New Mix

The shortest serious mix I've made. I wasn't sure if it was complete, but I think it probably is. I heard one other song I wanted on it, but forgot exactly which song that is.

http://8tracks.com/walking_daydream/i-want-your-attention

"I Want Your Attention. . . and affection."

01 Pilote - Turtle (Bonobo Mix)
02 Flight Facilities - Crave You
03 A-ha - Take on Me
04 Divinyls - I Touch Myself
05 Katie Herzig - I Want to Belong to You
06 The Whitest Boy Alive - Don't Give Up
07 Lykke Li - Little Bit
08 Mathemagic - Sequin (extra)
09 Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You

New Job

I came home last night and saw an email from the lady I met with about the job. Today I filled out paperwork finalizing my acceptance and now I have a job! I'm getting in at only $8/hour, but they're letting me stay at ten hours a week. Previously, since they were hiring me hourly instead of work-study, they were going to cut the hours down and probably pay less. It may be possible to get a pay raise (since lab techs usually get ten an hour on campus) next semester, but I'm not holding out on it.
So the job is with the short grass step LTER network, and I basically am sorting bagged samples collected this last summer. Rather than just grasses and forbs, I have to identify what the specimens are and sort them by warm season, cool season, etc. I start early Monday morning and they're already getting a key for me so I can work alone at some point after training. How fast!
I don't like having to be in class only all the time, and wish I could just go out and get a job already, so this is a good median.

Wyoming and Back Again

Friday morning I left with some people from the Range Ecology club to Wyoming where a professor-turned-assessor was doing private land monitoring and restoration. Friday our group looked around and got some of the natural history of the area and began learning some of the prevalent species. Saturday and Sunday we participated in monitoring riparian areas by doing cross-sectional plant community and land type descriptions followed by green line descriptions in the same fashion. Roy, the land assessor, showed us his transect method which involved 100m tapes and triple nested quadrats. The paperwork he used caught the data in the same way as the Southern Plains Network, but felt much more vague in the presentation, which I suppose is different because of the how the land is being used. It wasn't so much a study as grasping the area and figuring out how to make it more useful to cattle without detriment to land.
Unfortunately, one of the bigger guys in the group turned out to be a snorer and his bellowing woke me up multiple times in the night. Since we started with breakfast at 6:30, I didn't get much sleep. Tonight I hope to finish my work quickly and try to catch up again. I think after this week things will slow down a bit, which will be nice.
Wednesday I have a meeting with someone involved with the Short Grass Steppe-Long Term Ecological Research center on campus. I had heard about a lab position which involved learning characteristics of Northeast Colorado plants and the categories they can be separated into; so it's a lab job that seems to come directly after field work. It's a work-study position and the university has given out all that money, but the lady there wants me to come in to chat and then show me the lab. I'm not sure if it's a job interview, so I'll have to wait and see. It's a small weekly hour requirement but I've felt swamped as is with my classes and clubs. Extra money would be nice, though.

Good Phrasing

I really like the way this sounds so I'm putting it here to make it easy to find.

"I've thought about it and since you aren't able to decide between he and me, we must be evenly matched. I don't know what to do, but I don't like the idea of waiting on you if this is what you think because it probably won't go anywhere in that case. This doesn't mean I wont be waiting, I've been waiting my whole life; it just means I'll be waiting for nothing in particular."

New Mix

http://8tracks.com/walking_daydream/i-ll-miss-you

01 Album Leaf - Airplane
02 Yo La Tengo - Our way to fall
03 Caribou - After Hours
04 Cary Brothers - Blue Eyes
05 Charlotte Gainsbourg - Dandelion
06 Coconut Records - The Summer
07 Ray Lamontagne - For the Summer
08 Eric Clapton - Wonderful Tonight
09 Iron & Wine - Love And Some Verses
10 Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues
11 Coldplay- Talk
12 Death Cab For Cutie - Brothers On A Hotel Bed
13 Counting Crows - A Long December
14 Foo Fighters - Next Year
15 Pheonix - Long Distance Call
16 Robert Francis - Where You Came from
17 Kings of Convenience - Until You Understand
18 Helio Sequence - Shed Your Love

Prologue

I feel like I can only happily enjoy the Prologue when I drink.










Yet another famous one line post.

Lonely

The song of the day is "Terrible Love" by The National.

It seems almost a crime that someone who can make a friend so easily should be so lonely.

Garden Pixie

So the other day I was harvesting stuff in the garden for the produce stand and I saw a little figure moving in the sunflowers and raspberries. She was literally little, maybe around five feet and very thin. Her hair was cut short but she still had a pony-tail held by a green ribbon. I asked her name and she said Beck and never asked for mine. I started harvesting and suddenly she was putting stuff in the basket as well. What I found funny was how she put in one or two of something and moved to another part of the garden to harvest something else. Then she would be in the bushes eating raspberries, then gone to the orchard to see the apples, and back again with grapes. She mumbled when she talked and spoke to herself often. Her behavior was like watching a hummingbird; moving very quickly with changing interest. I said she was interesting and she declined.

Future Phase

I had a great dinner with Robyn Saturday night. The food was good; the conversation was funny. Then she reminded me we were supposed to go dumpster diving so we headed out for a place she said she knew, only she didn't know her way and didn't look it up before we left which irked my sense of destination. We arrived to find the dumpster totally sealed up with a pipe leading into it from the building. Diving was impossible. Then we tried Whole Foods, only their dumpsters were behind a fence and someone was sitting at the entrance; apparently you have to go late at night when everyone goes home. I was upset and kept going on about how we had set a goal we couldn't accomplish, as if it should have been easy. She went to her apartment and didn't look back. As I was falling asleep that night I realized my sense of urgency stemmed from the irrational belief that it was my last night, whatever that meant. One of my good friends here said it sounded like a disassociation of the mind, similar to what would be expected on a certain drug. I corroborated that I caught the extended moment when sleep is coming on and it sort of felt the same way. We never really came up with any explanation.

Another realization I had was on the current state I've felt being back in college. This last weekend felt like a repeating series of disjointed moments; in fact, this whole last week felt that way and it's beginning to feel like that's the theme of this semester. I am a wolf in winter with ribs pressing out against skin, senses heightened, looking for poetry or art or philosophy to consume. It's the liberal arts I'm starving for.

It was as if one's entire world were one long Sunday afternoon. Nothing to do. No where to go.

Today I watched the dance of two flying insects, whether in challenge or desire, in the glowing high-altitude sunlight. The rest of the day was a footnote.

The Psychopath and the Metaphor

I had this idea, possibly for writing. Imagine a psychopath who believed their own act of human emotion so much that they never believed they were a psychopath, which would mean that they began mimicry at a very young age before knowing what a psychopath is. And they have meaningful conversations with people and feel "love" and all, but then some instance happens which reveals the true nature behind them and the psychopath gets probed but they insist that the psychopath feels everything they talk about. And it comes out that they really didn't feel the true emotions and that they simple understood the bendings of language and created meaningful poetic lines that won people over.

Also, metaphors are a good protection or cushion against the world. A thick enough metaphor can surround and pad you against the true, bare blunt of things.

Interspecies

I suppose there's a reason individuals in a species go along with others of the like. Squirrels with squirrels, lizards with lizards, owls with owls. They have more in common, more possibilities. If an owl and squirrel thought they could be together, and the owls takes flight, the squirrel is left looking up at the other so free. A ground-dweller would have more in common with another ground-dweller; and the same goes for those who can fly. It would be unfair for the squirrel to cause the suppression of the cultivated abilities of the owl.

Mountain Man

Today I was a mountain.

Hopeless Romantic

One thing that has not, and probably won't, change about me is that I'm a romanticist. Emotion flows through me in such quantity that it flows over me. Like a fuse struck by too much power, with a POP, it all goes out. I often have to recharge because moments of overload are inevitable to those who feel too much. I'm fragile and hurt, lost and confused, lonely and longing.
The worst part about the mind is how it can create something so big that never existed; something true to only one person.

Ways Of Life

As I was working in the garden today, I could hear the sorority house across the street - the repetitious two-bar tune and the lyrics of any stereotypical cheer leading scene, how great they are and how everyone wants to be them. I couldn't see them because of the courtesy trees planted on the edge of the greenhouse property but I imagined they were all outside, standing in rows, heads held high.
On the other hand, I was bent over a raspberry bush; a simple act of collecting my food. I tried to picture myself in a situation of singing in front of a house and doing nothing geared toward my survival. Some guys rode bikes past me and said something scoffish. Could they put themselves in my position instead of paying five dollars for a small container of what I picked a half gallon? It is a status, showing that one doesn't have to go to the source. But the source is that of more than just physical sustenance.
And then a phrase came and went: I heard the echo before the call.