Biola Chimes Article
Love. It’s all around me. From the flocks of friendly cats wandering the neighborhoods, to the scary man I just saw on the subway who threatened a fellow pedestrian for casually brushing by him, it seems everyone is catching a wiff of the same thing, and no, I don’t mean the smell of my cat Georgie’s litter box. Everyone is catching the old “kissing disease,” which is what I usually call any disease someone catches. Except this time thankfully it’s not leukemia, it’s actually the Valentines Day jitters.
For some special people, Valentines Day is one to be cherished and looked forward to. Those special people however can range from uncomfortably affectionate lovers who treat each other with public oil massages in the park, to downright terrifying people who surprise their special someone with personalized billboards, skywriting, and/or by kidnapping them and placing them in a situation not unlike Hannibal Lecter. I’m not one to judge. Personally, I’m counting my blessings this year that my fiancee has completely forgotten about Valentines Day altogether.
“Good thing I remembered all that stuff you told me to do for the big day coming up,” I told her, with a phone poised in my hand. “I made so many plans I can’t even remember all of them! Oh so many plans! What were they supposed to be again?”
“What day?” She responded. “Is something coming up?”
Thinking quick, not unlike a fox, I responded by saying, “I mean... What?” And then ran away.
Yes, some might argue that may only mean she has so much more to look forward to when I surprise her this Valentines Day morning with her cat dipped in white chocolate and encrusted with diamonds. Sure, such surprises have their joys, but just think of the joy I can bring to her by giving her a day full of so much deception that she’ll be unable to ever understand what holiday is currently occurring for everyone else. So very much joy, I say.
My plan is so simple really. All I have to do is disable her internet connection to keep her off Facebook, then isolate her from her friends, perhaps by distracting them with Valentine’s Day gifts of their own. Then all that’s left is to print my own personalized version of the morning newspaper and replace the headline to something along the lines of “It’s Not Valentines Day.” After that, it’s clear sailing, as long as I can keep her from going to the grocery store and can easily convince her that the Valentines Day parade we run into is actually for returning astronauts. It’s almost too easy.
All this I am willing to do for her. Nay, for love. And also for me. But love mostly. Sort of.
Shhh. Don’t speak.
Finally, to complete my deception of love, I ask that all of the Chimes readers join in by quickly lowering their heart-shaped balloons and tossing their boxes of chocolates into a nearby shrub as my fiancee passes by. Remember everyone, now that I forgot to make those dinner reservations Beth told me to make two months ago, we’re all in this together. There’s no backing out now.
Happy Valentines Day Everyone!
Showing posts with label chimes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chimes. Show all posts
2.18.2010
10.22.2009
Legacy of the dead bunny
NEWCOTT: Legacy of the dead bunny
Chimes Opinions Article - 10/22/09
I have yet to explain to my roommates why exactly there's a dead bunny in the shoebox in our freezer, but I assume the less I say about it the better. Had this happened a year ago I probably would have used it as an opportunity to ward off my old roommate Jon from eating all my food, possibly along with a cryptic note written in newspaper clippings saying "You'll keep your PAWS off my bagel bites, if you know what's good for you." This time it's more out of necessity until my fiance's roommate finds a good time for a burial.
The problem I have had to come to terms with is that there's never a good time to have a burial, much less to remind someone else to have a burial, especially for their adorable dead bunny. No one wants to get a phone call in the middle of a romantic dinner to take care of the furry long-eared Popsicle that I've jammed behind the Eggo waffles. If only I had been fortunate enough to be responsible for the remains of someone's dead possum or pony, a bunny though? It's a sick world we're living in.
Beth and her friends gave the bunny to Claire on her 23rd birthday. Being a dwarf rabbit, the bunny was twice as cute as any ordinary bunny due to its small size and girlish charm, kind of like a Nintendo DS. The fact that she was so fresh from the pet store made her arrival all the more special. This, I suspect, must have driven our former dwarf bunny Johnson mad with jealousy. Could he have been the one to cause our new animal friend to meet her untimely demise? The evidence is inconclusive, especially seeing that I found the bunny stiff as a log in a very relaxed pose, but was it too relaxed? Only Johnson and our cat Geogie could ever know for sure.
Georgie is perhaps just as much a suspect as anyone. After an in depth research involving reading someone else's question on Yahoo Answers, cats apparently have the ability to hypnotize bunnies, to death. That's right, cats can literally kill other animals with their minds. That is messed up.
Whatever the case, now the bunny serves as the constant little reminder in the back of my mind, be it when I'm getting groceries or running to the bank, that death is all around us. Every moment I go to grab a Sunny D I hear its lifeless heart beating from behind the freezer door, it's cuddly paws clutching at my conscience. Every so often, I grab its cold body in my hands and am just inches from running out the door when I remind myself that I'll probably forget about it at some point in the afternoon and leave it's frozen body to defrost in the boiling interior of my car, most likely only to find it later among the possibly hundreds of other snacks, drinks, and animals I've left in my car earlier that week. The circle of life continues.
It's times like these that I'm glad my body won't be left in a college students refrigerator after I die, or at least I desperately hope not. Really makes you think. Now that the bunny has found her way to frollick on the giant carrot in the sky, she doesn't have to worry about what she left behind, and neither will we when it's time for us to go to our own respective giant carrots. It's down here that we have the problem letting go. Life's a fragile thing.
Chimes Opinions Article - 10/22/09
I have yet to explain to my roommates why exactly there's a dead bunny in the shoebox in our freezer, but I assume the less I say about it the better. Had this happened a year ago I probably would have used it as an opportunity to ward off my old roommate Jon from eating all my food, possibly along with a cryptic note written in newspaper clippings saying "You'll keep your PAWS off my bagel bites, if you know what's good for you." This time it's more out of necessity until my fiance's roommate finds a good time for a burial.
The problem I have had to come to terms with is that there's never a good time to have a burial, much less to remind someone else to have a burial, especially for their adorable dead bunny. No one wants to get a phone call in the middle of a romantic dinner to take care of the furry long-eared Popsicle that I've jammed behind the Eggo waffles. If only I had been fortunate enough to be responsible for the remains of someone's dead possum or pony, a bunny though? It's a sick world we're living in.
Beth and her friends gave the bunny to Claire on her 23rd birthday. Being a dwarf rabbit, the bunny was twice as cute as any ordinary bunny due to its small size and girlish charm, kind of like a Nintendo DS. The fact that she was so fresh from the pet store made her arrival all the more special. This, I suspect, must have driven our former dwarf bunny Johnson mad with jealousy. Could he have been the one to cause our new animal friend to meet her untimely demise? The evidence is inconclusive, especially seeing that I found the bunny stiff as a log in a very relaxed pose, but was it too relaxed? Only Johnson and our cat Geogie could ever know for sure.
Georgie is perhaps just as much a suspect as anyone. After an in depth research involving reading someone else's question on Yahoo Answers, cats apparently have the ability to hypnotize bunnies, to death. That's right, cats can literally kill other animals with their minds. That is messed up.
Whatever the case, now the bunny serves as the constant little reminder in the back of my mind, be it when I'm getting groceries or running to the bank, that death is all around us. Every moment I go to grab a Sunny D I hear its lifeless heart beating from behind the freezer door, it's cuddly paws clutching at my conscience. Every so often, I grab its cold body in my hands and am just inches from running out the door when I remind myself that I'll probably forget about it at some point in the afternoon and leave it's frozen body to defrost in the boiling interior of my car, most likely only to find it later among the possibly hundreds of other snacks, drinks, and animals I've left in my car earlier that week. The circle of life continues.
It's times like these that I'm glad my body won't be left in a college students refrigerator after I die, or at least I desperately hope not. Really makes you think. Now that the bunny has found her way to frollick on the giant carrot in the sky, she doesn't have to worry about what she left behind, and neither will we when it's time for us to go to our own respective giant carrots. It's down here that we have the problem letting go. Life's a fragile thing.
10.14.2009
Adventures In Engagement Photos
Chimes Opinion Article
Zachary Newcott
Although I thought Jennifer Lopez prepared me well with her instructional film The Wedding Planner, it turns out I thought wrong. J Lo knows nothing of my life. So when my fiance told me that we needed to take engagement photos I was at a disadvantage even before I suggested using her imac photobooth to do the job.
Now, I can't claim to be a doctor. Lord knows I've tried, but I can't. What I can claim to be is a college student intern. This places my price-range for wedding photographers a tier below insta-matics and a tier above talking about how great our wedding photos would have been had I a budget that didn't require me to save 7-Eleven cups for cheaper refills. This is bad news if you want to hire a professional (or a "pro" as the professionals call them), as they like to be paid in valid currency and not the unspecified favors I usually offer.
What's frustrating is that my fiance is a rather great photographer. I know this because she doesn't have to use the same amount of lense-flare and blur that I usually do, or insist on using MS Paint to edit in embarrassing photos of celebrities. She's a real classy lady, unlike me, who is a semi-trashy not-lady.
Sadly, first-person wedding photos would make for a terrifying prospect considering that they would mostly involve me coming towards the camera with my mouth opened incredibly wide and drooling (as is the way I expect our wedding kiss to be). If we were going to do engagement photos soon we would need another option. After thinking about all I had learned, I proposed we could make money snake hunting, but was once again convinced that was a bad idea after learning that I had mistakenly watched Anaconda instead of the Wedding Planner, which also starred Jennifer Lopez. Beth had a better solution.
The answer came in the way of the automatic timer on her camera, who works for practically nothing provided that it has enough battery power. Harnessing this resource we found an excellent location atop a pleasant mound of dirt. Problem was, in order to photograph a mound of dirt the camera itself needed to be several yards away. This resulted in me, a Chimes opinions-writer/part-time-videogame-player, setting an eight second timer and then running as fast as I could. This made the modest pile of dirt, to my physique, virtually Everest.
Having no knowledge as to how legs should function apart from sitting, I took whatever lessons I could gather from Discovery channel videos and hunkered down, assuming that if I stayed low I could practically pounce my way to the top of the hill in one swift movement. Somehow, I managed to make it literally at the last second, and although that means many of our photos feature me sweating and plastered with an expression of fear and confusion, that might just be exactly who I am deep down inside.
In this way we have captured a truly authentic moment in our relationship with a minimal budget of nothing. Even still, we fear that a similar, somewhat-complicated system of various cameras set to timers might have to be implemented in the actual wedding to come. We're dedicated to finding a better option. I think Jennifer Lopez said it best in the film Gigli when she noted, "Life, will find a way..." And although I never saw Gigli and actually stole that quote from Jurassic Park, I think we all learned something very special. Although saving money is important, if it takes making an investment to capture a memory, then it's worth the cost.
Zachary Newcott
Although I thought Jennifer Lopez prepared me well with her instructional film The Wedding Planner, it turns out I thought wrong. J Lo knows nothing of my life. So when my fiance told me that we needed to take engagement photos I was at a disadvantage even before I suggested using her imac photobooth to do the job.
Now, I can't claim to be a doctor. Lord knows I've tried, but I can't. What I can claim to be is a college student intern. This places my price-range for wedding photographers a tier below insta-matics and a tier above talking about how great our wedding photos would have been had I a budget that didn't require me to save 7-Eleven cups for cheaper refills. This is bad news if you want to hire a professional (or a "pro" as the professionals call them), as they like to be paid in valid currency and not the unspecified favors I usually offer.
What's frustrating is that my fiance is a rather great photographer. I know this because she doesn't have to use the same amount of lense-flare and blur that I usually do, or insist on using MS Paint to edit in embarrassing photos of celebrities. She's a real classy lady, unlike me, who is a semi-trashy not-lady.
Sadly, first-person wedding photos would make for a terrifying prospect considering that they would mostly involve me coming towards the camera with my mouth opened incredibly wide and drooling (as is the way I expect our wedding kiss to be). If we were going to do engagement photos soon we would need another option. After thinking about all I had learned, I proposed we could make money snake hunting, but was once again convinced that was a bad idea after learning that I had mistakenly watched Anaconda instead of the Wedding Planner, which also starred Jennifer Lopez. Beth had a better solution.
The answer came in the way of the automatic timer on her camera, who works for practically nothing provided that it has enough battery power. Harnessing this resource we found an excellent location atop a pleasant mound of dirt. Problem was, in order to photograph a mound of dirt the camera itself needed to be several yards away. This resulted in me, a Chimes opinions-writer/part-time-videogame-player, setting an eight second timer and then running as fast as I could. This made the modest pile of dirt, to my physique, virtually Everest.
Having no knowledge as to how legs should function apart from sitting, I took whatever lessons I could gather from Discovery channel videos and hunkered down, assuming that if I stayed low I could practically pounce my way to the top of the hill in one swift movement. Somehow, I managed to make it literally at the last second, and although that means many of our photos feature me sweating and plastered with an expression of fear and confusion, that might just be exactly who I am deep down inside.
In this way we have captured a truly authentic moment in our relationship with a minimal budget of nothing. Even still, we fear that a similar, somewhat-complicated system of various cameras set to timers might have to be implemented in the actual wedding to come. We're dedicated to finding a better option. I think Jennifer Lopez said it best in the film Gigli when she noted, "Life, will find a way..." And although I never saw Gigli and actually stole that quote from Jurassic Park, I think we all learned something very special. Although saving money is important, if it takes making an investment to capture a memory, then it's worth the cost.
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