18 February 2004 Wednesday

titleless

i’m reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.. i’m only at chapter four, but what a beautiful, beautiful book. the style/manner of story reminds me of Vonnegut’s, ”People so smart you can’t believe it, and dumb and nice, and mean.” and Dickens’ ”It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” actually, i’m missing Timequake a bit, right now.. and i want to jot down so much of East of Eden... but it’s not so easy to pull out quotes from it, as it often was with Vonnegut’s, and still maintain the poignance; and circling or putting stars next to every sweet/notable/right-on piece of the book would be just messy.. and not really possible.. it’s the whole thing that’s making it so beautiful.. the context of the people he’s introducing.. that’s what makes them so human and awesome and ordinary and perfect.

words matter. well, they don’t always matter terribly, in terms of one for another, since the entire basic purpose of words to begin with is to communicate, and that is simply the act of conveying one’s ideas or intentions or feelings or desires. but when it comes to literature, and poetry, words very much matter, since each one is, or should be, carefully chosen from the author’s repository to specifically convey and/or conjure that particular idea or intention or feeling or desire. there’s a song (by Nickleback)that’s been unfortunately stuck in my head today, since it was on the radio this afternoon… it would be a pretty good song, except that the chorus comes across repetitively, and i can’t get past the choice of lyrics: ”now the story’s played out like this, just like a paperback novel; let’s rewrite an ending that fits, instead of a hollywood horror.” the singer’s singing about a relationship; hollywood horrors pretty exclusively contain violent bloodshed, fear, sharp-objects, and grotesque, inhuman villains. unless the singer is suggesting that those elements are present or potentially present in his (clearly currently unsuccessful) relationship, then the comparison to the however-ideally alliterate and rhythmic ”hollywood horror”, is simply poorly chosen.

and wireless connection, why must you berate me so?
all
day
loooooooong.

09 February 2004 Monday

'do they collide?' I ask and you smile.. the world doesn't matter.

“when you feel embarrased,
then i’ll be your pride.
when you need directions,
then i’ll be the guide.
for all time.
for all time.”

~Death Cab For Cutie- ‘Passenger Seat’

having collected the past, curry the present, and cue the future .:.

tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the day a boy arrived in Antioch to visit me, and stayed for 10 days (i think it was sposed to be more like 6, but then that blessed hurricane snowstorm (fyi, a snowstorm generally IS a hurricane… just… with that whole coldness-that-begets-snow-and-ice sorta thing, going on) and that fantastic guy who called, officially informing us that the airports were closed…), and we flew home together.. and we haven’t been in the same state too often after that, but every bit of time in the past year has brought us closer. two days after tomorrow, on the 12th, we’ll fly to London together. our first trip together; my first time in Europe. Two days after that, will be the 14th..Valentine’s Day.. a day we also spent together last year.. this paragraph is actually a little harder to write than it might seem.. well, it actually might seem as hard as it is.. written with many pauses, as it is… remembering the incredibly wonderful moments.. and the very hard ones that are necessarily a part of our past.. and all the bunches of feelings and thoughts that pervade…

i… after trying to write this sentence a couple half dozen times, at least, and having erased it every time.. i’m just gonna stop. i’m very much looking forward to…. ::pauses yet again…and then smiles:: …everything.

04 February 2004 Wednesday

what's xml?

i guess i’ll find out. ‘grabbed a couple books from the library today, since i was there with mom.. i have discovered the 000 section. best section ever. where all the computer stuff is, and books on god and astrology and psychic stuff and past lives and all the fun/useful/good stuff. but 25890345897819 books on photoshop, but not one on illustrator. so far, i don’t understand illustrator. i should work on trying to… what with the new intuos2 and all.. :)

p.s. i’m going to london in a week :)

translating to css, and going away for valentines

i began, yesterday, to revamp the site in terms of this whole ‘web standards’ business that all my idol sites are about.. so i’m doing what i can to veer away from tables, and trying to more rapidly digest and impress css into my whole thinking and implementation… so far, it seems that to properly do that, i’ll have to at least lightly redseign it while i’m at it. i don’t want to change too much tho… i shouldn’t have to. but yes.. i dunno how much time i’ll get to focus on that in this week…

i’m going to london. :) bahbe’s taking me. for our anniversary/valentine’s day. i’ve never been to europe.. i figure it’s about time. it was gonna happen eventually, and will happen again in the future, but why not a brief interlude now, with the one person i’ll be happy to go away with. it’ll be good. no, it’ll be really good. i’m gonna go eat chocolate chip cookies right now, just to punctuate that. !

03 February 2004 Tuesday

late for bed

i will to bed, very soon. a couple briefs before i go, tho..

it is sooo past my bedtime, again. but the double batch of chocolate chip cookies is made, and well.. and there’s a darling already sleeping who i’ll call soon once i’m finally in bed…

i’m almost afraid to jot a note on here about how i might finally see europe sooner than later… the last time i actually posted on here that it was going to happen, i ended up taking it down within seconds because minds changed. thing is, i don’t have the funds to do it right now. but the timing is well enough.. i can get things squared up here quickly, before leaving.. and then upon return, launch into job-searching (i’m thinking i’d like to look into temporary positions for a meanwhile.. for personal experience and exposure, and also to imagine that i could work a bit more on learning for such projects as rasasayang and other..). so..

and the other issues have not been talked out, but i’ll generally welcome a change of scenery, especially with the right company, and the premise that what one might specifically need is to ’get away’ for a while, is very sensible.. and this is a realistic thing to do. as long as afterward there isn’t extra stress about the smaller stash of cash, and such..

by the way, css fascinates me. i’ve so much to learn…

sleep now.. think later…. i wonder what dreams will seek me tonight…

02 February 2004 Monday

33 days in, 333 days left

i am informed that today is the 33rd day into the year, and that there are 333 days left, making it a magical day. i had to pause a bit to do the calculations in my head.. it’s not that i didn’t believe the math.. i was just trying to make sense of 33 and 333 adding up to 365. unless it’s a leap year. i checked my calendar. why hasn’t anyone at all yet mentioned in my presence that this year is a leap year? that prolly changes more than just the significance of the 33rd day.

i had lots of dreams last night. or early this morning. prolly early this morning. i was in bed around 11pm.. and attempted to sleep around 12:30am.. but didn’t fall asleep til prolly near 3am.. and i know i was awake again around 6am.

my old neighbor was in my dreams.. in two of them, i think.. i only really remember the first one, now.. a large tent canopy outside… he and one of his friends i don’t know, and lor, were playing with a ball outside.. (our house).. but they were playing rough, and leaving holes in the canopy. i came out and told them off, but came short of telling them they would have to show responsibility and definitely replace the tent, phyiscally and financially. i mulled in my head that if i didn’t like him so much (friend), i would have been more direct when he asked carelessly, “well what do you want/expect us to do?”

in the other dream, the last thing that was said, he said to the other guy who was his friend/roommate.. we were all doing journals of some sort (like the japanese ones we kept in tokyo, i think), and i had been handed back one of mine.. but there were supposed to be two. i hadn’t done the other one cuz it should have involved the guy and he had made himself unavailable or something, i guess. the assignment, btw, had something to do with religion, but i don’t recall now. my old neighbor prodded his friend/roommate to come through as he should, and do the assignment with me. he commented to his friend, for having already failed to have done so, “(just) wait for God to punish you.”

i received two waking phone calls. and my mother burst into my room at one point, looking for her cordless phone.. which, it turns out, was somewhere on her bed back in her room, where she had left it. i wonder if my dad picked up the chocolate chips this morning like he said he would (i guess when he dropped lor at school..), so i can make the poor chocochipcookies that have been waiting, as dough, to be baked for the last few days. (mom said to make them without the chocochips. i insist that a key ingredient of chocolate chip cookies is that it has chocolate chips in it. she says i’m inflexible.)

i guess i would consider noting a bit about the contents of my thoughts from last night, and those related from the past few days/the past few months.. but.. i don’t think i’m ready yet. i’m gonna go see about those cookies. i’m glad there’s sunshine today.

28 January 2004 Wednesday

asking why

i don’t remember quite when this was.. two, three or so years ago? but when i first read this poem, i was told that it implicitly had meaning for specifically/particularly me. i don’t know if i was in mind while it was written, but since the author said directly to me that it held meaning directly for me, i’m not going to feel too out of line ‘analyzing’ this out a bit…

brief on the poem.. written by junior-year highschool friend, currently at school in Lawrence University. i hesitate to write out his name here for privacy issues, until maybe one day he reads this and decides he’s fine with his name being written out on here (—even if it’s already elsewhere on the web). (or he tells me he objects to having any reference to him whatsoever and i have to take down his poem and state my post here so much more ambiguously.)

it was composed as magnetic poetry.. and initially he put up two ‘pages’ of it.. but i really felt that the second page detracted from any power that the first page had, so suggested he cut out the first page as one complete poem. he did take down the second page.

the poem follows here:

“magnetic poetry #20

if this morning you awoke
to a brilliant eternity of beauty

would you worship it

if you watched the rain fall in
a forest on a warm summer night

would you dance in it

if you were presented with a
universe dazzling of diamond beauty

would you embrace it

or would you be the one to ask why”

i really liked this poem when i first read it. to be accurate, though, i… i don’t often identify with or really appreciate a lot of his poetry in general—that’s not to say it isn’t good; it just doesn’t usually keep my attention. there are a few that he has written, however, that do. and that kind of makes them stand out more, i think. i’m not explaining very coherently…

a bit more honesty: when i told him i liked the poem, and he told me i should particularly take it to heart, as it directly spoke to me, i was a bit offended. more by the presumption than anything else. but he says stuff like that to me a lot, and i’m very aware of this particular presumption he makes about me. i know that in general, he doesn’t believe i truly understand or appreciate art. saying that, though, is kind of like questioning whether or not i believe in God. what i do believe, is that: whether i believe or not; whether or not i believe in the glory of art (—what a hugely broad and monstrously subjecting term, btw) is okay. that neither to believe or not to not believe are condemnable states of being. that’s what i believe.

and my comparison between art and God here is not entirely of my own whimsical concoction; i believe he’s used the similie himself, if not spoken with this specific theme.

but you know what, this is my journal and my thoughts on the matter, and my indignant response on him linking me to this poem was two-fold: who are you (of anyone, let alone someone who knows me as wholly as possible), to presume to know or understand how i view the world/miracles/beauty/art/nature/God. ? for that matter, to presume over anyone on the matter of appreciation for life and majesty. i did also pause a bit to consider—since that was what he did ask me to do in the first place—to consider that he was right to presume my view of ‘art’. (in case it’s not apparent, this is an issue that has played well before this poem was ever conceived and received.

and here’s the other thing: i didn’t ‘ask why’ when i first read this poem. i didn’t even think about it that much. i decided it was good and i lost the bookmark of the site it was on, or something, and only remembered the moment it was shared with me, and not much at all about the poem.

until now. now i’ve gotten (what a funny word, ‘gotten’) to read it again. now i have an entirely new question, that i may or may not have briefly considered years ago, but i am feeling very strongly about right now:

what about the beauty in asking ‘why’?

now if this poem had been written by a stranger, and i was now rereading it and realized this other potential dimension in it, i would then imagine that perhaps the author might have had that in mind the whole time, and it was i who had misinterpreted it before. but that isn’t the case. this poem says ‘there is so much beauty. can you recognize it? can you appreciate it?’ and that’s just fine… but word choice, whether magnetic poetry or not, is paramount in poetry. and the word choice in this poem is “or would you...ask why”. which makes ‘asking why’ the opposite to all the forementioned in the poem, and since the forementioned is the positive, and was furthermore what was advised to me to recognize as lacking in myself, ... that makes the act of ‘asking why’ a negative one.

maybe this stood out to me because last night i dwealt again on the concept of ‘timshel’.. a choice to this or that.. to believe or not believe.. to act or not act… to love or not love.. (and it’s not all binary / black and white) ...to be awed by beauty, or to ask why… and hey, that’s the other thing. ‘or would you be the one to’ implies that you would do the one instead of the other. why not ‘or would you be the one to also ask why’. but that implies joining a multitude of askers. lemme think a bit…       okay. i think it would have to be something like ‘and might you ask why’.

i’m getting a bit tired. i’m gonna say i have two fundamental points, out of all of this:

one: why can’t you worship it and dance in it and embrace it and ask why ?

and two: the act of asking why is, to me, a potentially incredible and awesome thing. in many ways.. well, no, even more simply. again, this is my view of the world ~ if asking why is the privelege of choice, and choice is a promise of timshel, then that, that—the question, the promise, the choice—that is the most beautiful thing.. . .. .

site updates

i redid contentsub and contentsub2 is up (tho it still needs some help in the side right.. but i’m not even sure i’ll use it, so why spend another four hours on that one…) and please do let me know which of the three on the ‘tagline’.

27 January 2004 Tuesday

rough draft, after all

this site is looking a mess. all the entries are basically blurby comments to myself… eventually this will all have to get properly organized and neatened and maybe thinned or consolidated or something i do like that it’s moving along, though. i also like that the federal govt did shut down midway through the day today, and that the affected persons are clearly pleased about it. i get a chocolate.

textile

textile installed. happiness.