frustration

sometimes it is insanely too hard to print things.
sometimes.
sometimes i get really angry about silly things.
like people who cite and proclaim their "coolness" using things I INTRODUCED THEM to.
so vain. so vain vain vain am i.
but joey was the first and until she gets the credit i will continue to be frustrated.

you look like death

"...mother nature's pissed..." (and something about 'better watch out.')
that's all i heard of their conversation, but what with the creaking door and darkening skies, i admit, i walked outside with no small degree of trepidation.

my computer died. little bessy. so sad. she was so young. sometimes i can't think about it.

"schatzi" is a term of endearment

i just want to share with you of these jokes.

i love the gmail chat. it's the only way i talk to anyone, really. especially my faraway familys.

this afternoon, since i got off early for a doctor's appointment, i was on the gmail and both my mommy and my brother-in-law were online. by the whim of fate their chat messages seemed to present a sort of conversation to my view.

first, my mommy:

now, christopher:

----------------
Listening to: Final Fantasy - The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead
via FoxyTunes

it only makes no difference to me

[text to be added later]

still to be completed by others

words to describe me:
quixotic
logorrhea

tired

scott:
recondite
cryptic (?-approved, but not suggested, by scott)

jo:
convivial... minus the definitions about food.

oh ho ho, hoity toity

"to take part in 'a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.'"

i think that i might, after all, like the economist.
up until now i have been prejudiced against it. mainly because of who introduced me to it, not that i don't love them dearly, but they are a class apart and i always lumped it in with them.

also because of that slightly superior little quote they put by their "enum/chron" information and because of things like this:

=
but deep in my heart i always knew i liked that advertising campaign. and the other day when i was reading...er, checking, it on the bindery cart i found this article that i couldn't put back on the cart until i'd found the online version. i haven't actually finished reading it yet, but i like talking. and words and stuff. but mostly i like that it's kind of not that novel of an idea to me (that conversational rules would be relatively universal throughout time and geography--i almost said time and space, but then i realized that maybe aliens DO converse differently than humans do.) and i think in other hands, dare i at this fledgling state of my support say lesser hands? it could've been a boring short read. and this isn't. at least not to me.
i also like that it's published anonymously, but i don't really understand that because then it went on to talk about the prominent editors of the past.
and then also tim started a blog with a post about an article from the economist and i just feel like maybe it's time at last to embrace.

and why do i feel the need to declare that publicly? oh well. it's my weblog not yours.

throw off your mental chains!

this is a recruitment post.
the idea is that if you see the pictures you will want to be in them.
the goal is to have everyone in the world join the team. like world peace. just ask coach fredrick. (MY old coach. and so famous!) jump rope "make[s] this world a better place."

these pictures are actually old (if you can believe that i've had a team since it was warm enough to practice in viv's backyard!) and not everyone is represented, but it's all i've got right now.

viv and i do the wheel while erin goes solo.


viv and i let miles in on our wheel.



and rob and tammie rock the double dutch. i wish i could show you his power tricks.



leo focuses on his "fundamentals"



and then rob stuns all with his mad skills in the wheel.

why is rob so good at everything?



but jump rope is also for fun and games. here we stole cake from the sorority sisters and ate it. yum.

*thanks to rob for sending me the pics.

to be completed by others.

words to describe me:
quixotic
logorrhea

tired

as i stand knocking

it's the kind of thing that makes you want to write. that makes you wish you wrote.

i was talking to my friend with literary aspirations this morning on el internet. i told him i never had anything to write about anymore.
it was slow at the up's so i was reading. and i was reading short stories by thaddeus brewster. i hadn't read them in a long time.
brewster stories always make me think about the process of writing. yesterday was thanksgiving and my father and i were discussing good stories and bad storytelling.

i'm scandalously reckless with my keys. when my sister exclaimed at the number of keys on the ring i tossed to her, it never occurred to me that i might need any of them. it didn't dawn on me that the reason there were so many keys was that for most places i go, i need a key to get in.

it's happened before, working on a weekend, but there's always someone there. i knocked. and cringed at the mocking soon to begin. i knocked again. i could here faint clicks and shifts that gave me hope my boss was still around. then i heard it. "hey." it took me a minute to realize that the man studying at the nearby table was addressing me in such a private moment as i had imagined myself to be in. "you working?" "i'm trying to."

bernie went on for 45 minutes to tell me about the signs of the times and the bible code. to inform me that i was young and smart and unfortunate.
he shook my hand at least three times and finally allowed me to go back downstairs and find a security guard to let me in to the office.

meeting bernie makes you think.
at first i thought about the end of the world and that it was sad to have to see all the "evil" of the banks and "you know people talk about the beast...some of that's this, right? the computer." but that notion promptly yielded its position to other thoughts. it didn't take long to remember that the world isn't completely done for (i am the author of a happy blog, for goodness sake) and i wished i could have interjected a positive note into our one-sided conversation. as i recalled the conversation, stepping around photocopied newspaper articles on the ground and wondering who exactly it is that comes in on a late friday afternoon on a campus holiday to do work at the library and what exactly they were working on, i reflected on my reaction at the outset of the conversation.
i thought he was completely insane.

he wanted to show me his books. all about the bible and the bible code and the apocalypse.
next would come the bank and the 22 cents and the overdraft charges. maybe he could get them reversed.
but that's why he's so mad.
and the bank.
and that's why he had to come get these books.
he had another book by this author, it was written in 2002, but this was written in 1996.
and he just found this one. it was written in 1973.
he was sixteen.
in the panama canal zone.
he was sixteen.
in high school.
but the lady at the bank was just rude. (foul language ensued and picked up toward the end of the conversation.)
and that's why he had to come get these books.
he was in the pawn shop.
the lady there is nice. she likes him.
and i don't know if you remember, but they found these artifacts that were hitler's.
and he remembered the newspaper article.
and the jcc threw him out.
and the skybox threw him out.
did i get cookies at the gateway? they threw him out.
and that's why he had to come get these books.

i'm not doing him justice.
the story was so incoherent, i thought he was just loopy. but all his dates checked out, he knew what year it was, he had a legitimate looking print out from chase bank. but there were no connections, no transitions. yet he told it to me as if he were making a clear, organized progressive argument almost as if each point had a causal relation to the next.

as i kept listening, knowing against reason that there must be some sort of organizing principle, i was finally able to follow his train of thought. i finally grasped how all the seemingly disparate anecdotes he was relating to me related to hebrew and code-breakers.
and i felt like i had just lived in a faulkner novel for an hour.
and i wanted to tell a story like bernie.
but i can't.
not quite.

la pa'leer

shall i tell you?
i work in the library at the u.
i really like it, even though it can be a little monotonous.
one thing i really like is that i go through all the periodicals when they come back from the bindery. i have to make sure their records on the computer match up and everything is correct.
from an outsider's view i'm quite certain it looks like i'm just flipping through magazines all day.
however, like the conscientious employee that i am, i don't read the articles. i merely look for the pertinent information and move along. when i find one that catches my fancy i add it to my list of the pa'leer, which you have below. sometimes i would add a note to remind me what i liked, other times i wouldn't. now i'm mostly baffled, but i'm sure i'll be pleasantly surprised when i once again open them up. you'll notice that there are lots of architecture magazines...and not so many science journals. sorry, jo.

today i was feeling bad about not following through on my plan of working my way through la pa'leer on friday afternoons. and i was daydreaming the littlest bit about finding a desk and browsing through the wealth of treasures available in the biblioteca and then reality hit and i realized what i had been doing for all the months i've been working at the lib: i've been preparing all the records so all the serials can be loaded into the "arc." which means: NO BROWSING. certainly i can still get all of the books i want, but i can't just walk through the stacks and find something new. AND i can't have all the issues of one magazine together.

and this raises the following ethics of library science question: when is it too much? are libraries relics of the past? should libraries embrace the "digital age"? i can't tell you how many "08CAN"s and "CANFLIP"s there are (how many journals we no longer receive whether because we have subscriptions to the online version or because of lack of funding for buying hard copies.) my environmentalist side thinks this is good. my technofascinated side thinks this is cool. but my eyes hurt and my sentimentality longs for the time of dusty, heavy tomes of knowledge.
nobody even notices the books in the library. i don't think anyone but me has noticed that all the books have moved into different locations. the only thing anyone uses are the cushy chairs and the computers. don't you just want to cry?
it's great that we now have robots working at the library and all, it's great that we have so much more space now that the robots are taking over, but we can no longer browse through our old serials. if you want to read an article, you have to know what article it is and request it. no more discoveries in the stacks, no more found gems.
i think that is a sad tragedy of life.

but not to leave you on a sour note, with no further ado, i give you the pa'leer, all the books i wanted to browse that i will now have to use a computer and robots to get. (in roughly chronological order. oddly enough.)
:

world of interiors

sight and sound

japan architect

rivista di studi italiani v.21:no.2(2003:Dec.) -italo calvino

dwell

journal of semantics www.jos.oxfordjournals.org

casabella

journal of soil and water conservation

arkitektur

american heritage (esp.2006:june/july)

design news- v.61:no12

wired v.14:no.11(2006)-faceblind

techniques et architecture

chemistry world (2006:Feb)
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2006/January/09010601.asp

(l')arca

american lit. hist. v.18:no.4 --the courtship of henry wikoff

neophilologus (v.90:no.1 -a little noticed english construction pg. 107-117)

http://economist.co.uk/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9249262

riba journal

detail

volume

achis (2004:no.4 "murdernity")

acta orientalia v.64(2003)

domino

metropolis v.25:no.6 --greenest building ever. library at free university in berlin

i.d.

news photographer

o.g.

val david

today is not a sad day, but there was something of a somber moment this morning as i realized that i have an ocd i had not previously recognized.

if there's a room that you go into often and the decor rarely changes, if there's a poster or something written there, do you have to read it and say it in your head as you look at it no matter how many times you've seen it? HAVE to?

there's this poster at work. in the conference room. and every day when i go in to turn on and turn off the lights, i read it to myself.
until this morning i thought that i read it because it's in spanish and i like to practice. beyond that it is worthy of note because it says (in spanish) "we tell our children not to get into a car if the driver seems drunk...but what if the driver is their parent?" and while i think, yes, children of alcoholics is a sad situation, i just think, i would not tell my children that. i would tell my children "don't get in a car if the driver seems like they're not me." and that would be that.

i sublet ren's apartment this summer. it was so nice. but i confess that in 2 months i didn't get everything unpacked. i had one particular box that sat in the middle of my room for most of the time i was there. (i didn't know what to do with the stuff; i used it so i couldn't put it in storage, but i didn't have a place for it.)
my sister had got the box from work.
on it was written "val david"
i know now exactly what that means, but it was a mystery to me then. every time i was in my room i would say "val david" in my head. several times a day.
so many times that when my friend wanted a name for his band i thought it should be "val david" since it was such a fixture in my brain.

one more.
i have a box of emergency crafts.
it's an office max file box. everything on it is in english and in spanish.
under "location" it says "ubicacion."
i don't know that word. i assume that it means "location" but i don't know.
every morning i wake up, look at the box and say 'ubicacion.' in my head.
sometimes i say 'location ubicacion.'

this morning i after i said it i was thinking about it and how on the ocd test there's this question about counting when you go into rooms and i was always like, 'well, i don't have it that bad. i can't even think what that means.' (cause my brother and sister were all like "oh, yeah." and when i said i didn't understand the question they said "if you had it, you would understand." and i was like 'ok.') and then i thought 'oh no!! i bet reading the same things every time is the same thing! i do have it that bad!'

and i was kind of sad.

but it doesn't hurt people, right? just a minor annoyance to me, right? not a sign that i'm getting more crazy?






right?

how can you catch the sparrow?

Friday evening, Sunday in the afternoon,
What have you got to lose?

It's my heart that's a-sufferin', it's a dyin'.
That's what I have to lose.
I've got an answer
I'm going to fly away,
What have I got to lose?
Will you come see me Thursdays and Saturdays?
What have you got to lose?



i really like dad music.

onomatopoeia

more patty griffin, just because i think sometimes morrissey is too depressing.
"it's hard to live, still i think it's the best bet."
ok, ok. and morrissey crowds his way in anyway.
"i think about life and i think about death, and neither one particularly appeals to me."
so depressing. see? now you think i'm all "morose" and i'm not.

but a girl i know was talking to her sister. and what they were talking about is of consequence to our discussion, but her sister replied "i wake up every day for it."

i was talking to "bibiana" and we were talking about motivations and having them.
bib's were humbling to me in a way that i hope is constructive.
i think i have a motivation for living, but i don't think i wake up every day for it.
but i think it would be nice if i did.

so.
i think i will work on that.
and just to maintain the cipher of writing personal things in a semi-public atmosphere, i think i will say that, like bib, my motivation is, and certainly from henceforth will be, video. (that might be a stretch, and not my best work at blogging cryptography, but it'll have to do for now.)

just cause i like to be thorough (and also in the interest of full disclosure.)

i actually have a real post planned, but i'm late for my guitar lesson.

i have auch a happy blog.
and i used to try to be funny. (but then i went on vacation and then i started dating a boy and all that went by the wayside and i'm really kind of sad about it because i think now i would like to have that bread crumb trail back to semi-sanity. oh well.)
i also periodically write about, and mostly to, my good friend ren whom i used to not see because she quit being my secretary of war, but now i see a lot more because i used to live in her house and now i spy on her from across the street.
i joined my sister's performance art blog so that i could show up her students, but then never did.
and i started a really awesome project which promptly fell into technical difficulties and i gave up being a good person until i could afford the camera i want.

all these things are me.
if you ever see them, know that they are me and that i am the same person.

what?! you mean you're reading this right now??!

taylor
joAnn
johnson
busby

aren't those nice names?

while your life falls apart

i -um- don't know what to do with my life.
which is not to say that i'm sad in my life, i just feel like it's not figured out and is therefore temporary and therefore i have to keep thinking about what to do and i don't know what to do with my life.


patty griffin.
"the farther i come, the farther i fall. whatever i knew it was nothing at all. nothing at all. just making me small. smaller and smaller. i fall back."


i feel like maybe we should place bets on how long i can keep this up.
it's exhausting, but i'm surviving surprisingly well.
but it's insane.
and i got offered an almost real job that would most likely lead to a real job and i couldn't accept it because i work at the ups store. does that make any kind of sense at all? no. it doesn't. but that's how it goes.
i'm just going to tell myself that i would be too impatient with old people learning how to use computers.
i'm just going to tell myself that $8/hr is better than $16/hr because i can sit and do nothing (as long as no one wants to ship anything ever) and i get to see and, every once in a blue moon, work with my sister.
i'm just going to tell myself that there will be something else in january. (which is the date i'm tentatively trying to find one job instead of three.)

on second thought, i'm probably just not going to talk to myself about this at all for a while.


is giving yourself the silent treatment as juvenile as giving someone else the silent treatment?




in conclusion, i've been reading jana's blog, and i have some thoughts, but i have to get back to workingu.

up to zero

are you ever just tired of life?  i think that's such an ungrateful way to feel, but i feel it all the time.  just worn out and no hope of rest in sight.  

anyway.
it's friday and i don't have to work this saturday and it's viv's disco skating birthday so that'll be good.   wahoo for life.

drift gently into mental illness

i have lots of thinks to talk about, but i feel like they are all kind of half thought out and unprocessed.


...
can we talk about how i have a very symbolic house?
my windows look out on the alley and the university. i get to see hipsters and punks and college students.
kathryn's windows look out onto our nice quiet street. our industrious neighbors who fix up their old homes and yell at you if you park near their driveway.
from kathryn's windows you'd think we were all grown up and settled.
from my windows you'd be sure we were starving students just here for a minute.

my windows are more honest.
and really, i bet kathryn would trade rooms in a minute, despite her big windows. cause her windows don't have screens, the pigeons wake her up every morning and she hates the afternoon sun that bakes. (i love it. i spend any afternoon i can in her room.)


...
we're starting a jump rope team.
which is to say, we have a jump rope team. we have lots of members already. and we've had two practices. i kind of thought it was a joke, but i was completely willing, but people are super serious, so if you want to join, we're thinking thursday nights at the insit-ute.


...
no need to paginate actually plays music. who knew?

...
i work 3 jobs. did i mention that? it's crazy. like, i honestly cannot tell you how i'm alive right now. but i am, so i guess it works.



...
i like viv lots and gallons. she lets me play at her house and it's such fun.
ice cream also is good. and chit chatting. but that all amounts right back to viv, so i guess she's the perfect heading for this pseudo summary of thought patterns.



...
you're not the only choo-choo train that was left out in the rain the day after santa came.

miss alexandra chantal yvette mackenzie

i know what you were all thinking.
and i posted it that way just so you would think it, but,
no.

no young men have been smacking their chapsticked lips for me.
that last post was a quote from the lovely alex.
quite close to the last words i heard in her lovely british accent before she abandoned us all here for the comforts of her jersey home.

today is alex' birthday.
i think it's such a nice birthday.
9/9

isn't that nice and symmetrical?
she's a whole number!! she's complete.
and it's so true.
a flawless person if i've ever known one. (which i have, obviously: alex.)


it's not much of a birthday cake, but there's only so much you can do from across the atlantic.
so,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALEX!
many happy returns.