April 29, 2005

Said Andrea at some party tonight.

Which is why my 28th birthday passed with nary a whimper or grey hair hunts or do you remember whens. I still have 12 years to get my shit together. So don't wait up. And I smoked too many cigarretes and I am looking for the script for the second part of angels in america because there is an excellent (if rather long monologue...oh look I found it god bless the internet)

A quote for my birthday and for starting a new year with maybe less and then maybe more of what the old year had, and maybe some stuff i haven't even thought of yet.

Prior Walter: But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body more sores than skin when they're burned and in agony when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children they live. Death usualy has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway...

April 27, 2005

I woke up this morning thinking; Its time to re-read The Color Purple and Temple of my Familiar again.

I think I have read both books about 4 times each. Because the lessons they teach are really important, and I think periodically I forget them.

The lessons are simple ones actually and repeated often enough; Don't give up on people, don't be afraid of forgiveness, embrace the past but don't re-live it, be patient, learn to strike a balance between loving other people and loving yourself. There are probably others but those are the ones I need to be remembering right now.

I don't want to go into detail about the subject matter of the two books. Basically its the story of families and people who love each other and the fact that histories personal and cultural have an incredible impact on how each of us learn to love each other in our own ways and every time I read the books I end up scratching my head and saying how did I forget that lesson again?

April 25, 2005

The next day - April 26th
I took this down because I thought it sounded horrible and whiny and self-hating and all sorts of bad things. Then I got an email from someone saying some really nice positive things about it. I guess some days are just bad - and maybe they need not be hidden. So now I think I will re-post it. I should add another post for today, about how I feel brighter and better and I do. But there is another longer post coming up later this week, that will hopefully do a good job of illuminating some of the silver linings to all the bad nasties that are in this post. But later. now is bedtime.

The title is from an incomplete manifesto by bruce mau. There is an exhibit on in Toronto called "Massive Change" about his work, and I am going to see it with my Dad and my brother.

From this point on you have a choice: You can read the rest of this entry on the front page and then stop reading, or you can hit continue, and read how I am really feeling. I am not sure about this day or this entry, so I thought I'd give fair warning.

Okay the rest of the front page part of my day.

I woke up feeling awful, and I went to work, and I came home feeling awful and called my dad who I love to pieces. He said; Grieving is hard and it is slow, and the parts of you that you are trying to change are not going to shift overnight. All you can do is your best, and you should focus on your strengths, not always on what you are doing wrong.

Then he told me about creative inferiority. A term coined by a swiss psychologist to describe people who suffer from a feeling of inferiority that actually compells them to work harder and try to do better than they would if they had an innate sense of self-satisfaction.

Then we read some of Mau's incomplete manifesto together. The two I liked the best will end this entry. I realize Mau is referring to the design of dirigible-cities and recycable housing units and not a persons fragile psychic design scheme, which is how I am currently applying it, but heck. If the manifesto fits, wear it.

from an incomplete manifesto:

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

April 23, 2005

She says racking her brain to see if she bought any styrofoam encased coffees or over-packaged and essentially redundant beauty products....

Here, Cisco's got something witty, charming and beautifully written. Let's just read that.

I did re-pot a sad looking philodendron this morning does that count?