$disanpoter

the sniffles

one of my best-friends is moving to Spain. i've known this was going to happen for at least a half a year now, and as the time's ticked down i've been more or less resigned to this inevitability. now, there is no more time; she leaves tomorrow, and while i was going to spend some time with her this evening, she got caught up with packing boston and now won't get home in time for that. instead i have written a poem (a terrible one, actually, but so it goes) about this waiting for emotions to hit that has been an underlying state of mine for at least the past week and especially this afternoon. with an increasing frequency, i have felt this impending loss wash over me in subdued momentary ripples, and the very nature of them being so far from overwhelming has got me thinking about this trope we have in society of the nearly tearful goodbye. the one where instead of crying, we address our non-crying and conspire to draw ourselves back from the brink that is open emotion. there have been a few moments in the past few months when we have enacted that scene - not in any false way, of course, but still, we've consciously, explicitly diverted the conversation from the topic of leaving to abort getting choked up as soon as we begin to.

it's as if, in those moments, we (all of us who do this) hold as simultaneous truths both the sincerity and the ridiculousness of our emotions, and being unable to go further within that paradox retreat instead - but why should the non-tragic be ridiculous. it reminds me of a conversation i was having two weekends ago with another person, who i don't yet know well enough to share my emotions with (that condition is relevant to this; but not enough to go into, so you'll have to explain it to yourselves). that conversation touching upon situations far more heart-wrenching and difficult than any i have experienced, left me with an uncomfortable residual impulse to justify the hurts of my own life as lesser but still real. why do we have these impressions that lesser forms of loss or injury are less valid simply because they are less extreme? why should the loss of a friend's presence be something we are expected both to register and shrug off simply because it is not permanent or complete? why this convention of expressing our reserve instead of expressing what is there?

a distributed history of being

i slept once with someone else. by which, i mean that there exists a single instance in the history of my passage through bedrooms where i remember experiencing a return to awareness, wakefulness. all the rest, whether in long(er) relationships or transitory ones, whether in platonic or romantic situations, and regardless of whatever other contexts and events make them significant to me, the memories are infused with a sense of perpetual restlessness and imposed stillness.
i was reminded of this last week by a comment that may or may not have referred to actual observation of my lack of sleep (the alternative is it simply referred to a prior comment of my own regarding my general lack of sleep) but the true meat of the reference is less relevant than that it has since gotten me thinking about one's own experiential history as it is held in the memories of others. for instance, the above mentioned history of my passage through bedrooms as it exists collectively in one person's memory of their cheek on my shoulder added to another's waking to the discomfort of their leg all pins and needles under the weight of my own added to another's choice of words (or of silence). tonight it seems to me that i am truly no more substantially expressed in my own memories than i am in this hypothetical accumulation.   
at lunch today, i was working on ideas for the hadley story. i think i've got a good idea of how to start it (which i wrote about that over here). thinking on it, though, got me into the mode of thinking about narrative structures and sometime around the time when i was debugging an import script, the running dialog in my head started questioning the possibility of a voiceless narrative. i didn't realize it at the time, but the germ of this, too, was that offhand comment a few days ago. in fact, the image version of my experiences as they register in other people's consciousness came first, but simply wasn't articulated, and from that - bifurcated by the prism of expressing reality in class objects - came the question of whether one could go one step further and present a narrative that truly remained at the level of distributed awareness. what i mean comes from several sources: emergence by steven johnson, rats by robert sullivan and the discussion on mobs near the end, among others - situations where you cannot see the whole in the part, where detailing the individual within the mass bears no observable relation to the behavior of the mass. would it be possible to write a narrative that held the readers awareness at this level, at a level that does not even anonymously single out individuals? i don't know. when i try to reflect on either this or the exposition of character though other characters' memories i come up empty handed.
for the mob narrative, you have some like tale of two cities that amass many characters, but that's really what it is - an ensemble cast, not a description of what the collective whole perceives that the individuals cannot. likewise, one can see narratives like chronicle of a death foretold as approximating or experimenting with the notion of identity as perceived by others rather than experienced by oneself, but that not entirely the same. it preserves that boundary between perception and experience even in the mind that thinks it. my perception of another as a person is different from my experience of them. the difference being for instance, a person's awareness that i am moving versus the experience of that as shifts in weight or errant sounds.
anyway.
before the first of these thoughts came together, the inner narrative of my evening rang out with the words. yes, i am waiting. i am always waiting. for things that i know will not happen as much as for those i know will. and then i remembered the lines of one of my favorite poems "because we cannot learn how not to want, we have to learn by waiting how to wait. and i wait well." perhaps when i have something more condensed to say about that i will. in the meantime, it's sleep, and then hopefully some more worthwhile thoughts on this whole distributed history of being thing. i think it has potential. maybe not for me though.

got me on my knees

there's a certain blending of memories between my junior and senior years in college that i always find disconcerting. music that i'd acquired off the network drives late sophomore year when that was at its high-point but remember finding and listening to for the first time in the closet of a room i had in lake house. conversations with people in locations i only hung out in after they were gone. it's a strange and twisted forest, memory is. but today i think the reason for these incongruencies to be much simpler. college was a vast darkened plain of insomniac nights spent feeling impossibly alone - why wouldn't my memories of thoughts and activities i experienced alone stretch out throughout that time?

its funny how a word can set off a musing like that. i fell asleep last night composing an opening paragraph to a short story i'd like to write called the "Secret List of Obligations." So this morning before getting to my work, i ressurrected the writing board i'd made a while ago and shifted it over from this typepad spot to my actual website (there's no writing there yet). In doing so, i found one of the first attempts i made at the hadley story - only the persona at that point was laila. that stirred memories of why i'd named her laila to begin with, including my residual fondness for eric clapton's layla from sophomore year when i had a handful of acoustic bootlegs i listened to just about everyday. one was without words - an impossibly soulful water-like tumbling of guitarplaying that rose and broke like waves coming into the bulkhead. even now, even just the echo of what my mind's ear can recall of that song, brings me immediately back to the memory of how the night felt to my skin at 3 or 4am walking past the lake on my way home. all that, just from stumbling across something i'd written long enough ago that i was still living in williamsburg. it is, isn't it though - funny how the mind works?

of course, wellesley coming up so quickly probably was helped along by the fact that my book group's tonight. i'm a bit nervous. i've got a coffee date with the president of the nyc alumnae association before had to discuss possibly filling the co-chair spot for programs. being the dork i am, i'd like to offer some more education programs, learning series, knowledge shares. things less tied to the ever-present climbing the whatever-takes-your-ambitious-fancy ladder en masse as we wellesley women are groomed to do. but i'm nervous, still. her enthusiasms have the same tone i associate with some people's compliments, positive, but indiscriminate - a kind of innocent insincerety.

also, i've neither finished the book nor am a huge fan of it. it reminds me of someone who grew up wallowing in the abortive emotions of hemmingway without sensing the underlying authenticity and who thus creates plausible and richly developed characters but places them in a culture and society she constantly undermines more for the exercise of it than anything else. that's a bit harsh. she a proficient writer, but i think its true that her recent success has far more to do with the fact that she died in auschwitz than the endurability of her work.

in other news my father and brother may be coming up this sunday. perhaps i can get them to go to the frog exhibit with me - though that does dissentigrate my friday plans somewhat.

howsit

it's odd having occassional readers here. this used to be essentially a publically accessible but virtually unknown place for me to record my thoughts and feelings about the things that happened in my life. now i find myself turning away from here as a place to explore my more private thoughts, especially those i have some uncertainties about. this is not a bad thing. in fact, this morning, i merely find myself appreciating the organic way in which, contrary to the typical exhibitionary drive of blogdom, maintaining this blog is enforcing boundaries between what i want to keep private, what i want to keep relatively close, and what i want to share.

for one thing, i find it interesting to see the ways the need for these boundaries and for negotiating between them can affect my writing style. I think i'm more attuned to this this morning in part because of the contemplations i left out of my last post on the events of last week and in part because of the concrete and authoratative language i've had the pleasure of employing in the instructions to the user interfaces i'm working on. some posts are like lattice works, the unweildiness of the syntax growing in direct proportion to my impulse to control how much of my own feelings i reveal. it's not a particularly brilliant or unexpected observation, but its thought-provoking nonetheless.

more so though, sitting with myself after posting last night was an eye-opening experience. i realized there were reflections i very much wanted to put some expression to, numerous discrete events from the past week, both minor and more significant, that were valuable to me but in a way that is oddly personally - oddly because there's nothing about them i would necessarily hide, but because i don't feel the need to share them to validate them or to prove to myself that i am okay with the lack of certainty and omniscience they involve. it's hard to explain - and plus, it's new this being okay with imbalance and uncertainty - but here's an example: lately i haven't been depending on my friends assessments of behavioral interactions i relate to them to either confirm or moderate my assessment of the situation. this while scary, is a good thing for me. but last night, instead of trying to mitigate this by placing greater confidence in my own reasons and assessments, i kept returning to the idea that i simply can't know. however much a given situation appears to me to be a certain way, it's possible - even probable at times - that it feels entirely differently to other people involved. there are always times when one is confident that they can judge someone's enjoyment or displeasure, but really, there are just as many times when these aspects are not apparant. it's not that this is such a new concept for me, but usually this inspires a desire to take decided steps to push away or completely cut out the people in my life i feel such reservations over. that instead, last night i simply lingered on how much i had enjoyed the company of just about everyone i spent time with last week, from the people i'd just met to the good friends i hadn't seen in weeks, today seems huge to me.

might be the kitchen sink

i had more dreams about injured cats last night. this time the little cat (that's the one that died of kidney failure last year) had a broken rib that had come through the skin and lay exposed as a glistening arc of pinkish white. At first, I didn't realize what it was or that something was wrong, and then after i was running around with her held up in my hands trying to get to a vets office on flatbush via a maze of grey alleyways.
as odd as the situation was, the details seem to hold a pretty odd convergence of references from dinner last night. i think the aspect of not having noticed soon enough and consequent sense of failure to take appropriate care of a living creature i care about probably is a magnification of having watched an allergic rash develop on the neck of AHo for several hours and failing to make the connection that pattern of redness was a cause for concern. Feeling bad about bailing on BB after the train debacle probably factored into that too. Then the rib thing, I think emerged from a joke about a butler covering for a failure to laugh at his boss' joke by saying "i distinctly felt one of my ribs dislodge in the effort to suppress my laughter, sir." oddness.

[4/30/07] anyway, it was an upsetting dream wrought with this tremendous feeling of guilt that my own failure to be an observant person had caused this creature i love to suffer.

there was more that i was thinking about when i started this post yesterday - lots of disconnected thoughts, like remembering my grandfather's voice and his smile...the lake house in michigan (one of the people at dinner mentioned going to a lake this coming memorial day)...floating like a jellyfish in pool at my mom's grad school...the poem i wrote a few weeks ago and how if i do ever write on a sustained basis all my stories and little poem-like bits might be saturated by a sense of solitude and/or isolation and how i don't want that. anyway, lots of little scraps of memories, mostly, and all of them triggered by random interactions in the past few days.

i guess i just find it odd, how much i've been reminded of the past this week and how disconnected the memories seem from eachother.

in other news, i'm at my mother's. dinner was pleasant last night. i've been avoiding coming out here because there's nothing to talk about that i want to talk about. my mother wants to talk about that, but then she opens with "well, when i think of grad school, i think of a professional school where you get trained to do something, you know, like law school or medical school or business school" because going to graduate school for anything else, apparently, doesn't qualify as being prepared for a profession, since what you do afterwards isn't a profession so much as a service industry. the apparently was disingenuous. this view of hers has been the same my entire life. the point is she wants me to be moving forward in my life, but the things she says only keep me from doing that when i let them get to me. in her mind if i'm going to be pursuing one of these non-admirable careers, i should at least be going to a better school. the fact many of them don't have programs in information doesn't divest her of the opinion i should only be applying to the ivys or the top state universities. neither does the reality that i probably couldn't get in. to me graduate school is an opportunity to do very well so i can get into a better phd program down the road. going to grad school in the city i live in is a way of not having to completely redo the last few years' efforts of building up a social life and some work contacts.

i'm sorry i'm ranting about my mother. it's just you would think that after the past few years of pestering me constantly about why i'm not going to grad school, why i'm not more aggressively pursuing a career, why i don't have more direction, you would think she'd hold off from trying to shred the one bit of direction i've managed to grab hold of.

she wants me to leave new york. she thinks it's bad for me and that there are no good guys there. i wish i could come visit without have to justify liking where i live and not being all about finding some great guy to make everything better for me.

foundlings

i've been going through random archive CDs of of mine, hoping to find some of the papers i wrote in college - specifically the one's i wrote in the class of the professor from whom i just requested a recommendation. i haven't found those yet, but i have found various bits and pieces of poems and stories i wrote and despite the melo-drama that surrounded my life in those months, they're actually not that atrocious. I can even see in them what i trying to do in them. so, if your curious (or altruistically willing to offer feedback (or maliciously eager to laugh at my expense))...there will be a list of links, growing here below, to old writings of mine. the password, is my real first name, no caps.

[i mean, i could just copy and paste the text in, but that would go against my philosophies regarding setting content up to facilitate better information management...can't have that, now, can we?]

the non-self

i once wrote a poem for my boyfriend. he's not my boyfriend anymore, but still he was when i wrote it. all i remember now was some line 'i will make tea for you and...' it wasn't entirely about willing domesticity. it's still so strange to me when i feel that impulse to care for someone else, actively take care of someone.

then again, tonight i have such a subdued seething of the complete opposite impulse, the impulse to so embrace the separateness of the self that the self disappears. even the other poems that i wrote when dating that boyfriend were about withdrawal from the world. it was a poem about waiting until all the sporadic rackets of college night life died down in order to enjoy a kind of sanctuary of shared experience. except that i see now it wasn't really about shared experience at all. it was about that concept of sanctuary. that round slick and gritty poem, also about finding a sanctuary, an escape from the world through the experience of the sensual.
i think also, that may be why i'm allow myself to sleep with people too quickly. its trying to find that solitude that is healing instead of isolating. i close my eyes and i experience the presence and warmth of a person who registers to me as someone liked, someone/something good about the world, but they are not seeking me. they are not trying to get at me or get from me. they are not yet attached enough to the idea of whatever the idea of me is to people who do grow attached to me to be seeking a something in me. they are their own motives, and i am my own retreat from what is not immediately in the feelings of heat and skin and living warmth. anyway. i was just thinking about that now. and about how that poem was about to people having sex, but really it wasn't even about either person. it was just about sanctuary, escape from selfness. like this one that i wrote tonight, which, admittedly is far from 'good':

recharging my batteries

I did actually write yesterday - and I'm even fairly pleased with what I produced. A mere three pages, to be sure, but resplete (is that a word? I think it's a word...) with 3 more characters than I've had on any other attempt tp start this up. So I'm going to continue some now. With some coffee, on the front stoop. then i'll clean up a bit more, and then I'll search some more for gigs and jobs.

Oh - right, and I'm recharging all my batteries systematically. Right now there are 2 AA and a AAA, but they're almost done. I'm also unpacking my books systematically - or I was last night until my back started to hurt. I've far more hard-covers than I realized, though, still not as many as paperbacks...sigh. I'm okay with myself, but I do sometimes wish I were a more interesting person. or at least had something more substantial to say.

alternate reality

somewhere in the universe there's an alternate reality
where you didn't ditch me
and we're living happily

i kiss your head there
the skin soft and your hair is short and silky
you kiss my hand as it rest on your shoulder
and our feelings smoulder and alight
again for the thousandth night in a lifetime

somewhere in the universe we blend together
my voice its sweet and yours is off key and we meet
where lightening melts sugar and makes it taste better
where we tremble in spite of the comfort we offer eachother
where its good and right and its nothing like how we are now.

somewhere in the universe there's an alternet reality
where you didn't ditch me
and we're living happily

where you're warm not cold
where you're bold and honest not eager to get out in the world
or girls and sex and freedom from touching the heart of another
where you're not you, and i love somebody who loves me too.

fantasy futures

first off and a bit tangentially, google is taking over desktop applications in an absolutely brilliant way, by provided tools that free file creation from the local file system. server-side apps may just warp to lightspeed marketshare in the next few years. anyway - i could say more but that's really just to remind myself of what i was talking about when i come back later.

in other news, i got my printer last night. it boasts an imbedded wireless print server, double-sided color printing, and can take in longer sheets of paper and this weekend i'm going to be setting it up and seeing how well it prints an fancy shmancy kate's paperie paper. then i'm going to draw up my plans for the side business i hope will at least pay for the printer and the scanner, and then for some book cases and then for some new clothes and then who knows. but first i have to launch into that dangerous zone of infrastructure development - a ghostly, swampish graveyard that has claimed too many valued and ingenious ideas.

oh and i've got to convincingly deliver a talk on methods to encourage critical thinking on sunday - because i've been so very successful at encouraging the people in my life to adopt them.

oh - and i've got to build the mindsmatter website too. jeepers. yeah, i've been procrastinating on that one...it scares me. i'm afraid i may discover i'm incompetent...