Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Deep in Thought

I'm contemplating my future activities- sitting on the couch and staring at the walls will do that for you- as the semester winds to an end. Because I usually spend my summers inside of a bag of pretzels (good stuff, people), watching Jet posing out in the backyard like Annie Leibovitz is going to hop out from behind a tree and snap a picture of him, I've decided to get productive this summer and work on some new projects:

1). T-shirts. Can never have too many of those. I'm making Darfur t-shirts and then fact t-shirts for fun. The Darfur t-shirts are about, uh, Darfur, with snippets of African poetry and a painting symbolizing a part of Darfurian culture (music, food, religion, and so on and so forth). I'll sell the t-shirts and give the money to Save Darfur. So, uh, anyone up for an order? Fact t-shirts are second-which will have, uh, facts, all over them: Audrey Hepburn Spoke Seven Languages Fluently. The Second Most Common Surname in the United States of America is Johnson. Iceland is Awesome (that is a fact, Mom). Neat. O. And this time my stab at fashion will be far more successful because t-shirts are much better than the decorative shirts that Carmen and I attempted five years ago- forgetting that once you sew, button, and add lace along the bottom of a shirt it won't stretch anymore and you'll get stuck trying to put it on. THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN.

2). Make soap, lotion, and shampoo. It's organic. It smells good. It's cheap.

3). Follow Nate Sheets and continue to be his groupie. Nate Sheets is my hero. Even if he hates the greatest musical ever made and by that I do mean Cats. There is no Dogs. Back off, haters.

4). Stalk Sigur Ros. Given. Didn't need a plan for that.

5). Continue hating on Andrew Jackson by my "Remove Andrew Jackson from the Twenty" campaign- it's just me right now but you're welcome to join in on the campaign to get Sitting Bull or Martin Luther King, Jr. to take his place.

6). Find out what's going on with Elliot and Olivia. If you don't know who they are, give up on life and don't try again until you've seen every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit known to man. Our species thrives on stuff like this.

7). Benefit concert. That's right. Since I was thirteen, I've been procrastinating on a Darfur benefit concert. I'll move to do something this summer (any local musicians please- let's discuss). I'll start with a venue. I think that an outdoor thing would be better- maybe the city of Durango would be willing to listen to my proposal once I put it together. If that doesn't work, I turn to local resta...restrau...food joints.

8). Study Eyak. There's only one speaker of Eyak left in the world, and the last native speaker died in 2008. Her name was Chief Marie Smith Jones and she spent her life in a fight to preserve the wonderful and breathtaking Eyak culture, the culture of her tribe. The Eyak tribe hails from Alaska, land of the wolves. The language is preserved somewhere- it's been recorded, videotaped, and a dictionary and grammar book have been made. I'm not sure how to get it, though. It is possible to learn and flourish in this Athabaskan language (it's closely related to Navajo), though it could take me some time to track down the materials.

It's sad when the sole speaker of any language is an anthropologist.

9). Train Jet- I still haven't done it yet. Our little wolf is a wild man.

The summer list is off to a satisfactory start, says I. God bless the internet for holding me accountable. Ugh.