Categories
personal

Things to Blog in Denver When You’re Alive

I could start, I suppose, with an admission of negligence and a tender, heartfelt apology. I’ve sung that tune before, though, and jumping right back in is better than wasting time philosophasting about the difficulties of balancing blogging with daily existing. One thing is more important than the other.

I’m just about to leave Denver after attending the Reference Renaissance conference, which was rad and which I recommend to anyone to is a librarian and works mainly in reference. I found it so much more useful than the ALA Annual conference in many ways, though both have their own merits and resist weighing on the same scale. I guess the reason I would tend to attach more value to RefRen is because I’m leaving with oh-so-many more neat ideas about what I’d like to do with Virtual Reference services in Washington (among other things). This could be a product of where I am in my job now, but it’s also certainly part of the excellence of the conference and the quality of the topics covered.

I also got married recently. July 12th, 2008, to be exact, to a very lovely woman who I adore. Getting used to married life is a challenge, but we’re smoothing out some of the bumps and I’m looking forward to a long, long future with the love of my life.

So yeah, nothing exciting going on. Nothing at all.

Nope.

Categories
personal school

Educational Success

Cumulative GPA: 3.96

It was the first term did me in, and in particularly, one horrible partner. Oh well, them’s the breaks. I don’t think school grades are any indication at all of how intelligent someone is or how successful they’ll be, but gosh darn it I just spent two years and lots of moneys to get that degree and I want to brag a little bit!

Also it means I can disregard those horrible dreams I’d been having about completely messing up a final assignment, or missing some sneaky assignment entirely. That will be nice. The best reward, of course, is simply being done with school.

Categories
olympia personal poetic

It’s Oly Time

Miles and miles beneath the wheels,
we made it back under a shining sun,
mostly – but buffeted by biting winds –
it didn’t even snow on us ’til Washington.

And now home.
Like an ointment I wait for it to sink in,
to fill the vacancies and mend the lacerations,
to calm and to nourish and to fill –
I’ll overflow with everything that’s been lacking –
I’ll merge my Dionysus with my Apollo
and find peace in my passion and
slumber in my wine.

As I sleep, dreams of assignments overdue,
assignments I’ve already done,
assignments who may only haunt me through ghosts.
I’ve overcome them all.

Home.
I’ll never ride out, now,
without knowing when and how I’ll return.

Categories
personal

On the road again again again

It seems like I’ve hit the road a lot over the past few years. Oh well. I think this will be the last time for awhile, anyway. We’re heading out tomorrow. Oly, here we come! 🙂

Categories
personal

The yearly report.

fish at old school

Today I turned twenty-eight.

It’s been a good year.

Categories
personal poetic

A Suit and a Haircut

Yesterday I bought a suit and a haircut,
and now I’ve got the world on a string.
At least until the string’s cut,
then it won’t mean a thing.

Interviews, moving, assignments,
fond farewells and
fond hellos
and
the

d
i
s
t
a
n
c
e

that beckons like a drum,
that thrums through the wires;
the distance between home and home.

It was never a choice,
but it was always hard not choosing.

Categories
music personal

Easter melody

I was playing around learning “Hit Me Baby One More Time”, and I started playing this instead. Funny how music works.

Happy Easter, whatever it means to you. 🙂

Ahniwa Ferrari – untitled guitar tune
[audio:https://www.ahniwa.com/blog/uploads/easter-melody.mp3]

Categories
personal poetic

a poem, but not for me

apple trees, winter

silence marks keep filling up the page

angled lines of desperation stretch across

margin to margin like evening shadows

reach across the endless winter

what of that pink railway carriage

what of those blue cushions

we’d have never reached out

had we but known

Categories
olympia personal

Flying home

See y’all in Olympia!

Categories
personal poetic

Your Head Asplode

faded diver

Mad-cap dash rap
my brain is a thrummin’
haven’t got the chance
all day to give a crap
to this song I’m strummin’

Mixed up and overmixed
battered up, not buttered
overpopped and underseasoned
my arguments become unreasoned
as I become unspun

Flown over, flown by
days pass by and by
I float awry and wonder

why

why

why

Clueless and getting less
clued in, my mind spins
just three more days now
just three more days now
just three more days now

Second year’s the charm
almost done
overcooked
asploded.

ahniwa ferrari – 13 february 2008

Categories
music personal

And I’m so lonesome now …

I was a high school drama geek and it changed my life. Before drama I was quiet, shy — painfully shy — and had no luck with the ladies. Somehow, being involved in acting changed all that, and as I became more confident and sure of myself, life in general got a whole lot better. It’s funny how that works.

The only really sad part about this story is that I never learned how to act. Despite the many things I gained from being in drama, I really don’t think acting ability was one of them, and I feel like a lot of this has to do with our drama teacher, who we (dis)affectionately referred to as “The Beast.” I’m not sure why, except the fact that she was rather beastly. In her theater, acting ability was always secondary to being able to project and to knowing your lines. Which is fine, sure. Those are good skills. But for those of us who had a talent for remembering lines, and had learned how to project, her lessons were wasteful and superfluous. And we never learned any, you know, acting skills.

All of this just to get to the point that the only good thing I ever learned from the beast, really, is that no matter how you feel your performance will turn out; indeed, even if you know that your performance is going to suck, a lot, you should never start apologizing before you’ve even begun. Never tell people you’re going to suck. Let them figure it out, and who knows, maybe they’ll like you anyway. Somehow. Maybe you don’t suck as much as you thought you sucked. Who knows.

So I won’t say that the song I’ve linked below here sucks. Because it doesn’t. I will say that I’m not the greatest singer, but I hit a great Jack White note in there somewhere, and I can learn to be satisfied with that.

Ahniwa Ferrari — I’m so lonesome now
[audio:https://www.ahniwa.com/blog/uploads/im-so-lonesome-now.mp3]

Categories
personal poetic school

Two Weeks

daisiesonawall

two weeks

it’s like a whisper
it’s less than
it may never come
it certainly can’t arrive soon enough

two weeks

and this world forgotten
this world of the grind
of hybrid solutions to indelible problems
of trying to bury myself between the lines

two weeks

for two weeks i will
rise above this endlessness
i will learn again
to speak without whispering

ahniwa ferrari — 05 february 2008

Categories
music personal

New strings, same fingers

guitar strings

I briefly related my harrowing adventure, out into the ice, wind, sleet, and cold, to purchase new guitar strings for my lovely rosewood guitar. The strings I got are the same kind I’ve been using since I discovered them, recommended to me years ago in a music shop in Port Townsend, I think, back in 1997 or so. I don’t know if they’re really the best strings out there, but they do keep a nice tone for a long time, which is essential for a musician as lazy as myself, and one therefore prone to not changing strings for significant lengths of time.

I bought two sets of strings, polyweb lights and polyweb mediums, and put the lights on first. My fingers are out of practice, so I thought maybe lighter strings would do a little less damage for now. They sound great, of course, as new strings should. Bright and clear. Once they’ve worn in a bit, I imagine I’ll like how they sound even more. I usually do.

Now, if only they made me a better guitar player. Here’s a little sample of a tune I’ve been working on. My favorite at the moment.

Ahniwa Ferrari – Untitled Guitar Tune
[audio:https://www.ahniwa.com/blog/uploads/tune04.mp3]

Categories
montreal music personal

Inclement Weather Blues

It was raining when I went to class this morning. Muggy and nearly warm and I began to sweat halfway through my not-even-fifteen minute daily commute. For kicks I checked the weather on my laptop in class, and saw that there were two weather warnings. Weird, I thought, it seems so temperate. The weather people were right, though. All that rain flash froze as the temperature fell to -10C, and the windy picked up to steady gusts of 90kmph (nearly 60mph).

The result? I practically had to ice skate over to the Archambault to at last get new guitar strings, and everyone’s trash bins are merrily ice skating around as well, usually right into the middle of the street. Thank goodness they’d already been emptied, I suppose, or it would be trash-a-go-go.

Now I’ve got new guitar strings, cold cheeks, two new blues guitar books, cold fingers, and a sweet 10-disc set of old blues songs. Oh, and a cold tookus. Whatever that is. Once I thaw out, maybe I’ll even give ’em a shot.

Categories
libraries love montreal olympia personal

All of me

In which the author goes on at length about not very much at all and yet still somehow covers a significant distance in both time and space, and most likely tries your patience in the process.

So there I was, a brand new shiny blog and the year was 2004 and I thought Oh my, how I’ll dazzle them. And I was dazzling, occasionally, though I often blathered on insubstantively, and rarely had anything of general interest to say. But this was a blog, and it was new, and other people were exploring it as well and we were all trying to figure out the right things to say in this venue, with these people reading that we didn’t know, some that we did. Who did we right to? To whom did we write? Why did we sound pretentious when we were only trying our best to use the proper grammar?

Some of us figured it out, I think. Perhaps they just faked it well, all the time feeling the same insecurities about their thoughts, about the personalness of an enterprise like a blog, as well as the publicness. Personal blogs are a paradox. LiveJournal seemed like a solution: personal blogs that were less public. It was all the same in the end, though. Who was it for?

I fell off the blog-wagon entirely. Multiple times. Mostly onto my head. Often I thought to myself, There are probably at least several people in the world who do not have a blog, and I thought that perhaps I could be one of them. But I wanted to blog. I really did. Maybe it would be more true to say that I wanted to write; one is strictly the other, but not when you reverse the two.

Up to speed. Right. The part where I talk about me. What I’m doing. How I feel about what I’m doing. How I feel about what I’m feeling. Good writers take their lives and turn them into stories. I guess they don’t even have to write them down, technically. Some people are just good story-tellers. I’m a decent writer, sure … but stories? Who knows.

So, anyway … I was living in Ohio, right, in Oberlin, and trying to pretend to like Ohio when really I never felt like I fit in. Getting work was hard and I didn’t know anyone except for my girlfriend and her family and for some reason, having left the comfortable womb of college and armed with a BA, I had no idea how to make new friends. I tried working in restaurants, but Ohio had this ridiculous server wage of like $2.50 an hour and the place I managed to find work was strange, poorly managed, and fairly unpopular. The only perk was that I got lots of free scones.

I got my first library job in Ohio, due to this horrible restaurant business and my desperate need to do something different. It was small, part-time, low on responsibility and fairly cookie-cutter. Alright, so it was basically retail work, but it was in a library after all and I thought that was pretty damn cool. Cool enough, at least, so that when a full-time library job opened up in the neighboring town I took it and never looked back.

By 2006 I was living back in Washington and had experience working in no less than … four libraries. Good for me, sure, but I’m getting off track with the library thing.

By 2006 I was living back in Washington. I had ended a three-and-a-half year relationship. We had ended. I had no more reason to be in Ohio after that, and fled back to Washington, moved in with two guys, and spent some serious time being confused by the female gender. Breaking up is liberating. It’s heart-breaking, and it sucks, and you feel like you’ve wasted time and that you’ll never find the person that is right for you, but all the same it’s liberating and at times you feel like your entire future is wide open and you can do anything at all that might strike your fancy. The problem is that my fancy was inordinately dull.

That’s not true. My fancy was pretty … well, eccentric. My actions were what was mostly mundane, but that makes all the difference. All the same, I went through a series of … relationships involving poor judgment on my part, and some that involved fine judgment but just didn’t work out anyway. I dated people much older than I was, much younger, and more or less in between. I never did become the slut I always kind of wanted to be, but then it’s so far against my nature that the chances of it ever happening, despite the earnestness of my desire for it, was always slim at best. All the better.

By 2006 I was not only living back in Washington, but I was living on my own for the first time and I was absolutely loving it. I was dancing, I was feeling attractive, I was accepted to graduate school at a major Canadian university to get a Masters degree in Library and Information Studies (i.e. I was goin’ to library school), and I had successfully broken enough hearts to feel as though maybe I’d burned off all the good karma I’d earned in my life and could finally start the life of crime I’d always dreamed of. Of which I’d always dreamed. Fucking prepositions.

By 2006 I was living in Washington and I joined a softball team where I was the pitcher and despite my best intentions I fell in love with a girl I’d just met, because who was I to fall in love with a girl when I was about to mosey off to Montreal and become an actual, factual librarian, and who was she to fall in love with me when she knew I was about to do such a thing anyway; but there we were, regardless, and by July of 2006 I was living in Washington and in love and ready to mosey off to Montreal for library school and I found myself proposing one quiet evening as we lay in bed with all the sincerity and love I ever knew I could possibly feel.

By September of 2006 I was loading up my brand new Scion breadbasket with all of my worldly possessions and moseying off to Montreal as I knew I would, though at this point it felt much less like a mosey and much more like a very important and serious trip that I had to take before I would be able to move on with my life in any meaningful way. For clarification, saying mosey is much more light-hearted than saying a very important and serious trip that I had to take before I would be able to move on with my life in any meaningful way. And so you can only imagine how it actually felt at the time.

This was no breakup. It wasn’t liberating, at least not in the same way, nor did I want it to be. It was a new adventure and sure, exciting, but also kind of “meh” because I’d found this great thing, this person I’d been looking for my entire life, and yet somehow almost as soon as we met I had to say “All right, well … see ya later, then,” and go trekking off into another country and for a two-year commitment, no less. Yeah, sure, Montreal is magical. I don’t say it with disdain, just the simple knowledge that yeah, it’s true but it doesn’t matter so much to me anymore as maybe it did right at first.

Since first arriving in Montreal I’ve gone through the adventure stage. It’s well over. It was fun and all, a new city with new customs, setting up new bank accounts was fun and getting a cell phone was fun and finding places to eat and buy things and going into bookstores with books in French was all fun and good and new; of course school was a big deal, too, being back in it after so long and wondering what everyone would be like and finding out that while library students are exceptional people, and interesting to a one, that a feeling of impermanence even early on pervaded everything and I felt nearly incapable of making friends as I once had back in college. We were all adults now, our lives completely underway, and it seemed like we were so much pickier about who got in and how far. Maybe it’s all just perspective. I don’t know.

Montreal is almost over, now. Library school almost done, and this mosey/muchlongerdescription thing that I’ve done is ready to buy its one-way ticket back west and bury itself beneath the damp rainforest peat of the Pacific Northwest, never to mosey again. At least, not alone and not for such a long time. Some places feel like home, after all, for whatever reason. Home is the place where your heart resonates and where you can feel the intent of everything around you: every raindrop, every leaf that falls from every tree, every bite of food and every dance is something that adds into the story of you in that place. That home.

Montreal is almost over now and I’m pulled so strongly to the west that concentration is difficult and I feel like a climber who has gotten himself onto a difficult ledge after a long climb and though he only has a little ways left to the peak he’s already spent so much energy that he doesn’t know how he’ll ever finish. Even though he can see the peak, now, part of him doubts that he’ll ever really reach it; he’s climbed so long and hard already, and maybe he never even really wanted to go climbing in the first place.

But Montreal is almost over now and with everything inside me that is capable of being certain I know that it will end, that I will reach that peak, that I’ll turn my eyes west and then I’ll turn my body west. I’ll find solace in the cool Pacific winds and in the warmth of this love that has sustained me so well for so long and that finally, soon, I will be able to devote the attention to that it deserves.

Montreal is almost over now and most of the time I believe that we will, all of us that have been involved in this story in some way or another, be better for it having happened. In the meantime I’ll occupy myself with the little stories, the day-to-day accomplishments between now and then, and the soft moments of sweetness that rest even within these, the most frenetic of days.

Categories
montreal personal

Spiteful Mistress

Montreal is a spiteful mistress. Feeling my heart turning from her, my warmth moving west, she lashes out at me with all her fury. She opens my windows, destroying the solace of my home as I come home to strange energies and missing money; she turns me away from lines I spent time and money to reach, mocking my unfit paperwork; she soils my clothes, even as I’m washing them. Her energy and mine no longer run in parallel, as is apparent with every fickle wrong she turns my way. But she can’t reach me now, not really. I’m already too far away, already awash in feelings of home, of belonging, of being in the arms of my true beloved.

I console you, Montreal, and beg your patience. I’ll leave your shores soon enough, and not return if you won’t have me.

Categories
personal

Ready for Spring

Three weeks passed like geese overhead, now echoing quietly over the bay as they fade out of sight. Tomorrow I too fly, though eastward and north, not south, and to neither warmer climes nor a warmer spirit. Visits are rejuvenating and more, but are visits, all the same, all the more difficult the more they feel like home.

In April, as water clears the soil and the earliest blooms begin to glisten, I’ll throw off my winter coat and parade my own new blossoms, new papers and new skills; a new life, completely underway and yet just now beginning.

Categories
love personal poetic

All The Things We Forget To Say

All the things we forget to say
fall between the cushions
hide nestled in lint and loose change
grow warm and complacent and dusty
and we never think to clean them off and speak them.

All the things we forget to say
fall somewhere within the distance
between here and there
shimmy loose in the abstraction of cords and wires
and we never think to search them out and speak them.

All the things we forget to say
subside quietly into the sea
sink gracefully through the currents
come to rest at the bottom of oceans
where we dive for them and find
all the things we thought to say
and all the things worth saying.

04 Jan 2008 — Ahniwa Ferrari

Categories
personal

Observations

Tomorrow my first paper is due.

I still don’t have internet.

The leaves are turning; school’s started for real, now.

Categories
personal

The impenetrable sadness of parting

Today’s my second to last day at work. Tomorrow will be my last day at work.

In a week I’ll drive east once more. Once. Then, in April, I’ll be done. A real boy librarian. Right now I’m just more library pupa.

I have no words of revelation. No catharsis. Just the impenetrable sadness of parting, a nearly intangible twinge of excitement, and a distant longing to return.