geegaw.com

hooray for the diablog

Apropos of that diablog entry -- there are only two books on medical health I liked so much I read them from cover to cover. One deals with the vulvovaginal region and the other with the spleen-etic region. I totally recommend both.

The diablog has been AWESOME lately. Thank you, diabloggers, for coming back. I especially liked the photo of the aurora, the tiny hamster, the poxes, and the link to Jim's entry on metrosexuality.

a haiku or maybe an elegy for Dean

"What the fuck is a
metrosexual?", I thought.
Google cleared that up.

parable of the old loaf

This morning I read the latest issue of Adbusters and it filled me with so much loathing for my consumerist lifestyle that I didn't buy anything for lunch. Instead, I spooned leftovers on some stale slices of bread and, when I finally looked away from my book of Isaac Bashevis Singer stories and saw what I was eating -- this was about 80% of the way through the meal -- the bread turned out to be moldy and I ran to the trash can and spat out a mouthful.

I like my consumerist lifestyle.

So, bowing to life's advice, tonight I bought a laptop -- a refurbished Dell Inspiron 600m . I'm so excited! The one I picked had the 1400x1050 resolution screen and a CD burner and more RAM than the standard configuration. I haven't bought a computer since I got the machine that hosts geegaw.com, in June of 1999 . . . and it is stressful (though I imagine buying a car would be much worse) . . . and I would rather have a laptop than a car!

I haven't been the friendliest of people lately. Personal stress and work stress (I'm double-booked through Christmas and on the outskirts of negotiations with a certain group of people who made custom license plates brackets that said "The Most Hated and Feared" and whose web page features a slavering mastiff and plays some WAV file of loud barking noises when you load it).

Hopefully no one takes it personally.

It's been a long time since I just stretched out and read something. Tonight maybe Montaigne.

Was going to write a poem titled "To W" after that great William Carlos Williams poem "To Elsie" -- you know, the one that starts "The pure products of America go crazy" and ends "No one to witness or adjust; no one to drive the car." But there's no sport in it. The parody practically writes itself, cool dots and all.

haiku: a small bedside anthology

When reading haiku
that start all to sound the same,
I append "in bed."

Having planted a banana tree,
I'm a little contemptuous
of the bush clover
in bed.

- Basho

My summer robes -
there are still some lice
I haven't caught
in bed.

- Su Tung -P'o

Brushing flies
from the sick girl in the palanquin --
how hot it is!
in bed.

- Buson

Ok, I guess that's
lame. Anyway the best ones
don't need the "in bed"
(in bed)

Year after year
on the monkey's face
a monkey's face.

- Basho

Chrysanthemum growers --
you are the slaves
of chrysanthemums!

- Buson

The man pulling radishes
pointed my way
with a radish.

- Issa

Children imitating cormorants
are even more wonderful
than cormorants.

- Issa

For American
21st Century Web
Haiku, I like Jill.

about the celestial filament

I know I once wrote -- but now cannot find -- a poem containing the lines

I would crawl to the radio tower on my hands and knees
if I thought it would get me closer to the aurora fucking borealis

And when news of the solar flare hit my screen it was all I could think about. So I caught a ride with Patti and Jim out to a riverbank off of I-90, exit 32, where they thought the skies might be dark enough for us to actually see the northern lights.

The sign on the gate said the trail closed at 7:30. We walked right on through. Jim switched off his flashlight, and Patti pointed out that despite the new moon, the ambient glimmer from the nearby town of North Bend was enough to light our way. In my dim sight the riverbed was rubble studded with lopped-off tree trunks like massive coffee tables. I lay down on one and looked up at the Milky Way for the first time.

The surrounding hils were so low that, staring straight up, my field of vision was purely black sky and pinprick stars. Then, looking to the side and down, I could see the haze of distant light making dark silhouettes of the low hills. I looked back up, my eyes adjusted, and suddenly there were these pale cloudy forms in the sky -- fuzzy filaments connecting the brightest stars overhead, like an inconceivably immense mold organism made of light, and I couldn't say anything for a while. That was the Milky Way.

Then today A. and I went to a contact microphone workshop which was all about tapping into the imperceptible fabric of movement and sound -- the sound of buildings groaning and settling beneath us, the power lines in the ground and the walls, magnetic fields created by electronic devices whizzing past us -- alternators from cars, cell phones, our own brains and hearts.

The solar plasma that causes the aurora takes four days to reach the earth, and as it hurtles through the atmosphere, it disrupts the magnetic field. Voltage surges in the power grid. Cell phone signals can dissolve and planes fly blind for a heartbeat. And then the world resumes its busy, inaudible hum.

Did I mention that though we waited for a long time in the dark, the cold air clouding with our breath, the aurora never showed up? "It only comes when it isn't being looked for," Patti said as we headed home.

And even when my mind revolts against worship and worshippers, I find myself worshipping this: the pattern of invisible networks that burn somewhere outside my closed curtains tonight. One of them hangs in the sky somewhere beyond the cloud cover and the pall of city light. One of them invented and maintained by people like us. And the last one I've mentioned before, of human emotion and thought, and they're probably all part of the same thing anyway.

parable of the frozen ground

Riding on the bus to work this morning, trying to figure out exactly how I was going to explain to a certain Washington State steering committee member over lunch that I just really don't feel up to being the local coordinator of [censored] for Dean any longer -- when I noticed that, as we crossed the lake, the blue sky had opened up and a flower of yellow light was pouring in through the window.

"The sun doesn't warm me," I thought. "I'm frozen underground."

Ripples of light on the still surface. Sillhouettes of a dozen young ducks nodding and bobbing for weeds.

"The sun doesn't warm me!" I thought. But it did anyway.

. . .

(Her stories don't have any characters in them. Unless you count photons as characters.)

Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

I take back what I said.

(- JBF - thank you for the picture)

Hey folks! You gotta believe that depression is a choice and fight it and stuff.

Even on a day like today, with widespread record flooding and the rain clouds blacking out all of the sky except for a sickly yellow sliver out west, along the coast, and the moon barely visible in all that the black like a rubbed-out chalkmark.

the soft gray blues

I seem to get more and more seasonally affected each fall I spend in Seattle. But at this point it's fun; I have the lachrymose and maudlin routine down pat. Try to eat warm and nourishing food with a decent amount of protein in it. Drink tons of coffee, some Red Bull, and a little bit of booze. Rock out to Joy Division or similar. Take a few deep breaths in the mornings to help get out of bed.

I took a walk in the woods yesterday with G. and his son. Almost tore my skirt climbing over a chain-link fence, my reward being that when I got to the other side, I could hold the kid while his dad climbed over. This particular baby is so cuddly and soft and warm, yet mysteriously withdrawn, like a morose and inattentive stuffed animal. I could have hugged him for hours, but he wanted his dad.

Winters are a cakewalk, I know all about maudlin. It's the mean reds of summer that are tough.

somnia

Kafka said that a really good comic book acts like an axe to demolish the frozen sea of kryptonite within you, so I can't resist putting in a plug for one of the best collections since Berlin: the new Drawn and Quarterly Showcase, one of the top sellers at the bookstore at 315 E. Pine St. where I will be working today, Sunday, October 19 from noon to 6.

This is the time of year when I can never wake up. Back east, in all the ditches and drain-pipes, the standing water quivers slightly, readying itself to spend a winter as yellow crusts of ice.

The diablog is back. It thanks you for your patience.

my life's ambition is to sleep my life away

Till I turned 23 or so, I used to say things like "I never get headaches" or "my stomach is made of cast-iron; I can digest anything." Lesson learned: just don't say that shit because the gods will punish you for your hubris.

OTOH I think it's hilarious that, having acquired a godawful tension headache presumably from staring intently at LCDs, I can't seem to lie down and veg out with a good book; I have to get up and blog about it.

I bought the reissue of Julie Doiron avec le Wooden Stars last night. For some reason I could never get into her and then last night I decided, "C'mon, here's this incredibly mopey folksinger whose singing voice sounds like she's crying or she's just been punched in the mouth or something: how can I not like this? Better get the album and listen to it at home and give it a chance," and whaddaya know, I like it.

bag of winds

On Wednesday night as I was walking to the new state campaign office, I passed the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library building, where Laura is taking classes. They've lent her a manual braille typewriter to practice on, which is just the most amazing and tactile thing. It's about the size of an oversized shoebox; the metal is smooth and cool with an old-fashioned patina, and has the feel of something from an old diner in the middle of nowhere.

The Talking Book and Braille Library has a glass-walled child's playroom on the corner, with alphabet tiles that have Braille on the reverse. I realized that I have spent the bulk of my life doing exactly one kind of touching. I probably know the layout of keys on a computer keyboard better than I know the contours of A.'s face.

Last night after dark I drove a flexcar back from Bellevue, during the height of the wind storm. As I neared the floating bridge I could see dead leaves jumping and spinning on the freeway. I slowed down to meet the speed limit and felt the steering wheel twitch under my hands as the wind buffeted the little Civic. Sudden gusts launched the lake water in plumes of spray as tall as the lamps that line the bridge, and the water splashed across my windshield.

I parked the car at the top of the hill and walked down the main road. The orange cast of the sodium lights turned everything into an early Halloween. I saw a woman walking two frantic black dogs, one leash in each hand - pulled along by them like The Chariot card in the Rider-Waite tarot. A fallen tree blocked the sidewalk so I had to step into the road at a point when traffic was light. The wind blew up the hill from the bay like the breeze from an invisible speeding truck, lifting up my hair and my shopping bag like a couple of wind socks, at an angle greater than perpendicular. The wind made me feel like Bjork in the Pagan Poetry music video. I could feel it pushing the loose skin off my bones.

It's time to read Ulysses Chapter 7.

Frippery

Via Yukino - Panda Z(et) official home page. Yes, it really says the panda pilot's name is Pantalon. Also, there are these really nice hi-quality fotos of the toy figurines.

Someone please email the Kid Robot people and make them place an order for this stuff. . . .

Kill Bill was in some ways a perfect movie, but it occurs to me that it could have been made even more perfect if the crown of Lucy Liu's head had been lopped off during the swordfight, say somewhere a little bit above the ears, revealing that she was actually a massive Lucy Liu robot controlled by a tiny Lucy Liu inside.

UPDATE: Kinda like this. (Thanks Jim!)

Chew-Z ing-Z Bamboo-Z

A. showed me, but I can no longer find, the home page for Panda-Z, a gigantic robot panda which, if you open up its helmet and look in the cockpit, you find a real panda at the helm. It had some kind of cute backstory in Japanese about the panda pilot's dad and uncle, his lady friend Rabi-To the rabbit, a team of ursine civil servants including Medical Bear and Fire Bear . . . If someone can find and translate the page for me, I'll put back the diablog! In the meantime, here is a page selling the toy including a closeup of the little panda pilot.

"The tension between his personal discomfort and his acceptance of the state Supreme Court's decision was evident when he quietly signed the bill into law." Excellent article analyzing why Dean's civil unions bill takes the antiquated stance that marriage is an institution that can only exist between a man and a woman.

Though I disagree with him there, I don't blame him. I mean, we all have prejudices (I myself have tons), but so long as we act exactly as our better selves would, isn't that enough?

fiddleheads! fiddlesticks!

My little brother has food poisoning tonight. . . . Well, I have been up till 3 with chills or fever or bad oysters before, but it seems so much worse when it's happening to someone else. Right? I mean, he'll be fine of course. It makes me wish I lived closer by.

I bet his freezer isn't set to be cold enough, and the beef curry went bad. For a lot of those old fridges you need to keep it at the coldest setting but most people don't know that. And I think red meat only keeps in the freezer for a month or two anyway even at ideal temperatures. Part of why I like eating vegetarian.

I suppose part of entering your early twenties is learning that you can't eat everything you ate in your teens, and that less is better than more. But mine is a family of comfort eaters.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through The Good Soldier right now, but I don't want to think about that. I keep thinking that when I was a kid, I loved to read, and my brother would sit next to me reading for a while, but then he would get restless and want to run around and play, and I would push him away. I'm too sentimental. I'm glad I don't have children. I shouldn't have pushed him away.

public service announcement

If the winning bidder on your eBay auction is from Nigeria, don't sell to them. Even if they give you a cashier's check for thousands of dollars more than the real amount, and you cash it, and the bank gives you all the money, don't wire thousands of dollars back to Africa. Really.

I like Fridays

Unlike certain people who have the mysterious ability to get yoga instructors to confide in them, I only have stories about Dean or about my coworkers to tell. So I have to remind myself that discretion is the better part of online valor, and keep mum.

I did find out - since today was spontaneously Beer Friday at work - that one of the guys who hired me for this job google-stalked me before the interview. Which is a bit of a shock, coming on the heels of the realization that one of my interview candidates this week looked me up as well, before the interview -- he must have, because when I asked him a totally unrelated question, he started talking very intently about blogging, a subject he seemed to know relatively little about. Poor guy, I guess he didn't stalk thoroughly enough to deduce that the way to get on my good side is to talk liberal politics.

Waaaaell, heck an' tarnation, as shore as my name be Miranda H. Gaw, I do swear to try to be less stalkable henceforth. Ahem.

Picked up (literally - out of A.'s bookshelf) a collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories and was tickled by the author's introduction - an angry screed against gimmicky writing that made me think of that very disappointing book Everything is Illuminated. Oh Mr. Singer, although your initials may stand for T.U.M.M.Y.A.C.H.E., you yourself stand for so many things I believe in.

I am ashamed of my mother's Catholicism . . .

In so many other ways, she is a wonderful woman. . . . I just sent her an email that said Dear Mom, PLEASE CONVERT!

Another peculiar anecdote -- it turns out that one of my (Texas-born) coworkers is from some born-again Christian sect that celebrates the Sabbath on Saturday, because that's how things were before the Roman church moved it a day later in order to be different from those despised Jews. He also appears to keep kosher or some variant thereof. In fact my coworker (who, irritatingly, is also an extraordinarily intelligent, kind, and sensitive person) shares with me a discomfort about Bush's faith-based initiatives (which I blogged a couple days ago) -- but his reason for why church and state shouldn't mingle too closely is that he thinks that federal funding and federal constraints could hinder (i.e. taint?) the religious organizations.

Tomorrow some minor press release may go out with a quote from me chirping about the necessity for diversity -- and yet sometimes I feel a lot less tolerant than I think of myself as being.

a Doogie Howser moment

Today I cut the machine learning application's memory usage by half, and its prep time by more than half, by reading the algorithm more closely and changing the logic slightly, changing the file I/O routine to read in bigger chunks, etc. Lesson learned: always stay focused while coding 'cuz it's harder to rectify these mistakes later. And I think the total execution time can still be whittled down by doing things like allocating one huge chunk of memory instead of a bunch of tiny chunks, and ripping out all my pretty-looking helper abstractions and going back to the raw pointers.

I've been out of the main Dean activist loop for a quite a while now, working on a special-interest issue and also helping Jim on a not-so-secret Top Secret Project, but the little intrigues and politics I get a whiff of every so often never fail to crack me up. I wish I could gossip about them but in a blog-based campaign, discretion is key.

And I guess I've been pretty tired because apparently last night someone emailed me a status report, and my answer was "ahem. ayup . . . nothing."

"praying" for no recall

It's official: Fox News Rots Your Brain.

Today, read the first few chapters of a super-promising new novel written by a friend . . . then went over to Laura's and tried to hack her wireless network, correctly guessed the password but still could not get in. . . .

Wally's last clip show

The quote currently at the top of this site is from As You Leave The Room, the very last poem in my autographed¹ Modern Library edition of Wallace Stevens's collected work.

Like the Marianne Moore poem Poetry, As You Leave the Room comes in a fun-size portion: this one is titled First Warmth and is dated 1947 while AYLTR is dated "1947-1955?"   I've transcribed them both here.

First Warmth, which is a much gentler poem, ends with an epiphany where the speaker gets to re-experience "the warmth I had forgotten," which sounds kind of like Wordsworth's "the radiance which was once so bright."

But I prefer AYLTR because it opens with the insistence that he's not a skeleton, because "That poem about the pineapple, the one / About the mind as never satisfied, // The one about the credible hero, the one / About summer, are not what skeletons think about." He whips these references to his earlier work out of thin air, like a series of colored scarves out of a magician's pocket, and you get the sense that for him, these poems have become objects that he fingers meditatively, over and over, for sustenance.

Then at the end he descends into doubt about whether writing was really worth anything (something that doesn't happen in First Warmth): "And yet nothing has been changed except what is / Unreal, as if nothing had been changed at all." This is pretty similar to The Planet on the Table, and it makes me think of Erikson's conflict about Generativity vs. Stagnation², as well as the self-flagellations of all the blocked writers I know, myself included.

---

¹ The book is signed "For Miranda, Wishing you and yours the very best this Holiday Season 2001, Wally." It was a present from Toadex.

²Still, at the end of my life, I'd rather be asking myself "Was all this globally acclaimed writing really worth anything?" than "I wonder what I could have accomplished had I spent exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television?"

secret names

Today was Free Rum Day on Puzzle Pirates . . . but ol' StoneTemplePirate77 [not my character's actual name] languished in the dark zeroed-out bits of my laptop while A. and I had more fun amidst dem furriners, hooray!

But it's hard to come home and remember the current administration's plan to convert us all to Born-Again Christianity, then impoverish us en masse. Thank god for hilarious liberals like Margaret Cho, whose blog today contained the following hilarious letter to Arnold Schwartzenegger:

What up with the Nazi shit? If there is one person you cannot give a shout out to, it is Hitler. Nobody wants to hear about that. I understand that your father was a Nazi, and I don't blame you for that, because you didn't choose the family you were born into, unless you did it on purpose because you are from the future.

(thanks to Peter, my inspiration in more ways than one).

a monochrome set

Turns out remuneration isn't just renumeration spelled wrong; it's a whole 'nother word. This revelation courtesy of The Avengers, whose 1965 season we've been renting from Scarecrow lately. Started out with A Touch of Brimstone so I could check out Dame Diana Rigg decked out in her spiked dog collar as the Queen of Sin; but Patrick McNee consistently upstages her with his deadly umbrella, steel-reinforced bowler hat, and ludicrously upper-class affectations reminiscent of Phineas and Barnaby from Family Guy.

I've had a cold for nine days running, so in addition to Steed and Mrs. Peel, it's been a bunch of Twilight Zone episodes -- including the one where William Shatner almost loses to a plastic condiment dispenser. See, every Avengers episode involves the infiltration of some male-dominated secret society . . . every Outer Limits episode introduces new corrugatated-faced creatures that put the makeup crew of Deep Space Nine to shame . . . and every Twilight Zone episode contains a tasty homily wrapped in a well-worn plot whose twists I can describe aloud in advance, and there's nothing more comforting than the familiar.

Dean is visiting Seattle tomorrow for a series of fundraisers. So when I got a letter from his campaign the other day inviting me to come talk to him about what direction I thought the country was going or somesuch, I tossed it into the recycling bin. But this afternoon I got a call . . . it turns out the discussion isn't going to be a fundraiser at all, but some kind of private meeting. Only 40 people coming.

I didn't tell A., I just turned it down. Is that bad? Prideful? I'm just tired of spending my life on the man. Actually A. and I had plans to go up to visit Vancouver already, eat delicious food for lunch and dinner, and that seems more important. Between my regular job, Dean, and two Sundays a month at the bookstore, I've had barely any time to unwind for so long. And then this week, getting sick and all, that's actually been kind of nice. I read a few Stevens poems, took a walk with Laura down to the drugstore, redesigned the site, started to feel a little more human again.

I hope I don't regret this. But right now -- it's 1am and I just spent an hour and a half trying to photoshop Dean's face into a banner -- I'm pretty happy about my decision and it seems like a healthy one.

the forms of things unknown

"How does Merlin find his way out of the tree?" -- this question has been in my head all day. I envision it as the caption for a panoramic picture in a children's book. The tree is perforated with minute tunnels, and Merlin is shrunken, walnut-faced, with a thin wet beard and the body of a worm.

A long time ago I wrote over a hundred poems in a few months, and one of the lines in one of the poems (I don't remember which, or whether I ever wrote that one down) was "Merlin's adoze in his hole." By which I think I was trying to say that, even though he's been trapped inside a tree by his sometime girlfriend, Merlin finds it terribly cosy and comfortable.