My friend Krys pointed out that  haven’t blogged in ages. I am aware of this, but I’ve been operating under the “if you don’t anything interesting to say, don’t say anything at all” model.

However, on this rainy Wednesday afternoon, I find myself sitting with 30 minutes to kill (that I will not use to do work I could also be doing) while waiting to board a flight to San Francisco (for work). JetBlue provides free WiFi in this terminal, so I’m taking advantage.

Anyway - yeah. I may have to pay $7 for a blanket later, but at least I’m getting free internets right now. Unsecured. Sure. I’ll just stay away from online banking for a half hour.

I was thinking of posting about a matter that crossed my mind a few weeks ago when I got a haircut - the speed with which some relationships can go from handshake to hug. There are very few industries and interactions that allow you to make this jump. But I’ll expand on that another time.

Other thoughts: I’m way stressed. It’s not any one thing, but rather an overwhelming sense over the last few months that my time is not my own to divide and use. I wake up in order to prepare for work so I can get to the train on time. I fit my breakfast in before my morning meetings. I get lunch when I can and often have to cut it short to run to my afternoon meetings. I have to leave work within a 10 minute window of time if I want to catch my train and get a seat. Depending on the night, I have to fit in doing laundry, rock-climbing, visit with the doctor, etc. — or sometimes working from home or running errands. I maybe have one night a week that I can just sit and watch a movie. My Netflix return history is a testament to this; I recently returned two films I’d been trying to watch since February 12th.

My weekends are a nice break since I get away and visit with friends, but this respite from the crappitude of life is bookended by more time pressure and scheduling; if I want to beat the traffic on Friday afternoon, I have to leave work either before or after a certain time… but still have to finish what I need to finish. Friday nights and Saturdays are restful and fine. But when I wake up on Sunday, I’m already getting anxious about the drive home and how that translates… if I leave at x:00 hour, I get home approx 2.5 hours later, then I can unpack, do laundry, etc. and go to sleep by a certain time so I can wake up in order to prepare for work and get to the train on time.

There is no wiggle room - except for part of the weekend.

So - I’m in the midst of a 12-day stretch of work (including a trip to California, but that will be work, too) and then it will be another week before I can have a restful weekend. So, I’m looking ahead at 20 days of run-run-run, from day to day, from work to home to errands, from meeting to meeting, from deadline to deadline, from familial obligation to familial obligation… and I just need a break.

It’s time for a vacation. The plan is to take a week… a full week… and use that time to do what I want to do, with no schedule or pressure. I mean, routines are good. I love routines. They stabilize me and my moods in a nice way - but routines like seeing friends are positive; the other stuff? Just stressful.

Anyway, we’ll be boarding soon. Let’s see what else the internets have to offer.

Since last night, the wind here in northern New Jersey has been fierce. FIERCE. Loud and long and constantly hissing or screaming or howling. It didn’t keep me awake last night, but other things did. Not worries or concerns or anything. Just random stuff.

I was up until almost 4 in the morning and had to get up at 7, whether I wanted to or not. It was a rough day. I’m going to try to make it through until a more appropriate bedtime so that I can sleep through the night.

The stream of consciousness that was flowing during this particular bout of insomnia was kind of entertaining. I started by burrowing my head into the mound of four pillows that I have (for myself alone - I only use one, but I like having four for reading and propping purposes) and could hear my heartbeat in my ears. Then I noticed that the pulse in my neck was just barely making the sheets move and causing them to whisper a little. And that that whispering almost seemed to be rhythmic - but the rhythm of a waltz. Which is impossible because that would indicate a rather disturbing arrhythmia, no? Still, I was thinking about the waltz and things in 3/4 time, and then 4/4 and then 5/4. And I was thinking about how little I know about music and that the only song I can name in 5/4 time is Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five.”

(P.S. I now know that I know more… thanks to this very helpful article on musical works in unusual time signatures on Wikipedia. I could have figured out that Radiohead didn’t stick to 4/4 for everything, but 7/4 ["2+2=5"] Or 10/4 ["Go To Sleep"] Hey, guys - nice! Thanks for learnin’ me somethin’. And Nick Drake’s “River Man”, also in 5/4. I love that song.)

Then I moved onto thinking about words and meanings and semiotics and how, beyond never actually being able to understand each other when we’re all sane, lucid individuals, it’s frightening to think about how little it takes to separate us from the rest of the world in terms of comprehension and expression of meaning.  A friend told me about a play she saw about a woman and her schizophrenic brother, and we were talking about the breakdown in language and meaning and comprehension in schizophrenics or people with dementia and other loss of brain function. This carried over into another conversation with friends last night about the same thing… and so when I couldn’t sleep last night, I was just marveling at how incredible it really is that we can communicate with each other and that we have the capacity to learn other languages and comprehend units of meaning in a way that allows us to cross those communication bridges — and how tragic it really is to lose that particular ability. It closes you off from the world entirely when you can’t make those connections between an object, the word for that object and that object’s meaning to you or someone else. And I was thinking about aphasia, agnosia and apraxia (Wikipedia does a good job of explaining those too, as well…)

Aphasia: is a loss of the ability to produce and/or comprehend language, due to injury to brain areas specialized for these functions

Apraxia: is a neurological disorder characterized by loss of the ability to execute or carry out learned purposeful movements, despite having the desire and the physical ability to perform the movements

Agnosia: is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss

Besides being really awesome words (sorry - word nerd), they’re pretty terrifying as far as what they mean for an individual affected by them. An inability to produce or comprehend language - where you’re speaking nonsense but have no idea that no one else can understand you, or finding that everything other people are saying is gibberish to you. A loss of ability to recognize things, despite the fact that you see, feel, hear and taste it all…  you just can’t put it together and grasp it.

So I was sort of sitting there in bed at 3 in the morning, scaring myself thinking about that and how tenuous our whole world of communication is - and how terrifying it would be if that broke down. It sounds like something Jose Saramago could turn into a novel, like he did with Blindness or Seeing. Except there would have to be some terrific allegorical and political meaning. Otherwise, I’d write the fucking thing.

I was always fascinated by how Annie Sullivan was able to teach Helen Keller (you remember The Miracle Worker, right?) to name and recognize objects without the benefit of sight or hearing. While that was enough of an obstacle, imagine trying to do that when the person you were teaching was (or if you yourself were) incapable of making the connection between the taste in your mouth and the word/symbol for it. There are therapists who work on this with stroke victims or victims of head trauma, and that’s just incredible to me. Seems almost Sisyphean.

Anyways. I’m way exhausted and don’t feel like this thought process is working itself out in the most elegant fashion, but maybe if I ever feel like I have it in me to write a novel, I could work that angle. I’d be surprised, though, if someone hadn’t already done that.

I took a sick day to sleep, drink tea and eat toast and nurse my tummy back to feeling settled and happy. I think a lack of leafy greens and sleep led to badness. I’m oversimplifying, of course, but there is a line one should not cross in discussing health matters.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about things like the value of friendship and how friendships change and how we change and how it’s the nature of things to change… but that it doesn’t make them any easier when the change is not one we’re looking forward to.

A month or two ago, I was getting pretty upset and getting depressed and anxious worrying over an eventuality that has yet to pass, but most certainly will. That anxiety was probably a bit of self-preservation on my part and not unfounded or misplaced, but perhaps a little premature. I do that. I start worrying about things so early that I almost sabotage myself in the happiness department by constantly reminding myself that nothing good lasts forever.

In the last couple of months, other things have come to pass that I did not expect and that I was equally upset about - but I was able to get past them much more quickly since I didn’t have the expectation to live through and worry over and get anxious about (”Nobody expects he Spanish Inquisition!”). They just happened and I’m dealing and that’s that.

But it’s set me to thinking again about how the people I depend upon most are a small group, really. Small and important, regardless of how close we are able to be at any given time period in our lives. And I wonder if I’m open and honest enough with them about how important they are and whether I should be or need to be more expressive of that. Sometimes I’m honestly overwhelmed with feelings of love and happiness when I think about my friends, but there’s no way to capture that in words without sounding horribly canned and cliche. A hug can convey some of it, but that’s not something I roll with naturally… I mean, I’ve gotten better, but it’s still not a natural part of the relationship even with my closest friends.

So the issue at hand: change is the only constant and any day can bring a change that pulls your friends away from you in one way or another. Constant expressions of care and reaffirmation of friendship can be friggin’ annoying and cloying. I don’t want to be one of those people who is always thinking, “Well, I’d better let my friends know I love them because we could all die tomorrow” because that’s just no way to live, but I also know that regret is a bitch.

It’s a question of finding balance, I suppose, and being aware of the good moments so that you can call them out and enjoy them as they happen. That’s a start.

I don’t know how much credit I can take for managing to capture something like this. I didn’t put the car there; I didn’t cause it to rust; I didn’t align the clouds. All I did was happen by and shuffle my feet a bit to the left and notice, “Wow - look what you can see in the mirror.” And I snapped the shutter. I am quite proud of the result:

My friend told me about these videos a few weeks ago and again this past weekend and, man, I’m obsessed. I keep watching. They’re probably old news to most of the world, but BBC TWO did a series of parodies of old science films called, “Look Around You.” They’re all up on YouTube. Like this one about water:

Or this one about sulfur (sulphur for those from the UK):

It looks like they did a total of eight. The accompanying website is still up, too. I have to investigate that craziness.

“Thants.”

Once upon a time (in college, so within the last 8 years or so), I had a bright purple Clairefontaine notebook, clothbound.

I decided that notebook was going to be a  mixed media art piece, so I bought rubber cement, a self-healing cutting mat, various colors and types of electrical tape and duct tape, rub-on letters, and good scissors. I clipped interesting images and words and patterns from magazines, newspapers, greeting cards, flyers… whatever caught my fancy. And I supplemented with my own words and art - bits of my poems and random phrases that would fly around in my head, etc.

When all was said and done, it was a pretty cool piece.  I had pages that folded out, pages that were cut out and see-through to others, pockets and envelopes — all kinds of coolness. Somewhere between moving into and out of my apartment, it was lost. I’ve searched through storage boxes and I haven’t found it. It makes me quite sad to think that it’s gone because I put several years of work into it. It was the first and only book thus far that I was happy to see with a broken spine. It was filled and fattened to about twice its original thickness because of all the additional pieces of media thrown in.

Anyway - I was just thinking about it today and about how I haven’t done anything very creative lately… but that I have the elements. I’ve been liking a lot of the photos I’ve been taking lately, and there have been interesting phrases and thoughts and vignettes winding through my days and nights. So. It might be time to order up a new Clairefontaine notebook and try this experiment again. If I do, I’ll have to take photos/scans of the spreads as I make things I’m proud of. Yes indeedy.

We had a snowstorm that was really an ice storm this time last week. I took some photos. Here’s some long needled pine encased in ice:

Sheesh. That’s a slowdown. From every day to almost once a month? Damn. The good part, I suppose, is that unlike previous breaks from blogging, this absence wasn’t prompted by a descent into depression or anything of the sort. I’ve been busy and haven’t felt that I have much worth putting up here. I’ve got 50+ drafts sitting in my draft folder… but those are things I started to write, realized I wasn’t quite sure how to finish and so I just saved them for another day.

That said, here I am. I have a night free. I’m on my third load of laundry, I’ve placed fresh sheets on my bed, I’m catching up on my RSS feeds (in which there are thousands of unread items so I’m going to go back about a week or so and just consider it done).

I’ve been spending weekends in the Philly area visiting friends. I’ve been rock-climbing a few times a week. I’ve seen a good portion of this year’s Academy Award Nominated films. One thing I want to do is come up with “Six Word (or less) Reviews” of those movies (inspired by the “Six Word Memoirs” at SMITH Magazine). So here’s a start (and I’ll just leave the ones I haven’t thought of yet blank… and maybe I can cut and paste into a new post later). I’ve seen six of them, so yeah. Reviews, not synopses, mind you:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button = Forrest Gump 2: The ‘Brad’dening

Frost/Nixon = (don’t have this one down yet)

Doubt = Holy star power & title misdirection

The Wrestler =Potentially laughable, but instead beautifully poignant

Slumdog Millionaire = Little too neat; little too sweet

The Reader = Nazi pedophilia love story: Oscar time (need to work on this one)