Friday 21 January 2011

Too much Too much Too much!

Which, of course, means: WIN.
(without the ! because then you're screaming it instead of simply making the very loud and confidant statement. which is what you're after: loud confidence.)

This blog is also known as Why I Love My Google Reader (it is important to stress that it is MY Google Reader and not anyone else's because no one else follows exactly the people that I do.)(did I mention the part where I've been watching a lot of Fry & Laurie? A Lot.)(yes.).

My Google Reader shares things with me. It tells me that people around the world are doing much more than I am and that I had better get off of my ass and go to the coffee shop and have a read for a bit before going to the store to get stuff to make dinner tonight, which I think will involved carrots and cauliflower and potatoes and sausage and maybe a salad or something. In my world, that looks like this:

Pitch Black

Freakangels

xkcd

Questionable Content
(psst: you guys! I totally work there now! except for take out the bread and replace it with books and breakables!)

Warren Ellis

The Guild of Book Workers (I Will Be One of Them)(Oh, Yes. I Will.)

Okay, I have to take a break here and just have a sigh at the cut vellum work. It's gorgeous and amazing and I'm absolutely terrified that anyone would ever let any other human being touch it and yet thrilled that such a thing exists to see and work with. Ready? *sigh*

Fashion for Nerds (I love this woman. Love her. Love her.)(Also, I am Danish, so this entry really spoke to me and my inherent need to layer with fabulosity.)

I went looking for Robin LeBlanc and found her. Then I found This. And now I am thrilled.

Also, I went looking for Friendly Hostility. Sunday may be the day that I read this again - from the beginning and in its entirety.

There is something just wonderful about reading webcomics from the beginning, isn't there? I mean, I love reading books and magazines and all that and I do really enjoy my trades of Freakangels and share them and read them, but I also find a great deal of satisfaction reading all of Devil's Panties or Wapsi Square (I love reading Wapsi Square from the beginning - just because you can and it's delightful) or catching up, with a certain degree of overlap on Sam & Fuzzy.

I suppose I could actually articulate a thought about the observation. I don't feel like it.

Friday is an okay day by me.

Much love to all.

Thursday 20 January 2011

An afternoon with too many words

I am happy to say that my resurrected relationship with Netflix is going well.

Although I have to admit that the constant reminder that my tastes run to the 'witty' and 'quirky' and 'cerebral' is a bit galling on many levels (not least of which is the knowledge that no matter what I try to do, anti-intellectualism will always be a problem in my life (compared to things like hunger, rampant disease, living on a trash heap and war on the street outside, I'll take it)).

My own specificity is hardly a thing I need shoved down my throat. Nor do you need me to shove it down yours, so, yes.

Moving on.

I started a letter to my niece a couple of days ago and then lost it, have found it and added to it and would like to finish it today, only I'm seriously tempted to go on at some length about The Book of Kells and then The Secret of Kells and then scriptoria and the history of texts in the 7th to 10th centuries and how I really want to go to Whitby and Wearmouth-Jarrow and Iona and also Bobbio and Monte Casino and how sublime it is that humans can create such a beautiful thing as a hand-written, hand-decorated and illuminated and bound and covered thing as these texts are. There is nothing of waste in the continued contemplation of a well-turned phrase or deliberate decoration. The repetition of form is what has made us and every other thing on the planet, our attempts to be involved in that creation are occasion enough for pause and reflection.

These are hardly thoughts fit for a 12 year old who is less trusting even than I was at that age. They were the stuff of most of my ramblings over the summer. I fear The Porch may have begun to thrum to the familiar words spoken out in different orders again and again in between dancing princesses and wandering writers seeking ink from artists in communes deep in the jungle, finding reeds born from fungus made of blood. There is a whole story. It is too long to tell right now, and does not fit without the ground I have walked to get there.

I have forgotten how to make the sentences that invite, that fascinate without obligation. There is little of gentleness in my written manner; I am too focused to be less than sharp.

I want to watch a little movie. Something easy and predictable and human. I want Tom Hollander and Eddie Izzard to be brothers running an import business from a shop in the middle of some crowded neighborhood. They live in the world immediately around them and do not worry about the rest of it (a nice counterpoint to the global nature of their business, eh?) until they fall in love with, oh, I don't know, Emma Stone and Rani Mukherjee (who are both blessed with husky voices, yes.) and it's not so very angsty and there's dancing and a bit of spontaneous singing in the shop (I don't know about you, but this is a thing that happens regularly) and it's 3 hours long and somewhere in the middle is an adventure involving a runaway muppet who stole a packet of cookies and also puts sugar in people's potatoes without asking.

Only: surprise! Can't find it. Very cranky.

May have to settle for A Bit of Fry & Laurie again. Season 3, if you can believe it.

Some day I will quit complaining.
and then you will know that I am dead.

Sunday 16 January 2011

Sunday blog of love.

There's a cat on my lap.
My lap has been the site of a cat ever since I returned over a week ago. I am certain that the increasingly cold weather plays a huge role in their need to be on my lap, rather than any desire for companionship or need to make sure that I stay put whenever I am home.

Which is much less lately now that I have a job. Granted it is part-time and minimum wage, but it is a nice place to work, people are friendly and while there are some coffee snobs, most folks are forgiving and seem to be there to do what every coffee house customer is really supposed to do: talk. To each other. Sometimes to me. Mostly not. Steaming milk is my great challenge.

Foam eludes me. Repeatedly.
Foam is a skill.
Book Lady can learn.

I get to be a book lady. It is good to be back with books. So good.

My father and shared reading material this morning. Adrian Smith is helping a call to cut funding to various 'wasteful' funded agencies. Like, potentially, the National Science Foundation. There is a such a thing as a latte made with honey and a bit of nutmeg. Guess which one of these factlets I will take to work with me on Monday.

Chris Wilson has been sharing gorgeous photos again.
Paris.
Istanbul.

Hey, Chris - next time we go to India, wanna join? We're thinking that Jordan needs to be visited as well. A lot. Crusader castles. Just saying.


Robert Wurth got his Retrospective on, and while I am loathe to choose only one favorite (anything)(ever), I have to admit a huge soft spot for the last one. There are dogs in it. And Stormtroopers. So much less-than-three. So much.

Best thing about facebook? School-mates all grown up and being way more awesome than me. Hands down, best reason to follow anyone.
Case in point?
Broyls.
You get one.
Go read the rest on your own.

Wil Wheaton continues to make me smile by just being. Really.

Lotsa love today.
All for the dudes, apparently.
Hm.

Mama made french toast. and bacon.
I'm gonna go eat that now.

Much love.

Tuesday 11 January 2011

Fog and The Taj Mahal


On a foggy chilly gray day in January, six of us stood with our guide and realized each in our own ways that yes, we were standing in front of the Taj Mahal. It's not entirely real, that. So many images and stories reach into life about the greatest tomb; a testament to true love, craftsmanship and mystery, that to think of marble, stone and streets lined with shops and hawkers, monkeys, street dogs and other groggy tourists glad for the chance to be surrounded by less large crowds than expected, disappointed at the sunrise that did little more than lighten the sky's shade of gray instead of marveling at the wonder of the Taj Mahal, is almost blasphemy. I could not do anything but.


Symmetry is a design principal that always seems a better idea than reality to me. It is a condition of living a life that finds its center on the z-axis, somewhere in the neighborhood of vellum. All respect, then, to the architects and planners who made something of the sublime out of what could have been nothing more than parallel lines, centered on a tomb.


Centered? Not exactly. In fact, if you believe that the Yamuna River is the northern boundary of the grounds, then the whole thing is off - it is out of balance. The reflecting pools are the center, and the Taj itself stands at the edge. This is an asymmetry which puzzles people, and has for centuries. Why follow so many rules of precise planning and balance, only to put the largest building, the focal point of the work, anywhere outside of the center? And just what is that on the other side of the river?


There is a legend about a tomb that was to be built there, on the other side of the river, that would balance the Taj and create a unified whole. The legend calls it the Black Taj. The guide book that I skimmed before we visited suggested that the legend of the Black Taj was utterly untrue and suggested that we not trust anyone who told us the story presuming we would accept it in good faith. While we were fairly tour guide savvy at that point (remind me to not tell you about Dimple someday), it was with a certain degree of sadness that I heard our very nice Taj guide tell us about the tomb that Shah Jahan had planned for himself. It was to be on the other side of the Yamuna, and was to be built of black marble. His son, Aurangzeb, took power from his father and imprisoned him in Agra Fort before work could be begun in earnest. It is easy to forget your status as 'tourist' even in a place where everyone you see does not, by definition, live there.

It is a lovely story, though, and if there was to be no tomb in that place, what are the ruins? Elizabeth Moynihan has a theory that the gardens did continue to the other side of the river, and that the layout of the garden includes the river as an important element. She wrote a book called The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at The Taj Mahal.


In this place, I learned more of what it is too look not just at the frames of the world, but at the world the frames show. Doors do not exist simply for the purpose of defining their own thresholds. They offer a perspective, the kind that I find in film: the potential to consider what is on the other side, and how the person or animal or flower will change that view by entering it.


We walked around the grounds, all of us in our own ways. We marveled at the workmanship, the scope, the marble, the red flashing sign. It was cold enough that my toes started to cramp and I had to slow down to loosen them. We did not stay long. Even had our guide not given us slightly less time than we would all normally have liked, it was too cold to do the kind of slow, systematic study of water erosion, bird life, plant diversity, tourist watching, that is the preferred method of sightseeing. We ate well at lunch.

Sunday 9 January 2011

The annual letter

I have a very strictly defined epistolary relationship with myself. Every year, at the beginning of the year, I write a letter to me. After that letter is written, I seal it in an envelope with some note on the front like "to be opened no earlier than Jan. 1, 2011" and put it away. I then find and open and read the letter I wrote to myself the year before.

This tradition used to include the game of finding the letter that I'd written the year before, a thing which happened every year, right in time for the holiday, and without any encouragement on my part. It was the kind of thing that people didn't really believe at parties and would back away from me upon learning. They do that when I talk about my deja vu, as well. Or medieval intellectualism. Or cumin. Actually, well, never mind. It's a bit uncomfortable - faith that your things will be available to you just when you need them. Or want them.

After a while, I started running into my letters all over the place - because I never collected them. I would find them, read them, think a bit about them, and then put them back in the general collection of stuff. During the early part of 2008, while I was beginning to actively remove unwanted baggage from my apartment and life, I decided to put them all in one place - at least for a while.

And then I read them. As it was July when I finally took the time to read them, it was more like a survey course, rather than an exercise in developing any ideas about common themes, or strengths and weaknesses. Until last year. Last year, my parents were out of town, the city was covered in snow, I had just painted my apartment as a gift to myself and so after I'd written my letter for this year, I sat down and read all of the letters that I'd managed to find and collect in my note box. (It should be noted that while I do not have letters for years that I Know I wrote letters for, I do have letters for years that I was convinced had passed with no missive at all. My brain likes to keep its secrets at times. I'm sure it enjoys them.)

Most of the letters are sweet and include thoughtful reminders to be gentle with myself and have faith in myself and love freely and like that. Not the kind of thing I would share with anyone else ever even under the pain of never eating Indian food again. (Dreck is dreck, no matter who writes it or how well-intentioned it is.) But there were these moments that were like gifts of scenery and remembrance tucked into typewritten paragraphs and scrawled lines. At the very beginning of 2009 I wrote myself two letters, folded them into a card and left them like pressed flowers or fabric soaked in amber. Because while one was my standard note addressed to my future self, the other was a rambling treat of colors and images and a story idea and it was that one that fired the thought of what it is that I love to read. It was the kick galvanic I needed to change everything using the smallest units I have at my disposal.

I decided that I would leave myself gifts on a regular basis. That it was my right to leave things that I love tucked away in books and boxes of magazines and file folders of magazine pages.

For several months last year, I did just that. I replaced the game of finding one letter a year with the delicious treat of finding as many notes with stories and images and moments as I can stand to leave. Not all of them are wonderful, and those I take out of the game and keep so that I don't have to find them again, but I don't have to pretend they didn't exist.

Today, I read my letter from last year. Most of it is chatty and kind of uninteresting, until the end. "Darling," I wrote to myself, "I miss your writing, would you do some more of that? Thanks."

Yes, dear. Yes, I will.

Saturday 8 January 2011

Back into rhythms that are new to me

Spent the holidays traveling with friends. Went to a wedding. Did some sight-seeing. Slept for 12 hours on a train. Ate lots of good food. Got cranky at an officious bitch and a few unwanted 'helpful' types. All in all, a perfectly wonderful holiday.

And now I'm home and very certain about the future and what it holds and where it's going and what I need to do in it. Mostly, however, I am sleeping. I am shadowed by felines and listened to by anyone who sits down long enough for me to start talking (my listening skills are somewhere else. they got lost in transit.) and have not picked a starting place. Not a definite one anyway.

The sound of Ethel pawing at the tub of blankets on the floor of my office startled me into writing this. Every now and again my own stillness requires me to pull out a book and read until I cannot pretend to have room for any more thoughts and facts and my brain lets me sleep. The cold that has been with me since just after Christmas lets up for hours at a time and then, right about now, starts in with the post-nasal drip and the beginnings of a cough and all I want is warm tea and my bed with its electric blanket and the promise of Ethel curled up at my side.

She may be reminding me of my own presence as much as she reassures herself of it and collects my body heat for her own nefarious purposes. Seriously. The cat is strategic.

I am reminded that I love to write letters. I am reminded of the joys of domesticity and the potential for work reminds me of all of the things I have missed for lack of something consistent to do.

It is all still distant, all of the things of my world - the books and shelves and stuffed animals; the tchotchkes and mementos and candles; the paper and pens and glue sticks and typewriters. Drinking fountains amaze and astound me. Deliberate violence is astonishing and horrible. Nothing happens in the day without a series of stories wholly unconnected to each other or their inspiring moment.

I dream of stonecutters, lines of tourists in glowing halls, feet bare and warm on sandstone tiles. I feel spices in the colors of my dreaming world and have no notion what happens while I am there. Words do not push their way out of memory.

The physical gifts have found their places around the house. The rest of them got slipped into cracks made of mental exhaustion and overwhelmed senses surrounded in safety by laughter and family and friendship. I had room to slow down and enjoy the world. Who knows what lurked in while I wasn't looking?

Boris chooses my mother's company over mine, but watches me with his big stare and comfortable rolling purr.

It is coming home.
It takes a while.