So Zhaneel and Chris asked (within five minutes of each other, no less!) where all the posts had gone. The front page shows all the posts written in the last eight days. The problem is when life gets too interesting, I don't always post every day, and though this might be the first time in over a year, a week went by without my posting a thing, so they all dropped off.

So I spent ten minutes coding something I'd been meaning to for a long time. Now the front page shows all the posts for the last week, or the last 8 posts, which ever is more.

After all, when I'm too busy with life to post, I ought to assume that other people are too busy with life to read!

Blarg. Staying in sick today. My sore throat's threatening to blossom into the flu-ish thing that's been going around these parts for the last month. I'm cozying up to my new DVD copy of Fellowship of the Rings and striving to stave off the illness through prodigius consumption of Odwalla C Monsters, water, Advil and soup.

Hey, at least the weather finally turned nice!

Cellphone battery dead, charger 50 miles away, staying over with Ammy and Rick tonight, back to Karen and Crystal's tomorrow. I'll have sporadic email access, and will have a working phone again on Sunday.

So if you're trying to reach me, I've got a bit of a longer turnaround via email, and none via voicemail. You can call Ammy's cell if you're someone who's likely to want to reach me.

If not, expect new content before the end of the weekend. Can we say multimedia?

One thing I've found blogging in the last year: Too often I'll have an emotion and a seed for how to form it into a blog entry. Sometimes I'll just tell myself to remember to blog it later (hah, right) and sometimes I'll write down just enough of it so I can remember it. A scrap of paper in my wallet, a sticky note on my desktop, virtual or physical, sometimes my hand, and sometimes money, if that's all available. Worse is when I leave myself a message on voicemail, because I never go back and check my saved messages, to gather the seeds and grow them into posts.

The main problem is that the particular emotional passion is fleeting, and if I hope to capture it in prose, it has to be in the moment I'm experiencing it.

To go on a slight tangent, this is one of the reasons I really liked the Two Towers: While most sequels call on actors to reprise their roles, and the actors review the original work to 'get back into character,' the three LotR movies were all completely shot before any of the cast got a chance to see themselves on an an edited reel. This (and the fact that they weren't shooting linearly, and might shoot a Return of the King scene the day before shooting a Fellowship scene at the same location) meant that the actors had to call on the memory of themselves actually playing their characters, not the memory of them watching themselves playing their characters. In a sense, it's the difference between making a second identical printout of a document, instead of just photocopying the original and getting a fuzzier copy.

Tangent done. My point is that trying to write a blog post based on a scrap of paper means trying to recreate the thought instead of simply relating it. No doubt this has resulted in a few posts with a softer focus than I'd have liked, and a good number of posts that simply were never written.

One of my New Years resolutions for 2003 is to be better about this. If I don't have time to write a full and complete 1000-word post on something, I'll just put down what I can. On the flipside, I rarely edit my posts nowadays, even the ones that are upwards of 2000 words. Since I'm restructuring the site to make themed content (dotcom storytime, project posts, movie reviews, etc) easier to find, both for the regular visitor and the googlists, I'm also trying to create different quality levels. I need to know that posts don't have to be perfect (or even necessarily cogent) to go up on Fury, while at the same time I should have a higher standard above a 'post' more like an 'article,' 'story,' or 'paper' that stands well on its own.

But more than anything this post is a requiem for those posts that were and yet will never be. It's hard enough to write from the heart; writing from a memory and an obligation to your former self is a lot harder.

I've written a couple robust posts, but don't have a net connection to send them. I'm sending this from my sidekick, which can't connect to my computer.

At this moment I'm sitting at the table in a restaurant in Salinas with 20 relatives, finishing up dinner, but saving plenty of room for the coming ollaliberry pie (and I don't care if I spelt it wrong!)

Merry Christmas!

I feel the obligatory need to post something today.

Dickens Fair was great, danced a lot, ran errands in Berkeley, came home, and will be going out to Gaskells Ball in about an hour.

I got so many warm fuzzies today, and I'm not even at the Ball yet. It's a good day.

This post made my day. Read the comments to understand why.

---

Actually, lunch with Dawn made my day. But this was great dessert.

Visiting Home. The very concept seems to be an oxymoron. To have a home that you have to visit seems at least a little antithetical to the very concept of home. Nevertheless as I'm back in the Bay Area I find that I'm visiting home on many levels beyond the geographic. I find that I'm visiting myself.

One of the most intriguing concepts I encountered in George Lakoff's language class (was it three years ago already?) was that of the self-referential self. "I'm beside myself." "I talk to myself." "I take care of myself."

My... Self. The concept of self as a thing separate from, yet contained in, me. It belongs to me ("My self") it is a part of me ("Me, myself, and I"), and yet it is something that can have a metaphoric relationship both linked to and separate from my own sitting consciousness ("I'm beside myself").

I'm not the first person to extemporize on the dualistic nature of self-referencing, but when it comes up in my daily life, I can't help but share.

I'm not sure what I expected upon returning to the Bay Area. I looked forward to meeting up with friends I haven't seen in six months. I expected the stinging nostalgia of looking at a street I called my own for seven years, within a city and campus my own for eleven, undiminished by the expectation of it.

In a way, I expected to visit my self. The self I left behind.

...

Consider a refrigerator door. Notice the magnetic poetry. Half the words are unattached, floating in a sea of 'am's and 'I's with an occasional 'effusive' and 'turgid.' A portion of the rest are formed into fragments, standing on their own, or the scraps of poems sent to salvage for valuable verbs and adjectives. "sausage boy of love" and "trembling warmth in the deep places" lay about in seeming random, like the fallen pillars of unknown temples overgrown with moss, with only hints of white marble peeking through, belieing bits of their former composition.

Occasionally an entire poem remains intact:

though some were eager
in their fall
from the light
they dream
to shine
yet

The refrigerator canvas gives a snapshot of self: A clear representation of the current thoughts, desires, and meanings. Divining meaning from the not-yet-recycled fragments, the archaeologist-of-self can piece together bits of history, murkier, or at least more detached from the current self, the farther back in time.

This is the tableau I expected. Having left Berkeley at a pinnacle of social happiness and self-confidence, I sought to put my social poetry under glass for a year, put in safekeeping while I go away on a social sabbatical. My great hope was that it would be undisturbed; that I could return to find my life here preserved and waiting for me.

What I have found, so unexpected as to show me just how naive I am in life, is so much more.

As we walk through life, we continually make new friends, and old friends either continue on or drift away, like the poetry on the refrigerator. Life is a journey, and there is scenery we pass by along the way, waystations where we may linger for a time, and travelling companions we may journey with for a time, brief or eternal. The interactions form a pattern with a dimension of time; the tangled skein, the great tapestry.

My surprise on coming home was that I wasn't picking up the threads where I left them. My journey back was both temporal as well as geographic. Threads, departed traveling companions, phrases of verse long since recycled, they're all here. The refrigerator door has gained a dimension where all the poetry ever written upon it is equally accessible. I came home to find a balloonist's perspective, seeing not only my current position in the journey, but also the path I've taken to get here, all equally clear, equally accessible.

In short, I see myself. While "I" is the conscious awareness, travelling piggyback on my brain, watching, feeling, interpreting and acting in the now, my self is the repository of experience. I am the brush, and myself is the canvas. When I left this land I-the-brush could only see my immediate surroundings, my immediate past, painting my immediate future. I come back to see the work I created, the self that I am, formed over more than a decade.

I can walk down one street and feel nostalgia over the place I would eat dinner at least once a week for the year before I left; I turn the corner and wonder at the emotions latent in a cafe I haven't regulared for five years. At this moment I sit in the sixth-floor lounge of Soda Hall, a haunt of three years past, one where nobody would recognize me now, where I can walk in almost a dream state. A place more real in my memory than reality, as if I'm sitting in a holodeck typing these words. Yet there is comfort here. Comfort in knowing that it is a piece of me, pride in being in this place that helped shape me, formed in to the self and the I that I am now. Some odd sort of recursive nostalgic loop only one base-case away from mellow insanity, to be sure.

Beyond the physical environments, my relationships with people are similarly in the forefront. I'm staying with my best friend and platonic soulmate, our ten year anniversary just around the corner, and her roommate and close friend of mine of six years. I've been seeing some friends not seen in six months, others for three years. I'm experiencing passions banked like coals for two years, stirred back to a fire. I've explored regrets from six years past, readdressed and transmuted into a gentle rain that brings out grins more readily than umbrellas.

In short, I feel all of myself, carried with me. In many ways I feel my past and present as one, and I feel that I'm not so much visiting home, as crawling into myself for a time, and it just may be the happiest place on earth.

So a few folks have been alluding to the Fury mention in Macworld this month.

Turns out that this is a print-only mention, unless they just haven't posted it online yet. I went out and got a copy (December Macworld, page 26) and was pleasantly amused:

(click to enlarge)

I've got to start keeping a clippings book...

For the nitpicky, I added a whole bunch of items to the 'look ahead' calendar (which at the moment I'm using as my main calendar, keeping me reminded of what I'm doing when), and I changed teh date readout there, so it says soomething intelligent like '1/12" instead of '28 days'.

Oh, and I renewed a promise to actually fix the ugly comments page that I promise to fix several hundred times a day (that is, every time someone looks at a post's comments, where it says "I promise I'll fix this ugly heap soon."

If I fix it right, then there will be a lot to like about the new functionaly beyond a paint-job. Since i don't have anything planned tomorrow except lunch with Karen and dancing in the evening, I may just have the chance to fix it right.