Different is Good

"Different is good.

Where I come from, the highest compliment they can offer a person is to say that they're down to earth, grounded.
I hate it.
It drives me nuts."

- Johnny Depp as Frank Tupelo in "The Tourist", Directed by: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; Written by: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Julian Fellowes, Jérôme Salle

Kind Words of Comfort from a Special Friend

“Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.”

-Eskimo Proverb

'Cause You Think Being a Girl Is Degrading

Girls can wear jeans
And cut their hair short
Wear shirts and boots
Cause it's okay to be a boy

But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
Cause you think being a girl is degrading
But secretly
You'd love to know what it's like
Wouldn't you?
What it feels like for a girl

-What It Feels Like for a Girl,
lyrics by Madonna and Guy Sigsworth

www.atlantacotillion.com

A Guiding Light

Night
And the spirit of life calling
Mamela
And a voice
With the fear of a child asking
Mamela

Wait
There's no mountain too great
Hear these words and have faith
Have faith

They live in you
They live in me
They're watching over
Everything we see
In every creature
In every star
In your reflection
They live in you

-"They Live in You" from The Lion King
Music and lyrics by Mark Mancina, Jay Rifkin, and Lebo M

Of Visions and Memories

I went by the Druid stone

That broods in the garden white and lone,

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows

That at some moments fall thereon

From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,

And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

Threw there when she was gardening.

I thought her behind my back,

Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,

Though how do you get into this old track?’

And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf

As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

That there was nothing in my belief.

Yet I wanted to look and see

That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision

A shape which, somehow, there may be.’

So I went on softly from the glade,

And left her behind me throwing her shade,

As she were indeed an apparition—

My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

- Thomas Hardy, The Shadow on the Stone

Friday the 13th of May, 2011

This is a day when truths will out, perhaps;
leak from the dangling telephone earphones
sapping the festooned switchboards' strength;
fall from the windows, blow from off the sills,
—the vague, slight unremarkable contents
of emptying ash-trays; rub off on our fingers
like ink from the un-proof-read newspapers,
crocking the way the unfocused photographs
of crooked faces do that soil our coats,
our tropical-weight coats, like slapped-at moths.

Today's a day when those who work
are idling. Those who played must work
and hurry, too, to get it done,
with little dignity or none.
The newspapers are sold; the kiosk shutters
crash down. But anyway, in the night
the headlines wrote themselves, see, on the streets
and sidewalks everywhere; a sediment's splashed
even to the first floors of apartment houses.

This is a day that's beautiful as well,
and warm and clear. At seven o'clock I saw
the dogs being walked along the famous beach
as usual, in a shiny gray-green dawn,
leaving their paw prints draining in the wet.
The line of breakers was steady and the pinkish,
segmented rainbow steadily hung above it.
At eight two little boys were flying kites.

Those Were The Days

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven't done anything today.

-Lou Holtz

You're So Vain

Yes, I will try to be. Because I believe that not being is arrogant.

-Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

All the World's a Stage

The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel's.

-TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Afterword to Camino Real