Slam Poetry

I don't necessary enjoy watching these (too overly crazy hand motions), but I like the voice inflections and the poetry. There's something so alive in spoken word poems. Both of these really helped me today, the most out of any I listened to. I hope you enjoy them as well.

Eric Darby, Scratch & Dent Dreams

Peter Nevland, Your Story:

"Are you provocative in life?"

I've been looking for this recording of a Martha Stewart show that aired in 2007 for a couple years now, and I found it tonight. It's my favorite episode because Lindsay Lohan is a guest, and Martha Stewart keeps grilling her about her party life and bashing her in ways that are either unknowingly innocent, or vicious double meanings. It is by far the most entertaining episode I've ever seen of the Martha Stewart Show.

If you have about 15 free minutes, it will be well spent. Skip ahead on this video to 4:51, and it gets good from there. (I tried to put it up, but it won't embed very well).

"Excuses, excuses, here, see that? That's a party girl! Party girls make excuses."

"She's working up a sweat, this is so great! See, it's not even the dance floor, right?"

My favorite part might be at the end though, at 19:24-19:48.

There's a shorter montage of many things that were said here, although the longer version is more worth watching.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

The cover design was done by Jon Gray of London, and was the first thing that attracted me to this outstanding and vulnerable story.Jon Gray is mentioned in this good article, Kill Your Darlings by Print magazine about "killing the baby" (as Jane would say).

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Everyday I felt less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee commercial

My sister showed me this commercial that made her want a Jeep even more. I like it because it integrates a version of Johnny Cash's "God's Gonna Cut You Down", and it makes me feel proud to be an American, while still being honest. The new tagline for Jeep is "The things we make, make us."

The creative campaign was designed by Wieden+Kennedy (Portland), the same brilliant company that created the Old Spice commercials (some of my all-time favorites). Wieden+Kennedy also produced the Coca-Cola commercials shown in the Super bowl this past year.

So we sailed on to the sun, till we found a sea of green...

I wouldn't mind having this great tea infuser!

Greenwood

I know, I know. I've been away for awhile. Graduation, moving back home, a dear friend's wedding. It's not that I've been that busy though (I'm in Greenwood, SC with no job). To be honest, I feel stuck. I don't credit it to the whole exhaustion and letdown after graduation bit. Even after exams of any past semester, I've been going so much that I find it quite difficult to stop.

I never want to stop. I want to always be productive. I hate pausing. I hate extended breaks.

I've hit a wall, and I think it has to do with my location. I had to briefly move back in with my mom and sister in Greenwood so I could revamp my portfolio and improve it for interviewing in D.C. I want to move to D.C. and get a design job there. I think it's a good place to start out. I have friends around there and one in particular that knows the area. I still want to eventually get to Ireland (within 5 years), and D.C. would be a lot more recognizable than Greenville. I'm determined to do it.

There's one problem: I have limited amount of money and am stuck in Greenwood until I can move. I've never encountered a place such as this. I can't be productive here. Maybe it's the cluttered house and cramped space. Maybe it's that I feel that I don't have a workspace (my "workspace" consists of a fold-out table in the middle of a crowded den where my mom walks through continually each day and feels the need to talk about anything and everything). I can't concentrate. I hardly have room to breathe here.

It's not an ideal working space, but the town itself makes me feel stuck. I used to spend most of my extra time at bookstores, sitting for hours in Barnes & Noble and reading whole books in the store. There are no large bookstores in Greenwood. The library is a sad building with computers from the 90's and an inefficient organization system. I need to get out of here, but I need to work and produce what needs to be done for my portfolio before I can get out.

I've never been so unmotivated and unproductive in such a long period of time, and I'm scared, because I can't see the end of it until I get out of Greenwood. I've never been in such a place where I feel so stuck.