YAWN.

taken from an MSNBC pointless-trivia-type-story.

Why is yawning contagious? - P.H.
If you don’t think YAWNING is contagious, see if you YAWN by the time you’re done reading this explanation of YAWNING.
First, let’s dispel a myth. You don’t yawn to take in extra oxygen. “That’s been rejected in lab tests,” says YAWN expert Robert Provine, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland’s Baltimore County campus. He had test subjects breathe air with extra oxygen. For others, he reduced the oxygen intake by giving them air high in carbon dioxide. Neither caused more or less YAWNING.
(YAWN. YAWN. YAWN.)
Provine says “we YAWN when we’re changing states of activity. Going from sleep to wakefulness, like YAWNING in the morning. Or wakefulness to sleep.” (He says we YAWN more in the morning when we wake up, by the way.)
“Concert pianists will YAWN before going out to an important performance. Olympic athletes YAWN before the big event. Embryos begin YAWNING eleven weeks after conception,” Provine notes. He says YAWNING is somehow connected to changing levels of body activity, changes from one state to another, like inactive to active or vice versa, but nobody understands just what the connection is.
“It probably helps stir up the blood and brain chemistry to facilitate those transitions from one level of activity to another.”
Why? “YAWNING is ancient and autonomic,” Provine says. “Maybe it’s to get everyone in the tribe to synchronize their states of activity, to increase the success of the tribe if everyone’s working together. We really don’t know.”
(YAWN. YAWN. YAWN.)
YAWNING is highly contagious, he says. Every vertebrate species YAWNS. Fish YAWN. Birds YAWN. Alligators YAWN. But Provine says it’s apparently only contagious in humans.
Provine has made test subjects YAWN by showing them a YAWNING face. Interestingly, if he shows them just the YAWNING mouth, it doesn’t trigger the YAWNING. If he covers the mouth, and shows them just the nose and eyes of the YAWNING face, it does. He’s made subjects YAWN by talking about YAWNING, or asking the test subjects to think about YAWNING, or by having them read about YAWNING.
Yawning yet?

good luck during the witchy season

this rocks.

Today

is a day whose time has come, and very shortly will be gone.
Today won't ever return, like your virginity or your baby teeth.

Course, like your virginity, very few people (aside from the deeply spiritual kook) realize the importance of today and its power. And, like baby teeth, today will be replaced, but the replacements need just as much care as today did.

"Today is the greatest day I've ever known."

And I will do my best to make sure each and every day I can say those words with all sincerity.

"You are all beautiful creatures. And I bless you:

More Life!"

get outta here. enjoy.

One

There was the moment, Saturday morning in 2003 when I was working at the MOSAIC Project and had been for a few weeks now, and my new friends and I were enjoying the Napa forest and really sinking deep into each other and falling in love. Not the kind of love that leaves you sticky or sick-in-the-head, the kind of love that makes you want to grow it and spread it around for free.

We spent the morning rowing a boat in a little pond, Arturo and I, and we talked in the sun about God. And he reflected on his ideas of prayer, what it was, what it was good for. He had believed for a very long time, in the very basic tenet, that prayer, the conscious act of praying to God, was a way to communicate thanks for life, for the world, for everything to this all-knowing, all-powerful sentient and needy being.

I remember feeling so blessed to be able to share my thoughts with someone who I had experienced so much with. We rowed, shirts off, just men with lives behind us and futures and knowledge uncertain. Neither one of us was comparing or competing.

It was Idyllic.

I breathed the morning air in deep, noticed that Jose was wandering and exploring the man-made banks off to our left. Julie, Ginger, and Elicia, who I called "the three Graces," sat on a large rock on the other bank of the pond nearer to the kitchen/office of the grounds. They ate as we spoke. It looked like cheerios. As Arturo handed the oars to me, I wondered about my view of God. What was it?

"I don't think that a god who could create all this," the girls began to sing, in harmony, "would need our validation. Surely our thanks is evident. Surely waking up each day and taking everything in, as we have been, Arturo, is proof of our perfection in his eyes. No matter how we see ourselves, I think we were created just as we were meant to be. And anything that has the power to do that, sees our gratitude in our actions. Where the hell would mandatory, cheap, flattery figure into the equation?" I never felt more sure of anything in my life.

Arturo and I continued to exchange questions and quiet, and the day was probably one of the most meaningful of my life.

I knew in that one day, what it meant to exist, and to make an imprint on the world around me. I had found something infinitely more priceless than fame or wealth. And in that one day, I knew that this feeling was familiar. It was the light of recognition illuminating my mind so that these individual jewels of experience might be found. And lo and behold, they had all been sitting in my grasp threaded on the same string of my life. I guess I had never realized what I had in my possession.

Thinking of this reminds me of a story I read or heard somewhere sometime ago. It's something like this:

A society of people wear necklaces for their entire lives. For each day they are truly alive, they take the bead from around their necks and mark it with a notch. When they have died, this bead is tallied up and the marks totalled equal the true time they spent living.

How many notches would your necklace have?

Personally? I can think of one, off the top of my head.

2 was yesterday

and yesterday I decided that today would be good.
as good as yesterday.
all my troubles were just games we played.
oh, yes ladies and gentlemen, I DO believe in yesterday.

and I believe in tomorrow as well.

Tomorrow will break with the same force as its predecessors did.
Perhaps rain, perhaps light, but surely another breath drawn in peace.
I continue to breath through the wide world and all it has to offer me.

I am not the man I was one year ago.
Imagine that.
Nor am I the man I was five or even ten years ago.

I hadn't realized just what was changing, until it occurred to me to look at myself.
I thought everyone lived like this.
Maybe they do.

26 years ago today:

Every year my mother called me in the weeks and days before my birthday, and each time was exactly the same.

This year the conversation would have gone like this:

"hello?"

"Twenty-six year ago today..."

"Hi Mom." I always feigned boredom, which delighted her, of course.

"Don't interrupt. Twenty-six years ago today. I had a belly out to here and was due any day. You had apparently decided you liked it where you were and hadn't shown any signs of wanting to leave. But I knew...."

"Knew what?"

"I knew that you were just waiting for the right time. You've always had that sense of drama. I knew you would be my perfect creation. And you knew how to make an entrance. And when you were born, you were."

"I was what?"

"Perfect."

This always stung, though she would never understand why. "I am not perfect," I would say emphatically. But of course, in my mothers eyes (as it should be with all children), I was, and no amount of evidence to the contrary would ever convince her otherwise.

Like that for the past 25 years.

I broke down in the projection room today.

good thing the fuckers sound-proofed.

Three days to go.

3

four

work is all I can think about currently.
which is why the silence yesterday.
however, the silence the day before was because reality was setting in, and i had no words to honor the severity of the situation.
the situation being, this is my first birthday in a sense.
It is my first birthday truly alone.

yeah, fuck all, it is definitely a "woah is me" situation.
severity level?
Well, to inject some humor, this one goes to eleven.

so:

"woe is me."

five

for silver

seis

porque mi vida y mi familia vive en mi sangre.
Y en mi Corazon.

6

I want to write. Write and write and write.
Still not a writer, though, nay.

I just want to let rivers seep from my fingertips.
I want to pour my view of the cosmos onto paper and walls and rough-hewn boulders and let the world gain a bit of weight with my thoughts.

Seven is a number often conjured with mystic overtones. Seven Days. Seven Sins. Seventh Heaven. I guess seven days before my 26th year was a day when I clicked into focus.

I am applying myself to my life.

Six days left, let's see what one can accomplish when one isn't God.

neves (thank GOD that's solved Mix)

Oldest noodles unearthed in China

Late Neolithic noodles: They may settle the origin debate

The remains of the world's oldest noodles have been unearthed in China.
The 50cm-long, yellow strands were found in a pot that had probably been buried during a catastrophic flood.
Radiocarbon dating of the material taken from the Lajia archaeological site on the Yellow River indicates the food was about 4,000 years old.
Scientists tell the journal Nature that the noodles were made using grains from millet grass - unlike modern noodles, which are made with wheat flour.
The discovery goes a long way to settling the old argument over who first created the string-like food.
Professor Houyuan Lu said: "Prior to the discovery of noodles at Lajia, the earliest written record of noodles is traced to a book written during the East Han Dynasty sometime between AD 25 and 220, although it remained a subject of debate whether the Chinese, the Italians, or the Arabs invented it first.
Lajia is a very interesting site; in a way, it is the Pompeii of China
Prof Kam-biu Liu"Our discovery indicates that noodles were first produced in China," the researcher from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, explained to BBC News.
The professor's team tells Nature that the ancient settlement at Lajia was hit by a sudden catastrophe.
Among the remains are skeletons thrown into various abnormal postures, suggesting the inhabitants may have been trying to flee the disaster that was enveloping them.
"Based on the geological and archaeological evidence, there was a catastrophic earthquake and immediately following the quake, the site was subject to flooding by the river," explained co-author Professor Kam-biu Liu, from Louisiana State University, US.
"Lajia is a very interesting site; in a way, it is the Pompeii of China."
It was in amongst the human wreckage that scientists found an upturned earthenware bowl filled with brownish-yellow, fine clay.
When they lifted the inverted container, the noodles were found sitting proud on the cone of sediment left behind.
"It was this unique combination of factors that created a vacuum or empty space between the top of the sediment cone and the bottom of this bowl that allowed the noodles to be preserved," Professor Kam-biu Liu said.
The noodles resemble the La-Mian noodle, the team says; a traditional Chinese noodle that is made by repeatedly pulling and stretching the dough by hand.

There is evidence that a sudden calamity overtook the Lajia site. To identify the plants from which the noodles were made, the team looked at the shape and patterning of starch grains and so-called seed-husk phytoliths in the bowl.
These were compared with modern crops. The analysis pointed to the use of foxtail millet (Setaria italica) and broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum)
"Our data demonstrate that noodles were probably initially made from species of domesticated grasses native to China. This is in sharp contrast to modern Chinese noodles or Italian pasta which are mostly made of wheat today," Professor Houyuan Lu said.
Currently listening: Thanks I'll Eat It Here By Glenn Ribble Release date: By 14 September, 1993

neves (Infinite Crisis Mix)

neves

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/llama.php

Someone Else Noticed.

"Hey! Strange! Did I see you on-"
"-yes, yes that was me."
"WOW! So you're, like, a gay celebrity?"
"Somethin' like that."
"That's so funny. You should be really famous and then everyone would know you."
"..."
"Wouldn't that be cool???"
"...for a time."
"Okay, well, bye- Celeb!"

It's great being recognized. It's fun and flattering and silly.
It's also incredibly akward.
How do you respond to anything in this interaction with anything that can be related to humility?

I guess the correct answer is: you soak it up and try not to act like TOO much of a bitch.
That, after all, was what the TV show was for.
Now, you have to prove you're a really nice person.

Right.

The Society Strange

With eight days to go before my birthday, I decided that today would be the day to state clearly what this whole damned thing is about...
So...Without further adieu....

This is a call out to the hamburger stands and 24 hour taco carts of the world.
This is a plea to the office-workers and body-builders.
This is a question posed to the broken and bending masses on every continent.
This is a thesis on the value of super-heroics.
This is valuable information about the quality of life available to anyone who has had the exact same past as I have.
This is a potion to battle sorrow.
This is a dialogue between outsiders and insiders, where both parties find out that there's no such thing as each other.
This is an exclamation of coolness.
This is potty humor.
This is of utter importance to everyone changing.
This is sexuality in all its many incarnations.
This is Mythology having a drink with Reality, and then, if all goes right, a screw.
This is a sobering, cold shower to the irresponsible.
This is an interior monologue which bores even me.
This is wasted time, better spent on personal hygiene and broadened horizons.
This is for posterity.
This is the truth.
This is for no one.
This is for everyone.

Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star
Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, when you’re older, must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town
And they tell him,Take your time, it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

NINE!

NINE DAYS!!!
AH! AH! AH!

God how I loved the Count!
(Which is odd considering I really stink at math.)

So last night I went with Best Friends out to Fiesta Cantina and the like. Oh, it was a fiesta all right. And it all ended in our vodka. But it was a pleasant way to spend the evening so no complaints.

Its funny how things go full circle but always ascending. An argument, however familiar is never the same. That means progress. And that's good, because two years ago I wouldn't have been able to foretell this future. But here I sit, at 9:15AM, with nine days to go until my birthday, in my cozy office building, sipping a black eye and wishing for a hug from my mother.

She was right.
One day I would be sorry.
I guess that day is today.

Count Down from...

10.

Because in that many days I will walk through a door into another quarter of a century.
This doesn't scare me.
This intrigues me.
Because I've been silent about it and watched as the world moves quickly toward the day,and forward, and my life moves with the same pace it always does and the sand keeps sifting through everyone's fingertips, and my mind seems to have slowed down to take it all in.

Last night I had what can only be described as a waking dream.
I was smoking on a patio which may (or may not) have been smoked on by Marilyn Monroe shortly after her divorce with the playwright Arthur Miller. I sat down and inhaled and suddenly my brain said, "this is another moment you're wasting, and in this moment a fight breaks out in the apartment across the way, the one where Debbie Reynolds supposedly used to hang out her window and talk with Marilyn as she sat where you are now, but now there's a fight and it's 2005 and a girl is screaming and a man is telling her to shut the fuck up and she just won't and that's when you hear the pitch in his voice alter just enough to know he isn't fighting aimlessly anymore he means it and she's no longer screaming, her breath has caught in her throat. "
Funny part was that at this moment the entire area was unusually silent.
"And the sound of the gun is followed a split-second later by the shatter of glass and a scream which is followed a split-second later with a bullet searching for and finding your chest," my brain finishes.

And I sat with a burning cigarette between my thumb and forefinger and my heart tightening and releasing as it always has, but now I was acutely aware of the fact that I wasn't bleeding, but not feeling "healthy" either.

I was detatched and curious if the myth of death-while-dreaming is not a myth after all?

I sat, and felt my heart beat in my temples, and along with my heart beat, my brain quizzing, "what will be remembered of you, if you die tonight? Where are you going when the bullet hits? How much more will you resent, accomplish, envision? When will the weight in your heart be lifted? Or will that weight be enough to kill you before a bullet does?"

I labored to finish my cigarette and then went inside, shut off the light and went to bed.

As I drifted toward sleep, I marveled at my acceptance of the future, no matter what it held. My complicity cradled me into the un-knowable shifting zone between awake and asleep and my last thought was this:

"Shit, I'm getting older, too."

10.

Brotherhood with fire.

Been reading, and chatting and listening to all things bright and beautiful and decided to have this take on things:
The world, the universe, my own goddamn brain, have no idea with whom they are dealing.

A book I read caught a spark.
A song I heard gave it fuel.
A man on the other side of the universe said some things that have me thinking.
And I sit deep in the flames, allowing myself time and time and more time to really burn with this feeling.

What I mean is this:
I will not recede quietly in this roughness.
"What the flame does not consume, consumes the flame."
It's not an original thought, but I've never claimed originality.

And besides, I've got bigger things to consider than unique turns of phrase for the pleasure of whoever.

I'm through waiting for a hero....