inch by inch…

Life proceeds apace. The last week has been filled with good people, and a much lovelier living space than it’s been of late, and baby therapy (I got to hang out with a visiting friend’s 14-week-old boy wonder). My cats are lovin’ on me, my friends continue to amaze me with their magnificence, a few important connections are quietly blossoming, I have a job interview on Monday for an as-yet unnamed but very exciting position. Yet there continues to be an undercurrent of sadness and various other negative emotions. At times I feel like I’m walking upstream, knee-deep in fast-running water. The exercise is good for me, but its inescapability is still no fun at all. Good thing the bad stuff is background to so much love around me, and – for once – not the other way around.

American Gods free, online, for a limited time.

Neil Gaiman’s blog readership has spoken, and Harper Collins has put the entire American Gods online for free for a month, starting yesterday. If you have not yet read it, I highly recommend it; but then, I’ve never failed to like anything Gaiman has written. Some of his wor[k|d]s leave more of an impression on me than others, of course; American Gods is right up there at the top.

Of course, the publisher didn’t go so far as to allow you to download the thing; as far as I can see, you can only read it on the web. So it goes, step by step… at least they’re making it free in the first place!

cinnamoon.

The Moon is my mistress; has been for just about ten years now, ever since I noticed the reliable upward mood swings during full moon evenings.

So tonight’s full eclipse, spent alone and then with housemates and then alone and the entire time chatting with people online, was a salve for a hard February. I would have photos, too, but can’t find the camera cable – phooey.

She was red and pink and blackish and gorgeous, and always changeable. Saturn and Regulus hung out nearby (well, sorta). She was a clown nose, a koala, a cinnamoon (thanks for that last image, Molly). She’s almost out of penumbra again, bright white and always a reminder that the world is big and full of new things to discover.

Spring is coming.

FCC is coming to town.

From: “Josh Stearns, SavetheInternet.com”

The FCC is holding a public hearing in Boston about the future of the Internet. Make your voice heard: attend the hearing in Boston.

Comcast, AT&T and Verzion have given us a glimpse of a world without Net Neutrality, and it’s a chilling sight.

In recent months, these cable and phone companies have repeatedly been caught blocking, filtering and spying on your Internet activities. If we let them get away with this, these powerful companies will continue to roll back our freedoms whenever we go online.

Now the Federal Communications Commission is coming to Boston to investigate. Will you attend this important event?

WHAT: A Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet
WHEN: Monday, Feb 25, 2008
TIME: 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
WHERE: Harvard Law School, Ames Courtroom, Austin Hall, 1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138

More information: www.savetheinternet.com/=boston

The question before us is simple: Will we have a closed Internet controlled by a small handful of giant corporations, or an open Internet controlled by the people who use it?

With so much at stake, it’s encouraging that the FCC’s first move is to come to Boston for public feedback about the importance of a free-flowing Internet. Let’s hope this important hearing in Massachusetts is just the beginning of a national conversation that spreads to every town and city across the country.

[…]

Josh Stearns
Campaign Coordinator
Free Press
www.freepress.net
www.savetheinternet.com

fog, live-action and animated

Insomnia is no fun at all. Or, I don’t know – what do you call going to sleep utterly exhausted, then waking up five hours later feeling reasonably rested but knowing that that’s an illusion, and yet staying up because if you go back to sleep then you’ll have to deal with the emotional repercussions of the dreams you’ve been having?

Yeah.

On the brighter side, a few daya ago my housemate found my favorite Russian cartoon, “Hedgehog in the Fog,” with English subtitles so I can share it with you! It has won all kinds of awards since it was released in 1975, including several years ago best piece of animation of all time at a festival in Tokyo. It’s just about ten minutes long.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a temporal fog. The furthest I can see is a day, maybe. Maybe several hours. Maybe a couple of days. Certainly no long-term clarity (which tends to be an illusion anyhow). I make tea, sit down wih the mug, close my eyes and breathe.

reminders of power.

It’s been raining on and off for hours, but (and? – this is, after all, New England) it’s surprisingly warm: 44 degrees F, or about 7 C.

So I opened the window, if not the mesh screen. Mostly for the cats: Aki misses being able to go outside onto the roof, like he did in Providence. But the howling wind is tugging at my heart strings.

Soon it will be time to visit the ocean again.

mundane details are people, too.

Yesterday I spent about four hours making chicken soup, complete with roasting the chicken parts I got for it. Hey, there was nothing else to do – no job on the horizon, which is wearying – and chatting with friends dealing with random illnesses inspired me to go buy soup makings, including enough meat for two batches. Of course, instead of the intended one-batch-and-leftover-chicken there ended up being more soup. My entire household, and then some, seemed to approve; and I felt close to my grandmother, who’d spend entire days in the kitchen cooking stuff up for the sheer joy of the process, and of feeding people with the results. I joked with a friend that one day I’ll get a dozen friends to make a kept woman of me, and will feed them in return.

(But no, srsly, a job – preferably an interesting, challenging job that pays me enough for me to feed friends anyway – would be way better. You hear me, multiverse?)

Then we drove to the wilds of R’dale with soup, getting astonishingly lost for, like, half an hour within a mile of the place we were going to. Classic Boston adventure. I’d intended to drop off soup and friend, but ended up staying and chatting and laughing with folk in a room painted a pleasing shade of orange.

Last night I dreamt of having a good, loving and kind and familiar conversation with someone I don’t talk to much these days. Waking up to reality is a bitch sometimes.

But it could be worse than a sunny day, ice cream for breakfast (because what’s better when you burned your tongue on hot chicken soup yesterday?), and a small black cat curled up beside me.

V-Day goodness!

I dislike Valentine’s Day with something between deep indifference and red fiery passion. That said, as a member of my household I just got the best V-Day present ever, and am now almost – uh – sanguine about the holiday. From an email by housemate/landlady’s awesome partner: “For Valentine’s Day, I brought you a dozen duck eggs, just laid today.” !! Thanks, Paul!

everything is white and colors.

It’s snowing white all over and so, so quiet outside.

This past Saturday was Frostbyte’s memorial auction. I arranged food for what probably ended up being a couple hundred people over the course of about 24 hours. Didn’t really cook, except in a minimalist sense. Still, it was lovely – several times that day people asked me the requisite how-are-you and I would answer, “in my element.” Providing good food for people, even if I just shop and chop veggies and open cheese and get others to help me, fills my soul like nothing else does. Especially when people I don’t know take note of the food and are pleased with it. Especially-especially when I get to participate in a group effort such as this was, two years in the making (by others: I only came to it within the last month). Labor of true love, it was, despite the complexity and frustrations of the organizing process. The next day, as we were finishing cleaning up, one of my co-organizers smiled at me and said, “You’re a new old friend.” Burners’ spirit of instant community is priceless.

(I don’t actually know whether the person who made the above remark has gone to Burning Man. But he’s old-school TEP, and I gather that’s pretty close in all the relevant ways.)

Saturday evening I sat on a couch in front of Tensor, weaving slow conversation with the human beside me into its constantly changing color-light play. A swing hung between us and Tensor. Its shadow in the bright lights, sometimes swinging empty, most of the time complete with people’s silhouettes, was the narrative of remembrance unfolding. If the mark I leave on my community when I’m gone even approaches Kevin McCormick’s – he died at just 29 – I’ll have done well.

Yesterday I spent a few hours with a sweet, social two-year-old and remembered how exhausting and satisfying it is to live only for the present moment, all the time. I remembered the realization I’ve been coming back to over the last couple of months: the kind of family I want, the village that it takes to raise children and be the change I/we wish to see in the world, is already there. Here. All I need to do is participate in it.

Last night another new old friend, the luminous human with the Tensor-side conversation, brought me a present, a square of squares of color-cycling light. It is making slow progress in its simple programming as white snow layers itself onto the skylight, sounding like grains of sand falling. White cat at my feet, I watch the color cube and feel his still calm.

Raaar: or, weight off my shoulders, and weight training.

The last couple of weeks have been, let’s say, challenging. My experiences during this time have spanned from some of the worst of my life to great.

The worst was bad, a fast and furious storm. But I have amazing friends, and the good thing about hitting bottom is that everything after is going up, and I feel stronger and more balanced now, and that’s as much as I’ll be dwelling here on the worst, which is now past.

The good! There’s much more of the good. I have a floor, for one, and soon I’ll have molding around it. The bedroom is transformed by the lighter walking surface; even today’s grayness is not as oppressive as it would have been two weeks ago. I’m making fast friends with some [more] foodies, which has already resulted in delicious meals. (Oh, I’ve been eating better, have I mentioned? And cooking. There’s a joy rediscovered.) Reading, too: am only a few chapters into John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, but can already heartily recommend it if you’re into magic realism.

This weekend an important memorial event will take place in my larger community. I’ve gotten more involved with it than I’d anticipated, given that the person remembered was not someone I knew at all well. But it’s community, and I’ve been meeting great people, and most importantly I get to organize the food. And, well, you know how I feel about that. It’ll be good for the soul.

Life’s swinging pendulum aside, right at the moment I feel good, centered, purposeful. And powerful. This may have something to do with having started my day with a dear friend, delicious coffee and weight training. Who knew weight training could be this much fun? Now to stick with it: I’d forgotten how radically working out changes my internal state for the better.