On this beautiful cloudy day I am sitting in my house, determined to learn how to play guitar.

I have an acoustic one from when I took lessons when I was younger. And then I quit, before making substantial progress. Earlier this summer I put “learning to play guitar” as #12 on my “Super Summer List of Things to Do” and I plan on living up to that, or at least trying.

For the past two hours I’ve been trying to figure out notes, chords, and strumming technique, with the help of the Internet and an old guitar book. I don’t know much, but I do know that  I wasn’t born with any natural talent.

Oh, and what’s more is that my fingers hurt! A lot. I don’t know how guitar players do it, maybe after a while you form calluses on your fingertips or something… But those steel strings hurt. It even hurts to type now. Thank god it’s only my left hand, because my right hand’s fingertips have suffered through some mild dermatillomania for almost a year (go search it up).

I’ll hopefully have some decent chord transitions figured out by the end of the day.

The Story of Prisoner F95488 - http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=4300383

” One’s a rising soccer star. The other’s a self-described jealous boyfriend. One had no physical evidence linking him to a rape. The other had matched DNA and teeth marks. One’s black. The other’s white. One was convicted. The other was never a suspect.” - Digg

A friend of mine posted this link on Facebook through Digg, and while I normally don’t read links that people send, I read it, and it makes me angry. The article is about Eric Frimpong, a black student/soccer player at UC Santa Barbara, who was convicted of rape of a white woman, with virtually no hard evidence, DNA that points to someone else, and the testimony of the accuser who had a .2% blood alcohol level at the time of sampling. And possibly an incompetent defense lawyer, who knows. He’s been given six years in jail.

Now, reading one article might not give the whole story, but I don’t think Eric Frimpong was given a fair trial.

People compare this trial to the Duke lacrosse players, except you switch the races of the accused/accuser, but in this case, the accused aren’t from rich families with powerful lawyers. For me, it reminds me a bit of the Scottsboro trial from the 1930s, with a possibly prejudiced all-white jury from a mostly all-white city.

Please read it.

I got back two days ago, from a camping trip with my family to Ithaca, home of Cornell University, no doubt part of their plan to make me love and aspire to go to Ivy League schools. I left Canada Day and returned on the 4th of July.

Coming back, on Independence Day, we stopped in Niagara Falls. There were hordes and hordes of people, on both sides of the border. How do I know this? For the first time, I actually walked over Rainbow Bridge to the American side of the falls. I never knew standing with one foot in one country and the other foot in another country was possible, but now I do, because you don’t reach US Customs until another fifty meters over the border (as dictated by the sign that says “INTERNATIONAL BORDER”).

The American side of the Falls is much nicer, in my opinion, because there’s a big park where people can sit and eat ice cream, play catch, walk, whatever. It’s a much better preservation of all that green space. The Canadian side of the Falls, on the other hand, consists of a ledge in which one crowds around and looks over. Beyond the ledge there’s a road for cars, and then immediately there’s all this commercial stuff used to make money, including a shopping complex, bus terminals, hotels. And there’s a small, small strip of green space. And then you have the city. I was standing on Rainbow Bridge, looking at the falls from a side view, and I noticed that everything was balanced out, in a way. On one side, you have the Falls. The other side, you have money-making commercial shit for tourists.

The Fourth of July fireworks in Niagara Falls were disappointing. They lasted from 10 to 10:13pm. I had high expectations because of all the people that were there, how the traffic literally stopped for those thirteen minutes, and they even had live music beforehand. Oh well.

I spent today volunteering and hanging out with a friend. We somehow managed to finish a whole pitcher of Mountain Dew. I also applied for a job at Subway. It was spontaneous and therefore I didn’t have the full names/numbers/addresses of my supposed contacts, so I just had to give whatever I could think of on the spot. How smart.

Okay wow. I still can’t believe it.

I was on Facebook yesterday, and since I’m a fan of HuffPost, some of their news clips come into my Facebook feed. Yesterday they posted, “TMZ reports Michael Jackson has died,” or something like that.. I didn’t take it seriously, I actually chuckled. I never really trusted TMZ.

But then I saw that all the news sites were reporting that he had died, but it still didn’t kick in, because I don’t always trust the news. My best friend even called me up to tell me Michael Jackson died and I told her it was probably just rumors.

Evidently, they weren’t. Yesterday we lost the King of Pop.

Michael Jackson has had a tough past couple years, and the media didn’t help. But no one can argue how great he was, and how much of an influence he’s had, on music, and even just the lives of normal people. I remember the first time I learned the Thriller dance, during my dance class when I was really little. I remember trying to learn the moonwalk in sixth grade, failing miserably.

Billie Jean was my favorite song.

I still can’t believe it. I still don’t know what to say.

Am I going list crazy? But hey, I’m like that. Being the dorky person I am I thought I’d make a nice and official reading list. I figure if I type it out it makes it more official, versus scribbling the names of a few books onto a post it and then sticking it onto to the wall next to my desk.

I visited Chapters for some reading material, but I don’t like buying books I haven’t read. Books are too expensive to be a one-time thing, so I then went to the library.

These are the books I plan on reading this summer. But hey, I can be a slow and apathetic reader, so it’s all just a guideline. Who knows if I’ll make the time to read anything other than Time articles.

1. Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
I listened to Anthem through an audiobook on my ipod in January and it totally spiced up my boring bus rides to school. So I’ll give Fountainhead a go, and then maybe Atlas Shrugged after.

2. Slaugherhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
A lot of my friends have recommended me Vonnegut, so I picked this up at the library.

3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
I reserved this at the lirbary but it turns out when I went to pick it up I accidentally reserved the Russian version. Oops.

4. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
I’ve wanted to read something by Oscar Wilde since I discovered that the guy has the coolest quotes ever. I have a button/pin/thing on my tote bag with one of his quotes “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.” And I saw one of his plays. So might as well read one of his books, right?

5. 1984 by George Orwell / Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
I’ve been meaning to read both these books since the 7th grade, when we read Animal Farm. I know they’re two totally different books, but I’ll be content with reading one or the other. Which ever one’s available first at the library.

6. Poems
Just in general. I want to understand poetry better. It’s pretty. And concise, in a not-so-concise way. I like that.

I love how my anecdotes aren’t really plot summaries but plain, simple, dumb reasons for why I want to read something. I might read one of Obama’s books too, if I have time. And I might just cut out 5. because once something’s on your to-do list long enough it sort of loses its importance. But whatever, we’ll see.

Any suggestions/notes/opinions/reviews are appreciated