How do you say, “I'd like to finish your class, but trying not to want to kill myself seems to be a full time job?”

I wonder if I'm not doing something right, or if I'm just irreconcilably broken. Maybe that crucial part was knocked off long ago, like the rear view mirror came off that Cadillac when your teenage son backed it in too close to the mailbox. Or the time he didn't know what the fuck he was doing when he tried to rebuild the engine.

Some days I wake in the morning and my skin feels tauntingly intact. I would give anything just to be held, but my craving for someone to take a baseball bat or a knife to my back seems like a more honest version of the same desire. So I do the dishes; try not to cry, shake it off. Keep moving. Get dressed. Do something else. Fight. Remember to want to fight. Try, at least, to remember.


It's tempting to just tell her to give me a fail, leave it with everything else in the wreckage behind me. There's legitimacy here; I am trying, really, to build something new. New things need space to grow. The idea of tapping out is liberating, but also, angry and frustrating and sad. I love this work; I don't just like it. It uses me, all the intellectual muscle built up from years of reading useless crap that was never going to be any good to me if I was a physicist or a dancer. It's about taking the things I was inexorably drawn to, almost against my will, and weaving them into something useful and beautiful and real. I don't want to loose it forever.

My journals are like this, full of entries that apologize for their intermittentness. I've mostly made peace with my journaling habits (intermittent, yes, but still a bit prolific--but besides, I'm writing them mostly for myself anyway) but blogging is a little different. Nothing to prompt self-expression like a consistent audience.

And something about the discipline of it is really helpful. I would like to be a writer; Stephanie Meyer, no; Richard Dawkins, no; I don't care that much about making money or reaching a wide audience, and there are very few mainstream modern writers whose work I appreciate. What I would like is to make something that I think is really good, that in some sense fulfills whatever talent I have, and to share it with a handful of people who find it precious.

And for that, I need practice--practice writing for someone else. Practice writing for you.

Today was different; feels of possibility. I woke up to an alarm after five hours sleep to finish writing about Irigaray, finished that in plenty of time and got ahead on my reading. After class, I spent four hours grocery shopping for my sister.

It was interesting. I was doing things for myself from an early age, but I've never shopped for a family of eight. The amount of planning involved--especially with a diet high in produce--is spectacular. Also, the repeated push-starting of the car (not my car, which would have completely stressed me out) and a mild blizzard contributed to the sense of adventure. :)

And now I'm home, in pain (a high 4) but thrilled. There are vegetables in my fridge, a backup jar of nutella in my pantry, and--perhaps most importantly--a dozen packets of seeds across my desk. I have been counting them, reading and re-reading, arranging them. I've narrowed it to four I definitely want to grow and six others in the running. They are my sister's seeds, shared because that's what we do, and because out of the packets that I choose, I'll only need a few. It's important not to get involved with too many different varieties. This is, after all, the girl who killed lavender and rosemary in Utah making her first beginner garden.

Before now I never appreciated how much fantasy goes into planning a garden, but I'm making up for lost time, savoring every choice in vivid detail. The nutty, crisp warm of biting into a parsnip? Or the high contrast of casper and sweet pumpkins sprawling across my yard, disconcertingly orange and white against the lush green of their vines? What do okra plants even look like? And what kind of tomatoes do I want for making my first eggplant parmesan completely from scratch?

I also have, from this afternoon, 20$ of un-designated cash in my coat pocket. I would hate to associate poverty with virtue, but I think that it (poverty) can, for some people in some circumstances, be good. I'm one of those people in one of those times; some alchemy of my current circumstances allows me to unpack the magic in a twenty-dollar bill like never before. I was recently out of gas, funds, and fresh food all at the same time, but still had my basic needs completely covered. Knowing what I can do without makes it easier to understand what the things I have are worth--and turns a small amount of cash into much more freedom than I thought it could be.

So blogging, right?

Blogging (at least personal blogging) is the ultimate in fundamentally self-indulgent mediums. You just. . . talk about yourself, and maybe people will read. And when I abandoned any aspirations to interesting content--and started posting constantly--I assumed most everyone would stop reading. The great thing about being self-indulgent on a blog is that no one who doesn't want to has to spare the time. It's deeply voluntary; I tell people who give me guilty looks ("I just haven't had the time!") not to worry about it. Every day is an awful lot to expect people to donate towards my preening/writing practice.

However: This is not how things went down. Someone is still reading. In fact, I'd say it has to be at least a dozen someones, based on the hit counter. It was a pleasing but disconcerting discovery, mostly disconcerting because I have no idea who these people would be. Today I found out that one of the someones is my friend S.

Here's why this is particularly awesome news:

--S is awesome. Right now, she is doing* this really cool thing. Additionally, she is kind, a good listener, really smart, and I have never known her to have an unsubstantiated opinion.

--I've been wanting to get to know her better for a fairly longish time. Yay for technology furthering social connection!

--After reading a month's worth of emotional exhibitionism, S is still interested.

This last is a weirdly big deal, and it's made me think a lot about the social/emotional mechanics of blogging. These are things that take up a high percentage of my thoughts; ultimately, I need friends who are OK, even comfortable, with that. They aren't things I'd tell people, usually. . . almost ever. . . so it's hard to meet that requirement, without something like this. Hmn.

And this is the part where I go to sleep. More on this later, maybe.


*ah, and by doing, I mean founding the organization. I told you she was awesome.

So, blogging balance.

My favorite part is that by telling everyone, I don't have to tell anyone. There's no sitting in awkward silence. There's less of that feeling that I'm trying to knock down a brick wall with every sentence. There's no wondering whose day I've ruined, or which friend thinks I'm trying to use them as a therapist. It's emotionally reckless, but it's also pretty clearly marked, and so far I think no one reads at gunpoint. The writing every day feels good, and the openness also.

There are things I worry about. What not to say? I feel strongly that depression and anxiety, the commonplace messedupnesses, need a louder place. It isn't that they're good--it's that they're so hard to talk about. What are you supposed to do if sad and scared are the larger part of your life? How do you deal with the days when you have nothing to say to anyone because you feel you can't be happy enough for them--like they deserve something better? Even people who want to be supportive don't know how to deal with it. Maybe if we talked about it more often they would.

There's a line to walk. Wallowing is bad. I have no idea how to split the difference between self pity and a healthy, honest recognition of your circumstances--between raising awareness, getting healthy social feedback, and pointless exhibitionism. All good things to learn.

A long time ago, a friend of mine pointed out something really insightful; you don't want to be part of the noise. Noise is all of that stuff that was good enough to get published, yet isn't actually good--it's just more words. We have a lot of words. In fact, we have a lot of spectacular words that we're always claiming we don't have enough time to read, and few of us ever do. It makes sense to be worried about contributing to the over-all crappiness of the literary landscape.

I've been thinking a lot about the decision to go to every-day posts. It necessarily lowers the bar for content, and I'm sure looses a lot of my audience. However, the new approach is to write a lot about the things that are important to me--not the things I think ought to be important to me--and in the long run this is bound to pay out.

Don't get me wrong; I'd never want to see a book printed that wasn't worth the paper, and I place a high value on trees. However, to do anything well, you've got to do it badly. Sometimes progress is worth the noise.

Speaking of

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/mar06/health0306.htm


http://kateharding.net/

Highly, Highly recommended.

Three original jokes

composed by Taran Weathercolor:


What do you call a female supervillian?

a girlfiend!


What's poisonous to a clock?

tocktick.


What did the teenage zombie say after he wrecked his parent's car?

I'm dead.


Also, it's been an excellent day. :)

Corpse de ballet / Imperfect

The only other time I've posted any of my poetry on here, I asked for gentleness. As before, I present to you a classic instance of a new genre I'm pioneering: emo spine poetry. By now (I wrote this when I was still trying to dance) I've much more come to terms with this sort of thing, so if you would, I'd like you all to be as brutal as possible. I don't know much about the craft of poems, but I enjoy them and would like to improve. Also, I KNOW there are some really smart English majors who read my blog. Hopefully you'll have something to say. :)



I'm tired of laying here, trying to remember what it was for my body to be whole.


I want to climb into the mountains and
wrap myself in God
but tonight I can not walk

So instead I feel
the God who pools himself
as numbness across the heel of my left foot

reaching up in patches till
he thrusts his
flames into my
un-wrapped
spine.

I remember what it was to dance
or some days only try to
see congre devant, derriere, but suddenly

the memorable corps
de ballet
has snapped
broken spine dangling
and my eyes fill up
with blood


I was always wrong for ballet
but I loved

the slow music
and the long degages
where I could breathe into my body
and not have to be anywhere
else.

Project

Ladies and gentlemen, I've decided to make you victims of a writing project. People keep mentioning to me that I'm writing less and less lately, and I know that what I should be doing is writing more and more. I like to think that in the past I've had standards for this, out of respect for my audience. I've tried hard to include a lot that wasn't just about my life. No more.

For the next month, I'm going to try to post every day; certainly that should get me writing again. God save the quality of my content, audience forgive me.

. . .


So here's for today's post.

For those of you who were unaware, I have two major goals; meaningful political change, and family. Family doesn't have to be in the conventional sense. Here are the things I've been doing to work towards those goals.

For political change I've been reading theory from the very beginning, and taking notes. This is going much slower than I'd like, impeded mostly by family obligations and lack of sleep. Also, someone decided we can have a working relationship instead of acting like we're three, so today I went to the first RSU meeting, which was spectacular. Minch lectured on the republican, as opposed to the liberal, tradition; it is fascinating. Liberal liberty is freedom from interference and republican liberty is freedom from domination. I, who never takes notes in lecture (auditory learner), have a page and a half of notes, a list of books to find, and an appointment to go ask some more detailed questions. To Jacob who will never read this, thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou, it feels like Christmas. I want to jump up and run to go hug you, but that would freak you out.

The family bit is a pretty complicated kettle of fish, but here are a few mentionable things. Rape crisis training was really eye opening, and I've made a serious project of sorting out my brain--among other things, so that I can attack the problem of dating. Also, I've been making a big point of meeting people, so as to replenish the social life even in my hermitage.

And I'm doing simple things, trying to crack through those first impressions; fitful attempts to wear less black; getting feedback from the friends I do have on what behaviors they consider "prickly;*" experimenting dubiously with makeup. Baking. No one thinks you hate them when you hand them a blueberry muffin, right?

Well, almost nobody.


that's all.




*Correcting the professor on the first day of class?
T: (mortified)--you should at least act like you think that you're wrong. At least at first.
J: (approving)--Welcome to the real world/philosophy program.
D: (thinks this is hilarious)--That is such a Day thing to do.

hrm.

unabashed rambling

organizing books is one of my Favorite Things In The Whole Wide World.

Back when I was in high school, it was my primary sane-making pastime. . . there was something incredibly calming about bringing order to something, particularly since it was such a tangible something and it managed to carry such a potent subtext of Future. I wanted to learn almost everything, and the books I owned were my tool kit, their untapped wisdom the best shot I had at getting to who I thought I wanted to be. When I was upset, I would make myself a challenge--get rid of ten books, or in extreme cases fifty. . . and since I had a source of free books, this lead to a constant refining and re-organization process rather than true personal-library anorexia. :)

Organizing books can be a bit like organizing your brain. When I left the home of my teen-angst, I would often satisfy this craving to externalize my thoughts by way of the library. Thirty interior design books spread about you on the floor are like a specialized meditation garden on the subject at hand. . . I've often been known to wander for an extra forty minutes or an hour looking for exactly the right combination of items to express my mental state, then take them home and wallow in the creative fecundity of my acquisitions, reading a chapter here and another there in attempts to pick up exactly the information I was seeking.

These days I'm a little less spontaneous with my reading and a lot more serious about my study habits, but I've discovered that my "books to read" document has come to serve a deliciously similar function, except even better--The Future is now. It's like the Wheaties of book organizing; book organizing for now and the long haul. Here are the books I plan to read in Philosophy--in Science--in French--entire lists of books imported from friends on interesting subject matter, a list of topics to research (and find the best books to read on them), everything I'm currently reading highlighted in bold. . . and, of course, the singularly satisfying act of deleting items from the list, productive if I've read them and cathartic if I've decided they no longer need apply.

It might possibly be the case that the list is shrinking slower than it is growing. It does include such list items as: "items in my library which don't belong to me," "the rest of the major Russians," and "other items in my library which do belong to me." For the moment though, it is finite, motivating, exciting, extremely reflective of my goals and progress towards them, and, as perhaps I've said, deeply, deeply satisfying.


As soon as I've done writing this, I'll be off to return to my roots--organizing my physical, material personal library for the first time in almost a year, with space to keep my books where I can see them, and all in one place. I finally have the bookshelves, and I've been looking forward to it for days.

Organizing my books right now has two kinds of additional significance, above what it had when I was a teen. For one thing, as I have scarcely begun to believe, it seems that I have a home. While I don't see myself loosing my taste as a minimalist and I think I'll always be aware that it costs money to maintain Things (including a personal library of any size), I no longer need constantly to imagine how many camels it would take to carry all this, or how exactly I would pack the entirety into my Geo, or what I would leave behind and expect never to see again when I depart for Europe. I'm perhaps a bit too scarred to become attached to Things--which is not all bad--but it will certainly be a different thing to approach the project from the perspective of having a single, stationary, almost permanently allocated home.

The other difference is that as I've become more serious in reading, I care to depend on other people's libraries less and less. If I've put significant time and effort into reading this, I want to own a copy--I want to keep notes about it, maybe even (God forbid) underline sections in pencil--I want to be able to reference it and find the right parts when I need to, because someday soon I'll be using this to do my work. Personal library has become not just a projection of future destinations, collection of past favorites, and source of occasional reading material, but something far more vivacious, almost constantly interactive.

Exciting. Tasty. Very filling.

As I said, Satisfying.

So thank you, Mary, for sharing your library organizing experience. Sometimes when your favorite things are--we'll say quirky--its nice to know how other people enjoy them to. . . and as it turns out, writing (and sometimes reading) about sorting books can be almost as fun as sorting them. :)

Everyone will fail you; keep trying

Ah, so I suppose I lied. However, posting once in March does give the post sequence a pleasing symmetry, so I've forgiven myself and I think you should too.

Also, home ownership is nice, thank you very much; pleasant and overwhelming. I just have to keep reminding myself to take it one repair at a time; it sat empty for at least six months before I got it, and even the really terrifying repairs (drainage!!!!!) will be alright till the end of the week. Meanwhile, I pace, stretch, sleep, and dream of turning the roof into a power source, the living room into a dance studio and the basement into a library--but as I said, one project at once. :)


Now that you are all updated, I can move on to being excessively morose and impassioned about things nobody cares about or can change, like self-immolation, and food. I know you're all on the edges of your seats. Ready?


Anyone I talk to often knows that I obsess a lot about "my" kids, most of them people in extraordinarily painful and probably hopeless circumstances. One of the ones I've been most worried about is in her mid teens, and has been in foster care since she was a toddler. Perhaps some of you can relate to the experience of being shunted from one place to the next; perhaps some of you know what it feels like to be abandoned by your family, and some of you may have experienced massive trauma and its aftermath. There might even be someone reading this who has had the experience of aging out of the foster care system--and if this is you, you are probably aware of how likely it is, in that circumstance, for a person to shortly end up crazy, homeless, or dead.

In my efforts to help this friend secure a home before being dropped headfirst into adulthood, there's a particularly important step that I've been working on. I've been trying to hammer the point that even if she had joined up every gang, tried every drug, broken every window, and burned down every shed she'd come across, she would still deserve a safe and loving home in which to grow up. Every child, no matter how ignorant, violent, or difficult, deserves to be kept safe and to be unconditionally loved.

This is a hard lesson to swallow, after a life like that, because it means you can no longer run away. It isn't because you weren't trying hard enough, it wasn't because you were dirty, or stupid, or deeply inadequate as a human being. It wasn't because no one cared. Talk of personal responsibility and systemic inevitability, in this context, adds only mud; you didn't get a family because the world we live in is profoundly, heartrendingly, terrifyingly unjust.


It is perhaps my favorite thing about humanity that when finally confronting ourselves with this kind of truth, we begin to calm. Regardless of all that we've been taught for our whole lives--about hard work paying off, about how being healthy means not getting hung up upon these things--this is what we see in our everyday. Injustice is the truth we feel and breathe. To touch it, name it, can be profoundly sane-making--perhaps because the only way to look such monstrosity unflinchingly in the eye is with an aim to change it.

And that is how we should be.


For systemic violence, systemic change.

on giving up

the funny thing about life is, it keeps going, until you're dead.

You all have my apologies for the quality of this blog lately. It's been hard to write. . . I hypothesize that this has something to do with my last day off having been Halloween.

Anyway, this all comes out to: till you die, giving up means starting something else. Hopefully this something will work better. :)

Everything

If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way. -Simone DeBeauvoir


It seems I must be joining the famous echo-chamber of the blogosphere, because somebody blogged on my ellipses. I could not help but be struck by how much the photographs, to her, seemed to mean only death, only destruction, only despair.

As some of you must know, I have a predilection for certain pastimes commonly considered depressing or hopeless. One of these is the protection of the small.

If there is to be humanity, it is impossible to prevent all child abuse. From my life and involvement in the systems that govern this matter, I can only conclude that as a society we don't care. . . And not only do we not care that complete success is impossible, as a society we don't even come close to caring enough to do what can be done. I believe we will never come close. It is across this background I paint.


A twelve year old throws a physically violent screaming tantrum because the brother who raped her is about to get out of jail. For this she must sleep on the floor of the group home, and she remains on low privileges; she's not allowed to talk to her peers, eat sweet things, listen to music, play musical instruments, wake up early, wear normal clothes, or use the exercise equipment. She may read with permission. She keeps sobbing, and going on about how her father beat her and the things that happened with her brother; the staff member who supervised this tantrum does not want details, does not want details. The child must learn to take responsibility and control her emotions; she is making excuses.

A young teenager is responsible for his siblings. He has heard more than once from his parents that they don't want him. For good reason the kids are all terrified of foster care; they've been burned. Their violent alcoholic father has completed his required therapy, and the case is about to close on the day when he towers over me and yells at me not to come around, liquor bottle in hand, slamming the door in my face. The case closes on schedule, family preserved.

A sixteen year old refuses to co-operate and keeps running away. She is given only a blanket and underwear for clothing and is under observation day and night. Had she been in the program under it's previous ownership, she might have been taken out to the pond when she kicked and screamed to "work it out in the water."


Perhaps the most impressive thing about these stories, from this vantage, is their darkness, and their closeness; these are stories of here and now, America the beautiful within the past few years. It is impossible to save them; it is impossible to vanquish the darkness. I can try, but nothing I can do will really keep these children safe from violence, from neglect, from profound institutionalized cruelty, or from rape.

Somehow, though, this is not all. Between the lines there is the constant victory of survival--and the constant victory of humanity. I had an irrevocable revelation once as a CASA, squatting with my charges in the dust behind their friend's apartment. We needed a place where we could go to talk away from Mom and Dad, where they could suss me out and decide if I was OK. We talked about school, about foster care, touched a little, briefly, on when things got "bad."

These children had been kicked out of their house in the rain and told never to come home, or watched their father beating their mom, or watched their mother go on meth, or eaten only when fed by their older brother--this all besides the direct violence they had experienced upon themselves. They had been torn away from everything they knew and learned that all the world was dangerous. They had their wariness; they had sore spots. Possibly they had patterns, internally, that would damage them for the rest of their lives.


What they had more than anything else, though, was that they were simply kids; kids who wanted a princess backpack and a new football, who yelled and laughed and ran around, who picked their noses and yelled at their brother for picking his nose. They were funny and smart and playful, silly and cool, constantly teasing me for being a geek and each other for damn near everything. No matter how much trouble they were in or how much I couldn't save them, they were still people. If you had been there to take pictures of us on that day, they would have seemed to be happy ones.

And this, perhaps, is the undercurrent I see in those photographs of destruction and pain; this, perhaps, is the reason I don't see them as even a little one-sided. Human beings will be human beings, whatever their circumstance, and just as tragedy can hide behind a smile, so are profound courage and compassion to be found in death, destruction, and despair.

Some are fortunate enough to find themselves in happier photographs--but if I had chosen happier photographs, they would still be photographs of human beings quite capable of murdering and starving one another--human beings capable of hurting, of falling, of holding a bleeding stranger in the open danger of the road--capable of growing to maturity after a childhood of torture; capable of standing before a column of tanks and dying before the world in support of what they believe in, capable of burning themselves alive to stop the burning of village after village, alive.

They could not save us, and neither can I, but life is in the trying--because we are all human, capable of squatting and joking in the dust, or comforting our children as they weep upon the sand.

rabbit's end

The other morning I half awoke to the children's screams of Heidegger. It wasn't real, but biting in my sleep none the less.. . All the pieces were there, the piercing shrieks relentless and barely inscrutable. I would know what they could mean if only I would remember the ontic or the ontological, could remember something--nothing? Perhaps, if I would fight through this I'm caught in. . .

and there are other things, as well.

In the introduction to Memoir of a Geisha, there's a metaphor I've been thinking of a lot lately. It suggests, much more poetically than I am about to, that a rabbit running through a field is in no position to tell you about rabbits, but every position to tell you about the field. Somehow, for me, that fictitious introductory essay--or maybe the whole book, I'm not sure--soulfully embodies the experience of letting the world wash over and around you, sliding past in a cool constant stream of words. It reminds me of Tolstoy, this, they way you can see his characters in the way the hang their dressing gowns, the peculiarities of their facial expressions and their pet names for the servants. Tolstoy wrote like a rabbit in a field, and it seems he saw it well.

I love Tolstoy, but it comes clear that rabbit mustn't be my style.

It has been. I am nothing of Tolstoy, but there is a certain detachment in my words. I have an observers voice, except when I'm talking cheerily or melodramatically about myself, or directly communicating towards somebody else. I often lack even his sarcastic engagement with the word he saw; he had emotion towards his characters. It's the same way I read, absorbing obvious themes and imagery, perhaps, but allowing most of the processing, such as it is, to take place in my subconscious--leaving in me only the print of the obvious and the intuitive.

I want to contribute, or perhaps only create, more than I'll ever be able to if all I can see is that.

To some, in particular those who find me already to be an absurdly introspective and annoying overthinker, this must seem very strange--but for the first time in my life, I feel the draw in having my own ideas--really having my own ideas. I have been known for not choosing just because everybody else did, but that's not enough; sorting with my honest judgment, avoiding some groupthink, that's good but not enough. If it appears I have been doing more, it is only because I have been running through what, to most of my acquaintanceship, is a most god-forsakenly unusual field.

I don't need to be a seminal figure, or anything like. . . just to do more than passively sift the ideas of others as they flow coldly past.

Poetry ?!

ok. . . well, go easy, kids, I don't usually go public with this sort of thing. ;)

also, the formatting is somewhat all messed up. Oh well.





My Friend Greg is a Fascist


I wanted to be somewhere warm
and kept moving around on the office floor
and called Greg, who first thing
reminded me I am
a cripple
and tried to focus on the talk
but somewhere between t12 and l4
the silence is screaming
and I focus not to focus on the pain
promising myself a future
and pardoning myself the odd lapse
in discourse

I imagine what he'd be like here
the cold impassive face of this, my friend
wonder if he could see my body shake
and what it would be like
if he could feel the things I feel
the cold, the shaking nausea, and
the God
god
god
the pain, that creeps into, and out,
around, clinging into the crevices of
your awareness you weren't even aware
were there
And know what I have learned
from laying on the floor fighting tears
unthoughtfully hushing the scream
of each new breath, alone

That those are the times
to breathe into your pain
and feel it calm
In every breath to touch the
new-found steel of its core
and then move on.

Best of

Written 5:44 5/13/08
I've been thinking about how to make a good blog. . . sort of like how my sister wants to make a good cookbook; a cookbook, as it were, that is full only of cream. . .

So how do you do that--how do you stay that interesting? After kicking off with rather too much about myself, I think it's worth setting up a few ground rules. .

1) No immediate postage. . . let it sit overnight, or at least for a few hours, as a draft before posting. I don't know how I feel about blogger in this way, actually, because there isn't an easy way to save drafts in it. .

2) Enough pictures, but not too many. . And, of course particularly good ones.
Like this:

Maybe a similar rule on links.
Not exactly the elements of style, but we'll have a go.


Of course, maybe it also pays to look at how other people have done it better.

I could get thousands of submissions before every weekly post, so that I'd have plenty to choose from. . .
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

Or I could invite a cast of bitingly witty and repetitively sarcastic political contributors to help shoulder the burden.
http://www.thismodernworld.com/

If I wanted to be really content driven (snort), I could locate myself in some excruciatingly relevant position and then give articulate humanist commentary on it.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

I could allow anyone to correct, edit, and expand into an infinite variety of topics. . .
http://www.wikipedia.org/

Or I could just be totally "effing," as we say here in Zion, talented.
http://xkcd.com/341/


meh. . .

I'm gonna do it my way.

hullo world. . .

Once more with feeling, I find myself writing my first blog.

As a lot of you probably know, I've been blogging on Myspace for awhile now. . . except that I haven't been blogging lately on Myspace, because, well. . . you know.. . it's Myspace. Terrible design, objectification of participants, and tween-trendiness notwithstanding, it was well past time to get away from the extremely sexualized advertising.

The plan, of course, was to set up my own website. . . and it wasn't a casual plan, to be honest; there was quite a lot of planning that went in. . . but in the end, my strong anti-technology capabilities won the day.

Today, I got tired of people telling me it should be easy to set up my own page, and decided to make use of the easy-to-use tools that wander the world, waiting to be made use of by people who intend to blog but not on Myspace. . . and here we are.

For anyone encountering me for the first time here, I suppose I should introduce myself. Having just graduated with an eminently useful Associate of Science degree in General Academics, I'm about ninety credits away from the B.S. in Physics that I'm shooting for. In lieu of full time formal education, I volunteer, and goof off, and currently hold three jobs--I'm very excited about paying my own way this fall, and should probably take a moment to mention the entirely awesome generosity of my family, especially my mother, in getting me this far.

It bears passing mention that I am a wee bit of an emotionally stunted egomaniac. I have made some fantastic, amazing friends, but also my fair share of bad social mistakes and general trauma. . . who knows, maybe I'll blog about that later.

I love to read, bum around the internet, and watch lectures and documentaries. Currently I'm working my way through lectures on classical physics, economics, and world war II. I study French not in school, and have just decided to start rotating as well between Spanish (which I had a couple of years of in HS) and Chinese (which I know about one word of). At some point I'd love to pick up an impressive smattering of Latin and Greek--especially Greek, 'cause Greek geometry is the jam-diggity--but that's a lot lower priority at the moment than science.

(Hmn. . . I've just made myself sound like a psycho geek. . . no truth in that at all. . )

My goals for this summer include writing every day and becoming technologically independent. . . after all, maybe I can change my own oil, but I can't remotely start find out why my OS isn't working without help. Hopefully this will be improved.

My goals for the next five years (ish) include getting another 45-50 credits closer to that B.S., and traveling significantly in Europe and Asia, all in an as-economically-independent-as-possible way. After that I'd like to move to Canada and start a small commune. . . no, just kidding. Not a small commune.

Other interests include mountaineering, literature, dance, and revolutionary politics. And a lot of things. Most things.

That's all. :)