If you don’t want to practice guitar every day, then guitar is not for you. If you don’t want to practice every day, you will end up like 90% of the others who say they “play” guitar but in reality don’t really do anything except annoyingly fiddle under their four foot high ceiling of proficiency.

But the beauty of learning any instrument is that, as long as you’re diligent, there is no ceiling at all. The only limit that kinda exists is the technical limit, like when you get to be as good as Steve Vai and you can play up and down the fretboard while neon smoke stacks billow out of your blurry fingers. But that’s not why people play guitar.

People play guitar because it makes them feel good, because the vibrations are soothing and contribute to well-being. In that respect, there is no limit to playing guitar, because as you learn more about yourself and how to use your guitar, the guitar becomes more expressive than the words you speak. I believe sounds and melodies can convey feelings more accurately than words, and in that regard guitar never loses its appeal.

Poems were originally referred to as songs by the Romans.

The reason poetry is a popular form in which to convey feelings is because it’s meant to be ambiguous enough so that everyone can spin something off it. There is no correct literal interpretation but there is a mood that should pervade. The moods are what words (when not used poetically) struggle to capture but can’t because they’re too literal. That’s why guitar never becomes dull. It’s cathartic and endlessly so, because we can always improve at finding the best ways to express our feelings.

In lieu of that the first thing you need to do is find an idol really; a musician who will keep you inspired and act as a magnet to force you to better yourself so you can ultimately join them where they are. Usually, somewhere along the way you find your own voice, and from there a fusion occurs between you and the guitar. Then there is a conduit, uninhibited by conscious thought, that runs straight from the heart and out the sound hole.

My affair of hate started innocently enough. I was walking around Union Station one night this past summer, waiting for my bus to arrive. It was dark outside and the weather wasn’t bad so money grubbers were out in full force. The first incident was a man who approached me while I was minding my own business, sitting on a cement ledge outside Union Station.

*Guy I don’t know walks in front of me and starts talking*

*I take off my headphones*

“What’s that?” I say.

“You got a MySpace, man?”

“Ha yeah! Totally”

Then he started talking to me about music for about two minutes until he leaned closer to change the subject to drugs.

“I got the fire, man.”

“Oh, haha, that’s okay. No thanks. I don’t do drugs,” I said.

“You sure? Twenty bucks. This shits da best too.”

He kept coming at me with different angles of entry, trying to find a way to suck my finances a bit until he finally cut to the chase and asked me for some money. I gave him $5 but it was only to get him to walk away since he started getting aggressive when I resisted his prior ploys.

After that was over, I got up from where I’d been sitting and moved to the other side of the entrance to Union Station, and this time I stayed standing so I wouldn’t be in such a compromised position, like sitting. I kept my headphones on, of course, since I thought they were good deterrents to what I had just encountered. But they weren’t.

This next guy came right up to me and took my left headphone off my ear, then asked me what I was listening to, then tried to put the headphone in his ear. This pissed me off royally, because I was already in a bad mood from the guy I had just dealt with, and here this new guy is, all drunk and wobbly and slimy and slobbery and he had no concept for personal space. When I tried to take my headphone back, to at least show a little backbone, he (out of all people) suddenly turned angry and yelled, in an accusatory tone, “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”

“No, I just want my headphones back,” I said while trying to maintain some level of risibility.

Anyway, by that point he had made enough of a scene that he could no longer persist, so he had to wobble off and accost anyone else he deemed friendly looking enough for him to take advantage of.

I made sure to avoid him for the rest of the night, but he would tend to follow me with an irrational anger fueled by increasing inebriation. By that point I had been turned scared and timid, like I was being hunted for my life or something. There weren’t even cops around. I just had to avoid the asshole until my bus would arrive. If you know how Union Station works, you’ll know that there’s a street that bisects the station, yet you can get to either side by going underground. I would keep sneaking to the other side by going underground, then I’d emerge outside the door on the other side of the street — beautifully safeguarded from the drunken nut by the hard-to-cross-quickly-on-foot street. And, as soon as he saw me across the street, he’d look at me for a moment as if it were very slowly registering with him that I was the guy he was after, then he’d clumsily attempt to cross the street and come after me. Thankfully, all I had to do was wait until he was about halfway across, then I went back inside the door and crossed to the other side underground. This game of cat and mouse happened three times before my bus finally arrived.

Just to make things worse, there was this old and fat lady slouched on the stairs in the main entrance to Union Station and every time I walked past her she would swear at me, calling me a “skinny white bitch.” And she said other things too. She was on crack I suspected because her cut-downs were barely recognizable amid the flurry of the other words spraying out of her mouth, all unrelated. I did not say a thing to her. I just let her get her quick-fix satisfaction, a character fault for her I’m sure.

–

Now, today as I was on my way back home from a trip, I encountered another guy who tried to manipulate me with fear (eg Bush/Cheney, jk). I was sitting at a table reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. At my feet were my backpack, my camera bag, and my guitar case. I’m sitting there lost in an article about Nicolas Sarkozy and his awesomely attractive girlfriend Carla Bruni (and how it’s pissing off some of the French because they think Sarkozy is being a playboy) when I notice this guy with both eyes stuck in opposite directions — as though it would be impossible for him to look straight ahead — towering over me.

“Your friend over there in the arcade wanted me to get you,” he said.

“My friend? I am traveling alone.”

“Your friend over there. He’s white. Right behind you in the arcade, look!”

“I don’t have any friends with me. I am by myself.”

“Look behind you!”

“No, just let me read.”

Then he got angry and said “You’re not a Mexican like those guys, man,” he said while gesturing towards a table of people playing cards and walking off speedily. I had no idea what that meant, but I was a little rattled because the guy was right in my face and he was relentless about me turning my head, which I assume he wanted me to do so he could snatch my backpack and camera bag off the ground and make a run for it.

–

One would think that I might antagonize people or at least give them looks, but I don’t. I just look friendly and usable (skinny white bitch). In most of those aforementioned instances I get walked all over, but I was proud of myself today because I had the balls to not move my head when the guy told me to. I resisted and resisted until he had to walk away because he was drawing too much attention to himself. But all of that is exactly what I hate about Union Station. I want to be happy with a smile on my face as I walk around that big and classic building, but I feel like every time I’m going in there I gotta wear some kind of war-ready grimace just so I can fend off the glut of homeless people and drug dealers who traipse through both the inside and the outside of that station.

There was a time when I was young — before I thought about these things so much and when I would just let them come naturally — where the holidays were just perfect moments. I didn’t think to hold them to any standard based off a past holiday because the only thing the holidays presented to me were exceedingly happy times. HOWEVER, once I started getting older and more analytical and comtemplative and ultimately more nostalgic I suppose, I began to compare and contrast my holiday seasons as though they were athletes with quantitative statistics whose performance varied from year to year. Instead of living life easy as I did when I was a child, I began to be critical of what was to come. I began to put expectations on things.

–

This is a common feeling. Everyone admits that Christmas is much more magical during the adolescent, premature years. It’s so common that you, the reader, probably don’t even care to think about it anymore. Instead, you probably — like I do — accept it. A sad side-effect of growing older.

I am about to draw a comparison that may seem flaky and imperceptible (what else is new). But, tonight I realized something interesting with respect to Christmas and the like. Okay, so, say you used to know a member of the opposite sex whom you loved and felt great feelings for and all that. This person made you happy and they made your life seem like it had an infinite amount of dimensions, as in anywhere you wanted to go or anything you wanted to think was easily in reach because you felt magnificent and whole. Those are amazing times, but they only last as long as the relationship. They are limited, restricted affairs most of the time. They only serve to remind you of the high watermark of perfection you were once living out in your life — the contrast to bouts of sadness. Okay, so what I am thinking is that most people think of Christmas this way, because they think of Christmas as a past love affair, a love affair that only held significance in the years of yore long ago when they were still young. Now, it’s as though we adults (those of us over 18 and with an ego) can only view Christmas objectively, like an outside observer merely harping about what it used to mean.

But here’s the thing: Christmas is not a relationship in that it can falter and end. Rather, Christmas is a part of our calendar, part of the very fabric of our conception of time. It will not cease until time ceases, and by that point, we won’t be aware anyway. So I believe that the reason that people become increasingly disenchanted with Christmas is that they think of it as a nostalgic relationship: something that used to be but is now long gone.

Let’s suppose that I am human enough to be confident in believing that people have feelings that are relatively similar to mine. That said, the problem of Christmas becoming less magical is a problem born from the inception of the ego, as in, the analytical adult mind; the mind that is self-conscious instead of appreciative of the exteriors. Instead of Christmas being a free-roving three hundred and sixty degree experience of joy, it becomes something contingent upon ourselves as though it were a relationship in that we’re responsible for the success of the whole. And, when the whole doesn’t meet preordained expectations we beat ourselves up over it.

I think that people forget that things like Christmas are here to SERVE US. Yes! Serve us! Christmas is about God: love, family, communication, and above all, happiness. Sometimes, as we get older we forget about what it feels like to surrender oneself to something, to just allow that something to take hold in its natural course as we would have allowed it to when we were children.

So remember, the goal of humanity is peace and harmony. Christmas, like many other things in life, is a retributive force in the cosmic goo that comprises all. It is a treat, simple as that. Yes, we should expect to blissfully float in the ocean of eternal goodness at least every once in a while, otherwise, what’s the point of life in the first place?

“We never lost the garden” - Paul Williams

Then I wondered, is it possible that I’m the only person in the world who noticed this? That the hitherto infallible ESPN made a mistake?

I hope I don’t get in trouble for this. ESPN or TNT might be able to sue me for gillions of dollars for publishing their content, even if it is such a trivial thing to publish. But since when did the word “trivial” stop people from suing each other? Ahh that’s what I thought.

If that’s how Don Nelson chooses to react to bad calls, and if I were a gay referee, then I’d definitely want to be reffing the Mavs.

So, that was the death of my first digital camera.

And, it was a great camera too. I loved it. It was only 3.2 megapixels, but I feel like it took better pictures than my new camera, which is 10.1 megapixels.

My new camera is the Casio Ex-Z1080. I’ll tell you about how I bought it, but first I’ll tell you about something I read in the Wall Street Journal. According to the WSJ, people now spend tons of time researching things before they buy them. With TVs, for instance, people spend on average over 10 hours researching the best TV to buy. Now, with me, with my new camera, the new Casio camera that I bought, I actually did no research at all. I merely showed up at this camera shop near my apartment and the employee there pointed the Casio out to me with what seemed like disinterest. I had a guttural feeling that I shouldn’t buy it, since I associate the Casio brand with their economy watches. I kept asking about some different brands in a similar price range but the guy was impregnable. I say this because the camera sucks. I have yet to be remotely pleased with a single picture I have taken with the camera, especially in comparison to the cheaper and older Canon. I am not sure  what the problem is with the Casio. The pictures it yields have no flourish.

When you take a picture, you want a framed document: a visual representation of a single moment in time, represented in an aesthetically balanced and framed unit. You want it to be an icon, a symbol. Okay, time out, those may not be universal goals for the photographer, but they are definitely my goals. With each picture I take, I want it to be a singular and powerful entity on its own. I want each picture to be a whole, like an ornate plate gleaming against the light. My new Casio yields pictures that seem like fragments of a plate, unfinished because they never seem finished. I don’t know why, like I said, but it seems like the Casio just takes inferior pictures compared to my old Canon, despite the fact that that Casio has way more megapixels.

This leads us to a central tenet of the digital camera market, which is that megapixels aren’t the end-all be-all for digital cameras. In fact, they seem more like a marketing ploy, a quick and easy way to appeal to the broadest range of consumers.

So I own that Casio; my new digital camera that I have owned for a few months now. I own that camera and I have yet to be actually happy with what it can provide me with. I am consistently let down. It just seems like a cheap-thrill MTV-generation camera. But I am going to buy this camera soon.

And yeah whatever that makes me a bit of a poser, because, yes, there are ads everywhere now for the Nikon D40. And, I’ll admit, I found out about the D40 via an advertisement in Rolling Stone magazine. My rationale was cracked and my basest of appetites was whetted — that of the consumer. I’m only as good as the lowest common denominator.

Still, I am intrigued by the fact that the D40 is an affordable digital SLR camera, and that it could provide the same balance that my original Cannon digital camera did. I am going to look into all of that more tomorrow once I wake up. I am going to go to Best Buy and check out the camera and see what I think, plus I’ll do some more researching. Ultimately, I do see myself buying it. I want a good camera because I love taking pictures, and I want my pictures to represent, as fully as possible, what it is that I am aiming the camera at at the moment that I press down on the button.

I have not seen either of the original movies, as in, 28 Days Later or the original Hostel.

Okay. The reason 28 Weeks Later was so good was because of how insanely eerie it was. The first scene, for example, is the closest thing to the most perfectly film-reproduced nightmare ever. All of the elements are in place. The setting is a beautiful, natural, rural English country-side. There are lots of green hues, trees, old wood, a river. We see a kid come into a rural house — hysterical with fear — seeking refuge from the zombies that are chasing him down. From there the zombies go on to horrifically bleed over every semblance of comfort and serenity that would be associated with that otherwise ideal milieu. The beauty is ravaged by the uninfected people being chased by ravenous and freakish zombies, who — like the bad guys in your dreams — seem to have unlimited energy. The soundtrack compounds the horror. The music is relentless. It’s a repeating phrase that grabs at your mind and chest, like a vacuum in your lungs that sucks your breath unapologetically to the cadence. Thus, the first scene was one of the strongest, most fear-inducing scenes I’ve ever witnessed. All through it, my friends and I were like a broken record, saying “ohh my god!” The rest of the film was good too, providing a sense of doom and gloom that is rarely fully attained. Usually, the novelty tends to overshadow the horror; one can realize that what’s going on is a fabrication and thus not too emotionally inciting. However, something about 28 Weeks Later makes it seem uncomfortably real. The combination of having to fear both the infected and the uninfected (the soldiers from which ultimately must indiscriminately kill all humans to decimate the infected) — a sorry conclusion because of the circumstances — stings the psyche of the viewer. In all, it’s an amazing movie. At least four out of five stars.

The same can’t be said about Hostel Part II. I first heard about the Hostel series from my older brother. He and my dad had gone to see Hostel one afternoon, and when he came home he told me that Hostel was just flat out stupid. At the time, I thought he criticized it so because it was a horror movie, since my brother isn’t really into horror movies. Anyway, I rented Hostel II tonight because I wanted a good scare, although I realized later that there is nothing scary about Hostel II. More importantly, there is nothing at all to Hostel II in the way of plot or substance. There is nothing believable or resonant in the characters. For example, one of the antagonists — who ultimately gets castrated — indescribably changes from remorseful to murderously aggressive in the blink of an eye, just to lamely advance the plot. The general shape of the plot is that some college-aged women go against the instincts that all women have and get caught up with shady men who capture them so they can be auctioned off to be tortured.

The weird thing about the movie is that the viewer must come to terms with the fact that they are getting their entertainment out of watching people get tortured. In the end, that is the only point of the movie. There is no other aspect to the plot. There is nothing to reel in any emotions and there is nothing with which to identify with a character. So, the movie lopes along idiotically and unconvincingly until the very end, the moment when the credits start rolling, and you as the viewer don’t just loath that you wasted your money, but that you wasted precious hours of life that could have been better served by sitting in solitary confinement, because at least that way one could think, and the thinking of any living being would be more cogent and sensible than the ridiculous and disgusting events of the movie. Hostel Part II gets one out of five stars.

“Bagona reporting for active duty, sir.”

“Shutup Bagona. You inconvenient half-rodanian. We must be careful not to wake the humanoids who are busy sleeping.”

“They sleep? Why? I thought sleeping was evolutionarily weeded out, eons ago.”

“Well, for some of us it was. Not for the humanoids, however. They have been stuck in an evolutionary stasis ever since the dawn of what they call pop culture, which really took hold, for whatever reason, in their year 2000.”

–

The sound of pots and pans was clanging with an appetizing clash. A man with a chef’s hat on was baking bread and making pastries. It was 3am but his café was to open in only four short hours. He was in a small hurry because he also needed to set up the flower arrangement since it was New Year’s Eve morning and, traditionally, he dressed up his quaint café with greenery and flowers to mark the coming of a new year and the festive feeling it imparted.

“Amadayus,” he yelled to his son, his apprentice, “could you start on the Danishes? We need 200 cheese, 100 raspberry, 150 apple, and 75 grape. And don’t forget about the boysenberry quiche that we’re making for Grandma.”

“Gotcha dad.”

“Oh, and Amadayus, try to not burn all of the pastries in the oven this time. We can’t afford a blunder of that magnitude, not this year.”

“Why not dad?”

“The Daily Davenport called me two days ago and said they might swing by to do a human interest story on the café, you know, how our pastries and breads and other eatable goodies have become New Year’s Eve mainstays.”

“Ah, in that case I suppose I should try extra hard today to make sure that…” Amadayus trailed off to a pause and realized that his statement had no potential for a funny ending. He took a small sip of his coffee and started to roll out sheets of dough that he would then fold into the classic star shape that they had copyrighted, then he would divot out a hole in the center with his fingers, dirty from scratching the hole from which he defecated (once a day after his morning coffee), all before placing them on a rack 6 by 3 to be inserted into the oven for 18 minutes, not 30, as he had mistakenly done the year before to over 200 Danishes in a row.

Paul took off his chef’s hat and walked to his small office, which was actually a bathroom as well, to do some inventory analysis and other number crunching. Leaving his son on the task of the pastries. He trusted his son, despite his son’s inadequacies.

–

“Bagona! Hasten! I told you, keep your voice down, we can’t let these humanoids know that we are coming in for a stealth attack on the cusp of the eve of the year 2013!”

“Okay, master. I will do as you say, if only for this day.”

“Quit with the rhyming, it’s getting us no where. What we must do, now, is figure out a way to tactfully enter this humanoid’s house without any of the humanoids within it waking up to the sound. What we are going to do is steal their jewelry and other valuable assets so we can sell them at a pawn shop to get some cash so we can afford a hideout. Okay?”

“But, how are we going to go to a pawnshop when we don’t look like humans?”

“You NUMBSKULL, you STUPID NIMWIT!” boss screamed.

The martian boss walked up to Bagona and from his pocket removed a spring-loaded boxing glove.

“Bagona, explain to me exactly how you know there is a God, and I want to be convinced.”

“But, you know I don’t believe in God, boss.” Bogona said while shrinking away and trembling while sweating.

“NONSENSE. Do it NOW, or else!”

He moved the boxing glove from one side of Bagona’s face to the other in a taunting fashion. His eyes were wide and buggy, like those of a crazy man who has no regard for the physical or emotional well-being of others.

“Umm, okay, well…” Bagona stammered.

“Too late! Time to feel the hurt!” boss roared.

Boss discharged the spring-loaded boxing glove by pulling a trigger on the handle. The glove collided with Bagona’s face and pushed it in, similar to how one can put a dimple in an old and rotten fruit with their thumb.

Bagona stuck his thumb in his mouth and blew as hard as he could until his head inflated back to normal shape.

“Come on boss, you gotta give me some leeway here. I can’t spend my whole life being momentarily destroyed every time I can’t come up with a convincing argument for the existence of God.”

“Enough,” bellowed boss. “What we are going to do is knock on the door of the house, I decided. When the humanoid answers it, we are going to say we are girl scouts selling cookies. Most humanoids can’t resist that offer, for whatever reason. When the humanoid inevitably turns to get the cash, I will use my Boxing-Glove-Spring-Loader-Punch 5000 © and knock it unconscious, at which point we will comb the house for booty.”

“Yay! I have always wanted to sexually rove a humanoid, I am so excited”

“No you dimwit!” Boss elbowed Bagona in the larynx. “I mean we will comb the house for money! So we can get a hideout here on earth until we figure out a way to hold it ransom for one google USD.”

“And then I can buy all the g-strings I want and parade around in them while I eat my boogers!”

Boss rolled his eyes.

–

Mimi Hilario was sound asleep on her mattress. She slowly turned, yawning, and reached out for her husband Paul. Her fingers delicately tickled the sheets as she dreamily moved her hand about, half-wakingly scanning for her husband.

“Oh,” she said groggily, “Paul and Amdayus are at work extra early this morning. How could I forget.”

Suddenly their pet cobra started hissing downstairs.

“Shinshula, be quiet. I mean to get back to sleep. I have a long day of playing hostess to family friends ahead of me and the last thing I need is a sleepless morning.”

But Shinshula would not be quiet. There came a knocking on the door, in a cadence that Mimi had never heard before. The cadence resembled a woodpecker.

“That is the oddest thing. Who could that be?” Mimi thought.

The woodpecker cadence knock continued, getting progressively louder, until it started to sound like a jackhammer, and the house started to shake.

“What the” said Mimi as she approached the door.

Shinshula the cobra positioned himself directly across from the door, preparing to strike at the intruders outside.

Mimi shooed the cobra back, and prepared to open the door.

[To Be Continued]

I have fond memories of sitting cross-legged on the family room floor listening to Kris Kross. “Jump jump! You know we make ya wanna, JUMP JUMP ahuh yeeea.” What a great song. I would wait around during my preschool activities all day, looking forward to getting home so I could listen to that song, and the totally cool background romeo synth whizzing that accompanied the chorus. I also liked MC Hammer, and Vanilla Ice. These guys are all totally made fun of by VH1, a network that both likes to lambast past stars that look corny in retrospect, and make new stars that with any foresight will be just as bad (i.e. Flava Flav [sp?] or Tila Tequila even though she’s on MTV, but it’s the same thing [and how sick and disgusting is that show? That hideous looking woman making out with all the weirdos all the time, while the weirdos are so pathetically obsessed with her and think they love her?]).

That was a moment in time where I was very young and liked anything that sounded catchy and fun. When I got a bit older I developed long-term love affairs with specific bands. It started with Nirvana and Green Day and Pearl Jam and moved on from there. This was during MTV’s heyday, when there were those awesome MTV Spring Breaks, and awesome MTV shows like Singled Out, and awesome cartoons on MTV like Aeon Flux and Beavis and Butthead and cool shows like Weird Al and Tom Green’s show. Along with that MTV was showing all sorts of great music videos from a sudden onslaught of burgeoning alternative music talent like Spacehog, Semisonic, Blues Traveler and the Wallflowers; and of course, on a larger scale, Incubus, Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Rage Against The Machine, 311, and the list could go on endlessly. This was of course back in the day where there was actually a reason to put a lot of time and effort into a music video. A perfect example are any of the videos from the Smashing Pumpkins, most notably “Adore,” and “Tonight Tonight.” 311’s “Down” was an awesome video of morphing beauty. And, even though John Frusciante was on a drug and soul-searching hiatus at the time, the Red Hot Chili Peppers videos for the songs “My Friends” and “Aeroplane” were just rim-rocking slam dunks in the aesthetics department. These videos were so good that they practically changed the way the songs sounded. They were higher art that subsumed what were once only aural entities.

It was stuff like that that inspired my passion for music and guitar and my die-hard-fan status with respect to bands like Incubus, RHCP, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Green Day. The sad thing though is that all of those bands are past their prime. They are like NBA basketball players after the age of say, 32 or so, where you stop expecting them to be demigods. So, meanwhile, here I am in a limbo period with no young and fresh band that I can truly be excited about. A band where I know all of their CDs and the names of the songs on the CDs.

Boy do I miss all of that. It was mostly the 90s really I guess. The 90s and the alternative music therein. What a time.

But that was then and this is now. You know? You don’t see any of that any more. There doesn’t seem to be as much focus on creating something that’s immortal. Now that songs are so easy to create (Garageband for the masses) and acquire (download for free), they’ve become less important. We are being engulfed and subsequently emotionally turned off by the rapid fire stimuli around us. It is desensitizing us and the music is reflecting that.

I am watching the NFL Countdown right now, and I think it’s prudent to say that it wouldn’t be displeasing to get drunk with Chris Berman. I can picture myself chugging a glass of beer at a bar while he’d be there sitting next to me, with a huge grin taking up his soggy potato face, chirping out his baseball home-run signature “back back back back back back back!” with his phlegm-rattled voice.

First of all, the memories. The nostalgia. There are always the left over sentiments that carry from year to year. Hmm. It’s about being with family. It’s about late nights with no worries and only glowing computer screens. It’s about running up to your room and screwing around with all your new presents. Have you ever gotten a CD for Christmas and noticed how that CD is almost always instantly special in some way? More special than most?

You wake up late in the morning maybe. Or early. I love to wake up early. Super early. Lounge around the house drinking coffee in a wishy-washy morning trance, feeling the holiday energy pumping through your veins like blood. This morning I was up nice and early: I went to a room of our house where much sun comes in, and I laid down on a couch and started to read a book.

I didn’t get far with the book because my mind was going crazy. It was one of those moments where there is far too much going on in the head besides the actual reading, such that the words on the page are only occupying 20 percent of the mental activity, while rampant daydreams are running the rest. And there I was, on my back on that couch in that room with the windows peering out over the winter. Yes, outside, there were flakes of snow slowly descending to the ground. They were large and fluffy flakes that filled the air and transformed the world into a wonderland. I was still in my morning bafflement and I also had the holiday heart and those states of being intertwined and danced together to sustain what was the epitome of a winter break experience.

And now, I sit here, late, in front of a glowing screen. Outside the window to my right is fresh and heavy snow, new from today, coating the sleeping neighborhood with a gay and merry sheen, like melted silver glistening in a loving night.