Words are inadequate

things you people wouldn't believe

2022-06-28T15:45:48Z

Last night I emptied one more Office/Misc box. I'm down to three of those, plus some random stuff on top of the dresser that needs to be sorted and sent to storage. I think I can get the Office/Misc down to two boxen but beyond that I'll need a hanging file or something.

Among the things I excavated was the blue folder of memories. I no longer remember where the folder came from, but when I moved out of my dorm room I took down my photos of people I knew off the wall and stuck them in there, along with a couple of letters and such things. Over the years it's become the repository for Things From Important People.

A brief and incomplete list of what I dug up:

A card from my parents on the occasion of the death of Tommy (the family cat), including a few photos of him.
A list of things my Calculus teacher said during class, including "The AP exam will be the easiest test you take all year" (accurate), "The numbers are getting bigger and bigger in a negative sense," "We're going to start out with the concept of ... of needing more chalk," and "Never use a physics equation in my classroom again!" Educationally speaking the back half of high school was an almost unmitigated disaster, but I really, really liked Dr Stallings.
Rare photographs of me: Lion In Winter (I was Richard), pre-Homecoming-dance in fairegarb with Shaye and Scott and Kirsten, me and Mo looking content.
A certificate from college confirming that I made the Dean's List one semester in 2004. (As opposed to the Dean's Other List, which I made repeatedly between 1996 and 2000, and which eventually resulted in me taking the Dean's Vacation.)
A photograph of the apartment building in Fürth that I lived in from 1979 to 1982. I remember it as being this towering edifice but no, it's a three-storey walkup.
A couple of the photos I took in photography class senior year, including one of Jynx looking impish through the spokes of a bicycle wheel she's holding.
A postcard from tam_nonlinear.
Stuff from Andy McCoy's Eagle Scout Court of Honor, over which I was privileged to preside.
And of course letters and cards from high school and college girlfriends and friends, including one from someone I hadn't thought I'd had any written relics of at all.

This was easier than the journals were. It's the view from outside, and that's always been easier on me. Even the pictures of me, something I usually hate with a passion, are ... jeez, that guy. He had no idea.

Notably absent are any relics of Kelly, with whom I had a rocky relationship and very bad breakup in the 2000s. Those are all in a bag in a different box, specifically to keep them away from the good memories. And while it's getting on time to revisit those so I can finally discard most of them and filter the rest to the folder... not yet, not yet.

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Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

2018-01-23T23:54:53Z

There's a sense in which the idea of UKL being gone is just too much, like Bowie two years ago... and there's a sense in which it's inevitable and something I can accept. For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

I can't think of anyone who's had as much impact on the direction of my thoughts.

I read the first three Earthsea books in elementary school, and reread the first two over and over, enjoying the atmosphere and the saving-each-other aspect of Tombs of Atuan and, I think, trying to understand the ending of Wizard. Neither is precisely a heroic tale, though Tombs at least looks like one. Wizard isn't about growing stronger or overcoming evil, it's about growing wiser and accepting your own darkness. I stumbled on the occasional Le Guin short story and liked them alright; I read Tehanu a couple of years after it came out and was pretty unimpressed.

And there things sat until fall 2003, when I talked my advisor into letting me replace "American Lit Before 1900" in my degree requirements with a seminar on Le Guin. I had a fantastic teacher in Len Hatfield and a number of interesting and engaging classmates, including my then-girlfriend Kelly. We read ... not quite everything she'd written, but certainly a more than representative sample. I enjoyed her early novels, and flipped out over the chance to dig deep into Earthsea (including the two later books, which I liked much better than Tehanu), and thoroughly lost myself in her big two SF novels, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. And we did an in-depth analysis of her picture books, A Ride on the Red Mare's Back and the Catwings tetrology, and dug into her poetry, and of course bounced around her short stories, which I maintain are the form in which she did her best work.

But it was two nonfictionish pieces that stuck with me. Her essay "The Child and the Shadow" ... resonated, and I still can't talk about it, though I cited it quite a lot in my final paper. And her translation of the Tao Te Ching came to me at exactly the right time: I'd thrown my life into utter chaos and was desperately casting about for something to hold onto, something to make sense of it. And I got a simple, clear, poetic explication of the principle that things are, not for any reason but that they are, and that's enough.

That's not even getting into the ways that class accelerated my transition from technolibertarian to, maybe 'social justice cleric' is the best descriptor these days.

I never met Ursula Le Guin. Kelly did, and got her to sign a copy of the Tao Te Ching for me, which is part of why I have three copies. (Four if you count the ebook. Five if you count the CDs that came with the third copy.) I don't know what I could have said to her, anyway.

To live til you die
Is to live long enough.

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personal hinge points

2012-02-27T19:20:44Z

Elseweb a friend asked about personal hinge points, of the "if you could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be?" variety.

Most of the poor decisions I've made were the best decision I could have made at the time. As noted elsewhere, I lacked the tools to make better ones. To have chosen differently or better I would have had to be a different person. This rules out such obvious choices as "don't nearly fail out of college" or "don't give up on writing for the better part of a decade."

Having said that, there are one or two places things could have gone differently. ( For example... )

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and again

2011-02-14T13:47:04Z

Today is Monday, February 14, the ~~Feast of St. Valentine~~ Emperor's Birthday.

Today in history:
On February 14, 1929, gangsters acting on orders from Al Capone gunned down six rival gang members and an optometrist in the wrong place at the wrong time, in what became known as the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre."

Peace.

I dunno, this February is shaping up to be pretty decent.

It would be hard to top last year, though. Jim's death was bad enough. My "partner"'s response on hearing that he'd died was "oh. sympathy. so, are you going to [have an impossibly hard conversation like you've been saying you would for a couple of weeks now] tomorrow instead?" (Said conversation, some days later, was no picnic either.)

Perhaps February has decided to retire, having claimed its crowning moment of 'fuck you.'

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a difficult weekend

2010-10-19T16:36:38Z

My calendar tells me that Friday was National Boss Day. Mine celebrated by getting sick and going home midway through the day. I don't remember where Friday evening went; we must have stayed home.

Satyrday I slept lateish, and made pancakes because I was wanting pancakes instead of an omelette. Eventually I got on the road to head out to D&D, a little later than I might have liked, and stopped at Safeway to pick up crack chips. Was running not nearly so late as I'd thought, so I figured I'd swing by Trader Joe's to pick up a couple things of Vintage Cola (which, incidentally, tastes like the Platonic ideal of Coke).

( Cut for traffic bitchery. )Thankfully, after all that I got to hit a bunch of things with a hammer, so it was all okay. (In retrospect a Big Freaking Axe might have been a better choice than the Big Red Hammer. The difference between d10+2 ("d12 brutal 2") and 2d5+2 ("2d6 brutal 1") damage is mostly a matter of taste and whether one prefers a bell curve; the slight deficiency in average damage in the former is compensated for by its "high crit" quality, which means that if roll a 20 on my to-hit roll I get to add an extra die of damage. And most of the time I'm rolling two d20s to hit and picking the highest one, so my chance of a crit is effectively doubled.) (Here endeth the D&D neepery for the day.)

Satyrday evening daghain was in a play, and it would have been good to have seen that, but I was sufficiently beat that I just wanted to stay home. So I did.

Sunday started off with the sink flooding the kitchen during laundry again, which was about as much fun as it sounds. Eventually I got that cleaned up and finished and headed out for a ramble through Riverbend Park (on the Potomac, just north of Great Falls). Too warm, too many small children, and it turns out that what I was wanting was a ramble in company, but a decent walk anyway. Came home, had a fight with nixve, had dinner, tried to clear the sink with Drano, vacuumed, wrote email.

Was unfortunately still online at just after one in the morning, which led to an unexpected continuation of said fight, which led unrelatedly yet inexorably to getting sort of half-assedly dumped around two. There followed an hourish phone call during which, after some prompting, the dumping was performed with a whole ass, and then the ritual Changing of the Facebook Relationship Status, and then uilos being a Heroine of the Revolution. I remember hearing the clock chime four, and later hearing it chime 6:15, so I guess I slept for two hours in there. Emailed work to say "not today, sorry" and probably got another 2-3 hours of sleep. uilos also called in sick, so I had someone to fall apart on at random times throughout the day.

The apartment maintenance guys came by to fix the sink pretty quickly, which was nice. Later, I confirmed with nixve that it was neither a bad dream nor one of those things one says when exhausted but regrets the next morning, and talked with ancientsong, which helped an awful lot as well. Then home, and crashing.

Today I've listened to Inches and Miles and Trees Still Bend (which made me sniffly the first time I heard it, a little more than a year ago, and now just feels right and true). And now I'm at work, where I have an annoying blurry ache in my eyes and no keyboard tray.

Tonight is sushi with someone cool, and Wednesday is probably pumpkin acquisition, and Thursday is likely to be hanging out with elf, and Friday is Belly Horror, and Satyrday is Ren Faire and then ABG if we feel up to it, and Sunday is rislyn's followed by Tribal Cafe. I'm keeping busy, and sociable, and both of these are probably good things.

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"all things have endings, and beggars have their pride"

2010-10-18T23:55:20Z

nixve broke up with me last night, 'round two in the morning. Our long-term desires and my short-term needs have both been in decaying orbits for a couple of weeks now at least, and in the end gravity took its inevitable toll.

I would have posted this earlier in the day, but, like the man says, "you can hope against hope that nothing will change."

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labor day, seattle

2010-09-15T14:58:14Z

So a week or two ago I spent an extended weekend in Seattle.

( It was fun. )

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