31 posts, mostly having nothing to do with anything “sweet”, although I do like them, so they’re sweet to me.
1 monster headache from the publishing paper I’m working on at the moment, slowly realizing that I bit off more than I can chew with regards to publishing costs and numbers, because information on the subjects are guarded like the recipe for Dr. Pepper.
32 minutes left of May, and looking forward to June, where I won’t be doing Nablopomo, but still trying to write a blog post every day. We’ll see how that goes.
3,000 tweets. I know this says nothing good about my productivity, but I sure have a lot of fun bullshitting with people and checking out fun stuff!
1 Associates in Liberal Arts degree, with nifty coordinating English Award. Having a college degree is a little sexy. Having a Ph.D is going to be pretty sexy someday, too. Only 3 more years and $50,000 to go!
8 books. I really read/listened 8 fsckin’ books this month? I thought it was far less. One was “Crime and Punishment” which felt like 2 because it was so long!
Only 1 Maru the Cat cheat-day. He’s so freakin’ cute.
Alright… I’m a day behind on posts still, because school is eating my soul. Damn you, education! Curse your infringement upon my social and leisure time!
And now.. some funny Maru the Cat videos to distract from a startling lack of content!!
Because last night was so nice, and my bed was so warm, and my week was so long, I decided to write my Friday night blog post this morning.
“Upanishad” is the Hindi word for the scriptures that make up the essentials of the Venanta (the teaching of oneness with the universal being, or Braman.) It means “To sit at the feet of the master” and refers to the traditional way of teaching, the master passing on knowledge to the student by speaking the daily lessons. Books were produced by hand and so were considered priceless, kept well guarded by the temples. For this reason, lessons were passed from generation to generation of monk orally. The advent of the printing press obviously greatly improved the dissemination of information, and the oral tradition died out.
I made the argument recently that audiobooks were just technology picking up where the oral tradition left off. I catch a bit of flack about listening to them, but besides the fact that I can fit 45 minutes to 4 hours a day of “reading” into my schedule, I really enjoy listening to a good audiobook! I can listen to a book while filing at work, driving in my car, doing the grocery shopping or the laundry. Sometimes I just come home and decompress with my headphones on after work, or before I go to sleep.
What a lot of people miss by ragging on audiobooks, is that there is a connection not only to the story, but to the voice of the speaker. I have favorite narrators, just as I have favorite musicians or songs. There’s something soothing about the connection to the speaker that makes the experience unique.
I started thinking about this yesterday as I started “Beloved” by Toni Morrison. It’s narrated by Morrison herself, and while the story itself is gorgeous so far (I’m about 3 hours - or 60 pages - into the story), Morrison’s narration is incredible. Her voice has a buttery, soothing quality, and no one could read the book as well as its creator. Here’s a clip of Toni Morrison discussing her first days of writing, a step on the path that would take her to both the Pulitzer and the Nobel.
I finished “Crime and Punishment” yesterday morning on my way to work. It was loooong… 25 hours, for an unabridged translation of about 560 pages. But it was well worth it, a classic for a reason. The audio version is narrated by George Guidall, who could well be the most prolific narrator out there. There’s a good reason for this. He has this wonderfully gruff, basso voice that warms you right up. I’ve listened to “The Gunslinger” by Stephen King and now “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevky, and both were long but very enjoyable because of the narrator.
Of course I can’t miss mentioning my very first favorite narrator, Nick Landrum. I first became acquainted with his work on the Dexter Series, and although he said he loathes it, his voice really is perfect for the role. It’s quiet, steady cadence lends itself well to the inner monologue of Dexter Morgan, friendly neighborhood serial killer. Landrum has also recorded other titles. I’ve listened to both “The Virgin Suicides” by Jeffrey Eugenides (listen to a sample here), “Sweet and Vicious” by David Schickler. Both were wonderful books, and Landrum’s voice added to the experience.
I’m not saying that every audiobook is for you, or that even these narrators are guaranteed to be your cup of tea, but if you’re one to turn your nose up at audiobooks because you feel like they’re corny, or that you won’t be able to “get into” the story, or that you feel like it’s cheating to say you’ve “read” a book that you’ve listened to (ahem, EDDIE), then take it from me: give them another chance. You just might find that you can fit more stories into your schedule, and that you really enjoy the connection to the story that a good narrator can give you!
So I’ve been in “nesting mode” recently. No, not nesting as in preparing to force Ed into replicating his awesomeness with me… we got a kitten to hit the snooze button on the biological clock for a while
No.. I’ve been feathering my crafty nest. It’s been crazy lately between work and school, and even the edits on the book have been on slight hiatus, but I’ve been itching to start a new stained glass project. I go through the same thing whenever I want to take on something new, such as getting a new tattoo, redecorating a room.. whathaveyou.
I know when I’m gearing up for a new project when I starting thinking about enlarging artwork to trace a pattern from while sitting parked in traffic, or I see something particularly beautiful and want to make it into something to hang on a wall. Recently, I’ve been thinking about two or three pieces of glass that go really beautifully together, and I keep dying to make them into something great… but I don’t know what yet. I’ve thought about tracing a fractal rendering, but part of the beauty of those is in the intricacy. I’ve also been coming back to the idea of something Mucha-esque, but the colors aren’t really the same. I love the flowing lines and the anti-gravity aspects of his work, but could I pull that off in glass? Not so sure.
I think it’s time to start hunting for some ideas… aka “Nesting Stage 2″, feathering my nest with clips of pretty things, ideas of whom I could make a piece for (dare I make one for myself?)
First things first, if the pattern ever comes in for the fireplace screen, I have to make that for my Mom. That doesn’t stop me from getting the itch to start a new design for an original piece!!
Anyone else have any hints that let them know they’re about to take on a new project? Care to share?
::: Ed begins to extoll the virtues of the new Palm Pre - the $200 phone he wants. Remember that time he was sure to die if he didn’t have the iPhone, so I bought him one? It seems so long ago now… it must be one - no, two years now! :::
“So check it out! It comes with this charger? They call the Touchstone? And you literally just have to put the phone there, and it charges!”
“That’s cool! So how close does it have to be? Like, within a few feet?”
“What do you mean? Well - it has to be on it.”
“So it’s not really *through the air* charging, right? I mean, it still has to be touching it? So, how does it transfer energy?”
“You just have to put it on there!”
“Any way you like? Such as, you could like, put it face down?”
“Well no… it has to be face up. There’s contacts on the back. But still!”
“So it’s like a cradle!”
“No! :: frustrated :: It’s a Touchstone! It’s just… Flat! You just sit it there!”
“Like in a cradle! Because, y’know, you just sit the phone in the cradle? And it touches the contacts?”
“Its - no - I…”
“It’s a cradle.”
:: sighs, defeated ::
“It’s a cradle.” …………… “But it’s a fuckin’ cool cradle.”
“Mmmhmmm”
(And scene.)
And thus is illustrated the power of marketing over the young and impressionable nerd. That being said, the Palm Pre does look pretty friggin’ cool. And he CAN program in all the languages it supports. And it is cheaper for the plan with better services.. and it IS a Palm product.
Yes, this kool-aid is actually very refreshing! Why do you ask?
Remember when you were a little kid, and the best thing about a sleep-over was getting to camp out in the living room? Well, I’m here to tell you that you can do just the same as an adult.
I say this, because I am writing to you from our second bedroom, comfortably wrapped up and floating on an air-mattress, with the kitten between us purring like a jack-hammer. Why are we camping out on a tiny air mattress when we have a much more expensive air mattress right in the next room? (AKA: Sleep Number bed?)
The vet told us we have to keep Princess Roid Rage under wraps for the next 10 days while her sutures heal, and for that we need to keep her low to the ground. We’ve moved everything out of the second bedroom that’s over 6″ tall, thinking that this would keep our newest addition happy. Unfortunately, two things happened last night: A) She figured out if she cries long enough, we will capitulate, and B) She likes to cliff-dive off of our bed. This made for swelled stitches this morning, which don’t seem to bother Jawsie in the least, but scare the hell out of her parents. (Editor’s note: Ed is still holding out hope that I will start to refer to us as “her people” or “her humans”. He got to name her Jaws? I get to name him Dad. That’s the gig.)
Fast forward to tonight, and we are camping out in the cat’s room (this statement is as ridiculous as it sounds, I know) to make sure that our wild child keeps her paws close to terra firma, and keeps our bleeding-heart wits intact (She’s like a cougar in miniature. She stands her ground and CRIES at me for getting anywhere near the door like I was murdering Santa. It’s ridiculous, but it gets me every time.)
So here’s to the start of the camping season, even if we didn’t need to drive a stake or burn a marshmallow to get started!
I started one of my “Fill in the Blanks” classics today, the Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu- in Japanese called the Genji Monogatari.
I’ve wanted to read the Genji ever since a pre-1300’s history class from last year. I’ve been putting it off for a little while, as the book weighs in at a whopping 1200 pages. Did I mention that even at such a length, it is considered unfinished? Its often called the first modern novel, the first “Masterpiece”, and the first work of original Japanese fiction (up until the 11th century, the Japanese were mostly concerned with knock-offs of bad Chinese poetry.) Even more impressive than its literary merits, it gives a fairly accurate snapshot of life at court during the Heian period in Japan. Murasaki lived at court, and thus had access to the daily lives of court representatives, ladies in waiting, etc.
When I picked the book up last year, my friend Beth smiled at me and said “Why?” and the only answer I really had for her was “Because it’s a challenge!” The Genji is a book of intimidating length, concerning a culture completely different from our own. The Heian court was kind of like “High school on crack” as my professor described it; it was made up of a large bureaucracy who concerned themselves with the aforementioned crappy poetry, fashionable dress, flower arranging, and the ceremony of court life itself. You could draw the parallel to the intricacies of gentle life in a Jane Austen novel, but more ceremonial.
For me, the Genji amounts almost to a literary Everest. You certainly don’t run up there full-force, unprepared. You have to take your time, read the footnotes and the supporting text, learn to enjoy the intricacies of a story that unfolds almost in real time. In the course of the story, the nearly 400 characters age, succeed in rank, have children, live and die, in something akin to real time. A work of this magnitude would make pretty much anyone other than David Foster Wallace blanch.
So I’m taking my time, and enjoying it in small bites even though it’s going to kill my New Year’s Resolution of reading a book a week. I suppose I could count it as three between the page count and the research time involved, but that would be cheating.
I didn’t really know what to expect from the book, other than a long climb, but my curiosity is being greatly rewarded with the sheer beauty of the book. Of course a text written in a time that placed a premium on beauty would have to itself be beautiful, but there’s a delicacy and an intimacy to it that I did not entirely expect. From all accounts, that beauty and intricacy keeps the reader’s attention throughout the course of the story, so I am looking forward to exploring it further. Although it needs no review (It’s over 1,000 years old, so I’m fairly certain Publisher’s Weekly must have taken a crack at it at some point), I’m still going to give my impressions in a blog post once I’ve finished it.
Has anyone else read the Genji? Thoughts? Comments?
A comment left on my last post by none other than Jason Scott got me thinking (thanks for stopping by, Jason! I feel a little starstruck!) While I agree with Jason’s point that justification of any activity is sort of useless, I’m still puzzled by the “why” of some of our activities in the first place, especially concerning online identity. Justifying what we like to someone else isn’t really necessary, true. I can spitball what people find entertaining, just as easily as they can spitball what I find entertaining. Ed, for instance, will never understand why I find LOLcats - or Sockington for that matter! - so amusing. I just do, because it’s retarded and funny and burns fifteen minutes of my workday here and there. He shakes his head and sort of gives me his silent, pitying “I know you’re really intelligent so I’ll just let this one slide” face. I’m okay with that. I’ll never understand how he can like horror movies. It’s a wash.
Hell, I am all for enjoying oneself, even in supremely strange ways such as grabblin’ and cosplay, that I will never understand and maybe shouldn’t… you’ll be happy to know that the person under that cosplay outfit? Is a dude. But hobbies, even the really weird ones, usually connect you to other people, even if they’re as delightfully fuckin’ offbeat as you are (Japan has a whole cosplay CONFERENCE… one event I will never visit for fear of being permanently freaked out by empty faces of fixed comic glee.) While the cosplay thing does border on my forthcoming contentions, at least these guys are getting out of the house.
Anyway. Got distracted, sorry. My whole contention is, there is a whole culture of self-effacement that is evolving with social media, massively multiplayer gaming, and the internet in general. I first started pondering this effacement a while ago when I tried out Second Life after hearing about it from a co-worker. For the uninitiated, Second Life is a “game” developed by Linden Labs - I’m not really sure why, but I think it had something to do with sucking the soul out of humanity. I could be wrong on this count. Anyway, Second Life is basically as it reads on the tin: It’s a virtual world with its own currency, society, etc. You basically wander around the virtual landscape, making your “avatar” interact with other “avatars” in a variety of ways (btw, link is NSFW). ::::shudder:::: Just to let you know, my Second Life experience lasted about twenty minutes. I made a person who looked pretty much exactly like me (okay, I might have given her way bigger jugs, but that’s a whole other story), wandered around flummoxed for a while, and eventually accepted a script from someone I didn’t know, which forced me to fly around the world with my head jammed up my own ass for a few. I finally got someone to fix me, just so I wouldn’t leave the world of Second Life with my face forever in my own pooper, but the glamour was lost.
It’s supposed to be real life, only pixely. And if you stop at Jason’s contention that it doesn’t matter what it is so long as you get pleasure out of it, then okay I guess you’re not hurting anyone. But I’m still baffled by this concept of creating a digital cocoon around yourself, and pretending to be someone else. Most people aren’t logging into Second Life to live a pixely version of their own life; They’re doing it to get completely the hell away from their real life. The same rule applies unfortunately for the majority of people who blog/tweet as their pets/fake celebrities/fictional characters, or MMO players who live and die by the travails of their 47th level Paladins with kick-ass-plus-5-against-orcs swords. It’s an all-consuming escape from being a regular person. Furthermore, these are activities that can take you away from other real people. The siren song of a preferable alter-life can be fairly intoxicating.
I know that there is a percentage of people who are completely normal, workaday average guys and gals like the “rest of us”, but the fact still remains that we are using technology to replace ourselves with things that don’t even exist, people that are created out of the minds of writers, anthropomorphized versions of our pets. The idea that you can be “anyone you want to be” on the internet is stunning to me, perhaps because I’ve never wanted to be anyone but myself. Even though the real me is shit at math, will probably never live in the UK as much as she direly wants to, and can burn rice like a champion, I’m okay with it. Our technology, however, seems to be giving people the ability to separate themselves from themselves in ways no one ever could have predicted. A few minds are looking at this with at least a small amount of concern for what it says about us as a society. Why are we so willing to give up on our real persona in favor of a constructed, “ideal” persona? In the end, it’s all well as long as nobody gets an eye poked out, but it doesn’t stop me from being utterly baffled.
Yeah… first day playing with the kitten has left me basically mushybrained and speechless, so I’m not going to attempt to write anything worthy of attention. I’ll just say……
I should have known that nothing reasonable ever comes out of lunch at Eddie’s work.
Ed and I have been giddy all week about new kitten Jawsie, who comes home tomorrow at noon after a very long wait (a whole 6 days). We were jawing about the Jawsmeister while in the kitchen at ILink, and Tom (who is very awesome) started joking about how he’s a crazy cat lady at heart, that his three cats are his kids, and he refers to them as such. Ed, who is still making transition from growing up as a “pet owner” to being married to a “pet mommy” gives Tom an emphatic “Nooooope! No! No.” He expects that will end the conversation (as if it ever does.) He despises the idea that people would call themselves “pet parents”. Of course, my take is, if I’m cleaning up your shit, feeding you, loving you, and not being earth-endingly pissed when you destroy my house, all for gratis? There’s little chance I’m anything else BUT a mom. Just sayin’.
So anyway, I got a little silly and said I was going to torture Ed by tweeting and blogging as Jaws, a trend which has become all the rage ever since Jason Scott started tweeting as his two cats Penny and Sockington. Socks has somewhere in the range of 575,000 followers. To give this some perspective, President Obama had about 300,000 devout web-worshippers during his campaign. Of course, President Obama didn’t joke about funny shit like chasing shakymice and fighting with Penny. Maybe if he threw in a dig about Michelle here and there, he would have bridged the gap. He just had to settle for being President of the free world.
So I get back to the office, and decide that yes indeed, Jawsie has to have some time in the tweety spotlight. She is our technorati kitten-kid after all. So I created a tweetstream for her. She immediately followed Ed, annnddd all of his co-workers who had been in on the conversation. She’s a very outgoing girl. Ed was suitably embarrassed. My work was done.
Here’s the thing about tweeting as your cat: It’s funny and all, and it’s cool I guess to jump on the Sockington gravy train, but there are some people who are obviously really into it. Perhaps… a little too into it. This can’t have been what the great democratic medium was meant to produce. Tweeting as your cat/dog/horse in any serious, continuous way, let’s not even mention building a network of OTHER fake pets, is… hmm. Well, I mean, I don’t want to burn any bridges with potential readership.. but I guess the term that springs to mind is “sad”.
Actually… tweeting as your pet - or tweeting as a fictional character from a TV series for instance - it’s a little like larping. What’s larping, you ask? Actually, it will be more effective if I show you.
This is LARPing
Now… in the interest of full disclosure. I have larped… but let’s qualify this. I was seventeen years old. Around eighteen, I graduated from high school, stopped working at a video game store, and started fucking someone who eventually went on to move out of his parents house and put a ring on my finger. There. Consider my deep dark past disclosed.
Anyway.. tweeting about your cat licking its own ass and breaking Great Grandma Bessie’s bone china as any sort of actual pass-time, for any sustained length of time sort of leads me to assume that being yourself (or even :::gasp:::: being human!) is just too taxing or conversely too depressing. This generalization of course does not apply to Jason Scott, who is going to make a dirty-fisted fortune selling the book “written” by Pennycat and Sockington to the probably-by-then million fans who light their incense at the altar of Socks and Mrs. P.
I’ll admit, if karma kicks in and my next go around is in a different form, sign me up for being a cat. I’d be a natural. My two favorite activities are A) Sleeping and B) Thinking everyone else in my vicinity is an asshole who lives to serve my whims. The cat’s life would be a perfect fit. I’m just not willing to use my five-pound brain and two opposable thumbs to imitate that life 140 characters at a time.
I’m a writer, artist and degenerate internet addict. I have a day job only to keep the lights on and the internet working. I’m not always PG, but I’m always A+ (not to mention humble.) Please do not try to make me think before coffee. It will only end in tears.
