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brb crying #NowPlaying Hands by Tank and The Bangas

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#NowPlaying Everything Goes by Poolside

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#NowPlaying Show Me the Way by Penguin Prison

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#NowPlaying Keep Your Name by Dirty Projectors

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SO. GOOD.

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What happens when you list “send me a haiku” on your Tinder profile. All of these are from real people. Doodles mine. Find more at haikuoftinder.tumblr.com

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This Mixtape is Terrible

1. A maudlin ballad. 2. A choral work. 3. A lovely little music-hall ditty. 4. A whistling noise. 5. A houseful of barking dogs and screaming children. 6. The Song of Hiawatha. 7. Inaudible pulses of high-frequency sound. 8. Taxi drivers honking their horns. 9. Mozart’s symphonies in arrangements for cello and piano. 10. Four-part harmony in the barbershop style 11. A moment of silence presided over by a local minister. 12. The sound of the Beatles. Addendum: Andy Sturdevant turned this into an actual Spotify playlist, and it’s actually pretty great! Bravo!

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This Mixtape is Terrible

1. A maudlin ballad. 2. A choral work. 3. A lovely little music-hall ditty. 4. A whistling noise. 5. A houseful of barking dogs and screaming children. 6. The Song of Hiawatha. 7. Inaudible pulses of high-frequency sound. 8. Taxi drivers honking their horns. 9. Mozart’s symphonies in arrangements for cello and piano. 10. Four-part harmony in the barbershop style 11. A moment of silence presided over by a local minister. 12. The sound of the Beatles. Addendum: Andy Sturdevant turned this into an actual Spotify playlist, and it’s actually pretty great! Bravo!

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Water, water everywhere and many drops to drink: a seaside bar in Rio de Janeiro. À Rio de Janeiro, on fréquente les bars de mers. Photo by / par João Canziani. See more from our January 2015 issue. Découvrez le reste de notre numéro de janvier 2015.

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There’s so much I could tell you if I felt like it. Which I do less and less.

Margaret Atwood, The Door (via creatingaquietmind)

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Doodling neil gaiman’s latest new year’s wish, in the hopes that it’ll be ingrained in me.

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While most 20-somethings are relieved and excited about the fact that their lives probably won’t consist of choosing a job at 21, sitting at the same desk for forty or more years, and then retiring with a pension and a gold watch, most also feel an overwhelming amount of uncertainty about their futures.

Psychologist Meg Jay answers your questions about making the most of your twenties. Jay was featured on the TED Radio Hour episode ”The Next Greatest Generation?”

(via npr)

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"She taught me how to dance. We actually met at a graduation party. I was the only one not on the dance floor, and her friend bet her that she couldn’t get me to dance. I’d already said ‘no’ to ten girls, but she talked me into it. We were together 55 years. She died eight years ago, but I still dance every day."

(Mexico City, Mexico)

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 Around the world in six weeks. In Bedford, Virginia.

We stood in a circle on the soccer field, beneath the stars. A girl stepped forward to speak. I was surprised, because the first few days of the program session, she barely spoke at all.  “When I first came here, I kind of… hated myself. I am so glad for these past two weeks, the friends I have made, and the experiences I have had here.  I know now that I am not alone.”             

For that single moment, I knew that my summer spent working at the Global Youth Village had been beyond worth it.  Another participant stepped forward.

“I was in a bad mental place before I came here,” said a very bright and very opinionated young lady who never misses an opportunity to share. My goal for her had been to learn to listen more.  “Now I know I have the skills and the support so I can go out and produce positive things in my future. We can do it together.”

And another, his face brightened by candlelight, as he named every single one of us around the circle, and told us we would never be forgotten. 

The next day, they were all going back to their homes across the world: Poland, Ghana, Taiwan, Japan, Libya, France, North Carolina, Virginia. Their fleeting community would be scattered.   

Twelve days earlier, thirty high school students had arrived in the forest outside Bedford, Virginia.   For thirty five years, Legacy International’s longest running summer program has done the difficult work of bridging languages and cultures to enable intercultural understanding within its participant population, and give each young person the tools to spread that understanding within their home community. In my cabin, Salaam, my eight high school girls took a few days to warm up and become acclimated to camp life. There was was bunking in a cabin to get used to,  the program’s culture of dialogue and sharing, and a camp’s typical cadre of spiders and creatures of the night.   There were four ESL learners in my cabin, and to be perfectly honest, that first day I was terrified.  On arrival day, I had spent hours asking every question I could think of (What do you do at school? What is your family like?  Tell me about your pets!) to fill the void–and to little response. The gap between those students and the rest of my cabin was like a gaping crevasse, and I felt like my brain was about to explode with the pressure to bring them all together as a community.  At that point, the only thoughts I could cohesively gather were “Tree? Bee!” Someone had been stung that first night, life was charades, and everything felt as if it were collapsing into a fiasco. But keeping it in perspective, I could not even begin to imagine how the girl from southern China, who spoke not more than ten words of English, must have felt. “Trust the process,” I was told.  I laughed the delirious laugh of the exhausted, and asked for a hug.

Those first few days, I became a lot more comfortable with silence, something which I usually try to avoid at almost any cost. I knew, though, that they needed me to shut up so that they could take initiative with each other.  Slowly, slowly, slowly conversations started. “What is it like in Taiwan? Tell me about your school! You take the metro in Budapest? What kind of movies do you like to watch? Frozen!?  You know Frozen?! I LOVE frozen. Cue the  “Let it Go” sing along.   And in those moments was the true beginning. I remember celebrating (like jumping up and down in the staff lounge celebrating) the day the silent one came down from her bunk to sit on the couch, and cautiously ask one of the Taiwanese girls for help with some characters. Contact!  My English speaking girls took a Chinese language and culture class, and soon started practicing with the native Mandarin speakers in my cabin, who taught them not just tones and pronunciation, but card games and their favorite Chinese song.  They played guitar. They played  a uproariously silly game called Pterodactyl. They danced. The cabin meeting on the fourth day was filled with laughter. Hun hao. Very good. 

And on that last evening,  and as we reflected on the nights of folk dancing, the days of discussions about gender,  Fukashima,  and the merits and pitfalls of ping pong and Justin Bieber songs, we blew out our candles, and sent our lights back to the stars.  Good night, goodbye, and I love you echoed through the night air in a tangle of languages as they swirled together to rest peacefully in one whole and quiet understanding:  friendship.  Trust the process.  

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everybodys got a water buffalo