Irony?

I wanted to introduce you all to a new friend of mine.

The irony mark.

Ok...go...

Come on little guy you know you can do it...


>?<

...ok now turn around and face us...

>?<

Don't be stubborn!

>؟<

There we go.

Quick!

Hello Everybody,

I'm at work so this'll be much less substantive than the previous posts. In any case, my life recently in gloriously paltry detail:

Thoughts on June 20th‽:

And so beginnith the span of Sir Pacer's life where alcohol was only a slightly less dangerous substance. If any of you have access to the Dogfish Head 120 min. IPA. Buy it. Drink it. Celebrate its wonder. It's worth every penny.

Kurt Elling is a fantastic and ridiculous musician. Even more wonderful live than recorded.

Long Island Iced Teas: girl drink? Discuss.

Summer is a time for friends, frenzies, and films. Also research, but unlike friends, research is totally acceptable as a hibernal activity.

I have not been on enough rooftops lately, this begs for ammendment.

Dance friends...dance.

Arrivederci,
-->this guy<--

Disclaimer: I've just been reading (Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Steve Martin--a hoot and a half), which generally tends to make my writing slightly more articulate than necessary in such a casual setting as this blog. My apologies.

Hello, one and all.

I figured I would dutifully post on our so cleverly titled blog before it became a bandwagon for me to jump on. With the recent Metro collision merely a few stops away from me on Monday, I feel especially grateful to be able to do something as minor as impart my summer doings to you, my lovely Redhotties.

Okay, enough sobering words. Summer is wonderful. Before it began, I was expecting to work a 9-to-5 internship and be done with my day. "Twas not so. Allow me to escort you through my week.

It all begins on Sunday, when I wake up early after my only day off (Saturday) to accompany a Methodist church nearby. Think hand-clapping, feet-stomping and gospel-singing, and you've got the gist of the congregation. Interesting fact: the church meets in a building that was a stop on the Underground Railroad. I then run errands, followed by a quick change into my rescue squad uniform (steel-toed combat boots so totally make the outfit). Rescue squad duty, my favorite but most exhausting commitment, is from 1800 to 0600 the next morning, and is never dull. This past weekend I had back-to-back calls, seeing everything from a child with the flu to a high school kid who punched a window to a drunk guy with no pants on. Good times. Yeah.

Monday through Friday I have my 9-to-5 (open cubicle, desk, ergonomic chair, computer/laptop, black desk phone and all), which is so much more than I anticipated. I work at the NIH (National Institutes of Health) in the CNS (Cognitive Neuroscience) Section of NINDS (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke) (countless acronyms...oh how reminiscent). I'm running an fMRI study on the neural foundations of morality (broad, much?), as well as setting up a new study and analyzing the data from a just recently completed study. I love my job. And have also developed an obsession with brightly colored Post-It notes. After work I take the Metro home (fulfilling my lifelong dream of sitting in the Metro during rush hour, newspaper in hand, business attire on, ID badge proudly displayed), eat a quick dinner and leave for rehearsal. Rehearsal, you wonder? Why yes, I'm the rehearsal accompanist for the summer company I was in last summer. We're doing The Pajama Game, which I wasn't particularly fond of at first, but have grown to tolerate and even slightly enjoy. The show goes up mid-July, at which time I will start my accompanist gig with another company doing Aida. And I thought I wouldn't be doing any theater this summer...

And thus ends a week in the life of Melinda. Repeat six more times, add in weekly voice lessons and frolicking about with friends and family and you've got my summer, followed by a week of the beach, then Maine. Then (horror of horrors) sophomore year.

Oh my lands.

M.

Yo Peeps. I figured I would send you the link to the blog they're having me write for this website on sustainable city design. I've also been helping work on the site so any thoughts about it would be appreciated. Don't send me spelling and grammar mistakes, though, as there are so so many of them (most Danes aren't really fluent English speakers).

The blog is just some of my reflections on US and Danish sustainability but it's got a lot of info about my experience here in Copenhagen. Here it is:

http://sustainablecities.dk/en/blog/2009/06/an-american-in-copenhagen-1

I'll be posting a new blog every Wednesday that you can find at the top of the list on this page:

http://sustainablecities.dk/en/blog

The first link above is a blog that I published last week so there will be a new one tomorrow. Also, feel free to add comments to the blog. I've already gotten some interesting ones from my grandma, my crazy uncle and a mysterious person with the username "poop" (aka. my brother).

I Forgot!

I'm also starting to arrange "Don't Know Why," the Norah Jones song. I still feel inferior as an arranger, especially compared to the people who brought us all of our great arrangements over the years, but I'm trying and hopefully I'm improving. I'm still planning on redoing "New York State of Mind" (those of you who heard my first version know it definitely needs improvement), but it's a trickier song for me and I feel like I'll be able to do a better job right now with "Don't Know Why," so I'm doing that first and getting some more practice before tackling "New York State of Mind" again.

Continuing the Trend of Actually Writing!

Hey Everyone!

I hope that everyone else is having a good summer! I'm kind of in a limbo state this week––I had teacher orientation last week for my summer job teaching at the East Harlem School in NYC, and we don't start teaching until next week, so I'm just at home right now planning lessons. I've got two sections of 6th grade Humanities and a Government elective that I'm co-teaching with a student from Brown. The Humanities curriculum is pretty rigid in terms of what we have to teach: the theme for this summer session is courage, and each grade reads a different book (the 6th graders are reading Hatchet); so we have to keep to a strict schedule of reading to finish the books in the 5 weeks of the session as we also teach grammar and vocabulary. The Government elective, on the other hand, is completely open––we get to design the curriculum ourselves, which is really cool because we get to teach what we're interested in. The school is a private school mostly for low-income students in the neighborhood, although other low-income students from other areas of the city go there as well. The summer session is mandatory for all the students to prevent summer learning loss, and they have college and older high school students teach. It's a really interesting place.

Other than that, I'm mostly just reading all the stuff I didn't have time to read during the school year. I just reread the last two Harry Potter books, partially out of nostalgia and partially because I just saw a trailer for the 6th movie and decided I wanted to reread them. You can tell how nerdy I am because as I was reading the 7th book, one of my thoughts was, "There's a lot of stuff here that's similar to Lord of the Rings; that would be a cool paper to get to write, comparing Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings." I know, sad, isn't it? I'm reading Harry Potter and I'm contemplating a paper I could write on it! That plus the fact that now I'm starting to try to read Ulysses (we'll see how that goes...) has pretty much cemented my status as an über-nerd. Hmm... what school do I go to again?

I've also been glued to the television, watching what's going on with the protests over the election in Iran and the debate over health care. The latter's frustrating me immensely while the former has me spellbound. I feel like the situation in Iran is one of those events that could turn out to be a great historical turning point, another Tiananmen Square-like event in terms of its imprint on the world's collective memory. It's really thrilling to live through it, and I hope the reformers have the courage and strength to keep standing up for their own freedom to choose their leaders.

What's everyone else up to? Keep posting, people!

Dear people in Redhot and The World,

I am writing now only to start a trend of writing now. In actuality, I have very little to say these days. My life revolves around four things: reading, writing, lounging, and planning to do otherwise. I will now expand on these items.

I promised Hannah that I would blog about my various literary adventures this summer, and share any good books that I stumble upon. So the time has come to tell you about my latest favorite, Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman. I'm here to dispel any rumours you may have heard about it from one Ms. Egan. I think she generally has more interesting things to do than talk about books she didn't get very far into, but just in case. IT'S FANTASTIC. It is, in essence, the story of a man who, nine years after their break-up, kidnaps his university girlfriend's son. The story is told by seven different narrators, whose tales expose the various moral ambiguities at play in the event--hence, the title. I finished it over tour, so perhaps some of you have already heard me sing its praises, but yes, you should all read it. Since then, I've started and left behind a few books before settling into The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. I'm only a short ways in, but I'm delighted with it. I will keep you up to date.

I've also been writing quite a bit, mostly working on short essays about boring things like my life. I'm going to keep working in this vein for the summer and see what I come up with.

... and that's where I stopped writing a few weeks ago. I was going to just ditch this post, but no one has yet leapt up to take the "first post of the summer" position, so here I am again. I have since read some more, written some more, and traveled to my dad's house in Kansas City, where I now find myself. I am enjoying myself, spending some time with the family, and using my free time to research jobs/other options for the future. All that I have to say about this topic is: I CANNOT BELIEVE I HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THESE THINGS. For now, I know that I'm not going to go to med school or law school, but all other options are wide open. If you have any great plans to propose, do let me know.

Hope you're all having a delightful break. Please write, and move my post off this wall. Yes?

- Brady