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That last poem was inspired by Laura, who said I should write a poem using the sound of snowpants.. “vvvvvt-vvvvvvt-vvvvvvt-vvvvvvt” (which I had IM’d to her). But… it’s dedicated to irish-girl, who was the second person I showed the poem to, and who apparently actually broke her brother’s leg sledding when she was a kid. (Hmm. On second thought she didn’t specify when the leg was broken. Perhaps it was recently.)

My previous entry, the agate poem, was written as I woke up wednesday morning. I was feeling the particular slowness of winter eroding into spring, and the agate metaphor popped into my head. “Seasons change like agates smoothing”. I let the line run through my head as I did my morning rituals — shower, get dresssed, collect things to bring to work for my lunch… I didn’t actually type it out until just before I left for work. I also didn’t title it until then, and the title is the part I most question at this point.

Poetry is one of those things that I love to think about. I was all crabby and pissed off after reading a news article about bush’s tax breaks for the rich, and now I’m feeling at least a little better. Poetry is therapy. Poetry is rich cream in your coffee.

In the frozen foods at the grocery store after I pointed out the chocolate ice cream pops with chocolate filling, my friend Alex said “I think the world is coming to an end. There are movies about movies, and chocolate filled chocolate… Creativity is dead.” (I’m paraphrasing, I can’t remember the exact quote.)

xomina and I have agreed to disagree on this very subject. I enjoy writing poems about my poetry. (And even collect good quotes on the subject.) Does this make me less creative? Perhaps it’s true! (I’ve never felt coming up with new ideas was my strong point. More coming up with new ways to say the same things — hopefully they’re good, inventive ways.)

EL Fudge has come up with a new way to say Butterfinger (inside an ELFudge cookie), so I’m going to go have that conversation now…

I’ve been a juggling fiend. Friday: at least two hours of unicycle hockey, split up into the “good” and “peewee” teams. There were so many people there that I didn’t make the “good” cut, and consequently scored about 5 or 6 times against players who were generally younger than I’d care to admit.

Saturday: The bulk of the festival here… Unfortunately, I’d worn myself out playing uni-hockey the night before, and then combat for a few hours right after getting there. I got a second wind about the time I had to sit down and watch to see if any of my raffle tickets were called. They weren’t.

Saturday night: The mondo show has continued to improve in caliber and quality under its current artistic direction. I think this was the third year in a row we’ve sold out that 500 seat theater. [I wasted more than a few minutes here trying to look up the word for foot juggling… I think it starts with a p, as in it shares the same prefix as podiatrist.] Anyway, it was a great show, and there was much juggling afterwards (until the gym closed at two AM.)

Sunday: I showed up to the festival, and didn’t practice 1 trick the ENTIRE time I was there. I played about two more hours of hockey, and then volley club until they kicked us out at 5:00. I hadn’t played volley club since ren fest, and it was fun as hell.

Of course, yesterday we went to monday night juggling practice… low attendance for some reason… (I’m guessing people were worn out, those wusses!) My sister called me to tell me about how many new bruises she had after the weekend. (At least ten big ones, apparently.) Unicycling does that, especially when you’re practicing for level 8, as she was all weekend. (For those who really care, I passed level 3 a few weeks ago. I’d been stuck on it for about a year–I couldn’t go over the board.) Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that she was in the show… I got a fair amount of comments afterward about how good she is.

Probably the most vindicating moment of the weekend was when (late Sat night) I was hanging out with a group of people including this guy Sam. Sam is not at all a bad juggler… pretty good in fact, and he regularly cleans house at combat. I was unicycling, and he said something along the lines of “You’re better than me at everything I do!” Now, this was obviously a false statement, but he was sincere (mostly in coveting my unicycle skills, I’m sure), and anyway it felt good to hear. I have been doing this juggling crap for something like 10 years now (7 or 8 with any seriousness), so I should be better than some people, damnit!

PS, Note: this is not the aforementioned meta-juggling post that I’d meant to write and hinted about a few weeks ago. I will write that someday… someday.

Prey was just OK. It got a little less believable at the end. It was fun, and suspenseful, but not especially the kind of thing I like to read. It was to gut wrenchingly edge-of-your-seat. Strangely enough, I don’t go in for that kind of thing, really.

If all goes well, I’ll be getting a second book to read by Michael Marshal Smith today. I was pretty impressed to see the Mpls. Library has three or four of his books at the downtown location. (I ordered Only Forward from amazon.co.uk a while back, and it was pretty good, nothing terribly special, but well worth reading.)

Woah, I can’t believe I almost forgot to mention that MONDO Jugglefest is this weekend. That’s where I’ll be from friday after work till sunday late afternoon. I’m going to spend a bit of time very soon and whip up some forms for the website.

I’m finally reading Michael Crichton’s Prey. I’m almost done with it, so maybe I’ll say more when I know how it ends. (It’s pretty good so far, but too much like an action movie. His exposition is too dry, and the action too intense. I want more stuff that’s somewhere in the middle, I guess. Actually, I take it back… only some of the exposition is dry… some of it is quite interesting. I have a feeling I’m going to be disappointed that he doesn’t bring up more of the topics I want him to bring up, but I’ll save that pronouncement for when I’m finished.)

My video game addiction has reached a new high (low?) with Kingdom Hearts. I played it for about 9 hours last Sunday, and fifteen hours over the weekend total. At one point, after I’d been playing for at least 5 hours straight, I realized that my index finger was going numb in the tip. I thought for awhile last night I had “burned out” on it, until I decided to quit playing the level I was on (the whale that swallows Pinocchio), and go to another one (where you get to play as the little mermaid)… that significantly revived my interest in the game, and I played for another couple of hours.

I also watched episodes 4 and 5 of Cosmos last night. Nate is out of town for a week, (on his yearly jaunt to steamboat) and absolved me of the requisite that I watch them with him, so I’ll be plowing through them as I desire to do so. They’re absolutely fascinating, and I can see why they were so popular.

After episode 4, I looked up scale models of the solar system (because I immediately wanted to build one), and I found a whole list of them over on the Gainesville Solar Walk website, and another page with a huge list of related links on it.

I have good news and bad news. They’re the same news. In a nutshell: Laura got laid off yesterday. She worked at a photo lab (a “professional” photo lab), and now that their busy season is over, they had to let some people go. She’d been there for over a year, but she was still on the lower end in terms of seniority. (I guess the year before they actually took out a loan in order to keep all their employees. An observation made questionable by the fact that they also spent lots of money last year on new equipment.) She did some (half) of their digital work, although she’d been hired originally just as a front desk position.

Frankly, I always felt she was way overqualified for the job, as she has a BA in Fine Arts (emphasis on Photography), and had worked previously full time doing portrait photography.

<obligatory plug> Anyway, if anybody reading this knows of anyone in the Twin Cities area looking for photographers, (or digital artists), let us know. <end plug, on with semi-interesting content>

So… I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but by some strange coincidence, yesterday was also Nate’s last day where he worked. Nate is one of the luckiest sons of bitches in my esteem right now. They closed his store (he was an assistant retail manager), and offered him a $6000 severance package. Then, (after the severance offer, I think) they offered him a position at another store. Needless to say, he wanted the $6K, so he turned it down. This all happened about a month ago. Two days later, he had another job lined up — that bastard.

This weekend, Laura and I will be unicycling in the torchlight parade in St. Paul. Look for the bald guy juggling torches. (Actually, I’ll probably be wearing a hat.)

I have been an absolutely awful correspondent lately. My cousin who is eight years old (or maybe nine or ten) sent me a letter in October, and I haven’t yet responded. This morning, I sent a letter to my sister that was in response to something she sent me while she was on vacation over a year and a half ago. I had started to respond while I was on vacation, a few weeks later, but I only got a few pages into it before the vacation became overwhelming. I forgot about the letter in my laptop bag for over a year.

Yet, I try to turn around emails in less than a day. What does that say?

Snailmail has turned into a form of communication relegated to bills and advertisements, credit card offers and political fliers. Yet there is still some small part of me that looks forward to getting the mail every day. Maybe it’s because last summer I spent far too much money on ebay. Or maybe it’s the magazines I still receive (despite occasionally reading the more interesting articles online before they reach my house). Whatever the reasons, it seems that almost every writer has over-romanticized the physical and tangible letter. There is a mystery and solidity to the sport of tree-killing I suppose, but for me it’s nowhere near the thrill and rush of a good email.

Well, I’m here to romanticize digital letter writing. Email is beautiful! Fixed width fonts and headers and subject lines� these are some of my favorite things.

epistolarily yours,
-marty

When I get depressed, I find that I merely have to force myself to “step back”, and generally look at a bigger piece of the picture, and the feeling dissipates. Basically, I find that, my depression is usually from focusing in too hard on one (generally bad or sad) part of my life all at once.

For example, Laura noticed recently that I get frustrated or angry after I pay bills. It’s not that I don’t have enough money, or that I’m feeling particularly screwed by the man or anything like that. It’s usually just that I’m so focused on an aspect of life that i find thoroughly unenjoyable — money — that it affects my entire emotional outlook.

I have always found that thinking about space and the universe, especially the smallness of our tiny corner of it, to be particularly relaxing and satisfying. It wasn’t until high school that I stumbled upon, or realized, the power of those cosmic thoughts to calm my then often-intruding depression. I was learning to meditate (probably the only time in my life when I did so regularly). One of my favorite techniques as taught to me by my favorite writing teacher was to imagine myself as a galaxy or spinning ball of bright lights or stars. The point was to picture the state of these lights reflecting the state of my emotions, and then to calm the spinning of the lights until they were still, or at least calm.

Another meditation or calming technique I have also used for a long time involves thinking of an image of myself, then my immediate surroundings, then backing away until I saw the planet earth dwindle to a tiny speck. I like to try and imagine the other planets in relation to earth, and how large they are, and then the sun. All the while still backing away from the infinitely small image that is myself. As the sun shrinks away, I imagine exiting the solar system and then our galaxy, and so on and so on… This is particularly useful when I can’t sleep at night. (As an aside, I’ve always loved the last 20 seconds or so of the first Men In Black movie because it does something similar to this.)

Perhaps it is partly due to this stellar affinity that I have become (in one viewing) completely enamored with Carl Sagan’s first episode of Cosmos. Nate purchased the DVD box set, and I’m excited to see them all.

I’m probably not saying any of this very well, but I made an update to one of my blog posts that prompted this entry. (BTW, props to xomina for thinking of the word minisculity. I had already titled my entry by the time he came up with it, but I like it so much that I tacked it on anyway. *grin*)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole “lazy web” concept. I had a sort of lazyweb experience happen the other day when I posted on irish-girl’s blog that I wanted a site to pay my bills for me. (a few people pointed me to various services that do just that.)

This is of course especially appealing because I’m quite lazy, and I have lots of useless ideas.

I have a couple of useless links. dead baby jokes, and homestarrunner’s system is down message

Non-sequitur for the day: What’s up with women wearing skirts over pants? When did this become fashionable, and how?