But you’re not the only one, IOR. You could be speaking with my own mouth, using my own words and devices and tricks and inner torment.

But you are of course so unique. Commonalities it seems, have a way of connecting…

My dear friend is finally fulfilling a lifelong dream. Making a journey that he’s been talking about making since I met him six years ago. Driving from Dallas to Portland, stopping and camping in Palo Duro Canyon, the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Grand Canyon and God-knows-where-else in between stints of traveling across America’s harsh and barren West. He’s got his dog, a camera, a journal and a sleeping bag. He’s possibly remembering passages from my favorite beat-era novel on his way out west, maybe driving past shifty characters and road-beat old souls during his days On The Road. While I’m in traffic here in the rainy bog city, spending my week moving into the 1930’s old Museum District house, my friend will be witnessing the beauty of the land and hearing the cacophony of natural nighttime sounds around him.

And I relish this experience for him. I plan to exploit to its fullest this opportunity to live vicariously through a connected soul…though by exploitation I mainly mean imagining what it must be like.

it’s just great to know someone’s happy. that’s the main thing.

It’s all just one big allegory.

I’ve already told him a number of times that I’ve lost my fabulousness. That I can’t maintain vibrancy when softness is in the picture too. Intimacy takes up a lot of the proverbial surface area, one might say. That, or cubic feet maybe. It takes up a lot of damn space. I’m not lamenting my last few months of awarding less energy to my own self-development (because I know I’m investing it in other worthwhile avenues, and I enjoy it immensely), but I am noticing a theme-leading characteristic of consumption. Granted, these things are just the beginning, there is never a ‘one or the other’ relationship… I guess then, what I’m noticing, are the symptoms of being in this stage now.

And of course it’s good. I’m just commenting on a relative moment in time when you think about it.

I still have my same old sins. I’m still the person carrying the – I won’t say baggage – but maybe it’s more like wearing the same clothes. I’d like to think that the past four years have improved me, and in ways they have, true inroads do exist, but all in all I’m still not so different a person. I still have the same hair color. A person who can never say, “I would never do that,” or even “I know better,” because the truth is that I would, I have and I did. But more to test the boundaries than anything else. Milton’s theory of opposites is maybe the most commonly exercised strategy in my arsenal.

I still want to be really really smart; there’s a deep dark secret for ya. I want to have a mastery of most everything. It’s funny to type that, to read it even, but if I’m admitting things honestly, then I can’t deny that very real desire of mine. I’m young enough to harbor a faint, slightly eerish inconsequentially blinking glimmer of groundless hope that I might actually do that, really learn a mountainous amount and consume an ocean of information. I call it hope though, because I know to master something, you’ve got to commit to it. And I haven’t committed to much more than self-indulgence in quite some time, years actually. This little story might reveal the plight: When Melissa and I first saw “Good Will Hunting” and “Phenom,” our immediate exclamations were, “Damn. Now I know how much I’m lacking. How many skills I don’t have. Now I know how smart I’m actually not.” We were pissed; more distracted by our deficits to really “get” the movie’s lil’ message. It’s funny to remember now.

But that all comes back to commitment. I marvel at you people who have it. Now, I work in a research institute. Again, my lucky bastressness has gilded my path before me. I report on findings that make some people really excited. I study star-charts and today learned about the constellation, “Draco,” and what that has to do with the pull of the tide and flap of a butterfly’s wing, et al. (all for context, mind you) My point here is that I’m surrounded by either brilliant or committed people, world-famous doctors and multilingual travelers. I’m not starstruck, I’m deadpanning reality. Next to me, these people are giants. I’m not intimidated by their stature, but I am jealous of what they know. I just want to connect a wire with an electrode on each end to their temples and mine, and zap ‘em. Zap all of their gold right out of em and stuff it in my brain-folds. It’s the immediacy and not the work. And I’ve thought quite a bit about this, riding to and fro on my daily light-rail zip through Houston’s June monsoon season. I don’t wish to feel important, I just plain want to be smarter than everybody. I want to climb a mountain and know how to do it artistically. I want to make green things grow and induce little birds to alight on my shoulder. I want to do seven of those back-flips in a row, the ones where your body is long and stiff, like a board bouncing from end to end. I want to do 7 of those.

Learning to me now, is to feel uncomfortable. That’s when I know I’m learning, because the discomfort comes from boredom, which comes from my hatred of having to sit through something. That’s where my commitment problem comes in. I am bored-slash-uncomfortable much of the time. I’ve identified another kind of discomfort that doesn’t come from boredom, that results in learning, but is the Slap In The Face of Previously Held Paradigm-kind of discomfort. When Kelly shows me Seranno and Maplethorpe (interview), and it makes me remember The [life-changing] Bosch that left me, years before, blacked-out on the cold marble floor of The Prado after having stared in utter disbelief for the better part of an hour (b/c I knew that the man who painted it was a 14th century Catholic monk who could have never, ever seen these things outside of his own imagination….whoa…); it’s a damn effective learning tool – the accosting. And studying for the GRE is learning and it’s uncomfortable. Its hair-tearing frustration that I want to know those words and those math proofs, and I don’t want to sit down and relearn them, I just want to Know them perfectly and flawlessly and beautifuly.

But many of us like the learning power of uncomfortable accosting. I can’t even believe the job This Girl is doing, for instance.

I learn a lot with Kelly. We go and do and see a lot of things. There isn’t any room for posturing and leverage and being selfish, and I’m grateful that its just simply not tolerated because I naturally err on that side of self-preservation. We just watched 24 Hour Party People, Touching the Void and Dancer in the Dark, and they all blew my damn mind in a nice cocktail of different ways. (fkking Touching The Void, people. I don’t even have the words). And tonight we’ll go hear some low fidelity beats, most likely mixed with a little video snow interference, and walk around the CAM, which is oh-so-close to my new house. And mainly, just for something interesting to do, or at least, interesting to me. And to think, I never thought I’d come to like New Order and Joy Division. I’d thought I was oh so past that Czar presence of the 80’s…
Funny, the things that we do.

My god, I am constantly still writing volumes in my head. An entire imagined existence, one could say…A vaulted ongoing clicking burring typing, though silent and kind of imaginary. (…sigh….just playing around there, feeling the keys under my fingers….trying to get familiar with it again perhaps).

Anyway, I had this conversation with a couple of coworkers today. It was about being literally handicapped by the now-obsolete ability to physically write, and how we have all lost it. One co-worker in particular no longer even tries to physically write words. He says he can’t even take notes in meetings; that he’s completely dependent upon pecking out templated terms on the tiny keyboard that is his blackberry.

Does that say something about us? I have shit for handwriting. Can we, in our adulthood, actually change our handwriting? If so, how – because I would really love to.

So, cigarettes and chocolate milk? These are just a couple of my cravings….

I got my hair cut and it’s terrible. It is not a style, quite unfortunate for a girl without style. It looks like a grow-out; an in-between something fabulous and short and perky, in confusion with something long and luxurious and self-indulgent. So it’s neither of the aforementioned styles; it’s something else altogether. I aim to confuse. It’s no biggie…mentioning it here is actually more of a device to see if I remember how to write words anymore.

But of course I have the words. They’re spilling, tumbling, rushing out of me without fingers to capture them and a conscious to acknowledge them past the millisecond that they make themselves into my small reality. It’s not a chasing with the net to capture that flittering butterfly; it is instead the quickly moving credits at the end of a TV movie. In fastforward. Present but not acknowledged, real but not translatable. Confusing and headache-inducing at times.

I have become, interestingly, the unofficial spokesperson for a federal organization and I’m not anywhere near boned-up with the background or historical context requisite of such a task. But it is clearly very interesting. My day is filled with international requests and very, very up-reaching politically polarizing, world-uniting hopes. Infinitesimal hopes and intentions, actually. Like those necessary to go to Mars and back….. I’m not saying that any of my days are exciting, because that would be a flat-out lie, but they are in fact educational. Very educational. And I have left a peer group of idiots for one in which I am the idiot. And I don’t find that frightening; I’m hoping it will have the tennis effect on me actually. Like volleying against a talent who delivers solid, well-placed shots, causing my returns – resulting solely from the spin of the ball sent to me – to be short and hard and fast, even though I was not the generator of such pristine motion. At least then I get used to the feeling of responding to such hard, fast shots. Know what I mean? So here’s an interesting email from my morning:

Who am I? I’m a forty year old Irish screenwriter based in London and I’m currently working on a story (young adult ‘John Hughes’ drama) set in Orlando in the mid 1980’s. One of my main characters is a studious girl called Tammy who is pursuing a Masters in Aerospace Engineering and is eventually planning to work with _____ as a research scientist. Rest assured any similarity with your good self is entirely coincidental – I’ve been working on this story for more than two years now.

What I’m basically trying to do is add ’smarts’ to the script in order to highlight what a serious academic ‘Tammy’ is. If you could just point me in the right direction that will be fine, I’ll do the research myself.

Kinda funny, huh? Primarily b/c I’m in no way a scientist or an engineer.

Thought of the Day:
“There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.”

….though, the more you read and live and see, the more you see the word “truth” attached to so many random things, both real and completely unreal. and many believe that truth itself is relative. truth to anyone depends on culture, age, upbringing…the conditional reality of the place and time where we were born. complete chance. if you read deepak chopra, you even see principles of “truth,” like the passing of time, debunked and replaced with all new paradigms. it’s interesting.

have you ever seen a “wrong-headed majority assailed by truth?” i’m not sure that I ever have.

Ahhh, and the total loss of comments when you change templates…is criminal. Just wanted to thank those who’ve taken the time to share their thoughts in the past, because they’ve been a great memory.

Damn, I wanna go home and take a nap.

And I have no idea why the font is so small. I’ve changed it in my template 178 times, but then again, I still haven’t read “HTML for Dummies,” so I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I am the monkey with the typewriter, and not afraid to admit it.

It’s Friday and it looks like a gorgeous Friday. Maybe Char is done by now with her crazy day and maybe she’s doing something fabulous with her afternoon. Maybe, she’s taking a nap in the sun somewhere since she stayed up so late last night to catch the very first showing of the Harry friggin Potter movie. Maybe she did that because she likes little dark-haired English boys…wait, she DOES like dark-haired Welsh ones…

I’m in an office, enfrente de mi computadora, but it’s better here at the institute because I’m no longer by a window, so I’m no longer aware of what I’m missing. Yes lovelies, ignorance, when taken with a red bull and purple skittles, can be a bit blissy. Plus, the aforementioned makes it so much easier to write web copy and translate the findings of physicists. I’m trying, as usual, to weed through my thoughts before I confess them here and in another way, before I confess them to him. It’s so I don’t misstep and get it all wrong and misconstrued. The funny thing is that I pretend that I can do that…that I can actually communicate effectively so things are smoothed and not misconstrued…

The computers here are really fast. And instead of a big blinking monitor, I have a sleek little 20″ flat screen LCD. I chat all day with him and him; and I just got paid today for one week what I used to get paid in an entire pay period a couple years ago. Tis cool these days; I didn’t know easy work still existed after the bubble burst. And I am very truly grateful.

Is it a good thing if your blog gets linked by a newspaper? A colleague of mine just sent out a mass email that he was linked on the Houston Chronicle’s web log for writing via the “voice” of his cat. Points for creativity? I hate that the Chron. has a web log, btw. Nothing against my local paper, I just hate that so many commercial outlets have them. I need to get back to good reading.

But then again, if everyone didn’t have a blawg, then I would have never found Licence to Kim Jong Ill, which, if you summon the ghosts of the Beastie Boys, is really cause for a chuckle.

Look what just happened. I’m thinking this must be a sign. A sign for me to get off my ass, out of the funk and into something _____ (blank). Into something. This makes me happy. This makes me laugh just enough to remember that things are light and easy and can actually be effortless and simple. I’m not kidding; I had completely forgotten all of that. I have completely forgotten that not everything is heavy, because for so long, everything has been so heavy. It’s really quite strange; I’m telling you, I had completely ceased to realize…

I’m in to saying “F-” everything now. As in, “F that flat tire,” or “F- that boring old template.” F- this need for order and perfection. I am so exhausted from this constant wagering of relative outcomes, of this way of thinking…that I can control my future by motives of prevention and probability.

The domain(s) has(have) long since been purchased, and the design is floating and ever-changing, yet present. It’s a bitch the way my avoidance can just pop up anywhere…and everywhere.