Two forms of music exist: euphony and dissonance. The latter comprises man’s realm, untamed and wild to the point of inexplicable wars, apartheid, My Lai’s, and Madoff-esque avarice. Then there the sweet symphony rings, melting away the human for a pure note. This is the David’s chord, but not only his. Minor fifths, major sevenths, subdominant, Sonatas, Beethoven and Saint-Saens- the musical masterpiece from life transcends the living.

A guitar strums “Your Love is Deeper.” I sing along, transfixed by the chorus of combined passion and exhilaration. When “Grace Falls Down”, my eyes follow the brick, hammering nails to Jesus’ bloody hands. In the Churchen Powerhouse, logic often falls prey to legend.

But fidelity to religion fades in context, as faith holds no monopoly on music’s magic. Artists, musicians, and artist-musicians profess the therapeutic mysteries of marcato beats. The mantra of music remains especially effective on commercials (Five-Dollar-Footlong, anyone?). Now the heralds of angels have converted song to fit their own machinations. Piety, devoutness, the connection with Lord Almighty become readily apparent in the spirit-shaking tune.

Somehow, the empyrean soundstuff proselytize, with impact. Laced among the songs un-punitive morals reminiscent of the Ten Commandments complement the black and white of keyboards, the silver of guitars. Beyond the din is “eschew greed” or “value the family” (the commandments exclude mention of how to treat non-believers).

To call me a Christian or Catholic remains inherently inaccurate. I do not adopt the morals, rulings, and, bluntly, restrictions of either denomination. If anything, the existence of God may possibly only be verified in music- formless, beautiful, divine to the ears.

The change from adolescent to educated, vote-worthy citizen springs forth in the most poignant way, the alteration of gums by wisdom teeth. The initial protrusion is awkward and unknown to the mouth and excess saliva, different sleep positions, and vexing- but not life-threatening- headaches certify the oral metamorphosis. Then devastation, the dentist abrasively saws each massive molar from their roots. This is called “change.”

Flavorless, commonplace became salty, metallic, full of blood. Any charity beyond the initial precautions were forgone: no painkillers, long term plans, or extra gauzes. The wound eventually heals and the gaps close up, but the memory of mandible misery simmers, then explodes.

This country is in change. The Obama Administration’s negotations with Iran over nuclear policy has not settled well, and the Iranians remain adamant in the pursuit of alternative energy. But somehow ties to North Korea’s aggression are drawn, and suddenly the threat of nuclear war becomes juxtaposed on the news. Now the Axis of Evil may admit a new member.

Iran has been tarnished with political dissent and nuclear arms for its contigency to “high-risk” war zones. First Afghanistan plotted 9/11. Then Iraq somehow fell into the fray. And eventually Iran will be caught in the desert winds under the ploy, of what, “nuclear threat to democracy?” Contradicting explanations swirl in the desert winds of the Middle East, but underhanded tactics of fear mongering and lobbying have pushed the tenets of democracy and personal security to lands where airlift supplies are feared as bombs.

Declaring invasion on difference wasn’t hard, and it isn’t receding. Troops are being shuttled to Afghanistan, from Iraq, to pull down a curtain of terror. Iran is next under the cloud cover and “actions by Iran, and not al-Qaeda, are the primary threat inside Iraq,” says the Washington Post

America can not simply tear the mandibles from Iran. With over 70 million people and a relatively unified government (at least more so than its sister countries), nuclear weapons become minor concerns. Iran can wage a war of attrition to exhaust America’s remaining troops. Iran can erect a unified front to deflect hollow patriotism. Iran can learn from the bombed fields and dead journalists and it can change, while we resume the wars on enemies of our sacrosanct status quo.

America’s wisdom teeth are out. The country can induce a third war in a span less than a decade. But this time, we shoulder our own burdens, and no one will relieve the load of collapsed economies and daily deaths beyond a, “Told you so.”

If this country is truly ready for change, see the war for what it truly is. Afghanistan, Iraq, rubble. America hides behind 9/11 and freedom to continue a policy of war mongering not much different from the tactics of Korea and Vietnam. Our teeth may be removed but they suffer the consequence. Ravage a country, and the blood spills, the pain finally explodes.

- Submitted by Anonymous

Every Fifteen Minutes evokes irrational fear and intense emotions with the justification of it being for our own good. It gives the subtle implication that alcohol related accidents will be a big impact on all of us. Fortunately, this probably will not be true.

The program strikes fear in us by having speakers lecture about their own experiences with alcohol related accidents. Their presence and clear communication of honest grief makes the whole issue come to life. They turn a generally obscure experience into a very visceral one. Despite the short-term impact of the program, it’s very likely that it will either turn into a joke or be forgotten within a year. Intentions aside, the program cheapens the whole issue of responsibility and alcohol.

To their credit, the fundamental idea of the program is one I can support: we should all be more aware of the consequences of our actions and should acknowledge that bad accidents do happen. Beyond this point, the program deviates from what I can consider reasonable.

It’s undeniable that the program aims to lead students towards the “what if?” line of thought. What if it happens to me? My girlfriend? My parents? Such thoughts naturally lead to fear of the hypothetical trauma. With this awareness comes the key word of the program: fear. If we’re afraid of harming our loved ones, or ourselves, surely we’ll act mature and be responsible, right?

Wrong. To condition students to be mature, to make intelligent decisions, the positive aspects of such choices should be emphasized. We should be shown the benefits of general sobriety sans propaganda bullshit. We respond better to rewards than to fear of punishments. Especially when said punishments are scarce. How long can we be afraid of ghosts without seeing any? Obviously, fatal car accidents do happen (as opposed to ghost apparitions). However, the odds of us personally experiencing a fatal alcohol related car accident is much lower than EFM would have you believe.

If, as is claimed, there were a car accident involving alcohol in the United States every fifteen minutes, there would be about 35,000 such deaths per year. Having looked up several statistics, it seems that the actual number ranges from 20,000 to 25,000. For sake of argument, lets stick to the possibly exaggerated 35,000 deaths per year. Because the population in the U.S. between 15 and 64 is just over 200 million, the probability of personally being involved in such an accident is about 1 in 6000 each year. If we include loved ones (estimated at around 100 people- another exaggeration in favor of EFM) as well as ourselves to the number, we still get less than 2 percent probability of being affected. With such low odds, any fear that is churned in us at the Every Fifteen Minutes presentation will only diminish with time because the fear is not pertinent to our lives.

All that said, my heart does go out to those who lost their loved ones. Not just in accidents due to alcohol, but all loss; it’s painful no matter the cause. Mortality is a sad fact of life, and we are all doomed to suffer it. I understand the pain and guilt that can drive people to want to help avoid deaths. However, the Every Fifteen Minutes program, no matter how benevolent its intentions, is not the positive impact its proponents would have us believe it is. It relies on cruel methods of getting a message across; the program seems to exist under the banner of ends justifying means. Even there, it fails. The fear and emotions involved with the program are not based on solid rationality, but on shallow control. The program tries to control us into acting mature rather than nourishing us until we naturally are. In its attempts, it deceives us into believing we are in danger. Even when successful at that, it fails in the long run when the fear loses relevance and the message becomes a joke.

The days of mad mobs and lynching and Montgomery strikes is over, run over by the civil rights movement. If validation of racial equality is required, glance at the presidential power- half colored, half white. American. But despite the cheery assertion of racial equality, blinding joviality fogs the notion that the -ism- racism, classism, sexism- exists, dangerously lurking beneath implicit barriers.

We remain segregated, and voluntarily so. The projects of Compton remain predominantly African American, and Beverly Hills a swath of white. And despite their proximity to colored and the lack of regions, neither muddles the mixture, allowing certain colors (and classes) in, eschewing non-Blacks with fear and crime.

In the West, Asian populations are received as intellectual coolies, Hispanics Gringoes. Both are typecasted immediately: the former a quirky intellectual, the latter a family of ten.

Assimilation, appearing to proselytize, reveals society’s inherent differences through television portrayal. Children shows are incredibly susceptible to this principle. Behind the Anglo-Saxon actor or actress follows the goofy, often inept, Latino, Chinese, or black sidekick. Many sitcoms cast the racially disadvantaged as needing the superior White man.

We remain segregated and yet have come far. Bill Cosby revealed the strength of a Black community. Hispanic and Asian stars slowly inch onto the mainstream. We have tread far, but the steps of hypocrisy still hound us. Inherently, invisible, racial stereotypes still nefariously pervade our minds, secretly assaulted. To go further, drop the preconceptions, the expectations and pause to see the world.

All colors.

To Be Detached

The impetus of journalism is the “shot”, a single, profound piece, effected by meaning and visual pleasantry, which affects the masses. So each reporter lies in wait, by the derelict paths of the homeless or under the podiums of scandal-swiped politicians, hoping the fluke of the perfect photograph will thrust him or her into fame.

To achieve infamy- a month of musing and then a portrait in some museum- a reporter must always remain vigilant. Their eyes watch the world, awaiting the snapshot. The commonplace becomes discarded, while the lens only capture the unique, the profound, and the significant.

So a photographer does not capture life. He or she truncates it to minor pieces of dazzle and glamour. This segmented limb of a life is the subject, which a photographer could grant no import at all. Take the case of Dorothea Lange, renowned photographer of the Depression Era. Showcasing a battered people, she recorded the faces and facts of the Walking Wounded, but rarely handed aid. Similar parties include Civil War daguerreotype artists and onsite journalists. All are afflicted with “photographic objectivity.”

This is the plight of photographers, voyeurs, journalists, and expository fame seekers. Eyes hidebound and narrowed, each waits under the cool hood of the car, lens staring at a mother picking peas. They follow the war ravaged townsfolk as children wade in mudbaths. In the city, the camera idles in front of the homeless.

To vicariously engross oneself into the subject proves both rewarding and overwhelming. The photographer joins the picture and realizes the subtleties and nuances of the physical world. But the perks become irredeemable when considering the anguish of the house-less man, a bruised body from domestic violence.

Reporters, journalists, find themselves caught between a net: remain aloof and detach from the world; appear solicitous but suffer the consequences. If these chroniclers of humanity’s history are to succeed, they must redefine photography to include the capacity for empathy and the resolve of distance. Only then will the “shot” become life.

The Exciting Life of Dust- Floating!

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of dust invades every corner of our lives. At home no furniture or table is spared the layer of silky grime, which always manages to settle regardless of the incessant wiping or cleansing. The air is filled with dust, but the dust chokes the air. Eventually the lifeless spores tumble into a nostril, a tract, a sneeze, and inside our bodies, outside our lives, the dust pervades our very soul.

The dust begins a particulate, broken from a cotton blouse or emancipated from a pile of sand. Intelligible parts intermingle and intertwine– one and one, two and two– until the progenesis of a single,  swelled puff of grey. The parvenu of new birth darts left, right. It has no purpose.

Confused, the particle weaves through the skyline and assesses the situation. Here, on this solid and not-as-tiny-as-me world, it is out of place, not belonging to the solid of trees who consign it to the wind, or the river that nulls a dust speck’s existence. But the dust eventually, on a fluke, trips through an eave or windowpane and joins the masses. It has found its brethren- more dust!- and a purpose.

Now the dust dances and prowls over carpets and soggy dog fur, making homes in patches and tickles in noses; now the dust slowly retreats under dark avenues of unexplored sofa sinkholes and the depths of cabinets; and now the dust dies, swept to the Great Beyond on a stab of Windex.

That blast of turquoise cleaner, the peak of a journey, has ended the dust. Despite the ubiquitous nature of dust- to always return in droves- the climax remains the same: demise. It is a life unworthy of living, tossed to happenstance and flukes, simply hedonistically absorbing the moment. There are rocks for that.

No, the dust blankets the floors and walls and tabletops in a grey, pastey will and testifies to its existence, no matter how troublesome, in the ability to affect and effect. Some men talk of dust; some women sneeze by dust. A child dies from dust, and dust saves a child. Absorbed by its fate, the only sign of immortality a worthless speck of dust can contrive is influence, because death is as troublesome, merciless, inescapable, consequential, and pervasive is as dust is itself, and other dust as well.

Death, dust, neither can find salvation in life until each stops wandering through the air, hoping to find companions, until dust ends its charity of death, and until the future dies to allow the present to live. Dust is too engrossed in what-if’s and can-be’s andswamped by achievement, success, life, a successful life. Deny the dust dream, Dust, and be as dust be. Realize the wandering and lone existence are just as “effective”: you notice the green of leaves, a gargle of a dust-murderer. And when the jet of cheap window cleaner arrives, you know you have truly lived.

Here, on the battlefield, females are a rarity. It is a fantasy world, made up of Magic cards, blazoned with fanciful beasts, landscapes, and blood-tipped spears. Despite a mutual knack for fantasy and science fiction, I have never seen a girl don the part as my opponent sorcerer, declaring attacks or buttering up defenses.

The game, Magic the Gathering, requires tactics. A player utilizes multiple modes of battle- attrition, diversion, sacrifice- to trump the opposing side’s defenses. And so a possible solution is identified. Women are not tacticians. Odysseus devised the Trojan Horse, and Zeus plotted and schemed to overthrow Father Chronos. Which is a misaligned trope, as Atalanta brought down the Mycedonian Boar and soldiers pray to Athena for victory.

Perhaps it is the sense of dominance. The game requires invading an opponent’s sphere, revealing superiority through strength and mental aptitude. Yet females are more literate than men studies show, making them more viable magicians, and eventually more superior.

Then there is the barbarism. Most cards claim some queasy paraphernalia- knives, staves, fire whips and thorn pits. Yet, brutality is not limited to the X Chromosome. Mother Andrea Yates drowned her three children. Angry at her husband, Diane Down shoots her three children, killing one. Both sexes bear a crucible of shame, on ink and inkless reality.

Why have I never seen any girl play Magic? The same reason Hillary Clinton was yelled “whore”, or men appear homosexual by ostentatious dress. It is the same reason girls wear jeans, but only men are heard of as sexist and chauvinists. It as an underlying current of society to toss the cards and recognize only the emptiness, the difference. Both men and women are murderers, hedonists, nihilists, and sorcerers, but our societal expectations, soaked with political correctness and euphemisms, make us male rapists and female victims, Pantene-prunes and unshaved hooligans. A class, a group, a sex, forgets that both cards are square, both sexes people.

We see everyone as a deck.

And we fell asleep.

Sprawled on the bed, head wrapped in sickly warm drowsiness, I can not sleep. I have been awake for four, five hours, so long that my muscles begin to dissolve. Sometimes sleep taunts me. No matter the illusory slumber I always remain awake. Obedient to boredom, my eyes wander around the ceiling sky, having no place. The mind ponders the reason for mental perspicuity. The body contemplates suicide.

Here in the bedroom the day falls apart. The bed, a receptacle, collects memories. By bedtime I will have already ran and finished homework. The fast onrush of life flags to a monotonous drone and in sleep the day is finally erased.

For insomniacs, the “day” never ends.

Sight and sound and sensation collapse to a humid torpor.  Sleepless, but also attempting to sleep, we insomniacs begin to target stimulus. First it is the streetlight that keeps us awake. Then it is the footstep, a rustling of paper. Eventually we block out the world. We have fallen asleep.

Then again, insomniacs  live a longer life. Darkness descended, on the bed, the boredom of perpetuity transforms seconds to minutes. Life seems infinite, a starry expanse, unending.  The minute-hours are long and drawn out, meticulously forever. Yet, with vast caches of time, I do not see the stripes on my ceiling or hear the mewing wind. I can only catch a glimpse of them upon waking from a two hour slumber.

I was trapped on the bed. I had ran through the day, ensconced in sunset hues, which my eyes missed. To a runner the tinted painted sky and birdcall chorus blurs as we sprint down streets. Eventually our lives match the rhythm of our footsteps. Then it’s the world.

Homework delineates my life. During lunchtime, I must finish three assignments. Four, in the afternoon, warm, the textbook signs must be complete. By nine I must read or write shrouded in darkness. From waking to midnight awake, my life is ordered by schedule.

Unable to sleep, mind boggling, broiling, bursting, the hour day of “awake” jumbles with the millenia of sleeplessness. Memories arise on the deathbed, but the insomniac no longer cares. He must last through tomorrow. So the present actions and scenery roll by unappreciated; at night we can appreciate life- but we don’t.

Ultimately, we insomniacs end up sleepless but sleeping, attuned to a world forgotten after the sun sets. Eyes become blind to the physical. Surrounded by pretense and ego, consciousness seethes with patterned dullness to new ideas and change. Eventually, like any insomniac, the sleep finally settles, and the day ceases to be anymore.

But open your eyes past routine, and see with seeing. Let thought embrace sight and sound and savor it. Be forever awake.

I never expected to be one of them, old, antiquated, trapped in the 80’s- my parents. They fumbled with the power switch, unable to activate the computer. When advertisements pop up, their hands click the flashing marquee, inviting in the wayward Trojan. I would never be puerile infant at electronics, incapable of ejecting the CD slot.

But I was, inundated by a maze of scroll-down headers and endless buttons. “Publish, Public, Post…” each word reeked of familiarity, but organization and location had long since changed.

My blogsite, now jumbled, composes a mite of this trend. Modern technology sits on a see-saw of change with every cell phone company and website following that upward curve. So the technosavvies enlist upon a journey of mass marketing, garnering patronage by adding gizmos and gadgets here. Mavericks apparently wither away at the low end.

In this dotcom age, where fresh coms supplant half-year old coms, remarkability replaced functionality. The extra functions look nice- yes-, but the innovations  weblogs (readomattic?), Microsoft Office 07 (dropdown lists), and T.V. remotes (does one really need half the alphabet?) prove more cumbersome than appealing.

After all, what’s wrong with originality? Classic real time strategy Starcraft still attracts gamers a decade after its advent. Bicycles work great, despite the existence of motorized two-wheelers. Flickr, the electronic reading machine, is nice, but books are no less inferior in content.

I was quite shaken. If modernism overwhelmed me now, where is my (our) place in the future? Afraid, perhaps we’re all tossed out cell phones, lackluster with a lack of features.

The economy isn't doomed.

Daily, the radio buzzes about the plight of the modern market. The car companies suffer, fruit and rice prices inflate. Restaurants lose their holds on customers, eking out meager existences with empty tables. From the radio, the supermarket should be desolate and lonely, visited only by worried coupon holders.

But the buzz is only buzz, electronic fear mongering. Sensationalism exaggerated a depression a century ago, and the yellow press has returned. The country is in a depression, but not, as the cynics put in, in an endless hole.

I am not saying this economic crisis has not affected anyone. Unemployment, creeping up from 6.7%, reflects itself in the visible sphere- but not always too visibly. For every business-stricken restaurant or foreclosed home, another luxury Jamba Juice retailer or American Eagle outlet flourishes. And while this nation reeks of bank failures and mass buyouts, America’s GDP trumps those of China, Russia, Germany, France, and Great Britain.

After all, this is a consumerist nation. America ranks poorly in the sphere of pragmatic transportation. Instead of SmartCars, citizens indulge in Humvees and Chevy Blazers. And when there are more cars than people there are also more computers and cell phones. And as Americans purchase a new iPod to match a new convertible, we continue to buy everything we don’t need until the cash runs dry and a depression begins.

The Nixonites, enduring a decade of choked oil, are not entirely to blame. The foreclosures, profligate spending, and credit card splurging fall primarily on Generation Y, young, fresh, and never inured to frugal spending. But this is a wake up call, to gas guzzlers and credit that crunches.

The supermarket is no dust bowl. The checkout aisles of ValuMart and Ralph’s and Asiatic 99 Ranch Market still choke and tick away at minutes. Only the people are now wiser. They eye the extra coach cushion or table chair. The lines are no shorter, but the items seem fewer, still enough.