weary as water

every time i blink i have a tiny dream

Monthly Archives: January 2007

jan. 23

Things I Have Recently Realized I Was Wrong About:
1. I don’t hate fennel. At least, I don’t hate fennel when I’m guided by the geniuses at theppk.com.
2. I don’t hate running. Or, I don’t hate running when it is not all-out-sprints at the end of a sports practice.

That is all.

i used to be a superhero

  • Wow, this guy is a real life superhero. I know that I would have just stayed on the subway platform and winced.

  • For a laugh, you might want to read the exchange between the guys at attrition.org (who host an awesome data loss feed) and Todd Shriber, a [former] Congressional aide trying to hire the hax0rs to change his GPA.
  • Two-faced calf born in Virginia. “Genetically, this is one of my better calves.”
  • Jean-Christian Bourcart – “collateral“: He projects photographs of mutilated and dead Iraqis on American houses, supermarkets, churches, and parking lots. “I found the images on the web. Some American soldiers post their own pictures on a website. They would show a cut leg with the caption: “where’s da rest of my shit?” Or a blown up head with the caption: “need a hair cut” .
    I could not help thinking of those images as some kind of restless ghosts that endlessly wander in the intermediate level of the web. I took care of them like a embalmer would; downloading, revamping, printing, rephotographiing, then projecting them as if I was looking for a place where they would rest in peace and at the same time haunt those who pretend not to know what was going on.”

Yesterday was great. Emily got me a GPS for Christmas, so we went geocaching. Basically, people hide a container with random things in it and put the coordinates on geocaching.com. It’s like a treasure hunt! Got stumped on the first one (it’s in the UAB mini park, somewhere…) but found the second one easily, and took a mix tape (as in, cassette!). How awesome is that? I’m totally stealing that idea. The third cache we tried was up at Vulcan Park but it was too busy ti get to, so we went on Vulcan Trail and found one there. It took *forever* to find – somehow I managed to turn geocaching into a contact sport by trying to scamble up the side of Red Mountain and tumbling down a bit of it instead – but finding the cache (even though there wasn’t really anything cool in it) was well worth the red clay on my jeans.

It was near sundown when we decided to stop, so we came back to the apartment and I made dinner. Then we went to a movie (a *real* movie, too, not the dollar theater variety!) and saw “Pursuit of Happyness”. It’s a feel-good story to top all feel-good stories, and even though it does not give any sort of accurate portrayal of any homeless shelter I have ever heard about it was still worth the 7 bucks. Plus – and this is a little known secret – I absolutely love Will Smith.

Took Em to work early this morning and have been playing with the cats and browsing the web. Need to head to the store and hope to have time to curl up with a book for a while before fnb this afternoon. Ah, this is the life for sure.

Back for another year…

Had a great trip home. Found this picture, along with a bunch of other pictures that are pretty neat.

All in all, it’s been a pretty good year. A 6.7 on a scale of one to ten. I took lots of trips (gulf shores twice, berkely, key west, helena montana, washington dc & virginia, asheville, sipsey wilderness) and generally had a good time. I saw a bunch of good shows (most notably – Band of Horses at The Earl, B.B. King at the Alabama Theater, Alejandro Escovedo at Workplay, Ani Difranco at the Variety Playhouse, the Mountain Goats at Bottletree, and Connor Oberst with [The Taylor Family (as in, Maria Taylor), Taylor Hollingsworth, Gillian Welch, and David Rawlings] at the old Masonic Temple downtown. I remembered how to swim. I went snorkeling for the first time (and second time!). I took a philosophy class “just for fun” and really learned a lot from it. My relationship with Emily has deepened and continued to solidify. My relationship with my family has re-opened. For all of these things, I am thankful.

Things to work on this year: I need to write more (at least one short story a month). I want to meditate daily, which sounds so easy but is so hard to do. I also need to read more (at least one non-fiction and one fiction book a month). I also need to work out more (besides riding my bike to work and back). I would love to be able to ride my bike to Publix on Saturdays for groceries (about 6 miles, which isn’t bad…but over Red Mountain, which is bad).

Written on my bathroom mirror: be who you want to become.