intellectual properties

i am only coming through in waves

the approximate scale is 15 to 30:
a nice-looking spectrum in its duplicity,
but there’s a lot of room in the middle.

my right arm is barely alive.
one of my least attractive personality traits
is that when i’m in pain i whine.
how much does it hurt?
i don’t know if i have a low threshold for pain or for complaining.

sailing through the wet-green and foggy-blue,
today is not the first day i wished my bike commute was longer.

cognitive dissonance is not a problem

hey, Oklahoma?

As we know from last week’s discussion, Oklahoma lawmakers are now mandating that women undergo completely unnecessary vaginal ultrasounds so they have all the information they need before deciding to obtain a legal medical procedure.

Except that Oklahoma lawmakers want to make sure women don’t have all the information they need before deciding to obtain a legal medical procedure if it means they might decide to obtain a legal medical procedure.

for shame. so many conservatives talk about keeping the government out of their choices and our lives, but somehow this is ok?

castles in the air

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

–Henry David Thoreau

clothes maketh the (wo)man

this great piece on the historical and human importance of fashion by author Linda Grant on the Powell’sBooks.blog, contextualized by the odd historical footnote of the effect of sending lipstick to the women of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, simply articulates so many things i haven’t been able to in my defense of fashion (online and off).  some choice excerpts:

It is a commonly held view that fashion and makeup are trivial concerns: Superficial, unnecessary, and concealing by trickery what is held to be ‘real’ beneath. Fashion is surface, fad, transient. Yet time and again one uncovers moments when clothes and makeup become the things that render us human.

…

Our clothes are our identity. They are, whether we like it or not, how we are judged by others. Out in public, they send out numerous messages, about our social status and our sense of ourselves. A flamboyant tie, high-heeled shoes, this season’s shade of purple — all make announcements to the complete strangers we walk past on the street.

…

Clothes are not everything, but you cannot have depths without surfaces. They communicate with what is within; between the two there is always a great dialogue.

via nagutron

QOTD: Earth Day, 2010

“Mother Nature bats last.”

doctor, my eyes

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand

I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?

–jackson browne

brides, baseball, chanting and compost

friday night:  went to ariel’s offbeat bride v2.0 book reading in the upper haight (backstory: we’ve been online friends for years, via hooping, and have met up in-person a few times). i’ll admit that when i arrived i wondered for a second why i was there, actually (outside of seeing Ariel, but i didn’t necessarily have to go to the book reading for that), as i have zero intentions of being a bride (yes, still. please let us not talk about it AGAIN.) and i have already been to see her do this book reading once, when it was first published.  as i listened to the reading and the questions, i flipped through the current issue of sports illustrated swimsuit issue (aside: swimsuit models are so much better to look at than runway models. duh, you might be saying. but i spend most of my time looking at fashion, not men’s magazines.)

it was when Ariel started talking about how the main reason she started and continues her interest with OBB even though her marriage is way past that i perked up, and remembered why i continue to read (ok, SCAN) the OBB website even though i don’t intend to get married.  weddings entail and wrap up so much of our culture, from fashion to what we hold sacred (not that those are totally separate), and the process of planning a wedding isn’t just about where/when/who/whatdoiwear; as many brides and grooms have discovered, really complicated cultural questions can come up (case in point: there is currently a very long live email thread on one of my womens’ lists about changing your last name, sparked by THIS link suggesting doing so could have negative impacts you might not have expected).  weddings are a bit of microcosm of culture, and since i’m super into cultural habits/themes/rituals etc, it makes sense that it interests me. plus, i find out about all the hot underground fashion designers/dressmakers that way (i am not however, reading Offbeat Mama, even though I understand the same thing applies (parenting is a much about culture as it is about offspring), it holds almost no personal interest for me.) the book reading was lively and amusing, and it was great seeing how much people are enjoying the Offbeat Empire and good to see the Electrolicious family in real life again.

saturday morning was an absolutely glorious sunny spring day, jay went mountain biking, and i found myself in another context that you wouldn’t usually find me: a baseball game. it was my longtime friend JB aka Windigo aka The Fox‘s birthday, and a bunch of us went to the A’s game to celebrate. the first 8.5 innings were fairly uneventful, game-wise, but the group of 20ish people assembled amused ourselves quite well. and then, in the bottom of the 9th, the A’s pulled it together and somehow managed to load the bases and score 2 runs to win the game. the crowd went wild! it was great.

later that afternoon we went for sushi at Ozumo and then that evening, jay and i donned the only green outfits we had (yes, my wardrobe is fairly monochrome: black) and went off to celebrate the birthdays of 3 of our favorite women in a emerald city themed birthday party that only sort of got busted by the cops. WTF, SoMa? not even midnight on a saturday night and you’re telling us to turn it down? jeesh. sometimes it’s just too hard to party in this city.

yesterday was also glorious, so we headed north to China Camp State Park in marin and jay and the neighbor went mountain biking while i took a leisurely 2-hour/5 mile hike. i found myself doing this thing where i have imaginery conversations with people about things that have not happened, as if i need to prepare a script in case it does. i won’t get into the topic, but at a certain point i literally said to myself “why are you thinking about this and not something good?”, at which point i developed a little chant to try to empty my head and also provide a bit of a rhythm for hiking faster, like a march. it went something like “shoulders back! chin up! irises! green plants! blue sky! sunshine! the hum of the insects. shoulders back! chin up!….” yeah, i know it’s weird maybe, but sometimes chanting is the only way i can stop my brain from going all kinds of directions, and even then i noticed that i was thinking about things while chanting. actively trying to clear your mind is difficult.

we returned and stuffed ourselves silly @ Vik’s chaat, still the best Indian in the bay. they have instituted a 3-part solid waste system of compost-recyclable-trash (THANK YOU, VIK’S!), and it was amusing, sitting next to the waste station, to watch all of the people who looked like they’d never encountered such a complicated system in a restaurant stop, read the signs, and then sort their waste, *usually* correctly. it’s amazing how effective some signage can be, and i’m betting that a number of people learn something new about waste disposal when they go there, and not just greenwashing to make yourselves look better. this is an example of DOING IT RIGHT.

and then went home and watched The Life Aquatic.

life is good. the end.

a little less death

there’s a lot i should / could / would say about my own life right now to counterbalance all the photos of myself, which makes me seem really vain, or like i spend a lot of time taking/getting photos taken  of myself (….) and not any time doing much else.  but i am doing much else. so much, in fact, i’m exhausted.  well, if i wrote it all down:

get up. later than most people who have jobs.
drink coffee, read emails.
put on bike clothes.
ride bike to work (4.2 miles/23 minutes, flat terrain.)
change from bike clothes to work clothes (from pile i have stashed under my desk.  i wonder if my coworkers have noticed my wardrobe is now 3 outfits?)
eat something (usu organic fat free plain yogurt and raw fruit)
work. on stuff.
drink more coffee.
eat something (usually salad but sometimes indian or thai)
work on stuff (usually proposal documents and spreadsheets).
change from work clothes back to bike clothes.
ride bike to gym (3.5 miles)
change from bike clothes to gym clothes.
gym (usually weight lifting for about an hour, steam/shower etc for 20 mins or so)
change from gym clothes back into bike clothes.
ride bike home from gym (1.5 miles, 9 mins) or go somewhere to eat (usu ethiopian or something involving vegetables, beans, and salad)
change into home clothes.
weekdays: watch tv/movies/internet.
weekends: all kinds of exhausting shit that involved a lot of standing/moving/dancing/dressing/undressing for hours and hours.
go to sleep.
repeat.

it might not seem like a lot to some of you, who get up at 6am (9 on the weekends!) have toddlers and 1-hour commutes and mortgages and whatnot, but it’s a lot for me, apparently, because did i mention i’m exhausted?  seriously.  naps are being taken. and yes i eat enough and sure, maybe i should knock off the caffeine for a while and i am still dealing with this damned chronic pain issue which takes more out of me than i can even believe, actually. that’s not the point here.

instead of writing more about all that because, while i am exhausted, i’m also aware that most of it – except for those weekendy parts that produce photos – is very boring, which is why only the fun parts are being posted. no one blogs about the tedium of life anymore. that’s so 2002. you must be TOPICAL. and i am not of mind to be a topical blogger. politics? fashion? art? music? i don’t have it in me to journalistically focus on anything. i’m just not interested in being a topical blogger.

anyway, ok, well, in fact, some people do blog about “life”, subjectively, without topical focus. and do it well, and those are actually my favorite things to read online. like ramona. or this guy, and i’m sorry to be such a fangirl and repeatedly implore you to read somewhere else but i think his writing often borders on PERFECTION, which will be more clear to you if you click through and read this right now.

so maybe part of me is not writing much because i am reading all of these other great personal bloggers and i know i am nowhere near up to par. maybe if i tried? who knows. but for some reason i don’t even want to try. i think i’m kind of over it.

glow

necklace and photo by evil ali

stranger things have happened

4.3.10

goggles by james.tarin/stranger.things (SF)

photo by after5media.com