Danielle Speaks

Eat them up!

This picture keeps popping up on my flickr page in the pics of my contacts. Its my friend Kacy's babies. They look like their mommie mere here. Mere and Kacy are super cool- and kacy is a really really good photographer if you are ever looking for one. May I introduce- baby Shai and baby kaz- I heart them:

Gentlemen, I have never seen anyone rock a suit like you two little dudes.

Wax Poetic

 Fernwood Dock

  After a late dinner of salmon and runner beans
  after we've discussed the weather and the neighbors,
  recent deaths and births, it's past nine,

o'clock, and we've run out of things   to say.
  Home an hour and already I am sliding into the borrowed
  car, driving in the last light to Fernwood dock. Near the old

fir tree where I park, as usual, a   streetlamp casts me
  a bulky shadow. Back at the house
  my father has turned up the t.v. Mum is collecting

the dishes, talking to the dog. The   streetlamp spills this
  behind me in a tangled net of desires
  which time has helped to tighten. The night feels my clip

across this old haunt-my footfalls   on the dock
  ring like a pair of grey owls: hoo-t hoo-t
  back and forth. The sea laps beneath the wharf and houselights

are blinking on across the strait,   one island over,

lights, like bright blemishes
  against the night's total demand. It's not
  a bride's night, but a darker night-

blue-black, like seared steak, like   ten thousand
  fathoms into the chiasmic unknown.
  Five shades of blue whisper: if nothing

is invisible, even in the darkness,  
  then nothing is ever lost.
  I lean out over the rail. Years ago

with a friend, we sat long into the   dark, talking,
  waiting to see the whales jump. Her heart-shaped
  barrettes caught at the moonlight and skittered it out over the water

As though our low voices could
  call them to us, as though we were sirens. In the dark,

my friend and I had kept talking even   though we were getting cold.

Back at my parents' house there would   be the night-time
  fragrance of lilac and roses, bowls of ice-cream
  and warm cake. I've come to Fernwood Dock

just to think of the whales, even when   they weren't
  feeding in the straits. Their breaching backs
  like gunfire crashing the tides. Rendered in some Haida stories

as victims of the Raven. But I know   their secret violence:
  "a pod of seven killer whales had peeled the entire
  minke whale like an orange; they'd eaten most of its tongue,

but left the blubber and flesh untouched"   and I am waiting
  to catch the boat away from this dumb beauty,
  hovering over the water like a dragonfly, the way the wharf

hovers over the sea. To be some kind
  of mad monarch, devious spoiler of the little life
  I own. I would put my hands on the killer
 
  whales, to feel their need to skin their own kind,
  a vibration, a vitality-- to draw such terror
  into myself, as though I could taste

blood, tongue, and fear-- waste the   rest.
  Tonight, too, I'll go home well after dark, the maple floorboards

creaking as I cross them, trying not
  to disturb the sleeping house. The still house,
  the fragrant house

in which someone is always asking,   Do you love me?
  Do you know who I am?
 

 

This is one of my favorite poems by Joelle

Dear Douchebag

This just made me laugh out loud- like in a big guffaw!

(Dear Kim Jong II and Dear Hispanic Cat caller)

Thanks Giulia!

The Hum Drum beat of a sound mind

I was nausious, panicked slightly and settling down to a night of Net Flix and water. Red showed up- fresh from a viewing of "the place." Soon my childhood friend would be my close neighbor- YEHAW! So I forgoe'd my nausia in exhange for some cheap wine and allowed Humdrum to help me map out the last bits of planning for my trip to France. Her logic seemed so simple. When I sat down and reread my residency instructions- the answers seemed to appear so glaringly I wondered allowed, "could I possibly be more fucked up than I already estimated?' Nah said wise she, you just have a lot on your mind and I love planning trips. Humdrum soothed my anxieties- as always and helped me- as always - and got me drunk on red wine- as always and gossiped the night away.

Wine Bars in Willy B- beware! Two nutballs from SI are about to be neighbors and we've been known to imbibe a shite load of red wine while tearfully conversing!

Thanks Red!

  On Saturday night Claudia and her entourage (us!) went to a fake prom on a yacht that encircled the isle of Manhattan for 4 hours. It was open bar. We danced, we drank, we played spin the beer can and were completely inappropriate for a night on the town with your coworkers!!!! But wait I work at VH1- there is no such thang as inappropriate.

my dress was quite the material of floozy call girl nightmares- it was pretty but I felt like the high school slut. I never got a chance to be one so that's cool. Tristyn had a vintage pink and gold dress- I hearted her for it!

And the boys cleaned up good!

but not as purdy as the goils of course!

Moses are you sniffing me????

What? We did nothing!

Don't mess wid me bitches! I am a baddass muthafucka!

Claudia the hostess with the mostess and my breasts. We had a ball and I loved every moment of it! Thanks Guys!!!!!

The rating system

My friend at work, Bob, made up a rating system for women. Its a way to break down what makes up the "10" in a perfect 10:

• rack= 2
• ass=  2
• abs=  1
• legs= 1
• face= 4

You can click here for his entry. What is most interesting about this system is that when CC and I heard this (drunk in a bar of course) We demanded that we could make up a male rating system. Bob swore that there was no way; "many have tried and all have failed. Its impossible to make a rating system for men." What he did not say was why. Implicit in the omission of why is the obvious reason- woman are complicated. Well I thought this. But when I began to introduce the system to men in the office they were sort of stuck in their comprehension of this system. They could not understand the X factors. They continually pleaded with me for some numerical inclusion that summarized the candidate's personality and prowess in bed. But I had to be tough and hold Bob's ground- this is shallow territory to be maintained.  Yet when we sat in front of the television in my office and I implored them to yell out a rating number for the ladies we were looking at and then use the break down system to re-rate them...well the numbers did not match up. While watching these ladies on the tele - talk show guests to be precise on an episode of Tyra about domestic teen violence - these women won the hearts of my Guinea dudes- they rated up to three points higher than when estimated by the breakdown system.

Well this is all neither here nor there and there are a huge vats of other things on my mind but this post was in draft form and just needed to be born- here is the male breakdown as created by Sassy Sastillo and I:

• Pecs= 2
• Tush =  2
• abs=  1
• Arms = 1
• face= 4

We left out legs cause we don't think they don't matter as much. What do the other ladies think?

Ok off to more important things

One more thing

I can not keep up with all of my friends blogs! Seriously. Things are happening and I am just finding out.

HumDrumGirl you are way too prolific for my small little mind to grasp.  AND, we have seriously replaced our human time with cell phone, email and blog reading!

My New Blogger Role Model

I just went on a friend of friend's blog and clicked on his MOM's Blog! This woman's blog is amazing!!!!! I am jealous of David, of his mom and of this class- my HS english teacher was not nearly as cool! This is a link to her article about blogging- its fascinating

And here is a sample posting- Erica Jacobs- I don't know you- but I think you're the coolest- I am humbled- especially since I just wrote a blog entry about PMS!

Hamlet, A Modern Fantasy?

Monday, November 21

    What started out as a “fun” introduction to the twisted plot of “Hamlet” became, in my class of 22 boys and 4 girls, a roller coaster ride of exaggerated fantasies and profound truths.

    Hamlet is a moody young man who can’t make up his mind what to do about his dysfunctional family situation. For students, it’s “welcome to my world.”

       Before beginning Shakespeare’s bizarre story, I lead an activity designed to drop them into that world---with a crash.

       I ask them to imagine their father has recently died in a car accident, and that one month after his sudden death their mother remarries their father’s brother. “How do you feel?” I give them a few minutes to respond.

    I then add the next plot twist: their father’s death was not an “accident” and their uncle’s car was seen speeding from the scene. “How do you feel?” Another paragraph.

    The third blow, I tell them, is that their girlfriend dumps them only because her father tells her to and for no other good reason. Students respond a third time.

   

Monday, November 21

    What started out as a “fun” introduction to the twisted plot of “Hamlet” became, in my class of 22 boys and 4 girls, a roller coaster ride of exaggerated fantasies and profound truths.

    Hamlet is a moody young man who can’t make up his mind what to do about his dysfunctional family situation. For students, it’s “welcome to my world.”

       Before beginning Shakespeare’s bizarre story, I lead an activity designed to drop them into that world---with a crash.

       I ask them to imagine their father has recently died in a car accident, and that one month after his sudden death their mother remarries their father’s brother. “How do you feel?” I give them a few minutes to respond.

    I then add the next plot twist: their father’s death was not an “accident” and their uncle’s car was seen speeding from the scene. “How do you feel?” Another paragraph.

    The third blow, I tell them, is that their girlfriend dumps them only because her father tells her to and for no other good reason. Students respond a third time.