A library music video?
(warning: annoyingly catchy)
Month: March 2006
Egads!
I’ve spent four hours already today trying to work out student loan applications. It’s a process that’s involved three seperate phone calls and one call-back left on my voicemail, about six websites (with three open at any one time for referencing purposes), four different login (and registration) processes, and a lot of (probably annoying) finger tapping while I was on hold. Good thing it’s spring break this week and the library is quiet.
In any case, I have successfully (I think) navigated the maze of applying for a student loan. Been awhile since I’ve done that, and it’s a lot tougher applying to a school in another country. The really annoying part is that I can’t get my student visa until I can prove financial means to pay for school, and they’re in no hurry at all to tell me how much they’re going to give me. This will result in frayed nerves for the Ahniwa, I’m afraid.
I’m anxious about it as it is (though super excited), which probably accounts for my dream last night. I was supposed to catch a plane to Paris, but it was the day of my flight and I didn’t have a ride to the airport. Around 6:40pm (in my dream), someone said to me, “Wasn’t your flight supposed to take off at 6:00?”. Somehow, I figured if I could just make it to the airport, it wouldn’t matter if I was late, but I never did get there before I woke up. I had another weird airport dream pretty recently. Not exactly sure what’s up with that.
Cross your fingers for me. I’m more than happy to owe another $40k in loans if I get to live in Montreal for two years and get my masters degree. Especially now that so much has been leading up to it.
Categories
Feeling much better today.
I worked out what was aggravating me so much the other day, for the most part. The fear can be a sneaky ass ninja, but I’ve got rockets. All this revolution makes my stomach floppy.
Boo. Yeay? Honestly, I’m not sure.
But at least I’ve got energy again. 🙂
Stupid feelings.
For anyone interested in blogging, here is an excellent article from the Financial Times.
Which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere – tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.
Two men whisper on the back roads,
shoulders hunched;
their collars are up around their necks
and their dogs drawn in on a short leash.
In the frigid dawn their breath
draws clouds against the gray horizon.
Their eyes scan the trees,
above the hills,
and they are wary.
Their dogs are restless
and completely silent.
—-
Did you ever hear that Postal Service song? How did it go? Right.
I want so badly to believe that “there is truth, that love is real”
And I want life in every word to the extent that it’s absurd
I know you’re wise beyond your years, but do you ever get the fear
That your perfect verse is just a lie you tell yourself to help you get by?
When I think of “the fear”, I think of this and I think of “fear and loathing in las vegas”, not the title but a line from the movie, damned if I can remember it.
When I think of the fear. No, when I get the fear, like I can feel creeping up sometimes still, like today, my eyes feel too far back in my head. My pant legs feel too short and my shoes ridiculous. All these things that I want to do, but none of them energize me. The thought of these actions inexplicibly turns from exciting to draining, and I’d just like to lay down and sleep for a long, long time.
I make poor decisions when I get the fear. I quit dancing. I stay in more often than not. I start to judge the world, and worse, myself, with a scale that nothing can stand up to.
Indécise – Coralie Clément
Peut-être oui, peut-être non
Ca m’est égal de toute façon
À gauche, à droite, ça, je n’sais pas
De haut en bas, oui, pourquoi pas
Un jour où l’autre, on verra bien.
Toujours remettre au lendemain
Ce que je peux faire ce matin
Je ne sais pas me prendre en main…
Sometimes I know where the fear comes from, and why it comes, and what it wants. Sometimes it’s so simple.
Today, the fear is a fucking ninja. It’s sneaky and black and pointy, but I’ve seen its traces. Fuck you, the fear. Come back some other day.
Today. Today I don’t want you.
Even two days later,
my bed still smells like beauty.
My couch smells like me.
Aside from the fact that I shouldn’t be “getting with” anyone right now, what all with leaving the city, state, and country in about five months, there are certain people that I REALLY should not be getting with, for other very valid reasons.
Of course, those are exactly the people that I am insanely attracted to. Grrrrr.
So Friday night my friend Amy and I drove down to Portland to go to the Portland Lindy Exchange. First off, the Crystal Ballroom is mad cool. The floor is air-cushioned, which offers the effect something like that of dancing on a very firm trampoline. On the faster songs it was fun sometimes to stand back and watch the floor ripple. Aside from the visual effect, it was a dream to dance on, considering how much give the floor offers, and thus takes off your joints. I danced with people from New England, Chicago, and a flurry of other places. Had I known that there was an after-dance (from midnight to 6am) I might have geared up the energy to go, but as it was I was tired, and we left Portland around midnight:thirty.
Amy and I wandered around Olympia pretty much all day on Saturday, which was really nice. We had breakfast at Darby’s and later went to Chopsticks for Bubble Tea and green tea icecream. Seperately, good. Together, entirely too much sweet. It seemed like EVERYWHERE we went, every store and shop and restaurant was playing swing music. It was the soundtrack for our day, and all I wanted to do was dance. It’s hard to get a shy girl to dance with you in an antique store, though, where things might be broken.
Saturday evening I dropped Amy off at her house on the way to Seattle, and arrived at a party around 10:30 in the p.m. for some jiggy conversational action. The girl throwing the party is a friend of my sister’s, and used to be my babysitter. She’s a Cornish grad, so she knows all sorts of interesting artists and dancers and such types, which made for a fun crowd. Her downstairs neighbors are a band, so they came up and played, and there were a few dance performances at points that were fun to watch. We left after a couple hours and I crashed at my sister’s place.
Sunday we went to breakfast at Mae’s and then went ice skating. It’s the second time in my life I’ve ever been ice skating, and though it was hella fun, I think I prefer roller-skating, honestly. Plus, I had to pay constant attention to not run over little kids. Which is true when rollerskating as well, but seems more dangerous when you have sharp metal objects attached to your locomotive shanks. I guess, for the kid, it would be the difference between a crushing death or a slashing/stabby death. Hmmmmm…
Later, we went and watched “Night Watch” at the Neptune Theater in the U. District. I liked it a lot, and I’m interested now to see how the rest of the trilogy plays out. It’s nice to see good films coming out of Russia, and it was fun to listen to Russian. As a Russian film MADE to be seen by an American audience, they got to plan the subtitles out ahead of time (rather than just tack them on as an afterthought), and therefore had some really neat subtitle effects that I’ve never seen used before. Some characters practically gathered their energy and shouted the subtitle at the other character, in a very illustrative fashion (giant subtitle lashing across the screen), while some dripped, and some glowed, and while most were white, some were red or orange. In a word, it was neat to see subtitles included as an actual part of the artistic process.
I got home around midnight on Sunday, and went straight to work Monday morning. My bed smells like dangerous dreams, and I’m constantly torn between throwing myself into them or holding them at arm’s length. It’s all completely ridiculous.
Just like anything worthwhile.
.
I get off work in about an hour, and then I’m going to swing up to Tacoma to pick up my friend Amy, and then we’re gonna head down to Portland to go dancing at the Crystal Ballroom. The Crystal is huge (they cater events for up to 1000 people), and as the Portland Lindy Exchange is happening there this weekend, there will be good dancers from all over the world. The Solomon Douglas Swingtet is playing, dancing goes until midnight, and then a long drive back north. It should be a super-awesome time, and I’d be more excited about it if I weren’t sore and tired. I’ve been dancing a ton, and not sleeping enough, lately.
The funny thing is, I don’t think I’m sore from the actual dancing. I think I’m sore from all the driving involved to get to the dances. I think it’s time to invent dancing as a form of transportation. You know, like the elevator in Thoroughly Modern Millie, except maybe a little bit faster, and it would be nice if we could get our own lane on the freeway.
.
I can be compulsive, but usually not in a manic fashion. Obsessive? Absolutely. The subjects vary, but the ones that come to mind immediately are:
- Webcomics.
- Ideas for websites.
- Ideas for La Casa.
- Swing Dancing.
- Librarianism.
- Webcomics.
You’ll notice that, sadly, blogging is not on that list. I’d love to be obsessed with blogging, but I’m not sure if it will happen in this current format. My idea, currently (and this does fall into the “Ideas for websites” obsession), is to create a seperate space for purely personal, day-to-day things (probably on livejournal, which seems to cater to the format), and another space for something more of a professional (meaning, subject-oriented) blog. I have some fun ideas for what I’d like to write about, mostly technology, information science, design, librarianism, and webcomics. It would be a fun cross-spectrum for fun people, I think.
I have two other ideas for what I think would be good websites. The nice part is that once set-up they would, for the most part, run themselves. The not-so-nice part is that I really have no clue how to set them up. The ideas and the execution, I think, would be fairly simple. Unfortunately, fairly simple is generally beyond me at the moment when it comes to web design. I’m decent with CSS and for the most part I “understand” things. Understanding does not a good web designer make. Not by itself, in any case. The point? The point is, if you’re good with web design, and might be interested in collaborating with me to get this stuff going, I’m happy to pitch my ideas to you. Understand, they’re not “exciting”. I don’t have the next MySpace lurking in my brain. They’re simple, but I think they’ll work.
Tonight I’m going dancing in Portland. Tomorrow night, to a party in Seattle. Sunday night I may go dancing in Seattle. Monday night, more dancing. Tuesday and Wednesday: dancing. Thursday? Thursdays I crawl into a hole and sleep, or sometimes I go play poker and drink beer. And I wonder why time seems to slip by so quickly … oh wait, no I don’t. The answer is dancing.
Dancing and webcomics. The two best answers out there.