Meditative Prose
Thursday, 28 February 2008
Blogging from work: excellent. A guy from the help desk just came down to the bookstore to help me connect to the university’s wireless network. His reaction on seeing my laptop was priceless: “Lordy loo, you’re using Linux!” He sure wasn’t expecting that. For a second, I shared a bond with this stranger: the mutual respect and admiration of fellow nerds. What a beautiful thing.
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Snowy Grove
Outside the snow is coming down hard, and I am hoping for a snow day tomorrow — some things never change, I guess. I remember as a kid getting up early to watch the ticker of school closings scroll by on the bottom of the TV screen, hoping to see Yough (my school district) closed or at least with a two-hour delay. I was frequently disappointed, and on those days it was like torture to catch the bus, and school seemed even worse than usual — slower somehow, and more like a prison. Interestingly, on days when we had a two-hour delay (not ideal, but I took what I could get) everyone was excited and happy, and the shortened school day seemed to fly by.
What does it say about our school system that kids will get up early to watch the news (of all things), positively aching to stay home from school? What does it say about our society that here I am, twenty-three years old, hoping against hope that I don’t have to go to work tomorrow? I live for brief glimpses at freedom, just like every other working person, just like every kid in school. It will do my heart good if tomorrow nature brings commerce in Burlington to a screeching halt, and everyone except the snow-plow drivers are free, if only for a day. They are calling for fifteen inches, but I hope we get fifty.
Thursday, 21 February 2008
Photo by Minette
The following paragraphs relate to copyright and using content you find here. In short: you don’t have to ask me for permission. If this doesn’t apply to you, or you just aren’t interested, feel free to stop reading now and enjoy the pretty picture.
Tonight I swapped out a couple of the photos accompanying earlier posts because they were copyrighted, and legally I should have asked the owners for permission to use them. I didn’t receive any complaints, but I feel like it’s better to avoid that problem altogether, so I replaced the two offending photos with similar ones that were freely available on Flickr under a Creative Commons license. This allows me to use them on this site as long as I give credit to the photographer — easy enough.
From now on, for reasons of legality and laziness, and in order to support folks who are nice enough to make their photos available for everyone to use, I will only post non-copyrighted photos to this website. My own photos have always been available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and now the rest of the content on this website is as well. This means that you can use anything you find here for any non-commercial purpose, including altering it, as long as you credit me and share your derivative work under a similar license. The full terms of the license are available here. (Phew!)
Wednesday, 20 February 2008
The details of my life always seem mundane when I write them down. But then again, what is there except details?
At midnight I brewed a big mug of black tea and put on one of my favorite movies, Richard Linklater’s Slacker. The movie is a series of conversations and interactions that take place among slackers (unemployed twenty-somethings, anarchists, philosophy students, conspiracy buffs — people) in Austin, Texas. You see one interaction, then the camera follows one character elsewhere until they meet someone else, and so on. The thing I love so much about this movie is its pure plotlessness. Sure, the people are throwing out ideas that you don’t hear everyday, but really they’re just living — riffing on whatever topics they like best, engaging with the world, arguing with friends, being truly social individuals (think about that!)
I’ve seen a lot of movies — probably too many. Sometimes I catch myself wondering about the soundtrack for my life: maybe I’m feeling sad, and I hear some Elliott Smith playing somewhere far off in the back of my head (probably remembered from that scene in The Royal Tenenbaums), and I think Yeah, that’s fitting: Elliott Smith providing the soundtrack for my despair. And he is, in a very real way, and it’s not doing me any good: just allowing me to view my life like it’s a movie, like I’m just a character to be pitied, with no recourse to help myself, because, you know, they’ve already started playing the sad music.
All this is just to say that I’m beginning to realize the extent to which the media we consume affects the way we behave and see ourselves. Had I known this in high school, I wouldn’t have listened to such whiny music, which only exacerbated my frustration with girls. And maybe if the girls who come into the bookstore where I work to buy OK! magazine or People knew this, they would quit seeing themselves through the camera lens, pouty and airbrushed and surrounded by ad copy. I don’t know. All I know is that when I put myself inside the world of Slacker, there is no soundtrack, no playing on my emotions or stroking my ego. It is a world of free people freely engaging with one another, where no one person is the center of attention but every individual counts: An existentialist society. Sign me up!
Tuesday, 12 February 2008
Photo by Blacknell
Sometimes I wake up and think about the state of the world, and wish it were just a bad dream, a false awakening, and I could pinch myself and really wake up. Maybe I’d find myself in a longhouse with my family and friends still asleep all around me and the embers still glowing in the fire pit, and a dog gnawing on a bone from the previous night. I’d work the embers into flames again, then step outside and walk on deerpaths to a spring to get water. As I carried the water back I’d look at the mature forest around me, greeting the morning light and the crows, the pines and the gray squirrels. By the time I got back home, everyone would be awake — really awake. Maybe I’d mention my nightmare to Sarah as she plaited her hair: that horrible dream that seemed so real, where the streams were poisoned and the air was fouled, and a hundred species went extinct each day, and the world was populated by six billion people who seemed to all be suffering, rushing from one place to the next, looking for something but never finding it. How sad for the people of that dying world. How lonely they must feel.
