Can romantics be closet existentialists?

I am not so jazzed right now.  It may be because I’ve just gotten over the flu – there’s nothing like being sick to make you feel truly pathetic – or it may be due to the fact that I really do have to decide what my future will be.  I think that I sort of hate the idea of the future at the moment, mostly because graduate school has not made it easier to deal with the notion of my own mortality.  I love the idea that each day is a pocket of new time, but I’m coming up hard pressed to know how to fill that time in a way that’s meaningful to me.  You might argue that starting a business or joining a sports team should fill in some of that anomie, but I’ not sure that I’m passionate enough about them.  Passionate enough for what: good question; is the net result of Facebook the feeling that your life isn’t as interesting as that of the friends you hardly talk to?

I want to make something.  I want to not start every sentence I write with ‘I’.  I want to matter because I care intensely.  I want to love and be loved.  I want the conviction that I am writing the best story of my life that I possibly can.  Does an M.A. guarantee that?  Of course not.

magic

thesis all pau

can you get a degree in ridiculous?

The three things I would rather be doing right now than revising the hypothesis section of my thesis:

1. Working on my sister’s birthday present (oooohh, mysterious!)

2. Reading Dune (i.e., cramming for the official geek exam)

3. Watching the Scrubs marathon on ComedyCentral.  How can inner monologues be both so funny and heartful (to use the Japanese term) at the same time?  Awwwww.

But no, here I am in the lab, almost working, giving meaning to the phrase ‘future tense’: trying to balance my anxiety with my understanding that the sooner I get something done, the sooner I can not worry.

current work

I googled ‘art with statistics’ and the first entry that came up was this current work by the artist Chris Jordan.  Depressing, certainly, and a little trite after the nth iteration, but the concept is certainly worth considering.  And I’d quibble with Google’s definition of ‘statistics,’ but perhaps it’s a good thing to know that the rest of the world isn’t crazy about the power of inference.  (Or driven crazy by it?)

the mcelligot’s pool of the pacific

The Space Between is part of an occasional papers series that the Center for Pacific Island Studies publishes once a year on a variety of different topics.  This year’s publication concerns the Pacific as a meeting places for people and ideas, often in a liminal way.  (I haven’t used that word in years, and it’s making me miss anthropology, and the fact that I loved anthropology.)  I have three poems in The Space Between, one of which  – in a slightly different form – was also part of a Earl Ernst Lab Theater production two years ago that was based on linked poems, called ‘artovercome.’  (Here’s a review of the production.)  The whole text of the publication is available online, archived at UH’s scholarspace.

My hard copy of The Space Between came last week, and I haven’t had the chance to read it all yet.  Oh, but the smell of something freshly published.  The nose takes it in and the heart breathes it out.

Incognito cowl – Knitty: Winter 2009

These are amazing: Incognito cowls – Knitty: Winter 2009.

Get ready, people who need presents…

The good kind of tangle

I know it might seem a little weird, but a few weeks ago I stumbled on this program,  Matter Of Trust, that helps clean up oil spills with human hair.  Not the first thing you’d think of to do with hair (if one thinks of doing anything at all with it…), but it makes a lot of sense because 1) we shed 2) the ethic of recycling should apply to anything that it can.

The way it works is that this program makes mats out of hair by bunching it together somehow, and then volunteers use the mats to sop up oil on beaches and animals.  Apparently hair is really good at getting oil to stick to it so the mats can be used like a sponge to take up oil and wring it back out.  This way the oil can be recovered too and there’s less waste overall.  Then the used mats go through a process of really high temp composting to break them down, and finally the remnants are fed to worms, creating a closed loop system.

Think about it – even if you don’t participate, there are surely tons of innovating ways of recycling and reusing that can be part of our lives.