Miss Megan Angelica

babyblushh: stopdropandrun: Jonathan Hobin Re-Creates the...

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:11:56 -0700

"The Twins" - depicting the attacks of 9/11

"A Boo Grave" - depicting Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse and torture

"GOT HIM" - depicts Seal Team 6 's raid and takedown of Osama Bin Laden

"Dear Leader" - depicting North Korea and their threats against the world.

"White Nights" - depicting Jim Jones and the fall of Jamestown

"Obama Nation" - depicting Obama's rise to presidency and politics

"Holy Smoke" - depicting a monk, Thich Quang Duc who burned himself, protesting the Vietnam War

"Acid Washed" - depicting acid attacks in Muslim countries

babyblushh:

stopdropandrun:

Jonathan Hobin Re-Creates the World’s Most Infamous Tragedies with Children

more of the album here

This is amazing

September 9th! My one-way flight is booked!

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:58:05 -0700

September 9th! My one-way flight is booked!

jayparkinsonmd: A white person is five times as likely to...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 22:02:18 -0700

jayparkinsonmd:

A white person is five times as likely to commit suicide with a gun as to be shot with a gun; for each African American who uses a gun to commit suicide, five are killed by other people with guns.

via

Wow.

A year of accelerated growth....

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:56:20 -0700

I’ll be 23 this year and I’m not where I expected to be by now. I’m okay with that, but I don’t want to be so okay with it that I don’t accomplish the things that were once so important to me. I want to finish school in a place that brings back my excitement to learn. I’m ready to venture into my next city, and I’m slowly narrowing my list of places to settle. I’d like to make my way back into the design industry, even if I’m not looking to start a career just yet…. In short, it feels like as good a time as any to figure it out so I had the crazy idea to take a trip every month this year to push myself into making some life-changing choices.

I’m not sure how this year of trips is going to end but I know that only three months in, I’m excited by how much I’ve learned. I’m looking into schools and jobs that are reminding me why I decided to go into this industry in the first place. I’ve toured cities that both terrify and excite me with the thought of living there. I’m volunteering at a design conference this summer and attended two others with student groups, so I feel pretty confident that I’m headed toward some profitable networking opportunities….

As crazy as it seemed when I convinced myself to embark on this year of travel-based decisions, I think it’ll be one of the best and most rewarding decisions I’ve made in a long while. And I have no doubt that my outlook on various aspects of life will be changing with each trip I take!

designismymuse: thisnewurbanity:Council House, Perth | Howlett...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:32:37 -0800

designismymuse:

thisnewurbanity:Council House, Perth | Howlett and Bailey Architects

reblog Friday!

strle: superamit: Many of you have asked, so here’s what’s...

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:07:40 -0800

strle:

superamit:

Many of you have asked, so here’s what’s going on with me.

WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE

8/1979: Born. Grew up in CT, built a killer eraser collection, fell in love with computers.

Left college to start a company. Fell hard. Fled to India for 3 months.

Started 2nd company. Learned to be an adult. Fell in love with NYC.

Moved to SF, discovered burritos & some of my fave people on Earth.

9/2011: Got diagnosed with Leukemia!

Cried. Went through 3 cycles of chemo. Hurt. Thought hard about what I want out of life. Grew up a second time.

TODAY

… After over 100 drives organized by friends, family, and strangers, celebrity call-outs, a bazillion reblogs (7000+!), tweets, and Facebook posts, press, fundraising and international drives organized by tireless friends, and a couple painful false starts, I’ve got a 10/10 matched donor!

You all literally helped save my life. (And the lives of many others.)

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Tomorrow, I’ll be admitted to Dana Farber in Boston for 4-5 weeks.

First I’ll get a second Hickman line to allow direct access to my heart (for meds and for nutrients if I’m not able to eat). Over the next week, the docs blast my body with a stiff chemo cocktail to try and eradicate all traces of cancer cells. In the process, the immune system I was born with, and my body’s ability to make blood, are destroyed.

Next Friday, I get my donor’s stem cells by IV. I start on immunosuppressants to prevent my body from rejecting them (I’ll be on them for 12-18 months). For these weeks I’ve no immune system, so I’m severely vulnerable to viruses and bacteria. My hospital room and hallway become my world.

Meanwhile, the stem cells make their way to my bone marrow and, with some luck, start producing platelets, red blood cells, and white blood cells. At this point, my blood type changes to the blood type of my donor. And my blood will now have my donor’s DNA, not my own.

This is science fiction stuff. I can hardly believe it’s even possible, and there’s lots of chances for things to go wrong. It’s frightening.

AFTER THE TRANSPLANT

Recovery to a new state of “normal” takes about a year, but there’s a few storm clouds hovering:

My immune system is new, like a baby’s. I’m prone to getting sick.

Just as with any organ transplant, there’s a chance of rejection. Except in this case, it’s my blood that’s the foreign body, and it touches every organ. They call it graft-vs-host-disease and it can cause health issues and organ complications for the rest of my life.

Successful transplant or not, Leukemia can relapse. Stubborn mofo.

Overall, 75% of AML transplant patients survive year one, 50% make it through year five. My odds are a little better since I’m young.

THE GREAT NEWS

I’ve got a long road ahead. But I’ve got a donor & amazing family & friends. A few months ago I didn’t have many options. Today I have a plan.

I am alive. I start tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Thank you.

<3

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:43:53 -0800

jayparkinsonmd: My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:00:02 -0700

jayparkinsonmd:

My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.

Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.

This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.

How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.

Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If someone is determined to be a match, that person would have to be willing to undergo an outpatient procedure. It’s not a fun procedure, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.

That’s why, starting now, we are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent between the ages of 18 to 60 to take a test to see if you’re a match.

You can register online for your test, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th, for a special party we are throwing to rally support.

We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.

Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.

Thank you Tony.

Hands down, one of the most genuine and inspiring speeches...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:07:45 -0700

Hands down, one of the most genuine and inspiring speeches I’ve heard.

“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.”

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

micasaessucasa: Wallpaper Magazine Holder

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 09:01:46 -0700

micasaessucasa:

Wallpaper Magazine Holder

"Let’s take it slow, I don’t wanna move too fast. I don’t wanna just make love, I..."

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 08:36:46 -0700

“Let’s take it slow, I don’t wanna move too fast. I don’t wanna just make love, I wanna make love last….”

jayparkinsonmd: THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real...

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 14:11:18 -0700

jayparkinsonmd:

THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli …” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”

This is just plain wrong.

(via)

frank ocean: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:49:05 -0700

frank ocean: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,:

frankocean:

and sorry i could not travel both and be the one traveler, long i stood and looked down one as far as i could to where it bent in the undergrowth; then took the other, as just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear; though as for that the passing…

Photo

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:56:29 -0700

"Money in my safe but I’m livin’ dangerous."

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:29:51 -0700

“Money in my safe but I’m livin’ dangerous.”

Favorite topic from my philosophy class was def reincarnation. We left on a pretty intriguing...

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 00:29:02 -0700

Favorite topic from my philosophy class was def reincarnation. We left on a pretty intriguing thought… What if that light at the end of the tunnel that people associate with death is actually the first light seen as you’re being birthed in your next life? What if all the people who’ve experienced a near death situation and that glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel are those babies that didn’t make it, resulting in someone else’s life as a stillbirth or miscarriage?

I like this theory because it can make anyone think, regardless of religion or belief, and nobody can say that it is or is not possible. I’ve always heard that as one life ends, another begins…. What if?

micasaessucasa: outdoor furniture made from recyclable linear...

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 17:03:14 -0700

micasaessucasa:

outdoor furniture made from recyclable linear polyethylene by bobby berk

As Fall quarter is sneaking up on me, I’m reevaluating...

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 22:39:12 -0700

As Fall quarter is sneaking up on me, I’m reevaluating priorities and goals. This works for the basics :)

Photo

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 19:11:49 -0700

lostinhouse: tell me where this is! LOL

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:36:04 -0700

lostinhouse:

tell me where this is!

LOL