These wishes from Neil Gaiman’s journal have been going around:
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
All of that would be nice. So far, I’ve surprised myself.
Actually, new species discovered deep underwater. Gorgeous video set to good music, just under five minutes long.
There is so much we still don’t know about the life with which we share the planet.
(The title of this post refers to Captain Low-Rez and the Pixel of Destiny (SWF). If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. Watch the entire thing, especially if you have designed a website lately.)
This afternoon the sun was shinin’ like there’s no tomorrow. Barely out of the door on my way to the only open nearby coffee shop, a car pulling out of the neighboring driveway blocked my path so that an elderly couple could get in. I didn’t feel like climbing over the melting snowbanks to both sides of the walk, so stopped and waited. The old lady looked at me with a slightly apprehensive smile and said, “We’re going to delay you for a while here.” I assured her that it was ok, and looked around at all the gleaming-clean houses.
They took their time with the complicated affair of one getting into the front seat, the other in the back, unable to do so simultaneously because of strange car-door geometry. “Merry Christmas,” the car people called out. “And to you,” I said, and meant it. I don’t like Christmas, but I liked the old lady and her partner with their slow ways and their festive sincerity.
I walked to the coffee shop wondering about what Christmas might mean to those people. Davis Square was ghostly-empty and, if not for the cold and the snow and the barren trees, if you only looked at the light and the buildings, felt like deep spring. Everything bathed in light.
Then there was a pumpkin spice latte by the dancing fire in the gas fireplace, and a book. By the time I came outside again an hour and a half later, clouds had moved in and the light was whiter, less expansive.
Then out again in the twilight, and the blue houses stood out among those of all the other colors. There are at least half a dozen blue ones between my place and Davis Square, and they’re all different glorious colors. If the house I live in weren’t a pleasing shade of purple, I’d be jealous of all those blues. As it stands, I get to look at them in the changing light of the sun.
Coming back home, it was dark enough that the strings of tiny lights on our porch were already lit. Whenever I open the front door in the dark, I feel like I’m entering the secret center of some deep-playa Burning Man installation. And speaking of Burning Man, if you haven’t yet, do check out Neil K. Guy’s photos from this year’s event. He is easily one of my two favorite BM photographers, the other being Bucky Sparkle.
Dinner of tiny quiches and raspberry vodka. Conversation with beautiful women. Cats sleeping on me for hours as I do my thinking and writing. The blissed-out quiet of a house large enough to make it seem like we’re all impossibly far away from each other. Aaand an 8:30am interview tomorrow morning. Nothing like job search to bring a girl firmly back onto the ground.
Thank you, $obscure_mailing_list: images and sounds from Earth that were sent into space on the Voyager are now online. Check out the Voyager Golden Record.
Friday afternoon I left town just a bit too late, too close to Friday traffic going out of the city along the Pike. That and the slush coming down from the sky made the trip to Inspirit Common in Hadley a two-and-a-half-hour one; good thing that just before leaving I had downloaded some talks by Ajahn Brahm (thanks for the suggestion, Rob, what I’ve heard so far is good).
Together with Emily and Bucky (the friends who own and run the above-linked mind-body-spirit center) and their six-month-old son Kadin, I went to a drum-and-dance event. And for the first time ever I played a djembe in a drum circle, for half an hour or so. It’s a rush! I came in with this tightness in the middle of my chest, which almost worked itself out in the course of trancy dancing to the drums, but it was still there afterwards. Sat down to make rhythms, next thing I know there’s a lightness where the bad used to be. Later on in the evening Bucky said, “It opens up the heart, doesn’t it?” That’s exactly what drumming did for me. I will buy a djembe before I buy an iPhone, and that’s saying a lot.
Driving home late at night, I took the long way along Route 9. On and on and on through endless trees and industrial towns and mist. The road looked like it belonged in Neil Gaiman’s stories.
Subject line of a spam email: “saskatoon typography festival”. My first reaction: Damn, I want to go!
But, speaking of travel: I’ll be in Chicago 12/27-30 for a conference. I have a hotel room for the nights of the 27th and 28th; does anyone reading this have, or know of, a place I could crash on the eve of the 29th? My plane leaves O’Hare at 9am on the 30th, which means I’ll want to be there by 7:15-7:30ish; so proximity to public transport would be lovely. Bribes of chocolate, genuine Boston saltwater taffy, a drink and/or dinner available.
Went to the Peabody Essex Museum today. If you are in the Boston area and have a chance to visit Salem, I highly recommend the Yin Yu Tang exhibit, centered around a 200-year-old Chinese house taken apart brick by brick, transported over to the States and meticulously put back together. Watch the movies, too; just be prepared for the extreme misogyny of two centuries’ worth of a rural Chinese family. It was fascinating and alien, and somehow strangely familiar in some of its Communist elements.
Then we sat and read in a coffee shop, not far from a man with not one but two four-squares-to-a-row Rubik’s cubes and diagrammatic notes in a notebook. And then we came outside, and it’s dark and it’s snowing and everything’s white. The same streetlight-lit white of the evening sled rides of my childhood’s winters, with mom or dad or brother pulling the aluminum sled and laughing, and laughing.
What an excellent way to spend two minutes:
Hat tip to Greg Laden.
A, no, the salmon farm in Northern Ireland, raising some 100,000 head of salmon, got decimated by “billions of jellyfish.” The jellies were said to be “a dense pack of about 10 square miles and 35 feet deep.” I’m not sure I can imagine that, quite.
There’s got to be a horror movie in there somewhere. It helps that the jellyfish in question were mauve stingers. Seas turning red, indeed.
Via a wee goddess:
Astronomers rename asteroid to honor George Takei.
I am, sad to say, not a fan of the original Trek, so didn’t know Takei from his Sulu days. But he’s been an impressive presence on Heroes, my favorite currently-running geeky TV show.
But, dude. How much of an impression do you have to make to get an asteroid named after you? Takei is beyond cool. And modest, of course:
“I am now a heavenly body,” Takei, 70, said Tuesday, laughing. “I found out about it yesterday. … I was blown away. It came out of the clear, blue sky – just like an asteroid.”