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"Miscellanities
Ξ February 15th, 2005 | → Comments Off | ∇ General, Work |
In no particular order:
Physical labor = serenity
Moved two Uhaul trucksful of stuff out of my father’s office on Sunday. My hands and forearm tensors (?) are still sore. Last night, I tried to hold up an iron under the faucet (so’s to fill the reservoir), and I nearly dropped it (was helping Mark with his jerkin and pleiderhosen for the Estrella event in .. Atenveldt?). Haven’t felt this good since I was regularly armoring for 3-8 hrs / wk.
Serenity = jolly good entertainment
David B. and David C. independently introduced me (and some others) to Joss Whedon’s Firefly series. Andrea and I have been independently watching it sort-of together (she’s in MD, I’m in TX). For a first-season TV show, it’s darned good. Even more impressive, when you consider it’s SF. An additional major selling point for me was that it’s the first SF series I know of, which treats the SF future as merely a projection of our present, petty, dirty, noble, conflicted selves in new digs and duds. Screw the Federation and their prosthetic noses. :D
Weather shifts
Last night, driving to Mark’s around 10, I saw some wisps of fog curling around the lamp posts on 610. By the time I left around 1 a.m., a curtain of mist had descended on Houston. I’m sure if I lived in Maine, I’d hate fog. But as it is, I thought it was very pretty. Fog mutes and softens harsh angles and lines, puts a halo around lights. As I drove home, words crossed my mind, like: roiling, curling tendrils, swirling…
Valentine’s Day
Oddly enough to some, perhaps, I have no melancholy musings on this day of days. Just an anecdote:
On Sunday, I reminded someone that it was the 13th, b/c it was the day before V-day. How funny, then, that I completely forgot about it on the actual day. I was still at work around 7:30, when the janitorial staff (a girl and an older woman) came in, right on schedule. We usually only exchange a “Hi,” no more. So I was a little nonplussed when the girl posed a question: “What, you’re still here? Why aren’t you taking your wife out to dinner?”
Um, because I don’t have one?
“Well, what about your girlfriend?”
If I had one, would I be here?
She laughed, and they left.
It occurred to me afterwards, that conversation might have been brought on because it was V-day in particular. Strange to think that I *am* at an age where it’s better than even odds that people my age’d be married or attached in some other way.
On that topic…
Emotional growth (?)
I do feel like I finally graduated from high school though, in an emotional / relationship sense. In a way, I’m glad I didn’t bother with such trivial things back when I was a 16-year old, mixed-up cauldron of confusion — desires, hormones, etc. I certainly didn’t have a good sense of who I was, or what I wanted then.
That’s not to say I do now, but I certainly have a better sense of them.
Other, supposedly-knowledgeable folks might argue that I doth protest too much, and that it’s better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all. I can’t gainsay them on either account. :) But my older friends all agree with me, in their own ways, that certain Kantian principles apply to relationships, and even to full-blown, rose-tinted, dancing-on-clouds love. That is to say, love / sex / relationships are meaningless if we treat them as an end to be realized (with people being the means to this end) instead of as a means to greater intimacy with people we like and admire.
Put like that, we can then see those empty truisms for what they are. I’d have to say that it *is* sometimes better to not have loved. Hrm. Maybe I just did try to gainsay the starstruck lovers (or at least believers of Love). And maybe this qualifies as melancholy for some people. Not me. What d’ye expect, of a man who remained ignorant of the ‘05 Indian Ocean tsunami for 3 weeks? ;) Priorities, man — I don’t have yours.
And I’d started thinking through this a couple weeks ago, so it’s not a newly-birthed pondering. You might say it was rather ponderous, in fact.
Randomly, I’m reminded that David Watson (aka Iolo) said this in the context of making crossbows: The more you know, the more you need to know. Dunno what brought that on.
Techno ambient / chill
I love this Shoutcast streaming MP3 station.
