when it's not so bad, it's pretty good

I made a mix on my computer just now. It has all my favorite songs that remind me that when it's not so bad, it's pretty good. Life's worth all the tears, all the bruises and all the sleepless nights. But sleep is really great when you can get it. Sorry I (Jenny) have been absent in posting. I have had lots of homework (investigating human trafficking, reading one sci fi book a week, and not to mention the new york times every weekday) and tending to my own big blanket. But I still think of you big blanket snugglers quite often and have been wanting and meaning to post. I have been trying to fit it into my schedule because there are posts that come into my mind and nothing raises my spirits like tapping away at the old plastic ivories for half an hour or so. To make up for it, here is a small list of things that have been keeping my heart warm:

-keeping active and keeping rested (lots of people underestimate these things, but happiness is due in large parts to the chemical interactions in your brain, and although that may not be very romantic, doing both of these things is an instant pick me up)
-listening to this american life and the moth (these are both podcasts that you can listen to for free and include incredible stories of incredibly everyday people, it reminds you how bizarre and wonderful life is and makes you want to go out and hear and tell all the stories around you)
-utopian science fiction (all of the sci fi i have been reading will come in handy with this big post i have been planning since i started this blog, and in class we talk about how utopias are impossible and a complete fantasy, but i still find so much joy out of this fact and one day i will tell you why)
-synesthesia: is a neurologically-based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored, while in ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities. (I have the latter form, which I discovered was not normal when Dr. Ramachandran spoke at my high school five years ago. I never thought much of it until last night when I paid a man on the street $2 for a poem. This aforementioned man makes his living posting up on sidewalks with a typewriter, inviting pedestrians to give him a topic and he will write a poem on the spot, and you pay him however much you feel the poem is worth. I saw him once last December in front of the MOMA and my friend bought a poem from him about how "is", or more generally the verb "to be", is the string connecting all of the universe. I thought that was a very true and beautiful way of looking at things. Anyways, here is the poem he wrote for me. It's a bit scattered, but so is synesthesia, he argued.

"it's so easy with
all of these feelings
to be counted on one handed
gruyere cheese is made to be
tasted in name only is more less
or barely feeling a leaving seething
perfect fest quake literary or rather
dan newscaster and barely visible if
i am allowed to batter down all of the
walls between everything there is
on only once just un do or do
not there is no dividing the
sense experience from the event
tis the sense itself to be
holy and pyschic by virtue
of future or pyschic
usury you are jenny
an artist of the
highest inside
visible and private
order
of of
course
the numbers
are people
isn't every
thing"




Always remember that the numbers are people. The GPAs, the statistics, the probabilities, the social securities, the P.O. boxes and the cell phone numbers are all people. If any of these people that happen to sometimes appear as numbers on my page views want a mix cd to remind you that when it's not so bad, it's pretty good, let me know.