Month: August 2002

– this might be something to take a whirl at.

– my watershed – by way of Rebecca Blood
– bread salad – from megnut – sounds very tasty. maybe I’ll make it sometime next week. (with no onions!)
– Asheville Poetry Review (I gave CSS advice!)

so I managed to catch some of Anywhere But Here tonight. it didn’t interest me much – sounded like a coming-of-age-with-a-crazy-mom story (like we don’t all have those!), but some of it was filmed in the house where I grew up.

oddly enough, it wasn’t the part set in LA, but the part set in “Bay City” Wisconsin. (mom said they had to do some interesting work to hide the orange trees.)

I’d been wondering what it looked like on film (the movie was released in ’99), but (see above) had never gotten around to it. didn’t feel like finishing it off, but seeing my house was moving, or unnerving, or something. ’cause, yeah, that’s the house that I grew up in, that we moved into when I was 7 years old, more than 20 years ago:

the fading grey paint, the white porch with the slatted sides, the empty spot where the chimney used to be (it got taken down after one too many earthquakes), the long driveway with the slight curve, the tattered rose hedge in the front. they even caught the old double (triple?) garage and the tenant’s house – though they put fake dormers on it. and as mom said, there’s christopher (or his twin brother) riding his bike in the background, just for a second. they’re teenagers now, I guess; I used to babysit them when I was in high school. the house across the street, where Renee, the old woman in the wheelchair, used to live – she caught polio in Egypt, many years ago, and had pit bulls, and that’s where mom sent us when we came home from school one day, almost 20 years ago, to a fire truck and an ambulance in front of the house – you can catch just a glimpse of the front window. the front walk where I learned how to rollerskate, and the side lawn where I spent untold hours raking leaves. and in the distance, the avocado trees, though you can’t tell that’s what they are that far away.

places awaken my memories, and sometimes I ache for remembering.

now I have my own house – and that grey wooden house, built sometime around 1906, is officially “the house I grew up in” and not “my house” – this house is my house, and I have years to build memories here. (until 2032, according to my mortgage.) I wonder what this house will mean to me in 20 years.

I hate Sallie Mae. I try to pay on time, online to save stamps, and last month I apparently entered my 20,000 digit account number wrong – so they deducted the money from my account, went “hey, this money doesn’t belong to anybody”, then sent it back with nary a word. so this month I logged in to discover that I had an extra payment due…because this has not been a good month for me keeping track of things. luckily, my monthly payments aren’t that high, but still.

oh, and the whole fscking navigation for their account management system requires Javascript for no apparent reason. at this point, I can only quote Mark Pilgrim: “Don’t even get me started on those dynamic Javascript-based menu systems. They make you look cool like smoking makes you look cool. Use real links.”

but hey…I made my last payment on my other loan last month, and wasn’t that lovely. (must remember to download deferment forms for C.)

so I’ve got this humongous list of links in my drafts tab…which I really want to share with my four readers…except that I’m sort of dreading reviewing all the links, figuring out what they link to, and writing brief thoughtful commentary. question to the peanut gallery, then: can I just post the links uncommented? (except maybe for a title)

in other backlogs, I’ve been continuing to write Steering the Craft exercizes, and finding that my general interest and energy for writing is greatly increased. I also realized this morning that I’ve been holding back on writing on Aila again, and I’m not entirely sure why…some weird vague sense of responsibility for the story…but I really want to write more of that story. I love her, I love her story and that milieu. so, alongside my exercizes, I’m going to haul out as many of the different drafts and micro-drafts that I can find, and start re-reading & re-weaving. and that makes me happy.

I’m also going to reactivate the ailablog, initially to hold copies of my exercizes (and possibly even to write some of them), and maybe later it will again have notes for the novel. don’t know for sure. maybe, someday, it’ll be a weblog about getting the darn thing published. 🙂

1) I actually want to do things correctly.
2) I’m not sure I know how to do things correctly.
3) it doesn’t feel quite real.
4) so far, we have found: a 1942 Nazi 10 pfennig piece, a blue bead, a little red army man, a tiny plastic gun, and an weird little fork (3 curved tines, what is that?).
5) it really will take forever to unpack.
6) I miss the books I’ve gotten rid of (sold, mostly) over the years.
7) thank god it doesn’t all have to be done at once.
8) my god, I wish it could all be done at once!

all transportation was go today. Sasha was very fussy last night, needed lots of attention, while Maddy was more aloof. still tired, but not quite so spacy. did a little writing on the bus – picked up Steering the Craft again, which would make this my third attempt. Kat & I didn’t get very far, when we tried it years ago (before Q?) – and Q didn’t finish it either after our summer retreat (2 years ago now!), but both times it’s been a great positive influence on my writing – hopefully that will also be the case with myself as a “Lone Navigator.”

on that note, here’s a blog entry on ellipses and other forms of punctuation…I love ellipses, dashes (tho I rarely use them correctly), and parentheses. (duh!)

not related at all: another little guy gets taken on by the man – I must remember to download some of his fonts…I remember loving gauss jordan. (oh the fonts I’ve lost on reformatted hard drives…it’d make your heart ache.)

it’s been such a day. my email is down, for those who might care. I had to set my alarm for 4:15 this morning to walk to catch a bus (the vanpool would be short drivers the week that I can’t get a ride in an emergency!) only I accidentally set it for 4:15 p.m.. luckily my body woke me at 5:45, tho why it did that I don’t rightly know. oh, and a lady got tossed off the bus for being rowdy. yay.

last night I wrote a woe-is-me entry which has wisely remained in the drafts tab, along with the 47,000 links I’ve collected but not published over the last few weeks. drafts are a good thing.

from diveintomark: If you can imagine yourself not doing what you’re doing, do something else. Do whatever it is that you can’t not do.

and Gus has written an excellent bit on credibility & the media – the comments are pretty interesting, too.

All of us know which of our friends are prone to exaggeration; who can be trusted to show up when youre moving to a new apartment and whos just saying they will; when its socially OK and not OK to tell white lies. The problem now is that our small-scale systems are, before our eyes, spiraling into their place as tiny fractals along the arms of a vast, chaotic social and informational system. That systems influence on our smaller systems is more than any of us is currently equipped to handle.

I’d agree with the commentor who said that we were just living in “1913 with fiber optics” – a great phrase, no? – because I think the moment that those small-scale systems began to fragment/spiral/etc. was at the beginning of the urban/industrial age, once you get social units that are too large to actually know in person – which means both 1913, and in Rome, 13 BCE. 🙂

I’d even add the thought that newspapers, in the best-of-all-possible-worlds, are an attempt to rebuild, systematically, those networks of trust, with the newspaper serving as the voice of the trustable individual. the fractally bit, now, is that the scale is shifting again. (I feel like I could make a much more interesting and cogent argument if I’d gotten around to reading David W’s book.)

I’m back on the ‘net – dial-up again, alas. house thing is going well. had a big bbq last night, neighborhood buddies & Kat down from Seattle. it was way cool, a warm evening with tasty food & mellow conversation. (mmmm…s’mores….)

today is a little more tropical, with hard downpours like we hardly ever get around here. but good for unpacking boxes.

more later, if I get around to it.