things

I felt chilly this morning, so I turned on the little space heater that I keep under my desk.

Usually when I turn it on, I'm in a hurry, or distracted. In the middle of a conversation with a parent, phone in one hand, I'll reach down and flip the switch to 'heat' without thinking much about it.

This morning I stopped for a minute and looked at the little heater. It's really cute; a tiny black cube that manages to blast enough heat to keep my toes toasty in this cold basement office. It has a sensor that turns it off if it falls over, a little hidden handle so you can pick it up easily, an auto/manual setting, temperature control, and a fan option, in case all you want is a little air movement.

But mostly what makes me like it is the associations it has - my friends and roommates Jodi and Angela purchased this little gem for me in 1995 with 'house funds' (which funds these were, or how we came up with them, I now don't recall). I had just moved to a huge group house (there were 6 of us, unrelated professionals, and one bathroom. Wahoo!) in Los Altos, California, and my bedroom was the back porch. Had been the back porch. I had to put up thick drapes so that people in the living room wouldn't be able to see through the huge plate-glass windows, right into my bed. The floor was concrete, covered with a hideously-fluorescent green shag rug. When it rained, everything got a bit damp. When it was cold (which happens quite often in northern California), the room was freezing. Of course, being the back porch, the furnace's heating ducts didn't reach me there. It was COLD, I tell you! (Hence the heater.)
But from my bed, I could see the two enormous live oaks in the backyard, stretching their branches up over our house. I could see the moon every night. I could hear peeper frogs and crickets. It was one of my favorite bedrooms ever.

I love it that things have that power of association. That this morning in the year 2008, I can glance down at the little black plastic square at my feet, in my basement office in Oneonta, and be instantly transported back 13 years, to recall the details of faces and spaces and times that I haven't thought about for many a moon.

yes, it's true...

...I'm a language conservative from hell.
Except for when it's intelligent play, like on Buffy.

zen and the art of roadtrips

I love driving, especially alone.
There's something wonderful that can happen in your brain when your conscious mind is absorbed with negotiating turns, flipping to low-beam for oncoming traffic, watching for deer and stopped cars... while all that is going on, your subconscious is able to hum along by itself and get all sorts of work done.

...sometimes this process is aided by music; oftentimes the repetition of a particular song.

Thank god for CD players; for years I was stuck with re-winding the cassette tape over and over - now I can just put the thing on 'repeat' and enjoy my uninterrupted reverie.

There are drawbacks, however. Without having to re-wind anything, the uninterrupted reverie can sometimes go on uninterrupted for many hours... like, the whole length of the trip.

For example, there was one instance when I was listening to Kermit the Frog sing about how "It's not easy bein' green... having to spend each day the color of the leaves..." - I put it on repeat and didn't realize till I reached Oneonta over four hours later that it was still going.

The song being 2 minutes and 14 seconds long, that means I listened to it at least 108 times, without a break.

I wonder if that's worthy of a World Record?
Or maybe someone will arrive soon to cart me away.

the antidote to your anecdote

Have you noticed everyone saying "anticdote" lately?
"Let me tell you an amusing anticdote about our vacation to Kansas...."

Yeah, sure. I'd love to hear it.

-Although I suppose it is true that many an anecdote does involve antics of one kind or another.

The other thing that's spreading rampantly is 'safety deposit box'. I even heard William Hurt say it twice in the movie Mr. Brooks.
[Actually, four times, since I've seen the movie twice. ;-)]

profound thought of the day

Fruit is like purple. You can have all different shades and flavors, and they all work nicely together.

Chocolate is like black. Different shades of black conflict; the flavors of different chocolates conflict.

You can taste one kind of chocolate and think "oh yes, this is a very deep, rich chocolate. Yum."
And then immediately bite into a different kind of chocolate, and suddenly the first one seems very strangely-flavored, like a distant copy of the original.

The whole thing plays with your mind in a very mean and sneaky sort of way.

And leads me to ask - is there, then, a True Chocolate? Or is it all just layers of illusion?

And might lead you to ask - why is she eating so much chocolate in such rapid succession that she is able to have contrasting chocolate flavors on her tongue?! I thought she told me she was eating healthy and going to the gym!

speakinaspanish

Esposas=
Wives and Handcuffs, man, gotta love it.

'round and 'round and 'round it goes; where it stops...

I was just poking around in the SAL system that we use to maintain all our loan files, cause I was trying to figure out how to delete a pop-up memo in a borrower's account.
I wasn't having much luck, so I clicked on the "HELP" tab.

I seldom click on "HELP" tabs, because they are so seldom helpful.
But this time I did; I clicked on it. And it brought up a number of items that a user of such a system might need help with.

Except... wait. The top two items are-
1) How to Login to SAL (which I would've had to have done in order to see this page)
[yeah, just try translating _that_ into Spanish, I dare ya!] [que yo hubiera... habria...tendria... umm... hubiera tenido que hacer... no... Que yo hubiera tenido que haber hecho para ver esta pagina.... Yeah, that sounds like a mess, but that's as close as I can get it - Osvaldo where the hell are ya?!]
and...
2) How to Get Help [I kid you not!]

So I clicked on that 'How to Get Help' link, just for kix, and it explained to me how to do what I'd just done in order to get to that link, and then it had its own links, which brought me back around to the page where I could click on a link to get more help doing what I'd just done.... Fascinating! I could do this all day!

Hence my reluctance to ever click the "Help" tab.

I am pro-choice word choice

From: NARAL Pro-Choice New York
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 2:01 PM
To: Kate
Subject: What a guy.

Please thank Governor Spitzer for once again supporting New York women's right to make their own personal medical decisons. Let him know what a guy - and governor - he really is.
___________

Dear Governor Spitzer,
Thank you for supporting our right to choose.
You are such a guy.
What? Umm... yeah, they told me to say that.
Sincerely,
Kate

the table goes round and round

I've been reading... (as the second of my non-mystery before-new-years books) (the first having been The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster, which I highly recommend, but only if you're not already suffering from depression.)...umm... right... so, I've been reading Le Morte D'Arthur [by] Sir Thomas Malory. Maleore. Malorye. Malleorre.

It's a good read. And after living in that 1400s language for awhile, your brain starts saying things to itself like "and he was wonderly wrothe."

But anyway.
Thomas Malory reportedly compiled and translated these Arthurian tales out of the French Vulgate romances and some Middle English sources. (as per Elizabeth Bryan's Introduction)

And here's my whole point for bringing this up... in the original Preface, William Caxton wrote:
"I haue...enprysed to enprynte a book of the noble hystoryes of the sayed kynge Arthur and of certeyn of his knyghtes after a copye vnto me delyuerd whyche copye Syr Thomas Malorye dyd take oute of certeyn bookes of frensshe and reduced it in to Englysshe."

I love that - "reduced into English". I love it love it love it. It's so much more accurate than saying "translated", which gives you the misleading idea that the text has merely been moved from one place to another, laterally, without losing anything in the process.

I often get the feeling that people reading a translation think they're getting the whole story. That they're not missing out. But anything translated is only an approximation. Sometimes the translator gets close... taking months or years (I imagine, anyway) to find just the right word combo to preserve both the literal idea, and any cultural humor or added connotation, syntax and rhythm... but it's a futile task. Compelling, but futile.

Because language is so culture-specific. So experience-specific.
Like, hearing the word 'arbol' gives me an entirely different mental image than when I hear the word 'tree'. Sure, they sorta mean the same thing, but not really.

It's kinda like going to see The Golden Compass. (she said, making a leap and not bothering to fill in the gaps.)

guts

I was just reading the last entry on Osvaldo's blog, where he was speaking about a woman he met briefly; and how he realized in the space of a second, from one comment she made, that she would not be a good dating candidate for him. (O - if I'm summing up badly, I apologize.)

I, too, have had this experience, and it's still an odd one, when it happens, but I'm grateful for it. -You can be going along getting to know someone, and feeling impressed, intrigued, interested. And then - boom - they say or do something; and it can be a minor thing, as minor as slightly misinterpreting something you say - but suddenly you know, as well as you know anything in life, that they're just not on the same page, and that a relationship with them just wouldn't work. At all.

Because that slight misunderstanding could only have happened if about ten other extremely important things were off-kilter between you.

And it's often somewhat of a bummer to get this fateful internal telegram, cause he was so cool... damn.
But there's nothing to be done. It just is. It just isn't. It's over.

And, really, the mechanism itself is pretty darn amazing. Guts are great!

43 Cliff Street

I was awakened at 2:45am last night by irregular, clomping footsteps on the back stairs, and a hammering at the door. Then there was muffled shouting and more pounding, and I opened my eyes and saw my roommate walking through my bedroom, heading for the back door with a grim look on his face. He opened the door and I heard him say loudly, "You've got the wrong house, buddy. You have the wrong house!" I could smell stale alcohol on the air that was coming in through the doorway.

By this point, I was fully awake, and the police had arrived. I stood at my bedroom window and watched the scene below as the two police officers questioned this very drunk college student. He belligerently shouted "43 Cliff Street!" over and over again in response to everything they asked. "What's your name, sir?" "43 Cliff Street!"

The whole thing seemed almost amusingly surreal. I think I've been watching too many episodes of Twin Peaks.

I was going to write something

but I've forgotten what.

Sunday night again

It's been a weird day. Somewhat depressing and unproductive.

On a whim, I completed an email questionnaire my 12-year-old niece sent me.
According to whomever produced this thing, I am:
hot, romantic, cute, determined, preppy, I like to be around people, I'm "pale and original" (?! sounds like a beer ad), happy, and crazy...

...and fated to have a shitty love life because I failed to forward the email to 20 people within one hour.

Oh well.

I guess I'll go make dinner.