March 2004 Archives

i imagine myself discovering newdifferent energies within my imbalanced chemistry, i even believe i've already done some discovering, based on evidence that i'll refrain from enumerating here (suffice to say it falls somewhere between hubris & arrogance, & leave it at that).

is it still low self-esteem if i suspect that my high self-esteem is somewhere between extremely optimistic & delusional, based on actual factual accomplishments? it doesn't matter, as long as there is a core within which believes in a basis not yet accomplished, even if it consists of some fairly far-fetched dreams. the quirky loser with big plans is always a fun character to play in any good story, and that's the worst that can come of this, anything else is pie. a la mode. with a cup of really fine, fresh coffee. in a beach house.

somewhere between extremely optimistic & delusional, which is fine by me.

so anyway.

i am sooooo blonde. and you know what? it like, totally fits.

so there's this wonderful dictionary online, we are talking in-depth reference here, which i heard of because they found kurtwood's and my photographs on the stock photo site.

they used mine for these: 101, 95, arachnophobia, Born, Brass, buick, busy, cocoon, darkness, darn, daughter's, decorate, decorated, digging, ensued, fastest, fear, five, halloween, hour, however, hundred, hydrant, inch, kid, knocked, legged, miles, ninety, override, per, regal, saved, southbound, speedometer, spelling, spider's, spindly, straighten, terrified, today, ventura, vs.

they used kurtwood's for: grass, hand, worth. they gave us nice credit for it & everything.

hmm. did i have anything else to say? i am soooo blonde, have i mentioned that?

i should write i should post i should blog dammit blog but what would i say if i did? i am unwilling to try & explain my life at this point (it would only confuse me) (or you, if there are any you's left who still come here) and i'm sure i have other things to say however this $2.50 per hour internet thang is seriously impeding the flow of whatever those other things might be. composing offline just isn't the same, there is something in the connection itself that is a conduit for the expression of any inspiration i may have on hand; disconnected, it seeks other outlets. it's revived my long-dormant semi-obsessive tendency to frequent the stationery aisles, impulsively purchasing more spiral notebooks & cool pens than i possibly need. i have also been up to my elbows in glitterpolish & crazy glue & discarded things, to the extent that the finished products are less decorative than they are an infestation of sparkly crap covering every flat surface everywhere.

another thing i can't seem to do offline, is code. i can download code with the intention to modify it & upload later, but when the modem clicks off, so does the part of my brain that had those great ideas for those cool modifications. i am perfectly capable of doing some pretty extensive shit with code & having it right the first time, it's not like the old days of testing wild guesses, all elebendy kabillion of 'em, before i had a working finished product, so i don't really *need* to be online like i did then. well, at least not for that reason. but i do, apparently, need to be online.

there are parts of my brain that are conditioned to work on a computer that is actively switching packets in the background. i can get as far as the first impulse to look something up, & it's over. i might not need the answer to continue, but the sheer fact of not being able to have that answer till i log back on ... ADD ... look! a shiny thing!

weeks. it will be a few more weeks, two-ish, until this business with the offlineness is resolved. until then, i am ... somewhere between a holding pattern, and a test pattern. i am something filling in spacetime until the real something happens.

& if & when the apocalypse comes, and i survive, you will find me holed up in an abandoned ISP with a case of red bull & a generator, working diligently day & night to get the connections back running. and i know others who are of the same mindset. i comfort myself with this, whenever i am forced to face the depth breadth & extent of my need. there are worse things to be dependent on, than a blast-proof packet switching network that connects me to a mind-bogglingly vast array of things. even if some of those things are parts of my self.

god i love the internet.

i wrote this in notepad a week ago, they played the rest of the tapes tonight. i didn't see anything i hadn't seen before, i just watched to see her, hear her again. she was ... something to me, i cannot explain.

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her name mentioned anywhere in my periphery catches my attention. i struggle to ignore the television, yet i knew the tapes would be played tonight. i can resist most tabloid style shocking new development in history type things, but tapes? her voice?

i laid at the foot of the bed, close enough to the tv not to need glasses. i clutched my bottle of newcastle and i fell into her world, so familiar. i know the story, as well or better than i know my own. i did not listen for revelations, i only wanted to hear the things i know spoken in her voice.

and i cried, first at the wedding images and then off and on for the rest of the hour. six and a half years after her death, i cry at the memory of a woman i never met, whose life played out in a world so different from the one i inhabit, yet the recognition was instantaneous. i have been following her shadow from behind the harsh lights, since the first breathless headlines.

i can tell you that these tears are pleasure, an indulgence. and that they cleanse me in ways my own cannot. in fact i enjoy every thing i have felt during this following, the feelings i am feeling now are exquisite bittersweet and perfect. i will even tell you i love her, even though in the typing of that admission, i can feel every ounce of rational matter in me anywhere, protesting vigorously, but with complete and utter futility.

love. love is the word.

my headphones are my sanctuary. but my kid uses mine when his break, and then ... well, they break. i had one pair he didn't break, & it was 'cause they were broken when i got 'em. someone found them & gave them to me, i forget, & i'm a packrat, so here they were. and my last pair of kidphones had one side out, and ... i need headphones. one side didn't work, and was missing the hook dealy that hangs it over the ear. wiggling the cord did make the sound cut in & out, so there was hope. i used a hair tie to secure the wire, turned and bent in such a way that it makes contact. i took a different sort of ear thingy from another broken pair & stuck one end under the rubber band so that the speaker would hang precariously over my ear.

& this works. surprisingly well. astonishingly, even.

i used to do this all the time when i was a kid, i was always fixing my headphones. not very well, the repairs were klunky & generally temporary, but whatever works right? & i did indeed make headphones work on many occasions.

headphones have always been my sanctuary, my little hidey-hole. they don't make the world go entirely away but they do think twice before bugging me, since it's such a hassle getting my attention (hint: it's the same whether i them loud, or quiet, or turned off -- it's not that i can't hear you, it's just that i am ignoring you.) and music, music has saved me so many times.

anyway, living with someone ostensibly way better at this type of stuff than me, and headphones break, and he says 'i don't have a soldering iron', and that's that. well for some reason, i ... started to believe that it really had to be done with a soldering iron. in fact, i had the 'no soldering iron' thought all by myself, in my own mind.

but at nine thirty p.m. with no cash whatsoever & no headphones, it became time for drastic measures. i stood up and announced that i used to fix headphones all the time, because i didn't know it couldn't be done. the response was, this is microfiber you can't feel where the break is. i said, you can pinch them, and sometimes they make the connection, then you just do something to hold them that way. the response to this was a shrug.

well. ha. ha-ha. and neener neener neener.

before i knew i couldn't do it that way, i fixed headphones. the question is, when i did find out it couldn't be done the way i had been doing it, why did i believe that? "you can't do that" "well, i just did" "no, it won't work, because blah blah" "oh. okay then".

what? what?

and now for something completely different:

i was something to say, made of my own language.

i just don't know what it was. i cannot remember.

ever discover inconsistencies in your own story? key facts in a major event memory, cleverly falsified, for no reason whatsoever?

i won the schoolwide spelling bee when i was ten. it took place in the office, over the intercom. i remember, i remember so clearly, the ending. it was down to me and a seventh grader. they gave him complexion. he blew it. i spelled it. i had to spell one more word. it was easy. it was chicken.

as i tell you this, i see it, i hear it, i feel it. painfully shy child speaking into a microphone broadcasting live into every classroom in the entire school, you don't forget that special kind of terror, like slipping gears into this unknown overdrive and the world turns into a blur around a single point of focus. this is my memory, an audio-visual recording of whole awareness at the time: the word, the microphone, my own voice. i remember being asked to spell chicken, and spelling chicken. i remember.

the word was poultry. i came across the newspaper article decades later, while sorting through one of my packratty boxes. i *remembered* spelling chicken. clearly. i told that story many times. from memory. from a vivid, multimedia production of a memory.

which my mind had edited. seamlessly, inserting a plausible but incorrect substitute, overwriting the original. and even now, even knowing that this editing took place, i cannot for the life of me play back the memory with the correct word.

i remember chicken.

if the article had been incorrect, i would have spotted that at the time, when the memory was fresh and unadulterated. trust me, *that* i would have remembered. there's nothing a nerdy know-it-all kid loves better than correcting grownup's mistakes.

i was something to say, made of my own mythology, and whatever it was, i should not call it forgotten.

it is all revisionist history. all of it.

we don't even do war anymore, do we? war must be declared, so we have conflicts and storms and operations and peacekeeping missions and shit like that, right? much more efficient -- less red tape, more killing. and it's only human nature, killing. and i am not saying that because of the pms. even though it is a particularly virulent episode. it? i meant she.

the antichristine finds that people are less likely to piss her off when she explains her theories on the tendencies of humans to be naturally homicidal. then she smiles and mentions she likes sharp things and fire. and beer.

and cadbury's creme eggs.

per request, an overview (just not a very good one) and one other from the memorial at the park:

ok then. my daughter is an eggdonor. a *successful* eggdonor, having just presented her hopeful but up to this point infertile couple with twenty three eggs. they don't use them all at once, of course, but when the donor begins the medication that sends her into ovulation overdrive, the recipient begins meds which coordinate their cycles, so there can be simultaneous ... fruition. and when the moment is ripe, there is the harvesting, and immediately following, there is the ... implanting. or something. something involving a cup and a dogeared copy of penthouse, and ... boy meets egg across a crowded petri dish and ... laporoscopic version of a turkey baster and ... you know. birds. bees.

ok then. so. if all went well, by now, there is a little bundle of cells dividing merrily in some nervous but elated future mommy's tummy. and. t-e-c-h-n-i-c-a-l-l-y? this makes me ... potentially ... um nevermind.

copied out of a text file of one of my notepad blogging adventures. have uploaded some cool pictures have many many many more in store for when i can be more online. which is to say not yet.

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right before i fell offline, i went a little nuts. i imported both kdblog databases and added some entries manually from the old surreally dreamlog. i tried to export my old blogger archives but the FTP kept failing and ... i haven't given up. i'm not sure why not, but i haven't. so. i had all this content and i wanted to manage it in an obsessive and totally superfluous fashion. i installed this MT plugin that generates yearly calendars and one that groups archive lists by year, making the date headers links to the calendars. i changed the archiving filenames so that they now publish to directories by month and year, placing the monthly archives as the index file in the month folders. if you go to dotlizard.com/2002/ you see the calendar. if you go to dotlizard.com/2002/03 yo see the monthly archive. since the entry title now determines the filename, i placed meta http refresh tags in all the old kdblog archives to forward directly to the page on dotlizard. i did the same thing with all my old archives here, so links will always go the same place. i completely redid the next/previous entry by category navigation. i had abandoned the weekly archiving, but i have now rewritten the PHP and it does list the weeklies in spelled out ordinal numbers, one through one hundred twenty nine at this point. it lives in a page preserved from the old bug design. i also installed the 'on this day' plugin and so the archives include links to entries from prior years.

i stopped myself before i adapted the six kdblog skins to work with these templates.

i had so much fun.