geegaw.com

Dirty ditties

Desultor has yet another great entry about the childhood rhyme beginning "There's a place in France. . . ."

When I was in elementary school, in the Philippines, I had schoolmates from all over the USA and the planet, and the verses we settled on were, like my accent, a shifting average of the school's current population. "The Batmobile lost its wheels and the Joker ran away," not the clumsier but more accurate rhyme of "Joker stole the Batmobile and the Commisioner lost a leg."

I had a dream a few months ago that I'd found the secret intersection where Queen Anne Avenue passes through the International District, and I climbed over and was overjoyed to see the neon signs and giant LED billboards of Tokyo, and when I woke up I realized that aside from my friendship with Laura, nothing in my life right now marks me as a TCK. I pronounce "about" like the Canadians do, call Roshambo "jankenpoi", and get snotty about the clumsiness of the expats in Lost in Translation, that's about it. At dinner the other evening, a woman I'd just met was telling someone else about me: "Of course she grew up here. Have you even been listening to her talk all night?"

I've been living in America for almost ten years now, so long that I've almost forgotten what moving here, the transition they call repatriating though I'd never actually patriated, was like. And the only doggerel in the top of my mind is doggerel recently (mis)learnt:

Then up he rose,
and doffed his clothes,
and dupped the chamber-door,

let in the maid
who out a maid
never departed more.

stranger than fiction

One of the old woman's requirements was an egg about to hatch but unhatched, an egg with a chick curled inside it which must be left to rot and go beyond rotting to dryness. . . . When the charms were assembled, neatly laid out in their little dishes, A-Oa had a bad time, a sultry, transitional time of terrible smells, corruption and deliquescence whilst the egg rotted, exploded, and fell away.

- A. S. Byatt, "The Dry Witch"

Why did I ever think it would be a good idea to write 100 lies? It's hard enough to sort actual facts from fictions in the things I hear every day, including. . . .

1. A Californian woman sells collectibles sculped out of shit.
2. Kerry's campaign was behind the autodialed 4am calls in Iowa that accused Dean of being a wife-beating abortionist who wanted to abolish the Department of Agriculture.
3. Morgan Spurlock died of sudden liver failure.
4. Some guy discovered a dragon in a jar.

1. True, I guess.
2. Unconfirmed, but another Kerry push poll call was documented on videotape.
3. False
4. Better not be true.

I guess we're all just extras in the worst movie ever.

the 911 call

One look at this suicide-inducing bar graph and I just want to run off to the wife-fattening farm and hide. But hell, as an upper middle class Seattleite whose second-stage GoG interview isn't till the end of February, I guess I've got it pretty good.

"Don't you think we should try to help her?" is the title of the story that begins with me calling 911 at the bus stop this morning, at another passenger's request, in a futile attempt to assist a moaning woman who was feebly attempting to crawl up the glass door of nearby a apartment building and appeared totally unresponsive, eyeballs rolling up in her head till only the whites were visible. Not till I got through to the dispatcher and she was readying to send out the medics did glass-lady make eye contact with me and clearly specify that the kind of help she was looking for was street directions and not emergency medical assistance. I eventually concluded that the lady must have been "totally fucked up" on "drugs" but since I hadn't seen anyone in that condition since circa 1991, up till that point I just wasn't sure that she wasn't having a stroke or something.

So I gave her written directions and bus fare to the Union Gospel Mission, fat lot of good that's going to do her.

in which Kerry takes NH

Primping in the mirror tonight, trying to decide what style I should try for my next haircut, I noticed several inches of a white hair peeking out from the back of my head. "I'm gonna preserve this one, as a reminder to myself to start living," I thought and yanked it out, only to discover that the white hair seemed to have spontaneously changed its color back midway through, so that there were a good several inches of newer dark brown growth culminating in a black bulb.

I'm trying to take this as a parable about hope and renewal.

But it would've been a little more helpful if the hair had explicitly been printed with the words "Kerry may be a Lieberman-esque syncophant egomaniac but he's still better than Bush; keep your eyes on the prize." Because even though what I want to do is nothing, that hair switched back to black around the time I started this saving-the-world job and this saving-the-world hobby.

Well, anyway, it looks like job-wise, I'm set till July. That should buy me some time to decide exactly what kind of a breather I want to take.

putain, c'est la guerre

Everyone I see lately, even people I haven't seen in months, has the same question for me. "Aren't you depressed about Dean in Iowa?" To which I say: it's just making me give more money to the Comeback Bat, cuz I'm paying for a REBOUND in New Hampshire! Plus, Kerry is no more electable than Dean. The Republican-owned media is going to savage the Democratic frontrunner, no matter who he is. Remember that "scandal" about Kerry's haircuts, for god's sake? Or the time when he used the fuck-word?

Also, pls. forward the text of this article to all the undecided, independents, New Hampshire residents, and Republican women you know. . . .

My name is Laurie Hammond. I own a small business in Colchester, VT. It’s a retail store selling figure skating and dance wear.

I met Howard Dean eight years ago in Brandon [VT]. We were at the Fourth of July parade. What he didn’t know was I was a victim of domestic abuse. In 1996, when I finally found the courage to change the lives of myself and my three daughters, I did not expect what happened next.

At a time when my self-esteem was at an all-time low, and I was numb to emotion, I was enveloped by Vermont agencies that joined to form a step-ladder I could climb.

The first step on the ladder was the Vermont state police. Under the Dean administration, the Vermont state police had been carefully trained in the area of domestic abuse.

The state police had been trained to take you seriously, to educate you. They give you information on what the possibilities are to get away from the situation. . . .

I don't feel so tough

Lost in the Travelodge with the television on with the sound down,
I don't feel so tough.
Old issues of Sunset magazine to read.
Sleep for twelve hours
and dream about home.
- TMG

Try not to get sullen and complain about life living alone.

On the other hand . . . hey Bill, click this pic for an awesome musical experience:

Amazing factoid of the day: Selva can parallel park with one arm.

year of ten thousand hours

Two digital art galleries of dubious quality: Bitforms, Postmasters. In contrast, this stuff by Beverly Rayner makes me just . . . pause . . . and feel something for once.

By the twin criteria of clarity and enduring presence, the sentence "π seconds is a nanocentury" strikes me as art.

And the last art I saw that I "liked" was John Currin's work at SFMOMA -- and I should say I only like the paintings that were done since 1997 or so. But they generate zero clarity. They have a sickening, visceral impact and then push you away, like the time last week after it rained, when I saw an earthworm squirming in the driveway of the garage at work and tried to pick it up to move it aside -- I was so queasy at its softness between my fingers that I couldn't quite grasp and lift it, I had to settle for rolling and nudging it to the side of the road, millimeter by squishy millimeter. If that's art, Pulp Fiction (or pulp fiction) is art.

these dark days not dark enough

Thanks so much if you offered help or tips on ISPs. At some point in the next 24 hours I'll start testing out a new site redirect solution from Alien Web Shop ISP, so let's see how it goes. UPDATE: I'm not really sure what's gone wrong with my DNS, but I can assure you it's definitely not Lukas's fault. I don't have the time to troubleshoot it right now; too much else going on. I apologize for the ugliness of the site.

Cast my vote for Satan's Laundromat in the 2004 bloggies. It's nice to be able to vote on SOMEthing. These New Hampshire polls are lunacy. Dean slipping I can almost understand, given how the press savages him, but how can Kerry and Edwards be beating out Clark? I guess most Democrats must have been in favor of the war. And the thing is, you can cut and run to Canada but you can't fucking run away from the environment. Those Canadian girls have to stop eating the polluted tuna and slather themselves with sunblock to keep away melanoma, just the same as American girls do.

Anti-Anxiety Pills Don't Work For You? This Is Why

Fear not, gentle Diabloggers. Clinton lost Iowa in 1992, the senior Bush lost Iowa in 1988, Reagan lost Iowa in 1980! So, who cares about Iowa? Pah!

Got a phone call at work today from some Dean volunteer in Massachusetts looking for (literally) Miranda Gaw of Somerville, MA. They wanted a donation. Hrm. I should be more careful about the information I type into web forms.

In last night's nightmare I was swimming at low tide through filthy shallows and emerged with four syringes poking out of my thigh and shoulder. Need . . . less . . . stress. Here's the kind of obituary I don't want:

Doomed in early childhood to a lifetime of susceptibility to gangrene, Madame Sosostris turned to the bottle for the relaxation she could find nowhere else in life. Her sudden death after spending six days interacting with an aggressive mouse, though tragic, was not unexpected.

720 Times Happier Than The Man Who Is 101.25% Happier Than the Unjust Man

In the display at the airport bookstore, they were featuring Ann Coulter's book right next to a tall stack of almanacs.

And something about emptying my pockets and walking through the metal detector barefoot, coatless, makes me feel clean as a whistle. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is --

-- for me to get the last 1% of my blog to work on TypePad, meaning yeah, because TypePad's "Domain Mapping" feature is purely CNAME-based and rejects requests for http://geegaw.com, said site is is broken till such time as I can buy space on some ISP's server to do nothing but redirect that URL to http://www.geegaw.com. And I don't know when I'll have the time to get that set up (but the email addr "miranda&geegaw.com" will be broken till then, too - so use the "contact me" form only, please).

And because Jim's spem poem was really very good:

Trumpets or impudent,
I can help.
No more loneliness,
that great oil.

whew

The GoG phone screen went OK, though my nerves are shot due to logistical complications that occurred this morning. Now I'm going offline for a couple days, so have a great weekend everybody!

posse commitatus

Anyone know where I can download Paul Krugman Army flyers? I'd also not mind a T-shirt saying OBEY KRUGMAN.

retroverted

Scene: A van owned by the City of Seattle idles near a curb, waiting to pick up passengers.
Enter pregnant woman.
Guy #1: "You're due any time now, aren't you?"
Woman: "Pretty much, yep."
Guy #1: "So, have things begun to move around and open up in there yet?"
Guy #2: "What the hell kind of a question is that?
Exeunt omnes.

Three of the people in my vanpool are pregnant, and two of them are due within the next several weeks. Therefore, nightmares: that I've abandoned a sick baby at Video Isle, I'm acting as a decoy for some drug deal, a junky stabs me with an infected syringe. During the day, feeling more and more paranoid, so that unexpected praise starts to seem like a scheme to get rid of me, or to trick me into working harder, instead of what it really is: a calculated maneuver to make the team look better overall. Daydreams of spending the rest of my life in jail in Greenland.

laffterhouse

I really need to go to sleep, but I was wondering if any of you roxperts could tell me what are the actually critically acclaimed nouveau emo bands (by which I mean *blush* New Amsterdams, Further Seems Forever, All-American Rejects, Juliana Theory etc.). I feel very embarassed wondering if I should buy an album from a commercial genre whose average listener is half my age, but oddly, something about the stuff is really appealing. Blame it on that "Strong Sad Rocks Out" mp3.

a little stressed about the job hunt

Found a list of Microserfs who blog. Based on a small random sampling of the links, most of these blogs seem to be entirely technical, but some of them are not too boring? I wish someone would compile a similar list for the Grailiest of Grails dot Com: I have a phone screen with them on Friday. I'll keep you posted.

. . .

Update: I only worked 9 hours today, but those hours were 11-5 and 8-11. So I didn't have any time to study for my GoG interview tonight. What I want to know is, how does anyone else - how do normal people get anything done? - , must be because they don't need 9 hours of sleep a night, or maybe they don't do a 3 hour bus commute. But I WILL figure something out, exercise again, eat better, get a job, save the world. Really.

a cartoon must be an axe to break the shaky charcoal line...

At brunch yesterday, since I was waxing maniacal about Drawn & Quarterly Showcase #1, W pointed me to Kevin Huizenga online. Oh my god. Walkin' is brilliant. A walk turns into an epiphany about the gripping beauty of the quotidian. My jaw drops. "I feel that way all the damn time!" Clicking madly from page to page like a rat pushing a lever. I feel exactly that way when I feel most myself, which is almost never. Yes, Kevin Huizenga (or his alter ego, Glenn Ganges) has produced a piece of work that is more geegaw than geegaw itself! And for a few minutes I feel an exact, crystalline sense of coherence. . . .

meets in hir aspect

Here's a rerun: how to rejuvenate your aging lava lamp.

And, courtesy of Bellona Times, another rerun: a new reprint of a 1958 sci-fi story, the discomfiting, edgy It Walks in Beauty. See, this morning as I was walking to brunch, a guy driving a white van pulled up alongside me and honked. I looked at him quizzically and he made a face at me -- an unreadable combination of angrily knitted brow and puffed-out lips -- and sped away! And I thought to myself, "What was it about my appearance that might have pissed off someone like that? Was it my sex? My race? My age?" It's a litany I seem to ask myself a lot.

I made this emergency meal for dinner yesterday, an unholy fusion of Indian and Chinese cuisines, and it turned out so well I wrote down the recipe: vegan eggplant congee.

Kick me

Laura sent me this Popular Science list of the worst jobs in science of which the top 5 are really, unbelievably traumatic. I really liked the iconography they use to classify each job:

P.S. The most recent personality stats to be posted seem to be drifting farther away from the original norm. Could it be that the average frequent Geegaw reader is of a different type from the infrequent ones?

P.P.S. I've set up a new TypePad-based contact form. . . so if it breaks again, this time you can blame 6a Inc. instead of me . . . heh heh.

Not a drop to drink

If you thought salmon was the only safe animal flesh left, think again. We're now supposed to limit our consumption of farmed salmon to 8 oz. a month due the cancer risks posed by contaminants like PCBs. Might as well submit and be veganized!

Some boring stuff

Yeah, email on geegaw.com is slightly screwed up right now. I'm hoping to have time to fix it over the weekend. In the meantime, my old email addresses do still forward mail to my new address.

(I have 14 non-work email accounts that I know of, which I personally think is 12 too many.)

And I'm not the only one with email trouble lately (exhibits: A, B, C).

P.S. Listening to Oh, Inverted World for the first time... anyone else think the Shins sound just like Statuesque?

Time to get pierced

If you've been reading the political blogs, you've heard about the tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show. The ironic thing is that the Republicans are calling Dean "tax-hiking" when Bush has indirectly raised taxes by a huge amount (by creating unfunded mandates that the states have to foot the bill for, triggering budget crises and tax hikes nationwide). And as for "government-expanding", even a rabidly pro-Bush rag like the Weekly Standard called Bush a big-government conservative. If the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act aren't expanded government, what the hell is?

As for the other adjectives, well, I'm flattered of course.

Tarette Imasu

The morning bus ride across Lake Washington was intense. The shallows of the Foster Island marshlands had frozen over, and I loved the contrast of the tall dead rushes and the flat gray ice, with maybe an unhappy duck thrown in the mix, like larger-than-life ikebana with highlights of white snow.

Thanks for posting your Myers-Briggs scores. Since high school I've consistently scored within 20% of these stats: 100% I, 80% N, 80% F, 60% J, and had friends with generally similar scores (e.g. Helen was ISFJ, Aaron was ENFJ). So I thought you guys might all average out to something close to my score, when in actuality you are 89% I, 78% N, 44% F, and only 11% J -- a typical score for someone in my profession. C'mon guys! Feeling and judging things are two of life's sweetest pleasures!

I'm actually fairly skeptical about M-B these days, since I've waited almost a decade for those auditory and visual images of things to come to surface, and -- zippo, zilch, nada. Unless you count the hats with ears thing.

Green shoes (restored from memory)

This week I saw four women wearing hats with ears and, puffed up with pride at having predicted this trend last winter, I want to tell you what's going to be hot in 2004: striped thigh-high stockings and yellow-green shoes (e.g.: 1, 2, 3), esp. ballet flats, kitten heels, and slingbacks. Of course, it has been quite a long time since I read a fashion magazine, and I am totally making all this stuff up out of nowhere.

P.S. Aaron, check out #2.

P.P.S. The "personal financial gain" clause of the Diablog Pledge was added after a certain consortium tried to use the diablog to promote their merchandise. I've since seen said merchandise at several trendy stores around town, so I don't think they were hurt in any way by this. There are plenty of far more popular blogs to advertise on. Let me know if you ever get that million-dollar check!

Snow Day

When St. Paul gets four inches of snow, it's business as usual, but when the same thing happens in Seattle, business grinds to a standstill and the whole city starts to party. There were snowboarders and cardboard-box tobaggannists sliding down the steep road outside Laura's apartment, and cross-country skiers on the level roads. They wisely closed off the International Fountain with yellow CAUTION tape.

I couldn't have worked even if I'd wanted to, as the remote access servers at work were overloaded and rejecting new connections. I had a lot of fun.

PS. Take this test quick, before David Kiersey shuts it down: new Myers-Briggs/Kiersey sorter implementation. (And, if you don't mind, could you post your personality type (and link to your site if you like) to the diablog: I'm curious how you guys end up scoring.)

All gone!

I just accidentally blew away my primary personal email inbox - you know, myfirstname@acertaindomain.com - which contained 35 messages I had meant to respond to, from the past three months, and for the life of me I can't remember most of what was in it.

So, if I owe you mail, blush, sigh, maybe we can pick up that conversation some other time.

PS, from now on, all my mail will be coming from a different address, and hopefully that will translate into less spam all around.

Old data gives me a weird nauseous feeling which may or may not qualify as guilt. I have an unanswered email from a cousin of mine, dated almost exactly four years ago, and the little girl's age has doubled in the interim. Anyway, on very little sleep I have been doing a lot of rearranging and FTP'ing of data across servers, trying to clear out the old geegaw.com Linux box and consolidate all my email accounts into one solid mailbox... at one point I had backups of the lost data in THREE different places... and I deleted all of them. But this is all in service of the greater plan: CD backups of all my data from the past 6 years, so none of it will be lost the way most of my college files have been (I think).

Also, A. is all gone too, though I'll be going to visit him in a couple weeks -- it's just me holding down the fort in Seattle now. All contributing to a general feeling of attenuated instability.

New Year's Resolutions

I think this list makes up in ferventness (fervency?) what it may lack in length:

1. Successfully move with A. to New York.
2. Get Howard Dean elected as President of the United States of America.

Yee-haw! Here's to fulfilling my resolutions for once!

When Books Attack

Perils of being a literary pack rat; didn't this happen to Skinner in a Simpsons episode?

(Jim tells me that clicking on that diablog link ("Top 100...") will put Geegaw on the Technorati top 100 list. Let's see . . .)

A bunch of PETA people dressed up as mad cows are demonstrating outside of Larry's today. It made me realize how bad I am at aligning myself with any cause (even ones I kind of believe in, like Dean). For example, when I think of taking up knitting again, there's the question of what yarn I would knit with. Wool may be cruel, the harvesting of cotton may kill field animals, but acrylic is realy terrible not just for the environment but because it increases US demand for oil, so it indirectly kills people. Maybe the optimal but non-PC/non-sustainable compromise is to get a wool sweater from a thrift store and unravel it, resulting in yarn that's both pleasant to work with and free of bloodshed. Anyway, it seems to me that a hardcore anti-consumption reduce-reuse-recycle'r (which I am not) would cause less cruelty than someone who adopted a vegan diet but no further lifestyle changes. But it's all just daydreaming because I definitely don't want to give up woolly sweaters and century egg congee.

P.S. You know what really drives me up the wall? Vegan Republicans. (Even more so than gay Republicans or Arab-American Republicans.)

Happy New Year to you

It's a new year and Secret Kings is back!

More soon (working on some projects).