Melodramatic personae, perhaps?


Summer Finn of Shinnecock, Michigan, did not share this belief. Since the disintegration of her parents' marriage she'd only love two things. The first was her long dark hair. The second was how easily she could cut it off and not feel a thing.

Not even to borrow, just to marvel at:

since feeling is first
e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

A missed connection

Female, Blonde. I actually can't see you right now but I bet you're reading a book on welding, eating french toast or listening to van morrison.... I need to see you more

I found this during a brief internet trawl as a break from studying. I wouldn't mind meeting (or being) this girl...

Songs about love and bacon and Nova Scotia

Pretty solid
Saw this man last night under a ship's mast in the biting chill of the maritime winds.

I wrote this while on the phone with a girl who wasn't interesting enough to listen to.

I don't remember the poem that followed, but I remember this, and your smirk and your swagger.

A wind in the door

Matted hair and little boys' parkas handed down, giant climbing packs on the metro, the winds of Halifax in my eyes, train horns sounding in the distances of my mind. The sidewalk salt and balmy drizzle of Montreal feel Atlantic.

I board The Ocean tonight.

No glove SO MUCH LOVE

Montreal does this thing where for four months of the year your days are slush and darkness. The monotony seeps in and the state becomes immutable. You no longer mind, you adapt and deal. Winter biking, impervious to the biting cold, skiing on the mountain to remember what the world outside the window looks like, drinking mugs of spiked everything and wearing grandfather's sweaters, you let grayhaze depression say hello but fight to not quite let it settle in. You get goodnatured validation looking at all the wellheeled Tranochildren who feel the need to wear $700 polar expedition parkas and $150 galoshes in the city while your outdated kamiks and softshell hold their structural integrity but turn greyer and filthier as the season wears on. You get slippers for the math building so you never have to go outside. You think about replacing your bike chain for an entire month.

Then one day the thermometer peaks just above zero and you notice it's four pm and still not dark and for the first time in months you take off your gloves and bike barehanded, the pleasure of the contoured handlebars under your softening callouses hard to explain. So you buy sausages at the butchershop and barrel down the streets off the Main with groceries on your back and your head full of the melodies and noise of the Talking Heads, grit from the salty snowmelt in your hair and glasses and teeth, hearing the ices finally crack.

New Lovers

In a sunlit room nestled on the couch putting off tedious calculation, watching them.
The slightly sweaty softfeatured guy with the paunch and stained t-shirt making small talk with the businessdressed shorthaired professional girl, eyes in adoration. Their hands touch more than casually, voices animated, the pleasure of their interaction palpable. And I sit here with a refreshing feeling of presentness, disconnected from their world but still a part of it, and I play this song and drink fifty cent meteorological coffee, my eyes smiling of their own accord, my thoughts at rare peace of their own accord.

The strangest sensation

I was sitting in my favourite Mile End café pretending to study for my final tomorrow (to keep up appearances), cuddling with the local cat, and listening to some musicians set up for a set. As often with foreign languages I caught mostly only the conversational fluff, the fillers that frame communication - we need to, we have to, where is, I'm glad that... A pleasant lilting melodic background until I realized something. The musicians weren't speaking the usual background Québecois French. They were speaking Spanish. Because I have a familiarity with but not a fluency in both languages, the framework seemed natural even when I couldn't perfectly understand it. My preoccupied mind just harmonized with the flow of the language, got into its rhythm, prepared to maximize understanding, without even bothering to register what it was trying to understand.
Odd.

Viral

Julian Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, founded and controls Wikileaks. Assange has white hair, grew up on a place called Magnetic Island, never attended school regularly, spent ages 11 to 16 in hiding from his mother's abusive cult-member ex-boyfriend, and adopted the online moniker "Mendax" as a teen when he began hacking into servers at the Department of Defense, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other sensitive targets. He was arrested by the Australian National Police in 1991 and charged with 31 counts related to his hacking; he pleaded guilty to 24 of them and avoided jail time. Prior to founding Wikileaks, he spent time as a programmer, blogger, security consultant, and physics student at the University of Queensland. He is essentially homeless, spending the vast majority of his time couch-surfing around the U.S., Iceland, and Europe. In his OKCupid profile, he described himself circa 2006 as engaged in changing the world through "passion, inspiration, and trickery," and his CouchSurfing.com profile promises that he will regale hosts with tales of "attempted assassinations in Africa, telephone taps in Australia...election rigging, the Russian mafia...and politicians' wives." He has a 20-year-old son, Daniel Assange, in Melbourne.

-Gawker's crib notes on Julian Assange

Julian Assange sounds like the sort of badass nerd-cum-hero every pasty high school computer geek wants to be when they grow up. [Also allegedly an egomaniac and less than savoury character in some aspects, but what's to be believed?]

Apart from all that, this new role model for the nerds, despite a notsoslight immersion in it I've always been wary of the viral world (this is the point where the hypocrisy of this blag comes to the forefront, I know) as at once a watered down, pixelated substitution for the real world and the best marketing tool in human history. Information especially from the social aspect of the Internet is collected in mass quantities and used for the clever targeted sales pitches that then insidiously bombard us from all sides. It's inspiring to me, then, to see this network of nerds fighting back, using information and computer code as their weapon, telling the world things it needs to know. It seems almost too blackandwhite, good guys versus bad guys, and of course it's more complicated than that even if we like to think it's not. But lately I've seen the Internet as overwhelmingly a banal distraction/ purveyor of quick gratification/ marketing machine, so it's a nice reminder that people out there who understand this particular system far more than I ever will are using that information as power and having a very real impact.

One of my close friends had a poster on the wall of their dorm in freshman year. Soundbytes in pretty font are oft derided for being almost too easy, but this one rings true and perhaps sometimes a salve against the onslaught is not so inexcusable: