When we were sitting in the hot tub Thursday morning, a bald eagle flew by.
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1:05 PM |
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From the New York Times Book Review. 'The Last Summer of Reason': A Despairing Parable About Fanaticism
A defiant critic of fundamentalism at a time when an Islamic revolution in his country seemed all but certain, the Algerian novelist and poet Tahar Djaout knew that he was living on borrowed time. ''If you speak, you die,'' he wrote in one of his best-known poems. ''If you are silent, you die / So, speak and die." When a group of young men came for him on May 26, 1993, he was nothing if not prepared.
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1:08 AM |
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On calamondin, this really excellent waking dream:
I kept waking up, convinced that there was a new sleep filesharing system being tested - not filesharing exactly, but more like dynamic IP addressing, where each user could grab a chunk of sleep for a short time, and then you were booted offline (ie. woken up) as someone else grabbed a chunk.
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12:59 AM |
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{ Thursday, December 27, 2001 }
I'm back. I'm safe. I ate turkey three days in a row. More soon. I'm beat.
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8:26 PM |
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{ Monday, December 24, 2001 }
We're flying over to Victoria today for Christmas. I don't know what the last few days have been like elsewhere, but Vancouver has been full of sunshine and warmth. I got the greatest present today, a day early. Wow! Have a Happy Christmas everyone! Count your blessings, especially this year.
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12:49 PM |
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Have a look around the Susan Kare site, especially her portfolio. Who is Susan Kare? She was the person who designed all of the original Mac icons -- the happy Mac, the bomb -- as well as Chicago, New York, Geneva, Monaco. She just won a Chrysler Design Award. What great work! The old caterina.net was in Geneva. Remember this? Especially those patterns at the bottom. I've used that little baby in Cairo.
She's even more amazing than I previously thought. According to this designboom article about her work, she received a Ph.D. when she was only 13 years old!
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2:48 AM |
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{ Sunday, December 23, 2001 }
I think Meg should be finished with The Count of Monte Cristo by now, don't you? I think it's been, what? 10 months? Maybe I'll send her something off her wish list to get her reading a new book, maybe something short...
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6:56 PM |
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We had definitely overreached our grooviness threshold with these two blue plastic chairs that we bought at Propeller on Granville Island when Judith was visiting (same store where she bought some awesome lights made out of those sugar dispensers you used to see in diners). So we went back and asked Toby if he'd take them back for trade, and he was really nice, said, of course, and wouldn't even accept the 10% off that Stewart offered him. (I can't believe how nice everyone has been out in shopping land during the shopping madness.) So in trade, we got this awesome lamp made out of an antique heating unit, which was 20% less groovy than the chairs and comfortably below our grooviness threshold. Is it a sign of early onset maturity when your grooviness threshold drops?
As per usual, Dos Pesos made dozens of new friends. He goes everywhere with me now, though he got booted out of Safeway -- this only after he'd been there 5 times previously. I don't usually take him into places where there is food, except the local cafe, where he has lots of fans. I tried him out on an Almodovar movie, All About My Mother which we watched on video last night to see if he could sit for two hours without wiggling. He passed, slept the whole time. So I think he's ready to go to the movies with me.
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6:37 PM |
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{ Friday, December 21, 2001 }
Um, could someone explain to me why suddenly there's all this traffic on caterina.net? Last week I was getting 8000 hits a day -- and there was nothing in the refer logs to indicate anything happening online. Was there, say, a caterina.net TV special? A caterina.net direct mail marketing campaign? A caterina.net plug on Oprah? Gee, was caterina.net even interesting last week?
And you, how did *you* get here?
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4:44 PM |
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I have this big long queue of emails that are waiting to be sent, but for some reason they're being held up -- and have been all day. I hope Telus fixes this problem soon. If you haven't heard from me, and you're expecting to hear from me, this is why.
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12:03 AM |
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{ Thursday, December 20, 2001 }
Through cheesedip I find the Filipino weekly magazine Newsbreak, which obliquely reminds me that I need to head over to Goldilocks to do some holiday stocking up on Polvoron and Bibingka and Ube Puto and those Mochiko Coconut cakes my Lola used to make.
If anyone has any suggestions of where to get good Puto -- these are rice flour muffins -- other than Goldilocks in Vancouver I'd appreciate the recommendation. Theirs are sort of rubbery. I guess I could also make my own, but, well, I tried cooking once and I didn't really like it.
To culinarily honor the WASP half of my heritage, I'd have to stock up on some of those pearl onions in cream sauce that my other grandmother used to make. There were many things to like about my grandmother, but her pearl onions in cream sauce were not among them.
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4:23 AM |
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Looking for presents for other people, I find myself sidetracked by things that I would love but the people on my list wouldn't necessarily love, such as the Fornasetti Julia Plates which I had once seen at Gump's in San Francisco (here's the entire Fornasetti collection). Roving thusly, I happened upon the Minima Design site (a Java minefield!), which is the poorly designed site of a design store in New Zealand. There are all kinds of nifty, new and badly jpegged items there, as well as some of the old standards such as those miniature Vitra Chairs, and (*yawn*) stuff by Ron Arad. But who wouldn't love to attack this large Fur Ball or kiss these Vases of breasts and lips?
It continues to amuse me when $25,000 items have little "Add to Shopping Cart" icons next to them.
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3:42 AM |
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{ Wednesday, December 19, 2001 }
Crap! Getting late! Eiko and Steve just left for home, after a nice evening of eating Chinese food and gelato, enduring the amorousness of Dos P. and reading both the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Codex Serafinianus. I'd better get to bed if I'm to be awake for skiing tomorrow! Woohoo! (Insert schussing sound here).
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12:57 AM |
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{ Tuesday, December 18, 2001 }
An interesting thing on Eric's site about a very inventive approach to a very difficult problem: getting rid of terrorism.
From this month's Atlantic Monthly,
an article about one of the most successful terrorist groups in the world, the PLO's Black Septemberists, who catapulted the Palestinian agenda to the world stage by their successful abduction of Israeli athletes from the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Apparently the group was so successful and committed that once formed, the PLO had a difficult time "turning them off," and came up with a simple but radical solution:
"...Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO a reason to live rather than to die?...
They traveled to Palestinian refugee camps, to PLO offices and associated organizations, and to the capitals of all Middle Eastern countries with large Palestinian communities. Systematically identifying the most attractive young Palestinian women they could find, they put before these women what they hoped would be an irresistible proposition: Your fatherland needs you...
So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000...
Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family... 'And so,' my host told me, 'that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of.'"
This reminds me of a very successful roundup of fugitive criminals that was conducted in D.C. Apparently, the police sent a notice to the last known address of the fugitives -- some of whom had not been heard from for years -- informing them that they had be selected to receive tickets to the Washington Redskins playoff game if they showed up in person at such and such an address to claim them. Apparently, almost all of them showed up -- I forget the actual percentage, but it was like 90% -- and they handcuffed them and took them away. This seemed quite ingenious to me.
Thus fighting fire with fire is not always the way to go. Fighting fire with marshmallows, sand or rain might be the better solution. (Which also reminds me: it's been a long time since I've heard the phrase "thinking outside the box", a phrase that made me cringe because the people who threw such jargon around were usually the people who were more interested in docile underlings happy to stay in their cubicles than in freethinking iconoclasts with revolutionary ideas.)
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2:07 AM |
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{ Monday, December 17, 2001 }
One of the amusing things about Canada (there are many amusing things about Canada) is the French/English translations on all commercial products. For example, I am right now sucking on Le bonbon qui dure which is, you have to admit, a pretty lame translation of Everlasting Gobstopper.
More Fun with Frenglish: Another amusing thing to notice is when the translators just give up. Today I brought home some paint chips and found old pickup blue translated as pluie d'avril and tropicana cabana translated as liqueur de menthe and milkyway translated as illusion. Another thing I look out for are the pointless translations, or untranslated translations, i.e. barbecue sauce translated into sauce barbecue and blue spa into bleu spa.
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2:41 PM |
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{ Friday, December 14, 2001 }
The legendary training regime of Rocky Marciano, from Joyce Carol Oates's On Boxing:
Marciano was willing to seclude himself from the world, including his wife and family, for as long as three months before a fight. Apart from the grueling physical ordeal of this period and the obsessive preoccupation with diet and weight and muscle tone, Marciano concentrated on one thing: the upcoming fight. In his training camp the opponent's name was never mentioned in Marciano's hearing, not was boxing as a subject discussed. In the final month Marciano would not write a letter since a letter related to the outside world. During the last ten days before a fight he would see no mail, take no telephone calls, meet no new acquaintances. During the week before the fight he would not shake hands. Or go for a ride in a car, however brief. No new foods! No dreaming of the morning after the fight! For all that was not the fight had to be excluded from consciousness. When Marciano worked out with a punching bag he saw his opponent before him, when he jogged he saw his opponent close beside him, no doubt when he slept he "saw" his opponent constantly -- as the cloistered monk or nun chooses by an act of fanatical will to "see" only God.
Marciano is still the only undefeated heavyweight champion.
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4:02 PM |
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{ Thursday, December 13, 2001 }
More friends becoming famous! Scott Snibbe, of gravilux fame, has a new series of pieces based on breath, and currently has a piece being shown at the Exploratorium. He was in the Examiner a couple weeks ago, but I just found the story online.
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9:24 PM |
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Can you believe I'm still sick?! I can't. Enough already!
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7:30 PM |
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The Strange Behavior of Dos Pesos. First he was a good housetrained doggie, then all of a sudden he goes on this poop rampage, indoors! And then he starts acting guilty all the time when there doesn't seem to be anything for him to be guilty about, and starts non-chalantly humping his toys. He refuses to eat his special puppy food and averts his eyes when you try to talk to him about things. I think he's going through puberty.
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2:21 PM |
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OMIGOD! Shana and ReadyMade are in today's New York Times! It's a great article! I am so proud I am going to burst into smithereens! You, indie glue-gun do-it-yourselfer, this is Martha Stewart for the young urbanite. Go subscribe!
ReadyMade's first issue offers instructions for making a sweater blanket, found-object clocks, a Fed Ex wallet and dozens of other items, including a "spice station" by Constantin Boym. But the magazine extends its how-to ethos to droll articles such as "How to Become a Famous Writer" by Neal Pollack, who wrote the tongue-in-cheek book "The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature" last year.
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2:40 AM |
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It was interesting reading this story about Salon's design process on the Design Interact site (and by my old friend Sam McMillan to boot, hi Sam!) since it more or less describes what I did every day for a couple years in the dot.com trenches back in ye olde days. Of course, when I first got to Salon we didn't even have a staging server much less the content management system described here, but it's a pretty accurate description of what a typical day was like towards the end of my tenure there.
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12:36 AM |
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{ Wednesday, December 12, 2001 }
Studio Space Woohoo! I just found, with the help of Ewan (to whom I owe some soup and dawgie time) a new studio space in Gastown, right next to the Steam Clock. Location couldn't be better, and the rent is reasonable, and Marlene, my studio mate, is very nice. Dos Pesos is even allowed. Moving in January first. I can't wait!
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4:31 PM |
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Kiss. A woman of a certain age, clothed, and a naked young man. Like something out of the movies, but different somehow...
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12:34 PM |
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{ Tuesday, December 11, 2001 }
Low Res Life. It is a brilliant sunshiney day in Vancouver, and I'm over in this little bookshop just off Main street where there's this older much-smoking fellow named Peter Pratchett who owns the bookstore and is the cousin of Terry Pratchett, fantasy writer. We chat for a while about how his son ran a little "gang" in preschool where he gave out "invisible badges" to all the members, and now that he is eighteen, he "borrows" books from his Dad's bookstore all the time. Peter says he's reading Faulkner to his lover -- I love it when people approaching senior citizenry call their lovers "lover" -- and he is catching up on all the Mordechai Richlers he's missed. I buy a hard-to-find Sam Delany novel and some Faulkner, and head across the street to the Soma Cafe.
Maybe it is because I'm still feverish that the world seems so lurid, and maybe it's that the sunlight is so bright it seems like neon gas everywhere, but whatever it is, even sounds are bright: in the cafe there is a small Asian couple singing a beautiful harmonic version of Feliz Navidad (is the version I'm thinking of by José Feliciano?) and the counter girl seems to have plucked out all her eyebrow hairs and pencilled them back in way way up on her forehead -- it's really peculiar looking -- and I'm staring at her eyebrows while her mouth is moving, sort of a split screen effect, and it takes a second for me to realize that she's talking to me. I'm not sure I've understood what she was saying, but I take a risk and say "For here," and she nods and starts making my coffee. I'm starting to feel as if I would really be able to experience all of this, if I could just flip it into slow-mo and get higher resolution on it. After noshing on the (amazingly textured) banana bread, and studying the face of the dog tied up outside the window who has those cute Bozo-the-clown-style copper-colored Rottweiler eyebrows, I get on the bus, where there is more too-muchness to look at, the too-muchness of it all is really starting to get to me, and I keep thinking "I need to upgrade! I need to upgrade! I'm losing all of this important and fascinating information! The unfolding of the cosmos is being recorded on this (worse-than-Polaroid/Memorex quality) memory system I've got and the information begins degrading almost immediately!" I decide to make a concerted effort to look and see and remember everything and I really try, I knit my brows and I look and listen, and it's going OK and finally I transfer to the Davie bus and a guy wearing velvet antlers gets on as well as a miniature old lady and I cough terrible racking and phlegmy coughs and watch as everyone edges surreptitiously and not-so-surreptitiously away from me even though I've been very careful to cover my mouth. I realize that you can't both see and record at the same time, because you miss the present recording it for the future by wrenching it violently out of the incipient past and everything is lost anyway. It is horrible, horrible! I am relieved when I finally arrive home.
And I haven't even taken any flu medicine, there is no explanation for why the world is as garish and exciting as a Fillmore Poster, maybe I'm just sick or maybe my brain just maunders that way.
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3:20 PM |
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{ Monday, December 10, 2001 }
One of the best parts of Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar (which on the whole was a disappointment, not delivering on the promise of his shorter fictions) was the passage of Gliglish, a lover's language that parodies euphemism and subject avoidance, in which the subjects that make the speaker(s) most uncomfortable are spoken of in the most graphic terms, instead of cambiando la tema. Here, for example, is a R-rated conversation in Gliglish in which Oliviera is trying to confront his fear that La Maga is sleeping with his friend Ossip:
"Tell me how Ossip makes love," Oliveira whispered, putting his lips hard against La Maga's. "The blood is rushing to my head, I can't do this much longer, it's frightening."
"He does it very well," La Maga said, biting his lip. "Much better than you and much longer."
"But does he retilate your murt? Don't lie to me. Does he really retilate it?"
"A lot. Everywhere, sometimes too much. It's a wonderful feeling."
"And does he make you put your plimmies in between his argusts?"
"Yes, and then we trewst our porcies until he says he's had enough, and I can't take it any more either, and we have to hurry up, you understand. but you wouldn't understand that, you always stay in the smallest gumphy."
"Me, or anyone else,"Oliviera grumbled, getting up. "Christ, this mate is lousy, I'm going out for a while."
"Don't you want me to keep on talking to you of Ossip?" said La Maga. "In Gliglish."
"I'm getting sick of Gliglish. Besides, you haven't got any imagination, you always say the same things. Gumphy, that's some fine invention. And you don't say 'talking to you of.'"
"I invented Gliglish," La Maga said resentfully. "You acome out with anything you want and sound like a million dollars, but that's not real Gliglish."
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7:06 PM |
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I remember when I was about ten having a really high fever, and I dreamt that an enormous worm was crawling up the hallway to my bedroom, like those worms in Dune, if you've seen the movie. I screamed, and my sister and my mother came in. It was so real.
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{ Sunday, December 09, 2001 }
My wellness was a false alarm. I was actually sicker today than the day before yesterday, and spent the entirety of it in bed, sleeping and waking from strange disorienting dreams, feeling feverish, shivering, having my ears licked by a small dog, and getting occasional deliveries of orange juice from the kitchen. I forgot how profoundly weird it is to be sick, to stay in one room for a day, to wonder, who am i? and where am i? and what day is it today? and to feel that left behind feeling, a stranded kid watching taillights disappearing in the distance.
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5:07 PM |
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{ Saturday, December 08, 2001 }
Early detection and treatment, orange and apple juice, as well as TLC from Stewart and Xmas Turkey Soup from SoupSpoons on Denman can be thanked for my incipient recovery. I'd forgotten how boring it is to be sick, especially if you don't have a T.V., and how when I'm sick I can't even read anything, as if all the phlegm in your upper respiratory tract is oozing between my synases and thwarting all the electricity that ought to be going on up there. In spite of being ill, I still managed to kick Stewart's ass at Anagrams. Go me!
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11:54 AM |
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{ Friday, December 07, 2001 }
Sick? I never get sick. How could I possibly be sick? Let's see, we got fluish, chills, sore throat, aches, listlessness, ...yes, I'm sick all right. (Trudges back to bed.)
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3:12 PM |
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{ Thursday, December 06, 2001 }
One of the great things about Stewart is the way he goes about saying very ordinary things in the least straightforward way possible:
[ Example 1, last Friday ]
Stewart: How many Beatles are alive?
Caterina: Three
Stewart: (makes bleeping sound as when you answer a question wrong on a game show.) Wrong. And the correct answer is: two.
[ Example 2, yesterday ]
Stewart went out and got a lemon square from the place across the street only he didn't want the whole thing so he cut it into (1/2) + (1/4) + (1/4) then went to the gals who sit in the office behind his:
Stewart: You have won a prize! To claim your prize, you must quote your reference number. [To Deanna:] Your reference number is 317. [To Ginger:] Your reference number is 783.
Deanna: 317
Ginger: 783
Stewart hands over the prizes (lemon rectangles) (no longer square).
This may or may not convey how hilarious Stewart is. If it doesn't, let me assure you, he is hilarious.
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6:45 PM |
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I am very unhappy with the result of my art test!
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3:24 PM |
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From wood s lot:
Whatever possibilities of freedom we may have, they cannot be realized if we continue to assume that the "okay world" of society is the only world there is. Society provides us with warm, reasonably comfortable caves, in which we can huddle with our fellows, beating on the drums that drown out the howling hyenas of the surrounding darkness. "Ecstasy" is the act of stepping outside the caves, alone, to face the night.
-- Peter Berger
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2:57 PM |
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{ Wednesday, December 05, 2001 }
The friendly telemarketer I just spoke to told me to call the Canadian Marketing Association (416)-441-4062 or visit their web site, to get myself off of all Canadian mailing lists and telemarketing lists. I just did that, but apparently have to wait three months for the changes to take effect.
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3:07 PM |
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{ Tuesday, December 04, 2001 }
Another stichomancy effort:
He led her to their window to have a look. They'd been up most of the night, and by now it was dawn. Although the streets were irregular and steeply pitched, the entryways and setbacks and forking corners, all angles ordinarily hidden, in fact, were somehow clearly visible from up here at this one window -- naive, direct, no shadows, no hiding places, every waking outdoor sleeper, empty container, lost key, bottle, scrap of paper in the history of the dark shift just being relieved, was turned exactly to these windows from which Takeshi and DL looked down at the first yawners and stirrers, begun now to disengage from public surfaces..."They seem so close...can they see us?"
"It's a trick -- of the morning light!" Had they continud to watch from here as the sun rose, they would have seen the town begin to change, the corners of things to rotate slowly, the shadows come in to flip some of the angles inside out as "laws" of perspective were reestablished, so that by 9:00 A.M. or so, the daytime version of what was meant to be seen out the peculiar window would all be in place.
-- Vineland (p. 173), by Thomas Pynchon
This is interesting to me, because for the past few days I've been paying attention to the world as it exists vs. the world as one perceives it.
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1:38 PM |
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{ Monday, December 03, 2001 }
My favorite weblog of all time is back online after a 10 month hiatus. Brilliant, funny and never uninteresting, I've been missing it terribly. Watch me jumping up and down in glee! Welcome back, Sylloge.
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9:52 PM |
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My first grey hair. I've found grey hairs before, random ones here or there through my entire life, but never a grey hair that persisted in being a grey hair during its entire tenure on my scalp. This morning, I realized that the peculiar eyebrow hair that had turned completely white and that I'd plucked about a month ago, grew back white again, making it the first permanently grey hair that I've discovered. How exciting! And in my eyebrow! I had a sudden vision flash through my head -- you know those guys whose hair is completely white, but they still have black eyebrows? I pictured myself with completely black hair and white eyebrows, half Santa Claus half Penelope Cruz. Wow!
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10:50 AM |
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Last night we were talking about getting completely up-to-date, finishing everything that you've meant to do "someday" -- returning all emails, writing thank you notes, cleaning up all remaining messes, misunderstandings and bad juju, calling everyone you've "meant to call" converting all outstanding "let's get together's" into actual dinner dates. David said that he had once been completely caught up on everything 20 years ago, and that he'd like to be again, because it was such a fantastic feeling, so liberating. It'll probably take a week to do it, but why put it off?
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10:29 AM |
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