Month: December 2001

oh, and potato pancakes, yum.

got another email – and responded, I hope in the same spirit.

I need to update my links page. there are a number of sites that I think I would go to, if only I remembered they were there.

I’m thinking not so much posting tonight – I need, must, and will finish (at least the first half of) Chapter 5.

I’m a doofus. (posted prev. entry to the wrong weblog.)

some thoughts about the art of the journal

my first journal had a puffy cover, with a picture of teddy bears. it’s as dire and angsty as anything written by a girl tumbling from elementary school to middle school could muster up. and yet I find myself, quite painfully, identifing with those words even now.

since then, I’ve written in beautiful journals, composition books, and spiral notebooks of various sizes & shapes. I’ve had separate design & writing journals. I’ve kept journals & logs on the computer, the handspring, and here on the web.

sometimes I write mostly poetry, or stories, or doodles. sometimes it’s super-angst personal stuff. a lot of times, my pen-and-paper journal is a way to write through what I’m thinking.

this, the weblog, is a slightly different animal, because I walk a fine line of public vs. private. I’ve been asked, twice, under very different circumstances, to be circumspect about what I write. I’ve been startled, a little pleasantly, by actually having readers, on three separate occasions. (Tom, are you still reading?)

and yet…I find myself anticipating this screen, this weblog, because of its putative relationship to some sort of reading public. “dear reader….” which is sort of how I started my very first diary, back in 1984/5. (I have always wanted to write a epistolary novel, btw.)

I had an intense infatuation with anais nin, years ago, because of how she turned her life into her art, through the diary/journal. (her novels, which attempted to do that more explicitly, were much weaker for taking out the quirky & often self-delusional voice of the diarist.)

it would, I imagine, be possible to reconstruct my life thru a series of diaries & journals, complete with the inanity, obsessions, and short-sightedness. (see self-delusional, above) there’d be some gaps, of course: I seem to recall a period of 4 mos. or more, in college, when I didn’t write a word, except for a poem or 2, and there were several similar gaps in high school. but it’d be good enough. I find that both reassuring, because I often find my memory sketchy, and mortifying, because of the complete lack of perspective, or self-censorship, whichever. (reading old journals often makes me weepy.)

add in the one experiment in collaborative journaling from high school….

and about that: no, let’s not. some people do them, apparently, but after a brief golden period, it turned out to be a terribly hurtful thing for me. (many years passed before I could talk to Kris.)

so someday this will stand (depending on storage media, of course: one of these days I should print all these out, just in case) as a record of the silliness of my late 20’s, and what I thought & did, what those days were like, etc., etc., etc.

and when I’m famous, they’ll go to some university as part of my collection of papers.

yeah, e. in your dreams.

speaking of which…I should get to those.

I should go to bed. I need to go to bed. If I’m not asleep before 11 pm, then my brain is mush until 10 or 11 am. But damn it, I’m not tired. I can feel the shape of that chapter (is it 4 or 5?!) in my head, warm and round and sweet, and how it fills out the whole story, building up the themes that open with chapter one and foreshadowing the love and darkness of the ending…and maybe even hinting at book 2.

goodness. book 2? yeah, maybe, someday. I swear it won’t take as long as this one. (how long is that? the first inklings came to me sometime between fall 92 & spring 94. the first first draft was started in the summer of 94. faithful readers who can do arithmetic will note that 7 years, plus a few months, have elapsed since then. yes, that was the summer of OJ, the summer Ra & I lived in the pretty little cottage, the summer I first corresponded with HEA. and the story was an entirely different thing then, except for dear Aila herself, and the destruction of Tanu.)

uh-huh. no sleep for you tonight! I’m bouncing along to the Cure (just like heaven) and listening to Chad building with the legos.

I really want a digital camera.

oh yeah, the web is weird…and weirdly web-like. 🙂

can I be of 2 minds about this? no, really. I have all this fond nostalgic stuff in my head, and frankly, I found his weblog to be fairly entertaining. but at the same time…god, he was such an ass during that whole thing with edith. and the email she sent me a while back (a) creeped me out and (b) made me roll my eyes. whatever. kid’s gonna be f***ed up, with manic-depressive genes, etc., etc., she’s gonna find something to be f***ed up about. not that’s it’s any of my concern. except that I need to mail her a christmas gift, to be a good auntie.

which I’ve not been so hot at, frankly.

hrm.

here’s the trick question for this evening: do people ever really change? I speak not only of k, but also of people like Ra (and his god-forsaken mother), or Edith, or…anybody, including oneself.

I like to think I’m different from how I was 5 years ago, or 10 years ago (that 10 yr reunion is haunting the back of my mind), but sometimes I wonder.

and with legos spread out in the living room, it’s hard to take myself seriously as an adult.

the smiths followed by louis armstrong? yes, launch can be pretty cool, even after their acquistion by yahoo has totally tweaked the signin process.

but I’m about to be hell-pissed. was checking out the lego web site, and went to the shop at home section to look up prices for bulk sets (esp. the shubbery)…one of the items in their sidebar is “girls”…all the items are pink or dolls. or both! I’m fucking offended. like I didn’t spend all that time as a kid building crazy towns. (like I didn’t just spend an hour building the goth space castle with Chad.)

of course, they do have a lot of cool stuff.

it does seem to be “blast from the past” week.

exhibit a: Ms. Carter, my 7th grade computer teacher, turns up in some research on how the PUSD uses Manila.

exhibit b: phone call from greyson. makes me sorta sad that we lost touch so intensely the last 6-8 mos. 🙁

exhibit c: someone used my contact form. wow. to think, a few days ago I was bemoaning that I didn’t know anybody with a weblog. it’s like getting in touch with Irina…a little comforting, and a little unnerving. and I also have that uncomfortable sense of maybe being a bit more public than I really wanted to be. maybe I’ll write about it later, or not.

If I were a work of art, I would be Piet Mondrian’s Composition A.

I am rigidly organised and regimented, although my cold and unapproachable exterior hides a clever way of thinking and a rebellious and innovative nature. A lot of people don’t understand me, but I can still affect them on an emotional level.

Which work of art would you be? The Art Test

a funny (if maybe not ha-ha funny) story of how I found the art test. but more about that later.