Category: Uncategorized

His ethernet is fat.
Say “Hello.” — standard line out.
Handshake.

So I was organizing my music this afternoon, something that is sorely overdue, and allows me to procrastinate the other sorely overdue thing I have on my list of things to do today: mowing the lawn. Anyway, I finally came to the pile of CDs that I had previously set aside to either listen to or throw away. (Basically, they’re cds I got for free or something, and had no idea what they sounded like.) By the looks of them, they were all crap. But I pulled this one out of the stack that was in a Ziploc plastic baggie, thinking I’d trash that one first. It was a hand-written CD-R, with a tiny scrap of paper with it in the baggie with a track-list. I looked closer and discovered that I somehow had a Tiki Obmar sampler CD! How I got this, I have no idea. I can’t for the life of me remember where I picked it up.

Tiki Obmar are a relatively recent discovery for me, sometime in the last six months Laura and I heard them at a weird cabaret concert thing she got tickets to for free, and they were awesome. They’re a local three piece electronica type group. It wasn’t till I heard them again at a friend’s gallery in the Art-A-Whirl that I went out and picked up both their CDs. The CDs are AMAZING. I highly recommend them for any fan of electronic music.

And all that time, I already had a sampler CD that one of them probably made on their computer… crazy.

The page or archive you were looking for cannot be found!!! This is probably because I’ve upgraded movable type and chose not to use the “backward compatable” archive scheme. Google will catch on eventually, but until then you can always view the cached version in their results.

Click here to go back to the main blog index.

Or here to go back to the huge archive list.

My boss informed me this morning that I should feel free to complain about work on my blog. I told her I thought that it would be a first if I did. I didn’t think I’d ever actually done any complaining about work on my blog before… but now that I do a search, the third result for “work” comes up with me complaining, so I’m a big fat liar.

Anyway, I’m writing this from cubeville. Population: 2. My coworker Matt is not “home” right now. He will be here hardly at all this semester, as he has school at like one in the afternoon or something every day.

Fluorescent lights suck. Also, these desk chairs suck. (There was some talk of not brining over our chairs from the other office, but I think after everyone got here we realized they will be a necessity.) My biggest complaint would probably have to be that my back is to the “entrance” to cubeville. IE, that’s the way the monitor faces. This makes me feel unconsciously like someone is always watching me. I’ll get over it soon I’m sure.

Oh yeah, and the drive. Took me 22 minutes this morning with no traffic. And there is going to be traffic, I know it. But probably not on the way in, which is good. I just start late enough, I guess.

Biggest bonus about the new diggs would have to be the bathroom. They pipe in classical music, and the toilet paper doesn’t suck! Also, there was some kind of fresh flower in a vase on the marble countertop next to the sinks. They are probably the nicest bathrooms I’ve ever had at a workplace.

Also, I’m switching to a four-day workweek. So fridays off from now on. At least, as long as I put in enough hours the rest of the week. (Which I’m going to make an effort to do.)

Anyway, I should get back to it. Just thought I’d give you all the rundown.

Today’s poem is mediocre at best. I felt incapable of putting some of the best words into it, ‘impacted’, ‘serial cable’, ‘toner’, to name a few. I ended up chopping a bunch off, and it didn’t have any real conclusion, so I tacked on those pathetic last two lines in some feeble effort to bring it all together.

I played City of Heroes all afternoon with about five other friends that I know locally. It was fun, but just now I found myself wondering if maybe I should have been spending that time writing… or at least reading a good book. I’m about a fourth of the way into Broken Angels, by Richard Morgan, and it’s pretty damn good so far. He does a great job with action and violence. Some of the more cinematic prose I’ve read lately, that’s for sure.

Just now I found myself thinking back to the beginning of this year, when I decided I wanted to challenge myself to read more. Time seems to have just slid by so fast since then. Does perception of time change as we get older? I’ve had dozens of conversations about this over the years, and most people seem to think it does. I think we just keep doing the same things over and over again our entire lives (more so as we “grow up” or anyway leave school) and after awhile, we stop noticing ourselves doing those things as we do them. So that a day’s work seems like nothing when you look back on it, even though at the time it was just as real as any other moment.

Time is one subjective motherfucker. It makes mincemeat of us all.

OK, I upgraded to the latest version of movable type. Why? Because 1) I’m not getting off my ass fast enough in terms of switching to WordPress, 2) it was relatively easy (aside from the all-afternoon template finagling I’ve had to do), 3) I wondered what Six Apart had been up to, 4) clean install so comments work again, and 5) so I could beat Laura to it. (That’s last one is a joke, I swear!)

There is a lot of new shit. An amazing amount of new code went into dynamic rendering, (so much php that I’m surprised they didn’t just re-write the whole damn application in it).

The new default templates and stylesheets SUCK ASS though. There is extra white space in their stylesheets everywhere, and things are redundantly declared with great abandon. I had to make major modifications to get back to even this shoddy semblance of the way things used to be. More changes will no doubt be forthcoming. I prefer variable width to fixed width sites anyway, especially ones that are mostly (all) just text.

Tonight is the annual TCUC banquet. Laura is freaking out in the other room because she has to have all kinds of stuff done for it. (She thought she had more time to finish things.) I’ve offered to help, but I think I’m probably more help giving her encouragement and staying out of her way.

Monday night I have a sneak preview ticket to go see Team America: World Police at Block E. (I’ll also be setting up my desk and stuff at our new offices in Bloomington all day before that.) Tuesday The Faint is playing at first ave.

Today’s daily poem took a little more effort than yesterday’s. I sorta did some word doodling for about ten mintues before coming up with anything. I worry a bit about how many people will really be able to understand either of the two poems I’ve written so far. Just to clarify, I don’t feel obligated to post these if they are crap. So I may not be posting a poem a day, I’m just making the effort to write them.

I’m going to mow the yard now.

Worlds of Warcraft. There, I’ve said it. Far more addicting than the also recently aquired Fable (for XBox), Worlds of Warcraft has supplanted City of Heroes as my new favorite video game. I still know lots more people who play CoH, so I’m not going to give it up entirely, I’m just giving some of those people a chance to catch up with the atomic pig, who is about five levels above most of their highest level characters. ;)

So yeah, I got accepted into the WoW beta test. That means that this newest latest addiction is entirely free. (Until release.) Unfortunately, all our characters will go away at that time. So Grid, my level 12 Undead Mage will at that time cease to exist. I think I will probably stop playing at that time. At least, I hope I will be sick of it by then.

Unlike city of heroes, worlds of warcraft is a very different game, depending on what “race” you choose to play. (At least in the early levels anyway.) There are less options for customizing your character up front, but more options as the game progresses. They are very different games, really.

Fable is also pretty fun. I just don’t know when I’ll get around to playing it in betwen marathon nights full of WoW goodness. Laura started playing it, and last actually went to bed later than I did. (After last sunday realizing I’d played WoW from midnight to 7:30, I decided I’m going to make sure I get in bed by 1 am from now on.) It’s just added incentive to start playing earlier.

I went to Tai Chi today for the first time in about two weeks. As we began the standing meditation (in the beginning of class, just after stretches) I was composing this blog entry about how I’m going to take a break from Tai Chi for a while. Maybe all winter, I thought. But then as class ended, and I was wishing we did the entire form at the end of every class (as we did today), I started chatting with some of the people I’ve gotten to “know” from my months at the studio. Then the next (more advanced) class began, and as most of those friends turned towards it, the instructor turned back and beckoned to me specifically. It was my first non-beginning tai-chi course at the studio. After that class, I didn’t feel like I’d learned anything extraordinary, but then it’s not about learning extraordinary things. It’s about practicing tai chi. And it’s about knowing yourself.

One of my last posts was about how important I think it is to know yourself emotionally, and how I feel that is the poet’s job and obligation. Tai Chi is about knowing your physical self. And unfortunately, you can’t just think about your body and know how it bends and how it moves. You actually have to bend and move to know those things. And interestingly enough, the more you bend and move, the better you become at bending and moving. The same probably holds true for the non-physical self as well. The more you think the better you are going to be at thinking.

So I think maybe I’ll keep going to Tai Chi for now at least. I do really feel a sense of inner peace after class, a sense of calm and collection. Strange that you have to not think to feel the most centered.

In today’s writer’s almanac, there was a quote from Babette Deutsch that read:

The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.

This is actually very similar to another quote from her that I already had in my collection:

Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.

I have always thought this to be true. The poet’s job is often to bottle or catalogue emotion. It is interesting to note that I don’t really practice what I preach… in other words that I do this remarkably poorly. Most of my poems are really just wordplaying buffoonery. I don’t even bother throwing in a dead housepet or lost pair of shoes. (OK, I may have one poem about a lost pair of shoes. Maybe.) Anyway, most of my poems are light and fluffy. But still, maybe they capture a hint of what it means to be me.

But it’s really more the philosophy of the above statements that I try to live by. I am someone who wants to know WHY I have all the thoughts and emotions that I do. I want to trace down my grumpiness on any given afternoon to the midnight snack I had the night before. Or perhaps more commonly find the reason behind a particular jealousy or relationship aggravation. I live by this idea so much that it’s not uncommon for me to get frustrated at other people when they don’t share this same philosophy. If someone doesn’t know why they feel the way I do, my typical response is to berate them for not thinking about it sooner. And goad them into spending some time thinking about it.

A poet is a scientist in the study of his or her own life. Science begins and ends with observation, but along the way one must hypothesize and theorize and test ones own life to find consistency. To find conclusion. To find meaning.

I don’t really have any particularly startling discoveries today, but I’m going to find some poems by Babette Deutsch, and maybe I can share in some of hers.

It’s cold in the office and I guess I probably have dozens of more important things to be doing, but my inbox is filled with unread Writer’s Almanac entries and the one from today burns sinewy words into my braincan leaving sleepy room for unresolved plots and wordspun passages of time like model trains on a table or plates of spaghetti and asparagus. (Tastes like science experiments or genetic mutations.) And hot rods and supermodels and teflon-slickwet sidewalks, and all the while my slinky consciousness undulating or rolling down the stairs or just sitting still in a spiral that is near impossible to follow to any conclusion because it just keeps on like a mobius strip or simple circle lacking any plan or finishing touch.

Disturbing pig fact for the day: Last night I read that dripping male pig saliva on a female pig in heat will completely immobilize the female.