Apostrophic Chunder

days became years
  whistling softly down that hallway
i was just
  minding my own
still dripping wet with dreamy sleep
  when
you fell from the sky
  so full of hot blood
you smelled
  so delicious
like some imported exotic fruit
  to be savored
each bite a juicy universe of new flavors

if bodies vessels
  and the world a school
we'd conspired in some court
  hidden messages under a stone
been skinny dipping
  howled at the moon
coupled slowly sometimes
  other times savagely
eyed each other knowingly
  and each wondered just what
the f*ck was going on
  with the other one
all these goings on well before then
  when days became years

easy comfort need not be ruined
  by distance and irrelevant time
you ate the sweet cold plums in the icebox
  and i dared to eat a peach
know that the effortlessness is still there
  plenty more gravel roads and
faded blue pick-me-up trucks
  plenty more road trip diners and moments
outside of time

Yesterday I drank too much coffee. Today I'll probably do it again. It has become glaringly apparent that my education thus far hasn't prepared me for where I want to go next. This is inconvenient, but not irreversible. It is alarming only because I designed the curriculum based on ... my interests on the day that I signed up for classes each semester? In hindsight, that sounds like really bad planning! Of course, I feel like I'm getting "well rounded" - filling in some historical blank spots and cultural voids. I don't understand how highly successful people decide what what they want to be and just jump on that path. I need to tap what seems to be a great font of potential locked inside me. It is encouraging when I hear about people who change careers after ten or thirty years. So I'm interviewing architects, designers, and artists. I'm looking at schools, and weighing options. It's keeping me up late at night, and my frantic turbo-babble about this next leap in life is driving my significant other crazy. What's fascinating and perhaps satisfying to me is that the areas where I have the most experience and money-making potential have diminished into alternate or "backup" plans. So in my rose-tinted world, the worst case scenario is a job I like instead of a career that I love.

Labels: career, coffee

Limited only to what I said specifically about the weather. Now that we have three inches and counting of downy white powder on the ground here in the beautiful and scenic northern Shenandoah Valley, I don't care about your umbrella drinks and swimming pools. I've already shoveled and salted once, and I intend to do it again. I'm inside, not drinking hot chocolate. I opened the blinds to a few windows so that the cats could marvel at the sight. They've probably forgotten last year's big snow. They've probably forgotten anything that happened two hours ago. They're not particularly interested in the details. That's what I love about them. In other news, we bought them a water fountain and some other goodies recently. They don't seem particularly impressed with technology. Laptops are warm, so they make good beds. Cotton is fun to chew on, so it's a valuable commodity. I started this post before 1 PM and now it's 3:00. I had to put it on hold because I installed a new ftp server the other day and left it unconfigured to the point of broken-ness. So I had to go fix that. I had to RTFM a lot and even went to the irc channel dedicated to the server software. It was there that a friendly person reminded me of two things: RTFM before you ask and try it on localhost first before externally. Thank you friendly person! Now that my thought is thoroughly destroyed and I have a headache, I'll post the stupid thing with the photo (which was what brought the broken ftp to my attention in the first place.)

Fundamentals of 3D Design class, day one... we are shown a pair of unassuming blue dice made of card stock or a similar material. We are given plastic cups and told to fabricate a cube that will not fall to the bottom of the cup, but will get stuck below the rim of the cup. We are to use a paper material and no adhesive or tape. This sounds easy. It is decidedly not easy. It is easy to go find this in an origami book or button mash over to your favorite search engine and find a cheat sheet, a how-to, a step by step, or even a video. Internet research wasn't the assignment though. I recommend trying it. I'm using crap inkjet paper to build my prototypes. I have a decent cube, but it's not exactly seamless yet. If you think this is a waste of time, consider that you are sitting there reading random blogs on the internet.

The time to write freely upon the looming divergence is at hand. Having just re-read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, isn't it just so timely to decide that following the path of least resistance is no longer an appropriate plan of attack? Just rolling out of bed each day and crawling to the coffee counter in one's pajamas, rubbing the eyes like a little boy awakened early on Sunday will have to be reserved for... Sundays. Immediately, one must draw up a mission statement, followed by a new resume chock full of applicable qualifications and experience. Such major surgery demands a complete rewrite. Such rewriting demands paradigm shifts and discomfort. Point A is labeled "desire for change." Point A is a familiar one room apartment full of a lifetime's collection of paperweights and binders. There is a file cabinet in the corner overflowing with "new" manifestos and requests for comment. Will this be the one that sends the contents of that old dusty cabinet to the burn pile?! Memos will be filed with the Office of Procrastination: You're all fired!

Winter break is over. I want to kick myself every time I hear myself saying something about having no time to do anything "once school starts again." It's like telling somebody how hard you work, or how much you didn't sleep last night. Aside from the (very) few family members and friends who actually do care what's going on in your life, nobody wants to hear about scheduling conflicts or career problems. You can either be somewhere or you can't. Excuses amount to wasted breath. You can blog about it, and then maybe you're wasting keystrokes. Maybe I am wasting keystrokes. Off track as usual, that's not what I'm blogging about. Now I've got a stack of books on my bedside table that won't get read until May or so, and an enduring thirst for knowledge that I haven't had since I was just a pipsqueak. Just ordered the hardback 3rd edition of Marilyn Stockstad's Art History textbook, and I'm excited about reading it. Until I reach the point of extreme burnout in a couple of months, I'm riding this information buzz for all it's worth.

Labels: back to school, excuses

Last night I couldn't sleep, and so I burned up a few more chapters of Sophie's World. To a seasoned philosopher or bookish chap, this book might seem remedial and trite. To someone with zero knowledge of philosophy, it's quite good. It's a fictional novel that manages to be a brief history of western philosophy. The best thing about it is that it was written by a Norwegian philosophy teacher, and as such, has a much different tone and point of view from those of an American writer. Anyway, that's not what I stumbled in here to mumble about. I don't know how I ended up there today, but I had heard about this essay before. I just happened to find it for free on one of Neal Stephenson's book sites. It's called "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" and it is supposed to be about the state of affairs in the operating system market, circa 1999. Having read half of it, I would say it's definitely worth the time. If you are particularly sensitive about your chosen OS and you wear it like a badge, prepare yourself for your own righteous indignation. If you've used them all, and you don't give a crap which one you're sitting in front of, then you'll probably enjoy it more. Here's the link, and the download is absolutely safe and free. It's just a zipped text file. http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

Labels: Computers, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

If you constantly push and shove your creative mind only to publish every passing thought or opinion online, then how do you make your living selling ideas and being creative? I guess there are plenty of jobs selling products that someone else already thought of. There are plenty of days to spend talking on the phone with people you'll never see, convincing those people that the products that somebody else already thought of inventing are fabulous and there's no way to go on living without them. There are a plethora of such positions with ample compensation just waiting for warm bodies to fall from a passing warm body truck into expensive rolling desk chairs, and sell those products.

Let's not talk about the price of gasoline. We'll avoid the lack of insightful programming on television. Dance around the war issue. Forget about the primaries and the presidential election. We'll just sweep the school/mall/restaurant shootings under the carpet. If someone is going to or from jail, sneaking out of rehab, or getting divorced - let's just give them the privacy that we would want if we were in their situation. Stick with the weather, and personally I'm not interested in wind chill factor, frost, ice, or any other such ice cream truck killers. Yes, please come correct with those steady high seventies, partly cloudy and lightly breezy. Take me down to the water with that fake looking blue color like you see on travelocity. Get me one of those drinks with the umbrella. Throw the wireless router in the pool and pass me some of that nasty coconut lotion. I'm going to get burnt like a Kramer turkey and then after lunch, I'd love a nap in a dimly lit room decorated with dark wicker under a ceiling fan with carved mahogany palm leaf blades.

There were crunchy bits floating in the lukewarm coffee. He spat a bitter mouthful of the chunky swill all over his terminal. His cubicle didn't flinch as he jumped up and threw the mug down the aisle, over the rows of unsuspecting clerical slaves. The mug was identified and vaporized by the custodial robot before it hit the floor. Two uniformed guards quietly came and took him away to be re-processed. A younger man was brought in about an hour later, after the cubicle had been sterilized. The new man logged into the terminal and got right to work.

Labels: automaton

I do my best not to make light of the misery of others, but sometimes it just comes out. I have verbal diarrhea, the kind you might get from partially digesting a lot of fiction - a lot of high-carb, greasy, cheesy fiction. So a kid who's down on his luck might get the wrong idea about me from the way I laugh and smirk and poke fun. I'm really here to help. I was sent from the future to save your life. I spew non sequiturs all over your ordered conversation of pleasantries. Lately I've been thinking about this. I can see how people grow into their attitudes and and settle into ruts of social behavior. Once you go through something a few times, you just start to feel that you've completed that particular task or problem, and you don't want to repeat it. You don't want to explain yourself, because you don't have to anymore. You take the seat you want, because you deserve it. You don't need to protect nature, because nature would just as soon absorb you as look back at you. Anyway, before I ramble off into the incoherent rumblings of another hopelessly tangential rant, I just wanted to say that I'm getting over that feeling of entitlement that's been crippling our communications. I'm going to work harder at getting along with you. I won't start quoting any wise philanthropic philosophers or saints (yet).

Labels: verbal diarrhea