*Transcendental *Logic

HELP - DROWNING IN TABS - SEND SPARE BRAIN IMMEDIATELY

Here’s the goods!  (Maybe one of these days I’ll start doing this part more regularly, yah?)

-  Great stuff from WikiHow; my favorites are How to Define a Problem, and How to Create an Abundance Mentality.  It’s amazing how well a short article can handle a relatively abstract mental concept, I’m discovering.

-  The Working Group on Extreme Inequality (quite a find in itself) has a great piece on Auto Executive Compensation, which is quite eye-opening in light of the money they want to avoid completely trashing Michigan’s economy (at least).  The long and short of it?  US Auto Execs don’t make very much compared to, say, US banking execs.  But all US executives are racking up orders of magnitude more money than foreign executives, thanks to our clever lack of wage parity laws.  So one GM executive made $10.2 million in the same fiscal year that the top 32 executives at Toyota (including the CEO) made less than $20 million, BONUSES INCLUDED.

Oh yeah, but it’s the Union’s fault that they’re going out of business now, you know.  ::facepalm::

Anybody who finds that interesting will probably also like at least following the thinking in this Treehugger piece on three possible New-Deal-Like ideas to jumpstart the U.S. economy by building spiffy high-speed rail lines all over the place (not to mention solving the problem of how revolting air travel has become).  Say what you like about the New Deal, but those railroads are still a huge economic benefit today…

-  This is just cool, if you do Xmas presents:  Pangea Organics has gift sets packed in boxes that are not only biodegradable, but will grow into a spruce tree if you plant them.  Yup, open the gift, get the spiffy hippie-soap and stuff out, then soak the box and grow a tree out of it!  Big bonuses for creative thinking on that one.

-  In other hippie news, I found a neat site for people in the city who, like me, are seriously eyeballing the option of raising chickens.  It’s generally pretty badly written (seriously, "you’re here because you’ve been bit by the chicken bug"??  you make it sound like a parasite!), but the info is pretty darn helpful overall.

-  And there’s a weirdo in Michigan doing some downright disturbing face-paintings.  Not that I’m too surprised (though I am a bit surprised at the "self-described drag queen and born-again Christian" bit…wut??).  Looks like it takes talent, though!

-  "The End of Wall Street" is a really, really, really good article about the recent Crash.  I wish it didn’t end where it did — I want to know more! — but it was probably the best read on the topic I’ve seen so far.

-  Also, in the area of Things You Probably Didn’t Realize Would Be Interesting, the Book Design Review has a page up with their favorite designs of the year…and I have to admit, it was pretty fascinating to page through, and some of them are really, really cool.  If you know nothing about book design, this is a really fun way to burn five minutes.  ;)

Lastly, if none of that was weird enough for you…THIS IS REAL:

EEEEK, right?  How long do you think before some crazy religious nut donates Fetus Cookies for a bake sale near you?  (Thanks, again, to Cake Wrecks for the image.)

Whew!  Now that I’m not staring at fifty tabs, maybe I can get back to work!
 

It’s the middle of yet another crazy dream:  Something about cell-phones giving away the fact that I’ve been doing something immoral with or on top of a desk, and my ex-husband apologizing for calling my phone and explaining that it wasn’t nearly so bad as the fact that I slept in his car while he cheated on his new girlfriend two blocks away.

Seriously, that dream got so weird that I decided, in-dream, to check out for a while and take a break.  As the dream was happening in the neighborhood I used to live in long, long ago, and it was kind of chilly and there was nothing really to do, I decided to go for a run.

Normally I hate running — "Do you run?" the joke in Real Genius goes; "Only when chased!"  But this time, it was different.

An excerpt, just for the hell of it, from Ch. 2 of my novel, which opens with the exhausted main characters fleeing for their lives through a strange and confusing land…

—–

Everything blurred into running.

Hiss of grass on legs–first tickly, then abrasive–and scrape of breath in throat, harsh throb of muscles, permanent pain in ribs — the unleavened taste of the Plains, the insistent beauty of the now purplish sky hovering like a quiet kalidoscope over their heads — it all fused, became a god, became Running, and they worshipped and feared it, suffering along, heads bowed straight down like good little mortals.
—–

Then, later, when the first of them realizes one of the things that makes this place special:

—–

Then it hit him.

It was like somebody’d turned a light on, changing completely how everything looked without actually changing it at all…it was as though he’d suddenly woken up to see the reality of what he’d been dreaming about all day.

It was a more profound experience, he’d say later on, than his death had been. Who was Daniel Graff? Just some guy…But this was the death of Running.

He wasn’t tired. He didn’t hurt, anywhere, at all. He wasn’t running, he was floating at extraordinary speed. But he wasn’t flying, either. He looked down, and stared stupidly at his hooves, the sharp dark things on the ends of his sticklike white legs which flashed in and out of existence, blowing the grass into a flat path beneath them, apparently on their own power. His throat was a little raw, but he swallowed a few leisurely times and it was soothed.

What he’d just accomplished was nothing short of freeing himself from bondage to a powerful god, and Nova felt the awe of it in a place deep in the dark center between his lungs; a place where gods were obvious; a place he’d…forgotten.

—–

That’s pretty close to what I dreamed, except that it was just me and my sneakers on old familiar sidewalks, and I realized suddenly that I’d hit it, hit the stride, could feel every millimeter of the movement and yet had time to adjust anything.  When I turned, the strain on my ankles annoyed me; I learned quickly to put a foot out, if there was a tree or pole, and use it to launch myself around corners.  I thought I must be going a zillion miles an hour, but it felt like floating.

I remember thinking, "Wow, taiji really helped with my ability to run…" –and it was something like taiji, actually, in that it was total attention and total control coming together as perfect ease.

Here’s the funny part:  In the two days since this dream, I’ve tried running several times.  Obviously I don’t feel like Nova does in my story, or quite like I did in my dream, but there’s definitely something there that wasn’t there before.  Even funnier, in the dream I met another runner, an older black man (who smelled archetypal, like Elvis) who told me that if I worked hard, I might be allowed to remember this skill.  (This was before I finished my run and had to go back and deal with the desk-phone-love-triangle BS again.  ;)

The heel lands first; the whole foot rocks over the ground; the energy builds and the toe shoots it up the leg; it comes from the earth up, not the body down.  It pulls me right into a trance.  And it feels pretty darn wonderful, actually.

I think…I want a treadmill.  ;)

(P.S.  The prose I quote from my own work here is uncharacteristically purple (flowery), fyi.  Most of the piece is in much plainer language…but it seemed to warrant some texture, here.)

Why yes, I think I will.

…From FFFFound!

As in, Stephen Fry is THE ISH, as the paragraph below irrefutably demonstrates:

But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.

Witness, my friends!   And get more here.

Language wizards:  Firmly among the categories of people that I seriously might have sex with no matter what they look like.  ;)

The Ish is also a rare example of words that Google just gets totally wrong.  For instance, this top image-search result for The Ish is totally, totally not.  Rather, it appears to be what a picture that won the caption contest for "Matthew Good in Jonestown" might look like…

Okay, so all last week my sleep-schedule was like, b-b-b-b-WAAAAAAAUGhominahomina-pfft-SPLAT.

I kid you not.

However, this resulted in the Finishing of the Room and the Actual Moving In of my honest-to-compost Dream Roommate, so although there are still some yawns and kinks, life is definitely good overall.  A good chunk of the East Coast is probably burning me in effigy this week, for stealing one of their finest and tucking her away in my distressingly Midwestern sanctuary…but they can suck it.  I’m still seeing stars, I’m so happy she’s here. 

We went walking in the woods which are inexplicably five minutes from my house* the other day.  Also, Dream Roommate goes to Taiji with me tonight.  I will overdose on Squee!

And tomorrow is Hold Onto Your Patriotic Asses Day!  I’m having a party at my house.  We will have ridiculously good food (just in case this is the last time we can afford it) and watch TV and probably throw something at least once.

Nationals aside, in my state there are two amazingly important votes going on — one (Prop 1) to legalize medical marijuana effing FINALLY, and one (Prop 2) to support stem-cell research duh.  Naturally I’ve seen more signs against both of those than for them, but this means nothing other than that stupid people are loud, and we knew that.  ;)

And AND and, remember Unnamed Project X, that recently transmogrified into a real-on-paper business?  Well, next week it starts getting real on the paper that matters most — the little green kind.  The independence of running my own business has been one of my bigger goals for a long time now, and it will mean a lot for the big goal next in line behind it … so good thoughts for me, please?  I’m nervous as hell.

…

…What, you want to watch Mr. Vampire too?  I don’t blame you, of course!  It happens to be online, free, here.  Enjoy!

*As distinguished from the woods that are inexplicably five seconds from my house.  This is why I love Michigan, seriously:  Suburb, city, doesn’t matter; the woods are never very far.  Forests own this land, and they don’t let anybody forget it — stop mowing in downtown Detroit for a year, and you’d have vines growing all the way up the skyscrapers.  LOVE this place.