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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
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Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. ![Merit Badge in Quill Award
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Congratulations on winning an honorable mention for Best Blog at the 2018 Quill Awards for [Link To Item #1196512] . *^*Smile*^* This award was sponsored by the blogging consortium including [Link To Item #30dbc] , [Link To Item #blogcity] , [Link To Item #bcof] and [Link To Item #1953629] . For more details, see [Link To Item #quills] .](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/type-Blogging-2180.gif) ![Merit Badge in Highly Recommended
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| Write your entry today from the perspective of an animal. You could choose a pet, a lioness on the hunt, a rhino being pursued by poachers, or any other animal of your choice. "We have a rodent problem in the yard." "Hey, kitty!" was the Feeder's only response. "Are you listening to me? There are mice. In the yard." I brushed his legs in frustration, ducking out of the way of his questing paw. I wasn't in the mood to be touched; I just wanted him to listen. "What are you meowing about?" All that work, and he still doesn't understand me. No one does. I stalked to the door. "Let me out," I demanded. "What are you doing? You just now came inside." I pawed at the door. The Feeder sighed and opened it. I bolted. Fine. The Feeder won't do anything about it, so I will. I took my perch on the porch, and watched. And waited. Soon enough, I saw something flit through the tall grass, hesitant, wary. Still, I waited. It inched closer. I felt my tail twitching in anticipation. And yet, I waited. Closer and closer it quested. I could see it now. Not a mouse. A mole. Close enough. I pounced. I can't seem to get through to him with words. Perhaps something more... physical. Dropping the now-dead mole just outside the door, I signaled for entry. This part usually takes some time, but he must have been near the door. It opened, and I saw his gaze move from me to the message. Sitting, I looked at him and said, "See? Rodents." He slammed the door in my face. Licking my lips, I trotted off to find another one. ...yeah, I know, not the sort of thing I usually post here, but what's the blog activity for if not to stretch one's boundaries? Now to go bag some presents my cats left me. |
Fact! Today is Sum1  's birthday!   Write something to celebrate the dedicated Head Judge of the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  Sum1 can be summed up with one word: mushroom. No, wait; that's not it. Toadstool? Well. Some sort of fun guy anyway. After all, Sum1 is the curator of "Smile! (Groan?) You Know You Love These!" [13+], which does almost as much to spread laughter as my own comedy does. Look, if you haven't visited that yet, go there and catch up, because I have it on good authority that the images might start disappearing soon.I don't remember when I first met Sum1. It was probably in the super-secret Moderators forum, which the rest of you can't know about. I know he hasn't been around as long as I have, so really, he's just a kid. A kid with gray hair. Which, for the record, I don't have - mostly. Also like me, Sum1 is fond of travel and sharing his journey experiences. You can see that in "Where In The World Is Sum1?" [E].And of course, as the Head Judge of the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" , Sum1 is a big fan of receiving bribes and meaningless flattery. Be sure to slip him a few GPs and tell him he does a great job, because I certainly won't - I have too much integrity for that.Still - Hippy Bathday, Sum1! |
| What is the farthest you've ever been from the place you call "home?" Ever wonder what's meant by "halfway around the world?" Like, there's a spot in the Indian Ocean (I looked it up on Google Earth some time ago) which is exactly 180 degrees opposite my house. If I could walk in any direction at a steady pace, it wouldn't matter which direction I went in; they all result in the same time or distance to that spot. It is the south pole to my north pole, or vice-versa. Should we consider that spot "halfway around the world" for me? Because if I were able to walk to it, and did so, but then kept walking, eventually I'd end up back home - all the way around the world. And yet, every other spot on the Earth's surface is closer, by definition, so every other spot would be less than halfway around the world. After I passed my personal South Pole, I'd be 3/8 of the way around, then 1/4, then 1/8, and all of the infinite points in between. I'd never be 3/4 of the way around the world, even though I'll have walked that far, and more. There's no paradox here, of course; it's purely a matter of the inconsistency and imprecision of written language. Mathematics would describe the journey with far less ambiguity. To really answer the prompt question, we'd have to define exactly what was meant by "farthest," and probably "home" also. Even defining "farthest" simply as "greatest distance along a Great Circle route" and "home" as "the place you live most of the time," perception can be thrown off by something as simple as a map. It is impossible to accurately represent every feature of a sphere on a flat map. Something is always distorted. With the most common (Mercator) projection, it's mostly distance and size; for example, a Mercator map makes it look like Greenland is bigger than South America, when it's simply not. Distance is affected, too. Look at a Mercator map, and it appears that the closest point in the continental US to the continent of Africa is, like, somewhere near Miami, Florida. But no - the closest point (and it's not even much of a competition) is in Maine. It's a nice old lighthouse called Quoddy Head, not far from the little town of Lubec, which features a few comfy tourist inns, a border crossing into Canada, and the absolute worst place to eat breakfast in the entire Western Hemisphere.I know that because I've been there. Some years ago, and I think I've mentioned this in here before, I decided to drive all the way across the country. Since it would be my first time doing so, I decided to do something special: travel from the easternmost point of the contiguous US to the westernmost point. And the easternmost point happens to be... Quoddy Head Lighthouse. From there, the most direct route would cut across Maine, then into Canada, and then pretty much stay in Canada. I have nothing against Canada. I love Canada. But my purpose was to see the US, so I took a route that meandered around south of the Great Lakes, back up through Wisconsin, then across North Dakota and Montana - avoiding interstates the whole way. Took me about two weeks; I wasn't in any hurry. There is no such thing as destination; there are only stops along the journey. On the off-chance anyone is interested in my chronicles of that journey, well, here's the link to my offsite travel blog. Some of the links therein are broken; time will do that on the internet. First, this and then starting with this post and continuing as far as you can stand.The westernmost point, incidentally, is about a three mile hike west of a map point called Ozette, in Washington State. Ozette is little more than a ranger station; the nearest town is some miles away, and features a bed and breakfast. I stayed there the night before I hiked through the woods to the Pacific. They had a calendar on the wall. The calendar picture at the time featured... Quoddy Head Lighthouse. Life is weird. So you ask me what's the farthest I've ever been from home. I could pace it off on a globe; it's Bethlehem. No, not the one in Pennsylvania; the original one. But that's boring. I choose to interpret "farthest" as the most removed psychologically, and for that, I'd have to say: the empty stretch of Washington coastline, a three-mile hike west of Ozette. Hiking six miles, there and back, along a poorly-maintained trail through bear-controlled rainforest, all to fulfill a whim I'd come up with - well, it's not something I'd ever done before, and it's not something I'll ever do again. But I'm sure glad I did it. |
| In the future, if space travel became possible, would you want to go? What would most influence your decision whether or not to leave Earth? If you'd asked me that when I was 15, my answer would have been, "Hell yeah, sign me up." At that time, I had every reason to believe it was not only possible, but inevitable. For fuck's sake, we'd just lofted people to the goddamn moon. Certainly, Mars would be next, then maybe a generation ship to the Alpha Centauri system or some such science fiction trope. And I desperately wanted to be involved. What took me by surprise was that we spent all the time since then never leaving Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Oh, I know there are reasons for this: political and financial costs, greater awareness of the effects it would have on a human body to leave the safety of our natural radiation shield, whatever. And I guess I should be glad we didn't abandon even that, but we could have done so much more, especially as technology advanced. We went to the moon using little more than a slide rule. It would be another ten years before you could stuff a real computer into a spaceship. Whatever you're using to read this, laptop or desktop or tablet or mobile phone, has orders of magnitude more computing power than Collins, Aldrin and Armstrong had access to. We've done other stuff, of course. We populated Mars with robots, and sent probes throughout the solar system and beyond, and that's all very cool. Nothing like boots on the ground, though - or floating in a capsule. But I digress. I tend to do that when we're talking about space exploration. I'm convinced that Western civilization hit its peak on or about July 20, 1969, and we've been on a downhill slide ever since. But that could be age talking; I don't know. I've heard all the arguments against space exploration, and I summarily reject all of them. Now? Well, now I realize that there's no beer in space. Oh, I'm fully aware that astronomers have identified entire clouds of ethanol out there. Not the same thing, though. You'd also have to find barley, hops, and yeast, and there are plenty of those things right here on Earth. To go the rest of my life without beer? You couldn't pay me enough. Happy to sit back and watch other people endure the trips, though. Go for it. |
| They say art is subjective. What is art to you? Subjective. I had an uncle who was an artist. Created art, taught art at a university, left my aunt for a grad student. Artist. By which I mean, he mostly made sculptures. Very abstract, clean lines; liked to play with plexiglas, created interesting constructs of geometrical precision. Now, when I think "art," what I usually think of are sculptures and paintings; you know, the things you find in art museums. But of course, there's much more to art than that: music, drama, architecture, game design, films... writing... and so on. All of that stuff is art, in a sense, even though you won't find it in the Met. Except for architecture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is, itself, a work of art; so is the Louvre. You won't find my uncle's stuff in the Met, either. He wasn't all that famous. I used to have arguments with my aunt, the one who was married to the artist. Well, we used to have lots of arguments, but the relevant one here is that I asserted that art should stand on its own, while she insisted that, in order to fully understand art, one must study it formally, recognize the various "movements" throughout history - surrealism, cubism, pointillism, that sort of thing - and know where some individual piece fits in to the history. We were both right, I think. And both wrong, mostly for even arguing about it in the first place. Given her background, her position is hardly surprising; the same could be said for me. My parents weren't oriented to artistic endeavors, and all my attempts ended in abject failure. There's not an artistic bone in my body, except for perhaps some small talent in writing. What I admired about my uncle's art had nothing to do with shape, form, composition, and whatever other artistic merit it might have had; no, what I admired about it was its precision. Boxes within boxes, all perfectly cut, stuck together in such a way that there were no gaps or globs of glue. That focus on precision served me well in my career; I started out as a draftsman. I couldn't paint to save my life, or create a realistic sketch of someone's face, but I could draw the hell out of a road, with all its attendant utilities and other structures. It's precise, it's technical, and it involves little to no knowledge of aesthetic shape, color, composition, and form. There's a story I heard once about some brave soul who interviewed Jackson Pollack. You know, the guy with all the splatter paintings? The interviewer asked the question above, most likely in a haughty voice: "What... is 'art'?" Reportedly, Pollack answered by dipping his hand in a bucket of paint, throwing the gob against a wall or maybe a canvas, pointed to it with his dry hand and said, "That's art. That's art, because I say it's art." And, truthfully, he probably could have sold the resulting splat. Not for what it was, but because Jackson Pollack created it. If I did the same thing - and I have, actually, done something very similar - it wouldn't fetch a single cent. Hell, it would probably be worth negative money, since a blank, stretched canvas is somewhat valuable, and anyone but Pollack throwing paint at it would only ruin it. Pollack was (is? I can't be arsed to look it up) considered an artist, and so was my uncle - and yet, they had very, very different approaches to the practice. As far as I know, all attempts to define art have failed, or at least fallen way short. This is necessary; it's not like the word itself has any precision. It's like "freedom" or "justice" - an abstract noun. The best I can do is say that, for me, it's art if it elicits some emotional reaction. But even there, the definition fails, because some things (like Pollack's paintings, or the literary equivalent such as James Joyce's oeuvre), certainly elicit an emotional reaction - disgust, mostly, mixed with frustration and a bit of anger - but I'm not going to call them "art." Others' opinions will vary; hence, the "subjective" bit. I suppose I could go on writing about this sort of thing, but I'm already deep into tl;dr territory. To summarize: Art is subjective. |
| Regarding your craft of writing, is there something specific you want to improve on or give more attention? What steps will you take to motivate yourself? The best drummer in the world is commonly accepted to be Neil Peart from Rush. Word is that there was a magazine about drummers that, every year, picked a "Best Drummer" kind of like Time's Person of the Year, and every year for some time, Peart was selected. This got boring, so they changed the award to something like "Best Drummer, Apart From Neil Peart." I mention this because a few years back, I heard that Neil Peart was taking drumming lessons. Writing is like that. I don't care if you're JK Rowling, Stephen King, or William fucking Shakespeare, there is always room for improvement, and one should always take that opportunity. But to do that, it helps to know what aspects of writing are your weak points - and there are always weak points. Plotting, characterization, word choice, pacing, whatever. Most of us, I think, suck at knowing what our actual weak points are - that's where reviewing comes in - but even if you end up working on something you're already good at, you can still become better. The problem with reviews, by the way - or, well, one of the problems - is that we are all subject to the cognitive bias that I forget the name of, the one where criticism or facts can't change your mind about things. So the first thing to do is to work to overcome that particular bias. For me, one thing I keep seeing in reviews is that I repeat certain words and phrases. It's annoying, because I make a conscious effort not to, but the redundancy creeps in anyway. The worst thing about it is that I don't catch it myself. I can usually - but not always - catch point of view problems, tense issues, spelling and grammar flubs, etc., on a re-reading, but for some reason I have a blind spot when it comes to repetition. So that's what I want to work on. If anyone reading this ends up reviewing one of my thingies, now you'll be more aware of repetition when you see it. My other problem, though, goes back to the second question in today's prompt: motivation. I can barely motivate myself to write, most days, and while I have a near-constant desire to improve many things, not just writing, it's harder outside of, say, a video game. There, you know when you level up. In real life, you have to guess at it. Maybe if I treat it like I do exercise - but even in that activity, I can kind of tell when I've leveled up. My running resistance level becomes too easy, so I kick it up a notch. I do 15 reps at, say, 60 pounds, no problem, so next time I do 10 reps at 65 and work my way back up to 15 at that weight. That sort of thing. With writing, it's not so easy. I feel like I'm decent at it, and yet I still write some things that are obviously just throwaway, phoned-in pieces, amateur-level. And that doesn't even take into account my examples of purposely silly output. The motivation thing harks back to something I wrote here yesterday, about being complacent. Thing is, I'm not complacent about my writing the way I am about other things in life. I want to get better. I think I know how to get better. The only thing left to do is the practice, and that's where I lack motivation. What to do about that? Well, just write anyway, I think - motivated or not. |
| Happy Sunday! Take the time in your blog today to reflect on your week. Share one thing you accomplished this week and one thing you hope to accomplish next week. Accomplishments are overrated. At this point, my greatest accomplishment is "I'm still alive." I hope to accomplish this again next week. I wasn't always this way, you know. Like most everyone, I had big plans when I was young. Own a company, travel, be able to retire comfortably, own a house, live with cats, write, become a rock star... Rarely did I stop and think how these goals were contradictory. When one owns a company, one rarely has the time to travel or write. If one travels, one is spending money that could fuel retirement. At least it's possible to own a house and put cats in it. Thing is, though... I accomplished all of these goals. Well, except for the rock star one. That one I gave up on. Turns out lack of talent is still a barrier to that; who knew? So, I quit making goals. Well, sort of. I continue to lose weight. That's something, I suppose. And I do have the nebulous and impossible desire to visit every microbrewery in America. Nebulous because it's a goal without a real plan; it's not like I can visit over 6000 breweries while driving. Impossible because, every week, on average, we gain two breweries and lose one. Hell, California alone has over 10% of them; it's all the way on the other coast, and even if I visited two a day it would take me nearly a year just for that state. Maybe it'll finally secede and then it won't technically have breweries in my country. Still, it's something to shoot for. Just not this week. This week, then, will be more of the same. Keep myself distracted so I don't eat. Go to the gym. Get some writing done - this blogging activity and other stuff. Oh, and I have a contest to judge; that's going to take a good chunk of my time. Here's the other thing about goals and plans that I realized a while back: Every time you decide to make a change in your life, you have to give up something. Maybe you want to give up something; that's okay. But say, for instance, I decided I wanted to date again. Then I'd have to give up video game time. I'm not willing to give up video game time; ergo, I don't date. At some point, I reached a place in my life where I said, "Okay. That's it. That's enough." And it really is enough. Not that I don't want to continue to grow or change, but at this point, nothing really sucks, so why fuck with it? I mean, "everything is awesome" might be better than "nothing really sucks," but at the same time, "nothing really sucks" beats "life is crap." And making the wrong life decisions ends up in "life is crap." By the way, the bit about having to give up something to make a change in your life? It works the other way around, too. That is, if you want to give something up - say, smoking or Facebook - you can't really just, you know, give it up. Whatever that activity is, it took time and energy. That time and energy can't be destroyed; it can only be redirected. "I will munch on baby carrots" works much better than "I will quit smoking." "I will read actual books" can lead to less time on Facebook. That sort of thing. So, nothing sucks. And I intend to keep it that way as long as I can. |
| Stand outside for two minutes. Make a list of ten things you can smell, ten things you can hear, and ten things you can feel. Out... outside? You mean, like... not inside? You want me to go what now? Fortunately, it is midnight; the accursed daystar is on the other side of the planet. So, fine, I'll do the exercise. Ten things I can smell 1. Tobacco smoke. I figure if I'm going to venture into the Great Unknown, I might as well light up a cigar while I'm out here. 2. The remains of the "present" one of my cats left me. 3. Pollen. It's a good thing I'm not allergic, or all 10 of the items on this list would be "nothing." 4. ...Let's just say it's been a few hours since I've showered, and leave it at that. 5. Stinkbugs. To be fair, I smell them in the house, too. 6. Hm, I think one of my propane tanks is leaking. *looks at burning cigar* *shrugs* 7. Damp wood. It just freaking rained. Luckily, it is no longer raining, or I'd be skipping this exercise. 8. I could be imagining it, but I think there's a faint odor of shit, like there always is in the outdoors. 9. Oh, there it is. Some sort of flowery whiff. It is May, after all. 10. Petrichor. This is one of my favorite words, and it's all thanks to Doctor Who. Ten things I can hear 1. My cat scratching at the door. I'm outside, so she needs to be, too. She doesn't realize it's wet. 2. Cars. Generally, in every direction, but mostly from the interstate about a mile south of here. 3. Moths trying to commit suicide on my deck light. 4. Meow. Cat's getting insistent; I think I'll go let her out. 5. Creak. Clearly, I need to oil some hinges one of these days. I've been saying that for 23 years, now. 6. The backyard neighbor's stupid fucking dog is howling again. 7. Okay, something just crashed through the underbrush in the backyard. Maybe it's a bear. Or a mountain lion. It's not a skunk; see above. 8. Next-door neighbor's heat pump just kicked in. 9. Loose water is dripping off the leaves and splattering. 10. I have no idea what that squealing noise was, but I'm pretty sure something just died. Ten things I can feel 1. Trepidation. 2. Wet. 3. Cold. 4. A creepy, crawly sensation down my back. Oh, yeah... spider. 5. Lost, because I'm not indoors. 6. Moths crashing into me when they get bored with the light. 7. Some unidentified bug on my ankle. This is why I hate the outdoors. 8. A scraping sensation where I swatted said bug off of my ankle with my left shoe. 9. The overwhelming desire to go back inside. 10. The bottom of my laptop as I carry it back in. |
| Tell us a fact about one of your ancestors. Where does your family come from? How far back can you trace your ancestry? Real family or birth family? It only matters in terms of what you're trying to prove for yourself, I suppose. Birth family contributes genetics, obviously. As I've noted before, though, I have no real interest in seeking them out. Last thing I need at my age is to find another mother. Yes, I know who she is. As of a couple of years ago, she was still alive. Still no interest in contacting her. As for real family, I talked about them in my last entry. So here's a fact I don't think I've disclosed: One of my grandmothers died in 1918. Dad never told me how; I think the memory was always too painful for him, even though he would have been too young to remember her. From what I've been able to piece together, I suspect it was the flu epidemic that was rampant at the time. And that's as far back as it goes. Like most people, I suppose, I got curious after a while, and when the internet made it possible for me to be lazy and still determine my heritage, I tried tracing it back. My legal name is extremely rare, so I figured it should be easy, right? Nope. Grandparents, end of story, as if they sprang from the ether to which my lineage will return when I'm gone. Well, that's not entirely true. I know who my maternal great-grandfather was. From him descended not only my grandfather and mother - neither of whom was in any way famous - but a particular family who shall remain nameless for security reasons, but whose influence on the world is decidedly malign. Sometimes you learn things you'd rather not. In the words of both Popeye and God, I am what I am. I don't need to trace lineage back to find myself; I'm right here. I might as well be a child of Earth; apart from visible features such as the pale skin and blue eyes that marks me as primarily of Northern European extraction, there's nothing to prove anything for or against a heritage from anywhere on the planet. I am, in short, a lineage of one, world without end, amen. Even that is merely an accident of genetics, which I've already argued against as a meaningful measure of anything. There's a freedom in that, you know. I'm not boxed in (well, apart from having a fractured relationship with the accursed daystar, which keeps me from frolicking in the outdoors - pale skin, remember). There are enough factors keeping us apart from each other; why not just acknowledge our shared humanity and not worry about artificial divisions? Go back far enough and we're all descended from the same (relatively) hairless ape, anyway. I mean, I get wanting to know where you come from. I just think it's more relevant to know where you're going. |
| Remember bringing something from home for “Show and Tell” at school when we were little? Today, I want you to do the same in your blog. Pick an object that means something to you and describe it. What does it remind you of? How did the object come into your life? Does it bring you comfort? What is the story behind the object? I'm pretty sure we never had Show and Tell. I mean, maybe we did and I've just blocked that memory, as we do with many traumatic experiences - and getting up in front of a room full of, say, second-graders is, was, and always will be traumatic. Or maybe I can no more remember it than I can remember what I had for lunch on, say, June 23, 2002. It was probably pizza, though. The lunch, that is, not the Show & Tell. I ate a lot of pizza in the noughties. Still, I'm familiar with the concept from books and TV and such. There are myriad objects that I could use, since I'm a bit of a collector (which is, I suppose, a synonym for "hoarder," only I don't keep old pizza boxes around) and I have many dead older relatives. There's my comic book collection, for instance. Or my father's navigational sextant - he was a sailor back when a sextant was the way you figured out your position at sea. Or my mom's beaver fur coat that she never wore because it was a beaver fur coat; there's a story there, let me tell you. But instead, I think I'll talk about an antique torchiere. It wasn't always antique, of course. I think my grandmother bought it new. I'm not sure what era it's from, but it could be a hundred years old or more. Sitting on a black marble, oval base, bronze scrollwork supports a fluted cylinder that, at just under head height, flares into more bronze scrollwork that cradles a thick, molded, frosted glass bowl. Inside the bowl, of course, sits a lightbulb socket. But not just any lightbulb socket; this one is a discontinued size that is much larger in diameter than the sockets of today. Originally, there were two of these lamps in my family. My parents had one, and my Aunt A in New York had the other. My other aunt, Aunt E, possessed a very different esthetic and was married to a minimalist style artist, so it wouldn't have fit with her other furniture. Mind you, it doesn't fit with my furniture, either, but that's never stopped me before. At some point, you go from "nothing fits" to "what the hell, everything fits." Now, Aunt A was what you'd know in literature as the "maiden aunt" archetype. She was a feminist before feminism was cool, so clearly, she was also an early hipster. She lived in a townhome in Queens with her brother, my uncle, who - well, that's a whole 'nother story; I just want you to imagine that it's the end of WWII, you're a Jewish soldier in the Army, you get sent to the European theater, and you've heard rumors about what the Germans have been doing in their "camps," but you don't want to believe it, because how could people do that to other people, and then you end up being among the troops that discover Dachau. Suffice it to say that my uncle couldn't live on his own, so his sister took care of him. So the one torchiere illuminated their house in Queens, while the other brightened the rural farmhouse where I spent my childhood in Virginia. Now, a bit more background, if you can stomach it. My parents were absolutely committed to each other, but like the lamp, they were from another time. Their design seems out of place, now, but it was all I knew as a kid. What this came down to was that they often fought - and sometimes, these fights entered the physical realm. So it came to pass that during one of these altercations, the torchiere, which was never very stable to begin with, toppled to the floor and the ancient frosted glass bowl shattered into dozens of pieces. My father, ever practical, kept using the lamp, but with the bare bulb it just wasn't the same anymore - a harsh, glaring light as opposed to the soft, indirect glow of the intact torchiere. My uncle died in the early 90s; my mom, a few years later. Then my dad in the late noughties, and I have no idea what happened to the lamp that lived in my house. But when Aunt A died a couple years after my dad, Aunt E took me to the house in Queens for one last look at the townhome that shaped the "city" part of my childhood. "Is there anything here that you want?" she asked. I looked around at the odd mixture of ancient and modern, at the furniture that I knew so well from multiple visits. I had very little room, and most of the stuff, I figured, should go to my cousins, who have kids to pass anything important on to. But I knew that there was one thing - only one thing - that I needed, and that was the torchiere. They insisted that I take a few other things, as well, such as the letters home that my uncle sent from the War, which included a record of his shock and dismay at finding out the truth about everything. One of these days I'm going to see if a Holocaust museum wants them, but first I'd have to actually look at them, and the one time I did that... well, I can't describe the feeling, really, except to say that it reminded me of the shattering of the glass bowl of my parents' torchiere. So I schlepped that lamp back to Virginia in my car, taking care to protect the precious glass; and now it stands, incongruous, in my dining room. I've never plugged it in. I've never been able to be arsed to find the nonstandard bulb that would allow it to shine once more. But it's there, an eternal reminder of family. Every time I think that people believe I'm somehow a lesser person for being single and never having had kids, I look at that lamp - that intact torchiere - and I remember that there are worse fates. |
Hooray, hooray, the first of May! Outdoor fucking begins today! It's a new month, so it's a good time for me to get back to daily blogging. Maybe. (Pun intended, as always.) I'm participating once again in "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" [13+]Crazy as it may sound, we are now officially 1/3 of the way through 2019. Write about some of your goals and plans for the remainder of the year. What are you looking forward to? I'm wary of making goals. Or plans. When I inevitably don't fulfill them, I get even more wary next time. I'll tell you what I'm looking forward to, though: warm weather. I'm pretty sure we'll get some of that. While my area was spared the recent unpleasantness that happened in some of the middle states, I got tired of the cold weather damn quickly. In previous entries, I've outlined my dislike of the cold. "So, Waltz, why not just move?" Well, true, I could, but apart from a few months out of the year, I rather like it here in Virginia. I've been all over the country (except for Nebraska, Alaska and Michigan, none of which are in the top 40 candidates for states to move to anyway), and while I enjoy certain places, I'm happy to merely visit. Too much traffic most places, except for where there's nothing around, in which case there's nothing around. Here, there are nearby purveyors of fine alcoholic beverages, and I don't have to sit in traffic (or, more precisely, sit in a rideshare vehicle which is sitting in traffic) to get to them. But that's not the question, is it? To misquote an entirely too popular catchphrase, summer is coming. And, for the most part, I intend to sit here on my deck and enjoy the utter lack of snow. Assuming, of course, we don't get a volcano, nuclear war, or meteor strike that blots out the sun. Patient and sharp readers will have noticed an inconsistency here. I rant about cold weather, and then I rant about the accursed daystar. Well, I'm not required to be consistent. Self-contradiction only makes me more interesting, right? "I am large; I contain multitudes." This is easily resolved, though: I only go outside to sit on the deck, which has a patio umbrella. I am within two feet of the door to my house at all times, and if the blasted fusion sphere starts to annoy me, I can go inside where it's properly air-conditioned. Still, getting back to plans, I'm hoping to do a bit more traveling this year. Maybe go to Vegas in August or September. Almost certainly visit California in December, if it's still there. Apart from that? Stay warm for as long as I can, until the cycle turns again. And write. Against all odds and expectations, I've been steadily participating in "I Write in 2019" [E]. Just 8 more months of that to go... |
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