I was thinking today driving home that I’ve become my Grandmother, at least in that I’ll send links to certain people (sometimes people I don’t have frequent contact with), because in my head, the subject of the link and that person are inexorably bound. I almost can’t help it, it’s like I’m just following some cosmic path that’s been laid down for me. Hence my apology in advance.
It reminds me of my Grandmother because she has this habit of cutting out newspaper and magazine articles which she feels are relevant to one of her friends or family members. It usually has my name at the top along with a note or question, and my favorite part, she’ll underline or highlight parts she felt were specifically relevant, with occasional marginalia. Which is helpful when receiving a several page long New Yorker article.
The “clippings” usually come in bursts. She collects all these, I presume in some sort of filing system, and sends them out in bulk, sometimes in thick manila envelopes, on birthdays, Christmas, in her yearly letter to friends and family. I envision a massive filing system with a folder for every person she’s ever known. Or maybe it’s just a stack that she sifts through every so often.
The subjects of my clippings are frequently linguistics or Chapel Hill related, but sometimes it’s funny to receive one where there’s no conceivable connection between the article and my interests (or once-interests). She’s getting pretty old (mid 80s) so if she continues the habit, it’ll be amusing to see how the subject–grandchild correlation trends over time.
Today, May 9th, is an anniversary of sorts. One year ago I got in my car in Carrboro, North Carolina and started driving west. I had a final destination in mind (Santa Rosa) and a rough idea of when I needed to get there (to meet up with my stuff). I had a friend to stay with the first night (Melanie) and a stop I wanted to make along the way (Grand Canyon), but otherwise the trip was completely unscripted. I thought about this a few times today.
After work, Goli, Mark, and I went on a hike through Howarth and Spring Lake Park, and I snapped this nice shot of Spring Lake with my cell phone. It looks kind of dreamy to me, like I used some kind of deliberate soft filter.
Friday night I met up with Stephanie and her dad, Jean Claude, at Ale Works. Talked about this 40,000+ attendees, $700/head, Donald Trump financial seminar he went to in the city (for free, of course!)—and the fact that he’s actually 1/4 American. Story: his grandfather was an American fighting in France during WWI when he met Jean Claude’s grandmother. They had a child, Jean Claude’s father, but then his grandfather returned to the US after the war. As a result, Jean Claude has an American half-uncle who lives in LA.
Afterwards, Stephanie and I went over to Barcode on Mendocino, which I’ve been meaning to check out. Very swank. A really nice alternative to the Russian River/Ale Works downtown microbrewery juggernaut. Great drinks, though pricey, clean, modern decor, dj spinning background music, Spike Jonze music videos projected on one wall. Looking forward to going back. Turns out I didn’t have to wait long.
Saturday slept in, recovering from a wee bit of drinking the night before. Strolled through downtown SR because I wanted to check out a restaurant on 5th street called Satur Wine Bar and Bistro. Versatile menu (tapas), prices were reasonable ($9-11 range), decor looked upscale, not too snooty. But it was closed. We looped around to find a restaurant where we could eat outside and in the sun. Found Checkers. I’d never been. I had paneed chicken, she had the pasta carbonara. Quick trip through the mall, then a nap before Stephanie went off to prepare for her last spring dance show. I blogged.
Post dance show headed off in the direction of Barcode to meet up with some folks who turned out not to be there, but at the Belvedere. We stayed, had two excellent Mendocino Mojos, talked, basked, and closed the place down.
Sunday no plans. Eggs and bacon. Lazed in bed. Eventually got up and out (for dinner!) and went off in search of the fixins for some skillet burgers. Started my taxes and learned it’s going to be painful this year. As in $1500 painful. Time to call it a night.
Update: Hold the fucking trains! So I’ve been weathering the kind of angst that only a person who owes the government $1500 of his travel-to-france/buy-a-digital-slr-camera fund can endure, when lo and behold, I discover a $6000 discrepancy between my W2s and my year-to-date gross pay on my last pay stub from 2005. Lesson learned. It pays to check (and keep) these things. Taking into account a little bit of qualified tuition expenses, I swung from owing the government $1500 (and having to adjust to an additional $100+ taken out of my paycheck every two weeks) to looking like I might get $30 back. Yee-haw!
I don’t usually write about how I feel. Emotions are hard to write about. Even good writers do a poor job of writing about them because they don’t readily adapt themselves to translation. Because of this, feelings respresented by words tend not to age well, and I hate cringing when I read back over something I wrote in the past.
One might argue that feelings should never be expressed in words, that feelings are really a function of human experience (think the writer’s axiom: show, don’t tell). So that if I write about what’s happening in my life, you might experience (vicariously) how I feel. Or you might feel something else, which I think is the genius of feelings. I don’t want to tell anyone what to feel any more than I want to tell anyone what to do or how to be. That doesn’t belong to me. That isn’t something I want to be responsible for. That is only something I’d want to unintentionally provoke.
Even though feelings are so fleeting, often so out of my conscious control, people tend to treat them with an unusual permanence, when in truth exposing a feeling is more like an observation of the weather. I would say I hate to be reminded of how I was feeling in the past—except in truth it’s really no big deal, and whoever might be inquiring probably genuinely cares about my well-being. And I wouldn’t want anyone to stop caring. I guess I would say I hate to be reminded of how I was feeling in the past if I’ve come to realize that how I expressed how I was feeling was incredibly trite, and that the actual feeling was entirely ephemeral.
And all too often, how I feel could be respresented by a simple formula involving a few variables of which sleep accumulation affects the lion’s share of the outcome.
I find that I am constantly seeking inspiration—most often through new experiences, places, and people. I’ve thought before that the best work environment for me would be a place ripe with problems that need solving. My brain needs lots of raw material before it starts feeling inspired. I think the reason I read blogs is because I’m looking for inspiration, looking for a bit of something my mind can chew on and possibly make into something.
When I’m thinking about how to solve a particular problem, I can think about it for days and weeks and nothing will happen and then some day when I’m cutting the grass or I’m having a hamburger or I wake up in the middle of the night the idea will be there. I think it would be egotistical of me to say “I thought of it.” What happened is I opened my mind up and the idea came through and into my head.
These ideas, I don’t have to dig up anything, sometimes I don’t even have to be thinking about them and there they are.
It’s something between discovering and witnessing.
