red elephant

Start Small

So, Kat and I jumped on the iPhone bandwagon. And, I'm pretty impressed. Nice interface, snappy 3G signal here in Madison. Great on WiFi. Great for most trivial internet usage.

What I've been impressed with is how it refocuses experience. Websites that design for the device get stripped down to the bare essentials. Text & thumbnails.

It makes you look at one thing at a time. One photo. One webpage. One email. I like that. I like that a lot. It's helped me start to clean out my inbox, which has sat at about 100 message for a long time. I haven't replied to everyone or sorted everything, but it's coming along.

Likewise, I finally jumped on the twitter bandwagon. Same reason. One thing at a time. One thought. One message. What am I doing right now. No great revelation in the scheme of things. Plenty of other people have had this thought. But it's my turn.

No promises this time. No manifestos. [Am I right, Max?]

Just one word after another. Then one sentence after that.

Keep going.

Things I Have Learned From My Dog

1. Every day is a new day.
2. When you gotta go, you gotta go.
3. Getting outside to run around every day is important.
4. If you don't get regular time to play, you go crazy.
5. You will get attention if you act cute.

Things My Dog Has Not Learned

1. Fetch. Really, he just goes to get the toy/ball/whatever. Then he just plays with it wherever he is. No bringing it back.
2. The mailman is not trying to break into the house.
3. People do not want to kiss you after you have been licking your own genitals.

I love my dog, and think he's pretty charming.

Jay Pinkerton thinks that Dogs are Idiots. (Via Max)

Son of Brain Dump

And I'm back.

When I woke up this morning, rain was tapping on the roof, and there was a booming in the distance. The rain increased, and the thunder moved quickly our way. I was pleased, very pleased to wake up to these sounds. The first real thunderstorm marks the beginning of spring in my book. I can finally come out of hibernation, leave the house, start writing more, and sleeping less.

[Ed note - we did have a freak thunder-snowstorm earlier in the year, but that's not quite the same.]

It's strange how these things go in spurts. I get excited about a new thing, writing photography, what-have-you, and then I burn myself out too quickly. I've been trying to do this less, to really commit to things, and to begin slowly.

The best example of this has been yoga. I started back in 2002, almost four years now, and built my practice from once a week to several classes a week. This transformed once I began to teach classes and started practicing on my own.

This past weekend, I went to a great workshop with Desiree Rumbaugh. She's a Senior Certified Anusara Teacher, and she's a pretty amazing person. While we all learned lots of technical elements, I think her attitude is what was the most inspirational. She had a lot of fun doing yoga & helping people out. She talked about how it's transformed her life, and how it's helped her deal with the death of her son.

I learned plenty of technical things, including the importance of using your tailbone to solidfy the foundation in a pose and to integrate the whole body. I learned how to apply that, among other things, to make my backbends like Urdhva Dhanurasana deeper & more stable. She helped me re-learn Supta Virasana, which has always been tricky for me.

As important as learning the technical elements in more detail, was just the experience of attending a workshop. It's great to watch someone who is really dedicated to their craft present and practice. It's great to be around a bunch of other people who are eager to learn and practice themselves. It's great to dedicate a weekend to doing something you love.

And it's great when the excitement and energy from such a weekend carries over to the rest of your life. I'm excited to practice yoga right now, to push myself a little further than I have been, to try new things out. I'm excited to share what I've learned with my students. And I'm excited to harness this energy, to do some more writing.

I'll start with a little at first, and then build upon it. That seems to be the best way for me.

Write More

I've been a list-maker again lately, and near the top is getting back to writing. For myself, for public consumption, anything to get the old muscles working again.

I'm really interested in short fiction lately. New on my radar is 365 Tomorrows. I love it first & foremost because it's short sci-fi stories, different visions of the future. But it's also a collaborative writing project. Five writers got together [along with a web-savvy compatriot] and decided to publish one new short piece of fiction for a year. Ambitious, but not all that difficult. It just comes down to dedicating the time.

Of course, I'm a fan of McSweeneys, both internet & print editions. But for some reason, I've been neglecting The Believer online. And while I've been a fan for a while, I actually have some bizarre little story ideas that I need to work up & submit. While it would be neat to get a short on the website -- or on something like Fray -- the process is the important thing. Like Max, who decided that he was going to do a graphic novel & then a webcomic, the main thing came down to sitting down & drawing regularly until it was done.

And, oh yes, he also did a novel last November. Again, it's about putting in the time.

...

Speaking of putting in the time, Max and I have been talking about getting fat. About making excuses to write, draw, housekeep, drink, or anything but exercise. Granted, there is still yoga Monday nights, but my personal practice has suffered. Thankfully, Kat & Nick have been good at taking me up on bike-rides. Nick and I did nine or ten miles tonight, so that was really good.

But back to getting fat. I've weighed myself a couple of times in the last week, and it's come out to about 200 lbs. each time. Let me write that out, two hundred pounds. Now, this isn't a huge deal. [Pun not intended, but kept.] I eat fairly healthily, and I do keep active, but it is a big paradigm shift. I've hovered at about 165-170 since high school, when I topped out at 185 while taking weight training.

Granted, I've probably put on some muscle with yoga, but I think there's more to it than that. Seems to me it's a combination of increased muscle mass & then some poor choices in the past couple of months with regards to diet and my yoga practice.

But more than anything else, it's changing the idea of my body image. It's not just my pants that are shrinking, I'm coming in at two bills. And while that may be just what I weigh at this age, I can certainly be in better shape. So, time to replace the biscuits and gravy for breakfast [for only $1.50 at the shop across the street] with some fruit smoothies. Get rid of the candy & get some more dried fruit.

And oh yes, get on the bike & back on the mat.

When I'm not writing, that is.

Call For Entries

So, I've got plenty o' gmail invites if anyone wants one. No contests. Just open invites for anyone who wants to try. I've got five.

I'm also thinking about giving the free ipod deal a try. I might be hitting people up for referrals. Then again, maybe I'll just join David's little pyramid. I really want both an ipod for music storage [as well as data transfer] and a digital camera, but can't afford both right now.

I might be looking for guest authors, both here and at ask jenn and ben. We've been light on questions, so we'll have to get some more articles in there somehow. If you're keen, drop me a line.

Finally coming down from visiting my parent's house in the suburbs [read as: my own private hell]. I hate driving to West Omaha so much that I'm not going to even spread the hate by writing about it right now. You shouldn't drive angry, or post angry, I always say.

I'm also giving serious thought to switching wireless routers to an actual airport express base station, since my linksys seems to get confused with all the other wireless routers in the neighborhood. Sick of rebooting my router, cable modem, and computer just to get online. I suppose the easy answer is to just plug into my ethernet port, but it defeats the purpose of having a wireless card.

Finally, I saw & loved Garden State this weekend. Lots of lovely moments including Sam [Natalie Portman] introducing Andrew Largeman [Zach Braff] to The Shins.

She says to him, handing him headphones, "Listen to The Shins, it'll change your life." The song she plays for him is New Slang

...

Quick Links to Share:

Tricks of the Trade
An even smaller digital camera than the one i was looking at
Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes by Stephen King
and finally, Great legal mp3 download site via David

A Modern Way of Letting Go

Before webmail got huge, I found myself having to make some decisions. It was go through folder by folder to discover what was worth keeping or the grand gesture of deleting whole people, whole parts of my life. And as we all know, while I am a details guy, I am very fond of grand gestures.

There were acquaintances who didn't write much or well. There were online flirtations that had fizzled, or never really caught in the first place. Then came the old girlfriends. What to do. The theme lately has been closure. Letting go of old relationships, clearing out my life, rememberances, emails, letters, books, art that reminds me. There is always something there to remind me.

There is a difference in breaking up between letting go & pushing away. Sometimes you just let some people go, the stuff they gave you falls into disrepair, gets lost, disappears. There's the impulse to purge the person completely out of your life. I have a friend Who not only erased all of her email to the boy, but got into his email account [she had his password] and erased it all there, too. A total cleansing. Did she have the right? Doesn't matter, she had the access. The keys to his house, so to speak.

The committed girlfriends were the easiest. "Oh, she's getting married. Yes, better not to leave little flirty things around. Oh her, I still want her, but I have no doubt we'll never get back together. That one, oh, well, if she doesn't get married, she & the new boy will be together a long time. Good for them. No hard feelings. [Click]

Then there are the letters I keep. [Actually, I keep all my letters, I'm referring to the emails that are written like letters.] The ones from girls who were friends first, who I want to remember regardless of whether I have moved on, or if they have. These are the best written ones, the ones I can re-read later in life, whether I'm with someone or not and say to myself, "This is what I was like at that time. This is who I was."

I was talking with Jenn about her writing group -- how there's a woman & a priest who struck up a correspondence. [no, it's not a joke] It so happens that she is now divorced & he is thinking of leaving the priesthood. Their correspondence is intense, but ultimately they decide they have to stop. Or she decides, I'll have to ask Jenn. In any case, in the course of writing group, this woman thinks about publishing their letters, including his half. She's wondering if she's entitled to do that.

Slippery slope that. His words, but he sent them to her. I personally believe that once you speak or write a word, it takes on a life of it's own. You can ask people to respect your privacy, but ultimately the act of writing [or speaking] is an act of creating. People will do the words what they will. Kafka asked his friend & literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy his works after he died. Luckily for us, Max didn't. I can only wonder what Kafka thinks/would think of his legacy.

There's a word in Russian, razbliuto (ros-blee-OO-toe): the feeling a person retains for someone he or she once loved. That's what I think about, the things that remain after love, after lust, or at least after the relationship. Sometimes there are photographs, sometimes letters, and sometimes only memories.

Little Fun Bookish Things

I am a complete dork for how much I love this game on punctuation. Then again, I started hearing about Eats, Shoots & Leaves for a few months now. I think they reviewed it on NPR, and since it's based on an old joke.

There's also the Wrapped Up In Books Game to help promote a newish Belle and Sebastian single.

English as she is spoke

I've been thinking about how the word remix has taken on a life of its own outside of the music industry. The first use I remember seeing was Sprite Remix. Then I remember seeing people refer to people on boingboing refer to pictures that had been photoshopped as "remixed" -- even though Adobe maintains that photoshop is not a verb.

So, I've remixed my living room. I don't have pictures yet, but I'll figure out something. Perhaps I can borrow my roommate's digital camera. The feng shui is much better, and the space is a lot more usable. I won't be making Kevin Byrd's website anytime soon, but I can only hope.

In other news, I've been shooting film again on my Canon. Just some pictures of the farmer's market down in Lincoln. Felt good to get it out. Hell, maybe one of these days I can turn my basement into a darkroom. That, or I'll just buy a digital and avoid chemicals altogether.

Rusty

Been a tough couple of weeks.

Our office building got broken into two weekends ago, so we've been dealing with security issues. Locks changing. Locks unable to be changed. Boards used to lock doors. Checking to see what, if anything, is missing or out of place.

We also just lost a member of our office staff. She was in charge of files and the bulk of correspondence, among other things, so we've all been adjusting. New duties, trying to figure out how things are done, trying to prevent problems. All this while learning new case management software.

Timing has been kind of terrible.

To top it off, my laptop is still in the shop, so I've only got work to be able to post, email, or other things, and there's just no time.

I'm making time today because I need to. I haven't written much of anything in the last two weeks -- online, in the morning, letters, etc. -- and it's driving me a little crazy. Going to have to reschedule things, find new time, new ways to do things.

...

Some good news: I cooked dinner for the first time in weeks last night, and it turned out pretty well. Just a basic stirfry with peppers, squash, onions, ginger, broc, and "hawaiian" tofu. I think it was just from Hawaii, as it didn't taste too different. But it was chewy & good. Spiced it up a little with some chili. Yum.

That's all for now. Just needed to get some things down, keep the fingers working.

Other Life #3

The condom broke. Or you're even greener than that. It's your first time, or one of, and while you've been schooled on safe sex you're entire life, but you're so caught up that you forget. And all of a sudden the both of you are three months pregnant. The both of you because you love each other even though you don't fully understand all that entails. That's just what you feel and all you know. And you're decidedly going to go through with it. Not exactly a shotgun wedding, but quick enough. You're not even twenty.

It's a girl. The two of you are working a job an a half each. You're in an apartment for a year, two tops. Then you're saving up for a place of your own. Then you're working sixty or seventy hours a week just to save the money. You're so burned on manual labor, or service, or whatever your concession is that you take an office job just to get benefits and not be working all the time. Your parents help you out. There's something to be said for midwesten values and families looking out for you.

You take night classes in cooking, or electronics. You mow the lawn on weekends. You fix up the house. You go to working-class bars after work. It's not for irony. You talk sports and union politics. You quit the office job and take a job as a sous-chef in a restaurant that your friend started. The two of you have equity and are considering starting a side business out of your house. One of your buddies has you do temp work for him. He's an independent contractor, and he pays you off the books.

You put in a rec room. You have a jacuzzi. You wonder if you are getting carpal tunnel. You refinish furniture in your garage. Your daughter is starting preschool. You're not even thirty. You're a fully functional member of society. You've reproduced. You worry about property taxes, good schools, and whether the streets are safe. You save for college. You make ends meet. Your sex life is different because of your child's insomnia. But sometimes you're content to fall asleep with the three of you curled up in one bed.

You find a way.