Here is my post for Blog Action Day:

Save the Earth. Shut down the EPA.

What’s going on? What are the happy haps?

I was talking to my boyfriend today about a picture I sent him of bluejay fledglings eating spaghetti noodles that I was throwing out of the window. One of the birds was kind of dumb, which reminded me of an old camp song which for some reason we used to sing in the stupidest voice possible, like the Abominable Snowman voice from Bugs Bunny (you know, the one that picks up Bugs Bunny and goes, “I will pet him and stroke him and call him George!”…? Anyway.) So I sang, “Waaaaaaaaaay UP in the sky, the LIT-tel birds FLaaa-hhhYYYYY, whiiiile DOWN in their NE-HEST the LIT-tel birds RE-HEST…” and so on, but I couldn’t remember the part about “SHHH they’re sleeping!” so I googled that first line.

One of the first hits I got was a blog entry of yours with that title (“way up in the sky the little birds fly…”). Weird, because when I hit the link I see that you used it as a header, but don’t mention it in the post. So I read the entry, ok, nothing about the song, no help there. But there is something about how you stayed up late reading a book, and you say “my favorite book is the kind that i don’t want to stop reading, but am forced to because my eyes just won’t stay open another second. my favorite morning is the kind in which i stay in bed until afternoon, reading or listening to music or, perhaps, watching a movie. my favorite time to crawl in bed is midafternoon on a clear, cold february day.”

So *I* think, wow, that sounds like me! And then, hmm…maybe we like the same kinds of books. I wish I knew what book that was she was reading! Hmm, maybe I can ask her — and then I see that this was written in 2005, so chances are you won’t remember. I’m about to close the window when I see that you’ve got links to Toothpaste for Dinner and Married to the Sea. Ok, this is interesting because *I* have links to Toothpaste for Dinner and Married to the Sea! (And I just tossed my “Shakespeare Got to Get Paid, Son” t-shirt over the back of my chair today after we saw “Taming of the Shrew” in the park). So anyway, it just all seemed a little too coincidental to ignore, right?

SO, that was the HOW. And the WHY is that I figured I’d take a chance that we do have the same taste in books as well as what sounds like similar escapist/compulsive reading tendencies. Anyway, what it all adds up to is that if that turns out to be true, I’ve got two questions for you:

1. If you do remember, what WAS that book that you fell asleep reading on 11/5/05?
….and….
2. read anything really good lately?
There are so many books to choose from in the world that I have trouble narrowing it down. it’s always great to get recommendations from like-minded readers, so I’m always trying to find some. Like-minded readers, that is. For trade, here’s a list of some of the books I’ve liked this summer:

1. The Pleasing Hour -Lily King
2. Catching Genius -Kristy Kiernan
3. Prep -Curtis Sittenfeld
4. The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets -Eva Rice
5. Intuition -Allegra Goodman
6. The Observations -Jane Harris
7. Twilight -Stephenie Meyer
8. The Book of Joe -Jonathan Tropper
9. Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marisha Pessl
10. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night- Time -Mark Haddon
11. The Witching Hour -Anne Rice
12. Eat, Pray, Love -Elizabeth Gilbert
13. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice -Laurie R. King
14. The Monkey’s Raincoat -Robert Crais
15. Booked to Die -John Dunning

The first ten are all novels, and all pretty recent publications. The eleventh isn’t new, but I’ve read it about three times. Number 12 is nonfiction, but a complete page-turner, great story. And the last three are each the first book in a detective series – respectively: Mrs. Sherlock Holmes, a smart-ass contemporary L.A. detective and an ex-cop who owns a bookstore and solves murder mysteries that happen in the world of rare book collecting.
And all 15 are books I’ve either fallen asleep reading or *not* fallen asleep reading because they were so engrossing that I couldn’t stop turning the pages and just stayed up all night. Anyway, write back if you’ve got some books to recommend! Hope this wasn’t too strange — I just love books and can’t resist a coincidence. Also, I stayed up way too late tonight working on a project and I’m pretty much head-swimmingly delirious right now, writing in my sleep.

-Gillian

If applied to “negativity” as a concept, we could understand the negative as an absence of existence or quality. Malice is the absence of compassion, anger the absence of love, pride the absence of humility. Negative energy, then, would be a lack of positive energy.

Unfortunately, the model may not match your observation. As negativity does not have any quality in and of itself it cannot conceivably propagate or have influence of its own.

Though, Barth may speak to this when he says that “evil has no existence of its own. Rather men are attracted to the illusion that evil is and lift it up over the salvation God has already brought up on them.” Negativity then could be likened to the lifting up of a false idol; participation in that which does not exist.