Poeticartifacts
Smoking in Airplanes, my book of poetry available online now!!!! Just 12 bucks, and its personalized just for you!!!!!Just a wandering mass of carbon-based energy. looking for some elements to bond with.
Check out my blog for a few minutes and you will realize the things that inspire me most: Women, Cigarettes, Tattoos, spiritual development, and an unabashed cynicism towards hypocrisy. Enjoy.
Oh, I'm a member of the Intangible Collective. The illest people, let alone poets you ever heard.
I'll be your guide through this portion of the strange and twisting maze that is the interwebs.
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seattle theme by parker ehret
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(Source: sexy-smoking-girls)
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okay, bay.
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25 Things I Learned From Opening a Used Bookstore
1. People are getting rid of bookshelves. Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money. Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.
2. While you’re drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half. People are getting rid of bookshelves.
3. If someone comes in and asks where to find the historical fiction, they’re not looking for classics, they want the romance section.
4. If someone comes in and says they read a little of everything, they also want the romance section.
5. If someone comes in and asks for a recommendation and you ask for the name of a book that they liked and they can’t think of one, the person is not really a reader. Recommend Nicholas Sparks.
6. Kids will stop by your store on their way home from school if you have a free bucket of kids books. If you also give out free gum, they’ll come every day and start bringing their friends.
7. If you put free books outside, cookbooks will be gone in the first hour and other non-fiction books will sit there for weeks. Except in warm weather when people are having garage sales. Then someone will back their car up and take everything, including your baskets.
8. If you put free books outside, someone will walk in every week and ask if they’re really free, no matter how many signs you put out . Someone else will walk in and ask if everything in the store is free.
9. No one buys self help books in a store where there’s a high likelihood of personal interaction when paying. Don’t waste the shelf space, put them in the free baskets.
10. This is also true of sex manuals. The only ones who show an interest in these in a small store are the gum chewing kids, who will find them no matter how well you hide them.
11. Under no circumstances should you put the sex manuals in the free baskets. Parents will show up.
12. People buying books don’t write bad checks. No need for ID’s. They do regularly show up having raided the change jar.
13. If you have a bookstore that shares a parking lot with a beauty shop that caters to an older clientele, the cars parked in your lot will always be pulled in at an angle even though it’s not angle parking.
14. More people want to sell books than buy them, which means your initial concerns were wrong. You will have no trouble getting books, the problem is selling them. Plus a shortage of storage space for all the Readers Digest books and encyclopedias that people donate to you.
15. If you open a store in a college town, and maybe even if you don’t, you will find yourself as the main human contact for some strange and very socially awkward men who were science and math majors way back when. Be nice and talk to them, and ignore that their fly is open.
16. Most people think every old book is worth a lot of money. The same is true of signed copies and 1st editions. There’s no need to tell them they’re probably not insuring financial security for their grandkids with that signed Patricia Cornwell they have at home.
17. There’s also no need to perpetuate the myth by pricing your signed Patricia Cornwell higher than the non-signed one.
18. People use whatever is close at hand for bookmarks—toothpicks, photographs, kleenex, and the very ocassional fifty dollar bill, which will keep you leafing through books way beyond the point where it’s pr0ductive.
19. If you’re thinking of giving someone a religious book for their graduation, rethink. It will end up unread and in pristine condition at a used book store, sometimes with the fifty dollar bill still tucked inside. (And you’re off and leafing once again).
20. If you don’t have an AARP card, you’re apparently too young to read westerns.
21. A surprising number of people will think you’ve read every book in the store and will keep pulling out volumes and asking you what this one is about. These are the people who leave without buying a book, so it’s time to have some fun. Make up plots.
22. Even if you’re a used bookstore, people will get huffy when you don’t have the new release by James Patterson. They are the same people who will ask for a discount because a book looks like it’s been read.
23. Everyone has a little Nancy Drew in them. Stock up on the mysteries.
24. It is both true and sad that some people do in fact buy books based on the color of the binding.
25. No matter how many books you’ve read in the past, you will feel woefully un-well read within a week of opening the store. You will also feel wise at having found such a good way to spend your days.
After about 3 weeks open, I have experienced numbers 1, 5, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, and 25. Number 25 every day.
I can’t wait to visit Uncharted next time i’m in Chicago.
(Source: sunrec)
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Happy Ears
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This is my favorite type of map. (yes I have a favorite type of map, I’m nerd core like that) It’s called a Dymaxian map, and the sizes are much more to scale than regular Mercator maps. Just look at Greenland and Africa….. They in reality aren’t anywhere close in size. But most people grow up seeing maps where Greenland is arguably just as big, or bigger than Africa. Look at this map. BIG DIFFERENCE. One much more closer to reality.
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30 Rock Making fun of my alma mater! Love it!
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I Read Banned Books by Oak Park Public Library on Flickr.
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oh my god why do people talk about how drugs/alcohol/cigarettes will kill you
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The star of Golden Globe winning series ‘Homeland’, Damian Lewis.
Also…. Dick Winters from the amazing HBO mini-series ‘Band of Brothers’, aka one of my favorite things to watch.
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Teach them to do it for themselves.
When our daughter was 15 months old we enrolled her in survival-type swimming lessons via Infant Swimming Resource. Maybe you’ve heard about this - children as young as 6 months old learning to roll in the water and float? (See more about ISR here).
We had a marvelous instructor who on the very first day, after seeing the fear in our eyes, said to us:
“If you don’t believe she can do it, then you should leave now. Because I know she can. She needs to know that you believe in her.”
That struck a chord right away. She was exactly right. If we didn’t think she could do it, what were we doing there? I admit I wanted to snatch my daughter out of the water at the very first sign of discomfort. What I didn’t consider was that my behavior was sending clear signals to my daughter that I didn’t think she could do it. Of course as parents we wanted to protect her. The goal of these lessons was to enable her to float, saving herself, if she ever accidentally fell into a body of water. Did we want to sabotage her success?
We trusted in the instructor and in our little girl, and cheered them on through the entire process (which admittedly was at times difficult to observe). At the end of 7 weeks, my daughter completed the course by ”falling” off the edge of the pool, fully clothed. After sinking down into the water, she immediately rolled over and floated. At 15 months, she did this all by herself.
I realized that my children are more capable than I give them credit for.
Allowing children to do things for themselves is integral to the traditonal Montessori methodology. A a very young age Montessori students participate in practical life exercises that enable them to do various things for themselves. This includes what we might consider mundane tasks like getting dressed (buttons, snaps, zippers), cleaning up (washing dishes, sweeping, mopping, laundry), baking, and *gasp* cutting with a knife. This is done for various reasons. Read more about it here.
Our daughter made banana bread in class yesterday. She had been watching other children do it. She knew not to touch the materials or the oven because she had not yet had a lesson, but she was very interested. The spark in her was ignited. First she was given a lesson on it by her teacher. Then she partnered with an older student (5 years old) to watch and assist. After a few weeks she is doing it all by herself. She just turned four.
At home she is delighted to help prepare meals and fold laundry. She can dress herself, brush her teeth, comb her hair, and toast her own waffles. She sweeps the floor, and cleans up her own messes. She is showing her younger brother how these things are done. Without the experience with the swimming instructor, I would still be “protecting” my kids from things that they are clearly capable of doing.
It just goes to show you - if you believe in them and show them the proper way, they can do it for themselves.
(Source: modernmontessori)
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Burning Monk - The Self-Immolation, June 11, 1963, Malcolm Browne
June 11, 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon to bring attention to the repressive policies of the Catholic Diem regime that controlled the South Vietnamese government at the time. Buddhist monks asked the regime to lift its ban on flying the traditional Buddhist flag, to grant Buddhism the same rights as Catholicism, to stop detaining Buddhists and to give Buddhist monks and nuns the right to practice and spread their religion.
While burning Thich Quang Duc never moved a muscle.
(Source: vietnamiconicphotos.wordpress.com)
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New York City
Something I have never understood about people who move to NYC. Many of them don’t realize that the city does not give a fuck about you. In fact, the city probably hates you. You are just another body piling into its bloated limits, thinking that this is the place where everything happens. It is. And everything includes all the hardship, and hate, and grime humanity has.
You can visit NYC and have a magical time. But to move there is different. You need to hustle. You need let the city punch you in the face, a few times. You have to earn every little inch that might not amount to much. Honestly, this is why I haven’t moved there yet. I am aware of how hard it is. That city hands out nothing. You have to take it from its clutched fists. It will try to get you to leave. I have seen many people leave because they weren’t welcomed in they way they thought their life deserved to be.
Remember this if you are thinking of going. The city probably hates you. After a few years, maybe it will be tolerant of you. But never expect the city to love you if you can’t be as hard as its steel and concrete. It takes real dedication and lots of time to get there. So put in your dues, or go back to where you came from.
(I felt weird writing this, being I have never lived in NYC, but most of my people are from/moved there. Quite a few have left too. I love being there, but have always felt this way about moving to the city)
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On the idea of online dating sites.
This is something I have thought about. I know a lot of people who have either been using/or started using these types of sites. Many speak positively of them, and I have even seen a few real legit relationships begin this way. So i decided to check one out…..
I many times suck at meeting new people, but realized that I probably am more freaked out about meeting people online. It’s not hard to put on your best face when meeting someone, but it’s just so much easier on the internet to only show the things that you deem appropriate (or believe to be true about yourself, when maybe not so much in real life).
Also, getting myself to translate onto the internet seems too daunting a task. Most of my best qualities do not show up in text. There is no room for sarcasm, the charm and wit of face-to-face interactions let alone voice, facial expressions, and a feel for how a person carries themselves in the world.
I almost feel like starting a message like “Hey, you seem attractive, and you write nice things about yourself, I would like to now find out if you are full of shit and/or batshit crazy, and/or a liar (or just completely ignorant of how you really are).”
This may not be starting off on the right foot I guess. So i decided against it. for now.
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WARPAINT ETIQUETTE: 3/30: Last Will and Testament of Kristen Tomanocy
I, the undersigned, specifically and exclusively direct that, in the event of my untimely death, my estate shall devolve as follows:
Special Bequests:
My 2007 Apple Macbook laptop, to Joy Jerome, who will expressly review and delete any of the contents within she deems fit.
My poems. Printed,…
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GOOD MORNING CORVALLIS!!!!!!!!
Not sure if this a phenomenal group of poets running around performing, or a preview for Newsies 2….. or both. Either way, I like it.
