Correspondence School™

Talking Songs

2007-03-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

This is a clip off of Diana Deustch's CD Musical Illusions and Paradoxes.

"sometimes behave so strangely"

WNYC - Radio Lab

Sometimes I Forget Things

2006-12-15T17:27:00.000-08:00

When I was in middle school I once came into class, sat down, took my hat off, and realized that I had forgotten to wash the shampoo out of my hair. I had to stick my head into the bathroom sink and wash it out as much as possible. That didn't work very well.

My Name

2006-11-08T08:19:00.001-08:00

The boy's and girl's name James is pronounced jayms. It is of English origin. Variant of Jacob (Hebrew) "he who supplants." In the Bible, James is one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, who possibly was also a cousin of Jesus. The King James Bible is named in reference to James I of England (16th-17th century). Spanish pronunciation of Jaime: (HYE-may), Scottish: (JAY-mee). See also Kimo and Santiago.

James has 12 variant forms: Diego, Jacob, Jago, Jaime, Jamie, Jamison, Jayme, Jaymes, Jem, Jim, Jimmie and Jimmy.

Some related names are Giacomo, Hamish, Iago, Jacques, Jascha, Seamus and Shamus.

James is a very popular male first name, ranking 1 out of 1219 for males of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census. James is a very popular surname, ranking 71 out of 88799 for people of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census.

The Fourth Most Popular Folk Parody Group in New Zealand

2006-10-24T12:42:00.000-07:00

If you have never heard of Flight of the Conchords, you are not alone. But because they are so hilarious I think you'll find them at the top of the Folk Parody charts very soon. This fan site has clips of one of their shows. I really like the ones about Albi and the Issues.

The Amazing Powers of Marketing

2006-08-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how a company, an entire industry, can create a perception of their product that just isn't accurate, then bottle it, and sell it for 100,000 times more than the exact same stuff, but of better quality, you can get right out of your own home. Read this article.

Some of My Father's One-Liners

2006-07-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

"I'd rather have a bottom in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

"I feel a lot more like I do now than I did before."

Some Grade School Writing

2006-07-25T21:47:00.000-07:00

Hot Dogs and Corny Dogs
Hot dogs and corny dogs are different and alike in a lot of ways. They both have a piece of meat in them and bread is on the outside of each one. You can also put catchup or other things on it, too.

Some differentses are that the corny dog is on a stick and the hot dog is not. The corny dog is also different because it has bread all around it. Now you can see that corny dogs and hot dogs have semelarities and differentses.

©Jamie Wilson 3-2-1993
Grade: 3-/4

My Dream House
A dream house, from my perspective, has to have a lot of diverting and stimulating activities stationed throughout the house. First of all, my dream house would consist of a four wheeler and dirt bike trail that travels all over the six billion three million four hundred and seventy two thousand acre backyard. With this to enjoy, I would never get lackadaisical and watch Beevis and Butt-head ever again. The second attribute my dream house must have, would be an Olympic size pool the shape of an artichoke. With this gracefully and lusciously shaped pool in walking distance, I can soak up those rays in style. The last and definately most important virtue my dream house must retain is a toaster-oven. With this noteworthy invention, I can toast my Pop-Tarts just the way I like them. As one may infer, my dream house is not a dream for me, it's a way of life.

©Jamie Wilson 10-23-1996
Grade: 94

Writing
On Friday at 8:00am I went up the mountain Poco Moonshine. The trail I went on was Craggy Ridge. I was about half way up when I saw eight Halks. There was a spring that tasted so good. This mountain smelled like pine. I saw three other hikers that day. When I reached the top the wind was blowing hard and it stung my face. On the way down I saw two eagles. That day was fun.

©Jamie Wilson 12-4-1992
Grade: 95

The Tree
The trunk of the tree
grew up to the branches high
to touch the green leaves

©Jamie Wilson 12-15-1993
Grade: Unknown

Dear Mrs. Hortin
Dear Mrs. Hortin,
I would like to have my dad come and speak about writing. He is the publisher of the Park Cities People. He could tell us what a publisher does. He could also tell us how a newspaper printer works. Most important of all he could give us tips on writing.
Sincerely,
Jamie Wilson

©Jamie Wilson 3-5-1993
Grade: 4/4

Listen to Less Music

2006-07-25T21:08:00.000-07:00

Does it scare anyone else that people are now able to constantly listen to music? I started thinking about how much people are being cut off from the world by iPods. It seems so unnatural and unhealthy to have a constant input of information. When are these people relfecting on their experiences and their observations of the world around them?

I was driving to work this morning and decided to turn off the stereo. I realized, despite how much I love music and how much I think about music, I really don't listen to that much. As most of my friends know, I am a unitasker (you'll learn a lot about me from this link), so listening, really listening, to music takes up all the space in my brain. I can hardly speak or write a coherent sentence if music is playing or if someone is talking in the same room as me. This, as you can imagine, is an extremely difficult thing to live with. But it has forced me cherish peace and quiet, something I feel the world is in dire need of. I challenge you to spend an entire day without listening to somekind of entertainment. Let your mind wander. Dwell on those questions that pop up throughout the day.

I do realize that because other people are multitaskers they are able to force the music into the back of their minds and focus their attention on the other tasks at hand. But to me, this is just as bad because then you're not really listening to the music; music that, if it's any good, someone has spent their entire life building up to being able to communicate to you with their words and sounds. Yet most people just let it ring in the background without allowing themselves to be affected by it.

So, listen to less music, and really listen when you do.

AA Meeting Gone Awry

2006-07-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

Probably the most embarrassing thing that I've ever done was at an Alcohol Awareness class. On Halloween one year in college I got persuaded to go out with some friends to their fraternity's party at some bar. One of my friends came up from Austin and decided to be nice and buy me a beer. As I was taking the first sip I turned around and ran into a short lady. She also happened to be a TABC (Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission) officer. She pulled me aside and gave me a ticket. I was so pissed off. There were tons of completely drunk underage assholes wearing speedos and humping the air right next to us. They were obviously underage also, but this lady wouldn't have noticed them because she was writing the very polite and totally sober guy a ticket. Anyway, a few weeks later I went to my first saturday session of the class in order to get the ticket dismissed.

The class was going fine. We had a break and I went to the convienance store down the block and got some delicious snacks and went back to class. I was sitting there a while before I started feeling funny. It got worse and worse and I felt really queazy and my hands were all shaky and I felt like I was about to throw up. I kept my composure and made it to the last ten minutes of the class when the teacher started to tell stories, in great detail, of people over-drinking and getting sick. He dismissed the class and we all stood up and I slowly headed for the door. I was in the middle of a line out the door and right as I exited I threw up. It kind of came up all of the sudden and I'm pretty sure I kind of sprayed the guy in front of me. I made it to the trash can and was puking my guts out. I looked over and literally the entire class of people was watching me. I got home and was sick all day. But the thing is, I had to go back the next day to finish the class. I wore a hat and came in saying, "Man, did you see that drunk guy puking everywhere yesterday? That was disgusting." It was disgusting. And I totally lost all my street cred with the AA crowd.

On Trying

2006-07-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been wondering why most people, including myself, feel that something is not worth doing unless you can do it well. Tonight I was at my sister's house and we watched a video that her school made of a bunch of kids interviewing the teachers. The principal was asked what advice he had to give the fourth-graders and he said that they should find whatever it is they are good at and liked to do and to stick with it. I think this is pretty sound advice. Everyone has specific talents and it is important to develop those talents as much as possible, but wouldn't the world be so much of a better place if people were encouraged to find out all the things that they are terrible at and improve on those things? Obviously no one likes to do things that they're not good at because it isn't that fun to try and not succeed. But would failing at more stuff make us better people? I'm not sure.

Another thing that has been frustrating me is that I always want to be good at something right off the bat. I never want to take the time to build on the small progess from the day before. I want it now, whatever it is. I spend a lot of time wishing that I could do this or that but get discouraged when it's not completely natural. I mean, most people who can do extraordinary things like write symphonies, give amazing speeches, or go into space spent years and years developing those talents into what they are today. Some people spend their entire lives trying to do things that never get done. This all leads me to believe that the process of trying is what life is all about.

Pull Up Your Browsers! You're Scaring the Children.

2006-07-11T20:57:00.000-07:00

You might be asking yourself, "Why does this site not have a title?" or "Why is the header to this site all jacked up?" The answer to these questions is "Because you are using Internet Explorer and have no idea how badly you suck because of it." The other answer might be, "Because the designer of this site doesn't know what the hell he is doing." Both are great answers, but these questions would have never been asked if you would just get Firefox or Safari. I am trying to learn how to make it work on all browsers so this kind of thing won't happen, but I can only spend so much of my day (12 hours tops before I want to claw out my eyes and throw my monitor out the window of my 6th story office building) in front of a computer. Anyway, I hope that the changes to my sites are improvements, and would like to to know (especially from those of you on PCs) how everything looks.

Thank you!

– The Management

Dreams

2006-07-06T22:41:00.000-07:00

I had a dream last night that someone was throwing soup cans at my car. Each one left a huge dent in it. I was kind of pissed off about the whole thing in the morning, and then realized that it didn't happen. The absolute weirdest dream that I have ever had, and the one that I am most reluctant to confess, is when a giant Oscar, the Academy Award, was trying to have his way with me. The first dream that I ever remember having was when I was first learning about dinosaurs and I dreamt that I was lost in a prehistoric world without my family. I felt the same way I did when I got separated from my mom at the grocery store, only this time I had to worry about getting torn to pieces by a blood-thirsty T-Rex. And another dream that has stuck with me my whole life is when I was freezing to death on a hike acoss Antarctica. I woke and my head was at the foot of my bed and all my covers had fallen off and it was really cold in my room.

Here are a few jokes that my dad has told literally hundreds of times since I was born:

"I had a dream last night that I ate these two huge marshmellows and I woke up and my pillows were gone!"

"I had a dream last night. It was really a nightmare. I dreamt I was Dolly Parton's son and that she decided to bottle feed me!"

In highschool I used to have dreams where all my teeth would fall out. But I had thousands of teeth. It was awful. A book (Teach Yourself to Dream: A Practical Guide) that I accidentally stole from my friend Ernest from Georgia says:

"Dental problems, such as teeth falling out, being broken, and so on, are the focus of many anxiety dreams, reflecting insecurities in the personal, domestic or professional sphere."

AOHELL

2006-06-27T17:46:00.000-07:00

I am stealing this link from Yewknee but this is kinda like what I felt like today when trying to sort out some issues with my federal student loans. It's pretty funny though.

listen: AOHELL

Under Constipation

2006-06-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

As I was driving home from work today I saw a sign that said:

EXPECT DELAYS
CONST AHEAD

For some reason I read this in my mind to mean "Expect delays, constipation ahead." That works, too, I guess.

I Was Born Yesterday, Twenty-Four Years Ago

2006-06-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

6:59 pm on the 23rd of June, 1982. I used to brag about how my birthday was one of the longest birthdays of the year because it was so close to the summer solstice (about June 21, when the sun is in the zenith at the tropic of Cancer). Today seemed really long. I went to Half Price Books and looked around for a little while and bought a book of short stories by Raymond Carver and an album by Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez.

I sat down to eat a sandwich and this guy came up to me. He was an older man who had a red bandana tied around his neck. He looked very safari-ish. He said, "Do see that huge, 18 pound stack of books right there?" I said that I did. "You see, I just bought this coffee and I am going to go sell those books, but I am worried about trying to balance my coffee on them when I take them over there, and I am worried that one of the diligent staff members will quickly throw it away if I leave it. Would you mind watching it for me for a couple of minutes?" I thought that he did a very good job at explaining his situation so succinctly. But all of it was really unnecessary. A simple "Would you mind watching my coffee for a second?" would have persuaded me.

The thing is, he took forever. I finished my meal and had a headache. I wanted to leave. He finally came back and we talked about the book I was reading. Then I left.

I went swimming before the weather turned bad. There's this guy in our apartment complex that seems kinda crazy. He walks with a bounce and kinda hunched over. He jump-ropes down the sidewalk when people are trying to walk by and he is laying out by the pool literally all the time. I talked to him awhile about the history of the apartment. All the gossip. His name is Jody. I'm gonna call him Jump-Rope Jody. But not to his face.