fbook

Court Anonymous is riding a train through rain.
6:58pm · Comment · LikeUnlike · Show Feedback (10)Hide Feedback (10)
You like this.
Adam Anonymous at 7:05pm April 28
Hopefully not in Spain...or on a plain...and certainly not with Mark Twain.
Crystal Anonymous at 7:08pm April 28 via Facebook Mobile
...in pain?
Sarah Jo Anonymous at 7:17pm April 28
or down the lane...
Sally Anonymous at 8:53pm April 28
with butaine.
Court Anonymous at 8:58pm April 28 via Facebook Mobile
I've nothing to obtain, yet everything to gain.
Sally Anonymous at 8:59pm April 28
on the train, in the rain.
Court Anonymous at 9:04pm April 28 via Facebook Mobile
Thank you all for sculpting this poem with me. It shall be blog'd.
Melissa Anonymous at 11:02pm April 28
i tried in vain to contain the last refrain, but i'm not quite sane
Jayne Anonymous at 3:35am April 29
...and neither is Jayne.
Sarah Jo Anonymous at 8:03am April 29
Glad this didn't turn out lame!
Chris Anonymous at 10:09am April 29
As far as being lame, at least *I* am free from blame.
Sarah Jo Anonymous at 11:07am April 29
^^ was that a remark on my game?
Robert M. P. Anonymous IV at 11:46am April 29
time to drain the main vein

hardly anything

I hate times like this, and yet it seems my life is willed with nothing but: I have a lot on my mind, and things half-written in my head (to the point that, by typing them up, they would complete themselves), and yet I have less time than I'd require to do something.

Thing is, it's been lovely here, the weather. And good weather stikes my mood up a notch or ten. I've been sick lately, and yesterday was the first day I've really felt better, and so yesterday and today I've been up & about, early.
Today's goal was to get a Washington State driver's license. My current, TN card's photo looks nothing like me now (the traveling years have done me good... the picture was taken two years ago, and in it I look years older than I do now), so as an ID it's hardly useful. And of course, there's the fact that I've been living in Seattle for nearly a year.
I checked the website, and it said I needed proof of identification, proof of residence, and my SSN. I arrived with my TNDL, a letter from the US Treasury (explaining that, rather than sending me my tax refund, they are applying it to my debt), and my SS card. Turns out, that's not enough.
Proof of ID requires a DL and something else... for example, a high school yearbook. I think that's hilarious. What's really cool is, even though I live thousands of miles from my hometown, I do live with someone I went to high school with, and she does have a yearbook. What's unfortunate is, it's from the year after I graduated. Hurm.
So I dunno what I'll do, but this'll happen.

- -- --- ---- ----- ---- --- -- -

Completely new subject: Twitter. How the hell did it become such a big deal? I considered dropping it when Oprah joined it, mostly because someone I follow twitted about it, and I thought it absurd. But I like Twitter for what I use it for--little haiku-like blogs. I enjoy having to search for just the right words to fit a whole day or story into 140 characters. Oprah can do what she wants; that's not my Twitter.
I do feel a little stalkerish, though, following Neil Gaiman's son. But I do. Because he mentioned his mum. Neil never mentions her on his blog. I can understand why--she probably doesn't want strangers having an insight to her life via some else's words. However, it makes me a little sad. And I'm not sure why. So when I saw Micahel Gaiman make a small reference to her, I twitter-followed him. Maybe that's a little more than stalkerish, though.

There's another account I follow that I really love. Last week I overheard someone on the bus ask someone else if they had rubber tubing. This account, @overheardist, searches for twits using the word "overheard," and broadcasts them. They posted my rubber tubing story, and that's how I came across them. Today's gem: RT @baratunde: "Overheard at dinner: imagine if in your job you couldn't get anything done and what you did get done was f**king stupid."

- -- --- ---- ----- ---- --- -- -

Anyway, now I'm getting ready for work.
Have a good day!

One day you will be nostalgic for now.

All I see is the bill of my cap, the maroon of the blanket, and my girlfriend's hair. I'm laying face-down on Kite Hill at Gasworks Park. The sun is setting, and as soon as it's left us in the shade the temperature has dropped dramatically. I'm just laying here, enjoying my own, personal cap-ground-body cave, and listening to my breath, and I probably seem to be sleeping. Behind me is Lake Union, and beyond that, the Seattle skyline. Rolled over on my back, I can see nothing but blue sky, with two dispersing contrails from planes long-gone. I wish I could draw in a breath and, by holding it, stop time. I want to get up and examine every little thing, and see it for what it is right now, which it wasn't a moment ago, and it won't be a moment later. Everything is as it is, was as it was, and will be as it will.
There's no keeping up with it, so best just to take it in and appreciate it as immediately as possible.

At this point in the day, it's enough. It's been so beautiful outside, and now Jenny and I are laying on a blanket. She's reading, while I'm restless and exhausted. Before that, we enjoyed the UW campus. Her friend Lisha introduced us to the library; to the Largest Book In the World. We walked under cherry blossoms, and we admired Mount Ranier.
We had burritos, and I remembered the first time I settled for Chipotle, in Tucson, with Scott. And I missed Blue Coast Burrito, as I always do when I have to settle for Chipotle.

- -- --- ---- ----- ---- --- -- -

It's earlier in the day, and I'm timid. I'm embarrassed and I'm shy.
I'm walking around a room filled with tables. At each table, there is a person. Some people are getting attention; indeed, there are lines of people waiting to see them. Other people, at other tables, are looking neglected, or are drawing, or are both. I don't allow myself to make eye contact. I want to talk to them about their comics, but I can't. I don't know their work. I know four of the people, and there are lines at their tables. Of course tere are--EVERYBODY knows THEM. Mike Mignola, Tim Sale, David Mack, Rob Liefeld. Rob Liefeld... is it worth it to stand in line to spit on someone? I decide not.
I'm walking around, outshone by the knowledge and confidence of all these comic book fans. I never knew how little I knew about comics until now. I was not worthy to pay the admission price but, generously, they took my money. And now I'm in so over my head. A glance to the left breaks my shoe-gaze, and it catches my eye: a tattoo, and one I know.

Her name is Lyxzén Suicide and Erica Danger, and she is tiny--a full foot shorter than I might have guessed. I've seen her naked; I've seen her six friends naked too, but this is the first time I've met them. Still embarrassed and shy, I shake their hands and we all introduce ourselves. I manage to compliment Lyxzén's tattoos, to let her know they're, I think, the coolest tattoos I've ever seen, and she shakes her ass, tells me she's wagging her tail because I've made her happy, and I'm soooo out of my element. I buy a DVD (which the girls all autograph, even though
some of them were minors when the DVD came out; even though none of them are featured on it), a deck of cards, and I leave.
I return a moment later to ask if I might take a photo.
Soon after, I leave the Emerald City Comic Book Convention altogether.

Next week, Jenny and I will return to the convention center, where she'll be as embarrassingly excited over Dragonball Z relics as I was of exclusive Hellboy and Heroes artwork.

- -- --- ---- ----- ---- --- -- -

Good morning.
I love you.

Good morning.

I love you.

op ed reject post

Hm, I could post something. I could narrate the experience of not having a car for the first time since highschool, and share some of the experiences this has afforded me (such as the conversation two seats back, which began "Hey, you don't recognize me, do ya?" "From where?" "Walla Walla!").

Instead, I'm irritated by this, and I can't shake it. It's a post on bOINGbOING subjected, "Obama's diplomatic gift to UK leader fubared by DRM". It's about how Obama gave UK's PM a crappy gift, which was even crappier for the fact that it's Region 1 DVDs (and this is our tech-savvy Pres?).

But what gets to me is the misuse in the subject of the word FUBAR. This is a very specific term that portrays a very significant situation elegantly. If ya don't know, it means Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.

Say you've got troops in a town, anywhere doing anything. Having a meal, reading a book, whatever. And then explosions happen, and it becomes a war scene. That's FUBAR. From having a meal to being at war. That is beyond recognition.

Say you come home from work, and your front door's open and your furniture's gone. The day's gone from normal to fucked up--it can no longer be recognized as a normal day!! That is FUBAR.

This gift was not fucked up by DRM, it was fucked up by being a poorly chosen gift. That's not news; it happened nearly a month ago. And at no point did it pass beyond recognition. I'm sure when Gordon Brown pulled it out of his Region 2 DVD player, it still looked, smelled, felt, tasted and sounded like a disc of cheap plastic with a hole in its center. Also, still like a cheap gift.

Word use is wicked important to me, for some reason. I truly enjoy a well-chosen word, and I bristle at a poorly-chosen word. I know it's about as insignificant as it could possibly be, but reading the word fubar in this sense really, really offended me.

/soapbox

new perspectives

Working receiving in Tucson's BN, we listened to music. Sometimes it was low-key, sometimes it was a party, and sometimes it helped vent frustration. Always, though, it really set the mood for the day.
Working receiving in Issaquah's BN, we've got one mood, and it's set by NPR. We're not so sociable in this store (not anti-social, mind you; just not as social as in Tucson). Bryan and I hardly speak a word back there all day. I'm always listening, and always given a lot to think about. And since I've gotten the internet back, I use it mostly to re-listen to interviews I've heard or caught parts of.

Here are a few, and what I thought of them.

Gene Robinson
Gene Robinson is an openly gay Episcopalian bishop. His whole talk is quite good, and he's an entertaining speaker. The bit that I caught on the radio, though, and the part that really clicked with me was toward the end, about the last twenty minutes.
At this point he speaks of discrimination: "You know what an '-ism' is: it's a set of prejudices and values and judgments, backed up with the power to enforce those prejudices in society. So you have a prejudice against people of color, and if you're white, you have the power to enforce those prejudices and set the society up to benefit white people at the expense of people of color. So, as a white man, I never have to say anything bad about a person of color, I never have to use a racial slur, I never have to tell a bad joke... all I have to do is get out of bed in the morning and I benefit from being white in this culture. So tolerance is simply not enough. I can be tolerant and let things go along the way they always have, benefiting me because I'm white. So unless I am working to dismantle that kind of racist society, then I'm reaping its rewards."
And this is part of why I feel guilty, very often. Why I hate to be lazy or self-indulgent. Because whenever I am not working toward becoming the person I desire to be, I am benefiting from, and therefore enforcing, the world I desire not to live in.

I also appreciate his perspective on his faith, which I share: "I don't argue that you should 'do this' or 'vote that way' because God says so. That's a Theocracy. What I do is use my own religion. I use the values that I understand as a religious person to understand what it is that I long for, and I hope for. [...] I'm all the time saying, 'For me this is true,' and never saying what needs to be true for you."
I believe the nature of true love is understanding, and I find that for me to express that requires that it is clear that I want to understand you. I want you to know that I believe what I believe, but do not use it as a lens to look at you through.

Ken Robinson
This interview kept me glued to the radio. I thought it was just amazing. As with a lot of things I read / hear people say, I see the world changing in ways I'd personally hope for, or at least prefer to what we've got now. I think the understanding of reality that Sir Robinson portrays in this interview (and in his talk at the 2006 TED conference, and in his book, "The Element") reflects the concerns of many people (after listening to this interview several times, Katie and I discussed the declining esteem of medication in psychology). In addition to having interesting things to say, he's also an effective storyteller.

Malcolm Gladwell
Which of these do not belong: [ Billy Corgan / Buddy Holly / Tom Waits / Barack Obama ] ?
The answer is Buddy Holly. Because there's not an "A" in it. The obvious answer, though, is Obama, for not being a musician. And the answer isn't incorrect.
This is how I feel about Malcolm Gladwell. He points out something so basically obvious, draws the lines to explain how these simpler ideas point to different answers, while the majority of people simply beat their heads against walls for decades, trying to understand why Obama belongs, and Holly does not.
In his new book, Outliers, Gladwell argues that circumstances that lead us to class distinctions and racism have simpler explanations. I don't know that he's 100% correct, but I believe more in what he says than I believe that black people run faster, and rich people learn better.

Within that interview, Gladwell points out that the people who do best in school are the ones told they do best in school. As soon as he said that, I was struck dumb with the instant realization that this applied to me.
When I moved to Tennessee an 1986 I lived next door to Maitreya Dunham, who is an amazing mind indeed. (When I house-sat for her a few months ago, Nathan asked if the house began discussing complex theories with me when I walked in.) Before, when I lived in Texas, I did quite well in school. After moving, I became (and remained, even into my latest stab at college) a C-average student. Mom and dad were concerned at the drop, and wondered about it. Maitreya and I were so alike, and yet she made As, and I made Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs. "You're very smart," they'd say. "You're a good student."
When I heard Malcolm Gladwell give state his observation, I realized that Maitreya, at the top of the class, understood she was at the top of the class, while I always heard that I wasn't as good as she.

This is just a story about the revelations I have while listening to some of these people talk, by the way. I'm not unhappy about it, and in fact at this point I'm exceptionally glad for it, for reasons that would take so long to explain. I feel I need to say this, though, since I understand how that story could be something to be bitter over. Nope, I'm a happy person, and I think it's wicked cool that Maitreya and I live close again. We're way overdue for another game night, though.
I should call.

Reason #1 why Court can maybe live on his own after all.

Once upon a time, I tried to cook rice: 22mar2003

I know Katie has memories of me being some kind of romantic guy, but really I'm not. I'm really quite dopey when it comes to impressing the ladies. So when I realized, about halfway through the week, that Valentine's Day was on its way (and it was a one-month anniversary, too), I felt the pressure. I had no idea what to do. When it came down to within twenty-four hours, I planned the only thing I could think of.

I decided to cook her dinner.

Recalling that day, nearly six years ago, I expected it to go wrong all along. Jenny said she'd make something, too, and when she asked what I'd like, I suggested she make whatever she'd like to eat once I failed to make anything edible at all.

I had Mark send me his famous fettuccine Alfredo recipe from J140. He always made it look easy, at least, (and Jenny is a picky eater, but I know she loves fettuccine) so I thought I'd try it.

My car's dead (I suppose I haven't mentioned it, but yeah, the Blue MF is dead), so I'm taking the bus to & from work. If I'd left at 6:30, as scheduled, then I would have gotten back in time to walk to the store, buy the ingredients, and walk home before Jenny got here. Of course, there was some kind of plumbing leak that resulted in water from the Cafe coming into the receiving room, so I didn't leave at 6:30. And if I'd caught the next bus, I'd've gotten home half an hour after Jenny got here. So I waited at work. I'd been wanting to make a CD for her (goodness knows, I can make a mix CD or two, or a thousand), but I've been out of blank CDs. After waiting in the break room for half an hour, I realized there was an Office Depot nearby, so I bought blank CDs and then wandered around the parking lot, talking to Leslie on the phone. It wasn't until t was time for Jenny to leave work did it occur to me that I'd been standing outside a Trader Joe's for half an hour. I could have had the ingredients ready to go.
Ah well.

We left, we went grocery shopping, we came home, and I got to work. And...
It went well.

Considering I didn't know my way around a kitchen, and of course we don't have the pots I required (I'd forgotten this since the last time we tried to make food in Jenn's kitchen, January of last year), it took a while. but it went well. Finally it was as ready as I was going to get it, and I sampled the sauce.
Way salty, way cheesey. Damn and blast! However, once applied to pasta, it was actually pretty damn good.

I don't really have a clever way to wrap up this story. We ate, we watched "The Office" (the first episodes from season 4, when Pam & Jim are dating, so it was all romanticky), and I fell asleep on the couch.

Anyway, I can cook, now.

not enough on adventures OR God

I've just spent the past hour giving this blog some attention:
http://thereisabluebird.blogspot.com/

It motivated me to finally set up a new module over there to the right, for the blogs of people I've met who are also looking for something on the road. I hope to expand that into some collaborative project, but I've not yet found the right one...

It also motivated me to finally blog. I've had the internet here for three weeks, and I haven't really done so.
So here we go!
----- ---- --- -- - -- --- ---- -----

(approx 45 minutes in)
"A Biologist Questions Evolution" was the lead-in.
That's news? I like to think that's the job, at least in part, of a biologist.
Anyway, I want to blog about this, but can't get my head into it (probably because I have the interview playing, so I just want to listen to it).
Anyway, she, this biologist, is amazing me by speaking my views and ideas.
One question from the interviewer asks: "Aren't we just quibbling over what you think God is, then?"
Well yes, yes, that is what we are doing within this conversation. Because, in the traditional Evolution vs Creationism debate, isn't science quibbling over what God is not? This biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris, is saying "you've got it all wrong!" Which is exciting, because I think that's the case: Saying 'God does not exist,' is to say 'what I understand God to be does not exist.'
The God I know cannot be denied. But if you think I mean some old beardy man, if you think I mean a sentient being conjured up the world and the stars, if you think I mean Divine Intervention means an invisible hand politely moving something aside like a chess piece, the you're not understanding me.

Elisabet Sahtouris, in this interview, touches on the God I know.

----- ---- --- -- - -- --- ---- -----
Anyway, reading Justine's blog made me want to blog (and blog well) about my adventures, but that will have to wait. Now I'm going to watch last night's lost, and then I've got to catch the bus to work.