| Snow! |
[Dec. 1st, 2007|01:51 pm] |
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| A Feast |
[Nov. 24th, 2007|11:48 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  gorged | ] |
Twelve of us gathered about Luis and Brian's [coffee] table for the Thanksgiving feast. We spent the day preparing the food together, with endless mimosa's for everyone but me (This [Fool / Repository of Awkward Secrets] was still waiting to sober up from the previous night of integrated social circles, limited edibility, a blush that nobody saw, ripped pants that everyone heard and saw, and unexpected multiples.).
We all learned to avoid Halle Berry in Scattergories, and that the tautology of footwear = footwear is okay.
Immediacy made me forget that I'd brought my camera before long, so there's nothing in the way of commemoration aside from one photo
...and all of the memories we took away with us: Luis and Brian, Wayne and Ian, Gretchen and Dixi, Dave and Suk-Hyong, Rico, Sarah, Kristen, and me. The food was amazing, mostly because everyone there's a talented cooks. You can tell you're doing something right when it doesn't feel like a dinner for east coast orphans--it's where you want to be for the holiday, sharing it with the people who make your days full. |
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| Oh, Eggnog. |
[Nov. 17th, 2007|04:35 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | how I forgot | ] |
I missed you.
Also, I just gave my dad a call to see if he'd be able to pick me up after midnight at the airport, and he said it didn't matter how far he would have to drive or what hour it was--he just wants me to come home. |
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| Upon Mixing Business with Pleasure |
[Nov. 15th, 2007|06:09 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  with a balanced diet | ] |
Talk about compartmentalization.
Go on.
Do it.
Don't defy me.
Life is a fugue: Hedonism and Exploration both lead with content . At night, I can draw upon lessons from Melissa and Nelson. During sunlight, I bring back the tone of days first spent with Jeremy, Anita, Laurel, and Amber. Admittedly, the scope of the hedonism and the breadth of my discoveries feel somewhat lessened; I'm unable to tell if this is because my frame of reference is grander in scope, or if I'm somewhat desensitized. Let's go with the former, since both still quicken the pulse.
Moments from Saturday's bacchanalia with Jeci, Michael, and Pete that will stick are the chemically-altered hordes goose-stepping through the butterfly room to avoid killing the mobile exhibition, the brain of the helicopter devouring some girl's coat, catching somebody hunt for a bed-warmer from forty yards away, a rampage where two miles of sandwich boards suffered gruesome deaths, and best of all: a brief, brief second where the over-analyzation stopped, lost to the rhythm. I wasn't even there. The lapse of the critical eye only registered with me days after the fact. Having a job where I'm supposed to hunt down flaws all day is over-flowing into my personal life. I was already exceedingly thorough at it before I left high school, so finessing that trait is not what I need to be doing in this ongoing Pursuit of Whatnot; the hard part is sustaining a shield that protects my friends from the deconstruction that atomizes everything else charming and kind into an examination of motives. People get benefit of the doubt, but I'm still planning out contingencies.
Only a few hours later, after four hours of sleep, I took the ferry to Bainbridge Island with Sarah, Dave, Steven, and Wayne. These are friendships with mountains of history--is the different feel to them all in their duration? Ah, to find something durable. Back on the island, completely detached from this introspection, I enjoyed the best clam chowder I've had on the west coast. You know those days where doing nothing in particular is perfect? You wander the docks, quip over the local paper, share history, and plan the future while riding across the Sound (and W changes seats to avoid getting seasick).
Yeah. One of those. Food coma on the boat-ride home.
Now, to continue my mission to share Heights with as many as possible. I was finally exposed to the snark that is Heathers last night, so maybe they'll take the trade.
Also, the bloodbath that is work needs to stop before they fire everyone. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 28th, 2007|06:10 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | palludal | ] |
Earlier this month, the only concern I had about this year's Halloween costume was how to avoid freezing. However, microbes had other plans. This is the first day in nine that I haven't spent the majority in bed. Let it be known that the flu is a monster this year. If you can get the inoculation through work, do so.
BUT! Wednesday itself remains for unveiling the faun. While busy fusing my vertebrae in bed with infernal heat, I decided it was an opportune time to grow the requisite goatee with nobody having to see the intervening stages...to no avail. Facial hair remains an impossibility, so this will be a clean-cut satyr. I still have two days to puzzle out how to approximate the backward-angled shins.
Non-sequitur #1: I hadn't expected David to bring back a gift from Korea. The Konglish is pleasing.
Last night, we all met up at Wayne's for a collective carving of jack-o-lanterns and screening of Arsenic and Old Lace. Only moments passed before the geek in me possessed these hands.
The Eye of Sauron (though Lynn, John, Luis, Wayne, Rico, Salar, and Sarah thought it made an equally accurate O'Keefe imitation) now balefully glares from my balcony. If I could somehow get it to follow pedestrians, I'd die happy. Blissfully happy.
NS #2: Comparing forty-hour weeks to twenty-eight is impossible. I feel far more alert these days, get in enough time for reading/studying, and still have enough slack for a social life. It seemed a stroke of luck finding this job back in May, but it's now unreal how ideally suited it is to my situation after the conversion. Impossible attractions don't hurt, either. |
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| Conflicting Impulses |
[Sep. 16th, 2007|08:20 pm] |
- reduce summer to a book list
- evade all personal references and divulgences
- hide the silence in colors so loud that nobody will notice its existence
- coyly invite speculation regarding what's hidden by referencing the silence
- bemoan anthropomorphism
- irradiate the gonads of the irredeemably backward, simultaneously pretending that I know what's best for them, for us all
- post glorious visions: the various states of the garden, crowned by four sunflowers that finally opened yesterday
- express relief that of the two hospitalized by falling onto the street from my balcony, both emerged reasonably intact
- repeat the trajectory of excessive hope, unfair expectations, followed by time-biding
- try learning from my mistakes, if only for the sake of variety
- buy an Irish terrier, now that I accidentally met the Vancouver breeder today, and will have time during grad school to raise one
- resist the inclination to transform the hypothetical puppy into a social crutch
- celebrate the conversion to part-time for generously increased wages that will allow me to earn the same each week while working 12 fewer hours in said time period
- wonder why they're raising my wages at all after three months of a lack-luster performance
- shrug, take the money, and run
- abstract away from experiencing my life directly by making a bulleted list
- further distancing myself with recursions
Render yourself to me. |
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| Blank Verse, Mostly |
[Jul. 13th, 2007|04:13 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | hackneyed | ] |
Last night we gathered round some wheels of wine
And varietals of cheese, at which point
Our linguist friend and Pittsburgh boy unleashed
scholastic wrath. The game was Trivial Pursuit,
the place was Ian’s pad. The teams appeared
to be on par, yet appearances deceive,
and almost ere the game began it ran
away from me. With such facility
they trounced their foes! Capricious cards be damned!
We could but share communal woe, and rage
against the charity the game displayed
whene’er their turn came round: The wedges leaped
into their pie, unmerited and slick,
While we were stuck with questions arduous:
“When is Borneo?” and, “Why is Hitler?”
Aside from my besiegéd pride, the night
went swimmingly. We all lined up to see
how Myers-Briggs would diagnose a room
chock full o’ fools. INFP is who
I am; this came as no surprise. For Wayne,
it should be said, results did him displease;
ENFJ suggests a man that’s quick
to judge his peers, which is not how a stage-
bred lad would want to be perceived. The games
wound down, all parted ways—-we soon made our
way home; I spread my sleeping bag outside
beneath the sweet pea's buds. We passed the night
within the storm, watched lines of lightning stir.
The supple thunder shook the air,
we guessed at names of stars,
yet in the end I found myself
earth-bound and counting cars. |
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| On the Water |
[Jul. 5th, 2007|06:41 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | hegemonic | ] |
Lynn and I arrived at John's houseboat early enough to park [close/illegal]ly, but not so obviously that the car would disappear. Along with a few dozen others, we spent the entire day on East Lake from noon until well past dusk. An obligatory Top Gun screening, shirtless beer-drinking while watching baseball on the couch, undercooked ingestible flesh, and overcooked exposed flesh made for the definitive holiday...minus any of those pesky considerations for our nation's role in global socioeconomics. This is one of those retrospectively-themed holidays, so I'm sure a little bit of sophistry would entitle us to reveling in those hackneyed days of standing for justice and ignoring current events for a few hours. Anyone remember that quote a couple years ago about how difficult it can be sustaining a constant state of outrage? Yeah. I'll just say that I used the day to recharge my moral indignation.
We were only a couple hundred yards from the fireworks barge, and it was the first time I have experienced tactile pyrotechnics. The shockwaves were enough to rock us, and the larger bursts were enormous glaucoma tests in the sky. It was fantastic.
Also, there is the mystery of the champagne cork to be solved. On the end of the dock after dark, a cork hit me in the neck with some velocity. Nobody was aaaannywhere nearby drinking champagne, and it came from the direction of the lake well after the policeboats had shooed all of the combustible pleasure cruises from beneath the firework fall-out umbrella. The Gods Must Be Crazy takes a turn for the classier. Why does The Alrighty always speak at us sideways? What is to be learned from a cork that materializes out of the void?
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| Hooray! |
[Jul. 2nd, 2007|06:42 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  a bouncing baby girl | ] |
Here's my goddaughter Sylvia, born June 26th. Innumerable congratulations to Anita and Vince!
=) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 19th, 2007|05:34 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | lackadaisical | ] |
Inertia creeps.
I fill the balcony with meat-eaters, toss frisbees at dusk, take a weekend road trip to Portland that results in burdgeoning hope, grow accustomed to a new job as an analyst for an aerospace engineer, soak in the international film festival (even appearing in one of them for an entire twelve seconds (by extension, I must have a three-second role in a future movie)), foster the up-shooting of sunflowers, yet don't make the time to write. This will be amended.
Mandi arrives in two days! I haven't seen her in three years, which is hard to understand in itself. We'll escape from the city's gay pride infestation (see this for an explanation regarding my dismissal of the event) for some hiking through the Cascades, and all will be right in the world.
For the last four weeks, I've been standing at the bus stop downtown watching the very same policeman that gave me my ticket mete out 7am justice from his motorcycle. He cruises up and down a single block (on 3rd between Pike and Pine, turning around whenever he gets to either intersection) every day, handing out about a dozen jay-walking tickets in the ten minutes I'm there waiting. How is that life gratifying? Does he wake up with piggy heart racing to the awareness of spoiling the days of twenty people before breakfast? I hope he isn't passing on his genes: If there is any legitimate justice, let his fund-raising die with him...naturally, of course, but still die with him.
More will follow after Chez Gaudy. |
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| In the East |
[May. 26th, 2007|09:38 am] |
I had somewhat forgotten what my family was like up until my dad was driving me from the airport. In the act of describing the arrangements, he wrenched me out of my head: "Your grandfather is being cremated right now." The immediacy of that statement burrowed through all of the carefully-wrought abstractions I had been building to maintain a supportive, five-day smile. The sensation was foreshadowing for what I would feel at the internment, when I saw that they had chosen a joint tombstone; my grandmother's name and birthdate were already carved, and all that remains unwritten is the year of her death.
More than the plane itself, the smell of my great-aunt Charlotte's kitchen is what brought me home. Her place is older than the United States, and there is a tangible disconnect from the global scurrying every time I walk in those doors. Paulownia trees line the walkway, and gorgeous (but highly poisonous) delphinium are in the garden. I listened to the myths and remembrances at her table and was confronted again with wonder that these are people who have lived fully. There's a precedent (an obligation?) for leading anything but the unexamined life, and it makes me look back at the four years I've spent in Seattle and weigh them.
One of the stories I had never heard before goes thusly: During college, my dad, his roommate, and two friends put together a radio broadcast; they went knocking at every door in their dormitory to round out the supply of albums, and expanded from there. He called it "a labor of love," which isn't something he throws around lightly. What was this broadcast? WHFS. How did I not know that my dad created WHFS?
This kind of revelation is typical; they're not secretive, but my family rarely discusses their lives. Conversations usually aim a few generations further back on those infrequent times when we're talking about personal endeavors. Also, having Quakers in the blood makes for a lot of people taking a lot of principled stances long before they became fashionable.
I still cannot get over the fact my great-grandfather was born in 1867.
There was time enough to visit Jeremy and Nicole one day, and Melissa on another. It was as if the intervening two and three years since I'd seen them hadn't passed. Any time I complain about the west coast, I'm really just lamenting the fact that I don't have the kind of history here with friends that I do back east. Admittedly, everybody that moves goes through this, but the fact it's a common sentiment doesn't cheapen it.
Joyce had no idea what the hell he was talking about. You can always go home. |
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| Home |
[May. 16th, 2007|10:10 pm] |
After a year and a half of absence, I will be home tomorrow.
My dad called to let me know that he and my grandmother had decided to take my grandfather off of life support. For the last two weeks, he had only had two minutes of consciousness, and he was not going to heal from his condition. His body was too tired to overcome the ordeal of emergency surgery.
While the voicemail (empty of all these details, aside from the imperative to call as soon as I heard it) was being left, I sat at my new desk. After having talked to my dad yesterday, I knew what the message was even before I called him back. Here, a new aerospace analyst made himself busy by filling an entire desk drawer with origami swallows. They weren't precise, and the folds are nowhere near as intricate as those required for a crane. Still, they're infinitely better: Whereas cranes are designed to sit on their own, utterly static, swallows look as though your eyes have defied nature and frozen them in an instant of flight. There is the promise of motion and direction.
They were the only way I could immediately think of to keep myself wrapped up in my head for the remainder of the day.
My brother's birthday may be ruined for the rest of his life by being the same day as my grandfather's funeral.
My paternal grandfather was the only member of my family that I know almost nothing about. He never opened up about his eighty-five years, and the only hint I ever got was when his sister Nancy was laughing about him trying to teach her to drive. I don't even know if that was before or after he went to Iwo Jima. I know that he designed and built many of the monuments and museums in Maryland, but I don't know any specifics beyond the church where we held Uncle Don's memorial, a fountain in downtown Baltimore, and the B&O Railroad Museum.
I still feel guilty for destroying the grandfather clock. It took him four years to draft and carve it, create the gearworks, and perfect the balance, but it only took me ten seconds as a three-year-old cowboy with a lasso to pull it tumbling down into splinters. I don't know if he shunned me for years afterwards or if I was simply too afraid to approach him.
Dinner with my grandparents showed me the one thing I can remember looking forward to as an adult: They would sit at opposite ends of the table, with all of us spread between, and still flirt over the peas, over the bread, making something magic out of the most banal ingredients, even after fifty years together. Here was an example of something that was constant, something true, even if I couldn't find it at home.
Thank you, Grandpa. It's a beautiful thing, to spend an entire life creating things of lasting value. I'm going to miss you. |
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| Inconsistency |
[May. 2nd, 2007|03:50 pm] |
A friend of mine brought up feminism and the inconsistency of its detractors, and her favorite example had me laughing in tears. Check this out: Concerned Women for America is an advocacy group whose agenda is written all over the front page of their site. However, get this:
They don't offer their employees paid maternity leave.
heh. hehe. A-HAHAHAHAHA.
By all means, e-mail them and ask for yourself, if you won't take my word for it. How exactly does that policy help encourage financial stability in the mythical nuclear family they're trying to save from the anti-American heathens? |
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| Escape Velocity |
[Apr. 22nd, 2007|10:45 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  mordant | ] |
Older, though I haven't quite arrived upon illumination during this last trip hurtling around the sun.
The birthday was spent outside, and my skin ate its fill of photons as I savored the very last day of voluntary unemployment. I tried to herd everyone to Golden Gardens for a beach bonfire and s'mores, but every single one of the fire pits there was already occupied by swarms of underage urchins who were busy hooting and braying about the fact that it was 4/20. Sharing in the public worship of a controlled substance makes people perceptibly more adult.
With that attempt to escape bar culture having met with failure, combined with an unwillingness to resign so easily, the caravan migrated to Rico's to enjoy his fire place...and then a subsequent bar crawl (because I didn't really know what that assorted group would want to do, otherwise). Drank/danced my way to oblivion, usw.
Wobbling home the following morning (post-apology to Dixi for the pollution), I found myself on a block of the city I'd never noticed before. Lo and behold, it was the hipster factory, nestled between the sports caster and fauxhawk facilities. Only having enough crazy glue on hand to foul up one of the assembly lines, I had to choose wisely: Though sports casters are eerily indistinguishable from one another, they're mostly harmless. Fauxhawks are correctable given sedatives and shears. Hipsters, though...they will be mass produced no more forever. Hossanas, et cetera. The automated machines have ground to a sticky halt, so the preponderance of prophylactic glasses and "creative" facial hair will subside as sclerosis whittles down the ranks of the current hipster model.
My mom didn't bother to call/write. Another year of a check showing up in the mail with my revised age helpfully inserted between "HAPPY" and "BIRTHDAY," and that was that. To her credit, she did include a knitted pair of socks (that she had promised to send for last Christmas) with the check, but even five seconds on the phone would've made the socks feel like less of an obligation to include something tangible and more a gesture of affection. For fuck's sake, is that really too much to ask for?
My dad, on the other hand, has been surprisingly human since my grandfather's botched emergency triple bypass. Call me weak, but I don't think I'd be able to spend time with him on a ventilator, his own voice stopped by the feeding tube. God, I just know I'm going to have to fly home...they give him a week, and he's not even conscious, so I wouldn't be able to make my farewells if I left now. My brother tells me that my grandmother is falling apart. I can't imagine spending more than fifty years of my life with Someone Whose Happiness is More Important Than My Own, only to be unable to alleviate their suffering. Mortality undoes everything, when it comes down to it. |
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| An Annual Affair |
[Mar. 20th, 2007|07:59 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | back from an abortive vacation | ] |
Yesterday was my yearly brush with death.
We had intended to drive down to Portland for a few days, so we were packed and out the door by 7:00 in the morning, knowing that the southbound traffic out of downtown would be negligible. Sarah was driving, and I was in the passenger seat, with Dixi and Gretchen chattering away in the back, and we were just before Renton when she lost control and we slammed into a jersey barrier at somewhere between 50 and 60 miles per hour...three times. We clipped it with the front left corner and ricocheted off, going into a complete spin to shear off the rear bumper with the second impact, before another 360 and finally plowing into the barrier again head on. The airbags had deployed on the first impact, so they were already deflating before we really needed them for the last collision that absorbed almost all of the kinetic energy. We hit it so hard that both Sarah and I tore our seat belts out of the casing that attaches them to the car.
Somehow, none of us were seriously injured (even though one retard wasn't wearing a seat belt). We all wobbled out of the car while the dashboard was belching forth acrid, chemical-smelling smoke and all jumped over the jersey barrier in case anybody else decided to join the accident. After waiting for the adrenalin to drop, we pushed the car to the side of the road, and waited some more for the police, a tow truck, and Dave (our savior, who took off work to drive us home) to do their things. In the meantime, I'd had my camera out in preparation for the drive down Coastal Highway, so Sarah had me take a bunch of pictures of the remains before surrendering the vehicle to the garage (There is no way they'll be able to resurrect it.).
The Corolla suffered a gruesome death in order that we might live. I'm a fan, though the fact that the seat belts broke makes me leery. It was this close to being one hell of a lot worse. Instead, Sarah has a tiny burn on her forehead from the airbag, I have tiny cuts on my hands from the exploded glass, and Dixi cut her shin on the rear cup holder. I can accept that. |
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| Heh. |
[Mar. 8th, 2007|10:42 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | runway | ] |
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| Quote of the Night |
[Mar. 2nd, 2007|11:38 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | listening | ] |
T: Are we really going to get into this? Violence never killed anyone.
S: <baffled>
D: I think he meant "guns." |
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| "Fatwa in the Flurries" or "How Bjork Surmounted the Blockade" |
[Mar. 1st, 2007|02:01 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | bjorkine | ] |
Damnation! Tickets went on sale for Rufus Wainwright on both 4/22 and 4/23 at The Triple Door, but they're already sold out. The fact that I'm not getting my way for my birthday is further evidence that there is no justice. Irrefutable evidence. My only hope is to obtain standing-room tickets on the day of the concert itself, which is even dicier. But! I am appeased by the fact that I'll be able to see Bjork at Sasquatch. She has to play Joga (declension mark not included), primarily because I cannot think of a better setting to praise emotional landscapes.
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| Kitchen Life |
[Feb. 27th, 2007|05:14 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | with digits in hand | ] |
The sink is no longer the most amazing spectacle of life in my kitchen: After three entire years of indecision, the African violet has chosen to explode with blossoms in the middle of winter. This is excellence, and there are eight additional blooms that'll be open before the week is out. What inspired it? I bumped up the heat in my apartment by two degrees last month; was that enough to inspire it? If so, why were the last three summers insufficient?
Friday night out with Lynn, Rico, and Eryn; my first perfect game of pool with Wayne last night (He never even got a turn. (hehe)); dinner for eight on a gorgeous Saturday; the hypnotist show at The Last Supper Club this Friday with everyone (Thank you, Des.); Kristen's birthday celebration tomorrow night; the general disorder of immediacy. Both things and stuff are good, in spite of summer's non-attendance.
Scaro loaned me The End of Faith the other day, and I have to admit that I turned out to be more interested in public reactions to the book than the text itself. It's not exactly revolutionary, but it's the only blatant punch in the face to religion I've seen attain global attention. Sr. Harris has rendered himself a strong candidate for martyrdom, though I can't help but wonder why he inserted a couple of his own hobby-horses into a piece that didn't necessarily have anything to do with mysticism.
Also, I discovered cran-peach juice. It is love. |
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| Vomit up the Apple |
[Feb. 19th, 2007|02:50 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | kinetic | ] |
This is one of those days in which I'm incapable of concentrating. It's a combination of what got me expelled from elementary school and good, old-fashioned caffeination. Obviously, choosing to over-caffeinate while I'm already in a hyper-attenuated funk wasn't the best decision I've ever made, but I was feeling under-stimulated (How strange is it that hyphenation provides some measure of comfort?). Sometimes, not even the speed of light is enough--why should I have to wait eight minutes for the light of the sun to arrive? On the walk home last night, I caught myself comparing the phenomenon of starlight and alcoholic crowds: They're beautiful, and my mind conjures up amazing inter-connective dances between them, creates patterns of intention that aren't there...but most've them have guttered out millions of years ago, and those that are still around aren't even remotely close to each other. My distance is the only thing that sustains the illusion.
Last night was a lesson in the Madame Bovary brand of human bondage: We do it to ourselves. There are no two ways about this.
Here I am, the accidental Buddhist, devoid of desire. |
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thehardestword's journal