When I sat down to write, I had no idea what to say. I’ve erased and rewritten the beginnings of this numerous times. If computer screens were like paper, this portion would be worn thin and ready to sew together into some kind of garment. Do you remember making binder paper into “cloth” in grade school? If you crumple it up and rub it together long enough, the fibers turn soft and drape like fabric.

::Shrug::

Through the contorted lens of a three-day migraine, I’ve decided to take a break from my journey from Point A to Point B. I generally live my life with Productivity in mind, whether real or imagined. Point B constantly moves around, making it harder to pick a route to get there, and sometimes it gets lost in the fog and I just continue blindly, hoping I am still pushing forward in a straight line when in reality I am probably circling back on myself.

::Shrug::

I’ve recently had the piss taken out of me on two occasions for books that I was delving into during my lunch hour at work. One on studies of diet and its effects on diseases of affluence. The second on investing. Apparently, according to the rest of the world, my leisure reading is mind-numbingly boring. What can I say? I generally prefer non-fiction to fiction, filing away the articles I’ve read on canning and building your own computer and gardening and caring for a dog and buying a house and programming languages and outdoor survival in the Time Spent Being Productive category, when the truth is that most of what I’ve learned I’ve already forgotten by now. And of that which I haven’t forgotten, only a small percentage will ever actually be put to use.

::Shrug::

The ironic beauty of the migraine plight is that when it goes on for long enough, it exhausts me up against a wall upon which I can no longer worry about the build-up of little things. The errands I didn’t run, the phone calls I didn’t return, the budget I didn’t fill out, the reservations I didn’t make, the emails piling up in my inbox, the homework for sound class, the blog post for the website, finding that new plugin to stop all the damn spam comments, starting the other site…

::Shrug::

So, for this microscopic moment I have given up on all of that.

I just went to see Charlie Kaufman’s new film. I adore him, but his new film paints one of the most unrelentingly downcast moods I’ve seen on film in a long time. It is not desperately sad, but rather quite comfortable in its depressed mood. That being said, the story is in true Kaufman style, folding back on itself infinite times and meta-referencing its own constructs like a hall of mirrors.

For this microscopic moment, I have picked up Cat’s Cradle which has been sitting on a shelf waiting to be read for quite some time. I also adore Vonnegut. And the truths it is trying to convey are whispering to me by way of echoing the Kaufman film. A common line is drawing itself between the two, and implying a desire to be drawn everywhere else as well.

::Shrug::

Reading Cat’s Cradle naturally reminds me that Slaughterhouse Five is probably my favorite book. It is probably my favorite book for a lot of reasons, but the main reason is that, with three simple words, Vonnegut managed to set forth a life philosophy that I strive to embody (but mostly fall flat in reaching). So it goes. And in saying this he writes off everything he can’t control, lets go, and moves on. So it goes.

For someone (myself) who has spent so much of her life in the arts and who wholeheartedly believes in its importance, it is funny how often I forget that sometimes the best way to get to B is on the sideways, seemingly meandering artsy path. And funnier still that sometimes it takes a horrible headache to exhaust the left side of my brain enough to remember.

::Shrug:: So it goes.

Yeah, I know I’ve been a very bad blogger.  And yeah, I know I have a lot of nerve to just walk back in here and…say stuff.  But here I am.  And I’ve started this post 642 different times in my head, and at least five times on paper.  I’ve literally a stack of phrases and quotes and half-thoughts that I’ve memorialized in scribbles over the past month.  But I just couldn’t finish any one thought.  And no doubt this post will read as a patchwork of these aborted ideas, but at this point, it’s all backing up in my brain and exploding in the same manner a very urgently typewritten message might: jammed.

It’s been a rough month, what can I say.

And now I’ve missed all the predictably important events of which there have been copious coverage, like the new year* and the new administration**.

So let’s just go back to where I left off and see where that gets us, shall we?

If you’ll recall, back at the end of ’08 there was quite a bit of snow (for us) happening here, and everything was thrown a bit out of whack.  Who can blog when the excitement of unheard amounts of snow is just outside your front door?  And then, who can blog when that snow is still falling and you’re trudging to the bus stop to get to work in borrowed boots five sizes too big for your feet and all you can hear is the ka-LUMP ka-LUMP of your footsteps as you bemoan never having acquired the appropriate attire for said weather?

And then came the holidays, in which everyone’s schedules and plans ran amuck.  And around this time, I landed in a low.  Normally I would attribute it to the lack of light.  But the snow meant less rain, which meant more sun, so I really couldn’t tell you.  Heaps upon heaps of little worries that I’d been shoving to the back of my mind had collected to the point where the back of my mind was now the front of my mind, and my predisposition towards ANXIOUS! got the best of me.  I don’t have any dramatic stories to tell.  I didn’t stab a postal worker or jump off a bridge.  But I wasn’t me.  And maintaining during these times is exhausting.  This is where my fractured mindset began, where my mind became a jumble. It’s like this word I ran across at work: esophagogastroduodenoscopy.  And I’m thinking…ummm…pass?  Which is not unlike a stress overload – too much information.  But I know that if I break it down, it’s really not so bad: something about an esophagus, something about a stomach, something about a duodenum, and a scope. Ok. I can handle that. I get where you’re going with this…  Apply that process to my perspective on life, and you’ll be up to speed.

*Then came The New Year.  And can I just say that New Year’s Resolutions have such an odd effect on the flow of society?  Little, more or less inconsequential tweaks to masses of daily routines, all in the direction of our combined cultural goals meant that there were waves of oddities.  For a day, or a week, the gyms were at capacity and rush hours changed.  On my usual morning bus, we were packed like sardines.  No doubt more people were on time, or early, to work.  This has waned.  The personal blogs in my reader listed a new post daily. This has waned.  Personally, I think giving only one day a year to start afresh with a goal is foolish, because most of these goals inevitably fail.  We need to make little changes, and then more little changes to eventually get where we wish to be (see: esophagogastroduodenoscopy).  But what do I know?

Then I had a couple of wonderfully recouperative trips.  One with the boy:

and one to see my family, complete with photo expeditions:

And then another fabulous flu. I used to be someone who got several colds per season, but rarely got the flu. And for whatever reason, this is the season of repeated flu assaults for me. And can I tell you, it’s been just lovely. The fevers and the hurting bones and skin? Lovely. The fever dreams. I distinctly remember lying in bed, unable to get comfortable, having some delusion about the important choreography of my tossing and turning – how I had to move this way, and then that way. And for some reason it was of the utmost importance that I get it right. And I remember thinking, “Since when was sleeping so complicated!?”

And now, though the snow is still occasionally falling,

it is back to the daily grind.

Back to decoding emails from clients where listens, pasted, and fack really mean license, passed, and fake.  Back to the background drone of conference calls reminiscent of religious sermons set to to slam poetry beats, “Not to give expecting a return, but because it FEELS.  SO.  GOOD.  to give.”  Back to the hum drum.  And so now I am taking the time to figure out the esophaguses and stomachs, duodenums, and scopes of my life.  Once I break it down, I can build it back up…

Lest you worry, one of my non-new years resolutions is to post regularly and often.  So tune in next time for a (hopefully) more coherent and less meandering smattering of Moot.

**Yippee!

I finally got off my butt and entered all my previous posts into WordPress so that the previous problems could be solved. I may not be entirely satisfied, both because I have not yet found a theme I like (suggestions, folks?), and because I am not a master programmer like I had hoped I’d become with this project. But now I am just a blogger. And that could be fun too.

New chapter begins today. Get on my case if I don’t stay active…

In the predictable style of me, I have already grown tired of this project. The goal of this project was to teach myself raw html, and that I have done. This site was created with no programming of any kind. When I want to create a new post, I pull up a template, activate the previous/next buttons, create the title, activate the previous post’s next button, add the content to the homepage, and add the link to the archive page. Then I upload these files to my site. Which is not too difficult.

But suppose that instead of writing these words here, I thought them more appropriate in the header? Well, I would have to go into each individual page file and cut/paste to edit what was written up top.

Cumbersome.

There are many things I think I could improve on this page, and yet to do any one of them would be quite boring and time consuming.

Thus, I am done with what html alone can do for me. On to greener pastures.

Problem now is that I was looking at drupal, which led me to looking at mysql, which led me to php, which led me to 8,856,495,157,674 questions about…well…everything. It is as if I sat down with a novel written in Japanese and decided to translate as I went. Not so much luck. Thus, I am a bit overwhelmed at the moment. (Any suggestions?)

All of this just to say that this site will probably not change much, contrary to what I’ve written above. It will probably stay just like this (though I will continue to post) until I figure out how to wrangle some more sophisticated tools.

Wish me luck.