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Macrocosm - Today's Headlines:

Holiday sales strong over weekend except in snow-drenched Northeast
The Blizzard of 2009 slows shopping but retailers hope for "pent-up demand."

Senate Democrats Warn House Not to Toy With Health Bill

The Senate finally got enough votes to pass its version of the health care bill but now needs to chat with the House and come up with a joint bill and once again muster the 60 votes it needs to pass THAT version. Ladies and gentlemen, the legislative branch - "slow and deliberate so as to avoid hasty and unwise decisions." Ah American democracy <3.

Brittany Murphy Dies at 32
Millions of people die everyday. But a celebrity death is slower, I think. Not literally but afterwards, when the world investigates every detail of the death, relives it, speculates on the no-doubt Hollywood-related pressures or lifestyle that drove this young woman to her somehow more tragic end.

Microcosm - My Head Lines:

A particular scene in The Illusionist, a 2006 film starring Yale-man Edward Norton, inspired my blog's title, Slow the Flow. His character, Eisenheim, prefaces a magic trick that seems to slow the fall of an orange:

From the moment we enter this life we are in the flow of it. We measure it and we mock it, but we cannot defy it. We cannot even speed it up or slow it down. Or can we? Have we not each experienced the sensation that a beautiful moment seemed to pass to quickly, and wished that we could make it linger?

This blog is meant to make the moments linger. To describe what is going on at this moment in time - in the macrocosm (current political and world events) and the microcosm (my life), in essence slowing the flow of time. Each post will be titled with the sounds I heard before the post to "recreate" the moment. A Vietnamese-dubbed Chinese drama is playing on TV in the background. I am in the yellow-lighted foyer of my quiet, suburban house, typing away on a wooden, varnished desk on my precious HP laptop. clack clack humm clack.

A central theme of my posts will be about my years of college at Yale, which I suspect will define my life. You know how once you meet someone or learn something, it suddenly seems to show up everywhere? But maybe those people or things were always there, but now your eyes and mind know to look for it. It's the same with Yale. Yale is everywhere and maybe always has been.

I'm reading a book, A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I'm reading it because I know it's a recommended reading, classic, critically acclaimed book. I read it so I can feel as if I'm using my winter break wisely. I make myself read it - though self-imposed it isn't voluntary. I make my own rules, but it's anarchy. Anyways, I read it half-heartedly until I see that Mr. Knowles went to Exeter and then Yale University. The book is doubly important now, it's doubly imperative that I read my fellow Yalie's hailed literary achievement. But whY?

Y? School pride?

That's what I'm trying to figure out. At the moment.