Virtually Home

It's funny how impending change makes me take a harder look at my surroundings. I've been appreciating a lot of things I've taken for granted, lately. Just yesterday I walked into Richards Hall, which is one of two Zoology buildings on campus, and noticed some stonework invertebrates carved above the door. A beetle, a crayfish, a horseshoe crab. A grasshopper, I think. I should really have paid more attention for the last five years. Hell, for the last 22.

On my recent flight from Oklahoma City to St. Louis, an airline employee took the microphone to make an unusual announcement. The aircraft was transporting the remains of a United States servicemember home for burial in Missouri. I was surprised, to say the least. I feel completely disconnected from the war our country has been waging for the last decade, and I think that's not abnormal.  I tend to think of the military as something utterly separate from my peaceful civilian life. That commercial airliners are transporting the mortal remains of soldiers killed in action never occurred to me, but now that it has, it seems inherently wrong, and unsettling in a visceral and inexplicable way. It seems that their comrades in arms should carry them home on military aircraft, and that the horror of war shouldn't intrude on domestic travel arrangements. I can't say why I feel that way. Perhaps if war intruded more on our daily lives, we'd be more inclined to stop it. Maybe ...

This New Year's Eve I attended the fifth annual Flaming Lips New Year's Eve Freakout in Oklahoma City. I've been wanting to attend since the first year, but have spent none of my last four New Year's Eves in Oklahoma. While southern California, Paris, Paris and Belize was a fantastic NYE run, I was kind of psyched about getting to participate. The venue was done up in true Flaming Lips fashion, and I admired the lights and balloons and enormous mirror ball as vast improvements to the vacuous, concrete space that is the Coca-Cola Events Center in Bricktown. The opener was Phantogram, a three-piece band with a drummer, a guitar and a synthesizer, whose dance music was so bass-y that my esophagus must have thought it was experiencing an extended earthquake. No one really danced, which might have been because it was early or because the music was so out of line with what we expected to see next. They seemed genuinely psyched to be there, and having come from New York Ci...

Procrastinate Less. Corollary: If you're going to procrastinate, don't feel bad about it. Do something you want to do: Play more guitar. Read more for fun. Play more video games.

2011 started in Belize, where I rang in the New Year on a rickety bunk bed, listening to Counting Crows' "Long December" and Death Cab's "The New Year" while my traveling companions, quite sensibly, slept. On that trip, I experienced a whirlwind of bird walks and rainforest hikes. I found out what termites tasted like. I saw manatees and iguanas and sea urchins. I received more chigger bites than I imagined possible, and climbed a few Mayan pyramids. And then it was back to school, for the start of a long and painful semester in which I took 8 courses, worked, and took on extra research projects just because. Luckily, one of my eight was Animal Behavior, and that class served to solidify my emerging goals for graduate school and beyond. In February, Snowpocalypse threatened to come down just before my brother's family was due in Tulsa, and I skipped town ahead of the storm, arriving in Tulsa about an hour before the snow started to fall. We spent a w...

Today, I was in the Union looking at pictures of activities on campus in years past. Most of the photos in the Union were taken between the turn of the century and World War II, but they've recently added photos from the modern era. Among them were photos taken 1997 of OU President David Boren and George H.W. Bush at commencement exercises. Except that the photo's caption read "George W. Bush" rather than "George H.W. Bush". This is a pretty big error. As I left the Union, I was wondering who one talks to about campus decor. And lo! For the first time in my 4.5 years at OU, I saw David Boren on campus. He was walking out of the building that houses his office toward a car parked on the North Oval. I approached him, he shook my hand, and I mentioned what I had seen and asked if he might recommend someone I could get in touch with about it. He told me he was glad that I had mentioned it, and that he would much rather be in a photo with George H.W. Bush...

Tyler Bryant and the Shakedown On Saturday, I got up "early" and broke my fast with a Cliff bar on the way to the festival. The first act I caught was Tyler Bryant and The Shakedown. I'd never heard of them before, which is perhaps unsurprising in that they were playing on one of the festival's smaller stages before lunch. Nonetheless, Tyler Bryant comports himself as if he's already a rock star. I guess rocking a pink Stratocaster and a sleeveless Pink Floyd shirt are nearly enough to make him one, but I was seriously impressed with his guitar skills to boot. They played a very loud, very energetic set to a crowd ranging ages 15 to 60. Their music is of the wrong generation to be revolutionary, but if you're in the mood for some guitar rock, I'd check them out. Telekinesis This band wins my award for "Best Find of ACL 2011". I'd never heard of them when I wandered over to their set on the Google+ stage, but a bunch of other people app...