Words elude me.

So I borrow the best that have accompanied me this year.

Quotes from books, movies, and songs that I have befriended in 2012. 

“But once I felt even for a moment what I felt with you, you ruined me. I didn’t want to settle for less.” 

- Elise Sellas, Adjustment Bureau, 2011

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” 

- T.S.Eliot 

“Faith is misunderstood as a synonym for certitude, but really it’s a concept that has doubt folded into it.” 

- Rollo Romig, Confession of a Ramadan Rookie, The New Yorker, 2012 http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/08/confessions-of-a-ramadan-rookie.html 

“Heading out west with my headphones on, boarded a flight with a song in the back of my soul, and no one knows.”

- John Mayer, Queen of California, 2012

“I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measure in your relationship to memory.”

- Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“All of life is an act of letting go, but what hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.” 

- Pi Patel, Life of Pi Movie, 2012 

“Now I discover along the way that I am a collector of metaphors.”

- Ray Bradbury.

“I have to go see about a girl.”

- Will Hunting, Good Will Hunting, 1997

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.” 

- Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, an inspiration to The Dark Knight Rises. 

“Find what you love, and let it kill you.”

- Charles Bukowski

“Fashion fosters cliches of beauty, but I want to tear them apart.” 

- Miuccia Prada, Schiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012.

“I have a sadness shield that keeps out all the sadness, and it’s big enough for all of us.”

- Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.” 

- Denise Levertov, The Secret

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”

- Mark Twain

Paying homage to the year in words is a daunting task.

As poised as I am for a retrospective, the quiet is all that I sit comfortably in.

Words elude me. Nothing is good enough. 

Perhaps a quiet remembrance might do the year justice.

This is Gustave Flaubert’s agony over “le mot juste”.

2012 has made it mine.  

So here’s to 2012. For better or for worse, it is behind me. I am looking forward to “everything better”. 

So absolutely love the genuine love that is emanating through his craft and his passion. Enough to fuel the every day. 

storyboard:

Pianoing Across the World

Dotan Negrin spent almost a year playing piano across America — on street corners, in farmer’s markets, and anywhere else that would have him — and documenting it all on his blog. Now back home in New York, Negrin is taking on a new challenge: pushing his piano (and his dog Brando), by foot, through the chaotic streets of New York City, to bring his music to busy New Yorkers and avoiding taxi collisions along the way. You can check out his progress on his Tumblr, Piano Across NYC. We asked him about his cross-country trip and what it’s like weaving a piano through New York traffic.

What does it take to push a piano uptown?

The roads are terrible. There are potholes everywhere and plenty of obstacles. I broke my fingers when my piano got stuck in a pothole and fell backwards. But the cabs are the worst, because there are times when I have to push the piano in the middle of the street so that I don’t run into any parked cars.

How many different ways have you tried to cart your piano around the city?

I’ve tried a traditional dolly, with a couple of straps. That was wobbly. I tried building my own dolly with a hand truck and two dollies (my dad’s idea). It didn’t work so great. I researched having a piano bicycle actually made for me — but it was going to cost $2,500. I thought about buying a food cart and taking off the box, but it would have required a welder. Finally, after a whole lot of research, I landed on something called the all-terrain dolly. I had one built for me out of a family-owned business in Atlanta.

Before you returned to New York, you traveled for months with just your piano and your dog. Why?

I wanted to combine everything I loved to do: travel, make music, meet people. I figured I would get a lot better if I relied on the piano to eat and to pay for gas. I did.

Where was the most interesting place you visited?

I played on the edge of a cliff in Yellowstone. I played on the edge of the Grand Canyon. In Portland, Oregon, a guy came up to me and pounded on my keys because I was taking the attention away from him; he was playing guitar on the other side of the farmer’s market. But I think the craziest place I played was inside a redwood tree.

Any particular characters you met along the way?/

Cuba Gooding, Jr. came up to me and dropped a $20 in my bucket with a huge grin on his face. I also met Kevin Jonas. He tweeted a photo of me. This one time, a woman came up to me, dropped a $5 bill in the bucket and said, “This $5 is for Brando, not you.” I tried to give it to Brando but he wouldn’t take it. I gave him a few dog treats instead.

aaplorchard:

“[Apple is] going to continue to make the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.”

- Tim Cook in his first email to Apple employees as Apple’s new CEO sent August 25, 2011

“The path [Sony] must take is clear: to drive the…

It felt like a dream. 

You felt like a dream. 

We felt like a dream. 

It felt as thought I had slept cuddled with a dream of you and woke up happy that you appeared in my dream but upset at the same time too that it had gone and all I had left to contend with were the memories of you in my dream. 

It felt like a dream, a beautiful, absolutely lucid, and vivid dream. 

Hello, 

I know you’re probably not expecting this. I have been quiet in response to your radio silence and there is a force field between us and to be honest I’m quite sick of pretending that this has not hurt me more than I can or dare to admit.

Because I have nothing left to lose, and because you’re probably not going to be reading this, I shall take the virtual empty canvas as an open-mic opportunity to tell you how I feel. 

Sometimes I miss you so much that I can’t bring myself to listen to John Mayer because I worry that I will never listen to him the same way again. 

And then there are times where I feel I’ve reached some form of a breakthrough, where the halcyon days of quiet acceptance and multiplied revelations and epiphanies overwhelm me and I feel like a brand new person, but reality sets in and in retrospect it’s really just wool pulling itself over my eyes. 

So I don’t really like being left alone with too much time toying with the playground of my spinning-analytical-wheel-mind because they conjure up too many scenarios and configurations of what-if and why-not and how-come and my placating emotions can’t keep up and I always end up at the losing end, no matter how strong my weapons of rational shields are and how well-trained they get. 

Sometimes I feel as though my days are made up of fake smiles and fixed greetings, insincere handshakes and lukewarm waves and connections made to no one and moments cataloged to nothing.

I don’t know if you can attribute to the same, but then again maybe not, because you’re an important busy person, and even though I’d like to think of myself as the same pretty-awesome-stuff, I falter more than you do because my heart is surgically stitched to my sleeve when it comes to you, and its replica that is beating and circulating blood to the rest of my limbs is getting sick and tired of having to keep resuscitating me because the kryptonite that is you. 

Maybe I am giving you too much credit. Because all you do is stand there and call me “doll face” and “kiddo” and I think I’m special and now it hurts me because no one is going to call me that anymore and anyone else that does I’ll think is a pervert or a less-than-sorry person who’s subconsciously trying to sound like you. 

I’m ranting because all I really want to say is I miss you, and I really do, and I have to go and close my eyes right now and cry because it’s you that’s missing in my bed and your voice is the only one I can hear in my head, and all I really want to ask is if you’re feeling the same way too. 

I choose to be in love with you. I choose to love you still. I choose to hate you at the same time too. I choose to decide that I have the right to. I choose my thoughts that lead to memories of you. They are cataloged and dusted, hidden and kept, tucked away and safe. I choose these memories that I keep. Like the way Cobb did to Molly in Inception. Hostile they are not, just out of reach and with no access for entry. But whatever my choices are, and whatever they may mean to me, and even to you, I think the bottom line is I’m quite screwed. Because I choose to stay in love with you.