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the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
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THIS IS MOSTLY LINKS, SO GET YOUR HAND OUT OF YOUR PANTS AND PREPARE TO CLICK I have the wildly vacillating moods lately: Monday was horrible and stressful and bleak; Tuesday I resembled that small tornado that roars through your house and cleans everything, I was that ruthlessly efficient and energetic; and today feels sort of in between, sort of engaged and sort of amusedly detached at the same time, even though, unhappily, there are gargantuan piles of work to do, on around six different fronts that all have deadlines of nownownownow, on my desk. Currently my task is to try and not to take that too seriously. I am through with making myself stress-sick. I match books to mood and thus even though I have a big stack of unread books I have been re-reading the following two things: Mr Phillips by John Lanchester---representative quotation: There is something ridiculous about the male peacock's display, the lengths to which the bird is having to go to attract attention---but then there always is about males trying to seize the notice of females, whether it's to do with banging your head against another stag after a forty-mile-per-hour run-up or simply wearing black clothes and trying to look fascinatingly uninterested in an irresistibly interesting way. and I zipped through some of The Words by Jean-Paul Sartre to find this bit about childhood: My truth, my character, and my name were in the hands of adults. I had learned to see myself through their eyes. I was a child, that monster which they fabricated with their regrets. When they were not present, they left their gaze behind, and it mingled with the light. I would run and jump across that gaze, which preserved my nature as a model grandson, which continued to give me my toys and the universe. My thoughts swam around in my pretty glass globe, in my soul. Everyone could follow their play. Not a shadowy corner. Yet, without words, without shape or consistency, diluted in that innocent transparency, a transparency certainly spoiled everything: I was an impostor. Comfort reading; literature as Equipment For Living. Soon I will get back to the stack of unread stuff and stop indulging my literary sweet tooth. This story is not all that, except for the phrase "the deity of cereals," which made me happy. Banana museum! The photos make my insides vibrate in a slightly edge-of-freaking-out sort of way. They are just normal guys. Just normal, grave-robbing guys. In other jeez louise news. And it's vaguely local! I always knew you shouldn't raise kids in the suburbs. Know let's learn how to make a khorkhog. Hey Chicago, leave your books somewhere! I dig this vintage stocking package with the disembodied leg. Last night LT went to his first Chinese class, because he is a smart LT and I guess after learning Arabic, nothing scares you; although, as I put it, "Dude. They don't even have an alphabet." (That is not all Chinese doesn't have...when he came home he imparted the horrifying/fascinating information that there is no gender, no verb conjugation, and not really any verb tenses. Gulp.) (Okay, I was looking for something else, some half-remembered bit of Greek grammar to share with you, and instead I found this groovy essay on Greek prose style.) Anyway, LT doing his Language Boy thing meant that last night involved microwaved leftovers (I have no gumption when it comes to cooking for one) and too much typing. I got all carried away typing notes to myself and prancing about the Internet, and I have no idea why I feel guilty about doing that for hours and hours, it certainly is no worse than watching television or playing video games. I also finally got around to opening and sorting a pile o' mail, and one envelope turned out to have a geeeen-you-ine American dollar inside it, and a piece of paper "thanking me in advance" for answering a survey about "the commercial radio stations I listen to" when a telemarketer calls me next week to administer it. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! etc. Commercial radio, it is to laugh! Me answering the phone, it is to laugh! Me perhaps actually being near a phone when it rings, and noticing on the Caller ID screen that it is not anyone I know and hold dear, and answering it anyway, oh it is to laugh so hard you bust a spleen! (Young MC: Don't just stand there, bust a spleen!) (Also: Is the phrase "stone-cold munching" anyone else's favorite part of that song?) (Also: This is the day when some of the links will point to something perhaps not exactly straightforward. I am in an elliptical mood and my Googling is reflecting that.) I used to love Hue tights for several reasons: they are opaque black but also spandexy and not super-thick, they are sized well, and they are easy to find in non-control-top format (why anyone would want to wear constricting material across her abdominal region is totally beyond me). The black Hue non-control-top tights also stood up fairly well to machine washing---I would just throw them in a lingerie bag and then drip-dry, and they never pilled or shrank or did anything weird. However, in the past month I have thrown out three pairs of said tights, once right after a first wearing, because they keep developing strange runs and holes in the crotch and ass area. My crotch and ass have not changed size or shape recently (I know this, because I use calipers and a small spiral notebook to keep a log of very detailed measurements of my crotch and ass) (okay, no I don't), and I have not been doing anything ass-strenuous or crotch-straining that would account for said holes. Maybe it's a qualitative rather than quantitative thing; maybe my ass is so cosmically bootylicious that Hue tights are not up to the karmic challenge. Anyway, I am annoyed, and I mailed off my letter to Hue today. IF SOMEONE TRIED TO MAKE ME STICK TO A TOPIC MY HEAD WOULD PROBABLY FALL OFF 1. I am doing an experiment: since I used to have this problem with waking up way to early, way before an alarm, I decided that every day that the alarm went off while I was asleep, I would set my alarm ahead one minute for the following day. I am trying to calculate the perfect amount of sleep, where I don�t need an alarm to wake up and where I feel perfectly ready for the day. This is a fool's errand, however, because (a) I do not go to bed at the same time every night and (b) I seem to require approximately the same amount of time for breakfast, shower, e-mail, and putzing about every single day, no matter when wake-up time is, so that the upshot of all this is that I have been slightly late to work every day. But if I go in the other entrance to my floor I do not have to walk past the office of anyone in my department, so maybe no one has noticed, and even if they had noticed no one would have the guts to say anything, because if they did they know I would get all Mr. T on their asses and throw a file cabinet through the office window. And then I would pity them, because they are fools. 2. LT and I decided that the only thing we would ever order on pay-per-view would be Joan Rivers and Carrot Top fighting to the death. I think I would even throw a party in honor of this televisual event, and serve snacks. 3. No animals that I know of purposely pee on themselves, and barring extreme mental illness people generally don't either, which leads me to believe that not peeing on yourself is instinctual and NOT related to discomfort at having wet fur or skin, or even a hygiene issue (pee is sterile), but rather related to an instinct about not smelling strongly---to guard against predators, to keep prey animals from smelling you, or to get dates.
4. Do you think that maybe concepts of the self are at least tangentially related to architecture, in that it would be really difficult to develop the concept of a personal and private self until most people had private homes, and private/public spaces, and thus a set of private/public people for whom to develop different personas and such? Like sort of a post-Renaissance thing? Alternately, do you think I should be quiet now, because I am working your last nerve, and save the sophomoric philosophizing for my private journal? Okay. 5. I have invented something called the Schtupperware party. It is kind of like an orgy and kind of like a Tupperware party. Most Tupperware parties are like orgies already---an orgy of food freshness!---but here we make it explicit and we actually hump each other and "burp the seal," if you know what I am talking about, and you probably don't, heh heh oh yeah. ---mimi smartypants depends upon the Sword of Omens to give her sight beyond sight. back/forward |
