scifiknitter

I don’t know if this thought is original, but it feels like one that arose without outside assistance. I don’t take the concept of originality too seriously, though. I have been haunted for decades by the words of Lenny Bruce: “Believe me, I’m not profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me, because I do not have an original thought. I am screwed. I speak English. That’s it. I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to somebody else.” With that out of the way, here’s the thought: No matter how you spend your time, each day is full to the brim at its end.

I would like to feel, before I die, that I can read poetry intelligently. To help accomplish this goal, I’m slowly reading Stephen Fry’s book The Ode Less Traveled. The book is about writing poetry, and I figure that if I learn more about how poetry is written, the fog that descends whenever I encounter a poem MUST lift, at least a little. I recommend this book strongly after just a few chapters, although it’s not for prudes. Fry mixes elegant language with profanity. I think the result is engaging and lively, plus I get to learn some rude British slang. The first thing I learned that opened my eyes wide is that poetry is all about meter, or rhythm. As a quasi-musician, I appreciate this deeply. I always read with an inner voice speaking out loud, and now I know I must free this voice to be very emphatic, perhaps even aural if I’m not with company, whenever I encounter poetry. The spoken voice is the pathway to feeling the rhythm. Fry starts his exploration of style with iambic pentam...

While my blog is personal, it is not private. I've been thinking about what that means. My conclusion: I need to think about whether a story belongs to me before I blog about it. I'm entering into budget season at work and it's going to be even more difficult than usual. Still, that's not really a story that belongs to me. It involves connections between our agency, a major funder, and a partner agency, and it is not in my job description to publicize the issues. I don't observe my boss talking about the situation publically, so I won't either. It doesn't matter how many waking hours I devote to crunching numbers and projecting alternatives, this is not really my story. The same line of thought applies to the major project my husband has been working on for so many years. It just passed a major milestone when the New York State Legislature passed a bill this week that makes the project possible. The bill now has to be signed by the Governor, and it won't...

Sung to the tune The Waters of Babylon , the most beautiful and haunting lament I know. By the waters and the marshes of the southern coast, We laid down and wept, And wept, At what we’ve lost. We remember birds, remember fish, And shiver at the cost.

My daughter has graduated from college. Bittersweet, but much more sweet than bitter. This event triggered a lot of logistics, because my parents wanted to travel to the ceremony as well. Added into the mix was my convalescence from surgery. Things did not go according to plan, and we all did as well as we could with the problems that arose along the way. The first event was to be my father and stepmother coming to stay with R. and me for two nights. They would head up to Montreal on Sunday. They arrived on Friday, and I made spaghetti and meatballs, one of my dad’s favorite dishes. As we sat around with glasses of wine after dinner, the conversation wandered to tales of border crossings. At this point, my stepmom realized that they had not brought their passports with them. An uneasy silence descended as my stepmom and I searched the web. Conclusion: with no passports, they would be turned back at the border. Saturday morning she checked into having the passports overnighted, but the ...

My medical leave is coming to an end - I’ll be going back to work on Monday. I haven’t done as much knitting, or nearly as much blogging, as I thought I would. Twitter and Google Reader offer so many lovely distractions. I’m well informed and entertained - perhaps too much so. I do have lots of thoughts that I could blog on, but many of them relate to family or work, and do not seem to be fit topics to expose to public view. So I don’t blog on them. And as I hold my tongue, the practice of not saying anything becomes stronger, and I say less and less. The highlight of the 3.5 weeks of leave was (of course) my daughter’s graduation from McGill. It was a wonderful day. My husband has the best photos on his camera, and I have started nagging him to download them, and share them with me. The experience deserves a blog post of its very own. How do I feel? Pretty good, but I am not back to exercise or anything strenuous yet. I had a scare earlier this week when i started spotting, after 3 we...

I have a new-to-me computer! And I love it. We got a new 17 inch MacBook Pro for our daughter as a college graduation present. She needed an upgrade as her computer, a first generation 15 inch MacBook Pro, was starting to struggle a bit when she did statistical modeling on it. We timed the purchase so that her new laptop arrived when she came home for a week after her surgery. When we gave the new laptop to her, she gave me the first-gen MBP. Which, I will have you know, she bought herself. She is not accustomed to getting her computers from Mom and Dad, she has saved up her pennies and bought two Apple laptops over the years. I’m the lucky person who has inherited each of her purchases over time, though I paid cash for the first one. This lappy is a gift. We don’t think we gave an extravagant gift. For one thing, my father and stepmother contributed towards the purchase, and are official go-givers with us. The new machine is an investment in her professional future. She NEEDS computin...