At first I wasn’t sure what I thought of the shift from the harder, more in your face Kelis, but I can’t stop listening to Flesh Tone. The album tributes the birth of her son and departure from her marriage with Nas, and I feel I’m destined to love Kelis until Years from Now, she Reflects on a Milkshake long expired, but how the boys, ah, the boys remain. I love this song and think she’s gorgeous in this video, the hipster headdress notwithstanding.
I completely forgot about Robyn until recently. And then I realized she wasn’t even the person I’d thought I’d forgotten about, a different less talented Robyn who also had a nineties pop hit called Show Me Love.
The All Hearts tour was announced via a cute staged Twitter exchange between Kelis and Robyn:
Robyn: hey mama, I’m bored. U feel like doing something?
Kelis: Love to. Thinking it’d be fun 2 hit the road together?
Robyn: That’s what I’M thinking. I got my strobes ready & some new dancing shoes as well. We could do this!
Kelis: GLORIOUS! I’ll bring the lasers, confetti. Let’s do it!
Robyn: So what are we calling this madness? My <3's tellin me u got an idea?
Kelis: Lets call it "All Hearts." What do you think?
Robyn: #allheartstour in the us. heartbrake on all four on top of a speaker in a shower of star dust and acid rain.
Today I took the teens on our final field trip to Magic Mountain, a family entertainment park surrounded by a teal-green river littered with lost neon golf balls and cigarette butts. This group has been one of my favorites, and when I think about leaving them next week I get that choked up sadness particular to when you realize you’ll never be in this certain context with people you care about ever again. Upon arriving we headed straight for the “bumper boats”, which I came to learn are the terrible maritime counterpart to bumper cars. I spent the next hour drenched and shivering in the ice cold air conditioning, watching the teens play arcade games. C.C. spent all her tokens failing miserably at the claw machine, undeterred by my cold hard logic about how the game operates. R.T. hit the 500 ticket slot on the wheel of fortune game, inciting awe and jealously amongst the rest of the group. For lunch we ate pizza and sugary fruit punch. Overwhelmed by excitement and off kilter from the bumper boats, T.Y. lost his cookies all over the lunchroom. After thanking the unhappy looking teenage employee covering the puke with deodorizing powder, we spent the rest of the afternoon playing mini golf and making a group of small children cry by showing no mercy in laser tag.
In three weeks I’ll have a new job at the family center as an aftercare specialist. My primary responsibility will be meeting with families before they leave the shelter and following up with them 2, 4 and 10 weeks after they leave to make sure they’re not falling through the cracks anywhere. I’ll be going to case review meetings to learn about what is going on with each of the residents, serving on the appeals committee which determines if people who’ve been in the shelter previously can re-enter, and trying to build relationships with case managers at other agencies we work with. Much different job from spending all day with the teens building potato launchers, talking about if Kurt Cobain was murdered by Courtney Love, and playing Spades tournaments.
When I first joined OkCupid I actively fished, but the past few months it’s functioned mostly as a no maintenance fishing net. Maybe the rainbow fish will swim into it, but more often than not it gets clogged up with deflated tires and aluminum cans. Don’t get me wrong – I really like OkCupid. I [...]
Recently I decided it’s time to bite the bullet and get a second job. Student loans and aspirations to leave Ohio are looming, and since my current job doesn’t exactly bring home the veggie faken bacon something has to give. Starting this week, I’ll be starting not one, but two new jobs. The first is [...]
The Blurb #14: The Land of Underwater Birds – Eric Puchner on terrible titles: I’ve seen some jaw-droppingly awful titles, often from very gifted writers. And I’m not just talking about my students: The Great Gatsby is an inspired title, one for the ages, but it wasn’t Fitzgerald’s idea. He wanted to call the novel [...]
This morning I saw danah boyd speak at the 2010 Symposium on Youth and Social Media at the Moritz College of Law at OSU. Her keynote focused on how adults shouldn’t blame the internet and social media technologies for behaviors they see teenagers engaging in online they don’t like; those technologies just make those behaviors [...]
This morning I walked out to my car to find the rear passenger window smashed in and glass smithereens all over the back seat. I called the police who redirected me to make the report on their website, where I also accessed their helpful information about preventing car break-ins. Over the past year my 1993 [...]
Marine Biologist: At five years old, marine biologist = playing with dolphins. Before I viewed Florida as a humid hellhole overrun with pythons I imagined myself living by the beach and being a sort of Dr. Doolittle for sea creatures. One day I got a really bad stomachache because I didn’t wait long enough to [...]
Covering Haiti: When the Media Is the Disaster: Great article on how the media frames victims of disasters as criminals, primarily through labeling their attempts to get much needed supplies as “looting”. (via Gin and Tacos) Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction [...]
For the bulk of my time as a student I worked at a domestic violence shelter in Athens County. Once while I was working a woman staying there climbed out her window, went down the fire escape and jumped the fence so that she could go out drinking. I was oblivious to the fact that [...]
