Weird Occurences

At a gathering you attend, a friend of a friend all of a sudden seems to make fun of you, right in the middle of you saying something, but then says it was something else and walks away unexpectedly. Another night, at your job, you think you see someone who reminds you of the friend's friend. And then, that one starts to remind you of some much younger person you once knew, but maybe not their real name, because it was a highschool foreign language class. Someone who liked to make fun of you! Hmmmm.

It is time...

Had a moment today in which I found myself existing in a very shaky yet detached emotional state, walking across a campus to a parking lot, and as a gust of wind hit me, it was blowing a tear across my cheek. I was so surprised that a part of me bothered with a wry observation, which was that maybe I was embodying an emotional state similar to the old picture of the "fake Indian guy" who has a tear trickling down his face. Which sadly, in our ultra-cynical society, people fun of, as if that kind of emotion is just hokey or cannot exist. Oh it can exist. But some people might not know it, or could have forgotten what they knew. I can't pretend I'm really in that moment now, because I feel much better. Who knows, I might even laugh about that picture sometime. But I can still be grateful that the moment happened, that expression exists. I can appreciate imperfection.

Fruit songs

Visited this poet once. Read the poems on that website: The Cabbage and The Professor Cries. Now thinking of little apartments in upstate NY and a little Greek restaurant, and a little diner, and another little restaurant and a little and a not so little 24 hour diner...and looking up old buildings in the library and being hot late at night and watching DVDs from the libary on a lap top at night. Really cheap rent! Solitary road trip to the winery laden finger lakes. Turning on TV in a cheap hotel room and seeing people walk around a sports dome. (Hurricane Katrina.) Weird crisscrossings of past and present times, day and night. Be real. That is real. Parks with carousels. With swimming pools. At night, the sound of something like a Peruvian clay whistle. Was actually the pinging of a fire alarm. A crazy typewriting friend down the hall who liked to play guitar and listen to Bathory. Movies like The Seventh Seal. Visiting a pet cemetary. (Later I moved to Illinois. More movie watching from fantastic library DVD collection. A movie about a woman from Iceland called The Seagull's Laughter.) I'm listening to gloomy classical music. I was so much younger then! Small fruit songs.

que es eso

X is laughing at a grouchy e-mail from a friend who works for a major florist.
X is watching Cold Valentine.
X is not a fan of the spinning rainbow wheel. On the Mac, that is.
X is not going to buy a banner. Photoshop is thy minion.
(Middle French -mignon-"darling.")
X is things that make you go hmmm.
X es facebooking!
span span style span span span
you know why it is better to use span than italic?
watch people use sign language
a whole party of people using sign language
have you ever looked around and noticed that it is impossible to escape FONTS!
things that make you go Xtine de Pizan.

More positivity...

My friend, who wears red, and her boyfriend, who wears headphones, were in a positive story about the economy.

It's curious

Sometimes when I read things, I am like, that is curious. Like I just read something in an old Seattle publication that used to benefit me greatly (by providing me and a friend with free movie tickets!) Honestly, literary sorts, greatness, what have you, why must it trickle down to that sort of competitive-sounding pettiness? Maybe because it is in the hands of those who need to grow up, or perhaps, I should say, revert, back to the wiser, more childlike ones that they once were/still are.

But who knows, it's all just an interpretation of a writer.

Yesterday I ate a grapefruit, which I'd found on the sidewalk by the bank (because it's food and I felt financially challenged and I also love grapefruit) while watching the President's speech and then, for the first time, the famous Mr. Jindal! I wonder what my conservative southern relatives thought about him. I felt all hyped up and really wanted to go out and buy a sugary beverage. Maybe the Fat Tuesday and DC vibes were getting to me. I felt like I should have been working on a project, too. I eventually settled down. I woke up on top of an open book, though.

Mood is a very curious thing. Earlier today, life felt like it kind of sucked. But after I had my "last" (well almost) class tonight, I got this glorious feeling. FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE. I'd almost forgotten how that feeling rocks. When happens, it happens, and it is supreme!

In these times...

I am in more contact with those who have financial challenges. I have them too. I know people who might be evicted, and are looking for work. Wonder, more than ever, why are there such large discrepancies. Some people work customer service jobs 7 days a week, every day of the year, except Christmas. Tonight at work I found myself talking to someone who was very stressed out and complaining a lot, as usual. He said he just can't get his mind to be quiet. I said, "You can use music..." "Yeah!" he said enthusiastically. "Or, what I did the other day, stare at the light on a computer desktop...or a candle. "That's it, maybe I'll use a candle. I don't have a computer," he said. He also said, "You know, I just love fire. I noticed that when I'm at work, I just always keep gazing into the pizza oven...it's like I can't help it." "Yeah, that's like meditation, you're trying to meditate then, you're trancing. People used to sit around the fire and do that." I said, "If you do that then you can filter out the stuff you don't need and focus on what is helpful to you." "That's what I'll do, I'll meditate and I'll pray on it." It was a kind of nice turn to an oft-repeated scenario.
Now I just have to remember...

Book looking

I'm in a pout because I still can't find a book I read when I was much younger, and I can't remember the title of it. It was set in Europe, in medieval times, I believe. Had a female protagonist. Her uncle was a clockmaker or something. Her village was raided. She had a younger brother who was odd...maybe albino or a deaf mute...she had to take care of him. She had a romance with a knight. She lived with the uncle for a time. The plague came. Some violence in the book. I thought it was a young adult book. I tried to look for it in the Monterey Public Library website. I think a guy wrote it.
I did find the broom-balancing girl in Brueghel's painting about games which we looked at in elementary school. She had a little poem written about her in our basal text...it went something like "so and so can do this, but I can balance a broom. So and so can do that but I can balance a broom." And it ended with a question like "Do you think a circus might want me?" Hmmm. I think. Anyways, memory can be tricky sometimes. But I also found a book I liked, later on, called Midnight Sandwiches at the Mariposa Express.

Late night bleary nonsensical ideas

My first and favorite Choose Your Own Adventure book was about a blond girl and a unicorn. I feel like that is kind of so Christine de Pizan!
I know that some writers have put that Choose Your Own Adventure style into adult writing form now. I could try something.
A Thoreau-ish one could almost like an Emersonish one, except that the former went into occasional fits of coining the latter an Ellery Channing. A guy married a girl, but after objects were thrown and restraining orders issued, he ended up living a kind of partying lifestyle and she became a lesbian. They later became facebook friends and shared amiable custody of their offspring. For x, turn to page 7. For y, turn to page 9.
Okay, it was The Magic of the Unicorn.

10 minutes of anyone's life

Aishawarya Ray's photoshop transformation.
Did it help with the project I'm trying to do? Not at all. But there it is.
The artist likes debating people on religious topics online.
I wonder how many people out there mess around with photoshop and debate religion online and get paid for it.

Happy progress today

These are the small details of my life. At first, I had not consumed anything sugary or unwholesome or un-vegan. (Not that I am vegan, but I think it's a good way to eat.) I had also managed to look at a bill after an enormous car payment and not faint. Then, I did partake of some maple syrup and something not vegan. Oh well. Could be worse. I also decluttered a good portion of my living space of things like old cassette tapes and paper products and rearranged some furniture. Now I'm almost ready to get out the checkbook. Hooray. I went to the library, too. I'm going to work later. And tomorrow, who knows what tomorrow will bring.

cancion y pelicula

Do I remember it correctly. I think? Whatcha want is in Before the Rain. I don't know. I saw it a long time ago. And a little piece of the preview reminds me of being alone and lost in a desert at night in Utah. No flashlight, coming round a corner at night, was never happier to see the moon.

Hallelujah

A deadline I was going to try to frantically meet by tonight has been extended! Maybe I'll just try to meet it anyway. That's funny, it makes me think of actually meeting a rolled up piece of paper and shaking hands with it. Kind of like that "I'm just a bill" video I saw in high school. Ha.

Subversive postive mantra necessary.

Software is your friend.
Software is your friend.
Software is your friend.
Software is your friend.

Software, text, gahhhh

I need to like colors again. I'm feeling fatigued. It's sad. Too much obligatory this & that. Maybe it will be a big whoosh rush feeling to have completed certain tasks. Maybe...the great angel fairy of completing projects with happy ease and enjoyment...will swoop down...maybe....the angel fairy of sense of humor about completing projects...will swoop down...with her magic wand tool...

It's cool

Something my friend created:
Here, here, here, here.

reading, read, watched...

"Ravenous clock runs backwards, scares children" in Wired.
Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv.

Ooo, I feel the resistance

Yes, I know, it is pointless, but it must be like an addiction.
Resistance: I don't want to buy this or that. I don't want to go to class or do homework. (But, I do want to go on a road trip! Class tomorrow prevents me. Meh.) And, in the future, someplace I'd rather be: Kazakstan!
I need to look at the photo of myself standing on a glacier in Alaska.
Also, I say, good for other countries for more-than-two-weeks yearly vacations and a propensity for travel.
That is intelligent.

Maps. And other stuff.

I was just looking at a corner of this room and it occurred to me that I'm only missing one. Because there's a big map of Asia and two of the U.S. I also have one of Canada, and Alaska, highlighting native linguistic groups. But it is really big and I haven't put it up on the wall. The map I'm looking at is of "Early Indian Tribes, Culture Areas, and Linguistic Stocks." For sale by U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, Colorado or Reston, Virginia. I got them at a map shop in Racine, Wisconsin.
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One of these Nights by the Eagles. Thoughts of a gas station in Oklahoma! Road trips! Of rainy nights in Seattle & it's environs!
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I chopped up vegetables for pea soup and boiled eggs and thought of some of the girls I've known. One went to an inaugural ball in '04 with fake blood splattered on her gown, and found herself saying "unhand me, madam!" to a fellow ball attendee who began to pull on her cape. Her sister was outside trying to wipe tear gas out of her eyes while a woman in an evening gown stood at the window and rubbed her eyes and made a mock pout-y face at her. A girl I used to write letters to now lives and works in Australia and has written a novel. Listened to Phantom of the Opera (she used to scream during a rendition of it in band class) and Bittersweet Symphony.
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Had a brief thought about how unlikely it is that you would suspect a friend of, say, putting nails in the tires of your car.
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To work on being happily not poor, go watch "The Secret."
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Rose Wilder Lane. Christine de Pizan.
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Peru! Cardboard children's books read as a kid in upstate NY! What do these have to do with each other? I dunno, must've been some reason they both came up.
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Last library book I read: Crazy Loco Love by Victor Villasenor.
"No, wait!" I shouted. Let's just go a little further. I want to see that little, beautiful green valley on the other side of the big mountain!"
"That's Mexico!" he shouted at me.
"What?"
"Mexico! I can't cross the border without a permit!"
"But I don't see any border!" I yelled back...
He laughed all the more. "What did you expect to see, a great big cement border up here in the sky?" (Page 362.)

Comme ci comme ca

So, yesterday, my friend showed me:
John's a Gay Man Now
Human Resources
"She kind of reminds me of you." (Huh?)
Catherine Tate meets Dr. Who
French Exam

Nature and old photographs

I must scan some! Photos of gorgeous Alaska and of a trip some friends and I took in graduate school to "Massascrewsetts" (as in, screw you, confusing roads) to see Salem and Melville's house and Walden Pond. There is one where I am standing in front of the replica of Thoreau's little house. It is not my "prettiest" photo, at all, but it is more interesting than that, because to me it looks weirdly similar to how he looked in a photograph. I think that. I guess I looked more "pretty" in other photos. But "pretty" is...as "pretty" does...

From somewhere on the internet...

Courtesy of my old pictures folder!!!!
Oh, now I feel like I have to fill this space.
Maybe with something related to Italy.
Or something about food.
Like a recipe.
Or a "concoction."
Concoction:
Low carb tortilla
Creamed honey
Cinnamon
Red currants

NY people (in DC area)

Recently, an old childhood friend from NY contacted me. Tonight, when I was at work, another new person from upstate, like near where I grew up, appeared. And then some NYC guy came by and was behaving in a stereotypically loud fashion, i.e. "I'm from New York, so..." I remember that summer, when I came home from school and had a NY license plate, strangers used to honk at me, and an old guy totally freaked me out while I sat in my car reading a map in a parking lot (at almost midnight!) by knocking on my window and demanding I roll it down so he could give me instructions because "he was from New York, too." (Although, in retrospect, that was kind of funny.) NY people who have just moved here do not think it's that cold, apparently. But I do. Maybe I will furnish the room of poor insulation. What's a measly little space heater after a gigantic car repair bill? I would not be shocked to wake up one day and see ice forming in the water glass on my bedside table. But that hasn't happened yet.

Thank you

I feel that the guy who is outside my window screaming obscenities into his cell phone should chill out. Miao. That was nice, he stopped. :)
Also, I am not going to freak out about that car repair bill from yesterday. I am going to be happy. Just think of how much healthier the car is now! Yeah!

On zee merry-go-round?

What bizarre circumstances compel people to try to reconjure what just can't quite be reconjured, or to accidentally reconjure without the intention of doing so? How strange, to seem to be stuck in a feeling or situation or circumstance...or, alternatively, to feel as if life is going by too fast to ever be stuck anywhere, ever again! Amusement park. Monastery. Lecture hall. Classroom. Garden. Body? (XX, XY, or...?) C'est la vie. To dance or eat or drink or hike or do the duties of your job or do something for the earth.
We are glued, fixed, cemented, stuck on it.

Musica!

Regardless of the number of times I've kvetched about certain types of music being overplayed in the public sphere, sometimes it accidentally comes into my ears, when I'm doing something mundane like typing up a document, and seems perfect for background music!

Kind of funny paraphrasing from class

Have you noticed that the software doesn't care who you are? Software is not your friend. It is an application. It can't tell the difference between you and another person.
How about the temperature of your environment? How about numbers on a sheet of paper? How about the text you're reading? How about a piece of music? How about a light in your car? How about your PC? How about...