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It’s that time of year again – time for American Idol madness. I have been a watcher of American Idol for years, though I tend to stop watching full episodes part way through the season, season 8 being the one exception. The Adam Lambert vs. Kris Allen debate was a common topic of conversation with my friends and family. After the amazingness of season 8, last season was a bummer, and I’m really hoping to see some great talent this season.

Based on the first round of auditions, I’m not sure about this season. They have shown some good singers, some strange personalities, and some typically bad attitudes. I am still depressingly unimpressed by most of the singers. Two singers that have stuck out to me from the quagmire though are Jerome Bell and Naima Adedapo, both from the Milwaukee auditions. Jerome Bell’s audition was amazing; he really payed attention to every musical aspect – utilizing dynamics, tone, and expression to their full extent. Though Naima Adedapo’s vocal wasn’t as technically impressive as Bell’s, there is still something in her voice that I liked.

The thing I hate about the audition episodes is that they seem to go on forever, but they don’t really tell us anything about the artists we’re going to be watching for the next several months. It’s easy to pick out the singers we think we’re going to like and to laugh the terrible singers out of the room, but we never really get to see what kind of music we can expect out of each contestant in the future. I’m already bored with the audition phase and ready to see the real music competition get under way, but it looks like we still have another two weeks of boredom left.

The new judges are adding an interesting new dynamic to the show. Much to my surprise, I think Jennifer Lopez may prove to be my favorite female judge ever on the show. She’s almost like a mix between the Kiara DioGuardi’s tough, musical judging style and Paula Abdul’s silly sweetness. She seems able to deliver a real critique to the contestants while maintaining a sense of composure and politeness, which I think is nice. The jury is still out on Steven Tyler for me though. He brings a fun element of comedy to the judging table and often delivers good critiques, but he also frequently creeps me out with the way he’s speaks to some of the younger girl’s in the competition and annoys me by randomly showing off his screeching vocals rather than talking.

All in all, I’d say it’s been an interesting and hopefully promising start to the season. (Please let it be a good season!) When this show has some real talent, I can’t help but love it, but when it’s overrun with nothing but mediocrity, I’m compelled to hate it. I suppose only time will tell; we’ll just have to watch, hope, and see what happens.

I am making it publicly known, possibly against the better judgment that I, a member of the Harry Potter generation is actually a fraud.   I have in fact, yet to read the Harry Potter series.  There, I said it!  Phew…a weight has been lifted.  I didn’t know it was such a blemish on my record until I came to college.  Everyone I met had read them and ostracized me when they found out I had not.   Even though my best friend of three and a half years won’t admit it, I know she is embarrassed that I really don’t know about Hogwarts.

I avoid telling people this sad factoid about myself until it either a. comes up in conversation where there is no avoiding it for I can’t lie or b. I get to know them for a year and a half and feel compelled to share my deepest darkest secrets with them.  Since you reader, have not asked I had to resort to option b, telling you at about the year and a half point in our relationship.  If you kept reading to this point you are probably experiencing shortness of breath, dizziness and I might advise you to begin breathing slowly into a paper bag.  The shock will subside within a few minutes, so don’t be alarmed.

Now that you are at the point of breathing normal again, this is where most people ask, “I don’t understand, how did you not read Harry Potter?!”  Well, like most things in life, I blame it on my parents.  They forced me into sports and didn’t expose me to the fantastical life J.K Rowling created.  So thanks Mom and Dad for ruining my childhood and adulthood and sending me into a life of a recluse.

I will end this story with good news for all.  I have made it my short term goal to complete the Harry Potter series by April in hopes of regaining a piece of my childhood and avoiding ridicule in the real world.  However, when I went to the library to check out the first book, it was already gone!  I knew there were others out there like myself lurking in the shadows.  Come out and let yourself be known…and also, return the book!

From a recent writing exercise:

It is still the dead of winter, but the world around him is coming very much alive. The sun has risen hours ago, but it is not yet midday; the top half of the building is bathed in a wash of warm russet-tinged gold, the tips of bare branches before it glazed as in a tracery of metallic filaments. Already the wash of late-morning light is trickling down the building’s grand facade. It trickles down the flutes of wide columns and into the crevices of cornices and corners, under sills and eaves. Foot traffic is beginning to increase, now. People have risen from their beds, have left their homes, all to some purpose of their own, for some individual or shared goal. They swirl around him where he stands, unmoving, on the pavement.

It is curious, he thinks. How utterly incomprehensible. This building, this bastion of knowledge and learning, pragmatic and idealistic, has been standing here for goodness knows how long. Enduring granite, withstanding the weathering of time. Has it always been this way? Do these people climbing these broad, snow-layered steps see what one would have seen a century ago? Do they see what he sees, a sort of wordless grandeur that stands against the black-and-white palette of winter, a monolith, a stone construct that embodies values now tacit and undefined? It seems to embrace the curious and the strivers and the learners, drawing them into its maw, breathing them out again.

The air is crisp and cold and holds with it the promise of a new day. Snow crystals glitter in the watery but growing sunlight, and around him more people are sweeping past, angling for the building, climbing wide steps, disappearing among the columns and inside. He inhales, tilts his head back to take in the building once more before he urges his feet into motion. Yes, yes indeed.

Since some of my friends have yet to see such classics as The Breakfast Club or Say Anything, every Friday of this month has been dedicated to watching classic 80s teen movies. Accordingly, this past Friday we watched Pretty in Pink. Although the movie was overly dramatic (and thoroughly unsatisfying – she SHOULD have ended up with Duckie), I really enjoyed getting a glimpse at what life was like 25 years ago. I especially liked the scenes at TRAX, the local record store where Andie works. Seeing the endless rows of record sleeves made me nostalgically reminisce about the “record” stores of my youth – Sam Goody and FYE, which have since become virtually obsolete.

I guess my question to you is not if you like John Hughes movies (though you should – they are fantastic!), but if you ever miss buying an actual CD instead of an online MP3. Sure, you can get the album art online as well, but is it the same? Has the experience of music become less personal with the advent of iTunes, Rhapsody, and other digitized music stores? Or has technology been beneficial in that it has democratized music and made it easier for more people to enjoy and share? I would like to think that while there are many benefits to purchasing digital music files, there is nothing like running into your local Sam Goody and picking up the newest Spice Girls album. Sure you have to lug around 25 CDS on road trips, but there has always been a story behind the purchase of a physical CD that I have never had in the purchasing of a digital album. The influence of a physical album can be likened to an old (pre-digital) photo – there’s something about its physicality that makes it real, and thus, more personal.

“The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title… The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” — Emerson

The dichotomy between the arts and sciences has always been one that has baffled me. What has been portrayed as antagonistic forces in our society, I’ve always pictured in my mind’s eye as something of the same fabric, living tranquilly side-by-side as byproducts of human behavior, as manifestations of our own experiential limitations. They are both a testament to ignorance and the collective effort to push against that human stigma; we hold within us an equilibrium between humility and belief in human volition. (Richard Feynman has said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”) Perhaps I am just asserting this to retain my own sanity, to justify the polarities in my own life and for those who have also chosen, some may say, juvenilely, two rather disparate majors. “Like oil and water!” they splutter. And I respond, in a sagely tone of course, “Ah… but they have much more in common than differences. For example, they are jointly considered under the category of ‘liquid’ at room temperature…”

My intent is not so much to provide justification for all those who have chosen both a pursuit in the humanities as well as the sciences. It’s not for convincing ourselves that switching gears from writing a paper arguing the social construction of (insert almost anything here) to applying probability theorems in genetic pedigrees is not difficult. (It depends on how much sleep you’ve had the previous night.) It’s not meant to be a practical explanation, but more compelling and important than that – a brief commentary on our collective acquisition of knowledge throughout the millennia. Essentially, we have ameliorated this unsettling feeling of not knowing by differing means. Feynman, would add, succinctly, at this point, the thesis of my life:

“Although we humans cut nature up in different ways, and we have different courses in different departments, such compartmentalization is really artificial…”

In inspecting the veins on a leaf, an inspired individual could attempt to reach beyond the surface and contribute to a fruitful discussion by, determining an elegant equation that describes the fractal pattern, or by composing a lyrical poem lamenting transience. The end result in both is that a conversation has occurred and that, more than anything else, is it. When Emerson speaks of no individual owning the landscape, no “discipline” owns nature. A common ancestor joins the two, three, hundreds of disciplines, each of which have split off from the main line at different points in human history because each manner of thinking was enormous and could not contain itself. None of this, my field is worthier than yours, left-brain, right-brain hogwash. It’s these complications, the paradoxes, coupled with the constant desire to know and debate and deliberate — those are what matter.

Why is it that people are obsessed with taking pictures of their pets?  My roommates and I have a kitten.  We think like any new mother thinks that her child is THE cutest baby in the entire world.  But don’t worry my roommates and I aren’t delusional, we really do have the world’s most adorable kitten.  Therefore we find every opportunity we can to capture our feline, Princess Tigerlily Mancos-Davis (her birth name) doing something picture worthy.  What constitutes ‘picture worthy’ you ask?  Well, really her just sitting there or lying dormant will do.  We don’t need much encouragement to snap a camera in her face.  It’s nice when we can muster a smile out of her, but she’s a cat and often bossy, so smiles are rare.

On many occassions we have stopped our human activities such as intense conversations, eating and cooking when Tigerlily is looking photogenic, one of us yelling throughout the house, “where’s the camera, where’s the camera!”  Those of us in the house hear the urgency in our roommate’s voice, knowing what it is about and scamper in and out of rooms looking for the camera.

Even though our cat looks adorable day in a day out, we still feel compelled to capture her essence daily.  Absurd?  I think not.  So where does this compulsion come from?  Possible hypotheses include, we are simply cat ladies.  Our cat really is the cutest cat and should obviously be as popular as Boo is on Facebook (dogs are always stealing our thunder.)  Another option is our cat and pets are extensions of ourselves and we are intrinsically self absorbed species.  Taking pictures of yourself on a daily basis is frowned upon and often labeled ‘vain,’ however taking pictures of your animals is normal and widely condoned, thus getting around the system of vanity.

Check out Princess Tigerlily Mancos-Davis on Facebook.  She is eager for new friends and photographers!