This is one of the funniest things that I’ve seen in a while!  The floating guitar had us in stitches! Chris Hadfield sings his little heart out to David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ on the International Space Station as a parting gesture before he returns to earth.

Every 10th of May and 12 of October since 2002 I set myself the creative cake decorating challenge.

This year my son requested a Domo Batman cake.  So armed with the sugary play-dough-like icing and many tiny bottles of food colouring (which I’m sure contain all the bad ingredients that Chem-eleon would not approve of), I spent 5 hours baking 3 cakes and sculpting this crazy looking character.

The day after my hands are still stained with food colouring, but it was all worth it just to see his face full of happiness on his 11th birthday!

The revered author David Wallace in 2005 presented the graduating students from Kenyon College with a deep insight into life after education.

In his speech he tells us that life is often filled with routine, dead eyed clerks, empty phrases and annoyances, which can turn us into negative, impatient whining self-centered pessimists, with little tolerance of others. Driving along on the highway of life on auto pilot.

BUT.

What he also says is that we have the choice to change the way we perceive these situations. We have the choice to decide how we see it, and we have the choice to decide what is meaningful.

His quote sums it up…

“The only thing that’s capital “T” True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of how to be well-adjusted. You get to decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness.”

The ‘auto-pilot’ or as David puts it the ‘unconscious’ state is an easy route for many. Specially when our lives are moving so fast. It sometimes feels like we  don’t have control and we give in because it’s just easier that way. It takes real effort to fight the darkness and  brake away into the light.

The excerpt from his speech has been revived in this short film by The Glossary …

Here is the link to this full speech.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008 after suffering from depression for over 20 years. 

Yesterday evening I attended a screening of a new documentary Miss Representation at COFA. I found it insightful, shocking, inspirational, personally reaffirming and sad.

Sad because women are their own worst enemies; who too often fester in their own jealousy and scrutinise each other to feed their tarnished egos.

Sad because their self-confidence is so fragile that they become unconscious, subjugated slaves to the media. Some women are so preoccupied with how they appear to others and what others might think of them, that they become prisoners of the ideal aesthetic. This incarceration limits their potential to be the person who they truly aspire to be.

Inspirational because I have the knowledge to discriminate right from wrong, and because I am now more motivated than ever to inspire and influence my daughter and son, who are still young enough to have dreams and hopes that have not yet been influenced by gender inequality or the poison of the media.

My husband attended the screening with me (voluntarily) and said to me as we were heading home. Women could rule the world they have the power over men but don’t use it. “What power I said?” Sex. Men want it and have always chased women for it. Women have the upper hand but instead many demean themselves with it, instead of using it to their advantage. Women have something that men want. Its a primal need as well as a means of procreation. The greatest power of all is to create life.

So blatantly obvious, yet I’d never thought of it like that

I wish that this documentary was mandatory viewing for every 11+ year old. Not just girls that are about to step into puberty, but also boys. So that they too can be enlightened by the evils of the media.

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others–the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.”
~ Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”
~ Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.”
~ Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?”
~ Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close