Ashley Alabama

Do you read my wordpress?

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:51:27 -0500

I kind of update my wordpress… sometimes.

maybe you should read…

Enjoy the snow day (because I’m not!)

http://ashleymyers.wordpress.com/

Animal Collective - Banshee Beat (fan...

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:28:09 -0500

Animal Collective - Banshee Beat (fan video)

Awesome.

(via Mashable)

yvynyl: Under the Blankets - a yvynyl mixtape Here is another...

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:04:41 -0500

yvynyl:

Under the Blankets - a yvynyl mixtape

Here is another lovingly curated set of songs. All have struck a cord with me over the past few weeks and have been in pretty regular rotation in all my music listening technologies. I think you will enjoy them as much as I do. Please support the artists who created these gems.

Original artwork by the talented vrno.tumblr.

Tracklist:

Twin Sister - Ginger

White Hinterland - Chant de Grillon

Here We Go Magic - Tunnelvision

Espers - Sightings

Holy Holy Hollywood - The New Weight

Celebration - Open Your Heart

Lands & Peoples - Bad Habits

Bakers at Dawn - Undefined

Mimicking Birds - Rivers, Veins, & Roots

Atlas Sounds - Shelia

Dirty Beaches - Coast to Coast

Small Black - Pleasant Experience

Cold Cave - Life Magazine

JJ - Ecstasy

Ruth - Polaroid/Roman/Photo

Family Portrait - On the Floor

The Horrors - I Can’t Control Myself

Tiuana Panthers - Creature

Surfer Blood - Swim

Ganglians - Blood on the Sand

The Mantles - Don’t Lie

Death - Keep on Knocking

Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros - Home

Download directly here: http://bit.ly/5sos3M

Please create a new playlist in iTunes and then click and drag the file to import, thereby maintaining track order.

Check out more yvynyl mixtapes here.

I felt life and love and hope infested my bones. (Michael J. Totten)

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:45:58 -0500

I felt life and love and hope infested my bones.

(Michael J. Totten)

Tree Planter, Professional Walker

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:57:00 -0500

Yesterday was fantastic, for the most part We woke up early and planted trees with Philly Tree People all throughout Fishtown and Kensington. I’ve never planted a tree before in my life, so it a pretty awesome experience. We also met some interesting characters along the way. After finishing up planting, there was a free luncheon for all the planters at the Philadelphia Brewing Company.

Later in the afternoon my friend and I decided to bike along Kelly Drive. I was determined to make it Manayunk, because I’ve never rode there before. The ride was absolutely beautiful. Yesterday was a perfect day, great temperature, sunshine, and a long bike ride. We made it to the East Falls Bridge and kept riding until we saw a sign saying “Welcome to Main Street Manayunk.” We made it and I was overjoyed. I was already over 10 miles from my house and couldn’t wait to ride the 10 miles back. Then my gears started making a weird noise and my chain popped. My chain popped 10 miles away from my apartment. I couldn’t believe it, talk about the most inconvenient timing. The sun was starting to set, it was starting to get cold, and we had to walk our bikes back to Fishtown. It only took us around 3 hours, maybe a little bit more, but we made it. I fell asleep as soon as I walked in to the door.

Bikes

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:32:35 -0500

According to philly.com bicycle rules are set to increase in Center City today. While I’m all about safety and the enforcement of rules I think it’s crazy to blame everything on cyclists. One, I’m always cut off by cars and SEPTA buses while riding. Two, pedestrians always walk in front of me. I think there needs to be a city-wide initiative where cars stop cutting people off, stop speeding through the streets, pedestrians stop trying to cross busy streets like Broad when there are cars coming, and cyclists (me included) stop acting so careless. I hate think something will prevent me and others from riding our bikes through the city.

My dream room. (via sweethomestyle)

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:21:49 -0500

My dream room.

(via sweethomestyle)

Oh well, I decided after about an hour of contemplating it, I’m going to post the break up...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:54:55 -0500

Oh well, I decided after about an hour of contemplating it, I’m going to post the break up piece. My life isn’t quite as dramatic as this, but here it goes.

There’s plenty of fish in the sea, or at least that’s what friends say after a terrible break up. No matter how many times we hear it, breaking up still consumes our entire being, and causes never ending self-loathing. No one could ever replace who you lost. Break ups are heart wrenching and you feel alone, like no one else has ever gone through what you’re going through and no one could ever understand what it’s like to have your heart stomped on. Regardless of what your irrational self thinks everyone knows exactly what you’re going through after a devastating break up.

During my break up with, we’ll call him “Life Ruiner” or maybe “Steve” is more appropriate, I hated the fact that we broke up, so I repeated things over and over in my head, processing the thousands of things I did wrong. One of the most comforting facets of a tragic break up is the song you choose to accompany you in all your misery. My song was Belle & Sebastian’s “I’m A Cuckoo.” I could relate to every single line in the song with a burning passion and felt like every word was penned solely for me and my agony. It seemed to tell the story of my relationship and break up with Steve all too well. Stuart Murdoch passionately sang the words,

“Breaking off is misery

I see a wilderness for you and me

Punctuated by philosophy

I’m wondering how things could’ve been”

I sang along just as passionately until I couldn’t sing anymore, feeling sad in my defeat, and wasting countless hours wondering ‘what if.” In my mind, Steve and I were meant to be together and were lost in the wilderness of our love, searching for a way back to each other.

All the self-loathing, dramatics, and the sinking hole in your chest make you do and say things your ordinarily sane self would never think of doing or saying. Again, I was no exception to this break up faux pas. Some channel this negativity by drunk-dialing their ex, pleading to get back together while others become adrenaline junkies, having lost their purpose in life. Fortunately, my theatrics only led me to locking myself in my room and reading the entire Twilight series in two weeks. Not something a sane person would do. My pain was entirely gone for that period of time, wrapped up in the love between a human and vampire. Trapped inside a fictional world, far from my reality, turning pages in a place where impossible love seemed to rule.

There are many phases after a break up. You miss the person to the point of sickening sadness, eventually get over it and start to hate the person in the worst kind of way. At this point wishful thinking ensues. I would imagine myself gallivanting around Philadelphia with some serious eye candy, bumping into Steve, and seeing a distraught look take over his stupid face. After seeing my new beau, Steve would ferociously stalk my Facebook, seeing pictures of my new, healthy relationship, and cry. He would send me text messages, apologizing, pleading to rekindle our love at whatever cost. I wouldn’t respond. Unfortunately, wishful thinking is just that, and it never comes true. I hated Steve and I wanted him to feel my pain, but knew he never would.

Soon you realize you could never hate someone you once cared so much about and find every and any excuse to talk to them. It’s not over yet, at least in your mind. You’re sitting online, the other person logs on; you haven’t talked in months, and can’t stand it anymore. The first mistake too many make is setting their away status to an ambiguous “emo” lyric. An example goes like this, “You’re barely missing me, I’m missing you and everything you do,” a line from The Get Up Kids song My Apology. There’s a lot of logic behind this move. Obviously, the person will see the status, know you still love them, and instant message you immediately. Believe it or not, this isn’t very tactful and it makes you look like a huge, desperate loser.

Everyone learns the ambiguous emo lyric is far from ambiguous, so you remove it. However, you continue to stare at your computer, hoping maybe they’ll talk to you. Nothing happens. In this case, I searched my mind for anything I possibly could to talk to Steve about. Finally, when I was at the point of choking on my virtual words, I messaged him. I spilled my guts about whatever pointless thing I possibly could, hoping for a positive response. This, like everything else post break up, leaves you completely unsatisfied.

Someday, if you’re lucky, you wake up from the post break up nightmare that has become your life and move on. Once you can’t stand listening to the same song on repeat anymore and you’ve completed the stages of the break-up, the sun starts shining, your cold heart begins to melt, and you are flooded with an emotion you forgot existed. You are happy. With the weight on your chest lifted, the world is your oyster and you understand what everyone has been saying and you’re ready to go fishing.

Break Ups.

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:49:00 -0500

Recently, my friends have been going through some serious break up trauma, which as been fixed. Thankfully. However, I was assigned to write am 800 word personal essay about anything in the entire world, as long as it was about me. Inspired by recent break up events, I decided to write about the dramatics and hilarity of breaking up. I’m still deciding if I should post it.

I Wrote a Little Something.

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:04:18 -0500

The Urban Farmer: Planter Of Seeds, Grower Of Neighborhoods

Ashley Myers

Mary Seton Corboy looks like an intellectual and a farmer collided, wearing soiled covered clothing, thick-rimmed glasses, and blessed with the gift of a permanent tan. She keeps her agenda and checks her email with a Blackberry, hands out business cards, and makes sure the farm is up to date with social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. The 51 year-old is charming with a twist of ironic wit and unsuspected strength for a petite, soft-spoken woman. She is a revolutionary, community activist, and an inventor. Mary Seton Corboy is an urban farmer.

Corboy is one of eight children and spent her childhood and adolescence partially in Ethiopia, but mostly in Washington D.C. Her father was an original member of the Peace Corp. and later worked for the United States State Department.

Moving from Ethiopia to Washington D.C was not the only change in Corboy’s life. She has gone through many transitions and was described by Philadelphia Magazine as a “political scientist turned chef turned gardener.” The confusing life changes can be easily summed up. In 7 years she attended 5 different colleges. Corboy describes herself as not being “academically inclined” and graduated at the bottom of her Catholic high school class. She was young and unsure what to do with the rest of her life. It was not until one of her English literature professors described poetry as a metaphor, as more than what a person or poet says, that poetry actually means a world greater than reality. She heard that, something clicked, and life made sense to Corboy. She graduated from Wilson College on the Dean’s List with a Bachelors of Arts in Political Science and English Literature. Her academic achievements at Wilson awarded her a scholarship to graduate school.

She attended graduate school at Villanova University just outside Philadelphia and has not left the area since. Following the political lead of her father, Corboy continued her education and graduated with a Master’s degree in Political Science. During the early 1980s, while in graduate school Corboy discovered her passion for cooking. She says she became “enthralled with cooking” and soon realized she was not interested in political science anymore. It became a dull, mundane task and, to her, simply meant just reading the newspaper everyday. Cooking was different, because it allowed Corboy to be creative. It was the then the political scientist turned into a chef.

Since Corboy grew up in Washington D.C., she rarely stepped foot into the outdoors, let alone a farm. It was not until after graduate school that Corboy learned she liked the outdoors. Her enlightenment came when she was asked to take care of artist, Andrew Wyeth’s estate. It was not an easy transition from city girl into country bumpkin. Corboy’s first experience on the estate was driving a rider mower right into a river bordering the estate. After that mishap and a few other adventures Corboy fell in love with the outdoors. She was learning and expanding her mind everyday with knowledge she never learned in college.

In 1998, Corboy opened Greensgrow Farm with then partner Tom Sereduk. The farm opened originally to grow and sell hydroponic lettuce to restaurants throughout the city. The idea was to cut down on the travel time of the food to ensure freshness and premium healthiness. The farm takes up an entire city block in the Kensington neighborhood. According to Corboy, her and Sereduk did not choose Kensington, Kensington chose them. The farm sits on top of vacant land on which an old steel plant once stood, in the middle of a once benign neighborhood. When Corboy and Sereduk first opened Greensgrow and told their friends the idea of a hydroponic lettuce farm in Kensington, everybody thought they were crazy. At the time the neighborhood seemed like a barren wasteland, not to mention it was notorious for being unsafe. Nothing stopped the two aspiring urban farmers, because they believed cultivating in a city lot was an efficient way to reuse wasted urban space. The chef turned into a gardener.

With Corboy’s determination she was able to take the vacant city block and make it a breath of fresh air in the mostly industrial community. The idea of an urban farm seems an oddity in itself. Food cannot be grown in city soil, and concrete and asphalt cannot be broken down to plant seeds. With this in mind, Corboy mixed her creativity with some brainpower and the farm is now lined with rows of raised beds, which are filled with organic soils used to grow a plentiful supply of not just lettuce, but a variety of vegetables.

Corboy is a cancer survivor, a cancer surviving urban farmer. Her passion did not let her sickness get in the way of farming and shaping Greensgrow into a core of community development for Kensington. For those who know her, Corboy is inspirational, a fighter, a woman who shows those around her that you can’t take things for granted.

When describing Corboy, Greensgrow employee Stefanie Emery says she is, “a strong person, a lot of people don’t have that kind of will.” Corboy talks openly about her sickness to the workers on the farm and Emery said she has even referenced working on the farm lugging an oxygen tank along her side.

People often refer to cancer as a battle, an unfortunate battle in which many are defeated. In an online video profile by Logo, an MTV affiliate, Corboy said, “without humor I would have given up a long time ago.” When Corboy was fighting her battle she was armed and prepared to defeat it using humor, strong will, and her philosophy of life.

Corboy has learned to see the lighter side of life. Working somewhere as uncanny as an urban farm can be very unpredictable at times. On an almost daily basis she is called out of her row home office to solve a problem on the farm and she never knows what is going to happen, she just knows she needs to laugh it off. Corboy believes humor gives a better perspective for the dark sides of life. Emery says Corboy, “takes things seriously, but has a good way of looking at them.” Corboy describes humor as a level of pathos, just like hurt and sorrow. Rather than hurt or sorrow she says, “humor is what you get when you throw me emotions.” Instead of giving up when a hardship strikes, she sees the irony in life and that helps her get through everything day-to-day.

Corboy is a great presence in the neighborhood and has created Greensgrow to be a powerful tool in Kensington. In its twelve years of operation the urban farm has done wonders in transforming and developing the community. Corboy and the farm have not asked the citizens of Kensington to change instead have helped make the community a more attractive place to live. Greensgrow itself has transformed from a business located in Kensington, simply making money, into what Corboy calls “a community-based business all about the neighborhood.”

There is a banner that hangs on the fence surrounding the farm that says, “Greensgrow Farm: Growers of food, flowers, and neighborhoods.” Corboy has developed the farm to be not only as a resource for fresh local, food to those in the neighborhood, but also as a tool to be used in the community and to educate those living in the community. Greensgrow seeks to educate not only about urban farming, but also about the importance of eating locally grown food, its health benefits, and emphasizes sustainability.

Since the urban farm is a fairly new idea, something no one has quite figured out yet, Corboy is always finding new ways to be creative, and everything is an experiment. The farm is always growing, evolving, and changing. Recently, Corboy and the Greensgrow crew renovated the kitchen of St. Michael’s Lutheran Church located a few blocks away from the farm. This kitchen is open for the workers at Greensgrow to make the prepared food they sell. It is a community project kitchen and is open for the neighborhood to use. Emery says, “Mary likes to give back to the community” and believes she has hopes of one day turning it into a soup kitchen.

Through the tribulations Corboy has learned a lot about herself, the world, and life. There have been many times when she could have given up, cried, and settled into a normal, boring job. When talking about life Corboy says, “you just have to go where the road takes you.” She has found that she always lands on her feet with all the decisions she makes and ideas she has, no matter how crazy they may seem. Corboy could be busy doing something mundane, like reading the newspaper, but instead she is constantly reinventing something on an urban farm in an industrial Philadelphia neighborhood. In all of her efforts, Mary Seton Corboy hopes for one thing, to make reality better.

sweethomestyle: via supafab I dig yellow. I think it’s a...

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:05:53 -0400

sweethomestyle:

via supafab

I dig yellow. I think it’s a great accent color plus it generally makes people feel happy. However, too much yellow can make babies cry and cause adults to lose their tempers more quickly. It speeds up your metabolism (good thing, right?) but can make you feel cautious. Remember the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins? Makes me a little apprehensive about using it too much when decorating.

http://interiordecorating.suite101.com/article.cfm/using_yellow_in_design

(via sweethomestyle) I love this!

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:54:46 -0400

(via sweethomestyle)

I love this!

LookBook

Wed, 27 May 2009 23:44:15 -0400

LookBook:

This is my new addiction.

The cute little girl (my cousin, Mary Beth) I always take photos...

Sat, 23 May 2009 10:15:05 -0400

The cute little girl (my cousin, Mary Beth) I always take photos of has a birthday coming up on Tuesday and I bought her these.

Hey Morrissey, hang the blessed DJ, because you’re turning...

Fri, 22 May 2009 08:14:33 -0400

Hey Morrissey, hang the blessed DJ, because you’re turning 50!

Happy Birthday to Morrissey. <3

Photo

Thu, 21 May 2009 16:08:43 -0400

Hi, I’m Ashley and this is the weird stuff I do when...

Thu, 21 May 2009 16:04:35 -0400

Hi, I’m Ashley and this is the weird stuff I do when I’m bored.

This is my new kitten. He has no name. “He’s all...

Thu, 21 May 2009 13:56:25 -0400

This is my new kitten. He has no name.

“He’s all right! Aren’t you, cat? Poor cat! Poor slob! Poor slob without a name! The way I see it I haven’t got the right to give him one. We don’t belong to each other. We just took up one day by the river. I don’t want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together. I’m not sure where that is but I know what it is like. It’s like Tiffany’s.” -Holly Golightly Breakfast at Tiffany’s

"Everything you can imagine is real.” Pablo Picasso"

Thu, 21 May 2009 13:06:53 -0400

““Everything you can imagine is real.”
Pablo Picasso”

Dear Matt & Kim, Can we please hang out? Love, Ashley

Thu, 21 May 2009 12:08:51 -0400

Dear Matt & Kim,

Can we please hang out?

Love,

Ashley