2004-07-30 
 

just so there's no confusion

I am 100% in support of John Kerry. I'm pretty sure y'all knew that, but recent events have made me realize that there's no harm in reiterating information of this nature.

Labels: linkage

* posted by me at 2:34 PM

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2004-07-26 
 

ch-ch-ch-changes 

I recently went back into therapy. It's been almost 15 years since the first round, and while I said at the time that I'd go back eventually; I had begun to believe it wouldn't happen.  After all, I had learned how to be healthy on my own.
 
Not really.

So I'm doing it.  Mostly a preventive measure at this point. A need to let go and just purge myself of a whole bunch of shit that lives inside my head.  I could write more, but that's really not for public consumption right now. Suffice it to say that my life is an interesting one, and that sometimes interesting means challenging. (and sometimes challenging means...well as an old college chum would've said, "Shit, damn, fuckin' damn, fuckin' damn shit." 
 
And I know that I've probably freaked a few people out with this entry, because I have a lot of caring folk in my life, so let me reasure you that overall everything's fine and that I went through much worse in my first round of therapy.  Besides, I have G to lean on this time and he's being even more wonderful than ever right now.  (Thanks honk!) 

Labels: dose of mikey, g, spirit

* posted by me at 9:47 PM

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2004-07-24 
 

explode 

I have a vivid memory of a professor in college reading the Langston Hughes poem Dream Deferred.
 
She starts off in a normal tone of voice:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
 
Her voice drops a notch.
Or fester like a sore...And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-like a syrupy sweet?
 
She lowers her voice further and further until it's barely above a whisper 
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it...
The last word slams into us, as she shouts it at the top of her lungs.

EXPLODE!

A rather effective way to wake up the class on a dreary November morning.

I also remember constantly getting that poem and the Violent Femmes song, Blister in the Sun hopelessly twisted up together in my mind.  Whenever I  heard the song, I'd want to shout out EXPLODE at some point.  Which didn't hurt anyone really, just confirmed the general consensus that I was an odd duck.

Labels: dose of mikey, memory lane

* posted by me at 6:08 PM

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2004-07-20 
 

onward and upward

In a recent post I was kvetching about Netscape's gremlins snatching a long rant from under my nose and blah, blah, blah. I know there's code under here somewhere, but Blogger's made it even easier to not think about it by giving me this very user friendly interface. (which you can't see, but it's all very Wordpad up in my menu bar.)

No more figuring out what the correct character replacement for "<" or ">" is. Everything changes.

In other news, I discovered a title today. I can't tell you what it is, because in my own personal cosmology giving away titles before they're ready kills stories. This is a story I don't want to kill. It's been brewing in my head for quite some time now and I'm hoping it comes out in one piece. As if it were a cake that's liable to get stuck in the pan. I hate it when that happens. So hard to frost.

This again probably means nothing to y'all, but I did discover something else today that I can share. Sometimes it's good thing to be stuck on public transportation without access to a notebook to write stuff down in. It forces you to keep it all in your head and whole chapters fall into place in the time it may've taken to find a pen and get a sentence down had you been elsewhere.

In other news:

There's a story I've been telling myself for quite some time now, and I've gotten quite good at it. It's the story of my life.

You might think that your own life story would be an easy one to tell, but try it someday. What actually happened yesterday becomes too easily veiled by all the moments inbetween. Each one a single translucent sheaf thinner than the finest silk, but by the time you try and reach through to 100 yesterdays ago, the veil has become a solid and impenetrable wall. It's easy to think that you only need to concentrate on the big events, but it's often the smaller moments that end up affecting us most deeply while the events that memory tells us were all important can easily trail off into inconsequence.

Whether you find yourself weaving in and out of anecdotes like a toddler who's only just learning to walk, or leaping back and forth between topics like a crack-head who's just had a smoke really depends on your energy level at the time, but weave and leap you will.

Anyway, they say everyone has a story somewhere inside of them, and this is mine. It starts just outside TS 1.

I had just stomped out one last cigarette before walking into the main terminal. This was shortly before breaking the habit became mandatory again due to unforseen interactions between the fake shmoke and Mincom technology. True, they couldn't actually kill you anymore and were no more physically addictive than bubblegum, but I jumped on the fad when it started back in the 30s and found myself loath to give it up when it changed back from fad to fringe. It should've been easy. Another RubberDog(tm) to store up in the attic until the inevitable recraze hits. The thing is, I found the actual act of smoking to be a calming one. The deep inhalation on the first fag of the day, the quiet moments to myself, the secret camaraderie between the few smokers left. I kept at it along with what trackers let us know was 7.2% of the population and had soon had memorized the few locations where smoking was still permitted. (Even though they were safe and smokeless, the XYZ crowd that was running the country refused to repeal any of the archaic laws. Turns out this was a good thing, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here.)

See what I mean about weaving? I've told myself this story every day for the past two years and still wind up going off on tangents.

So I'm outside TS 1.

Labels: blogging, dose of mikey, writing

* posted by me at 12:35 AM

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2004-07-17 
 

typical weekend

Woke up around 10:30 and stayed in bed for a good hour reading and occasionally tickling G awake. Got up and put the coffee on. Back to bed for a bit more reading and some discussion of how nice it would be to have a Dunkin Donuts in San Francisco. Up again to turn on the computer and grab some fresh coffee to go with our pancakes. Yum.

Email checking.
Web surfing.
Game playing.

It's only just gone 1 o'clock, but I can predict the rest of the day.

Blog.
More game playing.
Web surfing.
Showers around 3.
Go out into the world for:
random product from Walgreens
OR
random product from Rainbow Grocery
OR
random product from somewhere that gets us out of apartment
OR
insert random excuse here

This errand will take anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 or more hours depending on how creatively we manage to drag it out. Not having a lot of free cash means taking fun where you can find it.

Return in the evening to make something yummy for dinner.
Tivo or a movie.
Games.
Bed.

It's not high drama, but it's comfortable. I like to think that lots of spare cash on hand would only serve to add "buy shoes" to the list of errand of the day. It might also give us the ability to do more travelling on the weekends which would make the experience I describe above less typical and more special. I'm going to enjoy that specialness while I can.

* posted by me at 4:18 PM

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2004-07-15 
 

i hate netscape

OK, I just typed another marathon entry. In it I was dissing Netscape.I swear to you, the evil gremlins of the ether knew I was doing it and caused some odd page error that lost me the whole rant. So, I'm too frustrated to retype and instead I'll give a quick list of what the entry contained.

I've Updated About Me page (over to left)
Still have link to original ego page within the updated About Me page
I am a pack rat and can't even through bytes away
Added link to a new Stats Page from the updated About Me page
Idea is to keep it updated, but we'll see
M called to say hi - Made me smile...Thanks M!
Entry from this point forward boring to all but blogheads...and maybe to even them
Feel free to stop reading.
Microsoft Scare
Switch to Netscape
Netscape Cool!
Netscape not so cool.
Rant against Netscape and the evil extra code that it inserted into my new stats page
Rant
Rant
Rant
Evil code
Messy
Page still displays fine, but very hard to edit if you're an old school html coder
I'm an old school coder
Rant
Rant
Rant
Etc.
Probably best this way since it was more therapeutic getting it out and would've been boring to all and sundry. (even my future selves)
Thank you and goodnight.

* posted by me at 12:40 AM

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2004-07-13 
 

happy accidets

I was trying to be clever last night as I went about beginning an update to this site and irony got the best of me. The catalyst for the update was the RainbowMikey banner which was one of the longest "temporary" banners in all blogdom. While I did manage to update the banner to the new one you see above, Rainbow Mikey (and the page format he lived on) went and took over all my archives when I hit the wrong update button. I didn't lose any entries, but I lost any of the different ways the pages actually looked. (which, for me, showed an evolution of myself as a blogger.)

Fortunately for me, I've got most of them saved on disk and therefore can still view the evolution of this site should I become nostalgic. Unfortunately for you, I'm rather lazy...er...I mean - of course - that I have a limited bandwidth allowance each month and won't be able to copy all the old archives back over very easily.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the bannerswap. That particular picture of G and myself always makes me smile because we look (and were) happy to the point of giddiness and feeling rather elvish. Not the Elves you may know from Tolkien or other mythologies, but a very real Mikey Elf...but that's another story for another time. What you don't see (out of frame) is the little pot of fondue that we'd just gorged ourselves on. The various gifts scattered about the cozy little room. Nor would you know, without me telling you here, that it's Valentine's day. A holiday that I used to greet with speeches about enforced consumerism and the Hallmarkification of America. But on this day, G and I gave up our inner gothchildren and made the weekend completely our own. Which was, as I mentioned, a very Elvish thing to do, and a story for another...oh ok, I guess it's another time now.

There's a picture that was taken back when Dude and I still had single digit ages. We're on a family trip hiking somewhere in Austria. Someone, probably Lotte or Mom, gave us pumpkin leaf hats and snapped a picture. I used to hate that picture, because as a vain child I thought Dude was WAY cuter than me. Which he was, but that's not the point. The point is that as the years went by, I started to like the picture more and more. Partially because I always find myself cuter in retrospect, but mostly because it was one of those pictures that gets blown up, framed and shared with various family members. Someone commented once that we looked like little elves and that stuck with me. Somewhere in my midteens, I came upon the picture, and after staring at it for a while said to myself, "Yep, we're two little elves all right. What a great picture!"

From that moment onward...and perhaps subconsciously in years before, I connected Elves to myself and especially with my experiences in nature.

A MikeyElf believes in the magic of the woods. He fights on the side of good. He can feel the earth breath beneath him. He has a strong connection to unfettered water. He's a bit of a firebug, but never an arsonist. He knows that someday the wind will take him away to a higher place. He's often mischievous, but hopefully never disrespectful. He's very mischievous actually...did I mention mischief? But he never intends to cause anyone pain. In fact he sometimes is allowed to use his magic to make other people smile and those are some of his favorite times....because at heart he's still a little kid in the single digits who believes that the world has a purpose and that the purpose is good.

There's more of course. On nights like tonight I could probably continue to write an entry for hours, but I'm going to stop now. I'm allowing the Gnome side of myself rule for a while and get some stuff done. But I won't publish this tonight (Sunday) I'm going to save the new banner, and this entry as a draft and not publish it until tomorrow night. Partially because I already did an entry today that I don't want to push down yet, but also because I know nights like this don't come along very often. Tomorrow will probably find me stretched for time yet again and unable to update. So I'm playing a bit of a trick with time, which is actually very Elvish after all.

The fact that I'm part Gnome does explain how an Elf ended up living in the city and loving computers, but the history of the MikeyGnome - and an explanation of today's title - will have to wait for another day. I really do have some offline writing I need to do.

* posted by me at 12:25 AM

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2004-07-11 
 

big trees

We've returned from our weekend in the woods. Portola State Park is a nice enough campground with a great staff, but it didn't top our top fave: Big Basin. Next time we manage to sneak off for a couple days we'll be checking in with the double B and playing in the creek again. (At Portola the creek's part of some domestic water supply and you have to keep out, although we did see plenty of racoons playing in the water. They must've missed the signs.)

As usual, I'm posting a couple pictures below, but I also had a little movie I really wanted Dad to see which I couldn't email. He asked once what it was like to camping in the middle of the redwoods and this gives a little glimpse at it all. It's a pretty big file at a little over 15MEGs, so don't click through if you're on a slow connection. Unless of course you're desperate to see site 23 at Portola State Park and willing to wait a while for it to download.

View Mikey's movie - BIG TREE.

our new (and much larger) tent came in handy since there were four of us
thanks to ebay (and G's eagle eyes), it didn't have a very large pricetag


a little scary to see after recent news events, but we made plenty of noise


G threatens to topple PG&E who were relaxing after our excursion


someone had painted this at our campsite...odd, but rather pleasing

* posted by me at 9:55 PM

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2004-07-09 
 

gone fishin'

see you next week

* posted by me at 6:58 PM

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time to change

I really need to do something about that banner. It was supposed to be an interem piece and somehow became permanent. Now that I've got the photo software working again there's no more excuses....other than I haven't a clue what to replace it with.

* posted by me at 2:38 AM

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2004-07-08 
 

new toy two

Finally got around to updating my cell phone calling plan to a better (and much cheaper) plan. In the process of doing that, I realized that I could get a Nokia 6800 for free by agreeing to sign up for another year...which I would have to do anyway to qualify for the new plan. Cool! I save 35 bucks a month AND I've got a nifty new phone with a QWERTY keypad built in. We also have the option of getting G into the plan for only an extra 10 bucks a month, but he'd have to change numbers. Also, the whole offer sounded a bit too good to be true so I'll research it a bit more first, but there'd be a free phone in it for him too...and he really needs one. (His Motorola antenna's been glued back in one too many times and it never rings anymore.)

For gadget geeks, we really let our phones live out their full lives before replacing them!

Of course if we had the money we'd be all over the new PDA/Phone combos, but they're a tad pricey right now. We'll give it another year and AT&T will probably be offering the Trio 600 for greatly reduced prices as an incentive to sign up again...and I can wait.

* posted by me at 2:19 AM

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2004-07-05 
 

new toy

I know it's been almost a week since I last blogged, but G got me Tivo for my birthday and I've been paying homage to a different glowing screen. I've been learning all about the different functions and watching way more tv than normal. I figure my viewing time will adjust back to normal levels at some point, but I'll never have to watch mediocre television again! There's always something being taped for me or G to watch and you don't have to stay up until 2 in the morning to finish watching that cool show that sucked you in. And commercials are all gone now... And that whole "pause live tv" function that sounded like it was a pretty nifty idea is actually a bit like microwaves and computers. Once upon a time I lived without them, but it's hard to imagine doing it now that I've grown accustomed to having them around.

Have managed to get out of the apartment a few times this weekend as well. Fireworks from Mr. Hooper's rooftop last night and several trips out to the Richmond and Sunset...which served to remind me just how lucky we are to live on this side of Twin Peaks. Over there it's hoodie weather all day long, but here we can sneak a pair of shorts on for two or three hours in the early afternoon.

* posted by me at 10:50 PM

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