MOULa: In the Museum

Time Loop

Dragonia arrives tomorrow.  In her opinion, she is leaving today:  she will be flying out very late tonight–  her tonight.  But she is actually flying out so late, that by the time she does, her tonight will be very, very early in my morning.  And then she will arrive later in that morning.  Which will then be our morning.  Presumably.

Meanwhile, the Empress, who in a burst of kindness agreed to drive with me to the airport to get Dragonia, arrived at my apartment to do that very, very early this morning instead of tomorrow morning.  Leaving me very confused.

She’ll flay me for putting that here, because she’ll think I’m making fun of her, but it was ultimately very funny.

Groovy

I’m in my post-punk hippie Madonna Ray of Light phase.

Two Red Roses: Then and Now

Got into an extended discussion with my friend Ylva this morning on writing and poetry, which led me inevitably to bring up the Bad Poetry story, but also led me to bring up the couple of poems I’ve ever written that I thought were any good.  One of them is the nameless “summer clouds and honeyed vales” poem I’ve already shared in this space.  Another is a piece entitled “Two Red Roses”, which I wrote on the bus after a few minutes of being Totally Present in the streets of the City of Mists, in an attempt to capture that experience before it faded.  My closer friends are generally familiar with this latter piece, as I’ve shared it with them or given them copies of it on a variety of occasions.  But I couldn’t find any of those copies at hand, so instead I pulled open the word processor and recreated it from memory:

TWO RED ROSES

I walked down the street on 8^th Avenue holding two red roses

And the porn sellers turned away

Because when you have one red rose they think that someone has given it to you

And you might want to dally

But when you have two red roses they think that you are going to meet someone

And you have better things to do

Than sit in a nudie bar

I saw a soft brown chiquita in a white dress laughing and licking a vanilla cone

Washing her feet in an open hydrant

I thought about giving her one of my two red roses

When you have two red roses you can meet the gazes of strangers

Because you have something to keep without fear

And something to give away without hesitation.

—

Subsequent to doing that, however, I became possessed by a suspicion that it was impossible for me not to have some copy of it somewhere, given that I remembered e-mailing it to the friends in question, and because my Archives are…  well, my Archives.  So I wrung them until they screamed (my Archives, not my friends,) and sure enough, in the end they coughed up a version of it recorded in 1997–  which is not the original version either (that was written by hand, on paper,) but is arguably closer or identical to the original, having been set down by me at a point much closer to when the original was created:

two red roses

I walked down the street on Eighth Avenue holding two

red roses, and the porn sellers turned away,

because when you have one red rose they

think that someone has given it to you, and

you might want to dally, but when you have

two red roses they think that you’re going to

meet someone, and you have better things to

do than sit in a nudie bar…

I watched a soft brown chiquita in a white dress

eating an ice cream cone and washing her

feet in an open hydrant. I thought about

giving her one of my two red roses…

When you have two red roses you can meet the gazes

of strangers, because you have something to

keep without fear and something to give away

without reservation.

—

I like that in the 2011 version the little girl is “laughing and licking a vanilla cone”, rather than just “eating an ice cream cone.”  (She really was laughing and licking it, and it was vanilla.)  I like that the 1997 version says “watched” instead of “saw”, though, as it creates the feeling the speaker is involved, active rather than passive.  And I like the way “washing her feet in an open hydrant” doesn’t take a whole separate line in the 1997 version.  I’m not sure how I feel about “reservation” versus “hesitation”.  “Reservation” fits the point being made by the end of the poem more accurately;  “hesitation” communicates something different and related, but what it communicates has its own, good flavor, and is not inaccurate.  Perhaps I need to do a hybrid.

—

Now if I could find a complete copy of the Valentine’s Day poem I wrote for Faye lying around somewhere, THAT would be a coup.

Last Day on the Pulse/ Sn@tch City Prom Hunt

The Pulse/ Sn@tch City Prom Hunt ends tonight, so if you haven’t made it over there yet, best bump it up on your To Do List.

I have to confess, I was so busy setting up my own boxes, I never got around to looking at everyone else’s, or picking up a few gifts for myself.  (There are pictures of much of what’s available in the Sn@tch blog, naturally.)  People who visit seem to be enjoying it, though.  Dragonia even saw the Tiphareth Red bowties mentioned in the Retail Therapy fashion blog.  Bonus!

Persona Non Grata

I love it when I throw a question out there on Facebook–  ostensibly a “social networking” question, the kind of mild query for opinions that takes very little time to respond to, and doesn’t involve anything embarrassing or personal–  and no one responds.  Not even to say something funny.  And by “love it”, I mean, “find it mildly annoying”.  Other people do that all the time, about things they want to know, and they get feedback.  What’s wrong with me?

On the other hand it was a query for opinions regarding good free Windows-based SSH applications, pursuant to the activities I described below.   So I suppose it’s remotely possible that no-one who happened to look at Facebook that day had any idea what the hell I was talking about.

Still.

Geek Joy

I used SSH to access my hosting account, then went into MySQL and figured out the command line syntax to specify the source file for a database I needed to recreate, in order to circumvent the host’s upload file size limits!

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Vindication

Jack is safely bundled off to go see Grandma upstate.  He was carrying his final report card with him when I picked him up from school;  we opened it in the car, before his mother came out of work, and discovered that his third marking period grades had SKYROCKETED.  He jumped at least one letter grade higher in nearly every subject, all across the board, and one number grade higher in nearly every subcategory.  The exception was Science, in which he dropped from an A to a B–  and which all things considered, seems pretty minor!

Also:  as I was telling him goodbye, he called out cheerily, “Maybe I can write you a postcard!”  And then, as his mother looked at him funny, added, “What?  He wrote me postcards when he went away.”  To which she only replied, “I know…”

Happy Father’s Day III

“Today’s my last day of school!” Jack calls back to the crossing guard, as we step from the crosswalk to the sidewalk.

“I think she knows that, son,” I say to him, with a smile. “It’s her job to get us across the street safely. I imagine they told her she doesn’t need to be here tomorrow.” I wave to her to myself in thank you, as she is a very good crossing guard, vigilant and friendly, someone with whom I have had a number of pleasant conversations this past year. The crossing guards at some of the other intersections are ancient women who do not smile, or speak. One of them doesn’t even get out of her car and actually stop the traffic when you approach the street. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Father’s Day II

“If you put ‘Secret War’ on your phone and I see it, it’s not a secret anymore.”

–Jack, handing my cel phone back to me after talking to his Mom on it

Happy Father’s Day

Jack and I are spending the day crushing various demonic entities and inferior civilizations under our boot-heels.  And also seeing “Super 8”.  And maybe eating some chili dogs.  There should be chili dogs in there somewhere, I think.

I also pop-quizzed him, as I am wont to do, as to what The Most Important Rule In the Entire Universe is, just to make sure that he hasn’t forgotten.  And he responded correctly, “When girls come over, make sure the bathroom is clean.”  So I have not been negligent in my paternal duties.

Fire of Unknown Origin

Two and a half hours of random crap streaming on AH Radio, starting at 9 PM Eastern/ 6 PM SL.  Daft Punk, Luscious Jackson, Citizen Cope, Beastie Boys, Zero 7, A Tribe Called Quest and a lot of other stuff produced by shakin’ my music collection upside-down into a pan.  You know the drill.

Pulse/Sn@tch City Prom Hunt

Hey, check it out!–  we’re, like, real merchants, in a hunt and everything:

(No, I did not do this art, those of you who are wondering.  Ivey at Sn@tch did.)

Here are the two fabulous TD items you can find, both of which are currently exclusive to this hunt:

The TD Tiphareth Red Bowties are free;  the TD Rose Stained Glass textures will cost $L30 for a pack of 12 that contains transparent and opaque versions of six different colors.  Smashing!

Here’s your limo:  http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pulse/71/76/596

From the Comments: Interregnum A to D

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this– current events got in the way.   Neuro made some points on a previous From the Comments, Inshallah, that I had to struggle to address in any logically coherent manner:

There are several ideas in your post that seem independent: a) an outdated website, b) one’s personal mythology, c) paradigms for how to take on life, d) a sub-optimal life or at least feeling it is.

Seems to me that the Interregnum is just about (d).

…I think you explained it well, I just don’t yet see the necessary connections between a-d. For example, it seems to me that one can have a personal mythology without having any “paradigms on how to judge and achieve…personal success and fulfillment.” And one can have both of those without happiness. I might be confused because, as I read it, a-d are mixed in your discussion as if they are all interchangeable, and that is not how I am thinking of them.

I view them not so much interchangeable as interrelated, and only independent of each other in the strictest sense of the term: that yes, it is possible (and sometimes appropriate, I suppose) to consider my problems in the light of only any given one.

The website, since its inception, has tended to be the truest expression of whatever’s going on with me at any given moment in time. That’s what it was designed to do. Everything that matters to me outs here eventually, one way or another– often in ways I’m not aware of until later. As such, it not only acts as an archival record of Where I Was At, but serves as a sort of crucible. The process of creating content for it does two things: it helps me clarify my thoughts and feelings and experiences, and it helps me place those thoughts and feelings and experiences into a structure where I can make sense of them, and not feel like they’re all ultimately pointless. That structure is what I refer to when I say “mythology”. Is that semantically accurate? Maybe not. But it always seems to wind up involving or invoking gods and angels and kings and demons and faeries and muses and archetypes and a lot of other things that are dear to my heart, things that occupy places in what people traditionally call Mythologies. So that’s what I call it.

Similarly, my personal mythology and my paradigms for how to take on life have always seemed to evolve together and inform each other. I suppose it’s possible to have one without the other. I never seem to. Some kind of storytelling always springs out of the ground where I step; if that’s not happening, it usually (if not always) turns out I’m stepping in a bad direction for me, or failing to accomplish anything meaningful.  And things feel wrong.

Also, a personal mythology that doesn’t involve or at least influence your paradigms for how to take on life doesn’t seem to me to be much of a mythology.

So, to make it clearer for me, if tomorrow you woke up with a new mythology and new paradigms and your life was still suboptimal, would the Interregnum be over?

Yes, I think so. Because then even though things sucked, I wouldn’t feel like the whole Earth was a wash and that I was just kicking around in the ruins waiting for the Sun to go out. I’d have a path, a way to move forward. At the best that would end it; at the worst that would number its days.

Or, alternately, if your life suddenly became optimal though you had no new paradigms or mythology, would the Interregnum still be in effect?

Yes– but in line with what I said above, I can all but guarantee that if my life did become optimal, something new would evolve in my mythology to parallel it, somewhere in the process of that happening– because that’s the way my mind and imagination work. (Some people would say that’s the way the World and the Universe work; I would love to say that, but I don’t dare claim the authority. :) ) And whatever that new evolution would be would also probably kill or displace the Interregnum.

I hope that answers more questions than it raises.

Vintage

Vintage is fun.  Aside from that fact that every fashion designer in SL seems to go through a retro period, there are a number of small groups that use their sims for accurate historical reenactment or roleplay, plus larger groups that co-opt the designs and looks and music of yesteryear for their own pastiche.  So you can sail the seas in the Age of Sail, dance at a Baroque Masquerade, walk the battle lines of the Napoleonic Era, darken the alleys of a hundred Victorian cites, quaff a drink in Weimar Berlin, stroll the boulevards of Old Hollywood, drag-race Midwestern streets in the 1950s (theoretically all in the same night)…  and with a little bit of effort, you can look the part while doing each one, often very economically.  (The exception seems to be if you want to be a Gibson Girl.  The Edwardian period is madly under-represented, probably because it’s sandwiched inbetween the Victorian era and the Roaring 20s, two larger timespans that most people are more familiar with.)

Most of what you see me wearing in this picture cost nothing.  The flapper dress, gold belt, skin, hair, necklace, bracelet and earrings (invisible at this angle) were all free, acquired by me at various points in the past, either through my own initiative, or via tips from friends that they were available.  The shoes I already had (ironically, they’re the same ones you saw me unboxing previously);  I just changed their color.  Ditto for the eyes.  I bought the eyelash layer for L$25 off Marketplace, after an informative discussion with Dragonia as to whether or not my normal prim lashes were appropriate for the look, and the eyeglasses from Hatpins for $L125, since I’d had my eye on them for a few months anyway.  Final cost:  L$150–  about 60 cents US, and paid for out of my profits on texture and object sales from Tiphareth Designs.  I’d call that a bargain.

—

On the other hand, it is possible to overdo it in pursuit of the Free.  Ivey Deschanel of Sn@tch had THIS to say on the ugly evolution of freebie hunting, and that was three years ago.  Behave yourself.  And if you’ve got the L, and you like somebody’s work, cough up for it once in a while–  especially if they’re catering to your niche-passion under-represented section of the market!