kitchen_kink | Entries tagged with so tell me

Back in the day, I felt like everyone was on Livejournal, and I got a lot of comments going with some frequency.

These days, I get mostly crickets.

I accept that it may just be because what I'm writing these days isn't as provocative of discussion as in the past. I also get the sense that a lot of people have gone off to Dreamwidth and other blogging sites, and that many people are spending a bunch of their online-social time and energy on Facebook and Twitter. So maybe that's it.

Still. It'd just be nice to know whether folks are listening. Ping here if you're still reading?

regyt asks why the world doesn't have a meme where everyone leaves screened comments with what they want to say to to the poster but haven't yet for whatever reason -- and I say, indeed, why not? So! Tell me anything you want me to know - about me, about you, about your mom, whatever you like.

Anonymous comments are enabled, and everything is screened. Tell me something you want to tell me, anonymously or not. If you say you want me to unscreen, I will, happily.

Then do the same, and I will tell you something!

[My own edit, in advance: be nice. By which I mean, tell me difficult things if you wish, but let's keep it civil, mmmkay?]

So hey everyone. What's happening tonight?

Say for the sake of argument that you lived outside Teele Square, off Broadway, near 16 and the Arlington border.

1. What's the nearest park-like thing in walking distance?

2. Where's a good place that's bikeable-to for running on grass or other non-asphalt turf?

I saw Pan's Labyrinth last night, and it was every bit as enchanting and shocking and incredible as everyone had led me to believe it would be...I was absolutely thrilled with it.

It was also fun for me to listen to the gorgeous Castillian Spanish as I read the subtitles, and to see the subtle mistranslations (as i saw them) and also some bits that were untranslatable.

To wit: I never did learn the vosotros verb tense.

You see, there is a familiar 'you' tense and a formal 'you' tense. And there is, ostensibly, a familiar 'you' plural and a familiar 'you' singular. But in modern Spanish, for the most part, folks don't use the familiar plural 'you.'

But the faun addresses young Ofelia. the princess, as 'vos.' I noticed it. And I wondered.

You experienced Spanish speakers: help? Is 'vosotros' a normal way of addressing royalty? Or, child royalty? And if so, why? Certainly, 'nosotros,' or 'we,' would be expected for royalty addressing the people. So the you-plural makes sense, but if so, why the familiar and not the formal 'ustedes'?

Anyone?

deadwinter?

So one day recently I was sitting at my computer when some HUGE flying insect buzzed with a helicopterish sound from out my skylight and then promptly disappeared. I found it, later, crawling lazily along one of my wires. It's not actually that huge; it's about an inch long, and not very fast. Nor have I ever since seen it fly. I had no IDEA what it was, and up until then, had never seen one before.

Today, while putting plastic on my bedroom windows, I found another one. And I caught heem.

Note: I couldn't get a very good picture. He's kinda brown-speckled, and his back legs are like a cricket's or grasshopper's, kinda. But he hasn't made any chirping noises, and he's smaller than a cricket. I think.

Confused, am I.

[Poll #921955]

EDITED TO ADD: It's a Western Conifer Seed Bug! Thanks, frobz and all. I have taken him from his Gorgonzola container with the holes poked in the top and placed him outside near a pine tree. Hopefully he will bury himself; more likely he will die, or find his way back into the house, so I can put him outside again. :)

Does anyone have a (preferably free) client they recommend for uploading a *lot* of pictures to LJ, and making them smaller first?

I learned today that drinking three cups of coffee before weightlifting is not a good idea. Having my heart rate shoot to 120 or so just from doing a couple of squats is, well, kinda scary. Also, sweating. Eiyich.

Question for weightlifting folks again, especially women: What do you think of those hip adductor/abductor machines? Probably my least favorite bits of myself are strengthened and toned by doing them, but I'm also doing wide-stance squats and sumo deadlifts, which seem to hit every part of the leg, and yoga, which often hits the difficult bits. Those two exercises seem sort of ineffectual and make my lower-body days take even more time.

Are these exercises necessary, or useful? By not doing them, am I creating an imbalance in my leg and hip strength?

I have a bunch of busystuff to do today, which I hope will be fun and productive. But after *counts* three days of basically not leaving the house and feeling like the sole of someone's shoe, I might be restless tonight and seeking entertainment.

ert is working to a deadline.

longueur and

amber_phoenix are off gallivanting until tomorrow.

Anyone know anything cool going on that's not too energy- or money-intensive, or feel like hanging out?

Hey, folks,

If you have added me as a friend, and I have not added you back, it means one of two things:

1. I have no frickin clue who you are;

2. I have figured out who you are but don't feel like I know you well enough to let you in on my posts, which is silly, because I have all kindsa filters.

So I'm planning on adding back people that I've met (to use

amber_phoenix's random metric) more than once, if I can figure out who they are.

Those of you who never see a post by me that has a lock next to it, whether you've met me in real life or not: Who are ya, eh?

Current Mood: curious

So my temp assignment at the loverly law firm ended, and here I am, on a Monday morning at eight (yes, 8) am, taking part in the same temp agency's Guaranteed Work Program.

The suck is that you show up at 8 am. The bonus is that you kinda hang out, do what you want (thus this journal entry), go out on assignment if they get one for you, and get paid.

Yeah, I can do that.

So as I sit here listening to the Beatles and Dylan pipe through the office, I have a query: What, to you, constitutes a perfect song? My criteria are pretty stiff; though I haven't fully defined them yet, I do know that I've found only three songs (if that) that qualify. What they tend to have in common:

1) They're short
2) They do not have fade-out endings
3) They have poignancy; that is, they skilfully raise emotion in a way that isn't sentimental or cheap

My three that make it? "Eleanor Rigby," by the Beatles; "Ave Verum Corpus" by W. A. Mozart, and "Bookends" by Simon and Garfunkel. (And that last one barely makes the cut, since it very nearly dips into sentimentality.)

To give you an idea of both my taste and my stringent needs for perfection: "Slip Sliding Away" by Paul Simon, despite being an amazing song, falls short because of its inferior fourth verse ("God only knows..."). Simon himself has written that if he had been braver, he would've kept it to just the three (the man, the woman, and the child). "Washing of the Water" by Peter Gabriel moves me terribly, but it spills all over the place with gospelish emoting.

What's your opinion? For me, I think what a perfect song needs most is economy, true emotion, and restraint; as Chekhov said about writing emotion in fiction: keep it cold. "Eleanor Rigby" is probably the saddest song there is, yet there isn't a drop of sentimentality. Tight, buttoned-up violins. Two characters. Three short story-poems for verses. "Ah, look at all the lonely people." Done. Perfection.

Thoughts?

Current Mood: awake

This morning in the elevator I saw someone with with a secret smile I recognized: that smile of someone who's just left the bed of someone he's mad for, or who has a date later with a massive crush. It was a smile I missed having, and I almost asked him about it, but felt it was obvious. He carried it all the way to the 15th floor.

I was in bad shape last night, and when I awoke--filled with that vague, crippling sadness--but I slowly worked myself out of it, until, upon arrival at work, I felt better. I have to be careful not to let it creep back in on me tonight.

This morning, I was sitting at the front desk with no computer--I couldn't log in because the person with the password was out. I wanted to see how I would do without its glare, its draw, its addictive properties. I was twitchy for a while, missing email and LJ, and the collective weight of everyone else's sadness.

And I wondered if that was in fact the problem: am I being dragged into the mire by being online so much?

Much like the endless viewing of CNN can solidify, and make impossible to shake, the horror of an event like 9/11; or like multiplication tables and religious dogma are force-fed to us and thus branded into the flesh of our minds forever, indulgence in daily weeping and praying and ranting and exposure to immense screaming bandwidths of information--pro-war, anti-war, every possible perspective, every conceivable possibility, every reality and paranoia and utopic vision--it weighs me down. It fills me with imparseable facts, a complete spectrum of opinion from which it is impossible to glean any truth, and a full gamut of painful emotions. Add to this that most of the people I read on a daily basis are friends of mine, whose opinions and feelings I care deeply about, all of whom are hurting in one way or another--inconsolably depressed, impotently angry, soul sick, numbed into quiescent indifference--of course it's going to affect me.

I'm upset about the war. Of course I'm upset about it. It's a cycle of upset: I'm crushed that we're over there, unjustly, bombing a decimated country; I'm frustrated that I can't feel more for people I am so far away from, and that my pity and horror means nothing coming from my place of privilege. I feel guilty for that same place of privilege and feel I have no right to any opinion about Iraqi or any other suffering. And then I feel so angry at my government, for only allowing their voices of greed and hatred and superiority to reach overseas, for making their voices of pomp and condescension, their ridiculous ideas of themselves as Saviors of the World, represent me, while my small voice of dissent and outrage and pity and sadness is crushed into a poor caricature of America to the rest of the world.

But that's not what's making me this depressed. I've shut off the wail of the world before; I can do it again.

It's my friends' voices.

From the most ardent peace activists to my least political and ambivalent friends, everyone is feeling this, everyone is frustrated or feel helpless to do anything, everyone's dreams are being haunted, everyone is overwhelmed and depressed and angry, and most of all, everyone just wants it to stop.

And I believe that this energy is not just cumulative but exponential, that all of this surfing and reading and very collective grieving is creating a cloud of fear and doubt and hatred and suffering, that we need to reach out to each other and spread some kind of positivity, that, whether I believe in it or not, we have to work some kind of magic, if not to stop this war, then at least to stop us all becoming casualties of it.

We are a community here, there's no doubt about that. Singly, we're all carrying our own wounds. Collectively, we're bleeding to death.

Is it time, perhaps, for us to fight our own war, against this darkness that's swallowing us all, day by day?