(hat tip to Janet Reid)
Stuck-in-the-Mud
I like to think of myself as a flexible guy — able to roll with the punches, able to work around problems, able to, y’know, cope. It’s amazing how quickly and how profoundly that self-image can be shaken simply by adding an extra person to the household.
Recently fallen on some sudden, transitory, but inarguably hard times, The Stepson will be staying with us for a while. Whatever other effects this has wrought and will continue to wreak on the delicate ballet of The Missus’s and my everyday life, it has revealed in me — to myself — a deep attachment to Keeping Trivial Things Unchanged.
Case in point: tableware. It really doesn’t matter that The Missus and I (mostly I, probably) have always kept the matched flatware in the drawer in the plastic bin with the variously sized and shaped little niches: one each for big knives, butter knives, dinner forks, teaspoons, tablespoons, and dessert forks. It doesn’t really matter that the various mismatched flatware (teaspoons, mostly) is just sort of tumbled together at the front of the drawer, where it can be easily retrieved without having to root around. It doesn’t really matter that we use the mismatched teaspoons just for dishing out canned pet food.
And, especially, it doesn’t really matter that all these neat little anal-retentive/obsessive-compulsive categories of household objects and their uses are suddenly blurring around the edges.
So if all that doesn’t really matter, whence the pursed-lips exasperation I suddenly find on my face when I go to feed the dog or cat and can’t find any mismatched teaspoons, but plenty of the matched sort? or when I pull open the drawer and find dessert forks and dinner forks shamelessly copulating in each others’ apartments?
What’s wrong with me?
I know: nothing is wrong with me. Everybody has his or her little “things” (or so goes the palliative advice which I can even now hear myself offering someone else in similar straits). Crotchets, right?
And yet, dang, I’m disappointed in myself. None of it is worth making an issue over, all of it could be corrected simply by putting a bug (or series of bugs) in The Stepson’s ear — or The Missus’s, come to that. But nope. Me, I’d apparently prefer to pout.
At the Outset
From whiskey river:
Morning
Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?This is the best–
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso–maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins–
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,and, if necessary, the windows–
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
(Billy Collins [source])
…and:
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.
(Jeanette Winterson [source])
The Quickening Squirrel
Marta was wondering a few days ago about writerly magic numbers: specific quantifiable targets which writers hope to achieve within some given time period. She’s doing NaNoWriMo, so of course over her head looms the magic 50,000-words-in-a-November target. But she asked what other writers might choose to be satisfied with: N pages or words per day, or one complete draft or book by date X, or whatever.
In a long, wool-gathering post back in September, among other things which I scavenged for the point(s) I was making, I mentioned an ambitious project by artist Rowena, a/k/a Warrior Girl/Mama: to create 100 pieces of art in a 100-day block of time. It just knocked me out (it still does) that she managed to pull that off.
Yes, it knocked me out, and made me very happy; although it wasn’t writing but art, it confirmed what I’ve believed for many years now. To wit: To get really comfortable doing something creative, you have to do it every single day. None of this vaporous swoony “Oh, I must wait for inspiration to strike!” nonsense. None of those “But I just have so many things on my mind/distractions to deal with!” excuses. Just do it. Every day.
Turns out someone else took inspiration from Rowena’s experiment: pseudonymous RAMH friend The Querulous Squirrel.
When the Vampires Have Finally All Flitted Away
…at least until the next revival: are werewolves the next It Creatures?
I have not read the Twilight series of books. But as I understand it, the new film, New Moon, features some sort of apocalyptic face-off between the vampires — brooding Edward and his ilk — and the werewolves.
(This premise seems to me to have been lifted from the Underworld series, starring Kate Beckinsale — but those films no doubt lifted from some other source, and so on, and so on. For a genre so heavily featuring the uselessness of mirrors, the supernatural-near-human-monster films seem to indulge in an awful lot of self-reflection.)
Anyway, I just learned of the impending (February 2010) release of a remake of the old Universal Horror film The Wolf Man, starring Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, and Hugo Weaving.
Things Programmers Think (and Sometimes Say)
In my day job, I have a couple of stock responses to questions from clients or just to my (and their) experiences with computers. One of these stock responses is something which clients almost never like to hear, because it translates, roughly, to This may sound like a “yes,” but if you believe that you’re crazy:
Oh, the [program/database/software tool] I’ve provided you with can be made to do almost anything. Some things aren’t worth paying for, though.
They often don’t hear the other stock response at all, because it comes across as a bit too braggy, smug, self-satisfied; I may be all of those things, but — haha — just don’t want anyone to know it.
But I think it to myself often enough, you bet. Always after a bout with some truculent beast of a technical problem: a program whose interface didn’t let me do X (although I knew damned well that X was among the things it should let me do); an oddball hardware device — a label printer, scanner, digital camera, trackball — which finally allowed itself to be fitted (usually tightly) with the software clothing available; a database query which had always taken thirty minutes to run but suddenly, simply because I poked at it and finally changed just, like, two words, returns its results in seconds. Whatever. Here’s what I think to myself:
The programmer always wins.
From my post earlier this week, you may already know this has been the sort of week with my home computer to make even an ardent technologist long for the days of abacus and quill. The image at the top of today’s post (like the one from mid-week) sort of sums it up. I had to take it with a camera, rather than the system’s built-in screen-capture feature, and as a result it’s sort of wobbly and muddy and Moire-patterned, but it gives you the idea.
Late yesterday afternoon, I took the “after” counterpart:
Big difference, huh?
True, I haven’t yet restored everything. But at that moment, I’ll tell ya: I felt pretty damned full of myself.
(Which brings to mind, now, that other thing I keep forgetting, what is it?, something about… pride? Yeah, that’s it. Pride. Oh, and I think there might be something about a fall involved, too.)
Things Which Seem Otherwise
From whiskey river:
Let me make this perfectly clear.
I have never written anything because it is a Poem.
This is a mistake you always make about me,
A dangerous mistake. I promise you
I am not writing this because it is a Poem.You suspect this is a posture or an act
I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.You actually think I care if this
Poem gets off the ground or not. Well
I don’t care if this poem gets off the ground or not
And neither should you.
All I have ever cared about
And all you should ever care about
Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
It is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing.
(Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear,” Afterworlds)
…and:
Then there is the BIG PROBLEM — who are you? There is an endemic human tendency for self-deception. We all think we’re one kind of person when we’re somewhat different (especially viewed by others) than we imagine we are. You — the reader — no doubt feel you’re an exception.
(Alan Fletcher)
…and:
Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Can’t you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—
(G.K. Chesterton, from The Man Who Was Thursday [source])
Smashing Your Thumb with Your Trusty Hammer
[Technology alert: If you’re not into PC tech, especially wonky stuff about operating systems and such, you might want to give this post a pass.]
As some of you may know, I almost never use Microsoft Windows anymore — at least, when at home. (At work, there’s no other option.) Until a couple days ago, in fact, I hadn’t used Windows since, oh, August, maybe? July?
That phrase “almost never use Microsoft Windows anymore” catches a lot of people by surprise. Especially when I clarify further: “…and I don’t own a Mac, either.” Like, what other option is there? And all other considerations aside, why would someone NOT use Windows or a Mac in the first place?
Losing Our Heads Over Modest Gods
[Above, a set of miniature Egyptian canopic jars depicting, according to the retailer, “Anubis, Horus, Monkey God, Prince.”* Click image for original.]
From whiskey river (which this week celebrated eight years of bringing to the Web wisdom about things we generally know, but generally do not speak of):
Shinto
When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of the mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.Eight million Shinto deities **
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us —
touch us and move on.
(Jorge Luis Borges)
Art, in Service to Commerce
…but first art, damn it:
[As with the previous post, another hat tip to Janet Reid. What can I say? When the woman’s on a roll, she’s on a roll.]
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