MySpace Pictures

One of the questions I always get when people look through my pictures: "Why are they all black and white?!"

So I remember, from the beginning of high schools, I always kind of wanted to be the shutterbug of the crew. I didn't appreciate pictures back then as much as I did now - probably not until 11th grade or so - but I remember I had some little amount of interest in having a camera with me at most times. Sadly, that didn't happen... my family had one crappy Kodak digital camera for a long time, and then my mom got a new one, too, but I thought it was also pretty crappy, and there was NO WAY I could carry that thing around with me - it was just too big.

But I did try, sometimes, to take it around with me. I remember at one point near the end of junior summer, after I got home from PGSS, I wanted to make a pictureboard [on corkboard] with all my senior friends [Class of 2007 friends]. So we went out to Target and found the largest corkboard we could - it was probably 3' x 2' or so - and it cost $14.99. That was right after we found out about the "$20 Rule," so when we went to the cashier - it was Kia Brinkley who checked us out - we assured her it was actually $10, and she had to give it to us. We were pretty happy about that. We also got some thumb tacks, I think. Clear ones.

I forget if I took pictures that night, or somtime earlier that year, but there are three pictures from that time period that really stand out to me.

One of them is of Erin. We were at the Kid's Dream Playground for some sort of party, I forget exactly whose, in the mid-afternoon. It was a really nice day. She was wearing her huge, dark sunglasses that only certain people can pull off, and her black-and-white striped jacket-like thing that I don't know the name for. I think she was also holding a cup in one hand, and she may have had her mouth open just a tiny little bit. I remember thinking it was a good picture of her.

The second one I remember is one of Beth and Steve. This was when Steve would always grope and feel and invade Beth's personal space. We were standing outside of Beth's house - we were always at Beth's house, of course - near our cars, walking in from wherever we were, and I really wanted a picture of Beth and Steve being Beth and Steve. He was wearing his signature green striped shirt, but I can't quite remember what Beth was wearing. He was jumping on her and trying to lick her face, and she was screaming and shouting and playfully trying to get him off of her.

The third picture was my favorite. It was of Beth and Steve, laying on Beth's bed in her room, where we always spent all of our time. Beth was actually on the floor, and Steve was slightly sprawled out on the bed. There was bottled water on the bed that someone hadn't thrown into the recycling bin in the opposite corner of Beth's room yet. The bed wasn't made and you could see her red sheets. They were both smiling a lot. It's a great picture. It was pretty much everything I wanted to remember about that summer.

Those are just about the only three pictures of mine from the first three years of high school. I put them on the corkboard along with a few others. One day, we had a corkboard-picture-finding party... we picked out a ton of old pictures, but for some reason we never got around to putting them up. I guess I know the reason, but I just don't want to talk about it right now.

Sometime after PGSS, I was talking to Alex DiJulio while at Beth's house - standing in her kitchen and kind of having an aside with him - when I saw him looking through his pictures on his camera. I can't explain quite why, but I thought they were all particularly beautiful pictures, and they were all in black and white. I asked him what kind of camera it was [Canon Digital Elph], and whether or not he liked it. I knew he was pretty hardcore into photography, so when he said he liked it, I knew it was probably a pretty safe bet. I asked for that camera for Christmas, and I think it's pretty much the best material Christmas present I've ever been given. I took something along the lines of 1700 pictures in the next eight months, most of them in black and white.

I think the reason I remember that night and that conversation with Alex so clearly was because I thought, You know, if I could take pictures that beautiful, I would take pictures all the time. And I sort of guessed that what I thought was so beautiful about the pictures was that they were black and white. So if I had that camera - just a small camera, good resolution, easy to transport, takes good black and white shots - I would finally start taking pictures like I had wanted to for so long. And I did. And I think I owe a lot of that to the fact that I find black and white pictures so incredible compared to normal colors.

So that's why I take black and white pictures, I guess. I always wanted to take pictures, but I was always disappointed with the ones that I took until I discovered I could take them all in black and white and I'd think they were all beautiful. So I take pictures in black and white because it's the only way I know how to make myself take pictures.

Peace out.

Eric Levy

I play piano in Alumnae Hall fairly often. I don't always play at midnight anymore - sometimes I'm sleepy, and sometimes it's cold, and sometimes I'm just not in the mood - but I still go frequently. Now that it's during the day, I often get visitors of some sort.

This Monday, I got a visitor. I was in the middle of playing Rage, Rage when a tall, black, 35-or-so, bald, tattooed security guard in full uniform walked into the room from the far corner. Like most of my visitors, he wasn't in a rush to get over to me. I was expecting the normal security guard check - you allowed to be in here? Can I see your key? Etc.

But not with Eric. The first thing he said to me was something very close to, "Hey man, you mind if I come watch you play for a little bit?"

I was very surprised. Seriously, I asked him? Yes, definitely! he said. He'd been taking some music theory classes, he told me, so he knew all about how music was supposed to go down, but he was just having trouble getting it to go onto the keyboard. He asked if I would play a little something more, so I said sure, of course I'll play - what kind of stuff do you like to listen to? All kind of stuff, he said. I figured I'd play Chemical Road.

He talked, before that point, about how he was familiar with chords, but not terribly familiar with how to use them on a piano. Chemical Road is pretty easy to detect chords in - especially in the left hand - so I pointed that out to him before I started playing. Then I started.

I kept my left hand in fifths - I usually don't do that, but he was new and I wanted it to be really obvious to him the way my left hand was moving. He was tapping his foot throughout the song. At first it wasn't always with the beat, and it was more like in half-time than what I usually think of as the song's beat. But by the end of it, the last chorus, where I was singing, "Coming home, coming home, won't see you coming home," he was tapping his foot on the accents and playing drums in the air. He seemed to really like it.

When I finished, he laughed and said, "Man, that's a hit right there! Did you write that? I can hear the drums in the background through the whoooole thing, and how it goes up and down... up and down... that's really awesome!" [I'm not trying to toot my own horn, I'm just recalling an experience] So of course I say yes, I wrote it, and thank you many times... but I didn't really care about me and I wanted to know more about him so I asked him some more.

He took his music theory classes as part of his church. They're not incredibly in depth, he said - just six weeks - but enough to get people started for a choir piano part at a church. He said his church has really good music, and a number of musicians [sax and drumset included, and a full choir that he sings in], but the piano player sometimes wanted a break, or to know that when he was gone, someone would be around in the community to carry on. Not to mention Eric just wanted to let him know that other people cared as much as he did about what he was truly passionate about. So he decided to learn.

He grew up listening to a lot of gospel, and a lot of jazz. He reads music, but he was new to bass clef, and I'm pretty sure his ear is a lot better than mine because of what he grew up with. He says that now he listens to a lot of alternative rock - Hootie and the Blowfish, Pearl Jam, that sort of thing.

He had a girlfriend a while ago who was German, and her grandmother forced her to play piano. Very rigid, very uptight - would smack her hands if she played wrong and smacked her shoulders if she sat wrong. But she stuck with it - unlike me in the story I was telling - and she finally found it to be a really powerful emotional release. That's part of what Eric wanted, and what he said he liked about Chemical Road - he could tell that I actually cared about it.

He asked the best way to learn, and he was talking about his practicing. Sometimes he would sit down and work at a single part for hours and hours, and get frustrated and angry and give up and sometimes not touch a piano for a month...! But he said he definitely had to start practicing, every day, he said, for hours. I was like, "Oh no! That's way too much!" It really is... it can't be something you force yourself to do. If you come to it slowly, that's how it happens. So I told him that - just find some sheet music that you really like, with chords and bass and treble, that you REALLY want to learn, and just sit down whenever you're a little bored and take a look at it. After all, that was what his piano teacher wanted him to do - to really love piano - so I thought that was definitely the best course for him.

He also needed sheet music. I told him about musicfiles.com [but told him it might also be musicnotes.com] and told him how to work it, and hopefully that'll come through for him.

I can't remember a whole lot more about what we said... those are most of the important things. In any case, I really liked Eric and I hope I see him again. I hope he starts playing, too. It seems like he really wants to want to play, and I just hope that comes through for him. I'm really starting to enjoy Alumnae Hall Strange Time Piano Playing as a way of meeting people.

Peace out.

Ice Box

When I came to college, I thought it might be nice to start logging my AIM conversations. That way, in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, I'd be able to open them up and see what I was like when I was a crazy college kid, or what I was talking about, or who I talked about the most with, or just what was happening in my day-to-day life without always having to write it right here.

So I set it up. Like cheese chockadados, it was REAL EASY! I mean, yeah, I just hit a button and told it where to put the folder and it started, no problems. I started that before I even came to college - so something like August 31st, I guess?

And so up until just recently, I was operating under the assumption that everything in AIM was logged away somewhere on my computer for safekeeping whenever I wanted it. I recorded the stuff onto my external harddrive every now and then just to make sure that even if my computer blew up, my memories would be safe.

I looked at a log the other day - it only went back four days. Four days. I think it only stores up to about 1700kb of information, and then stops. I was so crushed. Think of all the things that I said... all the things I talked about and all the things I felt that I wanted to keep forever that I unknowingly let disappear!

I suppose there's nothing I can really do about those at this point. Just start again.

Peace out.

Snow and Lights

snow and lights might comfort me [ah, ah]
surrounded by that sea,
i can't recall if i was there

i dreamed of things i could not see,
what life must hide from me,
i wasted all my time
in dreams

i tried to look out for you [ah, ah]
but never ask of you,
i can't recall how much i cared

i dreamed of things i could not have,
what life must keep from me,
i wasted all my time
in dreams

by now i can blame myself [ah, ah]
'cause now i'm old enough
i can't recall [explain] why that should help

i dreamed of things i could not save,
what life must take from us,
i wasted it all my time
in dreams

but snow and lights might comfort me

NPR

I miss NPR. National Public Radio. A pretty good amount. I suppose that really I just miss driving, but there's so much to write about that that I could never do it justice, so I'll write about NPR.

I remember one of the first times I listened to NPR was when I was with Mom and Mitch Albo and Virginia Heffernan were talking about their book The Underminer, written in second-person, full of passive-aggressiveness. The entire point of the book was just to show how horrible passive-aggressive people really are. Some of the best lines were "Hey, do you still like your new haircut? .... Oh, yeah, I love it! I just wanted to make sure you do, too." Or, "Oh my god, I just saw your ex-boyfriend and he is the HOTTEST thing I have ever seen." Or, "Wow, your guitar player is really talented!" You kind of had to hear the whole story, and have it done in their voices, but I ended up buying and reading the whole book and falling in love with NPR.

When I got my own car [my dad's old Infinity Q45], just about all I listened to was NPR, WHYY 90.9. Part of it was because the car didn't have a CD player, and who wants to hook that up? But part of it was also because I just loved NPR.

I liked driving alone with NPR on... It was nice to, for a couple minutes a day, I suppose, just think about whatever you wanted to think about, and if you got tired or lost of your own thoughts, you could listen to someone else's on NPR. It would give you new ideas on things and keep you up to date with the world. There were, I'm sure, dozens of times when I started stores with, "So I was listening to NPR the other day and..." And Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me would make you laugh at the same time. It was too bad I was never driving between 4PM and 5PM on Saturdays...

So I guess what I'm saying is, I'd like to be able to drive here, while listening to NPR. I don't know where to exactly, or exactly why. I think I'd just like to get in a car and listen to NPR and see what's going on in the world and think about it more often than I do right now. [It's hard to stay up with the world at college] But I suppose I can't do that until at least next year...

Peace out.

Time

We had this Monday off for Columbus Day, and everyone was really excited for the long weekend. As it turned out, it was a long weekend for me... and I kind of want to get back into work. It's hard to describe why, but I'll try my best.

A lot of people left for the weekend, so the whole campus felt a little bit empty. Danny was gone so I had the room to myself. He was in Boston, and he ended up meeting Emily Gaeman.

Anyway, on Friday night, there was supposed to be a little gathering in Maura's room, but for some reason that didn't really end up happening. I kind of forget what I ended up doing for the earlier part of the night, but the the later part of the night, I remember I was watching baseball in Spencer's room with him and Maura. It was kind of tiring, I remember texting Gina a few times, and almost falling asleep a few times. I think after that people wandered around the second floor for a while, into Jaime's room (pronounced hi-may), and... nothing was really happening. So I decided to go back to my room, and I'm pretty sure that was around 11:30PM.

That was Friday, October 5th. My birthday is October 6th. And I was sitting there, thinking - what do I want to be doing as it becomes my birthday and I become 19? I want to be playing piano. I want to be playing Snow and Lights.

I'm not sure how many of you have heard or really listened to the song Snow and Lights, but it is - I think - the most personal and important [to me] song I've ever written. It talks about pretty much everything I've ever cared about in some form or another. The first stanza is an image of me sitting in my piano room at the big bay windows on our flower patterned couches, staring outside to snow falling through our spotlights and postlights. It's about life being easy and comfortable, and feeling at home, and warm, and safe. The second stanza is about all you kids - probably the ones reading this - and how much I cared about you. And still care about you. I think so highly of all of you and I would give the world to any of you and I know that you could give it right back to me but I'd prefer if you kept it. And it's just about the fear that, maybe someday, you'll drift out of my life and I won't even remember how much I cared for you. The third stanza is about that fear, too - how tragic it would be to sit back and realize that I had let you get away, and to know that that knowledge doesn't even help me. It just hurts.

And of course, the chorus. It's really all about time... wasting time. Perhaps the worst feeling I have ever known. Feeling like I should have done something, knowing I should have done something, but letting time go and go and go and never doing anything about it. Oh, it feels so terrible...

So that was the song I wanted to play. Birthdays make me think of wasted time more than anything else, and I thought that would be an appropriate song. So I was in my dorm room at 11:59 and I started playing and recording it on my keyboard. And then at 12:01... Andy knocked on my door. I know he couldn't have known - how could he have known? - that it was a horrible time [did I mention I was sweaty and had no shirt on?], but for some reason I was upset by it, still. I think it was just because this wasn't what I wanted. He returned my scotch tape and told me I was Awesome Resident of the Month [for letting him play in Alumnae Hall]. I finished the song after he left, recorded another version, and fell asleep without showering.

I woke up again on my birthday. I went to brunch and got some pancakes (eventually) and went back to check my mail. I found out that the mail room didn't open until 12, so I had to go back later. When I came back then, a card had been put in my mailbox from Kim, and I was happy to see it! I also got a package from mom and dad.

I think the most interesting part of this experience was my letter from Nana [mom's side].

I've never really been close with Nana, or any of my grandparents... it's not that we don't get along, or dislike each other... it's just that we were never close. I never understood what I could learn from her or how to relate from her. And for some reason, this year, I finally started to feel like I was missing out on that. And for the first time, I read her card - I mean, really read her card and thought about it - and for the first time... I think I understood what it was like to be a grandparent, almost. And what it was like to have a son, or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter, and to love them and care for them and be proud of them. And it made me sad that it took so long to learn this, and that it came at a time where every communication I got from her could be the last. This could be the last I ever hear from her. I just don't know.

That night I really wanted to go to Waterfires, so Nupur, Bridgette, and Andy Watkins [from PGSS, now at Harvard] came with me. Colleen, Bridgette's roommate at URI, also came. I suppose it was what I expected of Waterfire, and what I wanted it to be - but that is somewhat reflective and somewhat sad. Andy and I had a nice conversation about his parents and his family - I'm not sure how much I should say about it because it was somewhat in confidence, so I have to stop here. I also remember that I saw Bridgette crying on Nupur's shoulder and wondering why, and wishing there were something I could do about it. I gave her a hug when she left because I thought she might just want to know... I don't know. It's hard to say. I guess that I care about her and hope she feels better.

That night I slept in Chaz's room with Nupur and Andy. They both left at 8:50AM, and I went back to sleep. At 9AM, I realized my alarm was going off back in my room and I had to run across the Quad, retainers in hair undone shirt backwards, to turn off my alarm.

I had pancakes again that morning (eventually).

I remember I did some amount of work on Sunday, but not a whole lot. I didn't do much at night. I kind of forget most of Sunday. I remember that Gina and I talked a whole lot, though =)

Today I had brunch with the PGSS kids, +Andy and Jules's friend Maro but -Rima [who went home]. Liz put a huuuuge crossword puzzle on her wall - it has 25,000 clues.

Tonight, I had a nice long conversation with Maura. We both had kind of sad weekends... Mine just kind of felt empty. A friend of her's died. Hers was certainly sadder, but we could kind of relate to each other.

I realized later that I was largely homesick. I talked to Dad and told him that he and Mom should come visit me the weekend before parents weekend. I think I would really like it if they did that, and it might be expensive, but I really hope they come. I'd like to see them.

I felt a little better after that/during my Democracy Matters meeting.

I thought a lot about time this weekend. I came to the conclusion that time was the best gift anyone could have ever given to me. I just wish that I had more of it. But there's no way for that to happen... you're given it once and that's all you get. I think that's why birthday's make me sad.... they're a reminder of lost time. And I just wish birthdays wouldn't come and time would stand still and I didn't have to worry about it going away or going to waste ever.

This was the first birthday where I was really away from everyone and everything that was really important to me. And I guess also the first one where I realized that I should have spent all my birthdays appreciating those things a little bit more. Or every day.

Peace out.