micheleaaa

at least it's only round one for this year.
but maybe a few more go arounds wouldn't hurt.
 

.....
 

something my mosaic professor said today in class has been lingering in the back of my mind since the mintue the words abruptly poured out of her lips. and here i am to put fingers to techonology and join in the everlasting harmony of the internet panic attack.

where is imagniation? when i was little, all i could even fathom to be a major element of my daily life was playing with my older brother. we would dress up in batman and bat girl costumes, respectively, and waste the afternoon away mimicking sounds we'd heard on television to the best of our ability. to my parents, we were just playing on our old rug with the smell of laundry detergent surrounding our afternoon. but, to my brother and i, gotham city was our backdrop and the only worry that plagued us was when the bat signal would light up the sky and summon us to protect our beloved home.

jump about fifteen years forward in time and here were are: 2009. my youngest brother is eight years old and almost every single time i walk in the door, he is plastered to the television. if the tv is absent, then it's replaced by his nintendo DS where he helps the lego version of indiana jones escape the snakes he dreads so much and successfully brush shoulders with death.  if he is accompanied by other boys his age, they sit around and talk about what happened on the latest episode of Ben 10, or they are actively participating in a video game on our XBOX 360. but NEVER is he with his cousins or his friends from school with nothing but their minds to entertain them.

and after today, i cannot let any other thought enter my brain than: technology is slowly (but surely) destroying young minds. now, i don't mean to seem like your old, crabby grandmother with the "back in my day" anecdotes, but i think this issue is too serious to be casually overlooked.

without imagination who would i be? who would any of us be? i have to have a strong, vivid imagination to be able to picture my words coloring the minds of people around me. where would the artists and the hopefuls sprout from? now, maybe i'm too much of an idealist for my own good, but i faithfully believe that inspiration can change the world. and for that inspiration to reach the people who are willing to take what they will from it, it needs to generate in the mind of someone, young or old, and it needs to be the type of inspiration that makes people believe that their passion and their determination to make a difference, can actually do exactly that.

to me, this all originates from the simple, unbiased minds of children. and if we take away their opportunity to create things with their minds and nothing other, than maybe we're illiminating hope for the the world as we know it.

death is, for me, usally followed by an inconsolable state of mind.

Richie Valore was one the best men I've ever met. He was basically a second father to me, and so full of life it was almost unbelieveable. And when disease struck his body, it was the worst possible way for him to die. He became a prisoner of his own mind as his body deteriorated and left him without words, without movement, and without a damn thing to do.

Richie died this morning, after asking the doctors to be taken off of Life Support because he was in too much pain to go on for the two expected years following his past months of suffering.

And now we're going to suffer without him. And I don't even know what to do.