Frank’s birthday

“It’s the birthday of poet Frank O’Hara, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1926).”

Thus begins the writer’s almanac entry for today. Frank was a god among poets. I have often quoted Autobiographia Literaria as my favorite poem. It doesn’t seem to move me in quite the same way it used to, but its brilliance is still apparent.

This afternoon Laura and her sisters and Jason and I went to see Pirates of Penzance at the Guthrie theater. I’d never seen it before, and had only watched the first half of the movie-ized version with Kevin Klein. I have to say that I enjoyed watching the intricacies of Klein’s facial expressions more than I did watching the play. Of course it is a musical, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised I didn’t enjoy it all that much.

Anyway, I did find an interesting quote about poetry to add to my collection.

Although we live by strife,
We’re always sorry to begin it,
For what, we ask, is life
Without a touch of Poetry in it?

Hail, Poetry, thou heav’n-born maid!
Thou gildest e’en the pirate’s trade.
Hail, flowing fount of sentiment!
All hail, all hail, divine emollient!

gah

well, things are not really progressing very fast with pyblosxom. It’s like instead of installing movable type once I’m installing it over and over again. I’m going to disable comments for this post because it’s confusing having the form there when it doesn’t do anything, I think.

This week has been busy for me. Monday night I biked to juggling and back, Tuesday I don’t know what the hell I did, and Wednesday I went to see the newly released original Godzilla at the Oak Street Cinema. Godzilla was really good, there were parts that were still funny, but you really didn’t want to laugh, because the movie was seemingly much more serious in tone than the americanized release.

Thursday was the last day for this documentary on Scrabble that I found out about at the Oak Street called Word Wars. My mom loves scrabble, so I told her we had to go, and it didn’t disappoint either of us. The world of competitive scrabble is just as weird and inbred as any other very obsessive-compulsive hobby… juggling, chess, sci-fi fandom, all share simmilar traits when it comes to the their upper eschelons, I think.

After Word Wars, I had this strange compulsion to see Trekies. It’s been on my list (albiet not very high) for quite some time now. We also (not surprisingly) wanted to play some scrabble, so we stopped by the video store, picked up Treckies, and got Laura to join us for some 3-player scrabble. It is definitely harder to play when there is a TV on in the room though, and I always feel bad for some reason if I don’t give a game my full attention.

Tonight I had about fifty things I was suppose to do, or could have done, and instead, Laura and I sat around at home waiting for her sisters to get into town. This seems noble, but we knew they were going to arrive after midnight, so we could have made it no problem to either or both of the birthday parties that were scheduled for tonight. Or maybe done the parade that started at six-thirty. But we both needed time to unwind after work, and it was easier just not to leave the house.

I did watch Shaolin Temple, (Jet Lee’s first movie), and it was a pretty decent action-packed kung-fu movie. Lots of one-hit deaths though, and then when it came down to real battles (at the end of the movie) there were times where it felt like a some of the blows should have been killers, but weren’t. It was silly, but fun, anyway.

Laura’s sisters arrived around 1 am, (having driven from Kansas) and we showed them the house, and played a game of Phase 10. Now I need to sleep… this weekend promises to be as packed as my week has been.

Anyway, that’s the week in summary… a small slice of it anyway.

comment spam sucks

ok, for the time being, comments are disabled. I’ll hopefully have them back online sometime this evening. (When I’m not at work.) With any luck, maybe you won’t even notice!

[update 6-20: ok, things are still not fixed (only almost a week later… :P) I’ve installed pyblosxom and played around a bit with it, but it’s nowhere near to prime time yet. Sorry.]

the weekend I got engaged

Here’s the big-ass story of my weekend and how I proposed to Laura. The important part is just that I proposed to her on Monday, May 31st, and that she said yes. We still have an open relationship, and no, we haven’t yet set a date. If you don’t really care about all the nitty-gritty details of our trip to Orlando, don’t bother reading the narrative below.
Continue reading “the weekend I got engaged”