Love Christmas

A few weeks ago, the greatest thing ever happened.

Christmas started.

Christmas is definitely more than just a single day. All of my life, I've felt disappointed in Christmas at about 7 at night. That's it? That's the whole thing? Everyone makes such a fuss, that you assume it must be a life changing day. That's why I consider any sign of Christmas- songs on the radio, lights up, all that jazz- as the effective start of Christmas.

Even if Thanksgiving or December hasn't come yet, we should still be happy to see Christmas come. The first thing everyone rags on are Christmas songs on the radio. "Wahhhhhhhh, it isn't thanksgiving yet! I can't be joyful and thankful at the same time! I need Lil' Wayne!"  These people are genuinely bad people. Christmas is a time of happiness and joy and anyone who wants to put it off even 5 minutes has no soul. If you get bored of happiness and joy, you have no soul. You should be doing more christian things, like deciding who does and does not have a soul.

The Choice Is Yours

Nordstrom famously put out a sign before Thanksgiving saying that they wouldn't be "Decking the Halls" until December 1st, proving that the anti-Christmas crowd is gaining sway. But you can fight back. Love Christmas all of the time, because Christmas loves you all of the time. It can make you happier if you just accept that you can enjoy peace and love for more than one month out of the year.

The Powers

"The Song of The Powers" - David Mason

Mine, said the stone,

mine is the hour.

I crush the scissors,

such is my power.

Stronger than wishes,

my power, alone.

Mine, said the paper,

mine are the words

that smother the stone

with imagined birds,

reams of them, flown

from the mind of the shaper.

Mine, said the scissors,

mine all the knives

gashing through paper’s

ethereal lives;

nothing’s so proper

as tattering wishes.

As stone crushes scissors,

as paper snuffs stone

and scissors cut paper,

all end alone.

So heap up your paper

and scissor your wishes

and uproot the stone

from the top of the hill.

They all end alone

as you will, you will.

I was at first overwhelmed by the selection when I was asked to memorize a poem from a list the size of a phone book. My immediate reaction, being the positioning jerk that I am, was to memorize a poem by a big name author so that I could flaunt it sometime down the road. My decision to rest with a 10 year old poem by a more obscure author was an easy one, however, as this poem reached to me in a way few have before.

Nothing quite annoys me in poetry as much as when the poet assembles his words in a pretentious, jejune assembly of imagery without any grounding. If you're going to use a metaphor, make it a unique and powerful one. I don't care if your emotions flutter and shake like the breeze. Apparently, everyone's do. That's what made this poem grab me so well. The metaphor it used was pertinent, fun and original. It conjures images of standing on the street outside of St. Ann's Elementary School playing with my friends, but also conveys a message I find myself forgetting too often as I apply to university. All the fuss I make at school or home or trying to get this or that award is really an exercise in futility, and I have to remember that if I'm not doing it for fun, I might as well not do it.

But he gets a "B" on intricacy. He could have a lot of fun with this.

Occupying The Homeland

Today, I joined a hippie commune.


Facebook was the first place where I heard about Occupy Delaware. They'd spent a day in Rodney Square and then got kicked out. Sounds like my kind of party, I says to myself. I says self, I should see if I can get involved in this kind of a thing, so I follow them on Facebook. Controversy brings the group into the News Journal, and the next thing I know, I'm Occupying Fletcher Park.

And on a pretty good day for it, too.

If you know me well, you know that I'd love to discuss the politics or the usefulness of a movement like this, but that's not what I wanted to write about. Being a part of today's rally fueled  my understanding of democracy in a way that brought the term into reality for me. Frankly, it's a textbook term. We're all habituated to it, and it becomes more of a given than a beauty to us. It has been significant to me before, but this really jolted it for me.

The first moment where the meaning of it came to me was while we were marching. We went up Market St. around to Rodney Square, the symbolic center of Wilmington and home to many banks, including the Bank of America headquarters. What it meant to be a taxpaying citizen became clearer to me during the march. These streets really were mine. I'd payed for them. I payed for the park. The idea of independent humans choosing to come together and use their money for the benefit of everyone is just so neat. I watch CNN daily, and in the hustle of the social debate we forget what it all even does. It becomes a show, and the government just a character on the TV (not much different from The Jersey Shore a lot of the time). On top of that reminder, I remembered that I have the right to go there and speak ill about the government that organized it. Let that sink in. Look outside and recognize that in a very real sense, you own that street. You share it, but you own it, and you can say almost anything there and do a lot of things there. The constitution is three dimensional, and applies right here.

Me marching, Courtesy of Occupy Delaware

Four hours later, my new sense of what patriotism really was came at my first Occupy Delaware General Assembly. Occupy Delaware considers itself a group without leaders, only with organizers. All decisions must be voted on by whoever decides to show up. What do you know! I showed up. As I sat on public property and debated a central issue of the Occupy Delaware Movement- should they stay at Fletcher Park illegally or be bullied into the obscurity of Brandywine Park- a whole new wave of democratic feelings overcame me. Everybody was gathered around a few people who wanted only to maintain order. The decisions rested on everyone as a whole. Anyone could speak, and anyone could say anything they thought appropriate, and finally, everyone had a final vote. Once you see pure and real democracy, the entire idea of an election or a vote seems a lot more meaningful than it did before.

The General Assembly where I'm sitting between a teacher and a veteran. Courtesy of The News Journal

As I said, this post isn't meant to be about the stances of the movement or the debate over the location of Occupy Delaware, both of which are pretty touchy subjects. I'd love to address them, but this isn't the place. But no matter what you say about the movement, it is democracy at its purest. The only thing that disappointed me was that I was the only high school student there. Our generation stinks at caring about things.


Oh, and for anyone who likes a good laugh- two dishes of food were brought to the event, a vegetarian pasta salad and baked ziti with meat in it. The hippies devoured the whole pasta salad in minutes, and four hours later there was still half a ziti sitting there. 

"Go To Grass. You Have Eaten Hay Long Enough."

To start off the new blog, I wanted something interesting, powerful, and rugged.

But alas, all I found was Gene Wilder with a beard.

I bought Walking, a long essay by Henry David Thoreau, while on a family vacation in West Virginia. The essay intends to show the reader what the true art of taking walks is. If you think you can take a walk, Thoreau disagrees. He states that he's only met two other people in his life who knew how to walk. So what does this purist say constitutes a real walk? You cannot plan where you are going. You just have to allow your legs to move you, and hope that you can find your way home like a lost dog. You have to fully make yourself a part of nature; any mindset that you had back home has to leave you entirely. "If you are ready to leave your father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again-if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk."

Thoreau's writing quickly takes on the nature of his walks- he goes all over the map. He speaks at length about his preference of swamps over nice land, his hatred of gardens, his hatred of names, his hatred of man's inclination to focus more on the world of his creation than the true, natural world, his hatred of human learning and thought,and his love of pine trees.

So if you're a person or were made by a person, HDT isn't a big fan of you.


I realized while reading this that a lot of his messages- closeness with wildness, the meaninglessness of words and symbols- have appeared many times before in things I've read. Shakespeare and Plato have said the same. And yet, no matter how many times these same sentiments may be repeated, my mind feels stretched by every reincarnation of the same idea.

Cliche and mind-blowing.

We forget, I guess. That living as wild and instinctive beings is natural. We forget that pretty much everything that we use day-to-day is made up, and every time we're reminded of it, we can't help but be shocked. No matter how many times we're told otherwise, our new natural seems to be fake. It's disgusting.