Author: grid

So I’ve decided I’m going to atone for not writing a novel in november by writing at least 50,000 words before next year’s nano. But I’m going with the mindblurbs style novel-length writing idea. “No plot, no problem” will be literal in my case. The difference is that I won’t even be trying for one.

It’s all a bit like prose poetry. I had briefly wondered whether others have written novel-length stuff in this vein, but hadn’t done any searching until this morning. To be honest, I hadn’t even known what to search for until today when I somehow dredged up a phrase out of a particularly dusty corner in my brain labeled “automatic writing”. The wikipedia entry on automatic writing led me to another on Surrealist Automatism, which is probably closer to what I’m trying to do.

“In 1919 [Andre] Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote the first automatic book, Les Champs Magnetiques [The Magnetic Fields] while The Automatic Message was one of Breton’s significant theoretical works about automatism.”

I know I have read a bit of surrealist writing, and all I remember was that I found it dense and difficult to get through, but rewarding. I will be hunting down both books in the near future. (This also gives me new appreciation for The Magnetic Fields, the band, which has been a relatively recent discovery.)

Nate challenged me to do this blog archive game. I did a quick google search and couldn’t find the origin of this game, so if anybody knows it, send it on my way. Anyway, here are the rules:

The Blog Archives and Hidden Meanings meme. The criteria:
Delve into your blog archive.
Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. Ponder it for meaning, subtext or hidden agendas.
Tag people to do the same.

“I sometimes fantasize about certain individuals having a more active role in my life… Twists of circumstance putting distance between potential romance.”

I’ll count the second part even though I capitalized “Twists”, grammatically it should have been the same sentence.

Anyway, I don’t have any fucking clue what I meant when I wrote that shit. The post is about possibly moving away to follow laura when (if) she went to grad school. And maybe I was talking about her, but probably I was talking about relationships with other people, people still in the cities when I move away. Trouble is I don’t have any clue who those people might have been. I certainly don’t think anything came of any of them. (This was about the time I had a couple of one-night stands, but otherwise I was only actually dating Laura, and I can’t find any indication of any huge crushes or anything.)

Anyway, I guess this is semi-relevant, because Katie and have talked a few times about moving to Chicago in a few years. I mentioned this to Christy and she didn’t like it one bit.

Anyway, so I’m supposed to challenge someone else. I guess Yami and Dr.Bombay, you’re both it.

I can’t decide how I feel about this decision. I am simultaniously incredibly relieved, and also a bit disappointed with myself.

I mean, of course I’m disappointed with myself. Writing is a big deal to me… but the weird thing is that I’m also not disappointed. I feel daunted by the task ahead, and also less interested in it than I’ve been before.

I feel like nanowrimo is the wrong way to write a novel. Yes, it is good for getting ideas down on paper, it is probably exceptionally good for getting your stentences straightened out–good for the practice of writing, but it is not necessarily good for the parts of writing that I am bad at… the finishing, and the plot. I am terrible with plots.

I have this picture of myself at 45 writing novels. Maybe even at 35. But right now I want to still be in my 20s (last year for it) and enjoying life to the fullest. Not stressing about work or novel writing, or how I’m going to fit both into my day.

I am still going to make an effort to write more frequently. Perhaps I will make an effort to sit down every day and write. Yes, I will do that at least through november. I think I will try and actually finish up the novel I wrote last year for nanowrimo. But more importantly, I think I’m going to try and write a poem a day again. And I don’t want to stop at the end of november. I want to write a poem a day for at least a year. I’m going to write a poem a day until next november, and maybe then I’ll do nanowrimo again as a 30-something. (But without the something.)

Yeah, so how are things? Things are grand, things are fucking great really. I’m dating someone wonderful, and I’m learning to do aerial acrobatics. (Albiet the latter quite slowly; I think I might start going to class more than once a week.) My work has moved to a real location again, which is quite nice. I’m taking the bus to work more or less every day and loving the time I get to read.

Oh yeah, and I’m going to take at least a half-hour to read every day.

So yeah, not writing a novel this november, but I’m going to write a poem every day, and maybe a bit of last year’s novel. I’m definitely going to print that fucker out and do some major editing. And I’m going to take time to read every day. And maybe start playing guitaur again.

…and I’m not going to feel guilty for not writing 2,000 words a day.

So I got in a car accident yesterday. It was totally my fault, and I should have been more careful. Fortunately, neither of us was hurt. I ran into the back of a pickup truck going about 10 mph (maybe 15). The pickup’s bumper was higher than mine, and basically tore through the headlights and hood of my poor little Geo like they were made of paper mache. I posted some pictures on flickr.

Also yesterday, I heard about this Zombie Pub Crawl vlog entry posted over at mnstories filmed by my friend jeremy, and after watching it realized that I also knew one of the organizers. So as if that’s not coincidence enough, guess who I ran into at lunch today? That’s right, small world.

OK, so i did things a little back-ass-wards, and ended up totally fucking up the MT instance on my free hosting account (where all my friend’s blogs are hosted). So if you’re one of those friends, and you can’t post to your blog, i really appologize. I’m going to be re-creating your blogs from scratch in a new location (with a new upgraded MT), and then asking you to switch to the new login. Basically, what i think happned was that the old instance of MT just has too many spam comments on it for the MT upgrade script to handle it. I did a little searching on this problem, but not too extensively. I’m sure other people have encountered it if that is indeed the case. (My comments.db file is 204MB large, if that gives you any idea of how many comments. I believe Elia’s blog has like 30,000 spam comments on it. That’s some fucked up shit right there.)

I wanted to add another item to my blog TODO… it’s really quite a bit more than one item… but I’d really like to sign up for various APIs and start integrating the various sites and services that i use regularly into my blog. This would include my flickr photos, various last.fm (audioscrobbler) information, and possibly boardgamegeek.com information of some kind. (I’m just not very good about updating that site really.)

[Update: I also saw a post on the flickr blog today that led me to QOOP, that prints bound books of your flickr photos… that seems like such a cool idea…Makes me want to take (and post) more photos.]

In order of priority:

1) Install lilina RSS aggregator. (Just discovered this today via delobius… it’s the reason for this post! I think I might also consider contributing to the project by adding a feature to “delete cache before XXX date”.)

2) upgrade MT…

3) upgrade the super-crusty 2.66 MT on various friends’ blogs. (should be able to do this immediately following #2.)

4) somehow call more attention to the mindblurbs, as they are more frequently updated than the main blog. (this may have to wait till after #5.)

5) Full conversion to a blosxom variant. (I’m hoping the options are better now than they were 6 months ago, the last time I checked around for a good package with the features I wanted. I’d prefer to have comment support out of the box, please, and i’d rather it were written in php than perl too, but that’s a secondary requirement.)

I have no idea when i’ll get around to doing any of these. obviously that last one is going to take some actual time, and what a scarce commodity that’s become lately…

So I’m taking care of Dr. Bombay’s cats while he’s in europe for two weeks. Today I happened to glance on his dresser, and discovered a DVD that I had loaned to him a few weeks ago. The DVD is part of a set, and the set isn’t even mine, so I’d been meaning to ask him for it back before he left. Anyway, I grab the DVD on my way out the door, but underneath it is a stack of small papers, maybe one fourth of eight and a half by eleven sheets. One of the papers sticks to the dvd, falling to the floor.

I bent down to pick it up and was surprised to discover printed on it in a very small font these poems… The strange thing was that I could swear I’ve read them before.

[update: They were jason’s friend charlie’s poems. Fucking amazing stuff, some of it. I really liked what I read while sifting through, trying to find some identifying text.]

OK, so the preface to this entry is that I somehow have a myspace fanclub. I don’t know how this happened, other than that I think it’s really more of a fanclub for my brother Dan, (the people who started it are all friends of his) but they don’t want to admit that, so they’re diverting their attentions to me.

Anyway, they’ve asked me some questions about when I started to juggle and such, so here was my response:

I started juggling when I got the klutz book of juggling from my uncle when I was probably like 12. I learned to juggle three balls at that point, but no more. It wasn’t until 10th grade, (1992–I would have been 16) when I met someone else who juggled that I started to “get into it”. I think it was shortly thereafter that I taught my brother Dan to juggle. He and I were very competitive at first, but he learned things much faster. I did learn to juggle clubs before he did, but I think he was working on 5 balls at the time, and wasn’t interested in clubs.

So I’ve been juggling for 13 years, or maybe 17 if you count when I first learned.

And yes, I can unicycle too. I’m working toward level 5, and only have to get my wheel walk solid before I can probably pass it. My sister and I are competing to see who can pass their next level first… I have to get to level 5; she has to get to 9.

I can also juggle while standing on a slackrope, and like to work on various slackrope skills like turning around, standing perpendicular to the rope and walking while rocking from side to side.

Right now I’m also taking an aerial acrobatics class from xelias studio here in Minneapolis. (http://watchhumansfly.com/).

Also, after watching the new cirque du soleil show Corteo, I really want to learn German wheel. I have this whole cirque-like routine worked out in my head where I balance inside a huge ring suspended in the air… do a little juggling, maybe some trapeeze type tricks, and then the ring is lowered to the ground, released from the rope, and I roll around in it like a spinning coin. We’ll see if I ever even get as far as the first suspended part…

I have only one month to plan for nanowrimo. I’m thinking a galactic space odyssey, but I have no idea what will make due for plot, or even characters at this point.

Last year I’d thought I wanted to try my hand at humor, and maybe that would be fun too… maybe I could do both. I really have no idea yet… I’m starting to compile a list in the back of my brain for possibilities.

Tonight was going to be me all alone and sitting around… playing video games and reading the novel that I’ve been carrying around for over a month without reading. (It’s good so far, but slow.)

But I’d forgotten about plans to watch more eppisodes of Lost, the only TV show I’ve been even remotely interested in lately, and furthermore, Laura is over packing boxes for next weekend’s impending move. (I’m planning on being out of town, maybe camping in the badlands.)

This month is so booked it’s fucking crazy. Every saturday has a party (but this next one), and the last weekend I’ll actually be in Chicago (just finalized plans last night) to see my friends Brian and Lana perform at Six Flags Great America. I guess we are also going to see The Midnight Circus while we’re there.