When "Have a good day" isn't good enough

Drove into Baltimore today for lunch and a movie and had a couple of interactions with homeless folks while I was in town. The first offered me a parking ticket that supposedly had an hour of time on it-- Baltimore's got those centralized parking meters at which you pay for a period of time and leave the ticket on your dash with the expiration time showing.  The local homeless folk have started a practice of collecting tickets that still have time on them from people who are leaving their spaces and then selling them to the next person who drives up and parks.  I declined.  Not because I didn't want to help the guy out, but because it just felt so much like a scam.  Which it's not, really (at least I don't think there's a way they could be scamming). So I'm not sure why I feel that way about it.  When I came back to the car after lunch, the guy very pleasantly told me to have a good day. I half-smiled and mumbled a reply, got in the car, and drove off.

The second guy approached my car along MLK Boulevard as I was stopped at a light. He'd already passed a couple of cars that didn't lower their windows, so I fished a couple bucks out of my pocket and lowered mine to hand the money out to him when he got to me.  He said "Thanks, beautiful. How's your Sunday going?" I didn't know how to reply. It was grey and dreary and rainy out, I'd just seen a film that left me devastated (Selma, holy hell), and I was in a bit of distraught mood.  But otherwise my day had been fine.  I had nothing to complain about, especially compared to someone who lived beneath an underpass and might not have any idea when he'd have his next meal.  I finally came out with "Oh, it's going ok". His reply was philosophical, something about at least we both woke up that morning and you've got to be grateful for that.  Then the light changed and the cars in front of me began to move and I had to go. I said "Take care", raised the window, and drove off.

What do you say to a homeless person in these situations?  They're a person like any other, but I always feel like the typical responses of everyday, just-passing-by chit-chat just aren't appropriate.  When someone who's panhandling wishes you a good day, the standard, habitual "Thanks! You, too!" seems dismissive of the difficulty of their existence.  I considered telling the guy I encountered at lunchtime, "I hope you do, too", but then that struck me as presumptuous.  Isn't it patronizing to assume he's not doing just fine despite his circumstances?  I just don't know.


There's no moral to this, and it's nothing fantastic that I wanted to share with others. It's just stuff I had to get out of my head.

Another day at the museum: Exploring synchronicity through Setlists for a Setting Sun

On one side of the room, one Setlist for a Setting Sun, The Crystal Palace.  Blues and whites and bone beiges. Glass domes over crystals and shells and butterfly wings.  A Victorian palace inaugurated by Victoria herself.  Four thousand voices singing Handel phoned in via Edison's phonograph. Hearing crystal-clear reality through a scrim of staticky needle scratches is still startling even now. Cylinder rotations thumping like heartbeats or, as John Fahey said, the furious beating of angels' wings. Is this what angels' voices would sound like to our human ears?

A couple of photos I snuck when the museum guard's back was turned.  For more views, go here.

On the other side of the room, another Setlist for a Setting Sun, this time Dark Was the Night.  Still blue and white, with more crystals, shells, and iridescent wings under glass, but this time with rockets taking off for the dark expanses of space. A Voyager in search of other voyagers, carrying the sounds of a man who could only see darkness. We've kept track of Voyager all these years, but have no idea where Willie Johnson, whose spectral humming and eerie bottleneck are an angel's song of a different sort, ended up.  

Again, my own surreptitious photos. More from the artist's site here. 

It's always exciting to me when I run into things that are meaningful to me presented in entirely knew contexts.  Dario Robleto's current exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art is a perfect example and I got a bit giddy when the pieces came together. At a distance, it's just an assortment of shells and glass and bits of stuff inside a pair of plexiglass cubes and I almost walked past without taking the time to catch the connections.  Fortunately, I stopped long enough to read the little card about the Edison phonograph recording of Handel's oratorio at the London Crystal Palace.  You see, it wasn't too many months ago that I read a book called Perfecting Sound Forever, by Greg Milner, which begins with accounts of several of Thomas Edison's "tone tests" such as took place at the Crystal Palace. So to read that card, then to pop on the headphones hanging next to the exhibit and hear what that London audience heard was fairly amazing. It was a digital copy I was listening to, yes, but still, the effect it must've had on those people, people who were hearing for the very first time an early, unsophisticated version of the recorded sound that we take for granted, was so easy to imagine.  

And then I stepped across the room and put on a second pair of headphones and heard Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, a song I first heard a couple of years ago, early on in my exploration of blues music, and one that immediately defined the blues for me.  And here it was, this primal, innately human sound, linked with man's attempts to communicate with alien species.

What was the one thing that tied all of these elements together and made them significant to me?  If you've read more than a few entries here, I'm sure you can guess. Yup, that's right, it all comes back to Jack White.  The musician who was my gateway to blues music, without whom I'd never have heard of Blind Willie Johnson or known that Johnson's song was chosen by Carl Sagan for inclusion on Voyager's Golden Record (I'd learned about this originally in the companion book to Martin Scorsese's PBS series, The Blues, and it coincidentally came up again recently in an interview that Dan Rather conducted with Jack). Whose songs have inspired a craving in me to learn how music is made and whose mention of Milner's book led me to pick up a copy and learn about the effect of those early phonograph recordings on concert-hall audiences.  Is this meaningful synchronicity or the delusions of apophenia?  I know it seems maddeningly myopic but, from my perspective, it's just the opposite-- The things I've been exposed to through Jack have opened up a whole world for me and broadened my appreciation of so many forms of music and art and even science. If not for my obsession with him, I would have walked right past those plexiglass cubes at the BMA and thought, "Shells and shit under glass. Pretty, but how is this really art?"  I would have missed the connections that made me stop long enough to understand the message of Dario Robleto's art.  The message itself wouldn't have meant as much to me.

And Robleto's message is important. The need to communicate is one of mankind's earliest and most primary. We've been using art and music as means of communication since we could speak, if not even earlier. And we're using music now to try to communicate with species beyond our own world. Art such as Robleto's reminds us of this, makes us understand how music can bring us together and connect us, and how vital it is to not take the need or the method for granted.  Words are great for getting a point across, but music can communicate feelings so much more succinctly.

Excellent review of the exhibit from Baltimore's City Paper, here.

Get out of my head, Jack White. Or, how the music we love can backfire

In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault wrote of Renaissance-era "ships of fools", on which societies would load their madmen and send them out into the harbor to get them out of the cities and isolate them.  Or to isolate the cities from them, whichever.  On Lazaretto, Jack White sings of being put down in a lazaretto, those old island fortresses where the sick and disabled were quarantined.  That idea of separation, of isolation, has become pertinent for me lately and been much on my mind.

I got away from writing here regularly for a while, in part because everything I wrote was beginning to sound so self-obsessed and sometimes self-pitying, to the point that it was becoming tedious even to me, much less to anyone who might've stumbled across those ramblings on the interwebs.  But also because as I got deeper and deeper into Jack White's music, I became involved in the community of his fans.  It began at a message board, expanded to the Third Man Records Vault and another message board, to a couple of Facebook groups, and, most importantly, to people I've met face-to-face at his shows.  I still wrote about Jack's music here because there was so much in it that inspired me and that I wanted to dig into and mentally digest.  But more and more, I didn't need this place to get my thoughts out, I was able to do it in all those other places and get instant feedback, have dialogues instead of these rambling monologues.  I came out of isolation, at least via the written word.  Physically, I'm still separate, as all of these people I relate to are spread around the U.S. and I see them rarely, whenever we gather for a show.  The rest of the time, it's me on my own, until I sit down at the computer and reach out.

But lately something's been different.  It's been building up gradually for a while, a feeling of disconnection, of distance, from the community I've felt such a part of, from both the internet "friends" I relate to and the real friends I've formed an emotional connection with.  Is it my old pattern rearing its head, my apparent inability to have long-lasting relationships with people?  What's behind that, anyway?  Whatever it is, it started out early.  I was always one of those kids who was off by themselves with a book or exploring in the woods.  I had friends, but still spent a lot of time alone. Then an incident in 6th grade led to complete ostracism, turning me into one of those kids sitting shunned on the side of the playground.  High school was no better, especially after I became one of three punk rockers in the entire school and walked a daily gauntlet of derision from the jocks and popular kids.  Exposure to my parents' constant arguing didn't help, either, as it was just one more thing to block out, to build a wall against.

If you've ever read the book Cold Mountain (and I mean the book, not the film Jack White was in), you may understand when I say that I strongly identify with the main female character, Ada, who is described as "eccentric and bristly".  Ada's physical isolation in Black Cove is, of course, a metaphor for her isolation from people in general, which is due in large part to how she chooses to relate to those around her.  She has little patience for the accepted mores of the city culture she was raised in, and is at a loss in the completely unfamiliar realm of country society.  She frequently ends up saying the wrong thing in the wrong way, often as a means to keep people at a distance either intentionally or unconsciously.  As a result, there's a wall around her, built by her own hands using the bricks of other people's inability to comprehend her.  To say that I understand that alienation would be an understatement, despite the friendships I've formed over the last few years.
   
For the past couple weeks, that feeling's been intensely strong.  Part of it is envy of those friends whose schedules have allowed them to attend recent shows on Jack's current tour for the new album.  These are people I genuinely like and have enjoyed spending time with, but I find myself not wanting to hear from them because the few details I've heard of these shows make me bitterly resentful that I've not been there.  It's an ugly reaction, one that makes me loathe myself, and that makes me retreat even further from these people because I don't want to expose them to my ugliness.  But the last few  days, it's become even worse. Without any rational clue why, I've been peevish, angry, melancholy-- lashing out, crying while driving in the car, having arguments with people in my head that I wouldn't allow myself to have anywhere else, stuck in isolation inside my own brain instead of focused outward.  Then it dawned on me-- Part of it is this record, Lazaretto.  This depressed and angry mood's been with me ever since the night I received it last week, from the moment I read The Admitting of Patience, a play in one act at the beginning of the book that accompanied the album:

THE ADMITTING OF PATIENCE 
(one act) 

PERSON ONE 
(Male or Female) 

 I fantasize about hospital beds, 
jail, work camps, the army. 
I thought of branding myself, 
 tattooing a message to myself 
With a symbol that I can't be 
at peace with anyone. 
 A raft, A boy in the water. I'm hurt, 
but not afraid of physical pain. 

 PERSON TWO
 (M or F) 

 I don't feel very good about myself. 
People always leave me. 
Nobody can stand me for very long. 
I wish I could cut my tongue out, 
or take out the part of my brain 
 that has opinions. Or cares. 
I wish I could be simple. 
Be quiet, introverted, or shy. 
I'm half way in between a wallflower 
at a party and elvis presley. 
People love one or the other. 
In between is no place to be. 

PERSON THREE 

 I see.

The impact of that practically brought me to my knees. It did bring me to tears, and I don't mean just welling up in my eyes. I mean shoulder-shaking sobs.  Good lord above, talk about identifying with something someone's expressed.  And then to put on the record and discover the song Alone In My Home, in which he sings 

These stones
That are thrown against my bones
Break through
But they hurt less as time goes on

And alone
I build my own home
To be sure
That nobody can touch me now

That's followed immediately by That Black Bat Licorice, with its refrain of 

Don't you want to lose the
Part of the brain that has opinions?
To not even know what you are doing?
Or care about yourself or 
Your species in the billions?

Listening to these two songs feels as if he's been in my own head, pulled out my own thoughts and feelings and experiences, all those incidents of feeling the wrong thing, thinking the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, offending people and pissing them off, alienating and feeling alienated, and retreating into self-imposed quarantine.  I'm not quite vain enough to believe I'm the only person who's listened to these songs and felt such things, but that doesn't diminish the impact. It's not been good. I love both songs, one of them is very beautiful, the other very witty, but the effect of them has left me feeling a bit on the edge of madness, or at least sociopathology.  Far from the euphoric feeling Jack's music normally inspires in me.  How do I reconcile this?  Wallow in it and hope it passes on its own? Stop listening to these songs?  Smack myself upside the head in the hopes of knocking some rationality back into my brain?  

I don't know. But I told someone the other night that I'd caught myself wishing I could be like a crazy homeless person, standing on a street corner ranting and talking to myself.  It would be easier than trying to be a normal, civil person, at least until I can figure out how to get back out of this state of isolated insanity. 

Lunch-time in the nation's capital

Just went to the Shake Shack up the street from work to grab a hot dog and fries for lunch. Placed my order, took the beeper they give you, and went  over to the other counter to get napkins and mustard and such. Homeless dude standing there with a beeper asks how I'm doing. I said I was fine and, out of courtesy, asked how he was. He said he was ok and complimented me on my hair-color. So I complimented him on his hat (which was really very cool, I'd love to have one like it). He then asked if I had any change. I told him I'd just spent the last of my cash. He asked if I had any plastic. I said "Yeah, that's what I'll be using the rest of the day". He said "Will you buy me a burger?" Sucker that I am, I said "Sure", despite the fact that he had a Shake Shack beeper in his hand already. We went back to the counter and I could tell from the clerk's face that this wasn't the first time he'd rung up an order like this for the homeless guy (whose name was Ronald, by the way). While my transaction was being processed, Ronald pulled out a gigantic wallet to show me his last name on his driver's license, and I teased him that he had more plastic than I did (though I couldn't tell whether any of it was credit cards). Transaction complete, I took my receipt, handed Ronald the beeper for his order, then went to sit on the bench next to the other counter where you pick up your order. Ronald stayed by the cash register fiddling with his huge wallet. While he was there, a family of tourists (so they appeared and this is DC, after all) came up to place an order and I watched Ronald finagle another burger (his third, remember) out of the father while the mother just stood there staring and I sat on the bench cracking up. A couple of the people who were already waiting when I sat down chuckled, too, so I assume they had caught on to his racket as well. So then Ronald is called to the counter to pick up his first burger, after which he comes over to the bench and asks if we can make room for him. The guy on my right stands up to let him sit and he plops down right up against me. So I told him that he needed to move over because I don’t let guys sit that close on the first date. He scooted way on over and made a big show of how he was being respectful to me, and then added a quip about “because he didn’t want me to smack his face”. Then he goes on to tell me about how he went to high school with Eddie Murphy at Roosevelt High in Long Island. Then he starts showing me how prepared for the elements he was- First telling me about the hat I'd admired, which was waterproof wool with pull-down ear flaps, then pointing out his waterproof North Face pants and Helly Hansen shirt (which he kept covered with another shirt so that no one would rob him of it). Oh, and then he began telling me about how a lot of people think he's black, but he's not-- Both of his parents are German, and his mother is part Cherokee Indian.  So I asked how he ended up with such dark skin (he was a fairly light-skinned seemingly black dude).  So he explains that it's not black, it's Cuban. So I started to ask him where the Latin blood fit in, but then he was called up to the counter to pick up the burger I’d bought for him. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the guy who bought Ronald’s third burger explaining things to his wife. Through all of this, I was still cracking up. When Ronald sat back down, I teased him about the racket he had going, and he started to tell me something about how he liked to help people out and we started talking about “paying it forward”, then he decided he had to go to the bathroom. He got up and started to head towards the back of the place, but stopped to talk to someone else along the way. Just then, my order and that of the tourist family were called, so we put the burger the father had paid for into Ronald’s bag with the one I’d bought for him. By that time, Ronald had apparently made it all the way back to the bathroom, so I asked the clerk to keep an eye on his stuff on the bench and I took my hot dog and went back to work.

See, kids? It's not always wrong to talk to strangers.

What revolves around what?

Sitting on the wall above the Potomac River at the base of the Rumsey Monument in Shepherdstown (where I've ruminated before), watching a pair of black vultures sitting on top of the world (quite literally) preening each other, I thought of something from an episode I recently watched of the BBC series, Sherlock (episode 4, A Scandal in Belgravia, to be precise)-- In his blog of their adventures together, Dr. Watson exposes Holmes' ignorance that the earth revolves around the sun.  Holmes' lack of this knowledge becomes a source of incredulous amusement to those around him, but he aggravatedly demands "What does it matter?"  As he explains to Watson, his brain is like a hard drive and he cannot clutter it with data that is useless to his purposes.  He may have had that information in his hard drive at one point but, if so, he'd long ago deleted it. He has a point.  What, indeed, is the value of such information?  I'm sure many intelligent, educated folks out there would cite all that we've learned about the expanse of space and how we may end up needing to live on another planet some day so we'd better learn all we can about them but, really, for the average person, how does that impact their day to day living?  If a child were born tomorrow and the parents decided to keep him ignorant of the fact of the earth's rotation around the sun, say, home-schooled him and contrived to keep the information from him as far into adulthood as possible, would his life be any less fulfilled, less interesting, less meaningful, or less productive than any of us who are cognizant of this astronomical fact?  Hell, there are tribes of isolated indigenous people who are unaware of the workings of the solar system as we know them.  And yet those people live, love, laugh, create and procreate and function within their own societies just as ably as any of us who are supposedly more advanced.  

I saw a film this afternoon that was a very complex exploration of the very complex subjects of love, relationships, family, and communication.  Our knowledge of the earth's rotation around the sun did not come up at any point in the film and seems to have no bearing on the matters it addressed.  So, what impact does a basic awareness of the workings of the solar system have on a basic awareness of the workings of human nature?  Which of the two is more pertinent to daily life and, thus, more important information to store in our mental hard drives?

Another example--  Last weekend, I stood in a "sky meadow", a huge section of steep hillside in a state park in Virginia that farmers had cleared of forest ages ago for grazing their livestock.  The field is now covered with wildflowers of all kinds and the trail transects growth as tall as my shoulders. First I saw a couple of butterflies-- Huge yellow, black &/or pale blue ones, then little speckly orange ones, then tiny little blue/brown ones.  Next thing I know, I'm looking around at what had to be a couple hundred of them.  I have never seen so many butterflies in one place in my life.  It was so gorgeous I just stood there for the longest time with a big ol' fool grin on my face.  In moments like that, what difference does an awareness that the earth revolves around the sun matter?  The sun is in the sky, we are standing on the earth, the butterflies are fluttering in between, and that's enough.  Isn't it? 



Disclaimer:  I do not state anywhere above that I believe learning about the solar system is unnecessary or irrelevant, so please don't make that assumption.  This was all just random rumination, the sort of stuff that clutters up my own mental hard drive. Worth thinking about, though.  I think.

 

The art (?) of conversation

You know how some paintings are obvious masterpieces?  A perfect unity of color, line, perspective, and form culminating in something that provokes, inspires, and moves people.  And how some other paintings are just a big jumbled mess that makes you wonder why the artist ever put paint to canvas, or that, even worse, actually offends?  Conversation is a lot like that.  Chris Cornell once wrote in The Day I Tried to Live, "The words you say never seem to live up to the ones inside your head." Those words resonated with me, and have become even more apropos now that so many of my conversations take place via the written word here on the interwebz. Pretty much everyone realizes the disconnect-- Without tone of voice and facial expression to help with conveying the meaning of your words, you're at the mercy of them being interpreted in a myriad of unexpected ways, no matter how carefully you try to choose them. 

For example, you can be happily conversing in a chatroom when someone mentions what they're eating. Completely off the top of your head, you type "I haven't eaten that since I was a kid". On your end of the internet, it's nothing more than a statement of fact and you're thinking "Wow, it's been a long time since I had that" and the words you both typed and thought are accompanied by nostalgic memories from childhood. On the other end of the internet, though, there are people thinking "Wow, she just insulted that person's taste in food. She must think she's better than people who eat that." How does that happen? 

On another occasion, you could write something with a lighthearted, joking intent, with a mischievous grin on your face as you type, only to find out that people on the receiving end are deciding that you're a disrespectful troll hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. How does that happen? 

I often wonder if people interpret the written words they read in a tone that they themselves might use, depending on what their own mood is at the moment, instead of stopping to think about the person who wrote the words, and what they know about that person. You'd think that enough of us have experienced this phenomenon to give each other the benefit of the doubt, to not assume the other's intent quite so quickly. Perhaps we're all too busy multi-tasking. Or, perhaps, that fatal flaw of faceless, voiceless communication will never be completely overcome.  How on earth did people handle this sort of thing back in the days of letter writing?

On the flipside, there are also times when this weird disconnect can be intentionally manipulated, such as when you sit at your desk in a state of miserable depression and, by scattering a few exclamation points and smiley emoticons through your words, convince the people on the other end of the internet that you're actually quite cheerful. Funny, that. 

I don't know about you, but I don't know what to say. I don't think I ever will. 

Random babblings: On corvids and connections

On a very November day, I wandered through a cemetery full of crows, thinking, thinking, thinking...

Greenmount Cemetery's located in one of the sketchier neighborhoods of Baltimore, but it's well worth venturing through the nearby streets for because it's one of the vastest, most gorgeous cemeteries I've ever visited.  I discovered it through the work of A. Aubrey Bodine, who photographed Baltimore and Maryland for 50 years for the Baltimore Sun.  Sounds completely trite to describe it this way, but really, the place is an oasis of rolling hills, lovely trees, and beautiful monuments in the middle of some serious urban decay.  Historically important, too, and not just for its notoriety as the final resting place of John Wilkes Booth.

 A fellow blogger, J., recently posted about a cemetery visit of her own.  I refer to her as a "fellow blogger", but is there more to it than that?  We first "met" through the blogosphere portion of the internet when she discovered my own blog and posted a comment asking me to get in touch with her via e-mail so that we could talk more in-depth.  I did and we began a correspondence about what the music we love means to us.  She shared very private details of her personal life with me and it felt like a bond was beginning to form.  Then we lost touch for a bit (my fault, through distraction and laziness).  Recently, we finally had the opportunity to meet "IRL", as the internet parlance goes.  It took place in a fair-sized group, though, and once we'd said hello and shared a hug, we each ended up talking to other people.  So what does that make us?  Fellow bloggers, acquaintances, friends...?  I'd like to be able to refer to her as the latter because I very much like what I know of her, but developing a deeper connection has eluded us.  But that doesn't mean the potential isn't there.  I think that, in this age of internet connection with folks who share interests but are strewn around the world, someone needs to come up with a new term for people who would likely be friends if only proximity allowed.  It's not like long-distance friendships with people one has barely, if ever, met are anything new.  Bookstores are full of collections of letters between literary and historical figures who shared ideas and emotional resonance through the written word because they were nations apart.  How is what happens all the time on Facebook and message boards any different?  Ok, yes, the communication you find on the internet these days is certainly probably much shallower than that of folks in those olden days (at least the ones whose letters made it into published books).  But are the relationships formed through such communication any less valid?

Posts like this in which I pose so many questions make me feel like that character from Sex and the City, the writer chick.  Someone please tell me it doesn't really come across that way...

Annoying that the crow photos didn't come out as well as I would've liked.  They were everywhere.  Couldn't get near them on foot, but was pleasantly surprised as I was leaving by the way that several of them perched on headstones right next to the lane seemed completely undisturbed when I brought the car to a stop and rolled down the window to capture some shots.  Huge buggers.  Hard not to think of Poe's raven, even though it's not likely that piece was inspired by Baltimore's birds.

In other news, I still cannot get this song out of my head. Not sure why, but it somehow seemed especially fitting today.


 

I am officially old and curmudgeonly

So last night, about 10:30 or so, I'm getting ready to go to bed.  As I was pulling back the covers, I suddenly heard a woman screaming, agonizingly, as if she were being beaten.  I listened for a moment, then threw some clothes on and went to open the front door to see if I could figure out where it was coming from.  On the sidewalk in front of the small park across the street was a crowd of teenagers carrying on, a bunch of girls judging by the sound of their voices.  I decided I wasn't in the mood for teenaged crap, so I yelled over to them to shut up.  One of them turned around and yelled back, "You want to fight, old lady?"  I just stood there for a moment, honestly flabbergasted.  I had no idea how to reply to that.

I should have said, "Sure, I love to fight teenage girls, it's my favorite thing! Lemme go get my switchblade and my num-chucks and I'll be right over!"

Uh-huh.

Then she yelled it again and I yelled back something about calling the cops and her friends flipped out and dragged her off down the street.  I went back inside, but didn't go to bed because I began getting paranoid that the mouthy one was going to talk her friends into coming back and throwing a rock through my window or something.  Finally hit the sack a bit after midnight, and spent the next five hours tossing restlessly.

Guess it's time to go buy a rocking chair and a shot gun for the front porch.

Can you tell me what I'm supposed to do?

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little….   -  Tom Stoppard

It happens every now and again, at least to me if not to you.  Words form and flow out through mouth, pen, or keyboard, but just don't come out the way they were intended to.  They take on a life of their own, as it were, conveying a different tone or meaning than they had in the brain.  You can practically hear them laughing at you as they cause themselves to be misinterpreted.  They nudge the world in the wrong direction.  And then, of course, comes the response to these rogue phrases, which can leave you (or at least, me) sitting flummoxed by the disdain thrown back at you.

Happened to me once again just yesterday.  I'm sure it won't be the last time, but you would think I'd learn.  One thing I have definitely figured out, though, is to take a look at my reaction to these situations--  This time around, it was a mix of embarrassment that I had expressed myself so poorly, frustration that people couldn't see through my ill-chosen words to the real intent behind them, and hurt over some of the harsh things said in reply.  Such a combination of emotions makes it difficult to not lapse back into the sullen misanthropic state that I've spent the last few years struggling to climb out of.

So why do these occurrences affect me so deeply?  There is a part of me that's fully aware that I'm not alone in making verbal mistakes, that the people who really care about me won't be swayed by my misstep, and that the entire situation will pass from memory sooner or later.  But there's another part that I've realized resides in my shadow side--  A small, insecure bit of me that wants to be accepted and appreciated, that's terrified of ostracism.  I say that this is a part of my shadow because I've always prided myself on not needing the approval of others, on recognizing my own merits and having the assurance to stand alone if need be.  But in exploring the anger that I've carried around for most of my life, I discovered just what I was sublimating in my unconscious-- My social nature, that primitive part of all of us that needs to feel it belongs to a tribe of some sort.  I've had to admit that, as content as I can be alone, it does feel good to connect with people with whom I share common interests and values.  But once such a connection is made, difficulties in communication prick at this shadowy segment of my self and send it into a panicky, aggravated tailspin.  Do I try to explain myself, re-word my statement, clarify my intent?  Or will the attempt just dig me deeper into the mire?  Do I refrain and wait for my faux pas to become a distant memory?  Or will my silence also be misinterpreted?  Why are situations that are usually really quite trivial also so damned baffling? 

Well, somebody walked up to me,

but I didn't know what to do.

And then somebody said hello to me,

but I didn't know what to do.

Because I think that my words could get twisted,

so I bend my back over, take a gulp, be funny,

'cause I know there's nothing I can do.

Then my mother tried to pick me up

when I was sittin' down on the ground.

Something forced my little eyes to come open,

but I couldn't make out the sound.

It doesn't matter 'cause my eyes are lying

and they don't have emotion,

don't wanna be social, can't take it when they hate me,

but I know there's nothing I can do.

When my thoughts start to feel like mine,

they're taken from me, it seems to happen every time.

And the feelings that are fine for you,

there's somebody there

who doesn't think they are true,

So think of something new,

there's nothing left to do.

And then my idols walk next to me,

I look up at them, they fade away.

It's a destruction of a mystery,

the more I listen to what they say.

So does that mean that there's no more doin',

and there's no more thinkin',

and there's no more feeling,

'cause there's no right opinion...

So can you tell me what I'm supposed to do?

Much fun wit teh words'n'stuff

The guy at essays and effluvia posts this every year and I greatly look forward to it.  This year, I decided to crib it from him and share...

The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternative meanings for common words.

(I believe this is older)

 
The winners are:  
1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach..
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n), olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you
   are run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline..

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with
   Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief
   that, when you die, your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck
   there.

16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn
   by Jewish men.             

The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. 

Here are this year's winners:
           1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops
   bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows
   little sign of breaking down in the near future.
           2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the
   purpose of getting laid.
           3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the
         subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
           4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
           5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and
   the person who doesn't get it.
           6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are
   running late.
           7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.
           8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra
   credit.)
           9. Karmageddon (n): its like, when everybody is sending off all
   these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and
   it's like, a serious bummer.           

         10. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day
   consuming only things that are good for you.
         11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.
         12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem
   smarter when they come at you rapidly.
         13 Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after
   you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
         14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into
   your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
         15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in
   the fruit you're eating.
And the pick of the literature:
         16. Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

Sometimes there's too much silence

The other day I posted a link on my Facebook page to a particularly appropriate entry at a Twitter feed that I follow called "shitmydadsays":

"I just want silence. Jesus, it doesn't mean I don't like you. It just means right now, I like silence more."

Most days, that's very much how I feel.  I'll babble a blue streak when the occasional mood strikes, but most of the time can't deal with the constant sharing of personal drama and empty, void-filling talk that so many people seem prone to.  It's amazing, though, to think that such verbal diarrhea could be considered a luxury, to realize that there are still places in this world where one has to be careful of their speech and where communication is a controlled, limited thing.

I have a friend blogger who lives in Iran.  Remember Iran?  It was much in the news just a few short months ago, when incumbent leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected through a seemingly fraudulent process.  Protests erupted immediately throughout the country, and the government responded just as quickly to shut down both foreign news media and internet access.  What's surprising is not so much that speaking out against the elections led to many Iranian citizens being arrested, or worse.  That's still almost an everyday occurrence for peoples such as the Tibetans and Uygurs. The amazing aspect to this particular government crackdown is that much of the news that did make it out into the international press came via Twitter. 

Hard for us in more democratic countries to imagine, huh?  My friend, who goes by the intarwebs pseudonym of human being, is a teacher and a poet with a beautiful voice who speaks words that make one think, words that should be shared.  These days, though, those of us who follow her never know when she'll be able to gain access to the 'net to communicate with us.  Most of us spend hours a day on the intarwebs, both at home and at work.  Those with less easy access can still go to places, libraries, etc, and get on a computer that allows us entry to the World Wide Web.  Stop and think for a moment about those words, separately and then together:  World. Wide. Web.  It's sobering and disturbing to think that some of us, grown adults with something worthwhile to say, are not allowed such access out of the fear that we might gain a measure of freedom.
    

hb, if you have the opportunity to see this, I hope you don't mind me sharing your latest words.

sometimes i've got so much to say that
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooi keep silent

sometimes i shout so loudly that
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooono one hears me

sometimes tomorrow is so far away that
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooosoon is yesterday

sometimes you are so close that
ooooooooooooooooooooooooi can't think of you...

Originally posted at Thus Spake the Crow, Sunday, December 6th, 2009.

Intarwebs intarvention

Hi, my name is Kali and I'm an addict. Yesterday, I blew off an incredibly lovely, albeit windy, spring afternoon by succumbing to the lure of the intarwebs. I said I would just sit down and quickly check my e-mail. Two message boards, Facebook, a bunch of blogs, and several RSS feeds later, it was less than an hour before sunset and I also had housework to do. I may be (hopefully) keeping my brain sharp with all of this stuff, but the body's getting soft and that just won't do.

It's time to impose some limits. I won't be going away entirely, as there are too many people around the web that I've connected with and I want to maintain those connections. But I also need to find a better balance between time on-line and time doing all the other stuff that rounds out one's life. So, to anyone to whom I currently owe a reply-- please be patient, it's going to take me even longer than usual to get back to you.

As for you, intarwebs... It's not goodbye, it's just au revoir.

Now this is a virus the world needs...

Stolen from the excellent blog, essays & effluvia.

A questionnaire by Bernard Piveau

I tend to shy away from all of the questionnaires and such that are rampant at MySpace and Facebook. I figure I've provided quite a bit of info about myself on my profile page, and I'd rather have people ask for anything else they'd like to know. That initiates a dialogue, and that's what I'm on the 'net for. Not just to blab about myself (though this blog might indicate otherwise), but to put myself out there and get a response, to share with others, to learn and be exposed to new things by the folks I meet through the intarwebs. So those MySpace questionnaires with a hundred and a half questions have always struck me as a little cheesy and defeating the purpose of truly sharing information.

That said, I've always loved the questionnaire from Bernard Piveau that James Lipton uses at the end of interviews on Inside the Actors Studio. It's brief, it's simple, and sometimes there's something to be said for brevity. So, here goes:

What is your favorite word? There are sooooo many. Love of words is what compels me to read and write. But there is one word that I use pretty frequently, so it probably qualifies as a favorite-- Why?

What is your least favorite word? No

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally? Curiosity

What turns you off? Ignorance

What is your favorite curse word? This is the question everyone loves, right? I don't know that I could choose just one curse word. What I enjoy is stringing a bunch of expletives together. There's just a nice, satisfying emotional release from all that vulgarity rolling off my tongue, like letting loose with something along the lines of "goddamn, simple-assed, mother-fucking prick" when someone cuts me off in traffic. That's good stuff.

(Though it does make me a bad Buddhist. And now I'm wondering if I should have set this blog for Adult Content...)

What sound or noise do you love? Spring Peepers

What sound or noise do you hate? Car alarms. Hearing one of those things can set me off on one of my strings of expletives.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Travel writer

What profession would you not like to do? Any type of political office

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? "Hah! See? You were wrong!!"


So, now it's your turn. Anyone?