison to the public impression of Philadelphia as dangerous, rough around the edges, blue-collar, and unrefined. Granted, Chris and I spent a handful of hours in a limited part of the city, after an exhausting day that began at 4:30am eastern time and ended with a three-hour time difference; nonetheless, as powerful as first impressions are, I certainly came away from our first day in Seattle distinctly lacking one.

Atop the Space Needle yesterday afternoon, the presence of the groups of teens loitering around Seattle Center prompted a discussion about identity that Chris and I had left off over a year ago, at a time when I was struggling with my own religious identity (or rather, nonreligious identity, as I had previously identified as atheist). The process of learning relies on the honing of extremes - we take in the rules of the world first by polarizing complex ideas, and only as they become more familiar to us do we learn the exceptions that add nuance to our understanding, in effect creating more finely-grained bifurcations of what we take in. I believe that the process of self-discovery follows this pattern. As tweens and teens we take on oversized personalities and try on the costumed labels created by society to see what fits. We clumsily turn outward to begin that attempt at finding ourselves, leading to those cringe-worthy phenomena (and lucrative commercial niches) like black lipstick, spiked chokers, and, on the other side of the hill, pink polo shirts with the collars popped and plaid shorts (both unisex looks, natch). As we mature, the identities we try on become less clownish, but I still believe there is a very fine line at which we stop looking to external dictates to tell us who we are, and actually start examining fully inward. Truly, I think this is a difficult journey requiring a lot of self-awareness and courage, and as weak creatures as we are, no doubt there are many who are never able to fully get to cross this line in their lifetimes.

(To be continued...)

Supermoon, Hello & Goodbye, and other Spring Things

The arrival of spring has nothing to do with the date on a calendar - it is a weekend that entices you to emerge from your winter-worn niches with great exuberance, with the treat of good humor that promises to beget more good humor. Last year it came the first weekend of March, and I still remember that Sunday, how Chris and I drove up from Maryland after visiting my mom. Our winter coats were laid over the backseats of the car, and we zoomed up 95 feeling such lightness, having shed the weight of winter from our minds and our own bodies.

Perhaps in anticipation of this feeling, for the last month or so Chris and I have been looking for a new place to live in Philadelphia. We were ready to emerge from our five-year hibernation, on City Avenue, in this apartment that's absorbed that many years of growth, change, clutter, and routine, feeling as much physical wear as that restless, gnawing sense of sameness. We looked forward to starting our married life in a new place - somewhere bigger for the cats (for Grundton to explore, and for Nicholas to hide from Grundton's shenanigans), and embedded in the city, not just by longitude and latitude, but by elevation as well.

I liked apartment hunting! Although sifting through craigslist postings got tedious at times, I enjoyed harnessing the excitement of envisioning a new life, and molding that vision to the places that seemed (even if only on paper) like a good fit. We whittled down bookmarked postings to a handful of places that we saw in person... On the "likely" end was a 3-level rowhome a few blocks away from Johnny Brenda's, with the 3rd floor being a "penthouse" master bedroom. The owners had really given the place a lift - installed surround sound, built-in bookshelves/entertainment center, added a chandelier to the kitchen, etc. We also debated a place in Art Museum that had a really gorgeous redone kitchen and living room, with a new fireplace, floating stairs, and a sunlit backyard. On the bottom of our list was a trinity home in Washington Square West that we dubbed "the creepy house". Photographs of the home were quite alluring, with exposed brick walls and a wide, slightly convex 3rd floor bedroom window, as was its proximity to about four different cupcake shoppes with impressive window displays. Then we toured the place, and realized it was cramped, a total fixer-upper (broken window panes, among other things), and totally creepy. I guess these "trinity" homes mean they're 3 floors tightly stacked atop one another...the stairs to each floor are a set of steep, rickety, and narrow spiralling wooden steps that pose a Mt.-Everestian feat for any person who's had one too many drinks. I imagined Chris, after a night of drinking, slipping on the stairs, knocking himself out, and wedging his unconscious body in that narrow spiral staircase, entrapping my own feeble self on the third floor with no way out.

Finally, last weekend we found a place in Northern Liberties that I really fell in love with right away. It had plenty of space, was in a great location, and had lots of the criteria we were looking for (spacious kitchen for Chris to do his cooking in comfort, hardwood floors that didn't absorb kitty messes the way carpets do, lots of storage space for our crap, etc.). After checking it out a second time yesterday and negotiating on the rent, we signed papers (woohoo!!) and celebrated by walking four blocks next to North Bowl and getting lunch at Dos Segundos. We'll start moving our stuff out gradually, but the big move will likely come in May after the wedding is no longer a priority.

Of course, no big change - even a happy one - is without giving something up. Leaving apartment 1115 in Executive House means saying goodbye to some pretty sweet things as well as things that just have become a part of our lives, like being regulars at neighborhood restaurants where the staff knows us (Shangri-La, Ginza, Primavera, Sangkee), having a plethora of nearby parks and lush neighborhoods for frisbee-tossing and Saturday morning strolls, and most of all, our 20-foot balcony and its accompanying view of the Philly skyline and (sometimes even better) different sky moods:
(dawn in January) (impending storm in May)
(after a storm in late summer)
(Supermoon last night)

Of course, it also means saying goodbye to sharing a building with college students (hearing the tail end of an elevator conversation that ended in "smelled like vagina" does not happen when with real adults), having to deal with driving on Lancaster any time I'm heading into West Philly (3-mile-an-hour trolleys, ungodly traffic, fresh potholes daily, the intersection at 52nd that is pure hell), and the omnipresent roving groups of giggling, suburban teens ("oh my god, I can't believe he said that!"). I can live with saying goodbye to all of that.

I'm looking forward to shedding all of winter's weight in the next few short months. Stay tuned for more updates on the wedding, moving, and life!

Are you there, Freud? It's me, Amy

This is the dream I had last night. Why my brain made me dream this, I don't know. Here's the dream:

*cue chimes and wavy, distorted dream transition sequence*

I am walking down the street. A car going in the opposite direction pulls up next to me. The driver leans over and asks, "Excuse me - where are the Gilman steps?"

I pause and think. Ah, yes, I know where they are. I point ahead, in the direction that the driver came from. "It's over this way - I'm heading near there right now. If you actually make a U-y right now and want to drive along with me, I can lead you over there." I beam and feel warm and fuzzy. What a good person I am! Just like the kind of person I am when I'm awake. *smile*

The driver agrees. He pulls past me to make a nice, wide U-turn. My back is turned as I wait for him.

I turn back around and urge the driver onward. I suddenly notice that he is now no longer in a car but in a wheelchair. The other side of the street that he's U-turned onto is no longer a smooth stretch of asphalt, but heavily under construction as a gradually descending set of concrete steps. Still incomplete, in the place of the middle set of steps is a rocky, dark, yawning chasm that has yet to be filled. The man is rolling himself down the steps, per my instruction, oblivious to the gaping hole awaiting him.

I panic as I process this new scenery and connect the dots of cause and effect. Oh. God. "STOP!!" I start screaming - "Don't go any --!!"

TOO LATE.

The poor man doesn't hear me in time. As the last step disappears under him, wheelchair and all, he plummets into the chasm and dies. Shock grabs a hold of me and I turn in utter horror, unable to watch. Simultaneously, the weighty reality of guilt rushes in, and I'm paralyzed with the realization that I was the proximal cause of an innocent man's death.

*cue chimes and wavy, distorted dream transition sequence*

WHAT IN THE FUCK IS MY BRAIN TRYING TO DO TO ME?? THIS IS TRAUMATIZING! THIS IS REALLY FUCKING TRAUMATIZING!! In the middle of a busy work week, in the midst of planning a wedding, I do NOT need to wake up first thing in the morning with the blood of an innocent human being on my hands, dream or not. I am really fucking mad at my subconscious - where does it think up this sick shit?!? This is really a sick joke.

And what pisses me off is that I can't do anything to get back at it. This is really the truest form of guerrilla warfare - while my big lumbering consciousness is asleep, the subconsciousness emerges from the mist like a pack of poop-flinging chimpanzees and forces me to watch a human being - a CRIPPLED human being, no less - fall into a giant hole in the earth and die. Read this definition of "guerrilla warfare" from Wikipedia and tell me that's NOT what my brain is doing to me (emphases my own):

Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians (or "irregulars") used military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and less-mobile traditional army, or strike a vulnerable target, and withdraw almost immediately.

MMMMHHMMM.

To add insult to injury, the dream continues like this:

*resume dream sequence*

...and I'm paralyzed with the realization that I was the proximal cause of an innocent man's death. As I begin sobbing, shaking, and otherwise turning into a soppy, goopy emotional mess, two figures emerge out of the air. It's President Truman and Anonymous, Non-Descript Old-Timey President from early American history (you know, they all kind of looked the same), except since there were no photographs of presidents before Polk in 1845, the Old-Timey President appears to me as a cartoon character.

President Truman and Old-Timey Cartoon President proceed to comfort me, rubbing my shoulders and cooing soothing words in my ear, that Wheelchair Man's death wasn't my fault, accidents happen, etc. etc. Gradually, I'm swayed by their words. The dream concludes with my arms around their shoulders, hollering, "Hey, Chris! Can you get a photo of me with the presidents?"

*end dream sequence*

So my brain causes me to murder a man, begin to suffer the moral consequences, and then just tries to smooth everything over with a comical presidential pardon. NO!! It doesn't get let off the hook that easily!! Fucking little imp.

The last time I got pissed off at my brain when I woke up, it had made me dream about making out with Michael Scott. I woke up disgusted and confused.

I remain disgusted, confused, and angry to this day.

Femme Fatale: Part I

I have discovered that I am a fatalist. In this realization, I feel not only that I have come to a certain philosophical "checkpoint" for a burgeoning idea from since my teen years, but also, in a welcome breath of relief, reconciled a gnawing, uncomfortable pressure I've lived with for much longer that keeps me on constant alert for making the "right" decision at every crossroads. It is a variation of Kundera's einmal ist keinmal, the recognition of our own insignificance not in the face of a vast physical space, but under the churning wheels of a temporal one, where cause and effect move but in one direction. However, instead of being pained by the inconsequence of existence, I am set free by it.

This entry tells the story of my arrival at this "checkpoint".

I: THE MICROCOSMIC ILLUSION

When I was in 10th grade, I was exposed to Calvinism and the role that predetermination played in its doctrines through Ms. Seabreeze's American History class. Up on the third floor of my high school building, I remember our class collectively struggling to understand a belief system that sprang from the Christian roots of doing right to get into heaven, while simultaneously stating that God's mercy was the sole determinant of the fate of one's soul. How, we protested, could a religion promote predetermination without seeing its followers, lacking incentives to follow God's decree, lapse into chaos and sin? "Think of it this way," we were prompted by Ms. Seabreeze, "You still have the freedom to make a choice about your actions. It is just that God already knows what choice you're going to make." The fact of God's knowing the outcome of an event didn't negate the freedom possessed by an individual to impact that event.

Although this idea was but a drop in the bucket of our course, and we moved on quickly from Calvinism to other 16th century developments that would impact the earliest years of American history, I was intrigued by this idea that, although counterintuitive, was not self-contradictory. A comfortable atheist, I sought to test this concept against the laws of logic by removing the element of religion in a thought experiment; I replaced the role of God with a fortune teller who always accurately foresaw the future, and imagined that this clairvoyant laid out 5 playing cards before me: a king, a queen, a jack, a joker, and an ace. I was tasked with picking out any card of my choice, and she, with her back turned, would aim to make a prediction about my selection.

Well lo and behold, because she was a true fortune teller, she correctly predicted my card selection 100% of the time. She therefore saw the future not as a series of diverging paths, each one leading to a different outcome, but as a singular path that held only one possible consequence. However, the paradox that emerged was that from my perspective, as a humble seer only of the present, my freedom of choice was never in doubt. I always had the capacity to choose any card that I wanted; the only pressure I felt was my own internal decision-making process, over which I seemingly had complete control. Predetermination, or "fate" (for those inclined to use a more romantic term), could exist hand-in-hand with free will. It is only the shift in perspective that affects the perception of reality.

For a little while, the logic of this pleased my 15-year-old mind. But, naturally, ideas beget ideas, and I soon was faced with overcoming the obstacle of this fortune teller's theoretical existence, a pound of flesh that I had essentially concocted out of thin air, and who sooner or later I had to pay back to the stoic gods of reason. For my conclusion to be more than the bastard child of an adolescent thought experiment, I had to answer the question, In the physical world, just what does this fortune teller represent? What, in tangible form, is all-knowing, would observe the actions of every individual, and could foresee the decision of every traveler who came upon two roads diverged?

The answer I came to - an idea that has only grown more nuanced and ingrained in my mind over the last ten years - was the Universe. The Universe, including all its physical manifestations, is the system that encompasses everything that ever has been, is, and will be, and therefore the perfect candidate to play the real-life role of the fortune teller*. The Universe is the only entity from which the perspective of all physical dimensions (AKA all events that may occur at any given moment in time) and all temporal dimensions (AKA the timeline from beginning to end of any particular event) can be seen. Although this perspective does not invalidate the perspective of the individual human being (or a bacterium, for that matter), it is the only one that takes into account all other perspectives that exist, and therefore the only one of the two that is complete**. Given this trump card, the second conclusion I arrived at - one that, this time, held water beyond the theoretical confines of a thought experiment - is that the microcosmic, individual perception of control over one's decisions does not exist in the holistic context. In other words, free will is an illusion.

Although by the time I was a junior in college, this was a "gut-feeling" belief I held to (still being utterly unfamiliar with the bodies of work of Howard Bloom, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, and other authors who would come to illuminate my understanding...including Albert Hofmann, if I may get cheeky***), my intellectual understanding of it was still tenuous, and it took another five years for it to develop into the fuller (albeit still very skeletal) idea that I've just presented. It had even further to go in terms of trickling down into my pragmatist views on living. That second half of this story, shedding light on why Kundera's "lightness of being" for me is not unbearable but one of life's saving graces, and why fatalism represents a falling into place of still more puzzle pieces in this existence, will have to wait for another time.

*Although I was incapable of making the connection at the time, of course this meant by extension the Universe is also God. But that is for another blog entry.

** Because of its completeness, according to mathematician Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem it is therefore also inconsistent. This holds in my analogy because the complete perspective of the universe necessarily encompasses a multitude of conflicting (inconsistent) perspectives by individual human beings.

***...which I may, because this is my blog!

September is the busiest month...

I am exhausted.

I am trying to make the most out of my weekends now. And what a month for that to be happening - September is just a complete breath of things starting to die and grow at the same time, a month so dynamic I feel like I could burst. I really think my three-year rut of giving in to inertia at every free minute is over. Each moment can be one of three things: downtime, maintenance, or life to the fullest. Spring of this past year I devoted a tremendous amount of mental energy to make "maintenance" the floor and not the ceiling ... I don't feel ready to let go of that momentum. I wonder how long it will take to exhaust this extreme of the pendulum swing? And how long after that until I can expect to reach equilibrium?

*sigh*

For now, Mondays in September are quite the day. It's a thin wall that's tasked with containing all my visceral highs and lows within a mere two days of seven.

I'm hanging in there.

A LOVELY Labor Day Weekend

For over a month, I had been looking forward to the weekend of September 3, not because of the lure of the long weekend, but because I knew there'd be the possibility that it would end with this:

...which it did! For those inferentially-impaired, the above-mentioned "measurements, color, style, price, and size" are that of a wedding dress. My wedding dress. Tee!

I'd scheduled a Saturday afternoon appointment at Lovely, a bridal boutique in the West Village, for myself and my mini-entourage of women: my mom, Chris's mom Maureen, and Chris's sister Kate. Like the rest of the wedding planning process, I wanted dress-shopping to be low-stress and fun, something that wouldn't overshadow the wedding itself, yet would be remembered fondly. I had stayed true to that philosophy thus far - the first time I walked into a bridal shop was completely on a whim, with my best friend and maid-of-honor Jen who was in town for the month. Sans appointment, we stepped into a Main Line boutique, and just like that, I tried on a handful of gowns and found two that I could have been happy with that only barely stretched my budget. No pushy sales women, no opinionated gaggle of bridesmaids, no drama.

But drama or not, what would a dress-shopping experience be if I'd stopped there? And so, with the help of my sister-to-be Kate, I organized a day out for the Chen/Canary women in New York, a metropolis I hadn't set foot in in three years (and which, to my knowledge, still lays claim to my Cloud 9 wallet and Maryland driver's license from my last visit). It was a gorgeous afternoon kicked off by a late brunch of Eggs Norwegian and a mimosa at Pastis in the meatpacking district, followed by a stroll through the shady and lush residential streets before our arrival at Lovely, an unassuming boutique nestled into the brown brick of West 4th Street townhouses. We almost missed it, as the only sign of its presence from the street was a simple chalkboard slate with the store's name written in script, hung from a black iron gate leading to its basement entrance.

From there, I loved every single moment of the dress-shopping experience. From the calming but quirky robin's egg blue walls covered in pleats of folded newspaper, to my mom telling me which dresses caught her eye, to examining trays of bejeweled hair pins and netted veils, to the three racks of draped, corseted, and feathered gowns that we could browse on our own, with no other customers to compete with ... and to being led upstairs to a sunny private salon with couches that stood on curved wooden legs, into which my family plopped comfortably as if they were at home. Oh, and I loved my salesgirl too! Melanie with her knowledgeable but yielding recommendations, earnest tone, and practical knotted turquoise flats put me right at ease and in the perfect mood to pick out a wedding gown.

For any brides-to-be reading this, I recommend creating an Oohs-and-Aahs rubric for any family and friends coming along with you. I could easily gauge the collective reaction of Kate and the moms - which were pretty in sync, mind you - by the sharpness of their

breath intake as I emerged from the curtains of the dressing room each time. The obvious "no" was a lace deep v-neck A-line; the lace made me look too old-fashioned an elicited only a restrained "awww". The more sure-footed dresses were accompanied by more chest-clutching and slower-paced sentences. "That. looks. fantastic." The dress that I ultimately decided on was collectively preferred for its wearability and movement, stylistic complements to the venue, and its overall Amyness. Although it competed neck-and-neck with a Grecian deep-v with a silver-beaded empire waist, I decided that the latter was of a much more common cut that I could find anywhere and wear anytime. The accents on my dress would only be fitting for a single day.

And that - was that! After just over an hour, we made our way back downstairs with my contract and credit card in hand, to find the next set of customers having just arrived and beginning to browse. In under four months, I'll be back at Lovely to pick up and take home the perfect dress, in my size, for my wedding.

Tee!

For more photos, click here.

Last photo courtesy of PRCouture.

Been locked up in my cell...

Q: How long does it take a dunderhead to figure out how to send a cell phone photo to an email address?

A: I have had this cell phone for three and a half years!! The hell is wrong with me... If a million monkeys hacked away at my cell phone for a million years, they would have written War and Peace in a text and I'd still be figuring this one out. *sigh*

Here is the thing with my phone. It's got two amazing features: a slick reflective screen that's great for checking makeup, and a kickass camera. Other than that, I use it for texting and phoning, don't see no other purpose for it, and those fast-talking smartphone salesmen ain't gonna tell me otherwise, dagnabbit. BUT! I've never been able to unlock the magic of Amazing Feature #2, for you see - I know how to take the photo, but I've never known how to get it out of my phone...

Until today.

Ahh, yes. In celebration of this historic moment, let's collectively take a stroll through the masterpieces that have been hidden from human eyes. (Other than mine.)

"Number 1 Bun" January 2007

Note the contrast of dark and light. Also note the newly retired phone by the tissue box - size of a pea but no camera feature! If you extrapolate from this the rate by which I upgrade my phone, I'll own an iPhone by the 50th anniversary of my death. This was the first photo I took on my current phone.

"Giant Sack o' Bras" March 2009

I'm struggling to add any qualifiers here. It's pretty much a giant sack o' bras from when I worked at Victoria's Secret. Disney sack, to be precise. Net worth: over $2000. How do I know that? We caught a few thieves trying to steal it. They dropped it and ran away when we called the cops, who then asked us to tally up the retail cost. My Aldo bucket bag is resting right behind it, for size comparison. Yup. Giant sack o' bras.

"Grundton in Repose" March 2009

One of the many in the "Grundton in Repose" series.

"Phillies v. Nationals" April 29, 2009

There is simply not a bad seat in CBP! Lately, I don't even sit anymore - I stay in the 100-level behind the wheelchair rows and get a damn good spot. We lost this game 4-0. We are terrible, just terrible, against the Nats. Stay tuned for some payback...

"Do I look flat in this?" April 2009

This was a period during which I became increasingly paranoid about the state of my car, even though there was nothing wrong with it. Not a thing.I took this photo and messaged it to Chris in a panicked frenzy after driving down to the TFA office to interview for the Program Director position with Mike Wang, freaking out that my car was going to fall apart while I was 76. Turns out the churning in my stomach I attributed to non-existent car problems was just interview nerves. This is what a normal car tire looks like. (Forgot my dramamine that day.)

"Good Luck Amy" May 2009

My last day at Vicky's was marked by a sweet ass cookie-cake from Vicky (the human, not the corporation). Thanks Vicky, and much luck to you as well!

"Einstein's Lappy" August 2009

This statue fucking rocks!! I found it with my mom when we were walking around D.C. Note my strategically placed hand. He gave to the world the photoelectric effect, the theory of general relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy. But I will always love him for his giant bronze lappy. God bless you, Einstein!

"Homies versus Couchies" December 2009

Winter in the warehouse is bitch, but so is anyone who tries to test their billiards skills against the Homies (Android not pictured). They know their way around the Hungry Hungry Hippo. 'Nuff said.

"A Dooey Pile" March 2010

OK, I see these trucks all over Philadelphia. They really couldn't have found a better name for the company that "brings the highest global standards of safe and secure chemical transportation"? I don't want to associate chemical handling with a dooey pile. On their website they call all their employees "Pyle People", which just sounds bizarre and makes me picture a bunch of tiny Lego men for some reason. It's not just me, right??

"An Asshole" August 2010

I have to share a parking garage with this asshat.

OK, we're almost done. Stay with me, here.

"Phillies v. Nationals, Part 2" August 22, 2010

We are all caught up in my life in cell photos. This was yesterday. We were 4-0 in the 7th inning when the long-anticipated scattered thunderstorm of the day finally came. Geoff, Jule, Chris, and I got to see the groundscrew unroll the tarp, and for the hour-and-a-half delay, we watched people in the 100-level gradually leave the ballpark while we plotted to steal their seats. After four hours of standing behind the wheelchair row, my dogs were barking! Patience, my pups... One of the ushers will be turning away any minute now...

"Phillies v. Nationals, Part 2b" August 22, 2011

Our coup de grace!! After being foiled once, we finally nabbed some sweet seats right by the first base line as it stopped raining. Cosmic justice for our patience was doled out almost immediately with an Ibanez two-run homer once the rain delay was lifted, and we ultimately shut out the Nats, 6-0. Of course, cosmic justice for our thievery was just as promptly handed down - as soon as we left to start the trek back to our car in FDR park, a sunshower broke out and completely doused us.

So there you have it! Three years' worth of cell phone photos crammed into a single blog entry, culminating in a kickass view of Citizens Bank Park. Much love to my dinky little phone, without which you wouldn't have wasted the last five minutes of your life reading this.

Until next time :)

I Will Not Even Dignify It With Its Proper Name.*

The bowling alley on the corner of City Avenue and Haverford Drive is, hands down, the most ghetto bowling alley I have been to in my life. It is seemingly manned by a single individual behind the shoe rental counter. The bowling ball racks were about 20% filled, and one of the balls that Chris encountered had all 3 finger holes parallel to each other. Halfway through our first game, a mysterious, unidentified object appeared in the lane gutter and wobbled like a seal trying to shimmy itself up a hill. Our keypad was held together by a piece of duct tape, and the leader of the group three lanes down from us kept yelling, "FAGGOT! FAGGOT-ASS!!" every time he bowled poorly. And there are no concession stands, so one is required to experience the evening completely sober.

I am ashamed to type these words, but this is the bowling alley that Chris and I took our friend Geoff to on his birthday. Had we taken him to the Sizzler it probably would have felt like the Ritz. If you read this, Geoff, please accept this very public IOU:

We, Chris and Amy, owe you one night of bowling-until-your-fingers-die at North Bowl or another swanky bowling alley of your choice.

For everybody else reading, please consider this a public service announcement of the perils of the bowling alley at the corner of City Ave and Haverford.

That is all.

*Center Lanes. You have been warned.

The lessons I've learned...

"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns,

so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry." ~ Richard Feynman

Since I have learned how to look, I have consistently and without fail found the most mind-boggling patterns that recur in the universe. Once I learned how to look, I couldn't not see them. Just as the human brain has the biological tendency to find a face where there is none - in an electrical outlet, for instance, or a car - I feel like I am now wired to find the manifestation of these universal rules in the way that a trained "seer" cannot avoid seeing a three-dimensional shape mysteriously emerge from a purely two-dimensional Magic Eye poster. Even this phenomenon itself is not a purely anecdotal one. It is subject to the same universal rules but arises in many different forms. Escher eludes to this in "La Mezquita" (left). Look at a series of arches from one perspective, and it is a random lot of pillars and horseshoe curves...but move a few steps to the left or the right - switch your point of view - and as Douglas Hofstadter eloquently writes, "beautiful regularity emerges. You've reordered the same information by changing your way of looking at it." This phenomenon also becomes familiar to anyone who has sorted data in an Excel spreadsheet. Look at a 10,000 KB document of pure raw data, and it is nothing but a messy soup of stuff. But once you learn how to filter, order, and graph, there is again that beautiful regularity, and meaning emerges.

"Since I have learned how to look..." These seven words hold an experience that is indescribably dear to me - possibly one of the things I treasure most about being alive. Just as all learning is, the experience is an ongoing one, and I can only imagine how exponentially more meaningful those seven words will be to me, in ten, twenty, or (if I'm lucky) fifty years from now, perhaps when I am on my death bed. As with all human beings, since being born, it has taken me roughly 21 years to acquire the most basic information necessary to serve as the foundation for this kind of search for meaning. As the Empiricists will tell you, understanding does not occur in a vacuum, and I believe that the richer one's library of experiences, both academic and worldly, conceptual and concrete, the more one is able to get a glimpse of the mammoth yet delicate processes that drive the universe and everything that has ever sprang forth from it, including oneself.

In this developmental vein, there are countless learners whom I have looked to to teach me, but the two figures who have touched me the most - just masters of finding these elegant, recurring patterns - are the aforementioned academic Douglas Hofstaedter, and the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. I will not go into detail about their life work and the conclusions they have drawn, as I simply cannot do them justice at this humble point in my life, much less in this humble blog, but Hofstadter has found nature's infinitely long threads weaving through what seem to be the most disparate, unconnected topics - number theory, consciousness, Zen, modern art, genetics, artificial intelligence, and the list goes on. For Campbell, a thread of a different material ties together possibly every human culture that has ever existed, and he finds that the similarities that exist between the mythologies of the aborigines, Christians, Jains, Navajo... again - the list goes on, are too significant to chalk up to randomness. Like Hofstadter, there are fundamental patterns to the universe that Campbell spent his life understanding.

I need to pause this post at this point, because it has already developed a life of its own that will take over my day if I do not put my foot down, temporarily. If anyone is still reading up to this point, I must first thank you for staying with me for so long, and secondly ask for your extreme patience as I continue to develop my thoughts. What I have written here is a first attempt at a synthesis of my inchoate reflections over the last five years or so (since I met Chris, basically - I will let you connect the dots there). I apologize if things are muddy, and in this initial stab many ideas are probably redundant. (Also - apologies to both academics named above for such a coarse-grained representation of their genius.) But I have more to say, and as always, more to learn, so we'll see next time, how I pick up where I left off.

I'll end this post today with one last little recurring pattern for you. In the opening of this post, I quoted Hofstadter, so it is only fair to end on a thought from Campbell. In looking at the tapestry of human experience, and how to reconcile the extremes of human tragedy with the ability to laugh, here is the mythologist's take on learning how to look, and his conclusion:

"The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest - as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars. Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible."