One sleepless night, one of those usual nights when I ignore the present and project into the future, I decided I'd get a teardrop for a tattoo (and i changed my mind, being fickle as usual).
Cos it stands for a teardrop (of melancholy) and life at the same time. Ties up the two (for me) nicely.
Anw
I was looking at world devt stuff on google earth, which is a great platform for many many things, and there's WaterAid, which has a teardrop for its logo.
And it does highlight the plight of ppl deprived of clean water supplies and sanitation facilities (public toilet was my speech topic in sec4)
so it deserves the visual pun much more than me.

And I think it's brilliant, with a talented photographer (earth fr above) getting deeply involved in such affairs. Attaching visually impactful and appealing pictures to places with trouble does make ppl more willing to knw more about them.
Somehow it helps dispel the gloomy apathy and gives one less reason to avoid these trends, as when they only exist in statistics.
Makes one feel more motivated to preserve the beauty.
I don't think there's enough awareness of what's going on globally at all.
Why haven't I heard the words Millenium Development Goals spoken of in the local media? (or at least when I was paying attention)
And I do think that Angelina Jolie's selling of baby pictures for money to be donated to such causes brilliant, cos she makes use of the (most of the time pointless and senseless, in my opinion) celebrity culture to do good.

I don't really knw how to say it.
Guess I'll organise everything (yes my thoughts drift until i verbalise them in writing) aft a's.

But me, I'm a single cell on the serpent's tongue - poison oak, bright eyes

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/earth_from_above_comes_to_nyc.html

Now

by Greg Watson

I told you once when we were young that
we would someday meet again.
Now, the years flown past, the letters
unwritten, I am not so certain.

It is autumn. There are toothaches hidden
in this wind, there are those determined
to bring forth winter at any cost.
I am resigned to dark blonde shadows

at stoplights, lost in the roadmaps of leaves
which point in every direction at once.
But I am wearing the shirt you stitched
two separate lifetimes ago. It is old

and falling to ash, yet every button blooms
the flowers of your design. I think of this
and I am happy, to have kissed
your mouth with the force of language,

to have spoken your name at all.

***

On the way home today
xiaoshuo unexpectedly inspired me by telling me one story she read (she just narrates it in a casual way that not even I, with my keyboard (more time to think), can. so ask her if you're curious)
that keeps her cheerful and upbeat,
entertaining herself when there's no entertainment to be found (in the form of yours truly)
and it has lifted some load off me
and made me sort of determined to let her vibrancy rub off me

"As the bee plays a vital role in pollination, its extinction would severely disrupt the food chain."

***

If I have children one day,
I'll incorporate philosophy (and ideas abt religion too), literature (and not be bored by classics like me - living vicariously) and all areas of knowledge (preferably many languages too) into the process of bringing up these children.
Of course, I'll force all that on myself just to be fair.

***

The working explanation, though by no means the definitive one, is that everything we know -- the whole cosmic fabric ranging from your coffee cup to the sun to entire clusters of galaxies -- is only about 1 percent of what's actually out there. Another 3 percent or so is hot interstellar gas we can see because it radiates X-rays and radio waves. Then things start getting weird. An invisible substance called dark matter, possibly phenomena such as giant black holes and unseen particles, is thought to compose 22 percent of the cosmos. Everything else, almost three-quarters of the total, is dark energy, a force that is apparently driving the universe apart.

The reaction among cosmologists was something like Keanu Reeves's in "The Matrix": Whoa!

"Your whole life as an astronomer, you learn that the universe is expanding, but it should be slowing down," said Tod R. Lauer, an associate astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory who is investigating dark energy. "But we find out it's speeding up. That's the most incredible shock we've had in cosmology in the last 40 years."

- washington post

My head feels weak
and suddenly
it's clear to see
it's not them but me,
who has lost my self-identity.
As I hide behind
these books I read,
while scribbling
my poetry,
like art could save a wretch like me,
with some ideal ideology
that no one could hope to achieve.
And I am never real;
it is just a sketch in me.
And everything I made is trite
and cheap
and a waste
of paint,
of tape,
of time. - Waste of paint, Bright eyes

We were standing
On the hood of your car
Singing out loud when the sun came up
- A lifetime, Better than Ezra

No that isn't the best line in the song (which is touching) but it's a graphic suggestion and i can only imagine.