November 25, 2002

Connection

I do not want the loneliness to be institutional, no more highways cutting large polygons of nothing. I do not want small islands semi-connected - houses filled with television-watching children learning about the world through red, green, and blue. I do not want separate buildings as evolutionary forks, across the street as the other side of a great canyon, people only seeing strangers in restaurants during special occasions, amazed at how they are the same as you.

I do not want one way streets of ideas all leading in. I do not want a collection of beliefs - political, social, geographical blinders, passed down at coming-of-age with every generation. I do not want a systematic ignorance of importance in this world; a false view of size in relation to it. This constant sense of 'catch up' makes me want to 'throw up' change.

I want diversity; the non-plurality of rurality infects me - I feel dirty with the systematic fear and doubt of reconfiguration.

I want connection.

11:38 PM part of personal

November 19, 2002

Open letter

Dear Man with mustache who almost killed me yesterday,

Hi, I am the owner of a blue car. You may have seen me yesterday waiting to take a left onto a major road; I was the one with my left blinker on when you arrived at the stop sign on the other side of the road. Although I may be jumping the gun, I thought that we shared something during those five minutes waiting to turn together: the understanding that I was going first since I had arrived first. During those five minutes we exchanged various strange glances from across the busy two lane-highway and when my time came I was trusting in your ability to uphold our agreement.

Instead you decided that darting out like a little fucking chipmunk right in front of me would be better for both of us. This conclusion will prove to be false as the next time I see you I will rip your mustache off like a blind woman doing her first armpit wax, you mother-fucking asshole.

Sincerely,
the man in the blue car

09:20 PM part of a balanced breakfast

November 14, 2002

what

Whatever do you mean she says softly over her shoulder while at the same time realizing that it sounds very english-butler of her to say and not at all natural for her but in this case caught in an obvious lie she suddenly feels very formal like this is an event, a performance that she must get up for because she has known that it will happen one day and she supposes that she has been mock rehearsing it in her head, analyzing and traversing the various paths that the conversation can take and creating little scripts in her head, memorizing her lines without realizing it but now she has failed completely on her first line because she never thought about how the performance would start and so he will know now and all is lost.

What the hell are you talking about anyway he says to himself as he braces himself for the sudden but expected stop of the train. He is quite tired and his mind was wondering, random firings after a day of very structured and disciplined thinking or at least the perception of such brought about by intense concentration and very fast context switching to avoid daydreaming - hours upon hours of thinking about the same thing, the same domain, the same realm of thought, a vast list of problems and possibilities that he traversed one by one and analyzed systematically - his mind so preoccupied or at least the top of it, the visible part to him, the concious, controllable - but after that was over his mind was wandering without his control and this is when the thought came to him and expanded into a thousand possibilities unfolding all the advantages systematically like it was used to, he could travel then, he could go to Asia, well maybe to California at least, and how he could be anything he wanted for real this time, you know like his parents had said once and he wouldn't be caught his foot on the track of normality. By the time he got through the doors of the train he had his thoughts back under control, wrestled to the ground by the thought of her.

What in the world is that guy doing she thought out loud to herself and was suddenly embarrassed and glanced around only to see that no one was looking at her or even at him even though he lay there right outside the window picking at it systematically lost in the sheer concentration of it. Looking around she saw everybody else was looking straight ahead, but that was where he was - straight ahead - only they looked at various angles so that they weren't looking at him but at the tree behind him or at people walking by or the building across the street, between hurried bites of salad and chicken. They were acting like they didn't see him just like a moment ago when the motorcycles went by and filled this place with sheer sound and nobody looked up from their papers - reading one sentence between each bite but mainly just looking at the pictures - even as the place shook and the blood rushed to her face and she thought that they were going to crash right through the window - who would look up then - and she glanced around and saw that nobody was doing anything different and suddenly felt like an idiot and that she was the loud sound. She glanced back over at him and saw that he had stopped picking at it now but it was bleeding a little or was that blood it didn't look the same color as her's but instead was a little darker or maybe that was just because she was looking through the window and out past the sidewalk and maybe her view was just distorted some or maybe a lot and now he was just staring ahead at the sidewalk maybe he was counting cracks and studying their shapes maybe he saw them as parabolas and important metrics, jagged edges crawling up the sky of profitability, numbers from clever market segment analysis, maybe he used to be very successful with a big family too but something had happened to him, no, no, he had happened to someone, he had done something wrong and he had hurt somebody and this was just how it was that was better much better and now she turned her head back to her purse which she held with both hands in her lap, the strap wrapped around her wrist, and checked to make sure that her jacket was still on the back of her chair that it hadn't been taken because that is what happens around places like this and you must rely on the advice of experienced friends in new situations like this one. She saw that she hadn't even started her salad yet, she hoped that he got here soon so that she could stop feeling like this.

What the fuck is that he says and looks up over the row of two-story shops and sees through the clouds a large plane banking sharply turning to the airport not a commercial but a military one he had never really seen one like it it was a little scary looking not the sort of thing you would want to see in wartime not a good sight for our enemies he thought but that did not make him feel better while the sound still shook his body and he realized that he had stood on this street a thousand times and never looked up at all so if he were deaf then he never would have during his entire life so then he looked down just to make sure but maybe he shouldn't look new places if this was the kind of shit he was going to see and have to think about and so he kept walking, switching his bags to his left hand.

02:51 AM part of stories

November 13, 2002

Sweet

This is a sample automated post.
This was written by a program.
This is a repost.
Sweet.

05:02 AM part of tech

November 05, 2002

Personals

Balding, overweight, hairy man. No self-esteem, career goals, or general intelligence. Mildly smelly and neurotic, few friends. Very critical of everyone but himself, given to long streaks of depression. Believes himself to be an above-average driver despite all evidence to the contrary. Horrible dresser, says the wrong things with suprising regularity. Lazy. Frightens children. Perverse beyond human comprehension. Condescending. Honest.

09:00 PM part of a balanced breakfast

Starfucked

There is this woman who I have seen at the coffeshop every single time I have been in there over the last half-year that frightens me beyond belief. Here are the facts I have gathered about her private-investigator-style:

1. She is a nurse at a nearby hospital.
   
2. She is married.
   
3. She visits the place everyday, including the weekend.
4. She is there so frequently that she restocks the napkins and straws without asking the employees where the extras are in the storage room (which is behind the counter).
   
5. She talks to the employees by name and asks after their children.
   
6. She frequently compliments them on how they fix her drink (more in a moment about this travesty of self-control) the right way unlike the other shop that messes it up and tries to charge her extra.
   
7. She is a coffee whore.
   
8. She scares me.
   

Now, about her drink. She orders 2 very large frozen cappuccino drinks with extra caramel sauce and three shots of espresso. They are apparently both for her and she comes in at least once a day everyday because she knows the employees (dealers) work shifts ("Hi, Sandy, so you have started working Tuesday close, is that because you are taking that class in the morning this semester?"). Combined I would say these drinks are probably 80 ounces of caffeine milkshakes that have her kidneys the size of raisins (or marbilized watermelons) by the time she is done. To you non-users this is equivalent on the Berkeley Slow Self-Destruction Scale (TM) to six cups of coffee, two very large milkshakes, and three tablespoons of whip cream.

The people behind the counter fix her drink quickly (rule number one: do not keep the addict waiting) and avoid eye contact and participation in her smalltalk monologue. I think that they do this for fear of being caught fixing such a blatantly pornographic drink; "Perhaps this is a federal crime", they say to themselves as they rush through pouring nearly two blenders full of the brown goo into the bucket-like plastic cups, which strain under the weight of the extra sauce ("We were not designed for this level of density!" they scream). "I am so going to get fired for this shit", they say to themselves while using the napkin as a glove in a vain attempt to not get fingerprints on the cups.

The reason she scares me is not the fact that she is me taken to a logical extreme (I am currently a CHIT, Coffee-Whore in Training) but the fact that she has said repeatedly that this is the only strain she drinks and I know that they aren't open all the time. There have to be days when she doesn't quite make it in time, or they are closed unexpectedly and the coffee-whore goes on a massive violent rampage, running into grocery stores and snorting coffee grinds through a little red sifter all the while gasping for air screaming "Charge me extra for this, bitch!" through mouthfuls of coffee powder and foam.

02:05 AM part of stories

November 04, 2002

A callarse

A callarse

Ahora contaremos doce
y nos quedamos todos quietos.

Por una vez sobre la tierra
no hablemos en ningun idioma,
por un segundo detengamonos,
no movamos tanto los brazos.

Seria un minuto fragante,
sin prisa, sin locomotoras,
todos estariamos juntos
en una inquietud instantanea.

Los pescadores del mar frio
no harian danio a las ballenas
y el trabajador de la sal
miraria sus manos rotas.

Los que preparan guerras verdes,
guerras de gas, guerras de fuego,
victorias sin sobrevivientes,
se pondrian un traje puro
y andarian con sus hermanos
por la sombra, sin hacer nada.

No se confunda lo que quiero
con la inaccion definitiva:
la vida es solo lo que se hace,
no quiero nada con la muerte.

Si no pudimos ser unanimes
moviendo tanto nuestras vidas,
tal vez no hacer nada una vez,
tal vez un gran silencio pueda
interrumpir esta tristeza,
este no entendernos jamas
y amenazarnos con la muerte,
tal vez la tierra nos ensenie
cuando todo parece muerto
y luego todo estaba vivo.

Ahora contare hasta doce
y tu te callas y me voy.

Pablo Neruda
(Estravagario)

08:41 PM part of personal

November 03, 2002

Transcending

Transcending

Escher got it right
Men step down and yet rise up,
the hand is drawn by the hand it draws,
and a woman is poised
on her very own shoulders.

Without you and me this universe is simple,
run with the regularity of a prison.
Galaxies spin along stipulated arcs,
stars collapse at the specified hour,
crows u-turn south and monkeys rut on schedule.

But we, whom the cosmos shaped for a billion years
to fit this place, we know it failed.
For we can reshape,
reach an arm through the bars
and, Escher-like, pull ourselves out.

And while whales feeding on mackerel
are confined to the sea,
we climb the waves,
look down from the clouds.

Marvin Levine
(Look Down from Clouds)

08:21 AM part of personal

November 01, 2002

Education

I found a videotape of myself giving a bunch of presentations when I was in the 7th and 8th grades. The first things that struck me were that I was wearing my brother's clothes - especially the comically oversized jeans that I had 'cinched' with a belt making me look like I had 40-year-old-woman hips - and that I had a very strong southern drawl. I was cracking jokes and generally comfortable in front of the camera, but it was so painful to watch myself with my strange haircuts and awkward body.

The real thing that struck me was not how I looked or acted back then but how I looked and acted when I saw this video. I feel that in a way I am the same person in the video although I have made some improvements - I have shaken off the clothes of my brother, although not completely - and some mistakes - I feel awkward about how I looked back then probably because I still feel awkward about the way I look and act now. But at the core I was the same person: I was nervous and awkward in the 7th grade which I didn't like and then comfortable and cracking jokes in the 8th, which I did.

And I don't really even want to think about where I lost my southern accent, but people have told me this before over and over. Education changes you. People think that you simply learn some facts but are the same person but you transform most of your views of the world by going to college. In an excellent book by a very successful man who grew up as a poor hispanic immigrant (the name escapes me despite the fact that I remember a lot of detail from the book) the contrast is striking: he learns english and starts becoming more 'american' and less 'spanish' by becoming educated. Even a child from a middle-class educated background changes when they go to college - it simply transforms you into a more historically- and internationally-aware version of yourself, and this can change major things like the way you talk and minor things like the way you think.

06:44 PM part of personal

Keep it to yourself

I have this freakish ability to analyze literature. A few minutes after reading a poem or story I can describe complex layers of meaning, expose subtle symbols, and list various alternate interpretations of the work. I hardly ever use this despite it getting me into various 'honors' programs over the years. Many of my former teachers and classmates saw me while I was in college and were suprised to learn that I wasn't majoring in English or History (capital letters mean something). I never liked using my ability simply because very early on - from the first time I ever used it - I realized that what I say about a poem or story absolutely doesn't matter at all to anybody. Sitting around listening to other people tell their little theories about stories is a fucking waste of time - you have to feel the meaning when you read it yourself - the rest is just intellectual masturbation.

12:05 AM part of personal