So here’s what the “typealizer” algorithm had to say about my blog. Typical. Am I this transparent even on screen? I do, however, like the boozy off-the-shoulder sassy cat thing that’s going on. MEOW! It actually reminds me of the Zoobilee Zoo cat lady (playing the saxophone in that clip). (PS. Those of you who know me, what do you think about the “conflict” bit? ) Thanks to Phil for the link.
ESFP - The Performers
The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.
The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.
I bought earth.
Not earth earth, but a reasonable
facsimile. Just earth skin, not proper
property that you own
through magma and core.
I bought a little bag of earth
that promises to nourish
whatever you put in.
I walk here.
I push myself up against the earth
to get where I go, or am moved
by a random stranger
in a room of random strangers
moving. If I move I am
rarely the one moving the machine
that moves me.
The sky has changed from dark
to dull rain white, covered
all the shallow corners of the sky.
On one of the times that I moved myself
I bought a plant that is three
plants that are meant to change the flavor
of foods that are their own flavor until then.
The flavor is not felt until it touches
your mouth or more precisely the inside
of your mouth. I bought it to put
in a pot from home that is just like
the pots that are here except
it is from home.
One of the plants died
before it got replanted in its pot
so I pulled it out by the root.
I thought the other plants would grow
with the extra elbow room
as it looked a little crowded in there.
The roots came out clean
and except for the bare spot
you couldn’t tell that it was there.
There is a practical reason for wearing pants
that taper at your ankles. Otherwise
you brush and carry the rain that pools
and pools on the saturated earth.
The other two plants are now wilting,
heading to a quick brown death.
I like to think they’re heartbroken
with that irrational symbiotic love
that comes from living too close
but I probably just pulled too hard.
It’s like the little bag of earth
full of nitrogen and phosphorus
humus and the remains of other dead things
that waits unopened under a window
that resonates with unending rain.
From the world of visual and performance poetry, something interesting that has been added as a feature to Poets.org that is, I think, worth mentioning. The “TextFlows” feature creates a flash movie that “performs” the poem at a speed that the reader determines using a slider along the bottom of the screen. The text urges people to “experience this poem” as a textflow, and the administrator of Poets.org suggests it might be a useful tool for teaching.
What’s cool about it? It does seem to make the text more vibrant, somehow, as it flows and ebbs on the screen, makes it seem alive. It’s a bare-bones visual presentation (black text on a white screen), and I do think “experience” could be replaced by “performance,” as it seems to foreground the text as an actor. The TextFlows website says that this kind of display technique is helpful for smaller/mobile media such as the iPhone, which I imagine is true. Also fun to think of people embedding “poem flows” on webpages they way youtube videos are shared.
What’s (potentially) not cool about it? It gives the viewer an alarming lack of control over how they see the poem - it would be more interesting, I think, to allow the user to determine even simple things like color, size of text, how many words are displayed at a time, etc. The fact that the length of line comes prepackaged is a HUGE deal, as it does seem to change the whole flow of the piece, and imposes an interpretation on the text that the reader may not agree with. In short, the reader/viewer/user is not presented with a new tool that will allow them to read the poem in a new way, but instead is presented with a new reading of the poem. I’m not sure the latter is a bad thing, but I just hope the TextFlows people don’t purport to have created so much of a tool as an easily viewable art piece.
I will say this mashup acts as a bit of a primer for current internet memes (a bit Iike Weezer’s Pork and Beans), but I love the idea that the conquest for world domination has been put on hold to make time for pranks.
I have been thinking a lot lately, which anyone who knows me will testify is no big surprise. But now that I’ve up and moved halfway across the country to pursue a new career in a town where I don’t know anyone: I’ve been thinking. A. Lot. Partly because I now get paid (!) in part to think and read (!), a fact that I find ceaselessly amazing and not a little absurd. And partly because this move has precipitated a bit of introspection and wandering that is probably long overdue.
Of course, this is also combined with a good deal of (both real and self-created) stress, as I try and find my feet about me again, searching for a vantage point in what feels like a pretty foreign place. I’ve described this to my colleagues in the English program as a “fight or flight, hair-on-back-of-neck bristling twenty-four hours a day” feeling and all of them agreed - the defamiliarization is both thrilling and terrifying, in equal parts, as you try to answer questions of: “where am I going? how do I get there? what do I need to do? and what’s your name again?”
And now, or maybe more than usual, I find myself looking for signs. Hard to tell if they appear now because I want to see them, or if I just wasn’t looking before. Maybe it’s the rain in Eugene and its blessing of all things abundance, but I find myself with a bounty of signs, piling up like pears from the tree in the front yard as I waited to write this down. (A pear tree out front! How delightfully Augustinian, no?)
Tonight, as I sat to do the NYT crossword from today’s paper, my first real “leisure activity” since I’ve arrived, I the puzzle looked different than normal - a long rectangle instead of the traditional square - but I have become so inured to difference over the past couple of weeks that I didn’t pay much attention. Then as I slowly filled in the blanks, one clue dominoing to the other, I came to #23 across, “City in Oregon.” “Certainly not,” I told myself, “couldn’t be” - but of course it was, this odd little textual clue to tell me I am doing the right thing, somehow, for reasons I can’t quite understand, two lines above the clue “In God we trust.”
This feels sometimes like an utterly crazy thing to do, to have done, to move away from friends and family and a community that are so important to me. It may be, actually, just that. But after a couple of weeks in my cave figuring it all out, I think there’s something true out here, though I can’t say just what. Now that I have the time and inclination to muse, I hope you’ll check back with me. This site has been fledgling, to be sure, and I’m looking forward to using it as a connection point to friends far and, soon, near.
Enough serrrrious stuff. Want to hear about Eugene? The trip here? Read on, dear friends. The story is just beginning.
I have a lot of stuff. And a lot of wonderful people who helped me pack it up and get it moved 1200 miles away. My dad, for one, the 22-ft-Penske rockstar, and Andrea, Jenga-packing-master extraordinaire, who helped me load the messa stuff into the van in four short (but long-feeling) hours:
We packed it up and left with a car attached on a trailer, but not before JONAH got to come over and tag my car with a little jewish love for the journey. (Still on the car and getting smiles, by the way.)
We got on the road just in time to stop for icing-laden cinnamon rolls on the way out of Colorado.
And time to gawk at the wind farms in Wyoming, like elephant herds, austere and almost regal in their slow spin.
Dad: “Do you think your mom would like this as an anniversary gift?” Me: “NO.” Dad: “But it’s telling the whole town. Isn’t that romantic?” Me: “Trust me on this one.”
As we made the curve toward the north, then the west, stopping by Boise to see a second cousin (and, as it turned out, get coffee and a new big-kid bed), the truck seat became harder, the hours a little longer, and the landscape began to change color to astounding oranges (Utah), and then to jut and flow and along the the Columbia River (bordering Washington and Oregon) as the wind whipped so hard it nearly knocked you over. This last little video is taken as we pulled through the last stretch of driving along I-84 into Portland, the sun settling into dusk, day waning. I’m not sure this convey the sense of nervous potential I was feeling, heading into a town I knew little about other than it will be home for the next three or four years. Hungry for details I tried to soak up like a sponge, the curve of the road, new radio stations with new call numbers I tried to remember, billboards, businesses, the familiar and strange.
Dad and I arrived into Eugene around 10:30 pm, and as exhausted as we were from the trip, we were also equally ready to be done with the moving bit, so we decided to push on through. And on a Saturday night from 11 to about 4 am, we moved the whole damn contents of the truck into the house, down a long driveway where the truck wouldn’t fit, and lifting furniture (couches! mattresses!) above and around the car parked in the carport. Dad gets major rockstar power points for the whole thing, and though I can’t remember the last time I was so tired (that includes a marathon), it was amazing to be able to get up the next day without any more heavy lifting to do. Just, you know, the small work of starting a life in Oregon.
There are so many things I’d like to write about, coming off of one of the fullest months on record - weddings, projects, endings and beginnings, intense introspection and nonstop socializing. But today, as Colorado seems to have finally crossed the fuzzy boundary between summer and fall on a rare grey day, the move to Oregon seems suddenly so…sudden! Even last week, on the last day of work, it seemed as far away as a someday-day, a camel loping its way across the horizon - a mirage? - that will seemingly never arrive at the sand under my feet. But today, looking at the calendar and realizing that moving day is a little over a week away, it all seems very and suddenly real. How do I say goodbye to all the people and all the places I’ve known for five years now, to be ready to craft a new sense of home? I keep wondering if it’ll take waking up in Oregon sometime next month for it to really sink in.
All this produce…$25 from Miller Farms, at the Colorado Farmer’s Market, along with a shared piece of banana bread, stories from being dismissed from the army for having only one kidney, and a lot of help hauling all this food to the car. Somehow, this whole mess-a-food is going to turn into enough soup to feed 100 people for next Sunday’s PieceMeal event. Maybe Stone Soup? Thank goodness for food processors… more later once the mess begins!
) Thanks to 
