"I'm after something that will make some sense of the chaos in the world and within us. The result should be something that is, well, 'beautiful,' but beauty isn't merely the pretty, or harmony or equilibrium. Rilke says beauty is the beginning of terror."
--Frank Bidart
Friday, June 29, 2007
Green Garnets and Silver
I am inordinately proud of finishing this. I've been alternately fiddling with it and ignoring it since last winter. Completion! Huzzah!
The Wonders of Technology
My first memorable experience with the wonders of technology occurred when I was two and began with a phrase I'd heard at my father's feet, where I often played while he studied at his desk or worked with a soldering iron and circuit boards: "I wonder what would happen if I did this." My father's mantra firmly in mind I sat behind his chair one evening with an admittedly pilfered X-Acto knife in my chubby little hand and considered a wall socket. "I wonder what would happen..." That night I learned one of the hard facts of life: technology can bite.
Forward twelve years. I have a boyfriend, a boyfriend who is three years older than my fourteen-year old self, a quiet boyfriend, it is true, but one who is kind, has a good sense of humor and how loves Star Trek even more than I do. What's more, he's fascinated by computers, and my father just happens to have built one himself from the ground up. The boyfriend comes over to visit. Whether he's visiting me or visiting the computer is a moot point; he's in the house, and my father isn't looking at his watch and asking loudly if "he's" still here, something Dad will do often in the years to come. I have learned another of technology's wonders: it attracts men.
Twenty-five years after this I'm crawling over ceiling joists, running cables and joking with Dad about networking my PC's and Great Scott's Mac, something that we both know makes my husband's hair stand on end. I'm not sure why he doesn't trust us. Just because we've spent some long nights trying to recover significant memory loss on one of my computers or had to wipe hard drives and start over, just because Great Scott sometimes comes home to find one of the PC's lying on its side with wires exposed and me up to my elbows in its innards, just because he knows my father has a penchant for working on electrical lines during storms without turning off the power first, is hardly reason to not trust us. Right? I'm thinking this may be technology's most wondrously utilitarian as well as entertaining value of all: making the husband nervous.
Forward twelve years. I have a boyfriend, a boyfriend who is three years older than my fourteen-year old self, a quiet boyfriend, it is true, but one who is kind, has a good sense of humor and how loves Star Trek even more than I do. What's more, he's fascinated by computers, and my father just happens to have built one himself from the ground up. The boyfriend comes over to visit. Whether he's visiting me or visiting the computer is a moot point; he's in the house, and my father isn't looking at his watch and asking loudly if "he's" still here, something Dad will do often in the years to come. I have learned another of technology's wonders: it attracts men.
Twenty-five years after this I'm crawling over ceiling joists, running cables and joking with Dad about networking my PC's and Great Scott's Mac, something that we both know makes my husband's hair stand on end. I'm not sure why he doesn't trust us. Just because we've spent some long nights trying to recover significant memory loss on one of my computers or had to wipe hard drives and start over, just because Great Scott sometimes comes home to find one of the PC's lying on its side with wires exposed and me up to my elbows in its innards, just because he knows my father has a penchant for working on electrical lines during storms without turning off the power first, is hardly reason to not trust us. Right? I'm thinking this may be technology's most wondrously utilitarian as well as entertaining value of all: making the husband nervous.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
The Poser Snarl
I am not a poet. I am not even a writer. What I am is a pen and ink and paper addict, a word addict, someone who scribbles in compulsive spurts and who, honestly, is about as happy to write a letter or a list of random words or to copy out a nice bit of someone else's writing as she is to write her own. Maybe more so. Often, most definitely more so.
Lately pen and paper mock me. I pick them up, and they whisper snide things beneath my pen strokes. What I need is to write utter nonsense, equally snide patter that has little literary value but that is a relief to write just for the sake of its smart-alek-y-ness.
So. Give me topics upon which to snarl, topics about which to be sharply witty and ascerbic. I need the excuse.
Lately pen and paper mock me. I pick them up, and they whisper snide things beneath my pen strokes. What I need is to write utter nonsense, equally snide patter that has little literary value but that is a relief to write just for the sake of its smart-alek-y-ness.
So. Give me topics upon which to snarl, topics about which to be sharply witty and ascerbic. I need the excuse.
Friday, June 01, 2007
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