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Friday, February 29th, 2008
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9:28 am - knitted cat toys and crafty things to benefit animal rescue
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signal-boosting for ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) eilonwy, who's got a bunch of her hand-made knit cat toys and other crafty goodness in her Etsy shop:
All proceeds from items sold during the month of February will be donated to AZ RESCUE (a non-profit animal rescue organization which takes dogs and cats off of the kill-lists at other shelters and finds them homes, more information at www.azrescue.org).
Today's the last day, so if you know a feline who might appreciate a catnip robot (or mouse, to be more traditional) poke on over there. She's also got a neat black-and-silver zigzag-pattern bag.
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| Wednesday, December 26th, 2007
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6:39 pm - solstice and sunrise
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I'm off to the woods again for a bit, then down to the Gulf Coast. I had a moment of quiet to myself for the solstice, and this year I'll be watching the sunrise on the first day of the new year from a beach on the edge of the Gulf instead of out by the Atlantic. As usual, I've got scraps and threads of thoughts, but haven't been keeping up with lj or made much time for writing...and right now, I need to get back on the road so that I'm not trying to drive the twisty highways past midnight. ("A bit late for that," says the Monty-Python-esque voice in my head, rolling its eyes.)
So, in lieu of my own words, I'm offering a friend's. This is taken wholly from tamnonlinear's winter solstice post, because she keeps on articulating thoughts that bounce around in my head, echo my own patchworks, set up such lovely resonances.
Thoughts for the dark of the year:
Live with the understanding that the choices you make matter.
We are at the time when the turn of the seasons is about to reach the longest night of the year. It's a good time to think about the paths we take in dark places, and how we guide ourselves.
Live not as if you might die tomorrow (though it's good to live a fearless life, now and again), but as if you will live a hundred more, building on the actions you choose now.
Live with the understanding of the power of that, and the beautiful responsibility that goes with it.
It matters.
This is not a scolding or a lecture, though those tones are present. This is a call to understand the wonder and beauty of connection, the joy in knowing we can make a difference, on being the pebble in the landslide, the butterfly flapping its wings in a foreign land, the saving grace that alters the moment.
We matter.
People will tell you to live without hesitation, leap without looking, as if these were synonymous with joy and bravery, as if consequence-free living was the only way to have what you want.
Life matters.
I'm telling you it is not so. Look when you're leaping, not to hold back from leaping, but so you're at least aiming for something, seeing what is around you that makes the leap (and even the fall, if it comes) worth it. Take the daring action not in ignorance of the consequences, but knowing, embracing, encouraging the change it will bring. There is bravery in taking the action with the knowledge of what it means and what it costs, and in doing so making the statement that it is important and vital. There is pride, without arrogance, in accomplishing a task with the full knowledge of what it entails and why it is worth risking and worth doing. There are tasks we cannot set aside or ignore, as a matter of being fully adult people.
Choices matter.
Assume there will be consequence, and believe in the ability of things to change for the better by chosen action. Believe yourself to be of the strength and integrity to handle that, to be someone who can not only stand but can soar, who can not only pull their weight but add strength to the rest of the world as well, by encouraging the connections that require commitment and consistency. Have the integrity to stand by your actions, the morality to know your choices define you, and live with that not as a limit but a support, as part of the basis of living a significant life.
Be foolish and frivolous and spontaneous, not out of thoughtlessness, but out of the wisdom of knowing the value of these things as well, knowing them as part of loving the world's complexity, not rejecting it as meaningless.
Living without forethought may sound spontaneous, but in the end it's a form of cowardice. It's denying your own power, your own ability, the importance of others, the very things in the end that makes life rich and strong and achingly beautiful.
This is not a weight. If you think that consequence and responsibility is a burden, you've missed the greatest joys in life. There is a wonderful, soul-shaking beauty to the thought that you can make someone's life better, you can save something that might be lost, you can understand and educate and change. You can be part of what alters the world. Your existence is of significance. Live with and within that truth. It is the difference between merely reacting and truly responding, carrying the understanding of your own part in the dance of it all.
It's frighteningly hard at times to accept this, and sometimes it's as simple and easy as choosing to hold a door, say a kind word, give a little money to a charity, leave a space for a someone else, allow room for a wild creature, take a moment to consider a course, evaluate your place in the scheme of things. It is the big actions as well, though those come along less frequently, and require rejecting the weakness of saying that you are not one to choose.
This is the balance of life.
It is a beautiful thing.
Choose well.
Encourage the light.
Shine with it.
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| Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
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1:46 pm - an All Hallow's Eve Eve treat
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| Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
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11:37 pm - Bay Area PSA: evictions & bulldozers at the Albany Landfill, protest tomorrow
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| Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
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12:35 pm - and now for something completely different...
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| Thursday, July 19th, 2007
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12:27 pm - Brain Weasel Stomping Day
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from tamnonlinear, because i heartily approve of the idea, and because i've definitely got brain weasels that are in serious need of a stompdown.
and dedicated, perhaps, to my good friend emofraggle, who has taught me a hell of a lot about the little pieces of human interaction that make life a better place.
Wow - what is it in the air lately? Post after filtered post about how everyone is feeling alone, disconnected, unwanted. It's not like this is one or two people - it's like a rash all over my friends list the past few days. Male, female, betwixt, undecided, unconcerned...it seems to be an equal opportunity Brain Weasel.
Clearly, something needs to be done. I think we need to have a Brain Weasel Stomping Day.
The problem, as I've noted before, is "it's easier to see the Weasels when they're eating someone else's brain." So this is my call to my friends list, and to your friends list, and beyond. This Friday, make an effort to squish someone's Brain Weasel. (And hell, not just this Friday. Do it this weekend, do it when you think of it, do it when you're having a rough day or a good day, do it on alternate Tuesdays...just get out your jackboots and go on a grand weasel-stomp!)
Have a crush on someone? Post a flirty comment in their journal. Admire someone's skills? Post a comment about it. Just think a person is nifty? Now is the time to tell them. Doesn't matter if the post your commenting to doesn't have much to do with your comment. Just post those good thoughts. Trust me. People will appreciate it.
Do this for everyone - not just those you suspect are feeling down (After all, you might not be on their Brain Weasel filter). Take a few minutes and help launch people into the weekend with a smile. And...who knows? Maybe sharing how others make you happy will make you a bit more cheerful in return.
(...and, of course, the image that comes to mind is that of Spider Jerusalem, with that devil-mania grin, ready to go out monstering...)
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| Friday, June 1st, 2007
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11:47 am - bay area traffic question
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quick question: can anyone tell me how bad traffic usually is on a weekday (Friday) morning, on 101S from the Mission down to South San Francisco?
(trying to estimate driving time to get from fyfer's to an MCAT test center at 6:30-7am. google maps claims it's ~8.5 miles, and 15 minutes.)
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| Monday, April 2nd, 2007
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7:22 pm - [booklog 2007]
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19. & 20. Control of Nature and Table of Contents, John McPhee. both excellent, and deserving of the far more thorough write-up that i'm not going to do right now.
21. The Big Over Easy, Jasper Fforde. wasn't as impressed by this one as by his other books, but it was a fun light read anyhow.
22. The Revenge of Hothead Paisan, Diane DiMassa. this one's got a couple of the pages/monologues i most like, and as always is a much-needed bit of catharsis and thinking-about-things.
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| Tuesday, March 6th, 2007
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11:53 pm - [booklog 2007]
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i feel like i've misplaced some books, that i must've done more reading than this. mostly, though, i think i haven't been reading because i feel like if i've got time to read books for pleasure, i should be studying.
in any case, these were in the stack of recently-read books:
11. Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee. fantastic book. essentially, it is stories created by taking three different men -- a mining engineer, a resort developer (one who developed part of Hilton Head, and who attempted to develop Cumberland Island in Georgia), and a Western dam-builder -- out into the wilderness with a fellow named David Brower, "the most militant conservationist in the world." ("militant" is not the word i'd use, except perhaps philosophically. he's passionate and he's powerful, influential.) each story involves facts, politics, deeply-held beliefs, perspectives from each side, and also the interaction of strong personalities.
i've got two more of his books, Control of Nature and Table of Contents, in progress.
12. & 13. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists and In an Adventure with Ahab, Gideon Defoe. two books in one, set antiparallel. extremely silly. along with the McPhee books, a loan from longueur. thank you!
14. PoMoSexuals -- Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Identity, edited by Carol Queen & Lawrence Schimel. the title-word makes me twitch, but the book itself was a good read in the right way, poking at my brain and making me think about things. written in 1997, and perhaps more than anything else it makes me want to know more of what's being written and thought and said right now. Pat Califia's essay ("Identity Sedition and Pornography") made me go demand that the internet tell me more, so i wandered off through mazes of interviews and essays and articles from the past ten years. other especially good bits: Kate Bornstein's preface ("Queer Theory and Shopping"), Dorothy Allison's story, which i'd read before in one of her collections but still love, and the essays by D. Travers Scott, Carol Queen, Jill Nagle, David Harrison, Riki Anne Wilchins...well, and really all of it, even the bits that didn't resonate as clearly, was very much worth reading.
mmmmm, gender theory.
15. Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris. a quick read and funny, if often painfully so. *laugh* kinda reminded me of George Saunders' CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in parts.
16. & 17. Kaplan MCAT Physical Sciences and Biological Sciences Review Notes, because that's what i've been slogging through for weeks, and i want to mark down that progress somehow.
18. The Bride Wore Black Leather...and he looked fabulous!, Drew Campbell. Tagline: "An etiquette guide for the rest of us." Some bits of it still pissed me off, but most of the basic principles were reasonable and flexible enough, and it was at least mostly an amusing read.
my stack of books-i'm-reading and books-i-want-to-read is getting rather high, especially since i picked up three more from J & ravenslost this evening.
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| Monday, February 12th, 2007
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5:46 pm - just one small moment
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i'm at home, typing with tea and toast in front of the big windows, and outside everything is soaking in a deep rose light. the holly-berries, the red motorbike, the fallen petals of the little tree-shaped camellia across the street, they all glow like props on a theater stage. and the bare tips of the treebranches are a deep and almost violent red, catching this light on all their intricate rainwet surfaces.
the sunset is behind me, behind the house and the long rows of streets, the streetlights just starting to fire up, behind the huge graceful crane-giraffes in the port of Oakland, each one lit up with its own brilliant constellation and surrounded by the deep yellow flashes of sodium-lights. and the sunset is even farther than that, beyond the bay and the hills of the city, travelling on across the western ocean.
and in front of me is the rainstorm that came down through the hills this afternoon, brushing aside the bright mid-afternoon in-between-the-showers sunshine and laying down a thorough slant of grey rain. the deep grey is shading to blues now, with the sun fading, and only the very tips of that one tree are catching the last bit of sideways rose light.
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| Friday, February 9th, 2007
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8:56 pm - [booklog 2007]
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9. & 10. The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts and Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, Louis de Bernieres. intricate, funny novels set somewhere in South America; stories of people and villages and families, with a dash of santeria and magical-realism thrown in for good measure. and now i want to read everything else he's written, except that longueur just lent me two John McPhee books and something about pirates and scientists, so those will be next.
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| Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
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3:58 pm - ...Bueller?
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This journal of mine is due for some poking-at soon. The bits about why and how I'm using it are mine to figure out, but as it's to some extent functioning as a broadcast medium, it would be interesting to know who's reading it, and why. (Also, it's been feeling kinda crickets-and-tumbleweeds lately, and that makes me wonder about these things.)
So, then: are you reading this? Poke in, say hi, tell me why if you feel like it, tell me a story, tell me your thoughts. Ask me a question or three.
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| Thursday, February 1st, 2007
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10:07 pm - two loaves of simple bread
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| Monday, January 29th, 2007
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4:03 pm - [booklog 2007]
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some of these are from the end of 2006, but i stopped keeping track, so i'm tacking the ones that i remember on here.
1. Falling Free, Lois McMaster Bujold. i have a vague memory of writing this one up already, but couldn't find the entry, so here you go. good sci-fi, and lots of badass industrial metalworking in space.
2. A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge. one of those books that's been on the should-read-this list for awhile. i liked it, but wished he hadn't tied everything up quite so neatly at the end.
3. The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie. read this one over the course of a very busy week or two, so my memory of it is a little scattered, but i enjoyed it very much. intricate and strange.
4. Next, Michael Chrichton. a gift from my grandmother; i think it wasn't quite the book she was expecting it to be. the usual pop-science thriller. there were some interesting thought-experiment bits, if you can get past the plot holes and egregious science errors.
5. JTHM: Director's Cut & Squee, Jhonen Vasquez. a great way to spend a saturday morning. i swear. doesn't leave you misanthropic and wanting to hide in your closet and smash things, not at all.
6. Eragon, Christopher Paolini. escapist brain-candy for a difficult cross-country flight. (though not as difficult as it might've been, since for the first time i got bumped to first class for the ATL-SFO leg.)
7. Books of Magic, Neil Gaiman et al. good stuff, a gift from violin. i've seen other books from the series in my favorite used-bookstore; anyone know if they're any good?
8. Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver. a re-re-read, but she's still one of my favorite authors.
...and that's all i can remember for now.
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| Monday, January 22nd, 2007
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11:37 am - penguin notes
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courtesy of mrcairo: did you know that it was Penguin Awareness Day two days ago? i bet you didn't! and, in case you missed it and somehow managed to not spend the day in a tux wearing funny plumage and doing little penguin-dances, April 25th is World Penguin Day.
and in other news, the cheese crackers in the Berkeley Bowl bulk-food section come in many fascinating marine-related shapes: frogs, crabs, dolphins (or perhaps porpoises), starfish, little blobby things that might be turtles, little blobby things that might be shells, and of course...penguins!
penguins are the new monkeys.
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| Monday, December 18th, 2006
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12:03 am - bio-geek amusement
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a footnote to the vertebrate limb development chapter, in the NCBI online edition of S. Gilbert's Developmental Biology text:
*When referring to the hand, one has an orderly set of names to specify each digit (digitus pollicis, d. indicis, d. medius, d. annularis, and d. minimus, respectively, from thumb to little finger). No such nomenclature exists for the pedal digits, but the plan proposed by Phillips (1991) has much merit. The pedal digits, from hallux to small toe, would be named porcellus fori, p. domi, p. carnivorus, p. non voratus, and p. plorans domi, respectively.
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| Monday, December 11th, 2006
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1:15 pm - roadtrip!
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it's a very small roadtrip, but... roadtrip!
hopefully the rain will hold off, and the twisty coast-highway will be beautiful, and at the end of it there will be good food and a warm place to sleep by the ocean.
back tomorrow evening, in time for class.
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| Monday, November 27th, 2006
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11:14 pm - [booklog 2006]
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85. - 87. The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road, the Fionavar trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay. yet more good fluff courtesy of vyrin, this time in the form of densely-packed fantasy motifs...of DOOOOOM! also, naming your characters "Aileron" and "Tandem" does not help me to take things seriously. but that's ok, i don't have to.
88. Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay. same author, still fantasy kinda-fluff, but more nicely crafted and an interesting thought-experiment about memory and identity. ravenslost says i should read some of his other books, too.
today, the only book i have read is Developmental Biology. the Barthes is still waiting, in part because i've put my brain on the shelf for awhile. also i think i'm about due to get some books back to their respective libraries.
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| Sunday, November 26th, 2006
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1:19 am - a gift, in the sunset
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today was a sweet day; a perfect day, like the song says.
there was long lazy sleep, with no nightmares, and then i met jencallisto and we wandered through the tail end of the farmer's market. we ate satsumas in the afternoon sunshine, and the band played 'Midnight Train to Georgia.' we had a lunch of thanksgiving leftovers, much very good conversation through the afternoon and evening, and a rare kind of peace and simple comfort. and as the daylight slipped away, we went out for another bit of wandering, up to the hill at the top of the cemetery. there were brilliant fall trees, and we made the top of the hill just after the sun went below the city to the west, and in the cold clear air we watched the clouds and the changing light.
...and she sang me a gift, one that made me grin and laugh: '1952 Vincent Black Lighting,' one of my favorites, but genderswapped to young Jane Adie, on her fine motorbike, and Red Bobby, from the corners and cafés.
Says Jane, "In my opinion, there's no greater joy
than a '52 Vincent and a red-headed boy
Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do
They don't have a soul like a Vincent '52."
She reached for his hand and she slipped him the keys
She said "I've got no further use for these
I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome
Swooping down from heaven to carry me home"
And she gave him one last kiss and died
And she gave him her Vincent to ride.
and it still makes me grin and laugh now; a lovely song, a sweet twist to it, and a voice that fits the last dance of colors in the sunset.
thank you, jencallisto.
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| Wednesday, November 15th, 2006
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5:52 pm - [booklog 2006]
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76. 1602, Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert, Richard Isanove. Beautiful, and a good story indeed. I picked up dragonvpm's copy in El Paso and read half of it there, but didn't manage to finish it until borrowing asarwate's the other week. I might have to read it again before I give it back.
77. - 81. Dragon, Five Hundred Years After, The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and Sethra Lavode, all by Steven Brust. Like I said, opiate candy for my brain. So far as I can tell, there are maybe four books of his that I haven't read yet, but I'm tempted to just pick up the Taltos series and start over again. Dangerous.
and from a few weeks ago:
82. - 84. Mort, The Colour of Magic, and The Light Fantastic, Terry Pratchett. All re-reads, but I needed something light and fluffy.
I've also read half of Collapse and half of Fragile Things, but those don't count yet, and I have The Baron in the Trees and Barthes' A Lover's Discourse to look forward to. (Thank you, again, Rax.)
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