Exit: Oct '07

(Posted 12 18 2007)









(What does it say for my school when all day I was amused that people were wearing costumes, but only understood that it was Halloween when I saw my math professors dressed semi-formally?)

La carta nunca recibí

Yesterday,
despite checking my email periodically,
I never received this.




Subject: Hey!

There you are! I've been looking for you for so long. I'm sorry none
of my other emails got through. Turns out I was spelling your name
without the last e. I didn't remember how it should be spelled.
That's funny cuz usually ppul don't know how it's pronounced, eh?

Anyway, I'm sorry I didn't say goodbye before I left. I'm currently
in Cork, India. It's been snowing a lot, but the bikes are still good
and the kittens haven't gotten rusty. I wish I could show you this
peach I've been sculpting.

The potatoes are all sprouting and they can't see very well yet.
There are no sad robots here. We are all nicely oiled humming
machines. I have not broken any teeth and most of the time we drink
red tea with lunch.

I do not miss our old home. I've just arrived but I feel like I'm
constantly arriving. It's not so bad you know, to forget. I
remembered you. I thought maybe you'd want to come. Oh, do tell me
how things are going there! I did not leave anything behind. I
didn't have anything to leave. It would be nice to see people again
though.

You can write in Chinese here, but no one remembers how to speak it.
A couple of the old men say they remember and they have meetings twice
a month. Nobody would mind. Beneath the grass, I think the ground
is made of sponges.

I do hope you can visit. You should make sure first that you don't
leave anything behind. And the old men would probably like to see
your Chinese book (Josh told me you're taking Chinese now). I miss
you and I hope I can still make you laugh. There are many things I
think you'd enjoy. Why don't you write more often? I would like to
read some of your stories.

Please meet me above Eliot circle at 9:10pm Thursday morning. Just
get on board the train. 98 Zephyr makes the trip a couple of times
every month. I'll be in the 48th passenger car, so don't train hop,
come find me! I'll probably bring my friend the Yeti. You should
bring your guitar. We'll it need to sing Wagon Wheel.
We're going home.


I don't know who will sign it. Maybe I'll just know. Maybe the poets
can tell me. Maybe it's whomever I was in the tavern with when this
drunkenness began.

I Had A Dream,

I say to you today dear friends, that in spite of my general inability to recall them,
that last night, I had a dream.

I had a dream,
that I returned to my homeland in Wisconsin to find the land covered in snow and the roads partially plowed.

I had a dream,
in which my family had, in my absence, acquired a system of transportation to suit the snowy weather. Ordinary bicycling was out of season.

Brothers and sisters,
I had a dream last night,
that the sensible alternative transportation was to adjust your bicycle by hitching a team of adorable sled kittens to the front fork. They were cuddly and soft. They work just like sled dogs, but they are much smaller.

It did not occur to me
until I had been awake for at least several minutes and was brushing my teeth in the bathroom, that a team of sled-kitties hitched to a bicycle is not a normal mode of transportation.

on Expectations

"He who forsakes what is there
for what there ought to be
pursues his own ruin."
(paraphrased by impression as best as I remember)

EDIT:
in which I am corrected:


"The way men live is so far removed from the way men ought to live
that he who forsakes what is for what ought to be pursues his ruin."

Actually a quote from Machiavelli. I think it's interesting because
it's blunt, but you can take it a couple ways. I'd like to think that
even if he's right, there are times when it's worth your ruin.
-ST

Lili's

The restaurant is on the corner of a block with space to eat outside at small round tables.

Indoors, it's like being inside of a very nice gift box or a giant petit-four. The place would be a great still-shot backdrop for a lighthearted cartoon.

The color of choice seems to be the spectrum of beige, from cream to chocolate with a hint of pink. Wide robin's-egg-blue stripes appear on the parts of the walls that don't have windows or circle mirrors, and the cabinets are what I'll call green tea with milk or cream olive forest green. The chairs are autumn-windfall-apple red.

Flowers, still-life russet-goldenrod fireworks lean silently against
each table's vase.

Quiet jazz (catch the trumpet?) from the radio matches the floor: vanilla cream and medium-brown outline paintings of kitchen utensils, each labeled with smooth curly-edge brushmanship.

A friend and I eat outside,
After much deliberation and indecision (so many good ideas), she orders the Tex Mex Breakfast, and I the Cornmeal Pancakes with Apple Compote and Caramel. They're so good that during the course of our meal, we switch plates twice.
Hers is some magical synthesis of beans/rice/salsa with a fried egg on top and ample guacamole served in a ceramic medium-dark blue bowl with a handle that makes it look as if it might have been raised with the saucepans.

I've never had cornmeal in pancakes before and I don't expect wheat to come anywhere near it anytime soon. Two slabs of pancake, served slightly off-center on a smooth white ceramic plate, were topped with an inviting pile of apple compote laced about with caramel. I think perhaps the best justice I can do to this pancake is again to list the ingredients:

*cornmeal pancakes
(Not grainy at all, but soft and very willing to separate when prompted by a fork)
*apple compote
little chips of apple in a little hill with cinnamon
*caramel
drizzled in an artistic entropic fashion.
Not too sweet to cover the cornmeal, not too much to make anything soggy, just enough to know that its there and mixing with the apple.





I know.. the flowers in these pictures are differently colored than I described... but that's because they use fresh flowers!

on the bullet-proof-ness of Ideas

i used to worry
that an idea could die out with a people

but there are so many of us
and though we often pretend to be unique and individual,
our thoughts are nothing special - as long as there are people, an idea will find someone to host it. Especially today, none of my thoughts are original. If all of the humans who think the same ideas as I were to perish in an Instant, the ideas would independently come to others, though perhaps they would use different words.

Today,
instead of feeling like a fountain or a spring which channels and gives shape to my meanings,
the ink from my pen draws little cages on my paper.

I peer down at ideas
bound to twisted black lines
-the page becomes a prison-
and wonder what I've done

Chuang Tzu

As quoted in Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler:

"Writing is that means by which the world values the Way, but writing is no more than words and words, too, have value. Meaning is what gives value to words, but meaning is dependent on something. What meaning depends on cannot be expressed in language, yet the world transmits writing because it values language. Although the world values writing, I for my part, do not think it worthy of being valued, because what is valued is not what is really valuable."

and

"A fish-trap is for catching fish; once you've caught the fish, you can forget the trap. A rabbit-snare is for catching rabbits; once you've caught the rabbit, you can forget about the snare. Words are for catching ideas: once you've caught the idea, you can forget about the words. Where can I find a person who knows how to forget about words so that I can have a few words with him?"

por cualquier otro 名字

me dijé,

انا pienso que aiza comprender mas idiomas para poder 听懂 他们 que las 說.

Pero a veces,
pienso que 我 想 是 un 人 differente.
Un otro lengua, otro 名字,
別 我.



Aiza 有 palabras de cada ala, con cada pluma, para volar ... nicht 知道.


没有 zhao3ta4che1 escaparé mit 漢字
Ich yao4 schreibe así
nadie me encontrará sin buscando.

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

Two things discovered to me today, of which I am excited:

ASHOKA: Innovators for the Public
&
www.changemakers.net

It is Well

The howareyou?goodyourself?fine exchange has often bothered me.


We'd already exchanged formalities, but as he left, he half-turned back to say "Are you well?" his voice lifted at the end in statement of a question.

Several words caught at my throat.
He'd asked the right question.

"With my soul" I replied.

At last, it is the right answer.

10.03.2007

We must "resist the tetmptation to suppose that some miraculous and costly action can be the solution to all our problems."
-Somebody Else, (quoted by Eric Schlosser)

Also,

The original Reaxorz license expire(d/s) at midnight (depending on which midnight it is...)

and apparently to mark the ocassion...


A transmission:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-10-03-terror-exercise_N.htm

A terrorism drill is happening soon on the Steel Bridge. State
distraktion and annoyanke forces should be deployed to the scene.

Rekkomend:

1) Go to rektor and get decontamination suits, the tyvek ones, lots of them
2) get other good things and report to the bomb site to either klean up
or act as pieses of radioaktive kontamination whi4 kannot be removed.
3)enjoy yourselves

-melor

Theorem 10.01.07

An Approximation** of Excellence:
(And demonstration of proper ordering)


To mark one more year-cycle done,
Evaluate this one for fun:
Derive the expression
that's sure to impress on
you that he's the best, #(exp(2πi))!

As proof of his total integrity:
Evaluate, respect to dt,
today as the limit
with integrand dhim, that's
# (exp(2πi)) (+ C!)*

***



*to simplify, consider C= whatever is necessary
**Approximation only due to excessive use of bad math puns.
***I need a Mathematica screenshot as a demonstration, but that will not happen for a little while.

Frustrated, said 司馬遷

"I am frustrated," Sima Qian once said, "that my heart has that which it has not completely expressed."

"As a man who had suffered much, and who believed that all distinguished literature is born in suffering, the Han historian not only assembled and attempted to make sense from the abundant texts of the past, but also poured out sentiments from a heart shaped by a curious and traumatic series of personal events."

(Stephen Durrant, 1995)