sleep and soup and stories

the general if mild exhaustion of this month feels pretty normal by now. but it is Thanksgiving week at last. there shall be time for sleeping more and making art and baking a dozen pies.

okay, maybe only three pies. or a smattering of mini-pies. we shall see.

there are bigger ideas than pie that I want to blog about. will blog about someday. maybe even soon.

on reading and teaching and knowing and goals that involve other people and therefore feel both somewhat easier and a million times more difficult than any other goals might feel. 

on airplanes and writing. believing. or not.

but today the priority is simpler: blogging for its own sake. I know my brain is too tired for blogging about all or any of those big ideas. so for now, this post is about smaller things. or at least about smaller-to-write-about things.

like the sunlight and shadowy air that lap around the hills and ridges about this town. the depth of horizon we get here is an endless source of loveliness.

or like how I've run out of time for making my handdrawn Christmas cards. but maybe I'll rehash one or two into digital ones. or reprints. or something.

what else?

today, apparently, is a new-ish holiday of its own (invented by a 7-year-old New Zealander a few years back). so, happy howly Wolfenoot to all. perhaps I'll give the gift of a bath to our two little pugs, for the occasion.

I'm also thinking about cookie dough. I'll probably make spaghetti and asparagus for dinner in a moment. there is laundry to fold and knitting to knit and a new roleplaying character to draw several increasingly-less-terrible sketches of. (she is a halfling monk with a wild amount of red hair. I named her Juniper Thornbrook, or June to her friends.)

and there are plenty of little bug-monsters to fight, in this rather adorable new to us platformer game.

and reading and writing, too. three library books. a journal/diary five-eighths or more full. two or three teaching notebooks (one for plans, one for grading), a research notebook, a professional service notebook, and various folderfuls of notes (inside my brain and outside of it) on a half-dozen half-told stories.

one month from now I'll be another year closer to being "old," whatever that really means. it'll also be the depths of actual winter. what will the solstice-time hold for us then? hunger and cold, to be counteracted with stories and soup. (speaking of soup, this is my new most favourite soup ever, though we make it with vegetarian meatballs.)

so inbetween baking pies and roasting poultry this week, let us collect some more good soup recipes, stock our brains with good stories + good story ingredients, and make plans for hibernating in as much comfort as we could possibly ever deserve.

today is Wednesday.

Field Notes sends me emails every so often (it's okay, I invited them to), almost always on Wednesdays, announcing the random Wednesday promotions and such that they have. today was such a Wednesday. I've never yet taken advantage of such a sale, but I love the idea of it. in their announcements about these sales they always say something like "you don't even have to be aware of this deal-- as long as you buy something from our shop today, you get the free stuff and the discount and it's all good." someday I will, probably, hopefully, happen to be able to buy something awesome from them on a Wednesday when there will be free stuff.

this Wednesday, perhaps for you too, doesn't really feel like one. it sort of feels like a Sunday instead. naps. a little rainfall. no pressure from the outside world to do anything in particular.

it's been nice, overall. the most productive thing I've done so far was pasta making.

one of our most awesome wedding presents was a pasta machine. it's very nice to have.

I didn't use it for pasta rolling today though. the lovely little thing can be a hassle to assemble, and it's tricky to find the right corner of the table to clamp it to, and the spaghetti attachment tends to squeak terribly anyway. so today I used a rolling pin and settled for rather thick noodles. they're fine, if rough. it's all good.

the basic rough egg pasta noodles I made today were made specifically to go with this mushroom bourguignon recipe. that was the other productive thing I did this afternoon. unfortunately, I slightly undercooked the carrots. but nevertheless, it's one of our favourite things to eat and it's worth the relative complexity involved in making it. highly recommended.

autumn timewarp collage

this week has brought the first cold rains of the season. half of October stayed quite warm and muggy, but autumn is properly settling in now. the time of hats and sweaters has arrived.

yesterday it seemed to rain and rain all day long. I spent the morning grading, the afternoon putting together job applications and writing bits of dissertation chapters. the pug spent most of his day snoozing, as usual, but we also went for a glorious long walk in the pre-evening. having a dog is such a great excuse for going on walks every day. I never thought I was a dog person, but walking a little pug around the neighborhood has become an unfading pleasure for me. I like being outside. it's amusing to watch him sniff at everything.

it's also amusing to watch him in general, whether he is curled up in a puddle of wrinkly fur or whether he is stretching up to look out the windows and grumble at bicyclists. 

my time this semester has an interesting grounded uncertainty about it. I'm teaching an online course, so my teaching efforts fit into whatever slots and nooks they need to. and so does everything else. morning walks, housework, reading and writing and research, cooking, spending time with dear husband, writing and reading and research, notebooks, evening walks, and making lists of more job applications that need filling out. 

the mountain photo there is from two weeks ago when my youngest brother was about to get married. the Chagall above is from a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago several years ago now--I'm not exactly sure when. maybe it was during an October.

last October had art in it, too. Washington DC art. and also Hamilton.

the October before that was more nature-y than artsy, it seems. 

there are ten Octobers chronicled in this blog. ten sets of intermittent records of my thoughts during the tenth month of ten different years. much has changed since the October of my senior year of undergraduate work, when I was neck-deep in building websites and waxing exuberant about the first USB drive I ever owned. so much has changed.

and many things have not changed. autumns are still the best. academia is still a great cozy, challenging cocoon of crazy curiosity. I am still writing.  

fall semester, 2016

no courses to describe this time around. just teaching some of same old things, working on learning how to be a real academic.

this is the weekend before the semester officially begins, and for days campus has been buzzing with students and faculty and that grand, subtle feeling of autumn ambition and learning-ness that I have loved for so long. it has been an exciting week.

I have just finalized the syllabus and assignments for my Business Writing class.

I am making lists and planning to dedicate this much work time to libraries, that much to notebooks, just enough to the undergraduates, and all the leftover time to my research gig.

and after work I will bake and eat, and read more stories, and walk and daydream, and water all the plants on my windowsills.

in sixteen weeks I'll be better at being a real academic. and it might be snowing.

it feels so good to be where I am. lucky me.

the rest of the stories

the very oldest old draft in my blogger file of draft blogposts was last edited sometime in 2011. only that is no longer true-- I am editing it now. and by the time you see these words, the draft will no longer be a draft at all, and my editing will have been and will be very past.

before I reopened it today, this draft had two very short lines in it.

1. a link to an old post on a blog that sadly no longer gets updated: http://missnemesis.blogspot.com/2009/08/commemorating-one-year-of-thermostat.html

2. the words the survey.

a third thing, the thing I wanted to blog about today, is something newer. something my dear clever sister linked me to the other day: a deep, detailed slideshow summary of a book called How to Have Crucial Conversations.

can this amelia girl create any insightful or meaningful link between all three of these snippets? I think she can. you'll have to let me know if it works, or what.

dear friend Elsie, many years back, was the one who first linked me to the Miss Nemsis blog. I binged on the archives for a while--those days being the golden age of blogging--and found myself drawn to this librarian woman who had lived in England once upon a time and who held fascinating opinions about books and who daydreamed in grand, romantic directions. her lively comments section was once a thing of envy. for example, see here.

and now her blog is covered in dust (or at least has been since two autumns ago), but mine is not. yet.

the Miss Nemesis post from 2009, "Commemorating One Year of the Thermostat War," must have spun to the top of my mind when I began working on the survey. The Survey. my survey. an informal, random, semi-widely distributed survey, it was. despite all my digging around in old google docs, not a single shred of this project has turned up. but I know it began in 2011 and that it consisted of a single question--

what's the hardest/worst part of being married?

I sent this question to almost all the married facebook friends I had. I sent out very random emails to any relatives and acquaintances I thought might not mind my nosiness. I brought it up in dozens of conversations, and still do occasionally, when I think of it. in 2011 I began compiling answers in Google Notebook, which even moreso than Miss Nemesis's blog, is now no longer a thing. I vaguely remember transferring them all to a document somewhere, and formatting them nicely with introductory commentary and everything--but it seems to have been lost. or perhaps I cannot remember what to search for, or where.

someday, hopefully I'll find the thing.

it took me multiple days to click through all 244 slides of Mattan Griffel's summary of How to Have Crucial Conversations. it must be a pretty hefty book. I wonder if I'll ever read the thing, or if those 244 slides covered it all well enough.

some sections of it seem like marvelous principles to teach a class of would-be technical communicators. maybe in this century, even if it is no longer the golden age of blogging, all of us are technical communicators at least some of the time. not many of us live outside of technology anymore, if we ever did.

one of the sections that poked at me with the greatest effect was all about how powerful stories can be, and how much attention they deserve.

I was chasing more than a single story with that survey question, five years ago. up to that point there had been mainly fairytales and rose-tinted spectacles, thin and sparkling. marriage is like this; relationships should be like that. flowers and birdsong, pastels and sugar. those can be lovely stories, of course, but they aren't enough. no single story every can be enough, no matter how awesome or detailed or long or meandering it might be. the more stories, the better. I guess I'm still trying to cram as many of them into my life as I can.

arts and articles

I finished reading Station Eleven thismorning. the end wound me around itself like a spring and then at the end I bounced away, eager to read the next book. what will it be? the fat copy of Les Miserables I have sitting by my bed? the half-read Metaphors We Live By that I borrowed from friend Sam last year?

we'll see. there are also next year's textbooks to get familiar with and this old food magazine to browse. one of the ads in it is going to be shoehorned into an article I'm drafting. I think. writing projects take strange directions sometimes.


but enough about books and articles. this past weekend we went down to Indianapolis for the Broad Ripple Art Fair. (does anyone else besides me want Broad Ripple to be one word? Broadripple just feels better to me. but then I also want thismorning to be one word, so I might be a little abnormal.)

as I walked over to the Indy Art Center I saw the above mural off next to the path. neat. my ipod camera refused to work after that, so I have no photographs of the art fair itself. ah well.

some of the cool artsy things we encountered there:

gorgeous leather-bound hand-made journals and notebooks. friend Beth bought one, and I am envious.

jewelry etched with patterns of microscopic organisms. looking at these was fascinating. the etchings are copies of Ernst Haeckel's diagrams, which I remember seeing in my Visual Rhetoric class

I can't find a website to link to for the awesome ceramic lamps we looked at, but they were awesome. the art fair map gives me the name of the artist--Brian Moore--but that's it. he makes cool ceramic oil lamps and other gorgeous ceramic things.

we also entered a drawing to win season tickets to the Indiana Repertory Theatre for next year. that would be cool, yeah?

I came home with a piece of lovely pottery in which to store my wooden spoons and other cooking accoutrements. the old tin cans I had them in before can be gratefully recycled now. 

me, words, now

this is the nine hundred and fortieth post, if blogger's internal number-tickers are to be trusted.

I'm writing it from the chair in the corner by the western-most window of this coffeeshop on Main Street. that hot chocolate mug has been empty for hours. my Modern Rhetoric midterm has been finished and officially turned in for forty-eight minutes, if the time-stamps on my email account are to be trusted.

the ambient music sounds a little bit like bleating ducks. 

these photos are miscellaneous snapshots. do they have anything to do with each other?

I sat underneath this Einstein painting on Wednesday for a good span of time, reading about the history of writing instruction, taking notes on noetic fields and closed systems.

are all photographs art, automatically? photographs of non-photographic art seem like they shouldn't be art, themselves. too many layers, that would be.

but who am I to say? meta-art sounds cool.

meta-everything. documentation-as-art. ephemera-as-art. breakfast-as-art. breathing-as-art.

this is the nine hundred and fortieth post. it doesn't have a real title, yet. 

I have Sunday sketches scheduled into January, but my weekly rambly writings might go on hiatus at any moment. you won't miss them too much, eh?

they won't be gone very long, I hope. but as of this frosted Friday evening, I'm giving myself permission to fudge the blog-every-week routine.

midterm excerpts

fuel coffeeshop. a few Fridays ago.
not pictured: Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing, with accompanying notebook and pen.

somebody asked me the other day what mind-mapping software I liked to use.

I muttered and gestured to all the notebooks in my bag. paper, of course. not sure it counts as software, being made of dead trees, but whatever. I map things into my mind using paper. that way I can doodle in the margins or write sideways or crisscross crazily between this note and that note. for example: the first leaf of the blue spiral notebook I've been keeping notes in this semester has some boxes, some circles, a sketch of an envelope, some numbers, some squiggles, an octothorpe, a non-existent email address, one question mark, four arrows, the word ungrateful in all caps, and the advice to Sing in Your Own Voice, followed immediately by the words blue ink in parentheses. on the verso, there is an overwhelming amount of math. I'm pretty sure all of this was written in late 2010 or early 2011, when I was studying for the GRE.

the rest of that blue spiral notebook is now full of notes from this very fall, 2014, my second year at Purdue University. I've had to start a new notebook mid-semester, which I guess is what comes of using one already half-used-up notebook for three different seminars + lectures + practica. because it's midterm-time, and because looking back at these notes might be a useful thing to do as I begin writing proposals and papers and essays and project reports, and because this blog needs more academic nonsense plastered all over it, here are some snippets from it. they don't always transfer very well to this stringent, linear, typographic medium. ah well. I can add hyperlinks to this version though, so that's something.

what does this mean? more money for ____ / quality +
find out the impact ★ 

agonism / movement
metis / arete / kairos / phusis / hexis

observing with no aim other than
normal/everyday
interaction
why that now
what next

ignoring ≠ not noticing ★ 
how to become sensible to things that are unremarkable? [doodle of fish under water]
ethnographers must join the fish but also remember what water is

tech separating creative process from production process --> bigger businesses
telegraph typewriter filing cabinet railroad copy paper

definitions need definers (+ attendant power structures)
I keep thinking about SUITS.

disconnects between writing/docs and + real expectations
or impossible to articulate things
beyond expertise

work (n)
work (v)
internal + external articulation

writers not writing.
interesting nod to Kant

"elite" / "male" / "western"

nature + functional historical knowledge (a formalist approach)
chronicle > story > mode: plot, argument, ideology

mystical / sociological / cultural models
unities / Weltanshauung, paradigm

★ sentience ★ consciousness
making of the world
torture - "torque"/twisting
terror - "to tremble"/terrible

useful vagueness!
scripts     schema
quantifying "shared knowledge"

rules tacitly learned
instruct > interpret > act > assume > instruct > interpret ....
making the world match the words

digital iterations are quicker
do machine made songs words art get copyrighted?

Taylorism = basic (time) task efficiency -->
Fordism = specialized production
functionalism = prototype prod. line + labor management
art?
passive / normative / or creative / or reactive

could machines cook?

what if actions are our bigger understandings of interlinked systems of interactions all working together? (more philosophically cool)
or we could see interactions as bubbly frothy conglomerations of discrete actions? (more etymologically consistent)

★  ideas precede expression
but we learn names before concepts.....
essence ≠ substance

man = ?
biology?
no immovable boundaries
men make sorts
nature makes qualities/matches

a set of subjects memorizable / polymathical
"tristapaedias"
categories / relationships / authorities

self-evident character of prison
war functioning as if...
prison NOT functioning as if... but pretending to try? <-- a="" br="" does="" how="" media="" play="" role=""> the Last Lecture Randy Pausch

practical advice / ❤ + integrity
"if small faults are to incur such grievous punishments, there can, indeed, be none found sufficiently sever for great crimes." (Edgeworth 245-246)

norms as processes, assumed in forming identities
legible / livable vs unlegible / unlivable lives / spaces
e. exclusion, boundaries exposing limits of constructivism

p 37 - always already material
centering the world symbolically
lack of control = castration

subject
abject

containing multitudes. [I was thinking of Maya Angelou at the time but really, Walt Whitman said this.]
"if the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, the unconscious necessarily exceeds the individual + becomes thinkable as Social + Cultural...

power (opposed to) ornamentation elitist finery
puritan austerity

Com 621 Social Media
Com 605 PW

blending sacred motherhood w/ secular moneymaking

regularity / order / harmony / sense

Beauty   Harmony / this sounds like Hume ^

ch 3 Zuern / "what we seek to master is the control of the cultural meaning of the body ... our offering of our bodies to the world as meaningful" p 62

places to keep

traveling is a thing I very much love, and I've been pretty lucky to find a million excuses for indulging in it, so I am not surprised that the list of places where I've spent time is getting a bit long.

the length of the list does surprise some people though. Canada? and Budapest? and the UK three times now? Paris too? I don't think I mean to sound boastful about it all. everyone has their priorities, and moving around in the world seems to be one of mine.

a more noteworthy and thoroughly more surprising thing, I think, would be to find someone who has never moved around. someone who has lived in one place and soaked up everything of it over years and years and years. wouldn't that be something to boast of? keeping to one, neat, consistent, contained set of spaces?

a few weekends back I stayed in Oxford with the lovely Nicola, and got to see lots of old nooks and corners and pubs and museums and parks. one such museum was the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (can we start spelling archeology like that all the time, eh?), where there were displays from almost every corner and time period of the world.

I found myself drawn to the pottery. so different on the surface, all these bowls and urns and cups and vases. but they were all made for a pretty similar purpose: to keep stuff in. for holding water, or preserving food, or arranging flowers in.

there were cabinets full of vases from Greece, Egypt, China, Japan. little plaques listed out the distinctive markings, the stylistic marks and the contexts that give them archaeological significance. I did not read all the descriptions--it would've taken so long. and besides, museums are not only educational. this one is not only for archaeology, but also for art.

Greece, Egypt, China, and Japan are place I haven't been to yet. looking at artifacts could never count as visiting. I might someday find excuses for visiting the middle east and the orient and other far-away realms. I might not. I might have used up my life's traveling quota too soon, too euro-centrically. I hope not.

the day after our stroll through the Ashmolean, Nicola and I saw this exhibit on the Great War at the Bodleian Library. there weren't urns and vases on display there, not this time. the cabinets were mostly full of paper and ink: stories from soldiers and politicians and workers from the first of that infamous pair of long-ago (but not as long ago as some) wars. reading them was eye-opening on several levels.

this war is one I've learned about in school, of course. there are dates and holidays and all that in my head somewhere. but mainly this first world war is framed for US citizens as a prelude to the second, and World War II takes up more space in our cultural memory, for some reason. Pearl Harbor, perhaps, ties us more closely and corporeally to the tragedies of that conflict.

seeing the Great War through a British lens or two or three was so different than seeing it through the lens I'd always seen it through before. I'm not sure I can explain well enough how it was different, but if you think for a moment, you might be able to imagine for yourselves. I don't need to explain that Britain was touched by this war much more deeply and brutally than my own country was. nobody needed to explain that to me, exactly... yet I hadn't thought about it, not really, before. all these manuscripts, bound up for holding memories, preserving moments, arranging experiences in--they made those differences real.

my final night in the UK this year, I got to see Henry V (second time this summer). the Glasgow acting company who's been performing it framed their performance with a 1915 end-of-year school festival, complete with songs of Flanders Fields and letters of condolence filling the silence during simple costume changes. the juxtaposition of the great Battle of Agincourt with all the battles of the Great War, so many on the same French soil, prodded my thoughts further in the direction of war, duty, bravery, and the value of sacrifices. it ended so sadly--Elizabethan armor transformed to early twentieth-century uniforms, the desperate enemies of English and French soldiers transformed to allied casualties.

I've thought before that almost everything we humans ever touch becomes a place for us to keep things. we build shelters and tombs for our bodies, shelves and closets for our things. we use pottery for holding water and poetry for holding feelings. and then we bind books, build museums, raise up theatres, and dedicate monuments to hold those things that do so much holding for us. we can look at all the layers of containment and be grateful, awe-inspired at the combined beauty and utility of them, glad that they do so well at keeping our places as we move through time towards an end we can't quite see past. some shapes and some structures are better for keeping certain kinds of stuff. some museums are less art and more archaeology, or vice versa. plenty of this pottery is different on the outside, but the general purpose seems close enough. these are our necessities, collected and revered, filled to their brims with stories.

like/as

there are folders and notebooks and stacks of my old schoolwork practically decomposing in boxes in closets in my parents' basement. tomorrow when I head back to Indiana, maybe I'll bring it along and transfer the decomposition process to my own closets.

last time I was here, I unearthed some of it and tried to remember who I was when I worked on it all, and how all those classes had gone. I'm convinced that going back to my own high school and undergraduate experiences as my current self (Ebenezer Scrooge style, perhaps) would somehow--at least partially--cure all my teacherly ineptitude. who knows if it really would.

these old essays and portfolios and scribblings show me a dim sort of sketch. I don't think I was a very usual student... but of course I can't be sure. I can only guess, and maybe nobody else knows either.

I've been writing non-required blogposts here for almost nine years. from time to time I wonder what it is I'm trying to do here. does it matter what I'm trying to do here? I write. our reasons for enjoying things are seemingly inarticulable. is there irony in that? I claim that words can make everything better. is that true even when the words crumble into meaninglessness as they fail at encompassing feelings? do I mean that even crumbled words are worth something?

yes. crumbled and halfhearted attempts at capturing it all still beats blank silence. I know only so much stuff fits into one life. there are only so many live possibilities. this is the way it needs to be, I guess. but the way everything is carved up now isn't how it'll always need to be carved. our crumbled communications don't stand still; they change.

I used to blog more often. I used to keep so many notebooks. I'm not the only thing changed since then. notebooks and tech and context all change too.

are my journaling and composition shifting toward the visual these days? the non-textual, the colorful, cropped quadrangles of things that catch my eye... are these the new and more regular records of my existence? maybe it's too soon to say. I don't yet feel as in love with that style as I do with writing like this. and even if I can't really say I know exactly what writing means, I can try to explain what I like about my practice of it.

I like the pausing and sifting through potential descriptions and the shuffling of parts of speech. I like the dancing of clauses and punctuation and space. I like the starts and stops and backtracking, the meandering fragments that stretch so subtly for their finish. I like the way these little symbols can twist and mold intangible thoughts into a dozen differently shaded shapes. I like unknotting a tangly draft, picking out the pieces that don't belong and pulling away each piece that does, tidying it all into a hopefully-clean curl of interesting prose. sometimes I save the scraps for later. sometimes I can't.

having this space here to display a few of my various little writing snippets is nice. it isn't the only option of course, and we all know I've experimented with heaps of other formats and genres and platforms. there are so many, though. I could draw more. I could vlog. I could make a zine. I could send out a newsletter like this pretty involved and fascinating one I saw someone telling Frank Chimero about on twitter the other week. I could post over here more often and make car-photos more of a thing. (actually, I had the very minimalistic thought recently that I might consolidate some of these as of now disparate blogs and somehow make car photos into a new series, à la the sunday scribbles. let me think about this and come back to the idea.)

nobody is really all that fussed about what I might or might not be trying to do here after all. this digital display shelf doesn't need to be usual or consistent. I write for the writing's sake. I sketch and wonder and experience plenty of other things for the same reason. they don't have to be means to some other end, these creative processes. maybe all the best things are their own ends, or at least neatly curled around something like one. 

sixth and wall

I bought my meager bits of furniture from some of the nicest people. they delivered all of it to my house. they were friendly and sent good vibes in the direction of my future crazy life. the people who sold me the nice sofa even invited me to their church down on 4th street, Sundays, nine o'clock a.m. I may go check that out sometime, though I told them nine o'clock a.m. seemed very early for a Sunday.

this is my scuffed little kitchen table. I took these photos before I started piling books and notebooks and papers and pens and bottles and various other knick-knacks upon its surface. today it is quite cluttered, and will probably remain that way unless I decide to throw a dinner party. which would be very cool.

classes started yesterday. it's kind of thrilling, all these navigation of new people, new responsibilities, new space, and new furniture. nothing is perfect. but all the scuffs give it great character, don't you think?

fragmented histories

I've mentioned before that I get a bit obsessed with notebooks. most of the blank ones I mentioned way back when are still empty, accompanied now by several new empty notebooks. I'd be happy to acquire more, even at the risk of running out of shelf space. currently, my journaling is nearing the last few pages of a nice little red one with a quote from Marjorie Hinckley embossed on the front: "Everything you are learning now is preparing you for something else."

I guess that must be true. this MA in Technical Communication? it's just a little stepping stone. the PhD in Rhetoric and Composition will be a slightly bigger stepping stone. and then what? we must wait and find out. the other side of that stepping stone is a long way off still.

a while back, colleague Angela, knowing my interest in copyright and the digital world, pointed me in the direction of one Dr. Brendan Riley, who writes this seemingly eclectic blog called Digital Sextant. he does reviews, talks about zombies, throws in occasional amusing photos (some in German?), posts about copyright controversies in the news, and every week or so compiles all the things he's lately posted on twitter.

all my notebooks (the paper kind and the non-paper kind) are just as eclectic, probably. some of them are easier to flip through than others. some of them reveal more of just what was going on in my life at certain times than others. there can be a kind of game in looking back. what sorts of things made it out of my head and onto the page one year ago? or two? is it useful to look for patterns?

so call this a crossover digital notebook flipbook flashback. yes, of course this kind of recycled post is a symptom of my end-of-semester busy-ness. yes, parts of me might feel a bit lame and self-absorbed using this space to puzzle publicly over her very own cryptic past. so what?

courtesy this searchable little javascript trick, built by one Felix Turner (way cool name, that), I've dug around in the past four years and plucked out a medley of past and present Aprils. (I did this lazy sort of thing a few years ago, but in June. maybe medleys-of-past-[blank]s will become a recurring thing. maybe.) I've put the longest-ago bits first, even though that may seem backwards compared to the standard bottom-up chronology of blogland. you may notice some themes. pizza. quotes. pointlessness. questions.

April 2009 - Seattle, Washington
(with a detour through Southern Utah and then California)
shaking the sand out of all my delusions Apr 23
reveling in placelessness Apr 19
i am about to encounter the absence of my grandfather in a house where he has always been Apr 16
"For a divine moment he had poised on the brink of revelation, and now it was gone, as miserably inglorious as a failed sneeze." Apr 16
what are the most important things to bring with you on a trip to california? hmm. answer: notebooks. lots of notebooks. and pens too. Apr 15
who the heck came up with this idea of resumes anyway? Apr 15
nobody told me there was seafood pizza... where can i get some? Apr 14

April 2010 - Salt Lake-ish, Utah
this day feels like three days all wadded together. Apr 19
naptime? Apr 19
to idaho and back in approximately sixteen hours. don't let me forget my toothbrush. Apr 19
lying awake. reliving dreams. Apr 18
i might eat this whole pizza. would that be bad? Apr 17
scanner, why won't you function? Apr 17
still sleepy. dreaming about oceans. Apr 17
i need ice cream. Apr 16
i wonder when this 'woah, the earth is not totally solid' feeling will leave. Apr 16

April 2011 - Salt Lake-ish, Utah
'in such a world... where every connection is so fragile & often so temporary... it makes me wonder how we make promises at all, to anyone.' Apr 18
rainy day retro-blogging. http://plaidsicle.blogspot.com/2006/09/do-or-die.html Apr 18
life. pain. sigh. Apr 18
something just sucked all the optimism out through my nose. what is up with that? Apr 15
eek, as i pace back and forth between precarious what ifs. Apr 13

April 2012 - Lubbock, Texas
what about the costs of inclusion? hmm? Apr 20
i'm going to get pouty and existential from time to time and start saying everything is pointless. just to warn you. Apr 19
so many emails. Apr 17
pajamas. japanese food. yoga. Apr 14, 2012
the anticipation is occasionally just a little bit electrifying. Apr 11, 2012

April 2013 - Lubbock, Texas
hmm. do all essays at this stage feel utterly forced and artificial? or is it just this particular one? Apr 17
i do not really know what this is for in the long run, but: a survey about salsa: https://t.co/BkvQdH7Muc Apr 17
thank you, universe, for this song: "Scandalous" by Hanneke Cassel. Apr 15
this friend-of-a-friend's startup is cool 'Periods can be lame--we're striving to make them a little more enjoyable.' http://t.co/mqecLPczjt Apr 15
so hungry. Apr 15
small car wreck. yay for that. will it turn out to have cured me of this string of awfully pointless-seeming days? we shall see. Apr 15
okay. intercultural values and authorship and plagiarism and copyright. sort yourselves into a brilliant essay-- ready set go. Apr 14
laundry and lunch and procrastinating alltheotherstuff. Apr 12
ich liebe. Apr 12

take a few guesses

fieldnotes, one of the sponsors for the tournament of books, decided they would send out a few prizes to some lucky people who happened to correctly predict the winning book and its score in the final championship round.

my guess (The Sisters Brothers to win 10 to 6), thrown up in the comments section without much thought, was just a guess. I hadn't read either book, I had no idea what the judges would vote. but I got lucky (much as I did a few months ago with the robotgeek folks), and not only was my guess correct--it was also chosen at random from among all the other correct guesses. and so it came to pass that I received in the mail...

{ image borrowed from these way cool people who make notebooks. }

... one of their specially created rooster notebooks. and a whole lot of other things. field notes pens. pencils. bands of rubber. steno books. a handy 2012 calendar. and a gorgeous trio of Texas field notes, from their county fair installment. on the back of these are lots of interesting Texan facts. did you know the smallest town in Texas is called Telegraph, and its entire population consists of a mere 3 people? crazy.

anyway, I guess you could say I was thoroughly flattered to win this little contest. and getting that package from Chicago last week pretty much made my evening. call me a geek. I'm okay with that. we all know Amelia loves blank paper and writing utensils. I'm only a little bit sad I didn't get a 1-inch button.

but not complaining! I have seven new little notebooks! it's wonderful.

other bits of news:

I am running away to Eastern Europe next month. it'll be a short little study abroad excursion, with one of the geography professors (whose daughter was in my bibliography class last semester). after a few weeks of thorough deliberation I decided it would definitely be worth going on. why not? it's summer. as long as graduate school is eating me alive, I may as well let it take me around the world a bit. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Austria. I'm crossing my fingers we get to do something like this while we're there.

I've been thinking about blogging one of my short stories, in small pieces, once or twice a week, just for you all. but which one? I'm going to ask you, and if you have an opinion please express it to me in some fashion. here are the options (listed not by title, but by vaguely surmised subject/tone):

a. the story about the boy and his goat (quirky)
b. the story about the girl who never woke up (melodramatic)
c. the story about a solipsist princess (freakishly depressing)
d. the story about the mermaid (cold and silent)

thanks in advance for your thoughts.

virtual cork

I guess I should tell you, I am notebooking things in tumblr now.

Ira Glass on Storytelling.

the latest addition over there is this very video, which I found via Veer. (oh go ahead-- by all means praise my use of all those alliterative Vs.)

of course, I've still got the old (mostly) reliable google notebooks too, but this new tumblr thing will get filled with the best of the everything. quotes and snippets and stuff I want to remember. so. if you find that you're into the same quotes and snippets and cool stuff that I generally am, you are completely welcome to subscribe to my new notebook.

and while I'm here talking about virtual places to tuck random information you may need for something someday, just in case, perhaps-- there's also this. if you want an invite, I'd love to send you one.

google minus

everyone and their yapping newborn puppy has been posting screenshots of google+ over the past few days. it's not that I feel left out, really-- it's just that I'm going to use 'everyone else is' as an excuse to blog a bit about google too. but not about new google stuff--I haven't been invited to join the new facebookesque google+ thing yet. I just wanted to gush randomly about google notebook, which was sadly discontinued way back before I even got home from Canada. maybe it's weird that I still use it now, but oh well. I love my google notebooks.

as most people know, I'm rather incurably addicted to notebooks, and I have at least one for everything you would ever want to take notes on. in my life, of course the internet needs its own notebook. and who better to host such a bottomless notebook than google? according to their lovely about page, their mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. notebooks are perfect for that! and naturally, internet note-taking calls for internet notebooks.

I mainly keep eight google notebooks. four of them are devoted to various novels-in-progress. one is purely for recipes and food-related links, another for listing and organizing the 100 things I might want to do with my life, and another houses the results of my informal survey (which I will someday blog about in more detail, I promise). lastly--though actually it was created first, long long ago--there is the one labeled EVERYTHING, which comprises a very long list of quotes, pictures, thoughts, links, and other randomness. that one is my favourite.

in google notebook, just like with real notebooks, the one I last looked at shows up on the top of the pile. just like with real notebooks, I can occasionally tear things out and stick them somewhere else. just like with real notebooks, most of the time they sit untouched in a nice, neat stack in the corner. only rarely do I find myself with a reason to pull out any of them for more than a split second. usually I'm either pasting in a very quick quote and its reference, or I'm frantically scrolling around looking for a recipe I'm sure I must have copied in at some point.

the best part about google notebooks is they are incredibly easy to edit, add to, and rearrange, unlike some other less-cool google applications. so I'm glad that even though google has given up on developing their notebook thing, I still get to use it. hopefully it will keep working for a long, long time yet.

any suggestions for a back up plan, just in case google notebooks ever dies completely?

sure as the most certain sure

earlier this week, as a break between quizzing myself on analogies and quantitative comparisons, I dipped myself into Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. yes, yes, I do know that they shelve poetry in the nonfiction section. does that make it boring? no. it doesn't. not all nonfiction is boring. just most of it.

anyway--I started with the famous 'Song of Myself.'

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
       — Walt Whitman

it's proud stuff. there are a dozen other sections I would love to quote. I took the title of my post today from part 3, line 12. I love the beginning of part 5 and all the poignant images in part 8. you start to get this idea of the poet encompassing all things--somehow on the inside and the outside and underside of every little smidgen of the world, taking time to marvel and wonder and question. and he writes all of it down in this lengthy, sensual free verse, just so the rest of us can put out our fingertips and touch at least one thin layer of what it feels like to be so full.

the whole poem makes me want to go sit outside in a big empty field and spend the afternoon looking at things, digging around in my heart to find a place and a description for them all.

how long would that take me?

I came across this today. it's a guy named Austin Kleon doing what he calls talking to a previous version of himself. Mr. Kleon quotes Goethe:  “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” and then he talks about shaping and fashioning our own selves in the creative work we do. "In my experience, it’s in the act of making things that we figure out who we are." that's quite a beautiful, cyclical idea. I am shaped and I am shaping, all at the same time, in discovery of who I am and what I mean. in creating something new I can sort of recreate myself? all the the blank paper I surround myself with, and all the stories I spill onto it, all the scrawling lines and curls in the margins... all of that together becomes a frame for everything that is me?

and all Whitman's proud vision? all his rolling mesh of observation and introspection? that is a frame for who he was. and it still is, even though he died in 1892. I guess whatever we spend time creating will leave behind a shadow of who we have been. that's what we're all doing here, after all. we are creating ourselves.

an impossibly amazing person told me recently that the person I am is easy to see in all my sketches. I've waited my whole life to hear someone say that to me and for it to be really, deeply true.

was it?

postage

today is St. Patrick's Day, and fittingly, I have spent most of it with Flogging Molly in my head. it's their song "If I Ever Leave This World Alive," which I remember hearing in the movie P.S. I Love You when I watched it with my roommate last week. cute film, it was. sad and sweet and random. she gets all these letters from her extremely thoughtful dead Irish husband. how beautiful is that?

I love writing letters. I have always loved writing letters, and I will always love writing letters.

anyone who knew me in high school can testify that I was a note-writing fiend. we'll call it a symptom of my finding school too easy, never needing to take notes, and getting all my homework done before class was even half over. I'd find a blank page in a notebook, write someone's name at the top of it, and start writing them a letter. there has always been something so comfortable about communicating on paper--seeing your thoughts spelled out in ink and ready for someone else to take in--even if there isn't much to be said. sometimes I stuck in little puzzles or drawings to keep the recipient entertained during those horrible Western Civilization lectures.

many, many inside jokes, crazy inspirations, and intense debates grew out of these little letters I tossed around between friends and acquaintances back then. I even got a prom date out of one such exchange of notes. the beginnings of short stories and plays and novels took shape in some of those notes. friend Vera (look, she has a blog, too. and by the way, yes, I do really want her to make me a corset like the one in her most recent post.) and I used to exchange entire blank notebooks, each taking a turn to inscribe long rambling, doodley messages for each other. I still have all those notebooks in a box somewhere.

once upon a time I attempted to write and post one letter each week, every week. Sundays were (and are still) good days for thinking about far-away loved ones and composing some news and a few thoughts to send. the goal lasted a month or so, and then for whatever reason I let myself stop. did I run out of people to write? no, not really. did I run out of stamps? they don't cost so much. it's pretty easy to get more. did I run out of time? well, that's possible. life is full of distractions and stuff. I think maybe I only ran out of people I felt like writing, or people who I thought would appreciate a random letter from me.

yes, letters are slow. they cost at least 44 cents to send these days. and they can seem overwrought and extra-complicated, especially now that we have phone calls and email and text messages and facebook and endless other far more immediate means of communication. but I still love letters, even if I'm writing to a person who lives next door, or a person I talked to on the phone thismorning. and it's not that an email can't be just as thoughtful or just as meaningful. it can, and I'm glad. but a letter in an envelope with a stamp on it is wrapped up in an extra layer of time. there is a sense of leisure to writing a letter, despite the extra effort it takes. someday soon I will get back in the habit. yes, that means I will need to buy more stamps.

and if any of you want a letter--first you'll have to promise you'll write back.

nebulae triangulum

I have been writing.

reading also, in short unfocused moments, but mostly writing. stumbling after the siren calls of all those notebooks and pens. my library books are being neglected. instead of automatically turning to plastic-sleeved hardcover spines and neatly printed pages, I am losing myself in a spiral-bound and blue-lined scribble-filled wilderness.

and?

mostly it's the black one. Starcustard. chapter ten has finally crawled out of its draft stage. you can read it over here. someday I may get my own little website up and breathing again, and you might be able to read it there too. someday.

these stories. they take up mere fractions of my mind, and yet seem so full. whole universes. entire communities. other consciousnesses. they all crawl around in their little compartments, kicking and pulling and stretching. what can we do? what can we do but give them a bit of two-dimensional freedom? some kind of on-paper existence. it isn't much. it might not be real. but hey, what else can we do?

after all, that sheet of paper or that screen may look flat, but it isn't. it's just the top layer, the one your eyes first meet. beyond the ink or pixels and light there could be anything. whole universes.

try not to get lost.

free range

a while back I finally broke down and ordered me some of those astonishingly popular little notebooks. a set of the grey winter-colored ones. they came promptly, straight from Chicago, in a very nice cardboard envelope. at first, I was a bit disappointed that all of them had pages of graph-paper grid. I'm a blank-paper notebook girl, whenever possible. it's so much easier that way. (then again, you miss out on that great rebellious sort of feeling when there are no lines at all to disregard...)

this here is an old sketchbook. I pulled it out and started using it, randomly, to hash out ideas for a web project genius brother and I are working on. it worked. sort of. until on my flight home the other night I found myself too lazy to tug the fat spiral-bound thing out of my bag. so I used one of these little notebooks instead:

and it was just about perfect. much more accessible. not so much space that I felt I had to scribble meaninglessly in every corner--just enough for the ideas I was chasing back and forth and up and down.

and the grid works too. my disappointment has fled. so, henceforth my little grey fieldnotes shall be my webdesign sketchbook. and maybe other kinds of designs too. I'm thinking I'll make one of the other two into a typography sketchbook and... well, the third might just collect scraps of paper, tags from clothes, and cool paper clips. for now.

you can pay us with old rags

I made a piñata for halloween. all you need:

one large balloon
about six layers of torn up newsprint
some flour
some water
two whole bowlfuls of diced white tissue paper
a smattering of black sharpie.
a few buttons
a length of string

toward this and any other possible future projects of mine, friend Carlos donated a very nice eight-inch stack of old newspapers. I could probably make four or five piñatas with that amount of paper. but who needs that many piñatas? instead, I shall probably save this stack of old newspaper next to my other boxes of paper, on the shelf next to my mirror. it will sit there, oozing potential, until I decide I have time to execute the next brilliant papier-mâché idea. (other than working on the crossword puzzles, papier-mâché is just about the best thing you can do with newspapers. and maybe, if you're really good at it, folding cool pirate-looking hats, too.)

paper. I love paper.

once upon a time I handed in my algebra assignments on astonishingly small fractions of notebook paper, just so I could save the rest of the page for doodling or writing notes to that kid that sat three seats ahead of me in chemistry. Mr Linn, who taught the majority of my high school math classes (and also physics), was very patient about this little eccentricity. it would have served me right if he'd lost half my assignments and taken away lots of points. lucky for me he was not the kind of man to do that sort of thing. he was the kind of man who wore neckties with fish on them and said 'holy mackerel' on a regular basis.

and to this day I remain so in love with the stuff, I collect blank paper, blank notebooks, blank notecards. I'm itching to use my employee discount at the bookstore solely for all the new journals I could add to that shelf beside the mirror. the six that are already sitting there won't last forever.

also, fieldnotes. a bit smaller than my regular style, but they're just so cute. and awesomely marketed. you can get them at greenwood space travel supply co. awesome. you can also buy bottled uncertainty, while you're there. who doesn't need a few ounces of that every once in a while?

paper that is not blank is not always as cool as paper that is, but we take what we can get. what with all the digitalization going on in the world, our dependence on paper is fading a little, but I hope we don't ever get rid of it completely.