The Bad Days by [David Ramirez]

I’m loving all the beautiful melancholy in this while editing some pictures from Arizona. I spent a chunk of time working in the café section of a local book store and enjoyed perusing the bargain section before I headed out. The funky mood I’ve been in as I think about wrapping up my life in Grand Rapids and starting a new one in Ann Arbor drew me to a book written by Eric G. Wilson in 2008: Against Happiness. Wilson is an English professor at Wake Forest that thinks there’s something terribly, horribly wrong with the voracious American appetite for happiness to the exclusion of melancholia, a state that he thinks responsible for some of the most beautiful art and true appreciation of real life. So far I’ve read the introduction and a little bit of the first chapter. I’m feeling it.

And now I will leave you with a sneak peek of what I’ve been doing with the mountain of photos I took in Arizona.

Happy Thursday.

The drought is over. Drink freely of this creative cover.

This might be enough to soften the hearts of even the coldest remaining tablet skeptics.

I apologize for the recent dry spell in this fountain of titillating information and exorbitant amounts of photos. I left you all in a metaphorical desert while I was gallivanting about in the actual desert with my very best friend. It was an artistic choice, really.

But I have returned, riding high on a bounty of adventures and no worse for wear if one disregards the full-body sunburned I acquired, which one finds difficult to do when the burn is concentrated on the back of one’s legs and one is about to embark on a 25-mile bicycle journey with one’s mother and sister. Here’s hoping they mistake my cries of pain for cries of the pleasure that results from being in their company.

In the next couple days, I will attempt to successfully divide my time between editing gobs of pictures, gathering my belongings for transport to Ann Arbor come Monday, and guiding the hungry masses through their burrito ingestion experiences. Look forward to lots of photos of rocks, lizards, and the most grand of all the holes in the ground.

Happy Monday.

P.S. Enjoy a sneak peek of the happiest of all the hikers.
Just kidding. There they are.

At this time, 18 years ago…

Happy birthday, Amy Turner. It is likely you’re the best sister I’ve ever had.

See below for supporting evidence. What not to miss: my dad trying to remember the term “flash mob” in the background.

Happy Saturday.

Mercy by [Ben Kyle]

Some time in March, an iTunes update resulted in the elimination of about 80% of my music library, including every playlist I had ever created. I consider myself lucky to have this be one of the greatest tragedies of my short life. But truly, right before entering finals season? Still pretty devastating.

So somehow I coped with the busiest set of finals in my academic career by listening to 80s songs on Pandora. John Mellencamp, Billy Joel, and I managed to write page after page about the most diverse assortment of topics I’ve ever been asked to address: Down syndrome, global warming and its effect on Malaria incidence, the importance of HIV transmission research in decreasing the stigma associated with the disease, and my own research on DNA repair mechanisms in budding yeast. Obviously this was the best semester of my life. But its soundtrack was severely lacking. Take a chill pill, Mr. Jackson. It’s not you, it’s just everyone else.

But this week, an embarrassing length of time later, I sat down and spent the day figuring out what my options were in terms of restoring my music collection to its former glory. Unfortunately, every rating  I ever made and all the playlists I created in the spring semester are gone into the abyss. Which also means hours of my life have evaporated into thin air. But I find myself not even caring now that I can freely explore the world of music without coming up against 3,000 broken files.

Today’s musical selection comes from my first forays back into my own music. If something makes my eyes feel like they want to cry, it gets five stars. Enjoy these five stars.

Happy Thursday.