bric-a-brac

I overshot myself this week, and needed some down time to recover. I know that I can't commit to doing too much with my time, but have a hard time cutting it down when there's so much fun stuff happening.

So I got home from The Auteur premiere on Friday (it was a really fun movie- I highly recommend it. Equal parts sweet and sincere and funny- Melik was amazing!), to find my cat limping really severely. It was the third night in the week that I was out late, and I'd been hoping he would get better on his own. No such luck.

So I skipped Cyborg camp Saturday morning, although I really wanted to go, because I was tired and seeing him like that really makes me ache. But there weren't any vet appointments available Saturday anyway- I'll have to take him in the morning.

I'm mulling over a question that I've been trying to answer, talking with Adron and Fernando about what, exactly, this blog is about. Either I choose a topic for it and stick with that, or it becomes more like a journal (like this post is). I don't want to keep an online journal, because I think it's ridiculous, but when I come up with a topic, it's always something like "Things My Friends Don't Normally Talk About". As in, I have friends and colleagues and people to talk with about, say, animation, or my personal life, or technology, so I don't really need to blog about them. If I were in a book group, I probably wouldn't blog about what I'm reading (just kidding- I would, because book groups read sooooo slowly). But I don't know anyone who is into the Long Now stuff, or poetry, or... whatever else it is I ramble about on here. So when my mind is turning this stuff over, I generally end up blogging about it. I suppose, then, that it's more personal, more intimate, than I had hoped.

I imagine, because it's my first blog, that I'm still trying to find my voice, to find out what I can regularly contribute to the overwhelming mass of competing voices out there. And I imagine that will change over time, but bear with me.

Quickies: I finished Anathem and was disappointed- I felt as though the plot payoff was too small for how much time you spent with the book. I felt as though the aliens showed up and behaved in completely incomprehensible ways, just to act as a proof-of-concept for something the author was trying to explain to the reader. They never questioned the Mathic structure, even when they needed to (didn't anyone ever say, "Hey, it's a good idea to have all these young dumb kids around because they know how to get stuff done? All us hundreders can't communicate with outsiders any more", or "Hey, isn't it great to have all this technology that lets us share information quickly? Normally we'd have to wait years in order to talk to each other!") Finally, it's petty but it always annoys me when a character spends one or two pages with another, and then for the rest of the book, that person is the love of their life and they pine for them. It doesn't add emotional tension, or depth to the character- it just makes them look like an adolescent.

Quickie two: Watched Secretary yesterday. I didn't like how tremendously unhealthy their relationship was. The movie shows how her self-harming is clearly tied to her relationship with her father, and the relationship with the boss only becomes eroticized when he becomes the instrument of pain. People can have healthy S&M relationships, but this movie takes two characters driven by tremendous self-loathing and then says they're "made for each other" and puts a romantic gloss over the whole thing.

Quickie three: Robert Frost. He's cool. Behold:

...

For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would covet it or think it worth
The pains of conquering to force change on.