BART Strike
So I was playing around with GIMP yesterday and just for fun came up with this :).
todays bird
we're not kids anymore.
Cosmic Funnies

@theartofmadeline
Keni
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Today's Document
h

if i look back, i am lost
Show & Tell
AnasAbdin
styofa doing anything

titsay

⁂
Claire Keane
wallacepolsom
tumblr dot com

blake kathryn
Jules of Nature
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

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@idleandwriting
BART Strike
So I was playing around with GIMP yesterday and just for fun came up with this :).
On Hiatus
In case you couldn't tell, I've been on hiatus from the blog writing on this particular blog for a while now. I plan to come back in a little while, likely rebranding the blog to focus on more professional topics. Until then, enjoy the personal stories I have posted on here :).
Hurricane Reflections
The only hurricane I've witnessed in my life is Hurricane Gilbert, a category 5 hurricane that hit Jamaica in 1988. I was five years old. Before the storm, my cousins Lotai and Kummy, and my sister Liana and I were excited. In our driveway, we made a play fort with pieces of zinc sheets much like this one.
Inside the fort is where we drank the porridge we got for breakfast. Once the storm started though and got really bad it was a different story.
During the worst of the storm, I was scared because the adults were scared. I remember my grandma escaping from a roof falling on top of her by mere seconds. The only reason she left her room was because my father, my mother and my aunt kept begging her to get up off the bed and leave the room. As soon as she got up and came out of the room, the roof caved in. One of my older cousins started crying. Other parts of the roof on the house blew off. We slept on concrete benches in a local school for a long time afterwards, along with many in the community. A bully beef sandwich was the meal of the period. I remember a neighbourhood drunkard trying to climb the walls to get out because the school doors were closed for the night. Long after we went back to the house, we lived without a roof over our dining room. Let's just say that even when we were inside, we would immediately know when it started to rain. All in all, it was an experience I'll never forget.
My thoughts go out to my family and friends in Haiti, Jamaica and the US East Coast who were affected by Sandy. And, well, my thoughts go out to everyone affected.
There are some people whose written thoughts seem to always represent what I think but even better than that is that these people I'm talking about are phenomenal writers. People who can express what I'm thinking in infinitely better ways. When they write many of the same things I've thought, their words lodge themselves into the core of our beings that need it most, easily encouraging the disheartened, cheering the sorrowful, inspiring the apathetic and opening or changing hearts that were only a moment ago hardened against them and their views.
Oh how I LOL'd! Glad she's posting again!
accidentalchinesehipsters:
Some of you may have noticed that I gave myself a little blog hiatus over the last month. There have been a few big changes in my life - I just started a graduate studies program - and thinking about those changes, which was actually much more stressful than experiencing those changes, temporarily made it difficult to approach writing for Accidental Chinese Hipsters. Well, this blue lady manifested yesterday as a way of saying, “You haven’t heard the last of me.”
Borrowing a phrase from OWS, she declares, “I am unstoppable!” She charges through the landscape like a warrior, fortified by pearl neck guard, sequin epaulets, and enemy fear-making hair pile, reminiscent of owl decoy. It is 1:45 in the afternoon on the Upper West Side of New York City. Somewhere, a ballgown is appropriate.
Thanks to my good friend Sarah M for taking this. Also brought to you by shiny hologram gift bags: welcome to the future of carrying things.
The end of summer is tragic.
Most prominent thought in my head today
I've always admired Jodie Foster. This essay gives me even more reason to do so:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/15/jodie-foster-blasts-kristen-stewart-robert-pattinson-break-up-spectacle.html
Olympic Sadness
Four years always seem like such a long time to wait. Four more years to make up for a missed medal opportunity. Four more years to imagine where each person will be during the next games. Four more years to discover the next crop of world class athletes. Four more years before such a large portion of delegates from basically every single country in the world mingle again. Where will I be? What will I be doing in four years? Four more years...anything can happen before then...So although I prefer it like this, a special quadrennial event, I still get sad each time it ends.
Looking through my Facebook feed all I see are Jamaican flags - in profile pics, cover photos and shares galore. Loving the black, green and gold all over di page!!! #proudtobeJamaican #guhhaadandone
Another thing I love about the Olympics: when athletes, buoyed by the cheers from their home crowd, dig deep within themselves for energy, grace and determination far above their norms in order to medal or, even better, win gold for their country.
Auntie Tania Why Are You Laughing?
Yesterday I had a long talk on the phone with my 4, almost 5, year old niece Shanae. Where even six months ago she shied away from talking more than a minute or two on the phone, nowadays she is quite the phone talker that one. As part of our extended catching up session she was telling me about her day.
She went to the Ontario Science Centre with my parents, my youngest sister (her Mum) and her father.
When they finished looking at the exhibits and left the museum building they saw a lady feeding pigeons outside. That was exciting in and of itself but then apparently the lady gave Shanae a piece of bread to feed the pigeons too. When the lady gave her the piece of bread, in Jamaican vernacular, Shanae’s glad bag buss. In other words, she could not have been happier. She sounded so excited, even just telling me the story.
“…and I saw a white pigeon!! I hadn’t seen a white pigeon in my ENTIRE life!!! And it had black spots…”
Her report included obligatory grammatical errors that kids make as their vocabulary expands.
“And I got-ed a piece of bread...and then I had-ed to throw all of it at the pigeons…”
But the funniest part of the story was yet to come.
Shanae went on to tell me that when she threw the last piece of bread at the pigeons all of them flew towards the bread then they all came flocking to her. All except one pigeon who, and I quote, “stood there and said, ‘What happened? The girl doesn’t have any more.’” When she said that, I quite naturally assumed that she had slipped into a mix of real-life and make-believe in her little world. As kids sometimes do. I am ever willing to indulge kids in their fantasies. Thus, when she later told me that she had to leave the pigeons to go home, I good-naturedly asked, “So what did the pigeons say when you were leaving?”
There was a short pause then Shanae of course responded, “They say nothing. Pigeons can’t talk.” As if my question was the most ludicrous thing in the world to ask.
Ooh, I forgot to tell you. We went to Old McDonald to get a drink.
My 4-year old niece, while telling me about her day
With the Queen sporting a bored expression and picking her nails as GB walks in, the BBC commentator goes, "The Queen looks on proudly I'm sure..."
I most certainly LOL'd.
Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.
Pamela Vaull Starr (via inspirinquotes)
Idle and Writing
Hi everyone. I’m finally back to do my first proper post as promised and it's all about what led me to start up a new blog…
I love writing. Especially about things happening in my life (cue the narcissism). Ever since I was very young I often found myself narrating events in my head as they happened to me. Then I would spend seemingly endless time, after the fact, rewording the event details. Again in my head. I dunno why, as a kid, I never thought to write down my thoughts like a normal little girl. Probably because I was a weird child. For real though, it’s quite possible that I came out of the womb thinking too much.
When I got a little older, just shy of puberty, I found out that some kids in the US and abroad kept diaries to store their thoughts. I was living in Jamaica and my experiences could not be more far removed from American kids yet I decided to have one too.
Now, I imagine that American girls my age probably had diaries that looked like this one.
Me? I took one of the free yearly agendas my parents had gotten from some store.
Yes, one of those agendas with very structured but limited space to write down short to-do lists and meetings. It was certainly not the right book for a diary. But use it I would. I declared to myself that it would be my secret diary.
I don’t remember what my first post was about. I do, however, remember what I wrote in the next two entries, written within days of each other. My second entry was a mean-spirited rant about a cousin who, not surprisingly, had wronged me in some seemingly large measure on the day I wrote it. The third entry in my oh so treasured diary was about a crush I had on a boy at school aka MY BIG SECRET. It felt nice to get things off my chest and write things out. The night after I wrote about my crush, I put the agenda in its hiding place between my mattress and bed frame. I made sure to push the book in as far as possible so that it was situated near the middle of the bed.
It is here that I should mention that EVERYONE in Jamaica knows that one of the best places to hide your valuables is under your mattress.
Clearly, I forgot that this was common knowledge. In fact, I thought I had a great hiding place. Oh how wrong I was.
The very next day I was to quickly learn that writing my secrets in a diary was a big mistake. It was a mistake you see because I am the oldest of three girls. My sisters did not (and still don’t) understand the concept of personal space and privacy. They are always digging through my belongings, wanting to wear my clothes, use my things and borrow my possessions (often without permission). As younger sisters tend to do. Thus, despite the pains I took to hide the book, one of my sisters found the diary and read it. Much to my fury and embarrassment. That day when my entire being was burning with anger and shame at the knowledge that she knew (SHE KNEW!) my thoughts, I swore to never write down my most personal thoughts again. Because writing them down meant that someone would find them. And for me, a very private person, that prospect was intolerable.
Needless to say, my diary-writing pastime was quite short-lived.
However, writing has and will always be a passion of mine. So while it was more than a decade afterwards before I ever wrote down my thoughts in a diary-of-sorts again, I took many a writing-heavy course where I got the release I needed. A few years ago, after I graduated from university, I started a blog but I stopped posting when life got too busy. Nowadays I share snippets of my thoughts on Facebook. I will shamelessly admit that I am a Facebook Jezebel. Added to that is the fact that, while I am a recent MBA graduate, I have yet to roll in any dough and am currently unemployed. It's no surprise then that, with more time on my hands, these days my Facebook status updates get the dreaded “...See more” link tagged on them more and more often. It was time to do something.
So here I am. With a new blog. Idle and writing.
I realize that saying that I like writing and then not writing seems to imply that I am lying in my blog description. Have no fear, I really do like writing! I just moved across the US from North Carolina to California and I am still settling into my new city. I will start writing soon.
Hello
I will start this blog by quoting the 3Cs of life. They are a little bit different from the 3Cs of marketing that I learnt about in business school.
True words indeed!