sometimes…

it’s nice when people don’t have a livejournal. so you can scold them, in public, & have that resounding sense that other people are making their own reactionary exclamation-points, & yet the people in question only hear your encouraging, enthusiastic, entirely appropriate response.

“oh, and something else i’ve been remiss in sharing–i’m engaged”

you’re what?!?
okay, yeah, over the past several years, you have actually made reference to a girlfriend or two. definitely two. at least two. two i can name, and we really don’t talk that much. it’s likely there are others. it’s likely in all the really serious conversations we’ve had lately–and they’re the only kind we’ve had lately–you probably had a good chance or two to mention the same one more than once. or mention that you really liked her. or mention that this just kinda happened months ago. like, it just might have come up.

it’s okay. i’d have sent you borderline-qualifying-as-decidedly-reminescent-of-love letters anyway. but good grief, boy, that’s a helluva thing to spring on somebody who’s just excited to see your address in the inbox as proof you haven’t yet been shot!

regional englishes meme:

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

15% Yankee

10% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

this thing is impossible to read on my page; i hope it works better on other peoples’. whose bad idea was it to set the text to default to the user’s settings when that puts it on backgrounds that might entirely white it out, anyway?

light bulb (ding!)

i’ve always gotten in trouble for offering too often to help people do mundane little things. i’m better than anybody needs to be at triggering people’s inner two-year-old: “i can do it myself!” we’re taught not to need help, after all. we’re taught to be autonomous, to idealize autonomy. we’re taught to give & not to take. & i suppose when you think yourself capable, and somebody (especially somebody who exudes an awful lot of mothering, when you’re someone who really doesn’t need another mother) offers—especially repeatedly—to help carry your burdens, you find yourself questioning if not your capability at least the image of that capability that you project. “is she trying to help because she thinks i can’t do this? of course i can do this! why would she think i can’t do this?!”

i don’t think i offer to help people i don’t think are capable very often. (be it in instances of teaching, proto-parenting, mentoring, whenever.) i mean, if somebody’s got too many things in his/her arms and is obviously just about to fall down the stairs, of course i’ll step in and grab a couple items to forestall a collapse. but in general, i’m an elitist snob about it. this isn’t martyrdom. if i think someone’s an idiot, i’m more inclined to find something else to do & let him/her continue in his/her idiocy. helping in the moment isn’t going to change much anyway. if i think somebody’s brilliant, on the other hand, and i see that he/she has frustrating grunt-work in front of him/her, grunt-work any idiot could do, it’s really hard for me not to step in: i want to free those brilliant hands to propagate more brilliance.

i don’t offer to help because i doubt your ability to do things on your own, i offer because i have a deep faith in your ability to do really great things. i offer because if you let me do the simple, little things—fetch that book when i’m going that way anyway, bring an extra coffee, reach around to throw the trash away—then you’ve let me facilitate your work, let me stretch the energy you have for putting something good into the world. on my dark days, sure, these acts of minutae seem inifintely more productive than anything i’ve got to offer anyway. you’re doing me a favor by letting me do stupid little favors and at least be doing something. on my brighter ones, all self-sacrifice aside, it’s a little bit of world-changing, it’s a seed that might become a mighty tree, it’s a simple testimony to how i value who you are and what you do.

qotd

quote of the day, for t, who knows it’s always been so much about (created in, given wings by, lived in hopes of someday finding) the language:

fading rapidly are the days when the spoken word satisfied a yearning for insights into whatever there was to know about the world, where words carefully chosen and artfully expressed carried us beyond the mundane demands of getting through another day. –tom walsh

i don’t believe in killing time.

instructions

please don’t:
congratulate yourself on how much easier you’ve made my life now that you’ve taken something precious from me you’ve already made quite clear was never mine enough that i’d have had grounds to complain

smile at me while you’re doing it, waiting for gratitude

expect me to say anything at all once candor has been thoroughly disqualified

lock me out for guessing wrong again about something too small to have warranted a question

project your limitations onto me

presume there’s anything i can’t or wouldn’t do for you

interpret interest as attack

read yourself into anything or everything i say; for fuck’s sake, if i were going to talk trash about you, i’d be a hell of a lot more specific &; far less complementary

pontificate about the lofty ethics of free space & then tell me what to do with (what it took me far too long to see was never) mine.

ask me what i think about another goddamn thing you don’t want an answer to

assume that because i’m still here i want any part of this

assume that because i’m still here you know anything about me

assume that because i’m not arguing you’re right

---

for a brief while, i entertained the hope that you were why i’d come this way, not because the things i brought with me weren’t love enough, but because there’s been so little reason here for me to even breathe, let alone extend a hand, and i thought perhaps you wanted one. i’m starting to suspect instead that you’re here to teach me the silence i should have learned a long, long time ago.

corrections

1) it is rude to say “cheese-eating surrender-monkey.”

2) anyway, piaget is swiss, not french.

3) it is rude to call people thieves and interlopers who are unaware that they have theived and interloped.

4) it is rude to stage mutinous events that won’t solve anything.

5) i may not put my textbooks into the fireplace while there’s a fire there.

6) the circus is not accepting applications for surly rhetoricians.

7) pizza is not a vegetable.

8) minions should not have “bitch” tattooed across their foreheads.

9) no number of requests will persuade the cats to vacuum.

10) i am not responsible for everybody.

a terminological distinction

mistakes are illogical, un-patterned, instances of mis-doing something we already know how to do, have done correctly before, and will do so again. transposing the “n” and the “d” when typing “and” “adn” is a mistake. errors (err = wander) are logical, purposeful attempts at doing something we suspect or believe we know how to do. using commas to denote “pauses” as if writing were speaking simply recorded on the page is a pattern of error.

right now, i have a vague & fuzzy sense that sometime in the next 15 hours or so that’s going to say something really profound about my personal life. or my career. or your personal life. or what you really did with the car keys you can’t find. if it’s earth-shattering, do let me know.

(but on the silly side, b/c i do still have one, and i’ve been mis-using it lately (quite deliberately, so it’s neither a mistake nor an error) to infect the computers of high school kids, esheep!)

i ♥ geek toys!

totally cool: downloading skype & getting to talk to vileone in shanghai last night (well, for me it was last night–for him it’ll happen mid-day today (tuesday)) for an hour or so TOTALLY FREE. he was describing traffic patterns and skyline shapes outside his window, & we were trawling the net for band sites for music we were thinking of that we ought to share w/one another, and it was one of those fantastic meandery conversations you used to have with your friends in jr. high when phone calls didn’t cost anything because a) they were always local, and b) you weren’t paying the bills anyway.

skype is the bomb. maybe tonight (he just logged in, because presumably it’s o-ridiculous wednesday morning now, and apparently it’s not easy to sleep on the 44th floor of the shanghai marriott, but i’m resisting calling just because i can & thinking the man should get some sleep. or maybe talk to his charming wife a little) we’ll snag vilejynx in a conference call and just max ourselves out on technological glee. yippee!

i felt like a total nerd in my little headset trying to figure out where the mic went for like the 1st three minutes. he adjusted something to fix the delay we were having (i learned something new last night: talking takes longer when one is routed through tokyo), and then i forgot it was nerdy and odd, b/c it was a fantastic connection–he says it’s clear enough that he can understand ian on it, which just amazes me. ever tried talking to little kids on cell phones? their ideosyncratic pronunciations turn into absolute mush over that connection, & they can’t quite figure out what to focus on to hear you… but this is crystal clear. muttering, whispering, whatever.

and did i mention the free part? to/from shanghai? or anywhere else, for that matter. got fast connection, got free telephony. unbelievable. get yours here.

(while i’m ♥ing things, i should add that i also ♥ coffee. mmmmm, coffee. you don’t understand–i’ve been being good while sick & not partaking of the drug-foods (okay, okay, there was that little incident out at becky’s with denise’s mudslides), and i’ve been just still sick forever, & i’m still snuffle-headed & a little woozy, but i’ve officially decided that the little is little enough. so this is my first cup of coffee since we got back to syracuse a week ago today! mmmmm, coffee.)

too much technology

as per burny_md‘s request, the cool campus camera [was once] behind

electric ukuleles, velvet vaginas, & magic scarves

with all the sand that gets in this world, we should all be motherfuckin’ pearls

down in ithaca yestereve, at juna’s café, where the current display of wall-art is an aggressive bloom of flower-images merged with female genitalia, posters promoting “love your yoni” initiatives, and a few hula-hoop sized fabric vulvas one could, presumably, take down off the wall to crawl through in a performance-art recreation of one’s own creation, academom and i met an edgier antje than the one pdxstraycat and i listened in on a few weeks back in binghamton.

we didn’t get to tear up to the sweet, sad song about her grandmother, or hear about the lost saint by the water’s edge; instead the she regaled us with protest-songs, scathingly poignant critiques of presidential character, race divides, too-tightly-closed church doors, and the real-life knives of poverty, with a little unrequited and/or ill-advised love & an empty gas-tank to tie them all together.

when you come down
i will meet you
out in the burning fields
for another damn spin
on your merry-go-round
…
you light me like a candle
with sugar in your mouth
you kiss my lips
and you blow me out

we also, of course, got to laugh with her, about her old landlady, the impossibility of keeping an electric ukulele in key, & the looming danger of her 30th birthday.

“this machine fights fascism,” she explained, picking the little wooden frame up, plugging it in, and twisting at one tiny tuning mechanism or another; “well, it tries to anyway. it’s kind of a ridiculous little instrument.”

between sets, as i snagged the above picture of the ridiculous little instrument, i offered antje geeky internet promises to blog about her, explanations of what blogs were, anyway (she asked!), and a demonstration of the amazing properties of my “multi-olive” magic scarf. she was probably bored silly by the former topic, but the latter so captivated her that academom couldn’t help spontaneously gifting her with the chocolate-brown one we’d just bought. “i couldn’t possibly keep your scarf,” she tried protesting several times, “although i really kind of want to!” academom was having none of it. “i feel guilty keeping it anyway,” she insisted. “my mother just sent me one she knitted herself. take it!” so here and here are pictures (one’s sharper, the other cuter–see, t, i told you i’d find a way to share!) of me and antje and our magic scarves.

“…i’m a little scared,” she said about the birthday; “it’s like the end of the roaring 20s and the beginning of the great depression.”
“you can’t be depressed,” i pointed out (there were maybe 12 of us in the room with her & her guitar, and so the whole affair much more conversational than stagey), “you have a magic scarf!”
“that’s right,” she answered, perking up again, with another giggle toward whomever she’d just rather morbidly assured that she quite probably would be writing a song about turning 30. “this portion of the program has been sponsored by the magic scarf!”

her