Woolgathering

Philadelphia

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:37:43 GMT

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where and Eidolon named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wierd clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space—out of Time.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
for the dews that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters—lone and dead,—
Their still waters—still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily.

from Dream-Land
Edgar Allan Poe
1844
(complete work)

Haunted Poe was tremendous. It struck the right balance between farcical and grim without feeling too much like a haunted house. The costumes and decorations were good and ghastly. The details all felt right, like the slowly creeping vines, the bubbling mist, and the insectoid catacombs, but some of the bigger designs could've been more impressive. Prospero's masquerade, for instance, seemed a bit spartan. The actors were excellent, in particular the ghostly Poe (though his reading of The Raven threw me a bit—I'm used to a more Basil Rathbone-esque interpretation), and the murderer tormented by the heartbeat beneath the floorboards, who looked like he could explode at any second. Hands down, the best scene was a deliciously eerie epiphany of Poe's preoccupation with the death of his beloved. Even though the whole show lasted about 45 minutes, there was so much material left unscratched I could've probably gone another hour in there.

Philadelphia

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:31:38 GMT

So began the pouring.

Light was weakening.

It was final.

Philadelphia

Mon, 04 May 2009 03:51:52 GMT

A brief list of things I've been thinking about buying but haven't:

A bigger TV

More silverware

A car

The print editions of Order of the Stick

A new vacuum cleaner

One of those things you put underneath a rug to prevent it from sliding around on the floor

A new computer

Another CD-sleeve binder

Summer shoes

A smart-phone

A replacement alarm clock (to fix the fact that the display is invisible in the dark—not because I'm sick of the Celsius thermometer)

An updated copy of Quicken/QuickBooks

Bedclothes

A pennywhistle in the key of C.

April is National Poetry Month

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 02:10:27 GMT

For the one boy –
A story.
For the other boy –
A different story.

The Boyhood of Raleigh
Adrian Rice
after Millais

Musical Interlude

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:57:45 GMT

The episode “Playford Ball Countdown and Piano Rental” will resume following a short thought.

A lot of times I feel like I don’t practice playing the pennywhistle “enough.” I’d say that on a good day I spend about thirty minutes to an hour practicing old things I know and learning something new. On an okay day I just practice old tunes. On a bad day I don’t play it at all. I have more okay days than bad days and more bad days than good days.

I know a few musicians read this. What’s your routine? How do you work it? Does this even make sense to ask people who are, you know, good?

Oh, and you know what else? Been thinkin’ about getting a C whistle.

Musical Instruments

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 02:19:07 GMT

I know I just put up this whole thing about how the melodeon is the
coolest and how the world will be a better place once I get one or
whatever. But here is the awful truth: I am on fire for the
pennywhistle. It is hard for me to put it down. Just now I had to
promise it I’d be back soon when I came over here to type this.

Almost certainly the best $10 I’ve spent in a good long time. Even if
it had been one of those tunable, hand-crafted, solid African
blackwood whistles with a custom thumbhole that costs $300 and has a
two-year waiting period, it would still have been a deal with the
amount of use I’ve gotten out of this thing in the past two years.

Personal

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:56:42 GMT

SWM ISO musical instrument for possible LTR. IPT traditional music, WT consider other genres. Must be able to play many keys in many locations. WAA.

May Day

Thu, 08 May 2008 01:51:09 GMT

Favorite Moments on the First of May

Running around the gazebo instead of doing a hey. Number of children collided with in the process: almost one.

The look the security guard at Barnes & Noble gave me.

Swinging sticks at eighth graders while ever-so-slightly under the influence.

Leaping with no hands (safety -- who needs it?)

Watching the kids loving the fool.

Doing contra and morris dances in the cafe while dodging the waiter. As though we didn’t bring enough havoc to that place by our numbers alone.

Morris-Garland-Morris back-to-back-to-back.

Dancing Nutting Girl in Rittenhouse Square at the haggard end of exhaustion, when everyone was dead tired, and mustering the final reserves of energy to absolutely nail it better than any of us would have at dawn.

Intentionally mispronouncing words.

Somehow managing to be involved in every team that was dancing post-Belmont.

Honorable Mention

A couple of Bryn Mawr students' reaction to Longsword.

A Mixed Bag

The Three Musketeers set (ouch).

Waiting for breakfast ("You guys look like you're at a funeral.")

Music

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 03:36:43 GMT

I have made some discoveries in the past couple of days. The ever-kind stowaway_geek lent me his 120-key piano accordion. It is crisp and clean and it has that slightly marbled look on its keys and I’m told it has some wolfish notes but, to be perfectly honest I think it sounds smooth and accordion-like. I can only really play it slowly. A properly played slow accordion’s sound should resemble that of a ghost sighing through a hollow tree, an alien flower exhaling, or a cathedral organ winding down after nightfall.

Of course I cannot play it anywhere near properly. See, I’m used to playing an instrument with six holes. The massive accordion, whose bulk is a subject I shall perhaps discuss later, has about a 30 keys and 120 buttons. When I played a wrong note on the whistle, I usually thought “oops, I did that wrong, let me try the correct one instead.” On the accordion it took me an hour to even play a wrong note because I was trying to figure out which keys are which.

Though at least with that side of the bellows I could figure it out. I am sure my attempts to decipher the 120 button chord side amused my neighbors at 11:30 PM last night.

Countertop

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:40:27 GMT

The beast was stalking. Its spindly legs carried it over burnt metal and charred slag. It latched thin claws onto a pipe whose surface dimly pulsed with latent energy. Arm over arm it ascended as lightning returning to its clouds. It flashed by a tangle of copper mesh, a relic from wars fought generations ago. Many a brave one had been thwarted by the immovable, inedible metallic snare. This beast knew better.

In a moment it felt the cool smoothness of the surface at night. It had no fear in darkness. In the black obscurity nothing could see it, or follow it through the trackless labyrinths to which it could escape at a moment’s breath. At night it was free to plunder, pillage, and befoul all in its sight with ghastly deposits. A glimmer of malignancy flitted through its bestial synapses. Its intellect lacked, but it could revel like a dumb brute in the chaos and pollution its exploits would wreak upon civilization.

The true nature of the civilized and the rational were alien to the beast. It understood little more than to walk and to eat and to shit and to breed. But amidst the detritus of its troglodytic brain, deep in the unhewn bowels of its neural chassis, was the thought that sought to tear down the structures and works of civilization. With every chomp of the incisor, whether upon cornered insects or stolen crumbs, the beast believed it was one bite closer to gnawing away the keystone of the arch of humanity, whose bricks are knowledge and whose mortar is reason, and toppling the world itself into numb anarchy.

But none of this was on what passed for its mind. It through the hunting grounds, an ever-changing landscape of metal, glass and stranger substances yet more alien. Not once had the beast stalked these grounds for prey and encountered the same trees, the same towering reflectors, the same pools of swamp-water. Always was it different, and so it was today. The hunting grounds proved barren and defiled, made rank with compressed nodules of guano and coprolite. The beast’s skittering gait halted momentarily and the corners of its mouth pulled back revealing the fiendish incisors. Its pitch-dark eyes took in the ruin it had caused. Amidst dome of glass and tree of metal lay the fruits of its mightily labor. Across the barrens were strewn noxious and vile remnants. And upon the open plains lay—something new. The beast cocked its matted neck towards the odorous monolith, scribing its scent and shape upon primitive memory before the odors of fresh prey assaulted its chasmous nostrils. Hunger and thirst propelled it onward.

The beast did not know how it first reached the summit of the peaks. The twisting trail rose higher than the warm caverns were deep, and the trek was more arduous. But at the summit lay treasures beyond any beast’s ineffable dreams. Time passed rapidly and the beast could feel the wind-currents of the world shifting as it crested the peaks. And it was there on the plateau above the hunting grounds that it found its prize: a storehouse of leftover grain. The beast’s claws tore open the feeble door and it squeezed its mammoth bulk into the trash-chute of the incinerator where the crumbs and morsels remained when the larger pieces had been removed. There it worked itself into a squealing frenzy of chewing and squirming and sucking stone after stone of hardened flecks into its dripping gullet. The maw of the beast was as a whirlwind of saliva and vomit as the insatiable gut of the wretched beast cracked its whip upon its undeveloped brain. The appetite was all; existence was to feed.

The beast exited the refuse heap in a stuporous haze and descended from the peaks. Its bloated haunches made the steep decline more hazardous but the beast was cunning. It crept back across the open plains and again noticed the gray monolith jutting out of the ground. From within there was a most delectable smell. It was luscious and raw, like the dust of the earth from which all life is formed, but somehow crafted and delicate, as though massaged by unseen hands for ages in darkness before emerging and taking flight in utmost perfection. It was wholly unnatural, and wholly irresistible. The beast’s stomach spurred its brain towards the side of the stone-gray rock, where a dark opening emanated the delightful smell. The beast placed a greasy paw upon the floor of the cave within, sending tremors throughout the interior. It was unstable. Yet the scent drew the beast onward and onward and paw over paw it went upward into the unnatural darkness and the scent was stronger and stronger and stronger. Then with a crash that shook the foundations of its world, the gate slammed shut behind the beast with a sound that was at once the jaws of Thanatos snapping at its soul and the Supreme Sapience laughing as its fist closes upon primordial chaos.

And the beast would awaken in a place far away, free to revel in its own nature and never to trouble civilization again.

On Transfers

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 02:17:19 GMT

The real reason SEPTA should not get rid of paper transfers:

It's something I would do if I were put in charge.

Philadelphia

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 12:44:55 GMT

The sweltering week. The week of smoldering asphalt. Windless week. The week of the never-evaporating.

My fan has become my best friend. Cold water, my god. Mosquitoes thrive on my feverish blood. I would wage unholy war upon the crawling and flying vermin, but my energy has fled for cooler climes. I get tired after walking for thirty seconds.

In the past, people must have fought wars to escape weather as stagnant and sapping as this. I wish I could as well.

Words

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 03:45:44 GMT

I am normally a fan of a good, solid portmanteau. Yet there’s something about “ginormous” that kind of throws me off. Gigantic and enormous mean the same thing. Is there really a point to sticking the two of them together? If something is gigantic and it’s enormous, that seems to be the same as if it were just one or the other.

Still, it didn’t stop Merriam-Webster.

I feel the same way about “guesstimate.” And I’d prefer it if no one mentioned “crunk.”

Southeastern Pennsylvania

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 03:13:43 GMT

I’ve realized that all I ever write about on this platform anymore is my annoyance with transportation. I’m still going to do that, only this time I’ve translated it into an indecipherable code.

His home had become a swamp. During his absence, the colossal stones which made up man’s marvel, the Great Road, had crumbled. The trees thickened their roots and like parasites the tendrils sought the heart of the rock. For centuries the mind had worked to layer conglomerate upon granite upon bricks of hornblende and monoliths of metallic osmium, and within weeks the rapacious, insensate forest had ground it to dust.

Bubbles breached the surface of a still pool and ripples lapped the fringes of moss and tails of lizards hanging off the shore. The stench and the heat and the tumult were overpowering. Armies of insects overwhelmed each other in root canyons. A tapir collapsed in a bush, victim of a sweltering chase. Swarms of howling birds fluttered overhead, flitting their dark green shadows where beams breached the canopy. Green was the color of the air and sky, the color of the frogs’ motionless eyes, the color of the ancient moss upon still older bark, the color of the airborne motes which once were the Great Road. Black was the color of the bubbles which now burst in the clear water. And every droplet that breathed its first and last upon the still surface was a thought of the deep below, the untouched autochthonous force whose hand moves nature, and whose memory has no beginning.

Stillness

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 03:16:13 GMT

In case anyone is still wondering, the beastly commute I have described continues to endure, though perhaps less annoyingly. It reached rock bottom a couple of weeks ago when I attempted to reach an event in center city that started at 7:00 PM and was late for it. After missing three trains I began to scribble some venomous invective while on the most wretched bus ride I’ve ever experienced, but the more I thought about it, I couldn’t really muster any real anger.

I used to summon great globs of annoyance. I called it “hate” but it was really crystallized annoyance. Yet at some point in college I witnessed the same venom gushing from the mouths of others and henceforth I’ve been unable to truly muster a truly emotional beam of destruction. The irrational and illogical can demolished without guilt, but it’s harder now for me to focus on anything else. There was no illogic to me being late, it simply was.

I feel like I have had very little to say for the past month. This disturbs me a little.

Ambler

Wed, 16 May 2007 01:50:21 GMT

Yesterday, for the first time ever, a mere eight months after first procuring a pennywhistle, I played for a dance.

It was “Balance the Straw” for the Renegade Morris team rehearsal.

Fern Rock

Sat, 12 May 2007 13:08:43 GMT

Transportation Post Scriptum

One of the things I enjoy about my commute is that I often run into the Sports People. A while ago it was the Eagles people and now it’s the Phillies people. These festively colored and exuberant folks gather at Fern Rock Transportation Center (an inappropriate name if I ever heard one—though it does sound nicer than “Concrete Parking Lot Transportation Center”) to take advantage of the special express trains that run directly to the stadium. I enjoy these trains too because they get me home faster. As an aside, SEPTA employees often don’t know what to call these trains. Yesterday it was announced as a “Phillies Tripper,” which sounds like something else if you say it fast.

The Sports People themselves amuse me. Many of them have clearly never delved into the sordid operations of the Broad Street Line before. Yesterday there was a group of college-looking girls, one of whom remarked as the train arrived “ugh, orange? We get the ugly train.” Her friend replied that she thinks all of them are the same color. The usual sullen commuter crowd is not quite so entertaining.

Memory, Reprise

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 02:36:00 GMT

Although I am loathe to use this journal for the mere posting of links, the redirection of a microcurrent of internet traffic, there is a miraculous confluence of National Poetry Month and my prior thoughts on the loss of memory that causes the appropriateness of this link to overwhelm my greater sensibilities. In my other entry, I could only conjure up one poem that dealt with the inevitability of forgetting. Unfortunately for most readers, “Le Calmant” (The Calming) is in French and slightly too lugubrious. Here is one that's more on-topic:

Forgetfulness by Billy Collins.

Reading Material

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 01:05:09 GMT

I do most of my reading on the bus. Often I will try to read in another place, which is my couch. Only rarely do I succeed at this endeavor without eventually falling asleep against my will. I’ll think “oh, this book is so good, but the urge to close my eyes is overwhelming. Let me just try it for a second or two.” And then some amount of time passes, between one and five minutes, I imagine, and then I blurrily try to go back to the book. The only reason I think I don’t just fall asleep at that point is that I’m spending a lot of concentration on maintaining the mental illusion that I’m going to keep on reading the book, which means I’m holding it open with my hand. So my little rest wasn’t all that restful and I think “okay, I’ll just put my bookmark in the book and roll over so I’m more comfortable.” I guess I do this with the idea that I’m done reading but I don’t really want to go to bed but I’m not sure why I do it. It will no doubt surprise no one to know that at that point I wake up at 1:15 and all the lights are on and I’m still dressed.

Anyway, I thought I might mention the last couple things I read on the bus and sometimes on the couch.

Roughing It by Mark Twain. This book made me want to travel and was amusing. I feel like he was the master of the sardonic wit. If only my journal entries here could be so entertaining! The trouble with this book is that it also made me feel like the world is bereft of possible adventures, that Twain’s bygone age took with it the possibilities of America the unexplored, America the frontier. Any adventure I could conjure up in this, the age of information, would only be a kid’s trip across the street when stacked next to Roughing It.

Lyonesse by Jack Vance. Apparently my “thing” now is fantasy not done in Tolkien’s style. The story is relatively simple. It serves as a vehicle for moving between a series of folktale inspired encounters whose tones range from magical to mysterious, heroic to hilarious. In the end I suspect the series got a little carried away with itself, though it was certainly unlike anything I’ve read before.

In Lyonesse was beauty enough, men say:
Long Summer loaded the orchards to excess,
And fertile lowlands lengthening far away,
In Lyonesse.

Came a term to that land’s old favoredness:
Past the sea-walls, crumbled in thundering spray,
Rolled the green waves, ravening, merciless.

Through bearded boughs immobile in cool decay,
Where sea-bloom covers corroding palaces,
The mermaid glides with a curious glance to-day,
In Lyonesse.
—Alan Seeger, Lyonesse

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. I’ve seen the movie for this and to me that film is the future version of Conan the Barbarian (interestingly enough, the score for both films was composed by the same man: Basil Poledouris): pure violence and sex. Many so-called serious science fiction fans, readers of “hard sci-fi,” objected to this interpretation. The novel was so much deeper, I am sure they said amongst themselves at their discussion groups. The film is so mindless, so adolescent-teenage-male, etc. I will not argue with the facts: the movie is ridiculous, yet oh so entertaining.

The book, on the other hand, is at its heart a very long description of Mr. Heinlein’s ideal socio-military implementation. This was pretty interesting for a while, and I really enjoyed the trials and travails of “future boot camp” (which, I’ll note, were the only parts of the book deemed worthy enough to make it into the movie). But after a while I truly ceased to care about who outranks whom on a starship and proper etiquette when your superior officer “buys it.” It’s possible I’m not military oriented enough to find it all fascinating and instead have to concentrate on remembering what the difference between a squad, a division, a battalion, and a unit is.

Possession by A.S. Byatt. Apparently my other “thing” is reading novels where you have to have a dictionary on-hand to understand what’s going on (though in the case of Starship Troopers some kind of army handbook might’ve been more apropos). The language used in this book, a love story between two Victorian poets, was tremendous. One could read the book and pine for the lost art of the letter, overtaken now by the “txt,” and lament that the death of language is the death of humanity, a slow unraveling of the mind’s dreams that will leave our race with naught but anemic lips that toil to chirp out straw thoughts. One could.

I also found myself sympathizing with the book’s obvious villain, whose crime was apparently having more money than the rest of the characters. And being American (though he’s from New Mexico—maybe that’s why I don’t hate him).

Anyway, that’s about all I can write about this.

April is National Poetry Month

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 02:00:19 GMT

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn…)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(…that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn…)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn…)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(…that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

— Delmore Schwartz

There was a time when I cared a great deal about the danger of forgetting. I didn’t want to lose anything to an inadequate memory. I’ve become more lax about this. I used to save everything. Went to a play? Save the program. Went to a concert? Save the ticket (I still have some of those from eighth grade). Got a Christmas card? Save it (I don’t even want to know how far back my pile of those goes). It was like all those things were keys to doors in the mind. It wasn’t even that I wanted the objects themselves; I wanted to remember what I was doing when I got them. The same way an archaeologist can (or claims to be able to) piece together the lives of ancient Egyptians from their dusty relics, I wanted to be able to do the same with my own life. It was insurance against the awfulness of forgetting.

Now I’ve come to recognize the silliness of some of this. I threw out my collection of year-old Newsweek magazines and illegible movie ticket stubs. I now relish and savor removing items from my apartment (“oh, look at this huge pile of paper I haven’t touched in months. I wonder just how much of it I can throw away?”). It’s also possible to, you know, remember things without some kind of physical artifact. Lots of people use pictures for the same purpose. I don’t. I think a lot of times pictures inject a falseness into the thing you are trying to preserve. It limits the memory. If I go to Paris and see the Eiffel Tower, I can try to remember everything about the experience. The hugeness of it, the clouds, the people walking by, the odors of the atmosphere. On the other hand, looking at the picture, the five-by-seven glossy rectangle, is nothing like remembering what it was like to be there. I also think that taking a picture lulls people (or me, at least) into a false sense of security. Like, “okay, got that picture taken, don’t need to remember anything else about this. My memory’s on film.” So I don’t go crazy about taking pictures of everything.

Digital memories are another thing entirely. Unlike the aforementioned huge pile of paper sitting my apartment, files on my computer are almost volumeless. So I still have very few compunctions about archiving every single bit of text ever directed to or from me ever since I learned how to send email, instant messages, chat messages, or anything else. There was one time, in a fit of what must surely have been madness (actually, I remember exactly: I was trying to set up a networked game of Heretic with my friends and I needed to free up a lot of disk space on one of my computers quickly) I deleted a bunch of log files that I still feel so utterly stupid and foolish for having done.

I don’t even really look at any of that stuff. I just like knowing it’s there. I feel like my experiences are safe from forgetting.

They aren’t, though. For all my trying, it cannot be denied: no one remembers everything. All our experiences gradually slip away as we are removed further and further from them. The crystal clarity of the present cannot be captured by any power known to man. All the transcripts, video recordings, journal entries, and—most valiant of all—human brains in the world cannot preserve everything in its perfect state. The black gulfs in our lives will wax without end, and the ineluctable tide of oblivion wash over all.

Plus qu'ennuyée
Triste.
Plus que triste
Malheureuse.
Plus que malheureuse
Souffrante.
Plus que souffrante
Abandonnée.
Plus qu'abandonnée
Seule au monde.
Plus que seule au monde
Exilée.
Plus qu'exilée
Morte.
Plus que morte
Oubliée.

—Marie Laurencin

Guilty Pleasures

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 15:39:48 GMT

Having recently been “tagged”, I suppose it is proper etiquette to respond as requested. The quiz in question desires five guilts—culinary, literary, audiovisual, musical, and celebrity—and reasons for deriving tainted and forbidden pleasure from participation therein. I have opted to preserve the typographical integrity of my meager pages by not permitting Torpidai’s Testbench to scrawl its own code onto this journal. Do not be alarmed.

Culinary: Truth be told here, this was the hardest to come up with. Though my own cooking style is not particularly adventurous, there's no guilt in the plain and the simple. I’m also not a huge fan of junk food. My parents found it perplexing when my Easter, Christmas, and to a lesser extent Halloween, candy would languish for months, untouched, in my room. I bet I still have some sitting there. But it occurs to me that I do have one weakness, one ghoul out of childhood that haunts my scullery to this very day: fast food. In particular, plain McDonald’s cheeseburgers. I consider it pure gluttony that the establishment gives away two of those at once for their special menu item. And they taste exactly the same as they did when I ate them ten years ago. The sham of it all is that those things might as well be plastic future-food. I mean, have you actually looked at them? It doesn’t look like meat. Yet I cannot truly resist their siren call, or that of imitators: microwavable frozen cheeseburgers, those tiny little White Castle things. Just thinking about this right now is going to put me back on the wagon.

Literary: I also consider myself mostly guilt-free on this front. Even trashy stuff like R.E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft have gained some respectability as they’ve fermented over the century, so I don’t feel any guilt about that. So instead I think my guilty pleasure is less of a particular literary item and more of a sub-sub genre: the overblown & omnipotent, the more ridiculous, the better. The best example here is comic books. I’m okay with superhero comics about guys with above average powers, but I find it hard to resist comics about Mega-superheros, whose powers dwell fifty thousand standard deviations above average. I want the most extreme possible. I want pan-dimensional catharsis, reality-mastering heroes whose dreams shape space and time against a globe-glutted cosmic carnifex whose cries of sempiternal torment shatter the spires of Asgard and Olympus. The best place to find this kind of crap is actually to invent it yourself.

Musical: For a long time, my first instinct was to say my musical guilty pleasure was the Beach Boys. It may seem weird, but when you hang out with the people I did, you’re a little ashamed of liking music that prominently features something like “doo-wop”. That’s not my real guilty pleasure, though. Really and truly it is absurd power metal. In particular it is Rhapsody’s magnum opus Symphony of Enchanted Lands, one of the most over-the-top pieces of music I have ever had the guilty pleasure of headbanging, air-guitaring, and falsetto-lip-syncing to. Please, please watch the “Emerald Sword” video to see what I’m talking about.

Audiovisual: I assume this means movies and TV. I don’t feel particularly guilty about liking actiontastic crud like The Scorpion King or The Matrix Reloaded (or at least the quarter of the movie that contained any action whatsoever), so I’m going to have to go with the horrible reality show Wife Swap, which never fails to hook me when I see the commercials for it. And while I have probably seen a maximum of three or four episodes of it, all of which were essentially the same, it was actually kind of fun. I think the source of my enjoyment is wanting to see bratty kids get their comeuppance, something that doesn’t happen often enough in real life and in my presence.

Celebrity: I’ve gotta say I have a weakness for celebrity fights if they are humorous. Jolie-Aniston fight: not funny. Dukakis-Nader fight: funny. Hilton-Richie fight: not funny. Eminem vs. everyone he knows: funny. A potential fight is the only thing that will usually get me to take a second look at those magazines at the check-out counter.

So, you have born witness to my guilts. No tags are necessary, but anyone else who wants to post some of their own can do so.

The Temperature in Port Leyden

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 04:18:28 GMT

Who can really say that they understand temperature? It certainly sounds very objective and scientific, and I like the idea that the complete state of hotness or coldness somewhere can be fully specified by one number. (Interesting fact: temperature is mathematically anomalous. The reciprocal of temperature is what is thermodynamically important; “temperature” is kind of a fudge that we make because it’s what we’re used to measuring.) Yet there’s so much more.

When you specify the temperature of a massive body (really the kinetic temperature, but who’s paying that much attention) you are really specifying two things. The first, which you wouldn’t care about unless you’re doing an experiment, is the average thermal motion of the particles composing the body. Fine. The second, though, how close it is to thermal equilibrium with objects in or around it. Any two objects that are touching want to be the same temperature as each other, so the hotter one will cool off and the colder one will warm up until they reach the happy medium. How long this process takes is determined by the thermal conductivity of the objects (this is why metal always feels really hot or cold and wood always feels kind of like wood).

At any given time, you are probably touching several different objects (clothes, shoes, furniture, jewelery, the air, other parts of your body, etc.) all of which are at different temperatures and heating up and cooling off at different rates. This whole process is how your environment interacts thermodynamically with your body.

This is not the end of the story. Your body itself is a furnace, piped and pumped full of fuels and gases and blood. The physiological reaction your body has to changing temperatures is far outside the realm of my knowledge, though I did manage to find an article that probes a couple of these anatomical responses as it tackles the age-old question of “why are women always cold?” But even as your body churns, burns, sweats, and upsets as its extremities conduct heat with the always changing outside, it seems to me that there is another factor that controls what temperature feels like: your mind.

Sometimes I feel psychology is the most responsible for the far extremes of hot and cold I’ve felt in my life. Once my mind has decided that it’s a hot day outside, that simply becomes how it is and nothing can change it. An even more common occurrence is when I’m really cold and I just stop thinking about how cold everything is, I seem to warm up a little. Maybe these are all just illusions, or imperceptible changes in the weather that trip a feedback loop in one of those unaccountable variables I mentioned earlier, but it sure seems like my psychological state has a lot to do with how I feel about the temperature (which is really all that matters).

The whole point of all this is I just wanted to say that even though the temperature in Port Leyden was at least 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit colder than I’m used to in Philadelphia, and I also spent a great deal more time outside in that frosty air than I even do when I’m shivering at the trolley stop each night, I still felt much warmer. Just a little odd, I thought.

Winter Invocation

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 03:28:42 GMT

“Blood drips from my frost-encased sword, forming a crimson blossom upon the ice.
My limbs cold, becoming one with the massing snows. My eyes, nearly frozen closed.
For how long have we traveled? The memory grows dim, lost to the cruel, searing storm-winds.
With the blessings of the elders we began our journey beyond the great veil of shadowed glaciers.
They spoke of a prophecy foretold, an ancient and glorious legacy,
A quest for the realm of legendry lost to man since before even the Star-Lords descended.
Now, only I survive, my blood spilling to the ice, turning to crimson crystal upon the deeply frozen earth.
Elder sorcery crackles and hums all about me, coursing through the sky, the snow…
As grim destiny approaches with the freezing boreal gales, and this ancient prophecy unfolds.”

— Bal-Sagoth
“Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule”

I used to say that to myself in high school, as though it had the power to call snow days. Snow days in New Mexico are a tricky proposition. We did not have very many of them, but not because it didn’t snow frequently. In fact it snowed somewhat frequently. The problem was it is only ever cold at night, especially if there were clouds overhead to trap heat close to the ground. I imagine people living on the east coast or somewhere with more normal weather would just wish for snow. In New Mexico snow was not enough. First of all, most of the time it didn’t stick. And when it did, most of the time it didn’t stick to the roads, which is really what causes snow days. On the rare occasion snow did stick to the roads, if it was all melting by 8:30 am, or looked like it was going to, there would still be no snow day.

A proper wish for a snow day in New Mexico often involved something like “I hope tomorrow it’s a really clear day so that the ground gets real cold, then a bunch of clouds come in during the evening and it snows a whole lot. Then I hope those same clouds blow away during the night so that it stays cold for the rest of the day.” Maybe this happened in other places too, but I imagine other places are equipped to deal with 2 inches of snow on the streets.

Tarble-in-Clothier

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 18:42:28 GMT

The last night of the year is the longest. Where did such an idea for a fantastic, night-spanning party come from? In any case, here's the highlights (and lowlights):

1. The war pipes. I love how this most-Scottish of instruments is actually called this. There is a kind of mysticism that comes from that name, like it’s an artifact of battle, an instrument of force. That is not too difficult to imagine, that the blare of the drone and the skreigh of the chanter can crash gates or topple towers.

2. The costumes. For the first time ever, I was able to obtain a near-complete panoply of Scottish attire. Kilt & sporran, hose & ghillies, shirt & jacket. I suppose there is an innumerable set of further embellishments one can make (certainly many others had all of these things) but I felt like, for once, I was not a poseur at this place. The problem with all those clothes is that it still felt a little weird. My groove, if that’s even what you have at Hogmanay, was slightly off. It could have been the floor, too.

3. The lights going out. I realize that things like heat, light, and a sound system are pretty nice things to have at a dance, but some part of me desperately wants to do dance the Scottish jigs and reels outside, on a desolate plain, miles from civilization, under the lights of the full moon and stars. Someone accidentally turning the lights off at Hogmanay might be the closest I ever get to that.

4. The giddy-punchiness. Everyone gets silly after 20 dances at 2:30 in the morning. I just love that atmosphere, that bond being between us all from being tired and achey and hopped up on adrenaline and endorphines and whatever other chemicals an addled brain leaks out in such a state. Dancing with a room full of people like that is like nothing else I know of.

5. Not following the directions in Mairi’s Wedding.

6. Seeing the “Highland People” (as I call them) getting really into the appropriate dances.

7. The crab-cheese spread.

8. Jennifer’s Jig & The Fireside Reel.

9. The stately cello. The elegance was astonishing at certain points.

10. Crashing into bed and sleeping like a stone until 12:30. The best possible ending.

Box and Fipple

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 14:28:51 GMT

For a while now, people have been coming up to me and asking “So, how’s that concertina playing going?” That is a prefectly reasonable question, but unfortunately it is also one of the questions I’ve added to my list of “questions that I, and only I, know the answer to yet remain mystified that other people do not share in this private and secret knowledge.” So for the most part when people ask me about that instrument, and I apologize if I have done this to you, I get kind of a baffled look on my face and explain that I have not really touched it.

There are many reasons for my lack of concertina diddling, but I’m going to spare you the litany of pathetic excuses. Suffice it to say that I have been drawn into a subtle war between the Anglo concertinas and the English concertinas. So I’ve been messing around on the Pennywhistle instead. There is a litany associated with this as well, but I’ll skip it and just say that I am having a blast with this thing but I need to practice playing by ear. Also, I feel like my ultimate goal is to be able to play Stars and Stripes Forever.

So if anyone is feeling bored and/or particularly patient, come and teach me a tune. I eat that kind of thing for breakfast. A very drawn out, savored, four-hour, thirty-six-chews-per-bite kind of breakfast, I admit, but in the end something does get digested.