well of course the tiger, for one. i've been able to express myself and relate my life to others through tigers better than most other forms of comminucation.

also, more majourly, my dog, harley. he's incredible [and incredibly old]. he's either 14 or 15, i don't remember which. his birthday is in may. he's a basset cockapoo, and he's totally cute. unfortunately, because he's as old as he is and my family isn't the kind of family who readily spends thousands of dollars on pet healthcare, he kind of has gross tumors or cysts all over his body, so that's gross. also, he always smells really bad. but we still love him.

in fact, i recently wrote a song [it's called "Belief (or, I'm Glad to be Biting My Lip Again)"] and there's a couple lines about my dog. they go like this:
      my life will never be the same thanks to a family pet
      for him there's always room right by my side and in my heart

also, as my friend Brian Stevenson says, we have to "Love him! Love him RIGHT NOW!" and my friend Tori always points out that he's her "favourite dog that walks." and my friend Erin always calls him Howl, because he looks almost exactly like the dog that Sophie thinks Howl has turned himself into when she's talking to the witch. lots of people love him, so that's really cool. i'm definitely glad to have him and he will be very greatly missed when he's gone.

1) What was the name of your childhood pet?
i don't remember the names of all of them, because we've had a lot. but we've had Harley, our dog, for forever, it seems, and we've had Myrtle the turtle for almost as long. her companion turtle, though, died many years ago and i don't remember his name. and we ahd Snoopy the guinea pig, and two other guinea pigs who i don't remember the names of [i'm really lame at this, it's turnign out]. and i have a dwarf hamster named Tito and a gerbil named Ben-Oni [or Ben for short]. we also had the dogs Rusty and Gus when i was younger. plus, my dad is a biology teacher, so he's had a lot of pets, like Bozo the savannah monitor and Jake the snake and Slinky the congo eel.

2) What was your favorite toy(s) during childhood?
me and my brother's favourite toys as children were definitely our legos. we had countless, wodnerufl adventures with our vast lego collection. it was amazing, really. we were very very imaginative with them.

3) Did you grow up with brothers and sisters?

yeah, i have a brother and a sister. in the first two houses my family lived in after i was born, my brother and i shared rooms while my sister had her own room, but then we moved again and each of us got our own room. my brother is three-ish years older than me, and my sister is one-ish year older than him.

4) What game(s) did you like to play?

my brother and sister and i used to pretend we were the Carebears [or some of the Carebear Cousins] and we'd have races. i don't really know how we decided on that being our game, but that's what we did. and i played a lot of imaginary adventure games with my friend Tim. also, me and my brother and Tim [now we call him Tom] made Star Wars and Pokemon role-playing games [none of us had any video games as children]. we were amazingly smart and creative as children, i'm not going to lie. i wish i still had that ingenuity. oh! and, we played a tag-esque game called Dragon-vulture-pig. it was great.

5) Did you have an imaginary friend?
i had a million imaginary friends. i don't remember a lot of them, but there was a rabbit and a dragon, they were my best imaginary friends. they were crazy awesome, and i came up with long stories about them and their families and everything. oh! i also was friends with an imaginary turkey, and a family of mice. before i was in kindergarten, i used to pretend we all went to school together. good times, good times.

i seriously have never thought of this as a possibility, to tell the truth. i'm always full of hope. it's crazy. i've been thinking about it a lot recently, actually. if you ask me, there is always hope.

but i'll try to answer this.

it's like the end of the Bright Eyes song "At the Bottom of Everything." there's this joy in futility. i mean, sure, having a purpose, or a hope that the world can be saved, but at the same time, if you "really no one," as Conor sings about in the song, you can be really happy. there's so much less pressure on you if you know you aren't anything, that you may as well try to accomplish anything, because there's no risk of failure compared to the failure of the big picture.

i dunno. i am completely overflowing with hope for the world and all of the people in it. even if i am doing my work "without needing to hope that we will succeed," i still am brimming over the top with hope for all the world.

also, i answered the question first! that makes me all happy inside!

1) Do you have a lucky charm? (socks, coins, small rubber chickens?)
not that i carry around with me or anything. i do pick up pennies that i find heads up, becuase they're lucky pennies. and when i find them, i either keep them separate from my other coins or i give them to friends.

2) Have you ever found a four-leaf clover? (and what happened?)
i haven't, as far as i can remember. that would definitely be awesome, though.

3) Do you throw coins into fountains for wishes?
i haven't in a while, like since i was a small child, probably.

4) Do you have any quirky or unique superstitions?
not really, i don't think. mostly i just pick up lucky pennies.

5) Have you ever seen a shooting star? (did you make a wish?)
i have seen shooting stars, but i don't make wishes on them. dang, answering these questions, i feel weird because when it comes to superstitions, i'm apparently super lame.

i've been thinking about what i should do with my life, what my life should be. i haven't come to many conclusions so far.

some major things have been influencing me lately.

there's a man named Bradley Hathaway. my brother has met him, and i almost got a chance to, but i didn't have a ride. he lives in a cement dome, and he is a Christian poet/folk singer. he is absolutely amazing. he has been making videos that show "where he lives and how he lives" and posting them on his myspace. he lives a very simple and wonderful life. in the second video of the three-installment series, he said that he likes to eat lunch watching the fish in his pond. he says that the fish hasn't been fed in three years, and it's doing just fine. he doesn't want to starve it, he says; it just doesn't need to be fed by human hands to live. but my favourite is what he says after that:

"if i don't watch the fish, i like to listen to the birds sing. i like to hear singing because it makes me think of God. so i'll sit and think about God."

i love it and i want to live like him.

i'm majorly into Harry Potter these days. it's great, reading about the wonderful things these people can do with magic. but as J.K. Rowling said when she gave the commencement speech for Harvard:

"We do not need magic to transform our world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."

Hermione told Harry near the end of the first book that there's more important things than reading books and knowing all the spells. there's also courage and friendship and love. i love that. also, i'm a total Hufflepuff. i just want to be friends with people, and when i am friends with them, i want to keep them close. one saying that is really like and agree with, that also totally goes along with the Hufflepiff way of thinking is "a person doesn't have to be perfect to be exactly what you need."

a friend named Richelle [AKA Unity] has really been helping me along for the past few months. we've been conversing via messages here on gaia.com, and she's provided me with encouragement and joy when i didn't always have other sources for them. she's helped me to understand that it's okay for me to not be in college right now, despite all the badgering that's been going on in my friends and family. i am eternally thankful for that.

another awesome influence on my life is my buddy Perry. he's a Christian, and, as far as i can tell, he is amazingly firm in his beliefs, and i respect him so much for that. he's been sending me messages here on gaia, and they've been very enlightening and uplifting. i'm very glad to be his friend.

i've also been listening a lot to the band Slow Club for the past couple days. their music gives me goosebumps, it's incredible. they're British, and i first heard of them from the website blackcabsessions.com. actually, my brother listened to their song on the site, and i fell in love. i'll have to thank him again tomorrow for finding out about them, because they're completely wonderful. they've been greatly inspiring to me when writing my music. i've almost got an entire album written now. i just need a couple verses for one song and one or two more whole songs and i'm done.

i visit the website socialvibe.com. you do things to get points, and the points are exchanged by the website for money to be donated to the organisation of your choice. i chose To Write Love On Her Arms. also, when you get enough points, they mail you a "pinkball," which is what i can be seen holding in my current default picture. they have a forum on the site, and tonite, a girl posted something very wonderful, i thought. it was definitely one of my favourite things i've ever read. it went like this:

"It’s the feeling you try to avoid. The feeling as if you’re falling, and you know there’s no end, so you don’t care. You enjoy the blurs of life around you as you fall, paying attention to what you don’t know. Paying attention to what you can see right in front of you. Sometimes, people will fall at the same time as you, and you get to know them. Sometimes, they begin to speed up or slow down, and you miss them.
Sometimes, you catch a glimpse of something exciting, and you think about grabbing it. You think on grabbing it, in your mind you can see yourself grabbing it, and when you finally decide to grab it. It’s already gone, and you’re back to blurs.
You’re back to trying to catch the words that seem to be bold, and you’re back to trying to keep the same speed as all your friends, and those are more than friends. You’re starting to get frustrated though, cause everything is a blur, and you just want everything to fall at the same pace, or just stop entirely. Yet, it won’t.
You just want the blurs to hold on for just one minute, so you can see them, so you can shake their hand or talk about their day. But the blurs aren’t always people, and sometimes you forget what’s real, and what’s fake. Sometimes you forget who you are trying to catch up, trying to know the blurs.
And all this is taking you down so fast, you just want to shout at the top of your lungs, and even though everything is right there you just scream, you scream so loud for everything to just be what they are and hold on for one minute. But everything is falling as such a fast pace, trying to get somewhere where they can’t see the end, they don’t know when they’ll stop falling.
And that’s why I pray. I pray, that everything will slow down in life, and at that moment, I can see before they fall, and I can see before I trip. That way, I know when I reach the bottom, believing in Him, got me to fall safely on my feet, and into the place where I want to be.
We fall so fast, and we can see it, and we know how this world blurs our eyes and focuses them, and then makes certain things pop out. So we can fall in love with the blurs that we don’t know. We fall in love, with what we don’t know, and since we don’t know what they are, we pretend they are what we dream they are."

sorry this blog is being so long.

and sometimes i go for walks. when i do, i see the cracked sidewalks, the dirty, used cars for sale off the side of the road, the rundown houses not far from where i live, the anti-drug billboards, etc. when i walk around the town i live in, i often think to myself:

"wow. i live in a completely dystopian city."

i see that things are broken, and i see that things are a mess.

but i know things can get better. it helps a lot when i listen to music. there's a song called "Milk Thistle" by Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, and i know that everything's going to be okay whenever i hear it.

anyways, i know things that are broken can be fixed. i know God is there, and i know that he is looking out for us.

but i don't know where i fit into the puzzle of life that's being reassembled as we speak. i watched a movie today called "Synecdoche, New York." it's starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and it's about a playwright who wants to be important and to make an impact before he dies. also, i'm writing a song calle "Let's All Become Birds" that's about things being put back together. i'm also being inspired these days to make an animated movie. i thought about doing that like a year ago, i think it was, but that didn't get very far, but i think i'll work harder on it this time. i'm being a lot more productive at real things these days, it seems, than i was at any time before this year.

it's like my new year's resolution for 2009 was to actually accomplish something, and i like it and i'm well on my way.

1) What did you have for breakfast?
i didn't really have breakfast. i woke up at eleven thirty-ish. i had oatmeal and some orange juice for lunch, though.

2) Have you grown your own food?
i have not. i'm lame like that. i don't really have gardening skills.

3) What is your favorite beverage?
probably either hot chocolate or some sort of juice. it's a toss up between apple, grape and orange. i jsut love them all so much!

4) Do you like to cook?
i don't do it much, but i have had good times while cooking, yes. i should really do it more.

5) What is your favorite vegetable?
carrots, definitely carrots. i absolutely love them.