it's not that i haven't been paying attention....

but i have been lacking in the, you know, actual posting dept. what would that be? postage sounded right in my head but now...not so much. anyhoo, you should know i'm not as much a slacker as i seem. here's what i've been doing...

In A Few Thousand Words

Gotta have somethin' to show to the people, eh? Cause i sure as heck ain't directin' any strangers to this corner of the intergalactic net. But anyhoo - we should also have a web gallery. in which we can both post pictures for the other to download in full-sized glory, which, incidentally does give me a sense of resolution. so there, Alanis! put that in your pipe and scream at it... it occurs to me that this reference, if not explained, may feel ten or so years too late. but i assure you, i hear gems off of jagged little pill every day of my current, supposedly new-millenium existence.  some people. it's like you can take the girl outta the 90's, but you can't take the 90's out of her playlist. ("her" being my reference to the Goddess of alternative retail music. who could be a God for all i know.)

sigh. 

my,

i

miss thine. 

for mine,

though inclined

to unbind

my smile,

after a while

make the miles

seem like files

stacked in piles

that stretch higher

than any fire

they'd sire,

making dire

the choir

of "why"s

that belies

my wise

eyes,

chiding

hiding

abiding

Thoughts from today's walk

I was going to record them here, but I can't remember them with all the static in my head right now. I am participating in "online discussion group" for my interim class. Only about 30 minutes of discussion left, then I have to read the packet for next week because next week I'm the one facilitating. There are so many of these things right now that seem like hoops that I just can't wait to get through and be done with. So much of this seems like it wouldn't have to be done if the screening process for the intellect, sensitivity, and open-mindedness in the teaching field was better. Not that I have any suggestions worth mentioning.

Anyway...what was I thinking??

OH--that my new iPod (can't wait to tell you the name of it, but it's a verbal thing that wouldn't make much sense here) might actually be sensing my mood and might do that even better if I only ever play it in "shuffle" mode.

OH--and then I thought up a good stump for a story. My coworker, Marie, saw a woman standing on the "high bridge" in St. Paul the other week. She remembers wondering to herself what this chick was doing. She saw her throw a rock over the edge. She pondered the fact that the high bridge is a destination for suicide (well, the river below more than the bridge, really). She noted "people don't just stop on that bridge, especially in the winter...I mean, you see people walking over it in the summer, but..." The next day she read in the newspaper that a woman had committed suicide the day before. She doesn't know whether it was the woman she saw...or what she would have said as she drove by.

So I'm thinking as I walk up to another bridge over the Mississippi today--but what about weirdos like me who actually do stop on the bridge in the winter? Then I thought, wouldn't it be great to write a story that began with someone standing on a bridge wearing a t-shirt with the following printed across the back: "I am not going to jump. I just like to watch the river."

Love you.

Productive, but short-tempered

^that would be me description of myself today. The people who call me are being insane, but that could be because I stayed up until 2:30am cleaning the kitchen last night. That was okay mostly, though, because I had my new ipod nano to sing to me the whole time. I was a tad concerned that my temporary headphone-induced deafness might be causing me to be excessively loud and it occurred to me several times to take an ear bud out thinking I might be missing my downstairs neighbor rap, rap, rapping at the door to tell me to shut the hell up.

Much love. Will write more soon. Ncd and his mama arriving today after drive from Arizona. Neato. Pretty sure the 5 hours I spent chiseling pre-Christmas fudge mess from many kitchen surfaces obliterates any chance that I'll have the house (and thereby, my brain) in order before their arrival. Oh well, at least the refrigerator's so clean it's empty, right? Aaand that makes 2 paragraphs about cleaning...which makes me feel like a freak. Alright. Ciao for niao.

how do you spell BLEAHH?

the library kind of rocks. 

when the people telling you "NO FOOD/DRINK ALLOWED" don't use mean mommy voice.

i'm quite capable of following directions given to me in a pleasant manner. 

again - if you don't like people... work without them?

i dunno.

really i'm here cuz they've threatened to give "us" a new roommate by posting a notice that they'll be painting and prepping the room recently vacated by a nice young austrian lad. seeing as how don't technically have any business living there, i thought i'd high-tail it for a few. get some writing done. but meh. remember the mer face? i can't stop making it. i feel like i've been lacking in the food/sleep/sanity department. but this is not the case. maybe it was the cheese i ate yesterday. cheese sucks, and i'm starting to think it makes my whole being wanna sink into my memory foam until my true love awakens my senses with a kiss. blehh. wow. how's my navel looking today? in this light, it's kinda linty. you know, the lighting in this particular corner of blogger's indulgence is wan. It's hard to make out astute observations through the muddle of the mundane. blah. 

let's about face: what have i accomplished today?

rising from couch - check!

munching honey bunches - check!

deconstructing my room to look like a mere storage/study, making visible only things hetero boys would own - check! 

and i scored $5 earphones at rite aid.

so ha! take  that, duane reade! with your $9.99's and your $12.95 nonesense!

so, with that...no--

i leave you with this: 

--as if we need a reminder of why freezing is cool.

These Boots Were Made for Workin'?

I am way too excited by the actual snow gracing our stoop with its presence. The sleet last night was worth it, if this is what it eventually yielded. Yeeaaay, SNOW! I also love that it's freezing ass cold in the living room - where i sleep this week cuz of the shady vapor (i.e. smells of turpentine) currently emitting from my radiator. 

And the best part - IT'S STILL SNOWING!

I am so excited to pull on my pink rainboots. Yes, they have daisies on them - don't judge me! It almost makes me wanna fuel up on Honey Bunches and walk downtown. It's only 108 blocks, right? Cakewalk. Well, like an ice-cream cakewalk. Only i doubt there'll be the little chocolate crunchies of cookie goodness when i finally make it to the bottom. Not to mention that one bite of this actual snow might actually be more noxious than the radiator. 

Maybe i should regroup. I'm sure i can come up with a better plan between now and when it's time to go PLAY IN THE SNOW! --er, go to work, i mean. Cause that's what i actually have to do today. Which is cool...way more important than playing. Totally more important than kicking round in fresh snow. I'm totally there. At work. Mentally. Aching to be there already, right? 

Right. Watch me run.  

No sense whatsoever!

The thing about leaving phone messages that makes them endearing, is the fact that it feels like you're talking to someone. It doesn't feel like you're talking to a recording device, pretending it's you're friend. Too bad this doesn't carry over into, say, a public sidewalk. Every time i leave someone a message that isn't strictly business, i'm acutely aware of how absurd it is, talking to a machine that won't talk back. Where is my suspension of disbelief?? Why do suddenly feel like a faker when i open my mouth to express my love, devotion and/or drunken belligerence?! Anyhoo -this pains me because 99.1415927% of the time, phone calls made in Manhattan are made on the street. We're multi-taskers on the way to/from anywhere. Everyone does this, in some form or another. Everyone has left a heartfelt message over the roar of traffic and wailing sirens. But this doesn't help. I always know when people are leaving messages. (Usually cause they talk for a minute straight after "Yo, whatup?" and end with a "Peace" "Call me!" or "Thanks for nuthin'!") How much do i care? How much do we actually listen to each other down there on them huge ass sidewalks? How much sense does it make for me to ever have stage fright ever on the sidewalks of NYC? Very very little. It's laughable, the amount of sense it doesn't make.

I wonder

What causes that racket? Ours don't do that in this place though I'm trying to remember if they did last year when Doug was around to go bug Barbara downstairs for the radiator key so he could bleed the radiators. In fact, now that I think of it, it IS peculiar to have heat without noise! I mean, they're metal! How can they NOT clank clank as they heat/cool, expand/contract?

At my last class (don't get excited, there's still plenty o' work to be done before I'm finished with it) we sat in groups of four. We discussed an abstract painting that Prof brought in. "How do you react to the painting emotionally?" he asked. We responded. "What do you see?" "What would you say in a narrative about the painting?" He then had us share with our group members. It was a bit peculiar since the thing we have in common is not necessarily a love of art, rather, we all want to be teachers...of some kind...of kids who are somewhere between 11 and 19. However, it never ceases to amaze me the creativity that emerges from the group whenever we're prompted. Last week, CTM (C the Magnificent) was giving a lesson using primary sources to teach about the Dust Bowl. She showed us some photos, read us some information about Steinbeck's background (asked questions about how this might affect his perspective on migrant workers), then played an historical recording of a man reading a poem about leaving the babies to starve and going in search of work. When she asked us to write a poem from the perspective of someone enduring these hardships the results were...whoa...impressive.

But, I digress. During our last class, we shared about the painting. Each successive person revealed things they had seen in the painting that totally changed our perspectives. The next step was to look at a piece of art far removed from the source. We looked at a BW print-out of a ppt of a photo that Prof ripped from the internet of a print of Picasso's Old Man and Guitar (don't remember exactly what the title is). Anyway, we looked at it, once again answered teh questions "How do you react to the painting emotionally?" and "What sort of narrative might you construct in response to the painting?" Then we read this excerpt from Wallace Stevens's "The Man with the Blue Guitar":

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

Then, after we had discussed that portion, we read a new excerpt with this addition at the end:

"And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are."

We were supposed to talk about the poem and the painting and whatever we liked. One woman in our group said, "It's like when a group remakes a song and you listen to it, hating it, and wonder why they did that."

We talked about that for awhile and then J gives a long look and says, "I'm a musician and so is my girlfriend. She plays guitar and does a lot of reinterpretations of songs. Almost always, I don't like them. And it makes me question our relationship.

We discuss this further. There are people who would hear that and think he's crazy, "I mean," they would say, "It's like liking some cornball song you hear on the radio, or downloading it to your ipod." But he's right. It's not. When you re-express the song and you invest time in making it sound like that. And 'that' is so utterly opposed to what J would consider to be beautiful (or even 'good') you might actually be expressing inner values that are fundamentally at odds. In some respects, it is strange that such a seemingly frivolous judgement could be so sound, but there it is. Wow. I'm glad that guy's gonna be a teacher. I wish I could take the time right now to write it in such a way that the true awe of it would come across more melifluously, but in the meantime I thought I'd feed you the story anyway.