Revisions

1.There are sparrows in the open fields
somewhere over there, and
they glide gracefully over the hills of
flowers and leaves and fresh green grass
saturated with soft, blurring mildew
with the scent of melons. They whisper
through the air with their wings
of paper feathers and songs of crystal clear
tunes. They are free, soft, and delicate things
that serve no purpose, but they are welcome,
because to me they are like decorations in my
peripheral vision, which is to say that they
are awe-inspiring and remind me of
if I could be free.
2. Andrew - You have some beautiful imagery in the poem "Air."  The poem needs a bit of trimming.  The end of the poem sounds more like prose than poetry, and that's where I would trim some of the lines.  If you do that, I think you'll have a great poem.

Mimi Moriarty

3. There are sparrows in the open fields

somewhere over there, and
they glide gracefully over the rolling hills 

of flowers and leaves and fresh green grass
saturated with soft, blurring mildew
with the scent of melons. They whisper
through the air with their paper wings
and origami feathers and songs of crystal clear
tunes. They are free, soft, and delicate things
that hang like the tree shaped car fresheners

and exist like a lazy cat on a Sunday.

They are.

4. I feel that the revised is definitely more clear and lightweight in terms of jargon. The first one actually had no true point towards the end and it dragged the light feeling of the beginning down a bit. Also, I had not noticed that it was in fact prose towards the end which I should probably look out for in the future. Aside from replacing and adding a few words in the beginning, cutting out the end was really the big thing that I revised in this piece. There still isn't much of a meaning, but the air of the poem is much, much lighter. Arguably, lazy is still too heavy of a word, but I feel like it could be left there as a transition towards something else if I were to use this poem again sometime.

S = Eight Living People to Emulate

1. Minoru Shiraishi- There are few role models in life that can take on the role of voice actors who play the part of the animated version of themselves in movies and TV series. Multiple different times. And he can sing the openings to said movies / TV series.

2. Mrs. Salamone- My ninth grade English teacher who taught and certainly inspired many to write and read more challenging works.

3. Joseph Stalin- Heavily industrialized Russia and created huge profits, as well as being partly responsible for the Russian victory in WWII because of this. not alive...oops. Well he's still pretty important.

3. Sarah Palin- she has the ability to see Russia from her house, she has a lot of experience in foreign policy because of Alaska's close proximity with Russia, as well as having a wide variety of tastes in literature and the habit of reading every single newspaper that has ever been put in front of her. She is also a strong supporter of the Tea Party and coining new terms, and her hobbies are comparable to those of such literary geniuses as Shakespeare.

4. Sen- A pro Starcraft 2 player from Taiwan, he has consistently good macro and ZvT matchups.

5. Skrillex (Sonny John Moore)- Is extremely talented at writing music, and has been extremely popular.

6. J.K.Simmons- The voice actor for Cave Johnson, who has motivated many people to live better, take control of life, and do science.

7. Shannon Chan-Kent- Also a voice actor who has spread friendship and joy and parties across the western world.

8. SaSe- An experienced professional Warcraft 3 player who has competed and practiced in China before moving on to Starcraft 2. He managed to amazingly defeat Idra, Naama, and Kas in DreamHack Summer 2011, and was knocked out of the Round of 16 by Sen. He now practices mainly Starcraft 2 in South Korea.

TU Tuesday-Culture

http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Land-dispute-sparks-protests-in-east-China-village-3334716.php
http://www.chinese-poems.com/d39.html

This article is about disputes between villagers and police over land disputes. The violent disputes and protests have been around in the past, and have now sparked protests, and the violence has escalated to where "a Dutch reporter interviewing villagers... was beaten up...by men who appeared to be plainclothes police". The poem, Qiang Village 3, is also about a struggle between villagers with the harsh conditions imposed upon them by the government. "Conscription still continues without an end" and "children are campaigning to the east" have a sort of alliteration that uses the hard c sound and gives a feeling of the rigidity of laws and mandates imposed upon the villagers and their way of life.

Valentine's Day

When I looked up and saw Cupid with his bow, I knew we were in trouble. Soon, there were scores of them, like a hive of bees. The clear blue sky drowned in minutes in a pool of magic dust that was colored a rainbow of red. I immediately commanded my pet panda to make a quick escape while I fired back miscellaneous objects at the swarms of cupids with my slingshot. Tables, desks, bowls of cereal, power cords, gift cards, and mattresses flew through the air, cutting through arrows and streaks of red. Cupids fell from the sky like flies in the rain. One of the flung kitchen knives hit an evergreen tree, which landed on a few of the Cupids and stopped the others from giving pursuit. After making it through the Chasm of Cupids, we finally encountered our last obstacle.  The Cave of Cavities. Naturally, I threw my long-time acquaintance, the Cat, into the dark, unwelcoming depths first to check for dangers. When the coast was clear, our party cautiously sneaked in, hoping to get to the other side and out the cave without a hitch. Suddenly, a pair of sheet white eyes appeared not ten meters ahead of us. I commanded the Cat to harness the power of white hot love and to stay still. Then, I punted him straight between the pair of lifeless eyes, which no doubt belonged to the Candy Monster, and ran bolted right out of the cave with my pet panda, leaving nothing but a smoldering wreckage behind. Later, I would again rendezvous with my acquaintance, the Cat, on a different journey to the Mountains of Heavenland, but that would be another tale. We, (my panda and I), had made it at last, to the land of Eternal Chocolate. We let go of our vigilance, while expecting to be greeted warmly. Luckily, something caught our attention. I've long forgotten how we figured out that the land of Eternal Chocolate wasn't actually eternal, and that it was only open ten to five on Valentine's Day, (or how we managed to even remember when Valentine's Day was, for that matter), but I do remember when we looted as much chocolate from that place as we could before burning it down too, and those were some good, good times.

Happy Chocolate Day Everyone!
May the next year be forever better than the previous!

Time passes as night blooms

Rainbow Sky, Transiently

Time passes as night blooms
like a watercolor painting
with dark, bold purple
bleeding into the red-orange
tangerine sunset bleeding into
a faint, empty yellow
apathy bleeding into green
softer than grass with hints
of envy bleeding into the blue,
blue, soft-as-day
sky above.

Comic Connection

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2011/12/10
I chose this comic because it reminds me of popular modern trends such as Facebook, Myspace (well, maybe not anymore?), and Twitter. Suddenly, conversation and thought has been degraded and condensed into snippets of statements and other people's thoughts. Bill Watterson has predicted the future, and it is very boring and mindless. Serious people can look at this comic and maybe say that it is about the childish ways of craving attention in every part of life. I think that it is fun to make a mockery of our flaws and the one's of society and that it is also very profitable to then put those pieces of satire into comic strips. As for me, I would  like to stay away from things like that, because they sound very boring in retrospect. Besides, a picture is worth a thousand words, and that's what pictures are for.

Don't wait to get started

Procrastination has always been a big part of my life and study schedule, as well as being a part of the lives of many other students. There is no way to explain why I always resolve to get things done before taking a break, even though I know I will not get anything done before taking a break. It is like deja vu, how I always procrastinate again and again after I know I will procrastinate. So this pep talk really does apply to my life greatly. Maybe I will be more successful, or witness more opportunities if I stop stopping. There are many times where I retrospectively regret not starting on something sooner. Either way, it is a helpful piece of advice, even though advice will not help much at all.

TU Tuesday

http://blog.timesunion.com/adirondacks/one-in-vermilioin/1054/
"I heard they lost a billion trees" was a hyperbole, or exaggeration, that reinforced the kind of light the author cast on the speaker at the other end of the telephone, in the sense that it made her, herself, seem more hyper and exaggerated and somewhat naive.
"and the next thing... and I had... and what are... and God knows..." The repetition, or repeating, of conjunctions and the run-on dialogue is also used to create the same hyper, too-much-to-say tone in the character of April.
"squeak like hinges" is a simile, (a comparison that uses like or as), which creates a sound in the reader's mind that helps to better explain the tone.

"One in Vermilion" is an article written by a bird field guide specialist about a, presumably, real life phone conversation with a crazed woman who is extremely naive and extremely interested in birds herself. He uses this conversation as a piece of evidence that he has "paid for [his] first field guide to the birds with [his] sanity". In the dialogue, he uses basically no punctuation to portray the speaker at the other end of the line as a crazy and slightly dim girl who lacks judgment and patience and who is on "nicotine or THC" because she talks so fast and won't slow down to even think about the ridiculous things she's saying. One of the things she mistakes, and thus was ridiculed by, was the line "I heard [Texas] lost a billion trees" in the context of the effects of global warming. This article was mostly a self blog about an event that happened.